A Dancer In the Dust

by Thomas H. Cook

  “I am Farmer Gessee,” he said as he thrust out his hand. “May I join you on this hot day?”

  I was aware that all members of the Agricultural Commission had been given the title “Farmer,” but I’d never heard anyone actually use it.

  “Please do,” Martine said, “Would you like a drink? You must be thirsty.”

  “No, thank you,” Gessee said. “I will not stay long.”

  We resumed our seats as Gessee sat down opposite us. With a big smile, he swabbed his face and neck with a tricolor handkerchief—red, green, yellow, the symbolic colors of an idealized continental unity that has never in the least existed. “It is hot today,” he repeated with an exaggerated amiability that appeared studied because it was. “And no place hotter, I suppose, than Tumasi, eh?”

  “The hottest place in the country,” Martine said amiably. “And the driest, too.”

  Gessee nodded as he eased back in his chair. “What a lovely farm. How long have you owned it, Miss Aubert?”

  “My family has been here for over fifty years,” Martine answered.

  This clearly surprised Gessee.

  “Fifty years,” he repeated. ”And your father was from…”

  “He was born in Congo.”

  “So you are… Belgian?”

  “I am Lubandan.”

  Gessee smiled broadly. “Of course, of course. But a beautiful country, Belgium.”

  “I’ve never been there,” Martine said.

  Gessee’s attention drifted over to the front window, into the interior of the house, his gaze focused on the one bed he could see. He released a slow breath, then looked at Fareem. “From what part of Lubanda do you come?”

  Fareem grew visibly tense. “The north.”

  “There is some trouble up there,” Gessee said. “Among the Visutu. Do you go often to that region of Lubanda?”

  “My mother is old,” Fareem said. “So, yes, I go home.”

  “A good son,” Gessee said amiably. “My respects to you. It is important to respect the elders. That is one of our traditions in Lubanda.” He turned to Martine. “So, you have owned this farm for a long time. Strange that there is no record of it in Rupala. No deed, I mean.”

  “A deed is not required,” Martine told him. “Not if the owner has been in residence for more than fifty years.”

  “True, true,” Gessee said with a big smile. “I see you know our laws.”

  Martine only nodded.

  There was a brief silence, then Gessee said casually, as if to dismiss the point, “Anyway, the records are not so good in Rupala.” He looked at me. “I fear that we Lubandans have not yet mastered the Western art of record-keeping.” Now he glanced out into the bush. “And, of course, no records are kept on the Lutusi at all.”

  “Why should there be records of the Lutusi?” Martine asked in a perfectly polite tone.

  Rather than answer, Gessee drew his attention to a small box filled with Martine’s carved oyster shells. “What are these?” he asked as he picked one up and clicked it.

  “I make them,” Martine answered. “The Lutusi children use them for music.”

  Gessee clicked the shells again, then again, so that they sounded like snapping teeth. “You give them to the children, I suppose?”

  “The Lutusi do not accept gifts,” Martine informed him. “I sell them or trade them.”

  “Simple trade,” Gessee said. “It is very rudimentary, the economy of Tumasi.” He returned the shell to the box after a final set of rapid clicks. “Surely we can agree that Lubanda needs more than that,” he added in a tone that remained quite polite.

  Martine gave no indication of either agreement or disagreement with Gessee’s remark.

  “What do you think Lubanda needs, Farmer Gessee?” she asked.

  Rather than answer, Gessee asked the same question in return. “What do you think Lubanda needs, Miss Aubert?”

  “To remain itself,” Martine answered.

  Gessee looked at her doubtfully. “Backward? Primitive?”

  “Those aren’t Lubandan words… or judgments.”

  “Well, just what is Lubanda to you, Miss Aubert?”

  “Lubanda is itself,” Martine answered.

  For the first time Gessee appeared both challenged and exasperated by Martine.

  “Miss Aubert, as a Lubandan, you should know that Village Harmony requires that the nation’s needs be considered,” he said softly, but firmly, like an elder talking to a child. “It’s not enough for any one person simply to exist on his—or her—own. A true villager must contribute to the life of the whole village.”

  “Forgive me, sir, but may I ask if these are your words or the words of others?”

  “Others?” Gessee asked. “What others?”

  Martine looked at him squarely. “The foreigners who want Lubandans to change, to be as they are. Who want Lubandans to buy what they sell and to make what they, these ‘others,’ want to buy.” Her tone was curiously plaintive, as if she were standing before the bar at some critical moment, standing nakedly before it, with nothing but her cause to plead. “Money is a chain, Farmer Gessee. Soon the ones with this money will say to you, ‘We wlll give you money if you educate Lubanda’s children.’ And you will force our children into the sort of schools these ‘others’ wish you to have. And to fill these schools our children will be forced to walk miles and miles from their villages, and during this walk the work of the village will be neglected, and in the schools there will be no teachers of these foreign subjects and so the children will learn nothing.” She stared at him resolutely. “But none of that will matter because only attendance will matter, numbers you can show to these ‘others’ who have the money.” Her gaze remained as gently firm as her voice. “This has happened in our neighboring countries, Farmer Gessee, and it is only one of many ways that their people have once again become slaves.”

  “Slaves,” Gessee yelped. He seemed genuinely shocked by the word. “Lubandans will never be slaves.”

  Martine’s features did not change. She gazed without aggressiveness, but without compromise, into Gessee’s large brown eyes. “That is my wish,” she told him.

  Then, quite unexpectedly, she smiled. “Please, you should get to your point, sir,” she said. “You’re a busy man, and so I’m sure you didn’t come all the way from Rupala to chat with a poor Lubandan farmer about Village Harmony.”

  “Actually, that’s precisely why I came, Miss Aubert,” Gessee replied. He drew in a long, obviously strained breath, but continued in a tone that was gently instructive. “In the Agricultural Ministry, there is some concern that your farm is unproductive.”

  “My farm isn’t unproductive,” Martine said. “I grow finger millet, fonio, teff, and a—”

  “The old staples, I know,” Gessee interrupted. “Subsistence farming. These are the crops of underdevelopment.” He laughed. “Teff,” he said scornfully.

  “It is a good grain,” Martine said like a mother defending her child. “There is much iron and calcium. And because the grain is small, it can be cooked with less fuel.”

  Again, Gessee laughed. “But please, my dear child, you must tell me, who eats teff?”

  “I do,” Martine said. “And Fareem does. And so do most of the people who live in this part of Lubanda, especially the Lutusi.” She sat back and rested her hands in her lap. “It is what the people here have been eating for thousands of years,” she added. “Do you know why? It is because they can grow it here. They can grow it in this heat, in this infertile ground.”

  Gessee had now quite clearly had enough of this discussion. He looked back and forth from Fareem to Martine, but carefully avoided a glance in my direction. “You are both farmers,” he said, his tone now growing harder. “But you are also villagers in our great village of Lubanda. Do you really want your fellow villagers to subsist on teff, on millet, on—”

  “Yes,” Martine answered with great firmness.

  “Why?” Gessee asked quite sincerely,
as if Martine’s position truly made no sense to him.

  “Because we can,” Martine answered. “With these crops, we will never starve. This has been true for as long as anyone can remember.” Martine paused, then drew in a deep breath. “The Lutusi have many stories, sir,” she said respectfully. “They tell stories about being eaten by animals, about getting lost, about dying because of accidents or misjudgments. But there is one kind of death the Lutusi have no stories about.”

  “And what is that?” Gessee asked.

  “Famine,” Martine answered. “Because they have never experienced it.”

  Gessee faced her silently.

  “Famine,” Martine said quietly, but pointedly, “will come to them if we do not grow the crops we use. And when this famine happens, the great foreign stores of food will flow in, and they will remain awhile. But when they come no more, as they surely will come no more at some point, we will be left even more destitute than before because by then we will have lost the skills and patience needed to grow our native crops, the ones that sustained us. After that, the one skill we Lubandans will need, Farmer Gessee, will be the art of begging.”

  “I see,” Gessee said quietly, then rose and once again offered his hand. “Well, thank you for receiving me with such kindness and generosity,” he added, almost sweetly, as he shook first Fareem’s hand, then mine. “A pleasure to have met you.” He now offered his hand to Martine. “Please consider your obligations to our village, Miss Aubert,” he said by way of a final word.

  With that he attempted to draw his hand from Martine’s, but she gripped it tightly.

  “What obligation?” she asked.

  Gessee glanced down at his hand, Martine’s tightly curled fingers. “Please, Miss Aubert,” he said softly.

  “It is ujamaa,” Martine said darkly.

  The fire that flashed in Gessee’s eyes could have torched a town. “That will not happen here,” he said.

  “It will if no one stands against it,” Martine said. Then, as if turned with a key, her fingers opened, and Gessee jerked his hand from hers. “And that stand must be made at the beginning,” she added, “when there is still time.”

  Gessee nodded curtly. “We will meet again,” he said in a voice that made no attempt to conceal that he was a man to be reckoned with. Then he turned and headed back toward his Land Cruiser.

  “What’s ujamaa?” I asked once Gessee had climbed into it and headed back down Tumasi Road.

  “It is a Swahili word,” Martine answered. “It means ‘familyhood,’ but what it really means is that the private farms will be collectivized and the labor needed to work them will be forced.” She watched the dust from Gessee’s car drift out over the bush. “It will destroy Lubanda.”

  Ujamaa.

  I’d suddenly said the word aloud, as if I were still in Lubanda, rather than in New York, facing Bill, who now looked at me worriedly.

  “That’s what Martine called Village Harmony,” I explained.

  Bill knew well what ujamaa was, of course, and that it had wrecked Tanzania, turned it into a military state ruled by one party, its agriculture collectivized, its schoolchildren dogmatized; that it was a system which had spiraled downward into economic collapse and finally war with neighboring Uganda.

  Bill watched me silently for a moment, then hazarded a conclusion. “It’s tragic, what it did to you, your time in Lubanda.” He paused, then added. “What it is still doing to you.”

  I waved my hand dismissively. “In almost every way, I got away clean.”

  Bill looked at me pointedly. “In every way, except Martine.” He waited for me to respond to this. When I didn’t, he drained the last of his coffee and set the cup down firmly. “So, what now, Ray? As far as Seso is concerned.”

  I shrugged. “I either find out more, or I don’t.”

  “Well, if it’s any encouragement,” Bill said, “I think he deserves for us to find out why he came here and what he brought with him.” He smiled. “But I know you feel that way, too, and because of it you’ll go the length for Seso, right?”

  Not for Seso, no, I thought. For Martine.

  On that thought, and even as I rose and said goodbye to Bill, I recalled how Fareem had retreated into the house not long after Gessee departed, leaving Martine and me on the porch.

  “Come,” she said after a moment, “I want to show you something.”

  We walked to the road, then across it and out into the wastes, where, after a time, we reached a small rise.

  “He is up there,” Martine said. “My father.”

  We walked up the gently sloping hill. At the top of it, there was a mound, clearly a grave. At its head there was a stone hand-etched with the name François Aubert.

  “The wind and sand take away some of the letters every year,” Martine said. “My father would have found that very funny, the way Lubanda never stops trying to erase him.” She seemed to retreat into herself, remain briefly in that secret place, then return. “So I am going to be burned,” she said. “If I am to disappear, it will be on my own terms.” She knelt beside the stone and ran her fingers over her father’s name. “He was as good as his own father was evil.”

  By then I’d read and returned the book she’d given me on the Force Publique about the outrages its members had committed against the people of the Congo: working them to death in the rubber forests, burning villages, torturing and murdering anyone who rebelled against this oppression. Her own grandfather, Emile Augustin Aubert, had been prominent among those who’d both ordered and participated in these atrocities.

  All of this was still swirling about in my head when she rose and faced me. “My father would have liked you, Ray,” she said, and took my arm. We headed back to the farm in this formation, looking for all the world like the lovers we were not, but which I hoped we would be in the future, a hope that suddenly returned me to an earlier conversation with Fareem.

  “And what of Nadumu?” I asked. “Fareem mentioned him, but then stopped. Is he a secret?”

  Martine smiled. “He was a young man I loved.” She stopped and pointed to the north. “His village was there, beyond that hill. His father was the chief of this village. We played together as children, like the ones in your English book, Catherine and Heathcliff.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “Paris,” Martine answered. “He went to school there, and after this schooling he came back. He wanted me to return there with him. He said Lubanda was no good.” She shrugged. “He looked down on everything here, and I think soon he would have looked down on me.”

  And so she had remained where she was and what she was, and this alone should have been enough to change the course I later took. But love erects a wall that reason cannot penetrate, nor experience, nor history, nor any force outside its own passionate demands, love still the arrow that pierces every shield.

  11

  Life is a story of lessons learned too late, of course, but even so I couldn’t keep from dwelling on Martine at her father’s grave, the feel of her arm in mine as we’d left it and headed back toward the farmhouse. With every step of that walk, I’d once again felt myself both enthralled and consumed by her absolute singularity, the fact that there was simply no one else like her, not in all the world. I would certainly one day leave Lubanda, as I’d always known, but it was increasingly difficult for me to imagine leaving Martine here as Nadumu had. For there really is a kind of love that you know will not come again. It has within it an element of desire, to be sure, but it is not carved from that alone. It is the recognition, fierce and abiding, that it is the core of this person that both summons and deserves your devotion, the utter and irreplaceable “herness” of her that holds you in the exact way the ancient oath proclaims, for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health, forsaking all others, a bond only death—and perhaps not even that—can break.

  By the time I realized that such was my feeling for Martine, I was already on my way to failure in Lubanda. I’d abandoned my well-di
gging project, convinced by her argument that for all its good intentions, it would do a world of harm. But to remain near Martine, I had to remain in the country, and the only way I could do that was as an employee of Hope for Lubanda. For that reason I had to find something to do, and so during the weeks following that fateful arm-in-arm walk, I worked quite feverishly to find some other useful project. Nothing came to mind, however, so that it was with a distinct fear of being sent home that I returned to Rupala after having been summoned there by no less a figure than Malcolm Early, the second in command of Hope for Lubanda.

  We met at one of the riverside villas the English had left behind, one that had since been converted into an entertainment center, complete with a movie theater, a billiard parlor, a large room stocked with pinball machines, and, of course, a bar. Only the bar still had the feel of the old regime. It had high windows that looked out over the river, and tables set far apart and covered with white tablecloths. The curtains, too, were white, and they’d swayed softly in the languid breeze like the lingering ghosts of an earlier colonialism.

  Early greeted me warmly, with a firm handshake, then lit a cigarette and blew a wide column of smoke into the gently undulating air. “So, how are you finding Lubanda?” he asked in an accent that was softly Southern, and in that way elegant and genteel. He was both a creature and a practitioner of gentle persuasion, a man so smooth and softly polished he seemed carved from ivory.

  “I find it a lovely country,” I told him.

  “Even Tumasi?” he asked with a wistful smile that was not at all doubtful so that he seemed almost to confess his own enchantment with such places.

  “Especially Tumasi,” I answered in a way that struck me as quite bold but one that gave no hint that its greatest charm—at least for me—was a woman.

  “Why especially?”

  “The people there,” I answered, “particularly the nomads.”

  “Yes, the Lutusi are certainly impressive,” Early said quite thoughtfully, which was surprising, since I’d expected him to be the sort of NGO executive Bill had told me about, little different from corporate CEOs—ambitious, arrogant, and always hot to generate new and bigger projects for new and bigger fund-raising opportunities. In fact, I hadn’t even expected Early to know the name of a nomadic tribe, much less be familiar with its customs, but he’d been very well-informed with regard to the ways of the Lutusi, particularly the various routes they took across the central savanna, which he compared with the “songlines” of the Australian aborigines. He talked about their marital customs, the “animism” that formed the basis of their religion, and even their rejection of any form of intoxication. He knew of the “bush schools” where the young were trained and initiated, and that the “devils” of the bush played shifting roles, sometimes malicious, sometime benevolent. As he talked, I began to think of him as the sort of intrepid man of the world so often encountered in the literature of foreign adventure, men who’d slept beneath star-dappled skies, waded swollen streams, faced imminent death in jungles or desert wastes, and who, in old age, compared their scars in the darkly paneled gentlemen’s clubs of the world.