Part III
Rupala: 11:15 A.M.
“The president certainly would not have kept you waiting, Mr. Campbell,” the minister tells me as he gently takes my arm and turns me from the window.
“It’s not his fault,” I assure him. “I’m early. I know that our appointment is for noon, but when I landed in Rupala it was already after ten. I’d hoped to have time to go to my hotel, freshen up a bit, but with my late arrival, I had no time for that.” I smile cordially. “I didn’t want to be late for my appointment with the president.”
The minister returns a smile as warm as my own. “I am sure he would have understood,” he tells me. “He is, as his life has demonstrated, a very patient man.”
And patient he has surely been, Lubanda’s new, reformist president. Patient in exile, endlessly railing against Mafumi’s madness, calling for regime change from podiums in London, Paris, Copenhagen. Patient as one after another of his exiled compatriots fell to Mafumi’s assassins. Patient as he himself escaped numerous attempts on his life: stabbed in Lyon, shot at in Brussels, almost run over in Oslo, the last attack having left him with a slight limp. Everything about him suggests this unearthly patience. He is modest in his dress, and wears the scholarly gold-rimmed glasses that mark him as a thoughtful man, by all accounts fluent in English, German, and French, a moderate man whose inner compass shifts neither north nor south, but holds with impressive steadiness to his hope for Lubanda’s future.
“It is only now that the president’s work really begins, of course,” the minister reminds me. “Lubanda was pillaged by Mafumi. He took everything and left us only”—he stops and nods toward the window, where the voices of the children can now be heard singing the new national anthem—“orphans.”
This is a dreadful portrait of Lubanda’s current situation, but on the road from the airport to the Presidential Palace I’d seen heartbreaking evidence for its accuracy. There’d been shantytowns as far as the eye could see, their dusty alleys filled with children. In addition, I’d passed a large tent city that looked like nothing so much as a vast field of tattered cloth flapping in the dry wind. And under each flap, of course, there’d been another gathering of destitute children.
“We would bring them all to the palace if we could,” the minister informs me. “But as you know, our resources are limited.”
I glance to the left, where a framed map of Lubanda is displayed. It is a paper map, dry and cracked with the years. A swath of brown traverses the map east to west and in that way designates the great savanna the Lutusi had once roamed. A black dot indicates the village of Tumasi, but there is nothing to designate Martine’s farm, nor the dusty side of the road where Ufala had found Fareem so badly beaten, his first words to her spoken in delirium, Martine, Martine.
The minister clearly sees the distress that suddenly rises in me, though he could have no idea of its cause.
“I am told that it has been many years since you were in Lubanda,” he says cautiously, perhaps in order to return me to some less troubling frame of mind. “And that you are now living in New York.”
I turn from the map. “I came back ten years ago,” I said. “And I came again a month ago.”
The minister is clearly surprised to hear of this most recent trip. “You came to Lubanda a month ago? Why did you not tell us? We would have welcomed you and—”
“I came in secret,” I inform him. “By way of Accra, then overland to the border. I crossed it at Gomoa. Without a visa.”
“You entered our country illegally,” the minister states without either alarm or accusation. “It is easy to do in the north.” He looks at me quizzically. “But why did you come to Lubanda in such a way?”
“I was on a mission,” I answer. “A secret mission. It had to do with a murder.”
The word “murder” has always had a sobering effect, and I can see proof of that in the minister’s eyes. It is as if simply hearing the word puts one at risk.
“Seso Alaya,” I add.
The minister clearly does not recognize the name.
“He was a friend of mine,” I inform the minister. “He was murdered in New York City three months ago.”
The minister does not react in any way to this added information save with a quiet, “I’m sorry to hear of this.”
He adds nothing to this expression of condolence. I do not press the matter, but instead let my attention drift back to the map. A slightly weaving line designates Tumasi Road, but no mark indicates the great wrong that occurred along its route. If life were kind, it would provide such markers, so that we could contemplate the risks, and thus be far more careful in terms of what we do. Halted in place, we would look ahead and judge whether hope or despair should guide us, vengeance, force, or mercy stay our hand.
But life is as it is, in all things as desperate and uncertain as the hope I have brought for Lubanda.
New York City, Two Months Earlier
12
Because there seemed no way to pursue Seso’s death, I’d more or less returned to my usual routine after showing Bill the photograph I’d bought from Dalumi. And yet, I continued to take it out and look at it from time to time. What could possibly have driven Seso to come so far? Hope has sometimes inspired such effort, I knew, but it has usually been driven forward by an even deeper fear.
Fear.
Another of risk management’s simple formulations returned to me: Fear freezes action. I recognized that as a statement, this was, to say the least, a penetrating glimpse into the obvious, one so leaden, in fact, that it could only have taken wing in an academic wind tunnel, in my case a university classroom presided over by a forgettable professor who, to my surprise, had added a salient point to this otherwise quite unspectacular pronouncement. Standing behind a podium, he’d paused dramatically, stared solemnly at his captive audience, then added, “This is the simple truth that every schoolyard bully knows, along with every tyrant. Fear governs the human heart, and only the deepest and most passionate of purposes can overcome it.”
I’d sat in the classroom that afternoon, surrounded by students far too naïve to grasp the cold reality of what the professor had just said, and thought again of the sweltering afternoon Seso had burst through the door of my house in Tumasi, breathless, terrorized. You must come! You must come!
Since returning from my last, ill-fated trip to Lubanda some ten years before, I’d avoided the memory of such fiercely unsettling moments. But now, by looking into Seso’s murder, I’d ventured out of that risk-aversive cocoon, though only far enough to reach a dead end with regard to my little investigation. The odd thing was that despite reaching that dead end, I’d continued to feel uneasy and sometimes distracted, and at all times strangely empty. It was as if a small bird had briefly taken wing within the vast empty spaces of my soul, then, following its short flight, had settled back into a nest it no longer found comfortable.
Perhaps it was that deep discomfort, the unfilled hole within me, that once again returned me to my own little tribe, the classics. I thought of Venus, how she’d pleaded with Adonis to hunt only easy prey. In Tumasi, that male/female role had been reversed, I who’d urged Martine to be cautious, to weigh her actions, and finally to compromise, she who’d refused every avenue of escape.
We’d been standing beside my Land Cruiser the first night I’d pointed out the risks inherent in her position. By then I no longer had to make up reasons to drop in on her. I was a secret agent now, making contact with my target.
But why had I accepted my new mission as a spy?
The answer, of course, was simple. I wanted Martine to compromise, because I wanted her to be safe and I felt that her position was putting her at increasing risk. Malcolm Early’s warning was continually ringing in my ears, each time more convincingly. Martine was a very conspicuous thorn in the side of Rupala’s plan to develop Tumasi, and the big men in the capital would have to find a way to pull it out. It would be far better, it seemed to me, if Martine could see this a
s inevitable and any resistance to it as futile. If reporting her activities to Bill Hammond might serve that effort in some way, then spy I would.
But there was also this: I wanted to buy time for her to fall in love with me more deeply than she had for Nadumu, and I’d come to believe that perhaps she would. She was somewhat older now, after all, and certainly she no longer romanticized any aspect of life in Lubanda as perhaps she had some years before. In addition, there was evidence—for the possibility that her feelings for me were deepening. She’d begun to come to the market more often, and to invite me to her farm more often. We took long walks and talked of our pasts, she of her father’s death when she was fifteen and her consequent struggle to keep the farm afloat in the wake of that loss, I of an easy Midwestern childhood, followed by my move to New York and my work in a school there. We’d talked about books as well, and it had become clear that she’d read considerably more English novels than just Wuthering Heights, the book she’d referenced the night she’d told me about Nadumu. She’d also talked in considerable detail about the terrible things her grandfather had done in Congo as a member of the Force Publique—the villages he’d torched, the prisoners he’d tortured, the massacres that had been carried out at his command—a bloody personal history that I thought might explain Martine’s seemingly unbreakable commitment to Lubanda, an effort, as I suggested on that evening, a week or two after my meeting with Malcolm Early, at atonement.
“I am sorry,” she said. “I have heard this word, but I do not know what you mean.”
“That you feel guilty for what your grandfather did,” I said. “And so you’re trying to make up for it.”
“Why do you say this, Ray?” she asked.
I realized that I’d reduced her to a stereotypically guilt-ridden liberal, but I saw no way out of the hole which I’d dug for myself. “I just mean that I know how much you want to help Lubanda.” I shrugged. “The same way I do.”
She shook her head. “Not at all like you,” she said. She plucked one of her carved oyster shells from the basket beside her chair. “Here,” she said as she offered it to me. “I want you to have this.”
I put out my hand, but she didn’t place the shell in it.
Instead she nodded toward my hand. “Look at your hand, Ray. The palm is up, but more important than this, your hand is under my hand. It is this way because the giver always has the upper hand.” Her look was piercing. “The Bantu have a saying: ‘The hand that gives, rules.’”
She started to add something to this remark, but suddenly stopped cold, her gaze at first curious, then troubled, then darkly resigned as she stared out into her fields. “That is Farmer Gessee’s latest move, by the way,” she said.
I turned in the direction she indicated and saw eight or nine men walking, one behind the other. They were quite far away, but even so I could see that they were carrying pangas.
“They are walking my property line,” Martine said. “They have been doing this every night for the last week.” She watched them closely, like one following a serpent’s slithering approach. “They will be careful not to cross it.” Her eyes drifted over to me. “In Rupala they think I am selfish because I want to do as I wish with my property, but what will happen to Lubanda when none of us can do what we wish with our land? What power will be left but the one held by the big men in Rupala?” She shook her head. “Power is even more greedy than money, Ray, and because of that, we should fear it more.”
Fareem came out of the farmhouse, his expression very grave as he stared at the distant line of men. “Gessee’s people,” he said. “We should go out there and tell them we know this.”
Martine shook her head. “If we confront them, they will say we provoked them.” She smiled in a way meant to ease Fareem’s distress. “It is a beautiful evening. Quiet. Good for talk, so let us just talk.”
And so we did, though even as we spoke of other things, we continued to watch the men as they slowly paced back and forth along the farm’s property line. From time to time they would stop and face the farmhouse, hold in that position for a moment, then move again. They never raised their pangas and shook them in the air, nor made any other threatening gestures. It was their presence that threatened, the simple fact that they knew where Martine was and could come for her at any time.
There is nothing more forbidding than men awaiting orders. This was the truth I learned that night as the three of us watched darkness fall, the men still in the distance, parading back and forth, stopping to pose, then marching again, always in a straight line, as if to provide yet more grim evidence that they would do whatever they were told.
“How far do you think they might go to make you grow coffee?” I asked behind the mask of being on her side rather than one who listened, recorded, noted, and informed upon her. “Gessee and the others in Rupala?” When she didn’t answer, I asked, “What are you thinking?”
She let her head loll backward and ran her fingers though her hair. “That I like the wild sounds. The animals and the insects.” With that she rose and walked into the house, leaving Fareem and me alone beneath the tree.
“She’s very afraid now,” Fareem said after a moment. “She tries not to show it, but she’s scared to death.” A pause, then, “Last night she was talking about Patrice Lumumba, the way he was beaten over and over again before they killed him.” For the first time, he seemed curiously defeated, like a man in a card game he knows is stacked against him. “It wasn’t enough just to shoot him and throw him in a hole.”
For a time we sat silently as the darkness deepened and thickened, turning the air into a solid brew.
“There’s something I don’t understand,” Fareem said finally. He was still looking at the short column of men. “How do they know so well Martine’s land line? There are no clear boundaries.” He watched as the men continued to make their way single file along what appeared a straight line. “Martine walked them with you, didn’t she, the boundaries of the farm?”
I stiffened a bit, at least inwardly, and wondered if he’d somehow gotten wind of the conversation I’d had with Early and now suspected that I’d even gone so far as to feed him technical information about Martine’s farm.
“Yes, we walked them,” I admitted casually, as if I sensed no suspicion in his voice.
Fareem abruptly turned toward me. “Have you ever thought of becoming Lubandan?” he asked.
Such a step had never once occurred to me.
“You’d have to renounce your American citizenship and pledge allegiance to our sunflower flag,” he added quite seriously. “Which is the only way Lubanda’s fate will ever really matter to you, Ray.”
I don’t know what my reaction would have been to this, but it didn’t matter because Fareem suddenly spoke again. “Ah,” he said solemnly, his gaze directed toward the far field. “The next step.”
I stared out across the fields to where a low trail of fire began to move along the property line until all of Martine’s farm was ringed in a necklace of flame.
“It’s a traditional warning to a tribe that has intruded on another tribe’s land,” Fareem said as the fire quickly burned itself out and the fields were in darkness again. “They are saying that Martine is a squatter on their land. They are saying that she is like you, Ray, not Lubandan.”
Had I been schooled in the principles that define my profession, I would have known that a fearful measure of risk had just been added to Martine’s life.
“I was on a boat once,” Fareem said. “In Kenya. We were drifting past a village. I heard a lot of noise, a lot of yelling, and when I looked over I saw a woman, maybe thirty years old. She was running toward the river. She was naked and lots of people were after her. Men, women, children. They were chasing her and throwing things at her and she was trying to get away from them. But there was no place for her to go but into the river. Someone on the boat said, ‘She’s a witch. They’re going to skin her.’ I don’t know what happened after that. We had passed the village
by the time the crowd was pulling her out of the river.” He paused, then looked at me. “You cannot let that happen to Martine.”
“I would never let anything like that happen to her,” I assured him firmly, because I believed with all my heart that it was true.
Martine came out of the house just at that moment. She was watching the distant fires, but nothing about them appeared to surprise her. It was only the next step, and I could tell that she had anticipated it.
“Men,” she said softly as she continued to stare out into the fields, where they were now jumping back and forth over the glowing embers, shouting, egging each other on, their display growing more and more crazed and violent as each worked to outdo the other. “They are such little boys.”
13
It was while still floating in the disturbing eddies of that memory, and perhaps urged forward by it, that I resolved to make one more effort in my investigation of Seso’s murder, called Max Regal, and asked if he’d made any progress with regard to the case.
A Dancer In the Dust Page 13