A Dancer In the Dust

by Thomas H. Cook

  So why had he come?

  And what had he brought with him?

  There are mysteries in science, and mysteries in art, but the greatest mystery has always been another person’s deepest motivation.

  So what was Seso’s motivation in making so long a journey?

  He’d told Dalumi he worked for Martine, which clearly suggested that his coming to New York, along with whatever he’d brought with him, had had something to do with her. In addition, there was the matter of the shell tattoo, equally an image from the past.

  To this I could add only that Seso had felt protective of Martine, at least to the extent that on one particular morning he’d warned me, and expected me to warn her, that she should get the hell out of Lubanda. We’d been driving across the savanna when he’d issued this warning, its great expanse suggestive of a limitlessness that was purely fictional. “If she decided to leave now, there would be time,” he said. “She could return to her country.”

  I shook my head. “Martine was born in Lubanda. She is the same as you, Seso.”

  Seso shook his head. “She is not the same.”

  Seso made no further elaboration on this statement, but I should have known from the gravity of his expression that for him the truth of life was this: a tribe need not welcome you simply because you claim to be a member of it, and so is it also with countries.

  “She will never willingly leave Lubanda,” I added darkly, and with that recognition, as I would later realize, a fatal shift began.

  By then I’d written several reports to Bill, all of which had painted an increasingly intransigent Martine. If Gessee sent those men to walk her property line and set that fire, then he should have known better, I’d written a week or so before Seso offered his warning, because nothing of that sort will ever make Martine grow coffee.

  Nothing of that sort.

  It was only months later, when I’d been obsessively revisiting my final weeks in Lubanda, that I’d realized just how ambiguous those words were and how differently they could be read—in one way as a suggestion that nothing could change Martine’s mind with regard to growing coffee, in the other that somewhat harsher methods of intimidation now had to be considered. In Lubanda, as I should have known, the second reading would have been the more likely.

  And so it had been, as events quickly proved.

  It was an old woman named Ufala who brought the news. She and Seso had become friendly, and so he’d gone out to greet her that morning, and perhaps buy some small amount of whatever she had to sell. Ufala had walked down Tumasi Road a day or so before, he told me, once again with that grave expression on his face. Her route had taken her past Martine’s farm, where she’d noticed Martine taking down a doll she’d found hanging from the front gate. It had a white face, and bright red hair, she told Seso, and it dangled from a cord that had been wrapped around the doll’s neck.

  “Ufala says there is talk,” Seso added after he’d told me this story. “Bad talk. They say the white woman is a witch.”

  In certain cultures certain words may be used frivolously, while in others they are uttered only in dead earnest. Seso’s tone was grave.

  “They say she is a witch with men,” he added, “and that this is why Fareem stays with her.”

  “Martine’s father found Fareem on the road,” I told Seso. “He’d been captured in the north, then abandoned. He was eight years old, the same as Martine.” I looked at Seso sternly. “So, please tell me what anything about Fareem’s living and working on Martine’s farm has to do with witchcraft?”

  Seso said nothing, but I could read the answer in his eyes: it is not the truth that matters; it is the untruth that is nonetheless believed.

  “Seso?” I said more firmly. “You don’t believe such nonsense, do you? That Martine’s a witch?”

  “She should be careful, this is what I know,” Seso said in an oddly plaintive voice. “This talk makes it dangerous for her here.”

  “Who’s talking, exactly?” I asked him.

  Seso shrugged. “Ufala says it is in the wind. It is everywhere, this bad talk. They say she is a foreigner.”

  I offered no response to this, because, in the most fundamental sense, I believed that it was true, that white and black racism were equally alive and well in the world, and that for that reason Martine lived in a garden in which she was and would always remain the invasive species.

  “Martine is NOT a witch,” I said.

  Seso said nothing in reply, but simply stood before me, unable to argue the point further because I was his boss. Even so, I knew that his fear for Martine was now being fueled by rumor, Martine’s peril made even more clear and frightening by a white-faced, red-haired doll that had been hung from the gate of her isolated farm.

  And yet, when I saw Martine a few hours later, she made no mention of this latest attempt at intimidation. She was in the field behind the house, hoeing at the dirt, wet with sweat, her arms smeared with grime. There was also a line of dust across her forehead, though I didn’t see it until she removed the straw hat she used to shield her eyes from the sun.

  “Hello, Ray,” she said warmly as I approached. Her tone was as bright and welcoming as always, so that I wondered if my alarm was unjustified, Seso’s story just one of the many rumors that often swept the village.

  “I just wanted to make sure you were okay,” I told her.

  “Why wouldn’t I be?” Her hair was a nest of wet tangles, and its very disarray, the fact that it was moistened by her body, sent a charge through me.

  “One of Seso’s friends told him that you’ve had a problem,” I said. “A doll. A red-haired doll. You weren’t going to tell me?”

  She returned the hat to her head. “No.”

  “Why not? If you are in danger I need to—”

  “Because it is not your fight,” she answered.

  She lifted her hand to cut me off. “It is not your fight, Ray. It is not Fareem’s either. It is my fight.” Her voice was firm, but it was the firmness of a woman who had begun to realize how hard the road ahead would be and how resolved she would have to remain in order to walk it. “Who told you about the doll?”

  “Seso,” I said. “He’s afraid for your safety. He says there’s talk. Bad talk, he calls it.”

  When Martine offered no response to this, I said, “Seso says there are rumors. People think that you’re a witch. They think you’ve cast some sort of spell over Fareem.”

  “And what does Seso think I should do about these rumors?” Martine asked.

  “I don’t think he believes that there’s anything you can do about them.”

  “Except leave Lubanda, yes?” Martine asked. “Not simply that I should obey the big men in Rupala and grow coffee. So it’s not what I grow, it’s what I am.”

  “I suppose he sees it that way, yes,” I answered candidly. “That you’re a foreigner, Martine. I know you don’t think of yourself that way but—”

  “And how better to prove that I am a foreigner than by leaving this country?” Martine asked. Something deep inside her, perhaps some core belief, or if not that, the substance of a long illusion, seemed to crack. “Why can people not see that I am nothing other than Lubandan?”

  In that instant I suddenly recognized that the loneliest of us, life’s true exiles, are not those without a country, but those who are at odds with the country they love.

  I might have spoken to this sudden revelation, but Martine turned away and began to dig in short, violent strokes.

  Then she abruptly stopped and stared at me.

  “A few days ago I was walking on Tumasi Road,” she said. “There were lots of people around, just people walking the way we do here. Then, as you say, ‘out of the blue,’ this Land Cruiser is coming up the road. I could see its cloud of dust a mile before it got to where I was. It went by me, then stopped, and the guy behind the wheel, he drives back to where I am still walking along with the rest of the people. ‘You need a ride?’ he asked me. I refused, and so
he drove on without me. But he had marked me, Ray. He had marked me. Because he had stopped for me, and no one else. And why had he stopped? Because I was white. And this was seen by all the others on the road.”

  She paused, her gaze burning into me.

  “Don’t you see?” she asked in a tone that was fiercely plaintive, a voice crying in the wilderness. “It is what you do that makes me a witch. You and the other foreigners who have come to Lubanda. It is what you do that marks me, not what I do.”

  She saw that this last remark had pierced me, and immediately worked to calm herself, even adding for good measure a tone intended to soothe me.

  “It was just a doll, Ray,” she said with a soft shrug. “You should not have come all this way.” She cast her gaze over the broad expanses through which cut the red swath of Tumasi Road. “My mother left Lubanda when I was ten years old. She was afraid of going mad if she stayed here. She told me this and I think it is true. She was a frail person. Like a bird, always looking around, afraid. She was never Lubandan. Fear was always with her here.” She appeared to seek some other way to describe her mother. “Her mind did not have deep roots,” she added finally. She turned to face me. “She wanted to take me with her, back to Belgium, to Liège, which was her home. She told me about the canals. How beautiful they were. All that water.”

  “What did your father say to all this?” I asked.

  “He said that I should go if I thought it would make for me a better life,” Martine answered. “But, Ray, how could I have a better life if I never felt at home?”

  “You would have adjusted after a while,” I told her. “Everyone does.”

  She shook her head. “No,” she said, then looked again out over the arid distance. “This is my only home.”

  This was hard for me to believe because I could not imagine Martine living out her life in Lubanda any more than I could imagine myself doing so. In fact, I could not imagine anyone really wanting to live on a small, hardscrabble farm, with no running water, to die in this spare land, be buried in its arid soil? Did not everyone doomed to such a life dream of escaping it? Was not this, of necessity, Martine’s dream as well?

  I was ashamed to admit any of this to Martine, of course. And so I simply glanced about.

  “Where’s Fareem?” I asked.

  She looked at me quizzically. “He is on his way to Tumasi.”

  “Really? I didn’t see him on the road.”

  She looked at me worriedly. “You didn’t?”

  “No.”

  She suddenly gripped the handle of the hoe more tightly, and although she said nothing, I saw the fear in her eyes.

  “Do you want to go look for him?” I asked with a nod toward my Land Cruiser.

  I half-expected her to hold to her rule of only walking, but she immediately cast all that aside. “Yes,” she said quickly.

  We headed for the Land Cruiser and within a few minutes we were moving as rapidly down Tumasi Road as its condition would allow. The savanna swept out limitlessly on both sides, and as we drove we sometimes saw deer, and once an elephant, but there was no sign of Fareem.

  Neither of us actually spoke the dread that was in our minds, the fear that the same men who’d hung a redheaded doll from her gate now had their hands on Fareem. We knew just how easy it would be for such men to fall upon him. There were countless places along the road where they could lie in wait, silent and unseen, behind the tall grasses or towering termite mounds.

  That Martine said nothing about any of this as we drove down Tumasi Road later struck me as a willful refusal on her part to face the growing menace.

  As I drove, I sometimes glanced over at her. She was sitting stiffly, facing straight ahead. Her blowing hair seemed the only thing that moved. There was dust in her face and dirt on her hands, and her lips were sun-parched from her long days in the field. A triangle of sunburn was visible beneath the open collar of her shirt, and a swath of grime crossed her forehead where she had no doubt wiped sweat from her brow with soiled fingers.

  Several times I started to say something, but some quality in her face, some stillness in her eyes, completely silenced me.

  And so I only stole glances, and with each one, I felt an inexplicable pang both of loss and the fear of loss. Not just the pain of longing, nor even the agony of desire, but a sense of irrecoverable loss and floating peril that could mean only one thing: Martine was at risk, and the thought of her being harmed was as unbearable to me as the notion that she would one day disappear from my life, that I would return to America, marry a different woman, embrace a life that would never know again the passion I knew now.

  “Stop,” she cried suddenly.

  It had been one of those moments in which my gaze had briefly lingered on her, so that I hadn’t seen a figure walking out of the bush.

  “Fareem,” Martine breathed as her relief at seeing him flooded over her. “It is Fareem.”

  He was alone as he came back onto the road, but in the distance, I saw two men moving in the opposite direction, farther out into the bush.

  By then, Martine had bounded out of the Land Cruiser and was rushing toward Fareem.

  “Ray had not seen you on his way to the farm,” she told him, almost frantically. “I was afraid that…”

  “I know,” Fareem said quietly, then pointed to the two retreating figures. “They’re from the north,” he said. “They say that Mafumi now has camps inside Lubanda.” He looked at me. “They say he has many men in Tumasi now. They say that these men are preparing the way for him to invade Lubanda from across the border.”

  All of this was exactly what Malcolm Early had both feared and predicted, but I said nothing of this and instead concentrated on my task of gathering intelligence.

  “Did these men say how many of Mafumi’s agents are now in Tumasi?” I asked.

  “No,” Fareem answered in a way that seemed abruptly guarded, as if my question had alerted him to the sinister presence of a different kind of peril. He said nothing about his suspicion, however, and instead turned to Martine. “I was not in danger,” he assured her with one of his wide smiles. “The president will protect me.” He laughed contemptuously. “As he does all his children.”

  Fareem had never spoken of President Dasai so disparagingly, so that it was now evident that any faith he’d ever had in the government in Rupala was broken. I knew that with its breaking, he was now at one with Martine, the two of them equally determined to stand firm against the whole broad scheme of Village Harmony, a hardening I duly reported later that same night, sitting at my desk in Tumasi, writing in the yellow glow of a candle whose grotesque underdevelopment I found so furiously exasperating that I felt nothing but resentment toward Lubanda, a country that seemed purposely to stand against me, as if both the place and its people were malevolently determined to thwart my most fundamental hopes.

  15

  Of course, devoted white liberal that I was, I’d fiercely chastised myself in the wake of these brutally hostile feelings toward Lubanda. Who was I, after all, to judge it in the harsh light of my own expectations and by a standard I had myself imposed.

  And so, as I continued to follow the ever-diminishing clues to Seso’s murder, I felt the tightening noose of my old guilt, as well as the awareness that it was precisely my need to confront it that had urged me to take the risk of setting Seso’s killers on my trail. I’d known that the chances were slight that anything would come of this, however, so it actually surprised me when my office phone rang a few days later, and I heard Idi’s voice.

  “You didn’t expect those guys to come back, did you?” he asked without reminding me of who he was. “The ones who killed… what was his name?”

  “Seso. And no, I didn’t expect them to come back. Why would they?”

  “Well, you were right, they didn’t come back,” Idi said. “But someone else did.”

  Idi’s voice was relaxed, so quite obviously this person had posed no threat to him, and would probably pose none to
me.

  “A black man,” he added, “Dressed in a suit. Glasses.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He showed me pictures of two men. He asked if they were the ones who brought your friend to me.”

  “Were the men in the picture the same ones you saw with Seso?” I asked.

  “Yes,” Idi said.

  “Where are these men now?”

  “The man didn’t say. He just gave me twenty dollars, and that was it.”

  “Did you tell him about me?” I asked.

  “You said for me to do it, so I did.”

  “And you gave him my address?”

  “That was our deal, eh?”

  “Good,” I said quietly, then paused before adding, “So, I guess I should expect a visit.”

  “Maybe so,” Idi answered. “You ready for him?”

  “He doesn’t sound very dangerous.”

  “You never know, he could be a bad guy,” Idi reminded me. “You sure you are willing to risk that for your… friend?”

  He seemed certain that I wasn’t, that any display of real feeling or loyalty from someone like me for someone like Seso was an empty show. He had no doubt seen too many people rush for the plane to have any faith in foreign avowals of love and loyalty. Abandonment in the face of danger, rather than steadfastness in confronting it, was one of history’s dark lessons, and Idi had quite obviously learned it well.

  “Someone I knew in Lubanda also never trusted foreigners,” I told him. The old pain struck again. “And she was right.”

  If I’d expected this heartfelt admission to penetrate Idi’s firmly established view of me, I was quite mistaken.

  “You paid me to tell you,” he said matter-of-factly, our transaction now complete, and our need to be connected over, “so I did.”