A Dancer In the Dust

by Thomas H. Cook

  “Quite often, yes,” Fareem answers. He buttons the jacket of his suit, then runs his fingers down his lapels. “You must find it odd to see me dressed this way. Like a Western man of business. It is not my normal attire, of course, but Westerners prefer to see African heads of state dressed ‘appropriately,’ as one might say, in business attire. It makes us seem less strange, less dangerous.” He shrugs. “Otherwise, one can be perceived as something of a clown. Mobutu in his leopard skin cap and Mafumi in his red toga. And so I am a suit-and-tie man now.”

  His demeanor is gracious and trusting, very different from that of the ever-vigilant young man he’d been all those years ago, forever patrolling the edges of the farm, certain that Gessee’s men were out there. There’d been a catlike watchfulness about him then. Now he seems like one who has already glimpsed his future and, with more certainty than human life allows, considers it his destiny.

  “This way, my friend,” he says as he directs me toward the door. “I have something to show you.”

  I do not move. I have something to say to him as a preamble to what I have come to do. “We all grow old, Fareem,” I tell him. “We all weaken and grow ill.” I pause as if at a precipice, then deliver a yet harder truth. “And at one point or another, we all lose our bearings and in that state, we make dreadful errors.” I gaze at him poignantly. “I know I did.”

  Though he cannot possibly know what else I might say, or why I have come to say it, he looks at me with an expression of fierce inquisitiveness as to where this stark declaration is leading, allowing me to see that which is truly great about him: his tremendous capacity for risk.

  “But given the dark nature of our shared fate,” I continue, “it’s the luckiest of us who love our country, our parents, love our wives and children, love our friends.” I pause briefly before I add, “As I know you loved Martine.”

  His hand on my shoulder is almost as light as Martine’s was on that final evening.

  “I did, yes,” he says. “I did love Martine.” He smiles, his hand now gently urging me forward. “Come with me, Ray,” he summons me gently, “into the new Lubanda.”

  I know instantly that Martine would have wanted me to come back to her country, especially now. And, oh, Martine, how I would have loved for you to be with me here today, the two of us observing Fareem as he leads us out of the Presidential Residence, the soft nods and warm smiles he offers to the doorkeepers, the cleaning women, the old man who prunes the garden and the young woman who sweeps the pathway with her old, frayed besma. Would we not listen as Fareem tells us of his dream for your country—your country, Martine, not mine; though as I walk beside him, with you the ghostly third party to this moment, I feel my briefcase grow light in my hand, perhaps as winged as you yourself had seemed on the night of your languid dance, dreaming, as I know you must have been at that moment, and as I am dreaming now, that there might yet be hope for Lubanda.

  New York City, One Month Earlier

  17

  Few “truths” are objectively true. Most are a matter of perception and so it is perception that must be closely considered in risk management. If the perception of the source of information cannot be trusted, then, of course, neither can the information. Both the fear of loss and the anticipation of gain distort “truth,” for example. But truth’s opposite does not reside in such understandable and to some extent calculable variables. The opposite of truth is disinformation, the fabricated used to conceal the actual. For these reasons, in risk management, a “truth” may or may not actually be true, but a lie is a deliberate act of deception, and therefore must be thoroughly investigated.

  “So, who do you think is the liar in this case, Ray?” Bill asked. “Beyani or Seso?”

  We were in Bill’s office at the Mansfield Trust, Bill sitting royally behind his massive desk, leaning back in a chair that was the leather version of a throne, the view of Manhattan that filled his window yet more regal. I’d just given him a detailed report on my conversation with Beyani that had left him in the same uncertainty as it had left me the day before.

  “I don’t know who Beyani really is,” I admitted. “But if his story about Seso is a lie, then he must be lying for a reason.”

  “And what might that reason be?”

  “I can’t be sure,” I admitted. “But he claims that Seso was involved in what happened to Martine on Tumasi Road. If that’s a lie, then perhaps Beyani is the one who was involved in it.”

  “And so he had Seso murdered to protect himself?”

  I nodded. “Or others, perhaps. But in either case, he isn’t who he claims to be.”

  “Or who Fareem thinks he is,” Bill added, “since he hasn’t removed him from the government.”

  I looked at Bill pointedly. “Which means that Fareem could be very much at risk.”

  “And you want to help Fareem,” Bill said. “You don’t want to take the risk that he might end up like Dasai, hanging upside down in Independence Square.”

  “It’s just that simple, yes,” I admitted.

  I knew that the moral logic was no less elementary. I hadn’t saved Martine, and so saving Fareem—if, indeed, he was at risk—was as close as I could get to making amends for the terrible consequences of my error. She had loved him, after all. But more than that, they’d shared the same dream for Lubanda. And so saving him, it seemed to me, was like saving some small part of that dream.

  “The problem is how to warn Fareem,” I said. “I know I could just write him a letter, tell him about Seso’s murder and my talk with Beyani.”

  “Then why not do that?” Bill asked.

  “The problem is that I’m not sure he’d take me seriously or even give a damn about what I had to tell him,” I answered. “Don’t forget, he despised me. The last time we were together, he said so to my face. I have no idea if he still feels the same, but even if he doesn’t, he might find a warning from me—sounded from such a safe quarter and perhaps with some ulterior motive—somewhat less than urgent.”

  “Okay, but what’s the alternative?”

  “A face-to-face meeting.”

  “In Lubanda?” Bill asked with a hint of worry.

  “Yes.”

  “Things are still very unstable there,” Bill reminded me.

  “True, but Fareem has taken great risks in his life,” I said. “For that reason, he might only respect other men who do the same.”

  Bill looked at me quite sympathetically. “We don’t have many opportunities to do the right thing, do we, Ray?” he said, as if turning over a few of his own failed chances.

  “Actually, we have plenty of opportunities to do the right thing,” I said. “It’s taking back the wrong thing we can’t do.”

  Bill eased his ample weight back in his even more ample chair. “How can I help?”

  “You can make me an emissary of the Mansfield Trust,” I answered. “There’s no way Fareem would refuse to see me if I were clothed in that golden mantle.”

  Bill nodded thoughtfully. “Okay, I can do that,” he said. “Let me know whatever papers you need.” He smiled. “I’ll even supply the briefcase.” With that, he rose and offered his hand. “Good luck,” he said. “For Fareem’s sake.”

  A few days later I arrived at the Lubandan Consulate to fill out the forms necessary to obtain a visa. The man at the reception desk was dressed in a white shirt and dark pants. He gave me the forms, then indicated a row of empty chairs. “Your name will be called,” he said.

  And it was, by a tall woman of around forty, dressed in what passed for “African dress”: a dashiki with a matching headdress. “I am Sinasu Vinu. I review visa applications. Will you come with me, please?”

  I followed her down a short corridor into a tiny office.

  “Please be seated,” Ms. Vinu said.

  I sat down in the metal chair that rested in front of her desk. As an office, it had the same modest furnishings I remembered from government offices in the capital during President Dasai’s rule. In those d
ays, a portrait of the rotund and beaming president in his yellow dashiki would have adorned the wall, but the photograph behind Ms. Vinu was of Fareem, standing beside the new Lubandan flag, dressed in a far from stylish gray suit. There was a large poster next to the presidential photograph. It showed a map of Lubanda over which the word ufufuo was inscribed in letters of different colors.

  When Ms. Vinu noticed me looking at the poster, she said, “It’s Swahili.”

  “But Lubandans don’t speak Swahili,” I said.

  “I know,” Ms.Vinu said. “And we are always saying ‘Africa is not a country’ to remind foreigners that there are many different nations on our continent. Unfortunately, this is still a difficult lesson, and so the president decided to use a Swahili word because that is the language Westerners associate with Africa.”

  “What does it mean?”

  “It is a beautiful word,” Ms. Vinu said. “It means ‘recovery,’ or perhaps even ‘resurrection.’”

  “Your new president’s hope for Lubanda,” I said with a heightened sense of the mission I had set myself with regard to Fareem, remembering all he’d suffered at the hands of Mafumi’s agents before leaving Lubanda, then the equal pain of his long exile, the many risks he had taken while I had lived safely in New York, calculating ones that were nowhere near as great.

  “It is, yes.” She smiled cheerfully, then asked me for my identification, my itinerary, proof that I’d had the necessary inoculations—the usual information required for a visa. I gave her what she needed, and she immediately began filling out the forms she’d assembled on her desk.

  “It will not take long,” she assured me.

  “I’m patient,” I told her.

  My attention returned to the picture of Fareem, and inevitably I considered the increasing pressure to which he and Martine had been subjected during the last three months I’d been in Lubanda.

  By then, she’d endured increasingly threatening attacks posted on trees or village message boards. But since literacy was not widespread in Tumasi, they’d more often been crude drawings that even the least educated minds could understand. During those last months, they’d steadily escalated in both the nature of their accusations and the crudeness of their content.

  When Martine had found them on her property she’d ripped them down. But typical of her, rather than destroy them, as I discovered one evening when I arrived for my weekly dinner at the farm, she’d taped her entire collection to the living room wall.

  “Martine says that if she were president of Lubanda, she’d use one of them for her presidential seal,” Fareem told me when he showed me the display. The first showed a redheaded white woman distributing money to various “enemies” of Lubanda, mostly countries on Lubanda’s border or tribes against which the peoples of the central region had been in either recent or ancient conflict. A second showed the same woman outside a polling location grandly tossing cash to a crowd of destitute Lubandans, obviously buying their votes. A third had Martine shopping near a crudely drawn Eiffel Tower while standing on a mound of dead Lubandans raggedly draped in the sunflower flag. There were others of this sort. The last, however, was quite different, and I noticed Fareem’s expression tense when he saw that I had reached it.

  “I found it nailed to one of the fence posts out front,” he told me. “When I saw it, I ripped it off the post, but Martine had seen me do this, and so I had to show it to her.”

  In the final drawing, a naked Martine is on her hands and knees, surrounded by several shirtless, spectacularly muscled black men, one of whom is placing a noose around her neck while another beats her bare feet with an iron bar.

  “What did Martine say when she saw this?” I asked.

  “What she always says, that men are simple,” Fareem said. “Then she just added it to the wall.”

  I hesitated to ask the question, but decided that I had to do it. “Fareem, does Martine ever think about leaving here?”

  Fareem shook his head like a man confronted with an insurmountable object. “Never.”

  This, too, would have to be reported to Bill Hammond, I decided on the spot, as it was further proof of Martine’s determination to stay the course.

  I looked at that last of the drawings, noted the lethal threat it portrayed.

  “This sort of thing is not a joke,” I said.

  Fareem nodded. “I know.”

  “So what’s Martine going to do about it?”

  “Nothing,” Fareem answered.

  “But she should report it,” I said.

  He was quite surprised by this response, as well as by the urgency I’d been unable to conceal.

  “To whom?” he asked.

  “The authorities,” I answered. “I mean, look at this thing. When men start fantasizing things like this, they sometimes end up actually doing them.”

  My mind filled with the ugliest images, all of them real-life versions of the hideous drawing on Martine’s wall.

  Fareem saw my distress and moved to calm it. “Martine doesn’t think anyone can do anything about these things,” he told me. “We don’t even know who’s hanging them around.”

  I turned back toward the drawings, the obscene lies they conveyed. “Who do you think is doing it?”

  “My guess is that it’s Mafumi’s people,” Fareem answered. “They’re all weak in Rupala. They wouldn’t have the guts to print something like that.”

  “They may not be as weak as you think,” I warned.

  For the first time Fareem seemed off balance and uncertain, as if suddenly undermined by a grave suspicion.

  “How do you know that, Ray?” he asked.

  He was staring at me very intently, like a man trying to read a coded message in dim light.

  “Politicians never are,” I said quickly, covering any direct knowledge under a blanket of generalized opinion. “They’re all alike, aren’t they? If they’re really challenged, who knows what they might do.”

  Fareem was still peering at me oddly when Martine came in from the kitchen, a steaming bowl in her hands. “Dinner,” she said.

  We discussed the usual subjects as we ate: the state of the farm, the fact that a group devoted to “the greening of Lubanda” had planted the wrong trees along the river in Rupala, all of which had promptly died. As always, there was little discussion of the world outside the country, and none at all of movies, music, the celebrities whose wayward lives dominated the culture of the West. It was not that Martine felt hostile toward these things, or that she thought life in Lubanda somehow superior to it; she had lived here too long to romanticize the life she and most other Lubandans lived. On the other hand, she gave off not the slightest hint of ever having considered the possibility of living anywhere else. It was as if she were a plant, and this the only soil that nourished her, or even allowed her to live. And yet, for the past several months, as I’d spent time in her spare surroundings, listened to her talk of fonio and teff, observed the labor of the planting and the harvest, the smoking of meat, the carving of shells, I’d often thought that regardless of whether she knuckled under to Gessee’s big plans for Tumasi or not, her life was wasted here, a round of changeless days that would inevitably lead, as poets say, to dusty death.

  After dinner, we all washed the dishes together, and Fareem, who had no doubt long ago sensed my feeling for Martine, discreetly went to his corner of the house and drew the curtain.

  “He seems to think that I want to be alone with you,” I whispered.

  “Yes, he does.”

  “And he’s right, of course,” I told her. “So, come, let’s go for a walk.”

  We walked out to the road, then turned right, toward Tumasi. It was a cloudless night, so we walked in the darkness beneath a wild array of stars and a faintly glowing crescent moon.

  “So quiet,” Martine said after a moment.

  “Yes, it is.”

  “Is it ever quiet in New York?” she asked.

  “Not really, no,” I answered.

 
“Is it ever dark?”

  “Sure,” I said. “In some neighborhoods. But not like here.”

  She smiled softly. “The darkness here is… old.”

  She said this simply as a fact. The darkness of Lubanda was old because it had not changed since the dawn of time, it was a world frozen not in amber, whose shadows might be altered, but in a thick primordial tar.

  Even so, I suddenly wondered if Martine might actually be comparing this ancient Lubandan night with the brightly teeming world beyond it, the great cities with their towers of light and streaming traffic and ceaselessly reverberating sounds. Could it be that my tales of New York, the little stories I’d related over the last nine months, had had the desired effect of piquing her curiosity? If I could just once get her out of Lubanda, I told myself, she would never want to go back.

  “A place with big lights,” she said as if she were answering a question she had secretly asked herself. “That is the best place for you, Ray. You would never be happy here.”

  So was it possible that from time to time she’d actually imagined us together in Lubanda? I asked myself in that charged instant. Had she lain awake as I had, thinking that we might share all the joys and burdens of a life lived together? Had she entertained the notion that we might one day plow the fields and harvest the grains on her small farm, and only now, in this darkness, come to realize that it could never be, that I would not only come to despise Lubanda, and all that living here entailed, but that I would finally come to despise Martine herself, and rue the day I’d joined my life with hers?

  “You are the same as Nadumu,” she told me. “And so, like him, you must understand what I would be in some other place.”

  “And what is that?”

  “An orphan.”

  “Did he ever think of stayng with you?” I asked. “Here in Lubanda?”

  She shook her head. “No. To live here, to be Lubandan, this was to him the same as being nothing, and he was afraid of being nothing.”