A Dancer In the Dust

by Thomas H. Cook

  “But these cars must have belonged to Mafumi’s old guard,” I say cautiously.

  “Of course they did,” Fareem says.

  “Won’t they feel deprived of them?”

  “Perhaps so, but they will get used to it.”

  “I’ve found that those who once had much rarely adapt well to having less,” I tell him.

  Fareem offers a look of great sympathy. “Your vision of life has grown much darker since you left Lubanda,” he says.

  “Reality has a way of summoning the shadows,” I tell him.

  Fareem laughs his worldly laugh. “Is that the view of some Greek oracle?”

  “More the simple lesson of experience.”

  “Perhaps, so,” Fareem says. “But the lesson of my own experience tells me that men do not need luxury cars as a prerogative of government service.” He smiles. “Besides, such luxury separates them from the people.”

  “So what will be the president’s car?” I ask lightly.

  “I think perhaps it will be a hybrid,” Fareem answers. “Lubanda has little superstructure at the moment, and so it stands to reason that the president should have a small carbon footprint.”

  I glance out the window, Rupala baking in the heat, everything increasing that heat: the packed clay of the ground, the ripple of corrugated metal, the stacks of cement blocks, even the steel rods that jut up from the capital’s many unfinished buildings, structures begun with donor money, then abandoned when the money was withdrawn.

  “There is so much left to do in Lubanda,” Fareem says solemnly when he sees me peering out the window.

  “Yes,” I agree, thinking now of my mission, uncertain though it is, a shot, as they say, in the dark. “Yes, there is much for Lubandans to do.”

  We are now on the wide boulevard that once led from the Agricultural Ministry to Embassy Row, the one street in Rupala that has been repaved and provisioned with traffic signals.

  “This is to be Lubanda’s Champs-Élysées,” Fareem tells me. “A proud avenue that will open onto Independence Square.” He shrugs. “At least that is my dream.”

  I look at him. “What was Martine’s dream?”

  Fareem visibly saddens at the mention of her name. “I don’t know,” he says, then shrugs softly. “A complicated person, Martine.”

  “Actually, I think she was quite simple,” I tell him. “And so was her dream.”

  I start to tell him what Martine’s dream had been, and of how recklessly I had betrayed her, of the fact that here, in Rupala, twenty years before, I had rolled the dice for a woman who was not even present at the table, and how on the outcome of that toss, a braver and more knowing heart than mine had been forfeited. I want to tell him all of that, expose the full measure of my error, but the car suddenly slows and Fareem points straight ahead. “Our national square has taken on a vital function,” he says.

  The square is large, and years before it had served the people of Rupala mostly as a park. There were areas of grass and shady walkways. None of this is now visible, however, for what opens before me is a tent city teeming with children.

  “This is the tragic legacy of Mafumi,” Fareem tells me as our driver wheels the car over to the curb and brings it to a halt at the southern perimeter of what had once been Independence Square.

  “Over there is where they murdered President Dasai,” Fareem says. He nods to the right, where there is nothing but more children. “And there is where his entire cabinet was executed. Their bodies were so riddled with bullets there was nothing to cut down from the post but bloody hunks of flesh.” He shakes his head at the inexplicable savagery of this. “They just kept shooting and shooting.” He looks at me. “There is much evil done in this world.”

  “There is, yes,” I tell him, “but almost all of it is done in the name of something good.”

  Fareem chooses not to engage my little philosophical remark, but instead, indicates a far corner of the square. “And that is where Farmer Gessee met his end.”

  “Yes, I saw it on the Internet,” I tell him. “All the executions. A whole day of them. The ‘White-Out.’ The assault on the zoo.”

  Fareem is clearly surprised to hear this. “So you have been following the descent of Lubanda?” he asks.

  I nod. “All the way to the bottom.”

  He smiles appreciatively. “And now the ascent can begin, I hope.” He glances toward where the new Lubandan flag waves above the square, no doubt daily saluted by its throng of orphans.

  “Perhaps our flag should bear a phoenix,” Fareem says cheerfully. “A symbol for new hope.”

  “But that’s a Western symbol,” I remind him. “Not in the least Lubandan.”

  “Western, yes,” Fareem says. “But perhaps only a suggestion of our shared hopes for this country.” He glances at my briefcase. “Have you brought hope for Lubanda, Ray?”

  I nod. “Yes,” I assure him, though I know that what I have brought to this beleaguered land is profoundly risky. Still, all else seems so profoundly to have failed.

  I smile sadly, then add. “It is the only hope I have.”

  Janetta, Lubanda, Three Weeks Earlier

  21

  What have I done?

  The question was again ringing in my ears as I made my way south, the vegetation growing more sparse with each step.

  And so Bill had been right—it was atonement I sought in coming back to Lubanda, an effort to save Fareem because I’d failed to save Martine by assuming that what I wanted for her should be what she also wanted for herself, an error that had set in motion a chain of events that had quickly spun out of control.

  No part of what my error had wrought could now be changed, however, and so my present task was to reach Rupala as quickly as possible, meet with Fareem, alert him to the risk I’d discovered, and hope that he would take my warning seriously.

  I’d made it to Janetta within two days of crossing the border, encountering very few people on the way. The ones I met had seen few whites since Mafumi had taken power, and so I was a curiosity to them, but little more than that. I offered them nothing and they owed me nothing, and so they had the luxury of ignoring me or not, according to their own will, which was generally to look up, perhaps wave or smile, then return to the labors and relaxations that were deeply and abidingly their own.

  The walk itself was long, and swarms of tsetse flies sometimes attacked me so fiercely I broke into a full run to get away from them. Still, it was the heat that most drained me. It beat down relentlessly, the sun at times so bright I felt that I was staring directly into it. The few villages I passed were baked by it, and everywhere, everywhere, people crouched beneath whatever shade could be found, motionless even as I passed, save for the near-naked children who sometimes rushed toward me, followed me a few yards, then gave up the chase and retreated back into the sheltering shade, movements of engagement and nonengagement that were, for them, as natural as the tides.

  Janetta had been the village to which Fareem had fled in the wake of the Tumasi Road Incident. It had sheltered him for several weeks, and for that reason, Mafumi had decreed that its people suffer a terrible retaliation for Fareem’s later activities in Europe, particularly his creation of a Lubandan government-in-exile.

  Mafumi’s revenge upon the people of Janetta had been characteristically savage—infants, toddlers, and small children sandwiched between strips of plywood and rolled over by trucks, women nailed to trees, men and boys hacked to death—an outrage that had even penetrated the cloud of mindless celebrity noise that generally engulfs the West. From Paris, Fareem had issued a grave condemnation of these events. I could still remember him standing erect and with great dignity quoting Voltaire to the effect that as long as men believe absurdities, they will commit atrocities.

  A few villagers still lived in Janetta, and all of the ones to whom I spoke remembered the visit Fareem had made some months before to lay a wreath beside the large tree at the center of the village.

  “It was the tree
where they nailed the women,” one of them told me, an old man, clearly one of the village elders. “The president got down on his knees. His shoulders were shaking.” He shrugged. “But he did not stay long. He was on his way to another village.”

  “Which one?” I asked, thinking that I might retrace Fareem’s return to Rupala.

  “Tumasi. It is all the way across the savanna. I don’t know why he was going there.”

  I knew, however, and it seemed typical of Fareem that he would have connected these two towns, each so dark a stain on Lubandan history.

  “I know Tumasi,” I told the old man. “I lived there twenty or so years ago.”

  “You lived in Tumasi?” he asked, quite surprised to hear this.

  “I came there to help Lubanda,” I said with a shrug, “but I didn’t.”

  The old man nodded, but I could see that he’d lost interest in the subject. What did he care if some foreigner had once come to help a place far away from his own village.

  For that reason I might have dropped the subject, but the day had been long, and the tree above me gave some relieving shade, and so I risked further boring this old man by taking out the one photograph I’d brought with me, as a kind of amulet, a way of reminding me of that lost time, of what I had been, and what they had been, and what had happened to each of us. It showed the key players in my life at that time, all of us standing in front of my house, Seso a little off to my right, Fareem and Martine to my left.

  “I lived here,” I said as I offered him the picture. “In that little house.”

  The old man took the picture from my fingers, the same weary look in his eyes until a stark recognition suddenly came into them. “He was here,” he said. He pointed to the picture, his finger trembling over Seso’s figure. “He was here that day.”

  “What day?”

  “The day the president came to Janetta,” the old man said. “I noticed him. We all did. Because he was Lutusi and we do not see many Lutusi here.” His expression showed the oddity of what he’d seen. “Especially alone. The Lutusi are never alone.”

  “What was he doing?”

  “Just standing,” the old man answered. He pointed to the tree that stood in the distance, the one he’d pointed out before, where the women of the village had suffered such grievous outrage. “All alone,” he added. “Just standing there. The Lutusi do that when there is danger near. A lion or a snake. They stand and don’t move.”

  “And he stood just that way the whole time?” I asked.

  The old man nodded slowly. “It was sidumo,” he said.

  Sidumo was a Lutusi word. It meant “warning,” and I suspected that the old man had used it as a way of determining if I’d ever really lived in Tumasi.

  “Did the president see this warning?” I asked.

  The old man shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  “Did the Lutusi go up to the president, or talk to him?”

  The old man shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  “When did the president come here?” I asked.

  “It was in the summer,” the old man answered. “Very hot.”

  This meant that Seso had left Lubanda almost immediately after coming to Janetta. Three months had passed since then, so the “very near” danger about which he’d tried to warn Fareem now had to be very near indeed.

  I felt a renewed energy and got to my feet, now determined to reach Rupala as fast as I possibly could.

  I reached Kumuli two days later. It was a dismal collection of stalls and small shops huddled at the edges of a nearly impassable road. A few old cars crawled through its labyrinth of alleys like gigantic metal insects, but otherwise everyone was on foot, the women carrying their burdens of wet clothes and bundles of cassava on their heads.

  Typical of such places, there were small enclaves of aid workers who, with the death of Mafumi and the rise of Fareem, had already begun to trickle in. As I discovered, they’d taken over a line of tumbledown structures along the river. I knew that they would have access to the Internet, and that was what I needed most at the moment.

  The first building I came to sported a large sign out front. A map of Lubanda had been painted on the board, and superimposed over the map, the large-eyed face of a child quite clearly in need of help. There weren’t any flies in the child’s face, but there was enough supplication in those pleading eyes to give a sense of how bad things were here.

  The door was open, and so I walked inside. A young man greeted me with a quick “May I help you?” His name was Pearson, he said, and he was the “chief in-country officer” of an NGO called Children First. He was quite enthusiastic, and in many ways he reminded me of myself when I’d first come to Lubanda all those many years ago. There was the same energy, along with the same sense of rising expectations, of personal adventure melded with goodness, the whole intoxicating brew.

  “The main problem in Lubanda,” he said, “is displaced children. There are thousands of them. The army’s out trying to find them so they can be taken to Rupala.” He paused as if expecting a question at this point, but I didn’t have one and so he continued. “Of course, the hope is that these children can be taken out of the capital eventually. But that will take a lot of money, so we are hoping to help raise the necessary funds.” He smiled as I once had, proud of the hope he was bringing to Lubanda. “That’s why we’re here. We want to be in a good position to start repatriation projects once the funding arrives.” He was on a good-intentions roll, and I could do nothing but recall how much I must have been like him on the day I’d met Martine.

  It was what he said next that surprised me.

  “Basically, we’re waiting for the Mansfield Trust to get on board,” he told me. “It’s the key to everything.”

  “Everything?”

  “The flow of aid.”

  “I see.”

  He appeared to think he’d gone on about all this for too long, and so he changed the subject. “So, what brings you to Kumuli?”

  “I’m on my way to Rupala.”

  “Really? Are you a…” Any possibility of guessing what I was seemed suddenly to escape him.

  “I do risk assessment,” I told him helpfully.

  “What kind of risk?” Pearson asked.

  “All kinds,” I answered, and added nothing else on the subject. “Actually, I was wondering if you have an Internet connection, and if so, I was hoping I could go online for a few minutes. Check my mail, that sort of thing.”

  “Sure,” Pearson said. “Come with me.”

  He led me to an office where I took a seat at the computer. “Thanks,” I said to Pearson, who was lingering at the door.

  “Oh, right,” he said, now aware that I wanted a little privacy. “I’ll be on the porch when you’re done.”

  He closed the door behind him, and I set to work writing a combination of words into the search engine: Janetta, Lubanda, Presidential Visit.

  The search engine’s first result took me to the home page of Lubanda, its flag festooned on an otherwise blank background. I scrolled down a list of possibilities until I came to Janetta Commemoration. When I clicked on the link, Fareem appeared in a color photograph. He was standing solemnly before the tree that had come to represent the massacre. In other pictures, he was seen at the village well or sitting cross-legged with the chief. In all these pictures the impression was that Fareem had come alone to Janetta. But in the last of the photographs, taken as he is about to get into his car, he stands with a group of men in suits and uniforms, several tall, a few rather squat, but only one of them somewhere in between. The man is well dressed, and he stands just at the edge of the group, his hands folded before him in an attitude of great patience, his little Beria eyes peering through the lenses of his gold-rimmed glasses.

  Beyani.

  Could it be, I wondered, that it was of a danger this lethally near that Seso had hoped to warn Fareem? I could think of only one person who might be able to tell me.

  “Thank you for letting me us
e your computer,” I told Pearson when I joined him on the shaded porch of the bungalow.

  “Where are you headed?” he asked.

  “Sura,” I answered. “It’s a small village about fifteen miles from here.”

  “I could drive you there, if you want,” Pearson said. His smile was open, winning. “I won’t have much to do until the money comes in.”

  “There aren’t any drivable roads to Sura,” I said.

  Person looked genuinely puzzled. “Then how do you plan to get there?” he asked.

  “I’ll walk,” I said, then gazed out across the savanna, an area of the country I still remembered quite well since I’d repeatedly explored it while looking for the perfect place to dig my well.

  “Sounds a little dangerous,” Pearson said.

  To one who knew nothing of Lubanda, such a walk would look dangerous indeed, I thought, but it was actually quite safe. I had plenty of food and I knew where water could be found. My command of the Lutusi dialect was slight, but I had carefully calculated that it would be sufficient for me to trade a few items in my bag for some sheep stew.

  “Well, good luck,” I said to Pearson.

  “You too,” he said with a smile as bright as his good intentions.

  I walked to the road, then across it into the savanna.

  It was the very land the Lutusi had wandered, and which I’d assumed them still to roam. I knew that Dasai had been killed before he could make farmers out of them, and Mafumi had barely seemed to notice them. I’d expected that, sheltered by this indifference, they would be living as they always had, but instead, as I moved deeper into their old territory, I was surprised that I didn’t encounter a single one of them. It was as if they had disappeared from the land in which they’d once so freely roamed. I knew the places where they’d always camped as they moved across the savanna, a route that had not changed in recorded memory. But rather than tribesmen, I found cold fire pits that had not been used for weeks.