A Dancer In the Dust

by Thomas H. Cook

  “Fareem is already back,” Martine said. “But this is not his fight.”

  “But he surely must have pleaded with you not to go or to let him come with you, because—”

  “Of course he did,” Martine interrupted sharply.

  She was clearly not going to reconsider her decision to walk to Rupala, and so I made no further argument against it.

  “No more about this, Ray,” she said sternly, then gave the fire a final stir. “No more—I mean it.”

  She was silent for a long time, and I could tell that she was thinking of something. She was staring off into the middle distance, though it was only a wall of darkness now.

  At last, she said, “It is strange, Ray, but do you know what really bothers me?” She looked at me very seriously, then said, “It is that no one will visit my father’s grave.” She drew in a long breath, held it for a moment, then very slowly released it, as if savoring the life she still had.

  It was a vision of her that overwhelmed me, and so I released the one true thing I knew in vehement whisper.

  “I love you, Martine.”

  She stretched her arms over her head. “I need to sleep now. I plan to leave at dawn.”

  I got to my feet. “Good night, then.”

  I turned and headed back toward the house. I got only a few feet before she called to me.

  “Ray.”

  I faced her. “Yes.”

  “You will find her,” Martine said assuredly. “The one for you.”

  “Sure,” I said.

  In the glow of her dying fire, her smile seemed almost transparent, as if she were already turning into a ghost. “I know you will,” she said. “I really know you will.”

  I nodded. “Yes, I’ll find her,” I said.

  But I never did.

  23

  It had all seemed so simple once, I thought as I continued my journey toward Tumasi. I would come to Lubanda and dig a well or build a school or plant trees or do some other goodly labor. But in the end, I’d done no good at all. Then after less than a year, and in drear admission of my failure, I’d gotten on a plane, flown out of Lubanda, and never put anything at risk again.

  Now, walking across the empty plains, I thought of the last time I’d put myself in peril, remembered the red sun rising over Tumasi Road, where I’d endured a sleepless night, Martine’s lifeless camp only a few yards from me, the embers of her fire long ago grown cold.

  I’d stayed in my house, listening to the sounds of her awakening—getting water, lighting a breakfast fire. I’d waited until those sounds ended, then gone out, certain that by then she’d gone.

  “Good morning,” I said to Seso.

  He was squatting a few yards from the house, drawing figures in the dirt with a stick, an idleness that was new to him. As I approached, he glanced toward the road, the dusty Land Cruiser he’d driven back and forth to Rupala.

  “Did you give Bill my note?” I asked him.

  He nodded in a way that struck me as moody, perhaps even sullen.

  “So he knows that Martine is taking Tumasi Road?” I asked.

  “He knows,” Seso said crisply.

  “Did he say anything about protecting her?”

  Seso shook his head. “He would not tell me such things.”

  This was true, so no further comment was necessary. Besides, it was obvious that something was eating at Seso. It seemed better to let it go until he saw fit to tell me.

  I had already turned and headed back toward my house when he suddenly got to his feet. “Why did she do this?” he asked in an angry voice, a tone I had never heard from him before. “Because she is white! That is why. She thinks she can do anything, and no harm will come to her because she is white.” He suddenly slapped his chest. “But to us this harm will come!” he said in a despairing cry. “The ones who rule will take revenge. Mafumi will punish us for what this white woman does.”

  “Mafumi?” I said. “What makes you think Mafumi will rule Tumasi?”

  Seso gazed at me as if I were a little boy in need of instruction. “Because he has the sharpest panga.”

  There it was, I thought, African politics as Seso knew it, triumph forever the misbegotten child of brutality.

  “Martine doesn’t want that to happen any more than you do,” I said.

  “But what weapons does she have to protect us?” Seso asked bitterly, then added with an even more bitter smile, “Little wooden shells?” He shook his head and looked defeated. “You should warn Fareem that she is taking Tumasi Road. Long before she gets to Rupala, bad men will know what she is doing. They will come for Fareem, and the color of his skin will not protect him.”

  In life, we expect a trumpet to herald the beginning of some great, life-transforming event, or a bell to toll at the end of it. But reality is more prosaic than that, and so I heard only the crunch of Seso’s feet as he strode away.

  One thing was certain, however. Seso was right in saying that everyone would be alerted to Martine’s mission long before she reached Rupala, and so, yes, Fareem had to be warned that she had taken Tumasi Road.

  Seconds later I was headed toward Martine’s farm, the familiar plume of red dust following the rush of my Land Cruiser like a huge furry tail. I saw no one on the road or in the distance until I came upon Ufala. She was sitting at a rickety wooden stand, hoping for someone to buy any of the array of items she’d gathered around her—a few pots, some medicinal herbs, the crushed dried leaves she smoked and sold or traded for various other supplies.

  “Have you seen Fareem?” I asked, thinking that he might have set out in search of Martine despite her insistence that none of this was “his fight.”

  Ufala shook her head, then waved her hand in the general direction of the farm, a gesture I couldn’t read save its possible suggestion that the conversation was ended.

  I arrived at Martine’s farm a few minutes later. It looked more desolate than before, but I knew that this was only because she wasn’t there. In fact, I saw nothing but her absence. It was in the empty table beneath the tree, the empty chair on her porch, the empty fields that swept out from all sides, even in the ghostly movement of the brush that shivered here and there when it was touched by a dry breeze.

  “Is Martine still determined to make her way to Rupala?”

  It was Fareem.

  He was standing in the door, looking gaunt from his long walk back from the north.

  “Yes,” I said. “By way of Tumasi Road.”

  He looked alarmed. “Then everyone will know what she is doing before she gets to Rupala.” He walked out to the table, where I joined him. “She told me that they are going to take her farm.”

  “They are.”

  “I told her that she could deed it to me,” Fareem said. “Then she could stay here forever. But she said the farm cannot be deeded to me because Rupala says it is not hers.”

  “I’m afraid that’s true.”

  Fareem stared at me darkly. “Martine said worse is coming, that she is no longer to be considered Lubandan.”

  “That’s also true,” I said, then risked another, yet more risky truth. “I offered her a way out, Fareem. A way out of Lubanda.”

  Fareem’s eyes sparked with recognition. He knew a conspirator just as he had known a spy. “A way out for both of you,” he said. “Together.”

  “Yes.”

  His lips curled into a sneer, and his eyes suddenly filled with a searing contempt. “Do you know what Martine thinks of you?” he asked. “She thinks that your head is full of wrong things. Full of errors. Like all the others in the Land Cruisers, bringing the money. She says you are like a man who puts food in a rabbit’s hole and does not see that as long as you do this, the rabbit will never come out of its hole.”

  Suddenly his voice grew taut, and I could see how mightily he was trying to control himself.

  “And this rabbit is Lubanda,” he said. “We are always children to you. Helpless. We can do nothing if you do not help us.”
/>   I could feel his barely suppressed contempt like a heat. It came from him in successive boiling waves. But rather than attacking me further, he straightened himself and stared at me as if from a great height.

  “You bind us up with your money,” he said. “Every dollar is a link in the chain.”

  “Is that what Martine wrote in her open letter?” I asked.

  Now Fareem seemed to come to a hard boil. I had never seen this rage that was inside him, nor guessed how deep it went, the fierce anger of a man who had known only the achingly opposite poles of condescension and contempt.

  “Go home,” he said. “I will go and find Martine.” His tone was firm and commanding, a voice that drew a line in the dust. He would go in search of Martine and he would do so alone. I was no longer of any use at all in Lubanda.

  He said nothing else, but took a long step and then another, and swept by me very quickly. I didn’t bother to offer him the Land Cruiser because I knew he wouldn’t take it. And yet, though he would have to move quickly to catch up with Martine, I felt so certain that he would, so confident that he would find some way to protect her, that a wave of relief settled over me as he grew small in the distance, and at last disappeared.

  But in believing this, I was once again in error.

  The news had come by way of Ufala, who’d heard someone moaning in the bush early the next morning. Fareem had gotten only a few miles down Tumasi Road before he’d been dragged out into the bush and beaten unconscious. Ufala had given him water and placed wet cloths on his swollen eyes. He’d moaned incoherently until he’d finally pulled the cloth from his eyes and uttered his first coherent word: Martine.

  Ufala had told me all this that afternoon, after she’d helped Fareem back to the farm. She’d then returned to the village and told Seso about the beating. Seso had, in turn, come to me.

  “It is as I told you,” he said grimly. “Fareem’s skin could not protect him.”

  He still seemed to believe that the whiteness of Martine’s skin would somehow protect her, but I knew that this was not the case.

  “I’ll go find her,” I told him, then rushed to my Land Cruiser and headed down Tumasi Road, toward Kinisa, the next village on the way to Rupala, where I thought it likely Martine might have stopped for the evening.

  Twenty years had passed since the afternoon I’d rolled into Kinisa in search of Martine, and now on foot, with the memory of my meeting with Bisara still fresh in my memory, I entered it again. As a village it bore the same name and was located in the same place as before. But it was the same in only those two ways, because its people had been grievously punished by Mafumi for the crime of living in the same village as a young girl who’d rejected his advances.

  Unlike the outrage at Janetta, which had been carried out hurriedly, Kinisa had met its fate some years after Mafumi had fully consolidated his power in Lubanda. Because there’d been no countervailing force, the savagery he’d ordered had been carried out at leisure and had known no bounds. Before it was over, nearly a thousand people had perished during a three-week carnival of blood.

  Janetta had to some degree recovered, as I’d seen a week before. Kinisa, on the other hand, had not, and now it was only the charred remains of this once thriving village that greeted me. The circular mud walls of its huts still stood, but the roofs were gone, along with anything else fire could consume. The spare vegetation of the region now claimed the center of the village, and on either side there was nothing but the sweep of the savanna.

  I stood amid this ruin, but only briefly, because the village itself urged me on, proof positive that if it were Mafumi’s old cohorts who were now plotting against Fareem, then the horrors that awaited him could hardly be calculated. It would not suffice for such men merely to hang him or put him in front of a firing squad. They would first torture him in endlessly elaborate ways, or if not that, beat him in the unimaginably brutal way Patrice Lumumba had been beaten, his features no longer recognizable by the time they’d finally gotten around to shooting him.

  On that thought I looked eastward, across a wide expanse, to where, in the distance, through the shimmering heat, I could faintly make out the red-clay gully that had once been Tumasi Road.

  24

  Ten years before, I’d attempted to reach Tumasi. The drive had been hard and I’d been threatened on occasion by fang-toothed thugs, but I’d managed to get halfway to my destination before a much greater risk had turned me back. In fact, I’d made it all the way to Nulamba, the little town where Seso had been taken for interrogation and where Fareem and I had found him locked in a storage closet. It was there that the dread of going farther had overwhelmed me and I’d turned back. But while there, I’d endured the puzzled glances of the villagers as I’d made my way toward the constabulary where I’d found Seso that night.

  It was a village that had later turned to Mafumi, and thus it had been spared the sort of treatment Janetta and Kinisa had received. In fact, tattered posters of the Lion of God still hung here and there in the village, along with a long-outdated government newsletter whose first page was devoted to Mafumi’s thoughts, such as they were: that AIDS was caused by a “Western poison” President Dasai had disguised as an antimalarial pill; that all art and culture had originally flowed out of Africa, only to be stolen by the West; that one day Lubandans would rule the world from a spacecraft launched from the solar system to which they’d gone “before this world began.” Compared with such transparent lunacy, Nyerere’s fraudulent weather predictions were the pinnacle of reason. And yet, it all seemed of a piece somehow, the magical thinking of a continent ravaged on all sides, first in the theft of its resources, and second, as Martine had written in her Open Letter, “in the theft of its will.”

  Little remained of the small, makeshift constabulary where Fareem and I had found Seso save for a single, crumbling wall, now overrun with vines, its cracked cement floor spouting grasses and one dusty fern. Still, it provided a step, or at least a marker, for it was here that I’d stopped ten years before, stopped and turned around and headed back to Rupala, then onto a plane that had returned me to my risk-aversive life.

  After a moment, I headed back toward the road, but not before stopping to look more closely at one of the village’s Mafumi posters, the Emperor of All Peoples sitting proudly on his elephant-tusk throne, a photograph I’d seen in The New York Times some years before. It was the last time any mention of Lubanda had actually appeared in the Times, in an article that had thoroughly chronicled Mafumi’s authoritarian clownishness: his claims to have raised the dead, cured the sick, laid curses upon his enemies so that their arms had withered and their eyes had fallen out of their heads. One of the author’s unnamed sources, a local named Bashir Rutani, had later been found hanging by his feet in a deserted playground. The sign dangling from his toes had said “Child Molester,” but there was no record of his ever having been one.

  “Who are you?”

  I turned to see a tall, thin man standing just behind me, a panga dangling from his hand.

  “I’m an American,” I answered. “I’m headed north, up Tumasi Road.”

  He nodded toward Mafumi’s presidential portrait. “Our chief made good magic.”

  I knew that he did not mean this as a joke. Mafumi’s magical powers had long been an ideological pillar of his rule. The stories were printed as fact in the country’s only newspaper, mainly in pictures. Films were also shown on Lubanda’s only television station. Few Lubandans owned televisions, however, and for that reason VHS cassettes had borne the weight of propounding this grotesque mythology, transported in military jeeps to the remotest villages, along with a boxy old television and an electric generator that could produce enough electricity to play the president’s miracle movies. There he’d been in living color, Mafumi blessing plants that abruptly sprouted, healing stricken livestock that instantly rose to their feet and galloped away. In Rupala, they’d been distributed by the Lubandan Youth Corps, the president’s cadre of teena
ged boys, some of whom had been fully armed. The single cassette I’d gotten my hands on had later been seized at the airport. “Not to leave Lubanda,” the guard told me, then tossed the tape into a large plastic bucket filled with other things that were not to leave Lubanda: medicine, tins of food, foreign currency, pornographic magazines.

  “But the new chief, he does not make magic,” the man added contemptuously. “The new chief does not have big powers.”

  There was only one picture of Fareem, the “new chief” in this still Mafumi-intoxicated village. It hung from the side of a storm fence, a different portrait from the one I’d seen at the consulate office in New York, the president dressed casually in flannel shirt and trousers, his arms outspread as he welcomes a group of children. The legend said simply: The President Embraces the Future of Lubanda. There were slashes across his face, and his ears were gone, his eyes gouged out.

  The man slapped his hand with the panga and stared grimly at Fareem’s picture. He didn’t need to say what he felt; it was obvious in the malevolent glitter of his eyes. He would have liked nothing better than to slice Lubanda’s current president in two.

  Ten years before I’d been pressed forward only by moral anguish, a wind whose force, as I’d discovered in that failed effort, is quickly dissipated. Now, however, was different, the purpose of my present journey not to redeem myself, but to save Fareem from the likes of the man who stood before me, glaring menacingly at this same portrait.

  Surely if any man on earth deserved protection, I told myself, it was Fareem. But on that thought, I recalled the hatred in his eyes when I’d last seen him, his contempt for the hope I’d presumptuously believed myself to be bringing to Lubanda. Once again I heard his voice: Do you know what Martine thinks of you?

  I did know now, and I also knew that she’d been right. But twenty years before, I’d been young and foolish and crazed with love. What mixture could have been more fraught with risk?

  The final consequence of that lethal concoction lay before me, and so as politely as possible I said goodbye to the man with the panga and headed toward the road, walking neither hurriedly nor slowly, but at a moderate pace, like an animal determined not to let a far more dangerous animal smell his fear.