A Dancer In the Dust

by Thomas H. Cook

  “Well?” Bill asked.

  Classicist that I remained, I suddenly thought of Artemisia, how fiercely Xerxes’ only female commander had fought at Salamis. It was a bravery the king had found merely ill-fated rather than inspiring, however. “My men are become women and my women become men,” he’d said, and with that stark admission retired from the field. Martine was like that fabled woman warrior, it seemed to me, and should have received Lubanda’s praise, rather than its ire.

  “I need an answer, Ray,” Bill said, though softly, fully aware of the weight of his request.

  As if there were a dark insistence that I could no longer avoid the verdict that honesty required, I sank the photograph Bill had given me into the pocket of my jacket. “I’ll do what I can,” I said.

  4

  After leaving the Harvard Club, I took the subway to my office on Rector Street.

  “Mr. Douglas will be here at eleven,” Gail said.

  Gail was my only employee, a woman who regularly retreated to the street for a cigarette, always returning with the smell of its smoke on her clothes and in her hair. She was overweight, made no attempt to exercise, and ate anything she wanted without regard to either calories or nutrition. As the welcoming face of a risk management firm she was wildly inappropriate, but there was something in Gail’s willing acceptance of statistically unacceptable risks that appealed to me. Perhaps she reminded me of that long-ago time when I’d taken the ultimate one, bet everything on a single chip and spun the wheel.

  “And you’ve got Mr. Carter at two,” Gail added as I swept past her desk and stepped into my office, where, rather than taking my usual place behind my desk, I turned to the window. From that perch I’d once been able to see the upper stories of the World Trade Center. Their sudden, cataclysmic collapse had added an unexpected urgency to the notion of risk assessment, but the magnitude of their fall had faded with time, and my clients had returned to the more mundane risks inherent in shifting markets and floating currencies.

  People can rarely pinpoint the forces that shape them, but I’d always known that I’d chosen a career in risk assessment in the wake of my Lubandan experience, the dark surprise it had brought to my life. For twenty years I’d lingered in its shadows, but Seso’s murder now made reliving it more urgent, so that I found myself once again drifting back to my time in Lubanda.

  For the most part it had been very pleasant, at least at the beginning. I’d been given a Land Cruiser and directions to Tumasi. As I pulled into it that first afternoon, I saw a group of small concrete buildings not far from the market. They were painted different colors: white, green, bright orange. A few had wooden shutters, but most of the windows were nothing but square openings into the interior, without glass or anything else to hold out rain or noise or whatever insects or animals might find their way in. I’d been told that mine was painted green and had a white door, and sure enough, there it stood, just off what appeared to be the market square. I remembered thinking, home, and feeling a wonderful excitement at the prospect of just how far away I was from anything I’d previously experienced. There was exhilaration in that feeling, a sense of adventure combined with service, a heady mix if ever there was one, since there is no better, nor riskier, amalgam than pleasure mixed with purpose.

  The market wasn’t particularly busy, though a few people strolled about the stalls, tradesmen and customers with whom I would become familiar during the next few months. Quite a few had stopped whatever they were doing and turned to look at me, or perhaps the Land Cruiser, though none of them approached, and most resumed their usual activities almost immediately.

  For my part, I simply stood for a moment and took the place in—the stalls, the chickens roaming free, a couple of camels, an old woman who squatted under a tree. The market was animated, but not what a Westerner would call lively. No one appeared hurried.

  I’d started to turn back to the Land Cruiser and unpack my gear when I gave a final glance into the market and she was suddenly, strikingly there.

  I’d not seen a white woman since getting off the plane in Rupala, and this one—tall, slender, her skin only slightly tanned—seemed more like a vision. She was standing near one of the stalls. There was a basket in front of her, and she was fiddling about with whatever was inside it. I’d no doubt made quite a display upon entering the village, a cloud of red dust behind me, but she had not been one of those who’d turned to see it.

  At that moment, I might have unloaded my gear and gone directly to the building that had been designated as my home in Tumasi. Why didn’t I? The answer is simple. Whether she was American, Dutch, French, German, or anything else, I’d instantly pegged Martine as a woman, as it were, of my tribe.

  She surely guessed this as well, for she seemed not at all surprised when I came toward her, though she looked up from her basket only after I’d closed most of the distance between us. It was then I’d noticed her most distinctive characteristic: eyes so luminously green they seemed lighted from behind.

  “Hello,” she said when I reached her.

  “Hi,” I said. “I’m Ray Campbell.”

  She offered her hand, and the instant I took it, I realized how very different it was from the other female hands I’d touched. Those other, far less tested hands had been creamed, oiled, moisturized, daily soaped and showered. Martine’s hands had never known such pampering. They were not only rough, they were damaged, wounded by brier and scarred by thistle. Heat had parched them, and dust had dried them just as it had the hands of the village women I was later to know in Tumasi.

  “Martine Aubert,” she said.

  She was tall, with broad shoulders, and looked to be about my age, which was twenty-five. Her skin had darkened in the sub-Saharan sun, but even so, it was only a shade darker than my own. A line of freckles, very small and light, ran from just beneath her right eye over the bridge of her nose to the left one. In another place she would have looked like that fabled girl next door. Here, however, the color of her skin and the texture of her hair rendered her as out of place as a traffic light.

  “Tourists don’t usually come to Tumasi,” she said.

  “I’m not a tourist,” I told her. I nodded toward the little concrete building that was to be my house in Tumasi. “I’m moving into that one.”

  “How long will you be here?” she asked.

  “I’m not sure,” I told her. “A year. Maybe more. How long do you expect to be here?”

  Something in her eyes suggested how indulgent she was of my question, as if it had been posed by a little boy on his first day in class.

  “I will never leave,” she said. “I am Lubandan.”

  Never leave? Lubandan?

  Until that moment, and despite the evidence of her hands, I’d thought her a fellow aid worker, citizen of some donor nation to which she would certainly return to regale dinner parties with tales of her Lubandan experience. But as I now noticed, her clothes were indistinguishable from the long skirts and loose blouses of the other women of Tumasi. She wore the same colored scarf on her head and the same crudely made sandals on her feet. The basket before her was identical to those carried by the other women and a quick glimpse inside it showed me that its contents were typical of those bought by anyone else at the market.

  “You are American?” she asked.

  I nodded.

  “Many of you are coming here, I suppose,” she said. “To Lubanda, I mean.”

  Her accent had a characteristic Lubandan lilt, a soft fluidity to it, a sense of words strung together like small wooden beads. For some reason I’d expected to hear a British accent, but there were no soft a’s, no “cahn’t” or “tomahto.” As I later learned, her first language had been the French of her Belgian father, but he’d also taught her English, which she spoke slowly, with a measured gait, in a manner that was quite precise, but formal, too. She rarely used contractions, for example, and there were times when her English took on the syntax of her native French. She always said, “May I pos
e a question?” rather than “May I ask a question?” There were also times when specific English words eluded her and she would search for them, sometimes finding them, sometimes not. I would always remember that one of them had been “atonement.”

  “I hope that you will enjoy your time in my country,” she said. “And also, I hope that when you return to your country, you will speak well of Lubanda… as it is.”

  She did not elaborate on the meaning she so obviously attached to those last three words, but simply returned to arranging the things in her basket, though now it appeared more like an inventory.

  She was still going through the basket when a tall man in orange robes approached her. Martine stopped what she was doing and turned to him. For a moment they spoke in what I presumed to be the local dialect, then Martine reached into her basket, brought out a bag, and gave it to the man. He nodded, turned, and walked away.

  “What was that all about?” I asked.

  “We have made an exchange,” Martine said in that same slow, deliberate way, as if she had to think of the words before she said them. “I give him something he needs and he gives me something I need. To me, he is giving wood. It is a wood that is from the north. It is good for carving.”

  “I didn’t see him give you any wood.”

  “This is because it is valuable,” Martine explained. “He is a Lutusi, and if something is of great value, he does not show it until he knows what I will give him in return.”

  “Where’s the wood then?”

  “It is hidden,” Martine said, then went back to sorting things out in her bag. “He will bring it to me in time.” She stopped and looked at me. “That is the way of the Lutusi.”

  She said this with neither admiration nor distain for this custom, an attitude I would come to know well in the coming months. Nor did I ever hear her romanticize Lubanda itself nor declare special powers for its people. She gave them no higher moral authority than anyone else, nor did she make any claim that their view of life was superior. Lubanda was what it was, a place she neither demeaned nor glorified.

  I glanced about the market. Most of that day’s customers were dressed in the same orange robes as the man who’d just walked away. They moved slowly among the sheds and stalls, eyeing the goods.

  “The Lutusi live by herding,” Martine said matter-of-factly, when she noticed me watching them. “They are nomads. They bring things here that they gather in their travels.” Her smile was delicate, but there was a strange force in her eyes. “When they are in this part of Lubanda, Tumasi is where they come to trade.”

  I glanced back toward the road that led out of the village.

  “Where does the road go?” I asked.

  “Into what you call ‘the bush,’” Martine answered.

  She returned to her basket and was still rifling through it when a young man approached us. He was dressed in brown slacks and a white, short-sleeve shirt. His gait was slow, but arrow-straight, and his stride was long.

  “Fareem,” Martine said without looking at either of us, “this is Ray Campbell. He is from the United States.”

  Fareem nodded softly, but said nothing. He was very tall and very thin, and I instantly thought of him in terms of Hollywood myth, one of the Zulu warriors who’d attacked the English forces at Isandlwana, slashed their way through the sort of men later portrayed by Stanley Baker and Michael Caine, and delivered a defeat that had stunned Imperial England.

  Martine finished arranging her goods inside the basket. “It is for balance,” she told me without my asking. “That is why I must put things in the basket just so.” She smiled again, this time quite warmly. “Welcome to Lubanda.”

  “Thank you.”

  She placed the basket on her head, where it seemed immediately to find purchase, then turned and headed toward the road. Once there, she stopped and looked back at me. “May I pose the question, who sent you here?”

  “I am working for Hope for Lubanda,” I said.

  She nodded toward my Land Cruiser. “Is it true that Rupala now has many cars like that one?”

  “Quite a few, yes.”

  “So many like you are coming?”

  I nodded. “Lots of people are trying to help, yes,” I said. “Lubandans are the last people to get their independence and so—”

  “So we Lubandans should learn from the history of our neighbors,” Martine interrupted. Now her smile transformed itself into something other than a smile, and I saw a hint of uncertainty in her eyes. “If we can.” She looked at me in what I would come to know as that searching way of hers, like someone trying to bring a distant shore into focus. “Come to my farm for dinner tonight,” she said, “You are a stranger, so it is customary among Lubandans that we give you food. My farm is at the end of Tumasi Road.”

  “Thank you,” I said. “What time?”

  “Before sunset.”

  With that, she turned and moved up the road. I watched for a time, then snapped back to attention and realized that Seso had remained at the Land Cruiser, leaning against it. He was watching the orange-robed Lutusi move through the market, a curious sadness in his face, as if he were looking at old photographs of a time gone by.

  “We should unload,” I called to him, and we immediately set to work. Within a little while we’d unpacked our supplies. We’d brought very little to Tumasi because the house had already been furnished with bedding, a desk, furniture, and I expected to buy my weekly supplies in the market, where, as I saw, there was plenty of grain, meat, milk, and whatever else I’d need.

  “There’s more here than I expected,” I told Seso.

  He nodded. “There is enough for everyone,” he said as one from another country might have said. “There is plenty.”

  I told him about Martine’s dinner invitation, but he didn’t want to go.

  “No, I will stay here,” he said, and offered no further explanation.

  “All right,” I said.

  Toward evening I arrived at a farmhouse that was considerably smaller than what I expected and which I’d already imagined as roomy, with tall windows and comfortably graced by a spacious porch. In fact, Martine lived in what seemed the bush version of a house: unpainted, sloping oddly, ill-suited to endure anything but heat. A single tree sprouted in the front yard. Otherwise there was nothing but plowed fields all about save for a small fence behind which a few goats lazily roamed around, nibbling at the spare vegetation.

  I brought the Land Cruiser to a halt, creating a cloud of red dust that drifted, then curled over and fell back to earth. Even this seemed strange, as if the dust had been unaccustomed to such violent disturbance and had quickly returned to its ancient rest.

  The door of the house was open, but I saw no one inside.

  I tapped at the door. Still nothing.

  Suddenly, Martine came around a corner, carrying a basket of grain on her head.

  “So you have arrived,” she said.

  “It was easy, since there’s only one road,” I told her.

  She took the basket from her head. It had no handles, so she held it in her arms.

  “Please, come in,” she said as she stepped up on the porch and gestured toward the door.

  It would be too late before I fully understood the meaning of Martine’s house, how completely it had both mirrored and expressed her character. In fact, my first thought was no more complicated than the simple observation that she was the opposite of a hoarder. There were a few chairs and a couple of small tables. Two cots, one of which had been done up to serve as a sofa, rested on opposite sides of the farmhouse’s single room. A gray cord made from sisal hung just below the ceiling, and a curtain had been fashioned that could be drawn across the length of the room, presumably for privacy. To these Spartan furnishings, Martine had added a clay oven, and beside it, a stack of wood. All light came from candles, and the only bathroom, as I learned later, was an outhouse whose contents Martine and Fareem emptied by turns.

  In fact, there was only one exceptio
n to the spare nature of these furnishings: an old gramophone with a black crank.

  “Does it work?” I asked.

  Martine nodded. “It is the one thing my father brought with him from the Congo. Not the only thing, no. There are some records. Most of them cannot be played on the machine anymore. The heat is bad for them. And the dust. But with a few, it is possible.”

  “Do you ever play them?”

  “Not so much,” she answered, then turned back toward the center of the room. “Would you like a drink? I make it from fermented honey that comes from the hives. It is strong.”

  She walked through the back door of the house, then returned with two bottles of a thick, amber liquid.

  “So, how did you happen to come by this farm?” I asked after the first sip.

  “My father was the first to come here,” Martine answered. “He was very young. For some time, he worked in Rupala, in the coatroom at the French consulate. While he was in Rupala, he learned a few Lubandan dialects, as well as English. In fact, an Englishman had told him about this farm. None of the whites had wanted to stay in Lubanda. They had come for gold and other mythical riches that didn’t exist. With no natural resources of value, land in Lubanda was cheap, particularly in the savanna. He bought the farm with the little money he had saved, and settled it with a Belgian girl he had met one day in the park.

  “My guess is that she had red hair,” I said airily.

  “No, my father did,” Martine said. “It is he who raised me.”

  She appeared quite pointedly to avoid any further discussion of her mother, and so I didn’t make any further inquiry in that direction.

  She shook her head, then took a sip of her home brew. “Do you like it?” she asked with a nod toward the bottle in my hand.

  I did. It was sweet, but the kick was strong.

  “Another glass of this and I wouldn’t make it back to Tumasi,” I said.