A Dancer In the Dust

by Thomas H. Cook

  The man did not seem in the least offended by this outburst. He was a thief, and knew it, and now he knew that I knew it, too, so the matter was pretty much settled.

  “I sell you fifty dollars’ worth of Lubandan currency,” he said. “You can use it when you cross. Another fifty for crossing without a driver.”

  He looked at my single piece of baggage, and so I acted quickly. “And another fifty for keeping my luggage?”

  A smile crawled onto his face. “You are not new to this country,” he said as he put out his hand.

  I took out my wallet, plucked the agreed-upon amount of cash from it, and gave it to him.

  By then the two other guards had joined us, both of them eyeing the cash as I handed it over.

  “You can go,” the man behind the TV tray said to Dolvo, and with no word of farewell, my driver turned and left the room. Seconds later, still standing in place, I heard the engine of his car fire, then the sound of wheels on gravel as it pulled away.

  “You are alone now,” the man behind the TV tray said. His smile returned. “But you are safe.” He laughed. “Lubanda, it is one big family now.” He leaned back slightly and folded his arms over his chest. “There are not many villages out this way. Where do you plan to stop tonight?”

  “Janetta,” I said.

  Perhaps he saw something in my eyes at that moment, the shadow of some old, remembered crime that needed no words to convey it. People had perhaps seen that same shadow in them before, though none could have suspected the nature of that inward injury, nor that there might be acts of love so fraught with error as to make the deepest hatreds blink.

  “Good luck,” he said. Something drew the lingering smile from his lips and curled them downward. “I think you’re going to need it.”

  I turned and left, glancing back only once to where the man sat intently thumbing the bills.

  I was on my way to Rupala, of course, hoping to warn Fareem before it was too late. And yet, as I moved deeper into Lubanda, I found that I hardly thought of him. All my thoughts were of Martine, and the night she’d asked me to help her save her farm, the long ride to Rupala, which I’d not reached until early morning. It was a memory that worked upon my soul like a barbed whip upon the body, vicious, unrelenting, every recollection drawing blood.

  Bill had been quite obviously surprised to see me standing outside his office door that morning.

  “You look road-weary,” he said.

  “I drove all night.”

  He turned and unlocked the door to his office. “I’ve actually been surprised by how rarely you’ve come to Rupala,” he said cheerfully. “But then, I’m sure Tumasi has its charms.”

  The lascivious nature of his smile told me everything. He thought that Martine and I were lovers, a supposition based upon the simple fact that in isolated Tumasi we were the only man and woman of the same tribe.

  “Come in,” Bill said as he ushered me into his office.

  It was very plain and decidedly functional, with nothing but a metal desk and a few filing cabinets. Its only adornment was an enlargement of the photograph of President Dasai I’d taken with Fareem’s broken camera, its starburst crack neatly cropped out so that the president stood quite magisterially before a Lubandan sunset, fists at his waist, the man of the hour.

  “That was a good day,” I said almost to myself, my memory of those events now entirely romanticized, for it had been early in my time in Lubanda, my love for Martine only beginning. We had shared a moment of grave risk, and had later made light of it upon returning to Tumasi. What could have been more thrilling?

  Bill laughed. “A good day? You were shot at. You could have been killed.” He nodded toward one of the room’s metal chairs. “Have a seat.”

  I sat down, and waited for Bill to do the same.

  “So, what’s on your mind, Ray?” he said.

  “I’ve come about Martine,” I told him.

  Bill made a nest of his fingers and placed it firmly on his desk. “What about her?”

  “Gessee is trying to take her farm,” I said. “He’s been doing it for quite a while. That tax on teff, for example was just a way of doing that, but since then it’s gotten worse.”

  Bill made no argument against this.

  “Now he’s saying she’s not ‘culturally’ Lubandan,” I continued. “And for that reason, her land can be confiscated by the state.”

  “That’s the new law, yes,” Bill said.

  “It means that Martine, because she isn’t black, will lose her farm,” I said. “It’s pure racism.”

  Bill laughed, “And the fact that blacks can be racists surprises you, Ray?”

  “No, but an outright racist policy does,” I fired back. “Especially when it’s aimed at a woman like Martine… a woman who is—”

  “Good God,” Bill interrupted. “You’ve fallen in love with her.”

  I nodded. “Yes,” I admitted.

  “And so now you’re playing her knight-errant,” Bill said, neither with approval nor disapproval, but merely as a clear statement of the case.

  “I want to help her, yes,” I conceded. “You’ve read my reports. You know what’s been going on in Tumasi. Those men at the edge of her property. Those horrible drawings.”

  “Which have evidently had no effect on Martine,” Bill said gravely.

  For a moment, he remained silent, his expression unreadable, making me feel like a man working with an instrument whose interworkings he didn’t understand.

  Finally, he said, “Ray, if you’ve come because you think I can somehow change what the government intends to do, you’ve wasted your time, because there’s nothing you can do and there’s nothing I can do to help Martine keep her farm.” He opened his hands as if to show how empty of power they were. “I’m sorry, but that’s the way it is.” He suddenly looked as if he now had to get on with things he could do something about, the matter of Martine keeping her land decidedly not among them. “So,” he said wearily. “Anything else?”

  I knew that I was being dismissed, but I had failed so dismally to help Martine that the prospect of returning to her and admitting that failure was more than either my love for her or my pride in myself could bear.

  “So, what do Gessee and the others think Martine will do once they’ve taken her farm?” I asked.

  Bill leaned back, and for the first time he seemed uncomfortable with his helplessness. “I don’t know,” he answered. “Her farm will be taken by the state and they’ll grow coffee on it. What Martine does after that is of no concern to anyone in Rupala.” He glanced toward the window, where a new building was going up. “I suppose she can come here. She speaks English and French. She should be able to find some kind of work.” He looked at me, and a sad little smiled crawled onto his lips. “Can she type?”

  “There has to be another way for her,” I answered sharply.

  Bill suddenly looked as if he’d been drawn into a conspiracy whose direction and possible consequences he didn’t like. “Do you have a suggestion?”

  It was precisely at that moment that the idea came to me, in a movement I could only describe as a dry rustling in my mind. I said nothing as the plot took shape, a pause sufficiently brief to suggest the risk ahead, but not long enough to deter me from taking it.

  “More pressure,” I said at last. “The government could put more pressure on Martine.”

  “Pressure to do what?”

  “Leave Lubanda.”

  “They’ve already taken her farm, Ray,” Bill reminded me. “What else can they take?”

  “Her citizenship,” I answered.

  The idea had come to me because I’d done as Bill had asked—read Lubanda’s Constitution very carefully—though it had never occurred to me that I might use that knowledge against Martine.

  “Her Lubandan citizenship could be taken from her,” I repeated, this time more emphatically.

  Bill looked as if he were turning a kaleidoscope, trying to bring its disparate elements i
nto crystal clarity. “What are you talking about? Martine was born in Lubanda.”

  “That’s true,” I told him, “but she can still be stripped of her Lubandan citizenship.”

  Bill watched me darkly. “How?”

  “Remember when I first came here, you gave me a copy of the Lubandan Constitution,” I said. “Well, I read it, just like you said I should. And there is a section in it that says that citizenship can be denied to any person or their descendants, who entered the country illegally or gave false information, or who—and this is the part that applies to Martine—‘who committed acts against Negritude.’”

  “Acts against Negritude,” Bill repeated. “What does that have to do with Martine?”

  “Martine’s grandfather was a member of the Force Publique,” I said. “She told me this herself. She also gave me a book about it. Her grandfather’s in it.” I leaned forward. “His name was Emile Aubert and he slaughtered God knows how many Congolese. Tortured people, burned villages. If he doesn’t qualify as a man who has committed acts against Negritude, then no one does.” I eased back in my chair. “Just by using the Constitution, Gessee could denationalize Martine. She’d be a stateless person. They could even refuse to give her a work permit. They could do anything really. She would have no rights whatsoever. She would be completely helpless.”

  “And you feel that at that point, Martine would leave Lubanda?” Bill asked.

  I nodded. “And when you get down to brass tacks, isn’t that really what Gessee and the others want… a black Lubanda?”

  Bill was silent for a moment, clearly reluctant to admit this stark truth of Lubandan politics, but at last unable to deny it. “But where would she go?” he asked. “She isn’t a citizen of any country but Lubanda.”

  “She could go to the States,” I said.

  “With you?” Bill asked. “You mean as your—”

  “Yes,” I interrupted.

  Bill smiled knowingly. “It’s like that old Bible story, isn’t it? The one about David and Bathsheba. How David sent her husband, Uriah, to the forefront of the battle in order to kill him.”

  “I’m not killing anyone,” I said. “I just know that Martine has to leave Lubanda… whether she wants to or not.”

  At that moment we were two men in collusion with regard to a woman whose best interest we were convinced we knew better than she knew it, a woman whose future we were conspiring to shape without regard to the risk we ran of distorting it.

  “So, I take it you want me to tell Gessee about Martine’s grand­father,” Bill said.

  “Yes.”

  Bill’s gaze was unearthly still, and in that stillness I saw our collusion grow darker as he became steadily more convinced that we were of the same tribe, he and I, and for that reason we should naturally join forces to rescue a third member of our pale clan from a life we had decided she had no right to choose.

  At last, he nodded. “All right,” was all he said.

  On the ride back to Tumasi, I knew exactly what Bill was going to do. He was going to call Gessee and give him the power he needed to deal with Martine with a finality that would surely appeal to him, and which could be provided to him via a mechanism enshrined in the Lubandan Constitution rather than any further resort to transparently phony last-minute laws. As a treacherous scheme, it was perfect, because Martine herself would never know what I’d done.

  She was on her dusty little porch when I got to her farm that evening.

  “How did it go in Rupala?” she asked tensely, as if her life depended upon whatever news I had for her, a fact far more certain than she knew.

  I sat down and released a dramatic sigh. “I’m sorry, Martine.” I told her. “There’s nothing anyone can do.”

  She drew a small piece of wood from the pile beside her chair and began to whittle it with her father’s pocketknife. “I did not think there would be.”

  I hesitated long enough to take a breath, then delivered far graver news. “And they’re going to take away your Lubandan citizenship.”

  She looked darkly amazed that such a thing could even be contemplated.

  “But I was born here,” she said.

  “I know, but there’s something in the Constitution,” I told her. “It’s about the descendants of people who committed acts against Negritude. Acts against blacks at any place or any time. Like the ones done by your grandfather in—”

  “That provision has never been applied to anyone,” Martine interrupted in a way that suggested her complete dismissal of this ploy. “It was just part of the anticolonial rhetoric back when Lubanda became independent. Some racist fringe group wanted it, and Dasai caved in to get the Constitution ratified. It was never meant to—”

  “Yes, but it’s there, Martine,” I said. “It’s there in black and white and they’re going to apply it to you.”

  She stared at me silently, as if numbed by an unexpected blow.

  And so I waited, as she sat, very still, like someone in a daze. It was surely sinking in, I thought, the desperate nature of her situation, the fact that there was no way out of it. She would lose her land and her citizenship. She would be declared an alien, and anything might happen after that. She would be a woman alone, a woman without resources, in a country that had cast her out.

  “You have to leave Lubanda, Martine,” I said. “With your citizenship revoked, you wouldn’t even be entitled to work here. You wouldn’t just be landless, you’d be… homeless.”

  Her eyes glistened. “An orphan.”

  It was but one level of the depth of my error that I’d expected her finally to accept the unforgiving and irrevocable fact that she was not and never would be Lubandan. I was certain that from the ruins of this newly enforced orphanhood, she would begin to fashion another life in another place. After all, as I had so carefully calculated, no other choice remained to her. I had set her adrift in the bulrushes, utterly confident that I could also pluck her from them.

  But instead of accepting the dire fact I had just presented to her, Martine suddenly gave a defiant jerk of the knife, then rose quickly and fiercely and stood, staring down at me, her hair falling in a red curtain to her shoulders, the blade of her knife glinting in the candlelight. “How can I repay you, Ray?” she asked in a tone so ambivalent I wondered if she’d guessed my treason, and now intended to repay me by cutting my throat.

  She didn’t wait for an answer, but as if in response to some inner signal, she turned and walked into the house. I remained on the porch, unsure of what to do, listening as she moved about inside. I heard drawers opened and closed, papers shuffled.

  When she returned to the porch she was carrying a large cloth bag. “It’s cured goat,” she said as she held it before me. “I wish I had something of more value,” she added with a thin smile, “But I am only a poor Lubandan farmer.”

  Since there seemed nothing else to do, I took the bag. “Thank you,” I said, and started to rise.

  “Don’t go,” she said. “Have a drink with me.” Something deep within her seemed to tremble. “I don’t want to be alone right now.”

  I nodded.

  She was a long time returning with our drinks, and once, glancing toward the house, I saw her standing in the kitchen, her back to me, her head down, her hands gripping the edge of the sink as if to keep herself upright. A few minutes later I heard her crank the gramophone, then the melancholy strains of a cello.

  “What are we listening to?” I asked as she returned to the porch and handed me a glass of that familiar homebrew.

  “Elgar,” Martine answered. “He wrote it after World War One. He was in mourning for a world he had lost.” Then, to my stark amazement, she faced me with an expression that looked carved of granite. “But I’m not going to lose mine.”

  “But Martine, you—”

  “I’m going to tell the world about what’s happening here,” she said firmly. “I’m going to write some sort of paper. I’m going to take it to Rupala. I’m going to take it on foot, an
d give it to anyone who will read it. Reporters. Anyone. They’re going to have to do more than take away my right to be Lubandan. I will never leave Lubanda. They will have to kill me first.”

  Within that fiercely voiced assurance, I saw the adamantine nature of Martine’s will. She would never relent, never take any route of escape. I had offered her a way out of Lubanda. With every other door closed, I had hoped she would take it. But now that hope seemed not just tragically misplaced, but deeply and fundamentally in error.

  And so later that night, now once again in Tumasi, I hastily sent a note to Bill, telling him that my little plot had failed and that he should keep secret what I’d told him about Martine’s grandfather. The two-word note he returned to me two days later could not have made the nature of my error more obvious: Too late.

  Martine’s determined voice returned to me: They will have to kill me first.

  And I thought, What have I done?

  Part V

  Rupala: 1:33 P.M.

  “Where are we going?” I ask as Fareem opens the door of the old black Mercedes that brought me from the airport.

  “You will see,” he tells me. “Please, get in before the heat makes both our shirts wet.”

  Once inside the car, I glance at the mirror in the front seat and notice that this is not the same driver as the one who met me at the airport. The current man behind the wheel has eyes that sparkle less jovially, and his face is leaner. Perhaps he is one of Beyani’s men. I calculate the risk that my earlier visit to Lubanda has been discovered, along with the dreadful thing I found there. In reponse, I am careful to hold tightly to my briefcase.

  “It is good to see you again, Ray,” Fareem says as he settles in beside me, his lean body barely causing a crinkle in the car’s old cracked leather. He glances about the once plush interior, his gaze completely unconcerned by the motionless eyes of the driver. “We are selling Mafumi’s fleet of luxury cars,” he casually informs me, his tone without apprehension that those who once enjoyed the pleasures of this fleet might resist the loss of such luxury. “A consortium in Brussels is taking them all.” He slaps his hands together. “All of them gone, just like dust from the hands.”