A Dancer In the Dust

by Thomas H. Cook

  And so I walked alone, through one abandoned camp after another, until I reached the outskirts of Sura.

  The town itself was little more than a gathering of aid-funded structures, buildings that would have long ago been completed had not construction abruptly stopped after Mafumi took power, leaving whole blocks as little more than concrete facades sprouting steel support rods like iron antennae. These would have been churches and missions and NGO offices and aid-worker housing. Left unfinished, they had sprouted into small open-air markets where the local products—grains, smoked meat, goat’s milk, baskets, and the like—were sold or bartered in the immemorial way of the savanna. Other than the occasional T-shirt or baseball cap, there were few items from the West, an absence that brought to mind Martine’s belief that if there was Lubandan gold, as she’d written in her Open Letter, it should remain in its veins, and that if there were Lubandan diamonds, they should remain in the rough, and that by a similar understanding of the ageless way of things in this quiet country, coffee need not be grown among a people who did not drink it.

  It didn’t take long to find Bisara. I had gone to his house with Seso on a number of occasions. He had not moved, but in every other way it was clear that he had changed a great deal over the preceding twenty years. His hair had grown gray and his features were far more deeply etched. Even from a distance, he appeared weathered by the hard years under Mafumi. Fear freezes a man, but terror shrinks him, and Bisara gave every evidence of that shrinkage. He was thinner than before, and frailer, as if his bones were little more than splinters. When he rose, he seemed barely able to support his weight and for that reason gave off the same sense of imminent collapse as the tumbledown shanties that now composed the village.

  But for all of his obvious decline, Bisara recognized me immediately. Unlike before, however, he didn’t rise or put out his hand, or smile broadly as I approached, as he had of old, and in that diminished capacity for surprise I saw one of the common effects of extreme misrule, that it deflates life and drains it of some vital energy. By the end of Mafumi’s terror, Lubanda had barely had a pulse.

  “Hello, Bisara,” I said quietly.

  He looked at me distantly, suspiciously. “What are you doing here?” he asked darkly.

  “I’ve come because of Seso,” I told him. “He was murdered in New York City about three months ago.”

  Bisara didn’t appear surprised, since he had long lived in a nation whose life was a fabric stitched with murder.

  “I’m looking for the men who did it,” I added. I knew that this was not actually my mission, but it hardly seemed the time to complicate matters.

  Bisara nodded, but said nothing, a demeanor far different from that of the jovial man I’d met so often during my time in Lubanda.

  “The people who killed him put a pair of crossed pangas in his mouth,” I said.

  He looked away, like a man calculating the odds of making a huge mistake. Then, after a moment, his attention swept back to me. “Some men came here. They were looking for Seso.”

  “When did they come?”

  “After Seso left,” Bisara answered.

  “Why were they looking for him?” I asked.

  Bisara looked away again, a gesture I’d seen before in people accustomed to being terrorized, beaten into submission, made to betray family and friends because they simply couldn’t take the pain any longer.

  “They tortured you,” I said softly.

  He glanced down. “My feet.”

  “Did you tell them where Seso was?”

  Without looking at me, Bisara nodded, his gaze now on the ground. “Yes.” A cloud of shame settled over him. “I did not think they would go so far to find him.”

  “Is that all they wanted from you?” I asked. “Just to know where Seso was?”

  He shook his head. “They were looking for something Seso had. They thought perhaps he had given it to me, or maybe I knew where it was, but this I did not know.”

  And so the torture must have been prolonged, I thought.

  “In New York, a man told me that Seso had evidence against certain men, and for that reason, he was murdered,” I said.

  Bisara thought this through a moment, then said, “Can you trust this man who told you these things?”

  “No,” I admitted. “His name is Nullu Beyani. Have you ever heard of him?”

  Bisara shook his head.

  “Beyani said that Seso had evidence against the men who attacked Martine Aubert on Tumasi Road,” I said. “He said he found it among the documents in the archive where he worked.”

  This clearly puzzled Bisara.

  “Seso worked in the archive, this is true,” he told me. “But not with documents. It was only pictures.” He appeared briefly afraid to say more, but then, quite suddenly, he stoked his courage and continued. “Mafumi was a big collector of pictures, Seso told me. Dirty pictures sometimes. Sometimes pictures of murders and people being tortured. This is what he liked to see.”

  His voice remained soft as he told me all this, barely above a whisper, and he often averted his eyes when he spoke. Under torture, he had betrayed his friend, told his murderers where to find him, and the shame of this act rested upon his shoulders like an iron yoke.

  As if they were unspooling from a roll of film, I saw images of myself on those nights when I’d hunched over my desk, penning reports to Bill Hammond, letters Seso had probably read, so that he’d long observed the steadily deepening nature of my life as a spy.

  “I know how you feel, Bisara,” I said, and placed a hand on his shoulder. “Believe me, I know.”

  Bisara’s eyes turned toward me. “The pain,” he said. “I did not want to tell them.”

  I knelt down beside him. “I’ve come back to Lubanda to save a man who I think is in serious peril. Your president, as a matter of fact. Seso knew him well. I think he is in danger, and I think Seso may have come to America for that reason. I think this because he called a mutual friend and told him that he had something to show him. He was murdered before he could do it.”

  Bisara took all this in, but said nothing.

  “Seso came to Janetta when the president was there,” I added. “He stood all alone, staring at the president. The man who saw Seso at Janetta used the word ‘sidumo’ to describe what he was doing.”

  “Sidumo,” Bisara repeated. “Yes, that is the Lutusi word for ‘warning.’” He looked at me gravely. “But it also is the word for ‘accusation.’”

  Years before, Martine had warned me that I knew nothing about Lubanda. Now, it seemed to me, I knew even less, so that the nuances within the Lutusi dialect, a pared-down language of no more than a few thousand words, were still unknown to me.

  “Accusation,” I repeated softly as I recalled the old man’s description of Seso, the way he’d stood so stiffly and symbolically. Whether this had been a gesture of warning or accusation, or some other nuance of a word I didn’t even know, the situation remained the same: Fareem was at risk.

  As if summoned by my sense that time was running out, a memory suddenly returned to me in the way of a gift and took me back to my third or fourth day in the village, Martine standing with an old Lutusi, the two of them obviously in the midst of a trade. I remembered the way she’d agreed to whatever the Lutusi had offered even though he’d stood empty-handed before her, apparently offering nothing, illustrating the fact, as Martine had later explained, that when the Lutusi have something of great value, they do not show it, but give it to someone they trust for safekeeping until the trade is made. To this memory I now added the fact that Seso had been welcomed back to his tribe, though only on condition that he rigorously and unswervingly follow to the letter each of its customs.

  Pondering all this, I now wondered if it applied to whatever Seso had had for Bill Hammond. The supposition that came into my mind remained unproven, and yet I found it compelling, for it did seem possible that strictly following Lutusi custom, Seso might not have brought whatever he had for Bill
to New York. Rather, he might have left it in Lubanda. Left it with someone he trusted.

  I looked at Bisara.

  “This thing Seso had,” I said. “Who would he have left it with?”

  For a moment, Bisara didn’t answer, but I could see that he was going through a dark risk assessment, calculating the danger of telling me whatever else he knew.

  “Someone he trusted,” he said finally. “But someone they wouldn’t suspect, the men who were after him. That is why he did not leave it with me. Because they would have guessed that he might do this.” He shrugged. “I am sorry. I do not know where this thing is. A Lutusi does not reveal the name of the one who has such things to anyone.”

  “Do you know where Seso went after leaving Sura?” I asked.

  “Tumasi,” Bisara said.

  “Tumasi,” I repeated, and instantly felt life’s ever-tightening noose grow tighter, squeezing out every illusion until I was left with the bare truth that whether inadvertent or not, or done with the best of intentions or not, the world is at last the misbegotten creature we make with our mistakes.

  22

  There are gravely transformative moments in life, moments when the air abruptly shudders and a darkness falls over you, and you feel that you’ve suddenly awakened in a much more dangerous part of town. Such was my feeling as I thanked Bisara, shook his hand, then turned and headed toward Tumasi.

  It was a journey of nearly forty miles, and on the way I let myself open to a flood of memories that detailed my final days in Lubanda, the most vivid of which was of the last time I’d seen Martine.

  She’d walked into my office carrying a basket she’d stuffed with supplies.

  “I’ve finished my Open Letter,” she said.

  “Open Letter?” I asked.

  “That’s what I’ve decided to call it,” she said. “An Open Letter to Foreign Friends.”

  Her tone was measured, resolved, with something classically fatalistic about it; she seemed to me like a soldier moving up the line toward a battle whose dreadful perils she had already calculated and accepted.

  “I was going to address it to President Dasai,” she added, “but I’ve decided to write to all of you instead.” Her smile struck me as deathly pale, a cold, dead smile that made it clear to what degree she had considered the dangers she faced. This was not some naïve foreigner foolishly trusting in the kindness of strangers. This was a Lubandan who well understood the perils of her country. For that reason, she reminded me of that carved wooden Christ I’d seen in Mexico, simply, fatally… ­waiting. “To Lubanda’s foreign friends, I mean.”

  “I see,” I said, though I no longer considered myself a friend of her country. It had thwarted me in too many ways by then.

  “Friends because most of you really are friends of Lubanda,” Martine said. “Some of you are here for bad reasons, but most of you are not.” She looked at me quite sincerely. “I do know that, Ray.”

  For the first time since I’d met her, Martine seemed fragile, and yet at the same time, unbreakable by any outside force. Her features had deepened in some inexpressible way and her gaze had the steadiness of one at peace with the choice she’d made.

  “I really do know the good you want to do,” she told me.

  I stared at her silently. What could I say to her, after all, save offer a full confession of my many errors, the latest having been the deepest of them all.

  “I’ve written several copies of this letter and I am taking them to Rupala,” she added. “I’m going to give them to the charities there, the NGOs, and to any journalists I can find.”

  “What are you telling them in your… open letter?” I asked.

  “That they should all go home.”

  She saw how absurd, perhaps even cruel, I found her position.

  “Look, Ray, the fact is this,” she said. “Others came and took things out of Lubanda, and in the process, they did a lot of damage. Now these same people are bringing things into Lubanda, and in the process, they are doing damage once again.”

  “I’m not going to argue the point,” I told her. “Others will do that for the next hundred years. But, Martine, you know they’re out there. Mafumi’s people. Gessee’s people, too. You’re caught between them.”

  “So is Lubanda,” Martine said.

  “Lubanda is a country,” I reminded her. “Not a woman alone, with enemies on both sides.”

  She was silent for a moment before she said, “Do you not love your country, Ray?”

  “Of course I do.”

  “Then why can you not understand that I love mine, too?” Martine asked.

  I searched desperately for an answer to this question, but the only one that came to me put me in Geesee’s quarter, and Mafumi’s. Unhappily, I realized that my conviction that Martine was not truly Lubandan was no less fervent and unbending than theirs.

  “I really have nothing more to say about all this, Martine,” I told her by way of sidestepping the question.

  She stared at me silently for a moment before she said, “Fareem believes you’re a spy. He told me this before he left.” She looked at me piercingly. “Are you?”

  At last I told the truth. “Yes,” I said, “but I haven’t reported anything that wasn’t meant to help you.”

  “Help me what?” Martine asked.

  “Survive,” I said helplessly, because it was the only answer that occurred to me—one, of course, which left out the fact that I had equated her survival with leaving Lubanda and marrying me.

  For a moment, Martine said nothing; she simply stared at me. I feared that this silence might end in an explosion, a lashing out at me in the same way she’d lashed out at Gessee. But instead she seemed suddenly more interested in the spy network of which I had been a part. “Who do you report to, Ray?”

  “Bill Hammond.”

  “Does he tell the big men in Rupala what you write?”

  “I don’t know, but it’s possible, yes.”

  “Do they know I’m coming to the capital with my Open Letter?”

  “Not from me, no,” I said.

  When she said nothing to this, I made one final gesture. “You can still leave Lubanda and put the farm, all this business of growing teff or coffee, all this… struggle behind you,” I said in a tone that was almost pleading.

  “This ‘struggle,’ as you call it, is my life, Ray,” Martine said. She lifted her basket into her arms. “I am going to camp here in the village tonight,” she said, “then head down Tumasi Road in the morning.”

  “Tumasi Road?” I asked with a level of alarm I couldn’t conceal. “Why aren’t you going cross-country? It would be a lot faster and no one would know where you were at any given moment.”

  “Yes, but there are more villages along the road, places to stop and talk. I would like to spread the word a little on the way to Rupala. People will misunderstand what I am trying to do. I am white, and they will use that against me, too. But there may be a few I can make understand my hope for Lubanda.”

  With that she turned and walked away.

  A few minutes later, I penned a last report to Bill Hammond, one that related this latest conversation with Martine, the fact that she’d written an “open letter,” and that she was bringing it on foot to Rupala by way of Tumasi Road. When I’d finished, I folded the paper, put it in an envelope, then summoned Seso.

  “Take this to Rupala,” I told him with a nod toward the Land Cruiser. “To Bill Hammond.” I glanced out toward where I could see Martine beginning to set up her camp for the night. “Martine has decided to take Tumasi Road into Rupala. He might be able to protect her.”

  Seso looked at me worriedly. “This is a bad thing,” he said. “You should go with her. But not on foot. You should drive her to Rupala.”

  I shook my head. “She would never allow that.”

  Seso said nothing more, but simply took the report, the same troubled look still in his eyes.

  By the time night fell, Martine had made a fire and was
sitting beside it, her knees drawn up to her chest as she silently watched the flames. I was reluctant to approach her, but after a time, my unease gave way and I walked out to her.

  “You probably don’t want any company right now,” I said by way of giving her the opportunity to dismiss me.

  “Everyone wants company,” she said, and nodded for me to join her. “When are you leaving Lubanda?”

  “My year will be over in three weeks,” I told her.

  I didn’t expect her to inquire further, and she didn’t. Instead she leaned forward, poked briefly at the fire, then sat back and gazed out toward the road.

  “There is a word I learned when I was in Kigali,” she said. “My father had taken me there when I was a little girl, and on trips like that I always picked up new words from the various dialects.” She smiled. “I wrote them down and later I put them all in a notebook.” She shrugged. “I do not know why this one just came back to me.”

  “What’s the word?”

  “Ihahamuka,” Martine answered. “It means ‘without lungs.’ It is used to describe the sort of terror that takes your breath away.” She looked at me like one from the distant deck of a burning ship. “I am afraid, Ray.”

  “I’m sure you are,” I said. “And you should be.”

  Her expression was as tender as any I had ever seen. “I wish it actually helped, the things you and the others do. And I know that here and there, it does.” She shook her head. “But in the end, it hurts us more.”

  At that moment I felt my own version of ihahamuka, my dread of losing her so fierce, my conviction that she was the only woman I would ever love so absolute, it took my breath away.

  “Don’t go to Rupala, Martine,” I said quietly. “You don’t have to do this.”

  She poked at the fire again. “Stop, Ray, please.”

  “Or wait until Fareem gets back and the two of you can make the walk together.”