A Dancer In the Dust (18 page)

I had hoped this would work, and I saw that it had when the man took my hand. “They call me Idi. They say I look like him, that crazy fucker. You know who I mean?”

If this was a simple test of my familiarity with modern African history, I was ready for it.

“I’d guess you mean Idi Amin,” I said. “He’s the only Idi I know.”

“You think I look like him?” he asked.

“I can see the resemblance, yes,” I answered.

“Because I am Kakwa,” the man said. “Amin’s tribe.”

He did not say “African” or even “Ugandan,” and here, in a nutshell, was one of life’s grim truths, the simple, irreducible fact that we are all tribal.

“Maybe the only Kakwa in New York,” he said.

Unhappiness sometimes provides a way into someone, and quite suddenly I saw this displaced Kakwa tribesman’s unhappiness and sensed that it worked that way in him, that his wound, whatever it was, remained open, and thus was a door.

“The man’s name was Seso,” I said. “And if the cops told you he was a drug dealer or a thief or something low like that, then they told you wrong. Seso was a good man, a family man.” I let this sink in before I added, “He came to New York for a reason. It took a lot of effort, and a lot of courage, and probably the last dime he had, and so I believe that the reason was important.”

Idi watched me silently for a moment. He was obviously trying to make up his mind about me. In another face I might have seen fear or some secret calculation of potential profit, but in this one I saw moral quandary, a soul working to do right, but unsure what that might be.

“Seso was Lutusi,” I added. “He was probably the only one in New York.”

Now this other lone tribesman stepped around the desk, walked to the door, and turned the “Open” sign around to “Closed.” Then he returned behind the counter and parted the curtain that led to the back of the shop. “Back here,” he said.

I followed Idi into the back room, where there was a bed and a chair, both of which matched the room’s general squalor.

“Take off your shirt,” Idi said in a tone of complete command, so that I began to imagine him as the real Idi Amin, the brutal tyrant who’d designated and equipped torture rooms in Kampala’s most upscale hotel, rooms that had often been quickly mopped so that he could subsequently use them for assignations with his whores.

“I don’t want a tattoo,” I told him. “I’m sure you figured that out.”

“Take off your shirt.” Idi repeated sternly when I hesitated. “If the boss comes you say you was getting a tattoo, but you got scared and changed your mind.” He looked at me as if I were a fellow conspirator. “I got to cover my ass, you know?”

I nodded “I understand.”

I took off my jacket, folded it over the back of the chair, then removed my shirt and undershirt and folded them.

Idi nodded toward the bed. “On your back.”

“Does it hurt, a tattoo?” I asked for little reason other than to keep the conversation going.

“The pain is worse for some than others,” Idi answered in a matter-of-fact way that suggested he’d learned this in something other than a tattoo parlor.

I lay down on the bed, then noticed the mirror attached to the ceiling.

“Some people like to see the work as it goes along,” Idi explained when he stepped over to the bed. He looked down at me, and under his gaze I felt entirely helpless. He was younger and stronger and although I might put up a fight, I knew it would be futile.

I suddenly imagined the grimmest of possibilities, that it was here, on this table, that Seso had been strapped down, a gag stuffed into his mouth, his shoes and socks removed, exposing the soles of his feet and their clusters of tender nerves; that it was here, in this back room, that his captors had applied the metal bars.

“To make it look real, I got to do some things,” Idi said. “The boss is no fool, so it’s gotta look real.”

He stepped away and out of sight, though I knew he was at the little table I’d seen when I came into the room. It was located only a few feet beyond where I lay, so that I could hear the tiny, metallic sounds of what he was doing—sharpening the needles, assembling the tattooing gun. Shortly, I heard him open the door of the autoclave I’d also noticed, then the sound of a metal tray being placed inside it.

“It takes a little over twenty minutes to sterilize the needles,” Idi said like a man giving a tour of his workplace. “Sometimes, when they are waiting, they are the most afraid.”

It struck me that the psychology of the torture chamber didn’t require much sophistication. There is the actual pain, but before that, there is the waiting, as the instruments are assembled, sharpened, heated according to their subsequent functions. Once, in Mexico City, I’d come across the strangest version of Christ’s Crucifixion I’d ever seen, a wooden carving of the Son of Man not yet hung upon the Cross, but sitting on it, his feet nailed but not yet his hands, his lacerated back curled toward his bent knees, his head falling into the nest of his hands, his blood-matted hair in his fingers… waiting.

“I saw on TV, these two cons did their eyes,” Idi said above the continual tinkling of metal. “Tattooed the whites, I mean. One did red. One did blue.”

“Why would anybody want the whites of their eyes tattooed?” I asked.

“To be different, maybe,” Idi answered.

“That’s an easy way to be different,” I said, “much easier than actually accomplishing something.”

Idi shrugged. “The world’s full of crazies, eh?”

I suddenly noticed that a Liberian flag hung from two thumbtacks on the wall.

“I thought you were Ugandan,” I said.

“The guy who owns the place, it’s his flag,” Idi said indifferently.

“It’s a terrible place,” I said. “Boy soldiers wearing wedding dresses and female wigs while they hack people to death.”

Idi said nothing.

“And then there was General Butt Naked,” I added in my best old-chum voice, just a guy talking to a guy.

“Who’s that?” Idi asked, though with little sense of actual interest.

“He was the leader of a wild Liberian soldier gang,” I answered. “They thought being naked would protect them from bullets.”

Idi glanced at the flag. “They were slavers, you know, those fucking Liberians.”

I heard the door of the autoclave open, then more tinkling, and at last the sound of a small motor.

“So tell me, what else do you know about Africa besides this naked general?” Idi asked at one point.

“Not much, I’m afraid,” I admitted starkly, now thinking both of my time in Lubanda and of all the years since I’d left it. “Not much at all.”

I noticed Idi looking at me bleakly. Then, before I could ask my first question, he said, “There were two of them. They stood by while I did the tattoo.”

“Africans?”

Idi nodded. “They wanted an oyster shell. Your man, he didn’t say nothing at all. He was drugged, I think.”

“Seso wasn’t conscious?”

Idi shook his head. “His eyes opened and closed, but there was no light in them.” He turned, walked over to the sink, and began to wash his hands, his back to me.

“So Seso never said anything to you?” I asked.

“Nothing,” Idi answered. “It was just before I closed when they showed up. There were two of them, like I said. They told me the man, the one who ended up dead, they told me he was drunk. They made like it was all a big joke, getting a tattoo. They said he would wake up, see the tattoo, and be in big trouble with his wife, shit like that. It was all supposed to be just a couple of guys pulling a trick on another guy, you know?”

I smiled. “Men are such… little boys.”

Idi nodded. “I didn’t believe any of that shit, but I didn’t have no choice.”

From here, Idi narrated a tale of being forced to tattoo Seso. He’d refused at first, he said, but the men who’d brought Seso into his shop had made it clear that they would brook no objection.

“They did not say why they wanted this particular tattoo,” Idi told me. “But they asked for it. The little one did. A shell, he said. So I did the tattoo he wanted and when I was finished, they took a picture of it. The smaller one, he had a phone, and he took a picture with the phone. And I think he sent this picture to someone, because he fiddled a little with the phone, and then he said to the tall one, he said, ‘Okay, it went.’ But he didn’t say it in English. That’s what scared me even more. He said it in Ululu. You know what that is?”

As it happened, I did. “That’s the Visutu dialect,” I said, thinking how unlikely it would be to find it spoken anywhere but among that tribe, Mafumi’s tribe. “How did you know it was Ululu?” I asked.

“I used go through the northern part of Lubanda,” Idi answered. “The Visutu area. This was when Mafumi was in power. If you spoke English, or some other dialect other than Visutu when you were in the north, they cut out your tongue.”

I knew that this was true, and that because of such extreme measures the Visutu had been thought of as the Khmer Rouge of Lubanda, bent upon ridding the country of every vestige of any culture but their own.

“So the men who had Seso, they were Visutu?” I asked.

Idi shrugged. “They spoke Ululu so I wouldn’t understand them. And I didn’t let on that I did.”

For the first time I began to wonder if the new Lubandan government might have entrusted Seso with a secret mission that had, in turn, been thwarted by men still loyal to Mafumi. The new president had initiated a policy of reconciliation patterned after that of South Africa under Nelson Mandela. The risk of such a policy, of course, was that it allowed the criminals of the old regime to gather strength and with that strength seek once again to regain their lost power. Mafumi had been a cult figure, ardently worshipped. At his funeral, people had gathered in great throngs, weeping and fainting as his coffin passed through the streets of Rupala. The ghost of such a man—like his evil—lives after him, of course, and because of that, I thought it quite possible that members of Mafumi’s ghost brigade had followed Seso across half the globe, beaten his feet, then strangled him, all in an effort to discover whatever it was he’d brought here.

But what could Seso have had that would have mattered to any of Mafumi’s old guard?

“One more thing,” I said quietly. “If anyone else comes here, those two or anyone else, people asking about Seso, I mean, be sure to tell them about me.” I reached for my wallet, plucked out one of my business cards. “Tell anyone who shows up that I know what Seso brought with him,” I added as I handed it to Idi, “then tell them where I am.”

“That is very risky,” Idi said, but he took the card.

Risky, yes, I thought, and thus an unusual step for me. And yet, the possible gain seemed worth it. For although we may get a second chance to make back the money we squandered, we rarely get the chance, however inadequately, to address a wrong, much less one done long ago, in a distant land, to one who never knew we did it, nor would ever know.

Not long after moving to New York, I came to realize that a city of dreams can only grow from soil enriched by broken ones, and that by that measure, New York has the richest soil on earth. You see the still breathing corpses of these old dead dreams everywhere: crowding the bars, walking the side streets, sitting idly in the park. It was impossible for me to imagine Seso as ever being such a person, however, and for that reason I felt certain that he’d not come as a refugee from Mafumi’s tyranny, nor ever planned to stay here.

So why had he come?

And what had he brought with him?

There are mysteries in science, and mysteries in art, but the greatest mystery has always been another person’s deepest motivation.

So what was Seso’s motivation in making so long a journey?

He’d told Dalumi he worked for Martine, which clearly suggested that his coming to New York, along with whatever he’d brought with him, had had something to do with her. In addition, there was the matter of the shell tattoo, equally an image from the past.

To this I could add only that Seso had felt protective of Martine, at least to the extent that on one particular morning he’d warned me, and expected me to warn her, that she should get the hell out of Lubanda. We’d been driving across the savanna when he’d issued this warning, its great expanse suggestive of a limitlessness that was purely fictional. “If she decided to leave now, there would be time,” he said. “She could return to her country.”

I shook my head. “Martine was born in Lubanda. She is the same as you, Seso.”

Seso shook his head. “She is not the same.”

Seso made no further elaboration on this statement, but I should have known from the gravity of his expression that for him the truth of life was this: a tribe need not welcome you simply because you claim to be a member of it, and so is it also with countries.

“She will never willingly leave Lubanda,” I added darkly, and with that recognition, as I would later realize, a fatal shift began.

By then I’d written several reports to Bill, all of which had painted an increasingly intransigent Martine.
If Gessee sent those men to walk her property line and set that fire, then he should have known better,
I’d written a week or so before Seso offered his warning,
because nothing of that sort will ever make Martine grow coffee.

Nothing of that sort.

It was only months later, when I’d been obsessively revisiting my final weeks in Lubanda, that I’d realized just how ambiguous those words were and how differently they could be read—in one way as a suggestion that nothing could change Martine’s mind with regard to growing coffee, in the other that somewhat harsher methods of intimidation now had to be considered. In Lubanda, as I should have known, the second reading would have been the more likely.

And so it had been, as events quickly proved.

It was an old woman named Ufala who brought the news. She and Seso had become friendly, and so he’d gone out to greet her that morning, and perhaps buy some small amount of whatever she had to sell. Ufala had walked down Tumasi Road a day or so before, he told me, once again with that grave expression on his face. Her route had taken her past Martine’s farm, where she’d noticed Martine taking down a doll she’d found hanging from the front gate. It had a white face, and bright red hair, she told Seso, and it dangled from a cord that had been wrapped around the doll’s neck.