A Dancer In the Dust (22 page)

I had no answer for this question, and so was left with no more lucid thought than how strange it was that after so many years, Tumasi’s shadow had once again crossed my path. I considered the little string of time that had run from my first arrival in Rupala, where I’d met Seso, then driven with him to where I’d intended to live more or less indefinitely, how on the very day I’d arrived in the village I’d found Martine fiddling with her basket, Fareem at her side, a first encounter whose grave risks I could not have guessed.

For a moment I found it all too large to analyze. For it was a risk whose perils were still with me, the present now as fraught with danger as the past, so that for an instant I felt myself swirling in the fearful jeopardy of the moment and thus unable to grasp how the winding way of Tumasi Road had finally curled into this fatal noose, with Martine doomed long ago, Seso recently murdered, myself a scrupulous manager of risk, and now Nullu Beyani added to this fateful mix, a Cassius who might well conceal a dagger in his gown, one aimed squarely at brave, risk-taking Fareem, the merciful and perhaps imperiled new president of Lubanda.

Rupala: 12:53
P
.
M
.

He is in his middle forties now, and time has added its layer of thickness, as well as the lines that spread from the corners of his eyes when he smiles. They are still eyes that glitter with intelligence and a keen sense of man’s capacity for evil. I would have recognized him immediately even if I had not followed his rise within the ranks of those who’d fled Lubanda, then opposed Mafumi’s tyranny from afar, a risky business if ever there was one.

“Ray,” Fareem says as he rises, comes from behind his quite modest desk, and offers his hand in the warm way of those long-lost days. His handshake is no less firm than of old and there is something confident and reassuring in the force of his grip. Here is a man who does not fear being in charge, facing his enemies, doing what must be done.

“So good to have you back in Lubanda,” he tells me. He tilts his head slightly to the right, and with this motion, more glints of silver sparkle in the black nest of his hair. For a moment he seems as weary as his history. Exile has added depth to his eyes, and struggle a layer of gravity to their expression. He was never frivolous, but now he seems a vessel carved from care. I had expected to see vigor, but instead I see fatigue. It gives him the air of a great statue that has been exposed to the harshest of elements, long exposed, perhaps fatally exposed, so that he seems at the beginning of a long decline.

“Hello, Mr. President.”

“Mr. President?”

He laughs, but his is different from President Dasai’s laugh. It is thinner, and there is no hint of the jolly and naïve Black Santa with his fatherly chuckle. Fareem has been through too much to have so rich a laugh. He has known flight, exile, poverty, along with the awesome peril of his political responsibility. He has been stabbed, shot at, and run down by a speeding car. A limp provides the evidence for just how narrow was his escape.

“Never call me Mr. President,” he says after a soft cough. “We’ve known each other too long for that.”

“In good times,” I add pointedly, “and in bad.”

“We parted angrily, yes,” Fareem admits. His voice has the tenor of a reed gently blown. “I apologize for the dreadful things I said to you. After all, none of it was your fault.” He shakes his head as if to free his mind of memories. “It was a bad time for Lubanda.”

“For some it was worse than others,” I remind him.

He makes no pretense that he doesn’t understand that this reference is to Martine.

“My white skin was a blinding light, Fareem,” I add. “I couldn’t see her for it.” When Fareem remains silent, I continue, “And the black skins of Lubanda’s people were just as impenetrable, so they couldn’t see her either.”

Something behind Fareem’s eyes darkens and I see that Martine’s fate still casts a shadow over him. “I think of her often,” he tells me.

“I think of her every day,” I confess.

“Of course you do,” Fareem says gently and sympathetically. “But times have changed, so the point now is to do the right thing.”

“The right thing?”

“For Lubanda.”

“Indeed,” I agree. “But it isn’t always easy to know what the right thing is.”

“True,” Fareem says. “If it were, then nothing would ever be at risk.”

He is tall, but no longer muscular. In fact, he is slightly stooped. There was a time when he could run and jump, when he toiled over modest crops in arid fields. He could do none of that now. Struggle and hardship age a man, but Fareem seems almost crippled by the hardships he has endured, chief among them the rigors of his own effort to return to Lubanda. He has not farmed for the past twenty years, and those decades spent in the West have altered his accent and given him a sense of gentlemanliness and sophistication, but at a considerable price. He is like a man dangling between two voids. He has neither the false grandfatherly manner of Dasai nor the psychopathic egotism of Mafumi. In that way, he appears almost to embody the moderate political policies by means of which he has pledged to lead Lubanda into the future. Even so, his smile remains fixed in sadness, making him seem very much the product of a long and painful enlightenment.

I glance about. “Mafumi spent a great deal of money on this place.”

“He did, yes,” Fareem tells me. “He called it his palace but I have renamed it the Presidential Residence.” He smiles that melancholy smile. “Even so, I do not live here.”

“Where do you live, Fareem?”

“In a small house on the outskirts of Rupala,” Fareem informs me. “Lubanda is poor, and it did not seem fitting that I live in luxury. I am not a chief, and I do not intend to behave like one.” Now his smile is so delicate it seems barely on his lips at all, and in it I can see how relieved he is that the tragedy we shared in Lubanda has not built a wall between us.

“Normally, I would invite you to sit down,” he says. “But I thought you above all might want to see the future that is now possible for Lubanda.” His gaze is full of sympathy. “Your experience here was dark,” he adds, “and I would prefer you leave us this time with some of those shadows removed.”

“It wasn’t all dark,” I remind him.

“No, not all,” he agrees. “There were those dinners on the farm, sitting beneath that pathetic little tree, all those many talks. All these things I remember fondly. What do you remember fondly, Ray?”

“The way she danced in the village that night. By the fire with the other women of the village. The way she swayed and turned and lifted her arms. She was happy then, because she still had a homeland and felt certain that she would always have one.”

Fareem appears to see this memory playing like a film in my mind.

“I remember that evening well,” he says. “It was an Independence Day celebration and there was something that seemed immortal in the way Martine danced so slowly, as you say, with her arms lifted… like wings.”

Before leaving New York, it had been hard for me to imagine Fareem as the president of Lubanda, a country still adrift in the wake of Mafumi’s death, reeling from the desolation he left behind, a country divided into factions, with so many old wounds still open. Such a man must have countless enemies, and to rule well he must make many more. I can hardly calculate how many of his fellow countrymen must be at this very moment plotting his fall, licking their lips at the prospect of all that can be done to him before they finally kill him. I have no doubt that Fareem has envisioned himself skinned, burned alive, hung by his heels, and filleted with box cutters.

And yet he does not seem to be concerned that the fate of President Dasai might one day be his own. Clearly he expects to fare better than any of Lubanda’s previous leaders, avoid their mistakes, rule more wisely, and perhaps by this means ultimately become Lubanda’s version of Nelson Mandela, the true father of that very country that made an orphan of Martine.

“Do you leave Rupala very often?” I ask him as my mind turns to the time we’d gone north with President Dasai, the attempt on that supremely naïve president’s life, that chuckling president’s obliviousness to the risks that surrounded him.

“Quite often, yes,” Fareem answers. He buttons the jacket of his suit, then runs his fingers down his lapels. “You must find it odd to see me dressed this way. Like a Western man of business. It is not my normal attire, of course, but Westerners prefer to see African heads of state dressed ‘appropriately,’ as one might say, in business attire. It makes us seem less strange, less dangerous.” He shrugs. “Otherwise, one can be perceived as something of a clown. Mobutu in his leopard skin cap and Mafumi in his red toga. And so I am a suit-and-tie man now.”

His demeanor is gracious and trusting, very different from that of the ever-vigilant young man he’d been all those years ago, forever patrolling the edges of the farm, certain that Gessee’s men were out there. There’d been a catlike watchfulness about him then. Now he seems like one who has already glimpsed his future and, with more certainty than human life allows, considers it his destiny.

“This way, my friend,” he says as he directs me toward the door. “I have something to show you.”

I do not move. I have something to say to him as a preamble to what I have come to do. “We all grow old, Fareem,” I tell him. “We all weaken and grow ill.” I pause as if at a precipice, then deliver a yet harder truth. “And at one point or another, we all lose our bearings and in that state, we make dreadful errors.” I gaze at him poignantly. “I know I did.”

Though he cannot possibly know what else I might say, or why I have come to say it, he looks at me with an expression of fierce inquisitiveness as to where this stark declaration is leading, allowing me to see that which is truly great about him: his tremendous capacity for risk.

“But given the dark nature of our shared fate,” I continue, “it’s the luckiest of us who love our country, our parents, love our wives and children, love our friends.” I pause briefly before I add, “As I know you loved Martine.”

His hand on my shoulder is almost as light as Martine’s was on that final evening.

“I did, yes,” he says. “I did love Martine.” He smiles, his hand now gently urging me forward. “Come with me, Ray,” he summons me gently, “into the new Lubanda.”

I know instantly that Martine would have wanted me to come back to her country, especially now. And, oh, Martine, how I would have loved for you to be with me here today, the two of us observing Fareem as he leads us out of the Presidential Residence, the soft nods and warm smiles he offers to the doorkeepers, the cleaning women, the old man who prunes the garden and the young woman who sweeps the pathway with her old, frayed
besma
. Would we not listen as Fareem tells us of his dream for your country—your country, Martine, not mine; though as I walk beside him, with you the ghostly third party to this moment, I feel my briefcase grow light in my hand, perhaps as winged as you yourself had seemed on the night of your languid dance, dreaming, as I know you must have been at that moment, and as I am dreaming now, that there might yet be hope for Lubanda.

Few “truths” are objectively true. Most are a matter of perception and so it is perception that must be closely considered in risk management. If the perception of the source of information cannot be trusted, then, of course, neither can the information. Both the fear of loss and the anticipation of gain distort “truth,” for example. But truth’s opposite does not reside in such understandable and to some extent calculable variables. The opposite of truth is disinformation, the fabricated used to conceal the actual. For these reasons, in risk management, a “truth” may or may not actually be true, but a lie is a deliberate act of deception, and therefore must be thoroughly investigated.

“So, who do you think is the liar in this case, Ray?” Bill asked. “Beyani or Seso?”

We were in Bill’s office at the Mansfield Trust, Bill sitting royally behind his massive desk, leaning back in a chair that was the leather version of a throne, the view of Manhattan that filled his window yet more regal. I’d just given him a detailed report on my conversation with Beyani that had left him in the same uncertainty as it had left me the day before.

“I don’t know who Beyani really is,” I admitted. “But if his story about Seso is a lie, then he must be lying for a reason.”

“And what might that reason be?”

“I can’t be sure,” I admitted. “But he claims that Seso was involved in what happened to Martine on Tumasi Road. If that’s a lie, then perhaps Beyani is the one who was involved in it.”

“And so he had Seso murdered to protect himself?”

I nodded. “Or others, perhaps. But in either case, he isn’t who he claims to be.”

“Or who Fareem thinks he is,” Bill added, “since he hasn’t removed him from the government.”

I looked at Bill pointedly. “Which means that Fareem could be very much at risk.”

“And you want to help Fareem,” Bill said. “You don’t want to take the risk that he might end up like Dasai, hanging upside down in Independence Square.”

“It’s just that simple, yes,” I admitted.

I knew that the moral logic was no less elementary. I hadn’t saved Martine, and so saving Fareem—if, indeed, he was at risk—was as close as I could get to making amends for the terrible consequences of my error. She had loved him, after all. But more than that, they’d shared the same dream for Lubanda. And so saving him, it seemed to me, was like saving some small part of that dream.

“The problem is how to warn Fareem,” I said. “I know I could just write him a letter, tell him about Seso’s murder and my talk with Beyani.”

“Then why not do that?” Bill asked.

“The problem is that I’m not sure he’d take me seriously or even give a damn about what I had to tell him,” I answered. “Don’t forget, he despised me. The last time we were together, he said so to my face. I have no idea if he still feels the same, but even if he doesn’t, he might find a warning from me—sounded from such a safe quarter and perhaps with some ulterior motive—somewhat less than urgent.”