A Dancer In the Dust (23 page)

“Okay, but what’s the alternative?”

“A face-to-face meeting.”

“In Lubanda?” Bill asked with a hint of worry.

“Yes.”

“Things are still very unstable there,” Bill reminded me.

“True, but Fareem has taken great risks in his life,” I said. “For that reason, he might only respect other men who do the same.”

Bill looked at me quite sympathetically. “We don’t have many opportunities to do the right thing, do we, Ray?” he said, as if turning over a few of his own failed chances.

“Actually, we have plenty of opportunities to do the right thing,” I said. “It’s taking back the wrong thing we can’t do.”

Bill eased his ample weight back in his even more ample chair. “How can I help?”

“You can make me an emissary of the Mansfield Trust,” I answered. “There’s no way Fareem would refuse to see me if I were clothed in that golden mantle.”

Bill nodded thoughtfully. “Okay, I can do that,” he said. “Let me know whatever papers you need.” He smiled. “I’ll even supply the briefcase.” With that, he rose and offered his hand. “Good luck,” he said. “For Fareem’s sake.”

A few days later I arrived at the Lubandan Consulate to fill out the forms necessary to obtain a visa. The man at the reception desk was dressed in a white shirt and dark pants. He gave me the forms, then indicated a row of empty chairs. “Your name will be called,” he said.

And it was, by a tall woman of around forty, dressed in what passed for “African dress”: a dashiki with a matching headdress. “I am Sinasu Vinu. I review visa applications. Will you come with me, please?”

I followed her down a short corridor into a tiny office.

“Please be seated,” Ms. Vinu said.

I sat down in the metal chair that rested in front of her desk. As an office, it had the same modest furnishings I remembered from government offices in the capital during President Dasai’s rule. In those days, a portrait of the rotund and beaming president in his yellow dashiki would have adorned the wall, but the photograph behind Ms. Vinu was of Fareem, standing beside the new Lubandan flag, dressed in a far from stylish gray suit. There was a large poster next to the presidential photograph. It showed a map of Lubanda over which the word
ufufuo
was inscribed in letters of different colors.

When Ms. Vinu noticed me looking at the poster, she said, “It’s Swahili.”

“But Lubandans don’t speak Swahili,” I said.

“I know,” Ms.Vinu said. “And we are always saying ‘Africa is not a country’ to remind foreigners that there are many different nations on our continent. Unfortunately, this is still a difficult lesson, and so the president decided to use a Swahili word because that is the language Westerners associate with Africa.”

“What does it mean?”

“It is a beautiful word,” Ms. Vinu said. “It means ‘recovery,’ or perhaps even ‘resurrection.’”

“Your new president’s hope for Lubanda,” I said with a heightened sense of the mission I had set myself with regard to Fareem, remembering all he’d suffered at the hands of Mafumi’s agents before leaving Lubanda, then the equal pain of his long exile, the many risks he had taken while I had lived safely in New York, calculating ones that were nowhere near as great.

“It is, yes.” She smiled cheerfully, then asked me for my identification, my itinerary, proof that I’d had the necessary inoculations—the usual information required for a visa. I gave her what she needed, and she immediately began filling out the forms she’d assembled on her desk.

“It will not take long,” she assured me.

“I’m patient,” I told her.

My attention returned to the picture of Fareem, and inevitably I considered the increasing pressure to which he and Martine had been subjected during the last three months I’d been in Lubanda.

By then, she’d endured increasingly threatening attacks posted on trees or village message boards. But since literacy was not widespread in Tumasi, they’d more often been crude drawings that even the least educated minds could understand. During those last months, they’d steadily escalated in both the nature of their accusations and the crudeness of their content.

When Martine had found them on her property she’d ripped them down. But typical of her, rather than destroy them, as I discovered one evening when I arrived for my weekly dinner at the farm, she’d taped her entire collection to the living room wall.

“Martine says that if she were president of Lubanda, she’d use one of them for her presidential seal,” Fareem told me when he showed me the display. The first showed a redheaded white woman distributing money to various “enemies” of Lubanda, mostly countries on Lubanda’s border or tribes against which the peoples of the central region had been in either recent or ancient conflict. A second showed the same woman outside a polling location grandly tossing cash to a crowd of destitute Lubandans, obviously buying their votes. A third had Martine shopping near a crudely drawn Eiffel Tower while standing on a mound of dead Lubandans raggedly draped in the sunflower flag. There were others of this sort. The last, however, was quite different, and I noticed Fareem’s expression tense when he saw that I had reached it.

“I found it nailed to one of the fence posts out front,” he told me. “When I saw it, I ripped it off the post, but Martine had seen me do this, and so I had to show it to her.”

In the final drawing, a naked Martine is on her hands and knees, surrounded by several shirtless, spectacularly muscled black men, one of whom is placing a noose around her neck while another beats her bare feet with an iron bar.

“What did Martine say when she saw this?” I asked.

“What she always says, that men are simple,” Fareem said. “Then she just added it to the wall.”

I hesitated to ask the question, but decided that I had to do it. “Fareem, does Martine ever think about leaving here?”

Fareem shook his head like a man confronted with an insurmountable object. “Never.”

This, too, would have to be reported to Bill Hammond, I decided on the spot, as it was further proof of Martine’s determination to stay the course.

I looked at that last of the drawings, noted the lethal threat it portrayed.

“This sort of thing is not a joke,” I said.

Fareem nodded. “I know.”

“So what’s Martine going to do about it?”

“Nothing,” Fareem answered.

“But she should report it,” I said.

He was quite surprised by this response, as well as by the urgency I’d been unable to conceal.

“To whom?” he asked.

“The authorities,” I answered. “I mean, look at this thing. When men start fantasizing things like this, they sometimes end up actually doing them.”

My mind filled with the ugliest images, all of them real-life versions of the hideous drawing on Martine’s wall.

Fareem saw my distress and moved to calm it. “Martine doesn’t think anyone can do anything about these things,” he told me. “We don’t even know who’s hanging them around.”

I turned back toward the drawings, the obscene lies they conveyed. “Who do you
think
is doing it?”

“My guess is that it’s Mafumi’s people,” Fareem answered. “They’re all weak in Rupala. They wouldn’t have the guts to print something like that.”

“They may not be as weak as you think,” I warned.

For the first time Fareem seemed off balance and uncertain, as if suddenly undermined by a grave suspicion.

“How do you know that, Ray?” he asked.

He was staring at me very intently, like a man trying to read a coded message in dim light.

“Politicians never are,” I said quickly, covering any direct knowledge under a blanket of generalized opinion. “They’re all alike, aren’t they? If they’re really challenged, who knows what they might do.”

Fareem was still peering at me oddly when Martine came in from the kitchen, a steaming bowl in her hands. “Dinner,” she said.

We discussed the usual subjects as we ate: the state of the farm, the fact that a group devoted to “the greening of Lubanda” had planted the wrong trees along the river in Rupala, all of which had promptly died. As always, there was little discussion of the world outside the country, and none at all of movies, music, the celebrities whose wayward lives dominated the culture of the West. It was not that Martine felt hostile toward these things, or that she thought life in Lubanda somehow superior to it; she had lived here too long to romanticize the life she and most other Lubandans lived. On the other hand, she gave off not the slightest hint of ever having considered the possibility of living anywhere else. It was as if she were a plant, and this the only soil that nourished her, or even allowed her to live. And yet, for the past several months, as I’d spent time in her spare surroundings, listened to her talk of fonio and teff, observed the labor of the planting and the harvest, the smoking of meat, the carving of shells, I’d often thought that regardless of whether she knuckled under to Gessee’s big plans for Tumasi or not, her life was wasted here, a round of changeless days that would inevitably lead, as poets say, to dusty death.

After dinner, we all washed the dishes together, and Fareem, who had no doubt long ago sensed my feeling for Martine, discreetly went to his corner of the house and drew the curtain.

“He seems to think that I want to be alone with you,” I whispered.

“Yes, he does.”

“And he’s right, of course,” I told her. “So, come, let’s go for a walk.”

We walked out to the road, then turned right, toward Tumasi. It was a cloudless night, so we walked in the darkness beneath a wild array of stars and a faintly glowing crescent moon.

“So quiet,” Martine said after a moment.

“Yes, it is.”

“Is it ever quiet in New York?” she asked.

“Not really, no,” I answered.

“Is it ever dark?”

“Sure,” I said. “In some neighborhoods. But not like here.”

She smiled softly. “The darkness here is… old.”

She said this simply as a fact. The darkness of Lubanda was old because it had not changed since the dawn of time, it was a world frozen not in amber, whose shadows might be altered, but in a thick primordial tar.

Even so, I suddenly wondered if Martine might actually be comparing this ancient Lubandan night with the brightly teeming world beyond it, the great cities with their towers of light and streaming traffic and ceaselessly reverberating sounds. Could it be that my tales of New York, the little stories I’d related over the last nine months, had had the desired effect of piquing her curiosity? If I could just once get her out of Lubanda, I told myself, she would never want to go back.

“A place with big lights,” she said as if she were answering a question she had secretly asked herself. “That is the best place for you, Ray. You would never be happy here.”

So was it possible that from time to time she’d actually imagined us together in Lubanda? I asked myself in that charged instant. Had she lain awake as I had, thinking that we might share all the joys and burdens of a life lived together? Had she entertained the notion that we might one day plow the fields and harvest the grains on her small farm, and only now, in this darkness, come to realize that it could never be, that I would not only come to despise Lubanda, and all that living here entailed, but that I would finally come to despise Martine herself, and rue the day I’d joined my life with hers?

“You are the same as Nadumu,” she told me. “And so, like him, you must understand what I would be in some other place.”

“And what is that?”

“An orphan.”

“Did he ever think of stayng with you?” I asked. “Here in Lubanda?”

She shook her head. “No. To live here, to be Lubandan, this was to him the same as being nothing, and he was afraid of being nothing.”

“What are you afraid of, Martine?” I asked.

She drew in a long, curiously troubled breath before she answered.

“I am afraid that all Lubandans will come to feel the same as Nadumu felt when he came back here,” she answered. “That to live here, to be what we are, is to be small, worthless, a failure. It does not bother me when outsiders feel this way about us.” She looked at me pointedly. “But at all costs, Ray, we Lubandans must not feel this bad way about ourselves.”

I knew that Martine was justified in having these thoughts. I also knew that I was one of those outsiders who’d come to think of Lubanda in precisely that “bad way.”

Such was the hard truth that glittered in my eyes, and which she recognized immediately.

And so she gave no quarter to the reality that stood between us. “I will never leave Lubanda.” She reached up and pressed her hand against my face. “And your home could never be here.”

She was right, of course, and she knew that she was right. In some fit of love for her, I might pledge my undying devotion to Lubanda, but she would not believe it and because of that we could never be together, since she would never allow me to live with her in Lubanda and she would never leave it. Back home, my rival in matters of love had always been another man. With Martine, the only woman I had ever loved, it was a country.

My memory of this moment of excruciating clarity was suddenly interrupted by the sound of Ms. Vinu stamping my visa.

“Enjoy your time in Lubanda,” she said as she handed it to me.

“Thank you.”

I put the visa in my pocket, left her office, turned right, and headed back toward the reception area. Several photographs lined the walls of the corridor, men and women in native dress, all of them officials in the consulate office. They were smiling brightly, their eyes sparkling cheerfully, full of welcome. There were other pictures as well, of these same officials greeting various dignitaries or sitting at conference tables, looking busy. None of them drew my attention in a way that was more than passing until I reached the last one. It, too, was an ordinary photograph, nothing dramatic, and it was only the presence of a familiar face that caught my eye. It was Nullu Beyani with a group of Lubandans, a delegation of ten, Beyani by no means the central figure, but simply one of the men who’d gathered together for a group photo, all of them in an impressive office, with an impressive view of Manhattan in the background, beaming happily as they posed with Bill Hammond.