A Dancer In the Dust (24 page)

You need not be a classicist to know that Dante placed traitors at the hottest spot in Hell. Of course, from the photo I’d seen at the Lubandan Consulate, I couldn’t tell who the traitor was in the current situation, or even if there was one. There was no indication that Bill had ever actually been introduced to Beyani, after all, and even if he had, there was no reason he should have remembered him. As head of the Mansfield Trust, he’d no doubt received scores of such delegations.

As for Beyani, I had only the feeling I’d gotten in his presence. Some men give off violent vibrations, and he’d been one of that dreadful fraternity. I’d felt it in his shape-changing smile and in the steely look of his eyes even when they showed sympathy, which itself might have been no more than the work of a polished actor.

In the end, it seemed to me that only one thing connected these two men in a way that was relevant to the risks Fareem might well be facing: both of them would know that I was headed for Lubanda, Bill because I’d told him so, and Beyani because quite obviously he really was some sort of official in the current government, a fact of which I could not have been certain before I’d seen the picture. For that reason, if for no other, it now seemed better for me to enter Lubanda in secret, by way of Ghana. I could fly into Accra, hire a driver, and head northeast. There would no doubt be many places where I could cross the border into Lubanda without a record being kept of my entering the country. The border stations along its sparsely populated northern border were rarely manned, and even if they were, any official word of my crossing into the country would take weeks to arrive in Rupala, if it ever arrived at all. More than likely, my name would be scribbled onto a piece of paper that would later be used as kindling or for some other, equally rudimentary purpose.

Swift action seemed the least risky approach as well, and so within a few days I’d gotten a Ghanaian visa and was on a plane bound for Accra.

During that flight, I recalled how I’d flown out of Lubanda nearly ten years before. Prior to takeoff, the plane had been thoroughly sprayed with some chemical aerosol. This had never happened on a flight in the States or in Europe and so it had seemed perfectly symbolic of our alien presence on the continent, Lubanda not a country but a collective carrier of agents with which Westerners were unfamiliar and from whose unpredictable effects they had to be protected.

I’d been one of a crowd of Westerners who’d been leaving Lubanda that day, all of them quite happy to be doing so. They’d laughed and joked and repeated the by then well-worn conclusion that Lubanda, along with the rest of Africa, was beyond hope, Mafumi’s insane antics being merely the latest of a slew of continental disasters. The man seated next to me had ordered first one celebratory scotch, then another, and after a moment unleashed a boozy attack on Lubanda and Lubandans that had ended in a drunken reference to “that crazy woman who walked down Tumasi Road.” His red-rimmed eyes blinked slowly. “Do you recall that incident?” he asked me. “When was it now?”

“Ten years ago,” I answered softly. “Her name was Martine Aubert.”

“She was French?”

“She was Lubandan.”

Lubandan, yes, I thought now, Lubandan in a way she’d known I could never be, an intuition that had proved lethally correct.

And so nothing could have seemed less subject to the rules of risk management than that I was now returning to that country.

It was a late-night flight and, with my usual transatlantic Ambien, I arrived in London quite refreshed, transferred to the British Airways terminal, and waited an hour for the plane to Accra.

The young woman who sat beside me was Danish, an aid worker headed for Kumasi, Ghana’s second-largest city. It was her first trip to the country, and she was going there to administer the distribution of a food product that, she said, was a “miracle” in treating infant malnutrition.

“Is there a lot of infant malnutrition in Ghana?” I asked, simply by way of making conversation.

She looked at me blankly, the soft sparkle of her youthful idealism resting upon her like a dew. “I suppose so,” she said, as if perplexed by the question. “So, what do you do in Accra?”

“Nothing,” I answered. “I am going to Rupala.”

“Is that a city in the north?”

“No, it’s in another country,” I informed her. “Lubanda.”

“You have business there?” she asked sweetly.

“Memories,” I answered.

As if brought to attention by the weight of that word, I imagined Martine not as she had been, but as she would be now if she’d been allowed to live out her life on her farm, a woman in her forties, sitting on her porch, reading or listening to that scratchy old gramophone, or perhaps simply peering out into the reaches of her beloved country.

“Sir?”

It was the young woman’s voice, and when I turned to her, she was staring at me worriedly.

“Sir, are you all right?”

When I looked at her quizzically, she nodded toward my hands, which, as I saw immediately, were trembling.

“Are you afraid of flying?” she asked.

I shook my head. “No,” I said truthfully, then even more truthfully added, “Other things.”

I tried not to think of those unnamed other things for the rest of the flight, but despite that effort, I found myself assaulted by ever more disturbing memories of Lubanda, particularly the last few weeks of my life there. It was as if I were moving backward in time as I was moving forward in space, a curious turn of mind, and, as I recognized, a danger unanticipated by the standard rules of risk management.

But memory is the judge who at last must face the facts, and because my mind was clear, and I knew those facts well, I couldn’t stop myself from recalling Martine in a hundred different ways: walking with a basket on her head; hoeing her fields; harvesting honey with a homemade bee suit. These were images of her that rose into my mind, lingered a moment, then faded as other images emerged, first in
pentimento,
then with a vivid fullness, to take their place. They came and departed without context, as if I were flipping through a scrapbook, but each new vision drew me closer to her, until I finally came to the evening when I’d found her sitting on her small porch, reading in the twilight.

She struck me as remarkably unruffled, given the increasing pressures of the last few weeks: the men who’d walked her property line and lit a fire around it, the intimidating visits by various officials from the Agricultural Ministry, the increasingly threatening letters from Rupala, and, latest of all, the crude drawings that were still appearing, and whose images had grown more violent over the last few days, her red-haired effigy assaulted by every imaginable savagery. The latest examples of crudity had been so viciously graphic—Martine eviscerated, beheaded, her body parts fed to pigs—she’d not added them to the collection on her wall, but simply plucked them from wherever she found them and tossed them into her cooking fire.

“Checking on me, Ray?” she said as I got out of the Land Cruiser.

“I guess you could say that,” I told her.

It had been more than three weeks since my last visit, time I’d used to come to terms with our last encounter. In the wake of that disappointment, I’d begun to prepare for my departure from Lubanda. I’d remained dutifully committed to completing the few small projects I’d started, but the wind was no longer at my back. I might still have had hope for Lubanda, but I had none whatsoever that my love for Martine was anything but doomed.

“Where’s Fareem?’

“Up north to visit his family,” she answered. “He’ll be gone for the next few weeks.”

“He should be careful up there,” I said. “Mafumi’s people are gaining power in that part of Lubanda.”

She looked at me as if she’d just spotted an unexpected figure in the distance. “How do you know that, Ray?” she asked.

“Bill Hammond keeps me informed.”

She stared at me somewhat quizzically. “And do you keep him informed as well?”

It was a clear suggestion that Fareem had mentioned our earlier conversation to her, how I’d seemed to be quite in the know as to what the men in Rupala might be wiling to do. If they gave me such information, was it not reasonable to suspect that I gave them information in return?

“Yes,” I answered.

“About me?” Martine asked. “Do you keep him informed about me?”

I shook my head. “No,” I lied.

I couldn’t tell if she accepted my denial, but she said nothing more on the subject. Instead, she glanced toward the road in the direction of Rupala. “And then there’s Farmer Gessee,” she said. “He’s now threatening to put a special tax on my crops. Taxes on
teff,
can you imagine? A luxury tax.” She laughed, but it was a sharp, almost jarring laugh, seeded with dread. “He wants to take my land because he knows that when you take someone’s land, someone’s property, you don’t just take that person’s right to oppose you; you take his
power
to oppose you.”

She said nothing more in reaction to this transparent scheme on the part of the Agricultural Ministry, and so, in the casual manner of a spy, I asked, “What do you plan to do?”

She looked out across the broad expanse of the savanna, twilight only now beginning to color the air.

“My father loved this time of day,” she said. She appeared almost to return to that lost time, be a little girl again, safely cradled in her father’s arms. Suddenly she looked at me. “So do I.”

I’d had the usual number of high school and college romances, but at that instant, I felt certain once again that I had never loved, nor ever would love, anyone the way I loved Martine. That this love was unrequited, and likely to remain so, made it all the more fierce. Her foreignness no doubt deepened her allure. But what made my desire for her almost uncontrollable at that instant was her settledness, the fact that while I was still in the process of taking shape, she was fully formed and completely finished. There is nothing stronger than the gravitational attraction that draws a boy, which is what I was, to a woman, which is what Martine was. Such was the force that simultaneously crushed and lifted me at that moment, and which I could control only by battening down every hatch and by sheer will hold back my devouring need to reach for her, pull her to me, and yes, yes, as if I were the half-crazed suitor in some cheap romantic novel, smother her with passionate kisses.

She returned her gaze to the distant fields for a moment, while I sat, a romantically boiling mass, beside her. Then she looked at me again, and something in her eyes changed, so that I knew that she’d glimpsed the ardent love I could not get rid of and which she had willed herself never to return.

“I’ll get you a beer,” she said quickly, then rose just as quickly and went into the house.

She stayed inside longer than necessary. I heard her clinking glasses in the kitchen, then the sound of water being poured into a basin. When she at last returned, her expression had changed. She seemed less at ease with me, and her tone struck me as more formal.

“Your drink,” she said.

She handed me the glass, but let go of it the second I grasped it, as if even so casual a nearness was perilous.

“Thanks.”

Rather than sit down in the chair next to me, she walked all the way to the other side of the porch and leaned against one of its supporting posts.

“You must be looking forward to getting back to your real life,” she said.

I put on a stolid front. “Yes, I am,” I answered with an unexpectedly sudden display of my disappointment at the little I’d accomplished here. “I’d hoped to help shape Lubanda’s future.” I released a bitter little laugh. “Shape its people.”

She took an edgy sip from her glass. “The line between shaping people and distorting them is very thin, Ray.”

“No doubt,” I said with a shrug, then finished the last of my drink and all but leaped to my feet. “Well, I’d better be going.”

She didn’t offer her hand in farewell as she always had in the past, and I knew that this was because she feared even so glancing a touch might convey too much.

“Well, see you soon,” I said casually, my eyes at that instant no longer able to meet hers.

“Of course, Ray,” she said tenderly. “Anytime.”

I made my escape with quick steps and a leap into the Land Cruiser, though I was very careful to ease back onto the road rather than churn up an angry cloud of gravel like some spurned teenager.

Even so, I couldn’t help but glance into my rearview mirror as I pulled onto Tumasi Road. Through the haze of its dust-coated glass, I saw Martine return to her chair and her book, turning the pages until she found her place, so beautifully self-contained in the soft glow of the lantern that I knew absolutely that I would never know such painful loss again, nor ever again open myself up to so dire a risk.

Seso was sitting outside chatting with Ufala when I arrived back in Tumasi. He nodded as I strode toward the house. I gave back only a crisp wave in return, then silently swept past him, dashed to my desk, and drew out the pad and pencil I used to make my reports to Bill Hammond.

As I wrote, I imagined Martine back at her farmhouse, sitting in her chair, immersed in her book, a vision of her that suddenly turned my hurt into a steadily building anger.

It was the sort of male rage that I might have quelled by pumping iron or swimming laps. But there was no gym in poor, dismal Tumasi, no pool, and so I took up my pen instead.

Dear Bill:

This evening I once again spoke to Martine about the situation with regard to her farm. I am even more convinced that she will not under any condition concede to growing coffee, or anything else she doesn’t want to grow.

All true so far, and none of it different from what I’d written in earlier reports. But like one suddenly carried to an unexpected shore by an unexpected wave,
I crossed the line from spy to advisor.

It is, of course, possible that Martine derives a sense of power from remaining a determined obstacle to the big men in Rupala. If this is so, then their only hope is to render her as powerless as possible.