A Dancer In the Dust (9 page)

Across from me, I notice a portrait of the current president, now a little heavy and with sprinkles of gray in his hair. He wears gold-rimmed glasses and is dressed in suit and tie.

It is said that the desk this new president has inherited from Mafumi once belonged to Mussolini. The Emperor of All Peoples had been a collector of such morally tainted relics. He owned a pen taken from Hitler’s bunker, it is unreliably reported, and a lamp that once rested on one of Stalin’s bedside tables. I have no idea if the current president has rid himself of these other seamy artifacts, though I suspect he has, for he would be careful in such matters, and he would certainly know that any official emissary from the Mansfield Trust, which is what I am now, would find them offensive.

I glance toward the door at the far side of the room. There is an anteroom behind that door, as I have seen in drawings of the palace. More than one assassination plot has unraveled there, but that was years ago, when Mafumi was still new to power and the forces against him had not yet been killed or imprisoned or driven into exile. The first failed resistance fighters were reported to have been skinned alive, but who knows if this is true. One thing is clear, however: for the last fifteen years of Mafumi’s rule no internal hands were raised against him, because such hands had been severed by pangas early on.

A man in a dark suit enters the room, and as if signaled by his appearance, a great cheer arises. It comes from beyond the tall windows at the other side of the room, which the guards instantly open so that these young voices fill the airy space. The cheering continues as the man in the dark suit comes to the window, peers out, then turns to me and in a friendly gesture waves me over to the window.

“I am Joseph Abutto,” he says as he offers his hand. “the president has appointed me minister of orphan affairs.” His hand sweeps out toward the window. “Orphans are our great problem now,” he says. “Those below are just, as you say, the tip of the iceberg.”

I look out into a large courtyard where scores of children have gathered, women in nurses’ uniforms moving among them, handing out cookies and dispensing milk from large plastic buckets.

“They receive mid-morning snacks,” the minister tells me. “They are the children of the nomads.”

“Where are their parents?” I ask.

“They starved to death,” Abutto tells me. “There have been many years of drought in Tumasi.”

“Which isn’t good for coffee,” I remark, remembering Martine’s fatal choice. “Drought doesn’t hurt teff all that much, but it is very bad for coffee.”

“Teff,” the minister says. His smile is fully appreciative. “The president has told me that you know Tumasi well.”

“As well as any foreigner can, I suppose.”

Below, the children are quiet now as each awaits his or her portion. Watching them, I recall the mute and nearly motionless waiting I have seen among the crowds outside food warehouses and in refugee camps, people with nowhere to go and nothing to do, so that they wait in silence to be fed, clothed, sheltered, their stoical patience not so much impressive as simply dependency’s mark of Cain, the admittedly complicated fact, as Martine said, that handouts stifle reach.

“These children would have died, but we brought them here to be fed and sheltered,” the minister tells me. “We are bringing more every day.”

“And they’re to stay in Rupala?” I ask.

“Oh, no,” the minister tells me. “We intend to return them to their native region.” He smiles benevolently upon this sea of waifs. “And if we can do this, then these children will become the future hope of Lubanda.”

I find it fitting that I am the official now charged with helping the country realize this noble ambition, since years before, I’d made a similar, though far less exalted, effort to help Lubanda. How strange that year had been, it seems to me now, and how far I thought I’d traveled beyond it before I was returned to it by Seso’s murder—a crime that has now brought me back to Lubanda in a final effort to do what I failed to do so many years before, offer to this sweet, long-suffering country a genuine gift of hope.

“Our president will see you soon,” a voice from somewhere across the room assures me.

I nod, grip the handle of my briefcase… and wait.

Memory is sometimes like an unlucky traveler, the type who needs only board a train for the bridge that lies before it to collapse. It can attack a man at any point, and mine attacked me at full force in the days following my brief meeting with Max Regal. The classicist returned, and I recalled that King Darius had given one of his servants the specific task of reminding him that Athens had to be destroyed. My mind now acquired a similar servant, this one tasked with insistently returning me to Martine.
She
w
as Lubandan,
this dutiful servant repeated, a remark inevitably followed by a vision of Martine in her last days, set upon her course, her reasoning quite plain:
In fighting for my land, Ray, I am fighting for my country.

Given the force of such a statement, and the tone of her voice when she’d made it, how could she not have returned to me with startling vividness, so that I’d seen the plain blue scarf that bound her hair, the tattered skirt, the frayed sandals. How could a crystal wineglass not have returned me to her dusty bottles of home brew? After all, shouldn’t the many who risk nothing continually remind us of the few who risk everything?

And so it struck me as perfectly natural that in the wake of Seso’s murder I would often find myself adrift in time, remembering Martine in the glow of a sunset, the silhouette of the Lutusi moving across a red horizon while we sat beneath a scraggly tree, peering out over the savanna. Baboons would sometimes slink out of the darkness, grab whatever they could find, then dash off into the bush, squealing with what seemed a raucous joy. Martine never chased them or made much of their thievery, since the food stocks were secure and beyond them there was nothing of great value.

But my memories didn’t always return me to Lubanda itself. One evening as I sat alone in my apartment, I abruptly recalled a conversation I’d had with Bill Hammond shortly after his latest visit to that ill-fated country. By then, the bloody event that the press had dubbed the “Tumasi Road Incident” was almost ten years behind us. Even so, it seemed still to be reverberating in both our minds, perhaps all the more so in view of what had happened since—the fall of Rupala, Mafumi’s savage rule.

“Lubanda is a mess,” he said.

We were at a bar on Bleecker Street. Bill had only recently assumed his position at the Mansfield Trust, and I’d just opened up my consulting firm for risk assessment and management. Though I’d not returned to Lubanda after my abrupt departure, the awful state of things Bill described had not surprised me. I was well aware that under Mafumi the country had descended into nightmare, its “stability” now maintained by force of arms, along with the archipelago of police barracks and makeshift prisons and little concrete torture chambers.

“Mafumi actually encourages crime against any foreigners crazy enough to stumble into the country,” Bill added.

“Why shouldn’t he?” I asked. “He’s a thief who came to seize the aid warehouses and stayed to empty them.”

Bill appeared genuinely puzzled by Mafumi’s extremism. “But what kind of fool would believe that once he’d emptied the warehouses, we’d just fill them again?” he asked.

“It’s been done before,” I reminded him. “Remember Goma?”

The largest relief effort in human history had been carried out in Goma, Congo, a city that lay just across the Rwandan-Congolese border. It was later shown that vast amounts of this aid had gone to the Hutu
genocidaires,
who’d only recently massacred, mostly with clubs and pangas, nearly a million Tutsi. With this aid, they’d set up restaurants stocked with donor food and established a black market in donor goods, the profits for which had gone into bars, nightclubs, whorehouses, and the automatic weapons necessary to maintain this vast criminal enterprise.

“Besides, Mafumi went to a convent school when he was a boy,” I said. “They tested all the students there. His IQ was seventy-three.” I shrugged. “All he knew was what a panga can do. But he knew that really well.”

The grave nature of this fact clearly made Bill uncomfortable.

“Anyway, crime is rampant in Lubanda now,” he said. “The guy who picked me up at the airport… Christ, Ray, you wouldn’t believe the equipment he had to keep his car from being stolen.” He shook his head at the nightmarish life that had descended upon Lubanda in the wake of Mafumi’s triumph, and for the first time I saw some hint of his own regret at the part, marginal though it was, he’d played in its doomed trajectory. “In addition to the usual electronic alarm, the kind that kills the engine if someone tries to hot-wire it, he’s got a lock on the wheel, a lock on the stick shift, and another lock on the accelerator.” His gaze became quite sad. “Poor Lubanda. People can’t live normally with crime like that. If property isn’t secure, nothing is.”

“Isn’t that what Martine believed and said in no uncertain terms?” I asked him pointedly. “That tyranny gains power by taking your property and holds it by taking your life.”

He looked at me candidly, like one facing a friend who knows all his secrets. “She did, indeed, make her opinions known.”

I saw that even after all these years, his memory of Martine remained both raw and painful, and so I moved to a different subject. “Did you meet with Mafumi while you were in Rupala?” I asked.

He nodded. “Of course. I could hardly ignore him. He controls everything.” He shrugged. “I even got his excuse for one-man rule, namely that Lubandans can only be ruled by a chief.”

“Mobuto said that about Africans in general.”

Bill looked at me solemnly. “You know, Ray, when darkness fills my soul, I sometimes think it might be true.”

I shrugged. “All I know is that there was a time when Lubanda had hundreds of chiefs, and most of them were pretty decent to their people.”

As if to shore up some small collapsing wall within him, Bill took a sip from his Grey Goose martini. “True enough,” he said with the sympathetic look I recalled from years before. Then, to my surprise, he returned to Martine. “I recently read a line that reminded me of Martine,” he said. “As a classicist you’ve probably heard it. It’s what Zeus says about Athena, that she had a wondrous way of bringing men to grief.” Now his expression filled with warning. “It’s risky to fall in love with a woman like that.”

He waited for me to respond to this, but when I didn’t he glanced out the window, where the usual Saturday night street life was flowing by: NYU students on their way to jazz or blues clubs, tourists looking for Positively 4th Street.

“Do you think she ever trusted Dasai?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” I answered. “But she tried to help him.”

I remembered the dusty afternoon when President Dasai’s modest little Nissan had rolled into the northern village of Shintasa. He’d come to make his pitch for Village Harmony, and he’d asked Martine and Fareem to join his entourage because he’d wanted to showcase Martine, a decidedly white Lubandan, and coal black Fareem, two people working a farm that sat pretty much at the geographical center of Lubanda, a position that, he said, was symbolic in itself. Surely if black and white Lubandans could work together, then so could members of the country’s various tribes. Martine had had her doubts about lending herself to this mission, but had finally decided to do it.

Bill had subsequently asked me to go along with Martine and Fareem. It would, he said, be a good opportunity for me to see more of the country. “Just remember, Ray,” he’d jokingly written, “you’re an ambassador for Hope for Lubanda, so no cursing, brawling, or bedding native girls.”

Shintasa’s villagers were Visutu, the same tribe as Mafumi. It was typical of the upper savanna, a scattering of mud huts only a few miles from the country’s northern border. There was the usual cassava, along with a few staples of subsistence farming. For meat, there were goats, chickens, and a few cows, along with grubs that were eaten, still alive and wriggling, in a red sauce.

We arrived in the afternoon after a bumpy journey along roads that were little more than trails, perfect for herding animals but very hard on the president’s car, which was covered with the region’s pale yellow dust by the time we pulled into the village.

Once there, Dasai gave the villagers his big, jolly laugh, then drew groups of children into his cuddling arms so that the folds of his bright yellow dashiki seemed to capture them in a golden light.

“These little ones are the future of Lubanda,” he proclaimed grandly, in response to which the villagers smiled as widely as Dasai himself.

The president and his entourage were then offered the usual village entertainment. Girls danced before us, hopping and twirling to the beat of drums played only by the boys. The president responded enthusiastically, of course, his eyes sparkling with delight.

As a scene, it was picture-perfect, so I quickly reached for my camera, only to find that the battery had died. This was a major problem because Bill had specifically wanted me brought along to take pictures that could later be used in Hope for Lubanda’s promotional material. I had not yet presented him with a project, and now I had even failed at taking a few publicity shots.

“You can use mine.”

It was Fareem, and he was offering me his camera.

“It’s old and has a crack in the lens,” he added. “But perhaps it will do.”

The crack was in the left-hand corner, a distinctive starburst pattern that was certainly large enough to appear quite prominently in photographs, but perhaps not so prominently that it couldn’t be cropped out.

“Thanks,” I told Fareem, then began shooting as President Dasai drew one child after another onto his ample lap.

For the next few minutes I chronicled the president’s visit, snapping pictures of him with Martine on one side, Fareem on the other, each of them looking somewhat embarrassed by his designation of them as “the embodiment of Village Harmony.” And yet at the time, they’d seemed exactly that: two Lubandans, different in sex and race, who’d managed to share a farm, make it work.