A Dancer In the Dust (10 page)

I’d taken more pictures over the next hour or so, President Dasai shaking hands with villagers, walking through their small gardens, watching women as they pounded cassava. With one and all, he’d played the black Santa, smiling, laughing, dispensing advice and encouragement, assuring the Visutu villagers that he would look out for their interests despite the fact that he was of a different tribe, the Besai, of the south.

“We are no more different peoples,” he proclaimed just before he got into his car for the trip back to Rupala. “We are all Lubandans, children of the same village.”

“He means it, don’t you think?” I asked Martine as we stood together, listening to the president’s speech.

“Nyerere said the same thing,” Martine answered. “That the country’s tribes could live quite well together as long as they were all members of the same political party.” She drew a handkerchief from the pocket of her blouse and ran it across her brow. “Nyerere’s party, of course.” She shrugged. “Lubanda could go the same way.”

This struck me as a darkly pessimistic remark, a product of the many books and reports Martine had studied, and which I’d seen in her farmhouse a month before. How many nights had she pored over them by candlelight, I wondered, tracing the history of postcolonial Africa from one failed state to another?

“Unless it finds another way,” she added now.

A few yards distant, President Dasai ended his talk, then led the villagers in a ragged version of the country’s national anthem. Few of them had learned the words.

After that, we were on our way back to Rupala, the president with his advisors, Martine, Fareem, and I following behind in my Land Cruiser.

“He doesn’t have much security,” Fareem said at one point. He looked out toward the scrub brush that rose in thick patches as far as we could see. “And Mafumi’s thugs are just across the border.”

We rumbled on through the heat, the dust thickening as the brush thinned, so that we were soon driving over an isolated landscape, empty as the moon, with only a set of previously laid tread marks as a road.

The plan had been to stop midway to Rupala for another presidential visit, this time to a nomad encampment one of his aides had described as “picturesque,” and where Bill had asked me to take yet more photographs of Lubanda’s beloved president.

I’d expected all of this to go smoothly, but once we were out of the desert and into the more lush landscape of the south, I noticed Fareem becoming steadily more agitated.

“This would be the place,” he said, then looked pointedly at Martine. “This would be the place to assassinate Dasai.”

At first I’d thought myself the butt of a joke, Martine and Fareem engaging in a little game to frighten me. But when I looked at Martine, I saw that she’d taken Fareem’s remark in deadly earnest.

“That’s always the easiest way,” she said darkly, “Just to kill someone.”

There is the sadness one feels for one’s own life, and there is the sadness one feels for all life, and it was this second sorrow that seemed to fall upon Martine at that moment, the bleak and dreadful fact that men were simply not up to the job of taking the harder, slower road to whatever vision of paradise possessed them.

“Always the easy way,” she repeated softly, almost to herself.

As if to confirm her stark conclusion, at that very moment a loud pop, pop of rifle fire sounded from both sides of the road.

“Get down!” Fareem cried, then grabbed Martine, pushed her into the rear floorboard of the Jeep, and dove on top of her. “Fast, fast!” he yelled at me. “Go! Go!”

By then the president’s lead car was speeding away as fast as the bad road would allow, but fast enough to spew a nearly impenetrable cloud of dust from its madly spinning rear tires. The president’s driver had not been trained in evasive action, and so he simply shot forward as fast as possible.

Within seconds the firing was behind us, a distant, muffled series of shots that made it clear that this had been a stationary ambush, the president’s would-be assassins on foot and thus unable to pursue him.

Minutes later the president’s car came to a halt, and Dasai, quite unruffled, got out and strode back to where I sat, pale and shaken, behind the wheel.

“Are you all right, young man?” he asked.

I nodded mutely.

The president glanced to the rear of the car, where Fareem and Martine had now retaken their seats.

“And you, my dear?” he asked Martine.

“Fine,” Martine said, though I could see her fear, along with the firm way she acted to control it.

Dasai’s familiar smile spread once again across his face. “The perils of office, my child,” he said with a soft laugh.

Suddenly, I blurted, “May I take a picture, Mr. President?”

“Of course,” Dasai said. “Just let me slap some of this dust off.”

As he did precisely that, I picked up Fareem’s camera and stepped out of the Jeep.

“Where do you want me?” Dasai asked.

“There,” I said, “with the horizon at your back.”

Thus did I pose the president, standing proudly, and as if alone, a blazing sunset behind him, his fists pressed into his sides, his feet spread somewhat farther apart than usual, the stance of a man in full charge of his country, a picture so brimming with confidence in the future that only a month later it would adorn the cover of Hope for Lubanda’s glossy new brochure.

It was a brochure I’d brought back with me when I’d left Lubanda ten months later, and which I still had, and which called to me that night so many years afterward, in the wake of Seso’s murder. In answer to that call, I walked to a drawer where I kept my Lubanda memorabilia. There, among papers, a map, and one of Martine’s carved oyster shells, was that very brochure, along with the original picture, never cropped, and thus still marked by the spidery crack of Fareem’s broken lens.

I stared at that original photograph for a moment. How symbolic the crack in Fareem’s lens now seemed of the fractured nature of Lubanda at that time. But there was nothing to be done about the terror that had later overrun it, so I returned the brochure to the drawer, then took out the map I’d used to plot the movements of the Lutusi across the savanna. I recalled the way Martine had stared at it, her gaze focused on the black lines that marked their wanderings. She’d said nothing, but I’d noticed the look of disquiet in her eyes.

Had that been the second time I’d visited Martine’s farm, I asked myself now, or the third? I was surprised that such an insignificant detail mattered to me, though it was clear that I’d begun to go over my year in Lubanda with the curious sense of searching for small clues.

There is a certain element of investigation in all risk management, of course, but when one’s own actions may increase the risk to another, then the thoroughness of that investigation becomes of prime importance. Had I known that simple rule of risk assessment all those many years ago, and applied it to life itself, I would have acted differently that day on Tumasi Road, facing Martine as she began her walk, the basket on her head bearing her few necessities, as well the
Open Letter
she was bringing to Rupala.

It had been found in her basket, then retrieved by authorities, one of whom, an army officer, had had it on his desk the day I was questioned. “Did she write this herself?” he’d asked as he nodded toward the paper.

I looked at Martine’s
Open Letter
. The bloodstains had by then darkened and gone dry, crude evidence indeed that Village Harmony had grown decidedly inharmonious.

“Yes,” I said.

“You weren’t involved in writing it?”

“No.”

“And the one she lives with on that farm in Tumasi.” He glanced at a note on his desk, the name I could see written on it. “Fareem Nebusi. Was he involved in writing this… paper?”

“I don’t know.” I nodded toward the
Open Letter. “
May I have it?”

The officer hesitated only long enough to decide that there would be no further attempt to investigate this latest crime, and so no need to keep anything in evidence, least of all a worthless piece of paper. “Of course,” he said finally, then handed it to me.

And I had it still, a dreadful souvenir of my time in Lubanda that now rested in this same drawer, rolled up tightly and secured with a rubber band. I had not thought of taking it out since last putting it there, but that night, only a few days after Seso’s murder, thinking of Tumasi again, of Martine and Fareem and, of course, Seso, I drew it from the dark and unfurled it on the top of my desk.

There it was, the plea Martine had written on behalf of her country, then placed in her basket and set off with down the long, weaving road that ran from her farm to the capital.

In the years since then, I’d rarely thought of Martine making her way down Tumasi Road. Instead, I’d imagined her as evening fell and she left the road and headed out into the bush, where she rolled out her bedding and sat down, took a deep breath and a swig of water, then ate the bread she’d made from the grains she’d grown, and after that, stretched out, faceup, and peered into the overhanging stars. For years that vision had floated through my mind, but now as I thought of it, it arose through the screen of Seso’s death, as if I were now searching not just for Seso’s killer, nor even for whatever it was he’d claimed to have for Bill, but for that elusive, perhaps unknowable, but always painful line that in every life divides what we should have done from what we did.

Before going to Lubanda, I’d known that there is an innocence of mind that experience can change, and you will be the better for it—less naïve, for example. The risk is cynicism, of course, a religion whose only sacrament is suicide. But if something, even cowardice, stays your hand from so final an act of hopelessness, you have no choice but to soldier on, a fact Seso’s murder made clear. Besides, I finally decided, it was possible that Lubanda still had tricks to play, an experience, dark and bloody, that wasn’t finished yet. I had no idea what those tricks might be, of course. I knew only that, like an unexplored river, its source lay behind me and its terminus ahead.

It was a Friday night when I made my way toward the Darlton Hotel, a busy evening for most of Manhattan. But Twenty-seventh Street has no clubs, and only a few restaurants, and so in that part of the city, a peculiar urban quiet descends with the failing light. It isn’t the silence of a meadow at close of day, nor the whispering softness of a twilight field, and certainly it isn’t the ancient silence that fell over the savanna on those evenings when we would gather on Martine’s porch to watch the sun go down. An urban nightfall can have a sinister effect, as I’d noticed all the more vividly upon returning from Lubanda. In Lubanda all nocturnal things had lingered; here they lurked. There the perils of night had been at one with the scheme of things; here they seemed the product of a grim manufacture, a world of risks that were fundamentally man-made.

There were people on Twenty-seventh Street, of course, but by and large they were on their way somewhere else. None would be headed for a low-rent hotel populated by African traders whose customs and dialects might as well have come from Mars.

Both the street and the Darlton Hotel had the look of an afterthought. Much of New York had changed during the last twenty years, but this part of the city had remained remarkably the same. The buildings were shorter than most of Midtown, and the youthful energy of the Village, the vibrant restaurants of the old Hell’s Kitchen, the clubs of the Meatpacking District here gave way to something gray and heavy. Even the buildings seemed to slump.

The Darlton had that same feel: old, tired, less a faded movie star than a faded bit player. It stood erect, but somehow on its last legs, like a man suffering from a long, debilitating illness, still alive but weakening by the hour. I had little doubt that its owners were waiting for one last wave of speculation, the building destined either to be torn down or completely renovated, nannies dragging their properly dressed wards down streets once reserved for people who’d come with nothing, acquired nothing, transients, runaways, men with unclear motives who faced uncertain fates… like Seso Alaya.

How different this later Seso was from the young man I’d known, impeccably dressed in black trousers and a white shirt. Max Regal had found a middle-aged man, destitute by all appearances, living in a derelict hotel, a man who’d come all this way for a reason I was trying to uncover.

On that thought I recalled that Seso had accompanied me to the airport on the day I left Lubanda.

“Maybe I’ll come back someday,” I told him, though with little confidence that I ever would. “Maybe things will be different and I can have a drink with you and Fareem.”

“Fareem will never come back to Lubanda,” Seso said. He shrugged. “He would have nothing to come back to.”

“But where will he go?” I asked.

“To the north,” Seso said. “Back to his tribe.” For the first time since I’d known him, Seso offered a cutting smile. “Isn’t that where you’re going?” he asked. “Back to your tribe?”

I might have made some limp defense for leaving Lubanda, but the airport public-address system scratchily sounded at that moment, announcing the boarding of my plane.

“Goodbye, Seso,” I said, and moved to embrace him, but he stepped away.

“Do not worry for me,” he said. “We must now take up our old lives.” He offered his hand. “You were always kind to me. I thank you for this.” Now his smile became genuinely warm and generous. “It is not your fault that Lubanda is not your home.”

The lobby of the hotel in which this noble man had died was a shadowy affair. The floor was covered with a dull layer of linoleum, and although the walls were wood-paneled, some of the panels had fallen away, leaving strips of bare wall behind them. There was a row of vending machines to the right of the reception desk, and on the other side a few worn chairs. Everything looked drained, a room on life support.

“What can I do for you?” the woman at the desk asked. She was wearing a brightly patterned dashiki and a large African headdress, but her accent was full-throttle Bronx.