A Dancer In the Dust (12 page)

I might have asked a question or two about all this had Bill Hammond not suddenly come roaring up in his Land Cruiser. As usual, he was all smiles and self-confidence as he strode toward me, a large cooler under his arm.

“Hello, Ray,” he said cheerfully. His eyes whipped over to Martine. “Bill Hammond,” he said as he offered his hand.

“Martine Aubert.”

“Where are you from?” Bill asked.

“Lubanda,” Martine answered.

A less ebullient spirit might have felt rather embarrassed at having to entertain the possibility that Martine was a “native,” but Bill pressed forward obliviously.

“Well, congratulations on being a citizen of this wonderful country,” he said. “One that will be much more wonderful once Ray is finished with it.” He laughed and slapped me on the back. “Right, Ray?”

“Right,” I said softly, then watched as Martine’s gaze slid away from me and settled on Fareem. “This is Fareem,” she said to Bill.

Bill smiled and offered his hand.

“We’d better finish getting our supplies,” Fareem said to Martine after shaking Bill’s hand with a clear sense of keeping his distance.

“Well, I hope you’ll join Ray and me for a beer afterwards,” Bill said expansively. He slapped the side of the cooler. “Fresh in from the States.” He indicated a group of wooden benches that rested a few yards from where we stood. “We’ll be waiting right over there.”

Martine and Fareem smiled politely, then moved away, leaving Bill and me at the edge of the market.

“Good-looking woman,” Bill said as he watched her. “What’s the story with the local?”

“Didn’t you hear what she said? They’re both… locals.”

“I mean the black guy,” Bill said. “Does he live on her farm?”

“Yes.”

“Hmm,” Bill mused with something of a verbal leer in his tone.

We walked a few paces, then stopped in a patch of shade, and in that stillness I became aware that Bill was watching Martine closely.

“Just how far do you think that woman has gone bush?” he asked with what was now an openly salacious grin.

“Martine hasn’t ‘gone bush,’” I told him. “She was
born
bush. That’s what she meant when she told you she was Lubandan.”

“Yeah, well, she’s living a fantasy if she believes that,” Bill said. His gaze drifted over to me. “Lubanda is a snake that knows its eggs, Ray.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means that some people in Rupala already have their eyes on her.”

“What people?”

“The people in the Agricultural Ministry,” Bill answered. “They think she may prove to be an obstacle to the ministry’s plans for the region, which is to grow cash crops.”

“Why would Martine pose a threat to that?”

Bill smiled. “With your help, maybe she won’t.”

I didn’t smile back. “I don’t want anything to do with politics.”

Bill’s smile vanished, and he became dead serious. “Everything is political, Ray. Lubanda hasn’t stabilized yet. In the north, that warlord asshole Mafumi is stirring up some serious trouble.” He abruptly returned his attention to Martine. “But I’m sure she’ll do the right thing.” His attention remained on her for a moment before it returned to me. “Now let’s go have that beer,” he said. He draped his arm over my shoulder and guided me over to the bench that sat a few feet from my quarters. “So,” he said. “Tell me what’s on your mind, project-wise.”

“I’ve been thinking of a well.” I said. “Only one to begin with, then maybe others.”

“Great,” Bill said. “Let’s hear it.”

I reviewed the research I’d done, tracing nomadic routes, going over with him the calculations necessary to determine the likelihood of finding water at various depths, along with the always-considerable risk of finding none at all.

Bill paid great attention to all this, then said, “Okay, so, where do you plan to dig?”

I rose, walked into my house, and returned with a map of Lubanda. “Here,” I said, and pointed to the x.

Bill nodded. “Good enough,” he said. “Write up your project proposal and I’ll review it, and if it’s approved, I’ll get you whatever you need.”

We talked on for a few minutes, and after a time Martine and Fareem strolled over to where we sat.

“Ray’s going to dig a well,” Bill said ebulliently. He pointed to the mark I’d made on the map. “There.” He smiled at Martine. “What do you think?”

Martine sat down beside me and for the first time, as our bodies touched, I felt a steady charge in her nearness. She was not classically beautiful, but something furiously sensual came from her, so that a hint of breast beneath her shirt was far more tantalizing to me than anything a
Playboy
could provide. Her voice, with its musical Lubandan rhythms, added to the mix, of course. And then there were those emerald eyes, soft yet resolute, with something in them that had been tested by heat and dust and long, hard labor. There is nothing more unfathomable than the sort of desire that has the seed of later love inside it. In the end, it has little to do with the flesh and so much to do with the heart and the mind. On a New York street I might not have noticed Martine because she would have been dressed like a million others, spoken like a million others, been framed by the city’s immensity and lost in its faceless crowds. But here in Lubanda, sitting close beside me, she seemed quite suddenly to shimmer with a rough beauty no powder could smooth nor any rouge provide a false bloom of youth. I thought of the women who’d followed the westward trek of my own now distant country, who’d lived in sod houses and weathered the innumerable hardships of a land in which they could ultimately depend upon nothing but themselves. Martine had the sense of those older struggles about her, the dust of ages past still clinging to her hair. There was nothing cracked about her, nothing fragile. She was like a vessel whose every particle had been strengthened by a flame.

“Hmm,” she said as she stared at the map, the place my well was to be located.

Bill’s gaze remained fixed on Martine. “Good idea, don’t you think?” he asked somewhat tentatively, as if he was already probing for both her strengths and her weaknesses. “To dig a well?”

When Martine drew her eyes up from the map, the look in them was neither quizzical nor hostile.

“Have you a pencil?” she asked.

Bill took one from his shirt pocket and offered it to her.

She took it, leaned forward, and drew a circle around the x where I’d positioned my proposed well. “The nomads will come to this well,” she said, “and because of the water, they will have bigger herds. But to and from the well, these larger herds will eat more of the grassland, and so the nomads will have to move farther and farther from the well to feed their animals.” She drew a second, wider circle around the x. “The grasses will be eaten clean first here.” She drew a third, still larger circle. “Then here.” Now a much larger circle. “Then here.” She looked at Bill. “All their cows will die within the first circle.” Now she looked at me. “The goats will die within the second circle.” She handed Bill back the pencil, her gaze now fixed on him intently. “When that happens the nomads will have nothing to trade for the grains and materials they need. No meat or milk. Nothing to sustain them… but your water.” She stared at us in that level, no-nonsense way of her. “You are friends of Lubanda, but even so, it is important to know the consequences of what you do,” she added softly.

Bill looked at her sternly. “We’re trying to do something good for Lubanda,” he said.

“I am sure you are,” Martine replied. “Honestly. I have no doubt that you are.” She smiled in a way that was not at all superior or even unfriendly. “Did you know that in Nairobi, when the aid workers turn on the air conditioners in their compounds and houses and apartments, the lights dim or go off in the poor parts of the city?”

“And your point is what?” Bill asked with an icy smile.

“That everything is more complicated than you think,” Martine said. “More connected to other things.” She looked at me. “Like your well, Ray.”

With that she politely said goodbye, turned, and walked away.

“Does she think I don’t know about these contradictions?” Bill asked when she was out of earshot. “Does she think I don’t know that at conferences on starving children, you’ll find food and wine, all you can fucking eat?” His eyes whipped over to where Martine and Fareem were beginning their homeward journey up Tumasi Road. “It’s easy to make aid workers look like assholes. But, Ray, those people stuffing their faces are getting more done for the world’s poor than Martine Aubert, who is, after all, only taking care of herself.” When he looked at me again, I saw the warning in his eyes. “Be careful, Ray,” he told me, “because she’ll undermine everything you say or do. She’s a primitivist. If it were up to her, Lubanda would stop dead in its tracks.”

“But do you think she’s right?” I asked Bill. “Technically, you might say. About the well?”

Bill shrugged. “What I know is that she should keep her mouth shut,” he said quite seriously.

With that he rose, motioned me forward, and the two of us headed back toward his Land Cruiser, silent all the way.

Then, once he was behind the wheel, a smile struggled to his lips as he tried to return to his more jovial demeanor. “Just dig your well,” he said, “You’re a good man and you’ve come here to do good. That’s what really matters.”

A harsh clatter of metal on metal loudly returned me to the present and I was back in New York, facing Herman Dalumi, a man who now seemed uncertain that he’d made the right decision in allowing himself to have anything further to do with me.

“You look like man in a spell,” he said to me. “A bad magic spell.”

The elevator door had opened to a bleak landing, a floor covered with a strip of linoleum that seemed never to have known a mop.

“The dead man’s room is down there,” Dalumi added as we stepped into the foul-smelling corridor.

I followed him down the hall, though with little expectation that I’d find anything of interest in Seso’s room. Still, it was the way of movie cops and private eyes, a well-known route that generally led from clue to clue until the villain was discovered, and though in real life such an investigation would probably reveal nothing, I calculated that there was little risk in carrying it out.

We stopped at Seso’s room. Dalumi inserted the key and eased open the door. “You first,” he said as he stepped back and let me go ahead of him, careful to duck under the yellow crime scene tape.

Imagine a bare room, and then add to it the poorest trappings of necessity. There was a bed with a thin mattress, supported by creaking springs and an iron frame. It was unmade and the blanket, a girlish pink, lay crumpled on the plain wooden floor. There was a chest with two drawers. The mirror was cracked in the lower right corner and again about halfway up, so that the line crossed the forehead of an average-sized man but must have cut ominously across Seso’s throat. There was no closet, only a metal rack like the ones used to transport clothes along the streets of the nearby Garment District and from which hung two plaid shirts, both long-sleeved, and a single pair of badly frayed trousers. A small radiator supplied the room’s only heat, and a dangling bulb its only light. There was no chair, no desk, no adjoining bathroom. A few cans of food rested on the windowsill, but there was no hot plate. A plastic fork, spoon, and knife sprouted from a Styrofoam cup, the room’s sole utensils.

I walked over to the window and looked out. Below there was a square courtyard littered with whatever had been thrown from the windows that overlooked it.

“Seso was a quiet man,” I said softly. For a moment, I continued to stare at the brick wall Seso must have faced during the time he’d spent here. Then I turned to Dalumi and suddenly felt the urge to tell some small part of my story.

“I went to Tumasi to do something good,” I began, “and so I studied the routes the nomads took across that part of Lubanda. They wriggled and curled back on themselves and zigzagged. A journey from one point to another that should have been a mile became two miles, or three, or ten. Because of that, the routes themselves made no sense.”

Dalumi stared at me silently, his eyes glimmering in the dim light of Seso’s room.

“I would never have understood these routes if Seso hadn’t told me that the Lutusi wandered in this way in order to familiarize their young with all of their territory, not just to make a beeline to water.”

“How did this man know any of that?” Dalumi asked. “He said he lived in Rupala.”

“He knew it because he was a Lutusi,” I said. “A nomad.”

As I continued, I thought of Seso as he’d been so long ago in Tumasi, shy, rarely speaking to anyone, sitting for long hours simply staring out into the bush, his gaze never so focused as when he caught sight of a line of nomads wandering in from the far reaches of the savanna.

“The Lutusi send their boys out into the bush, then wander away from them,” I went on. “It’s part of their training. The boys must find the tribe. Seso got lost. He couldn’t find his people. So after a while they looked for him. They found him in the village. He had just wandered in out of the bush. The people in the village knew he was Lutusi and so they knew his people would eventually come back this way. And they were right. The Lutusi came into the village, but they wouldn’t take Seso back.”

“They are crazy, those nomads,” Dalumi said with the contempt city people generally have for country people, “bumpkin” being a designation that appears in almost every language.

“It wasn’t because he’d gotten lost that they wouldn’t take him back,” I said. “It was because, while being lost, he had accepted help. A little food and water. He didn’t ask for it, but it was brought to him, and he ate and drank.” I shrugged. “So he ended up with me.”

I suddenly felt the oddly contradictory elements of Seso’s character come together, the correctness with which he followed my instructions merge with the joylessness with which he followed them, as if his care were itself a diminishment. He’d done his job well, but he’d done nothing beyond his job. He’d never once initiated anything or exhibited any real ambition. Perhaps all he’d ever wanted was to return to the Lutusi.