A Dancer In the Dust (3 page)

His request suddenly sounded more urgent, something important clearly at stake.

“All right,” I said.

“The Harvard Club, nine
A
.
M
.?”

“Okay.”

“Thanks, Ray. See you then.”

The click of Bill’s phone as he hung up was loud and oddly jarring, like a pistol shot.

A murder,
I thought, and suddenly felt somewhat like Fowler, the jaded British journalist, when he learns that Alden Pyle’s body has been found floating in the Saigon River.
The Quiet American
had been one of the books I’d read on that first plane ride to Lubanda, and I’d so reveled in its exotic atmosphere that its warning about the risks of inexperience, of entering, even with the best of intentions, a country one knows nothing about, had drowned in the waters of my youth and naïveté.

Those risks had long ago made themselves clear, however, and so for a moment, I went back over the conversation I’d just had with Bill. It was a habit of mine, going over things again and again, putting one piece of data with another. Risk assessment is mostly connecting the proverbial dots.

Someone from the old days,
I heard Bill say again.
When you lived in Tumasi.

The old days, when I’d been young and fiercely determined to do good, and nothing, least of all my soul, had seemed at risk.

I thought of my first meeting with Seso, how I’d found him standing alone in a small, airless room not far from the capital, the way he’d introduced himself very formally as “Mr. Seso Alaya.” He’d stood extremely straight, and though the collar of his shirt had been frayed and his pants too short, he’d had the dignity the great explorer Richard Burton had found in those who’d served him in India, made yet nobler, as he’d said, by their raggedness.

Seso informed me that he’d been assigned to be my translator and general assistant, and with that he’d reached for my bag, which I’d refused to give him because to do so would suggest that I was his master; and I’d come to help the Lubandan people, not to rule them. Seso had read this gesture for what it was, and smiled. “It is my job to be of service,” he told me. “I am not ashamed to work.”

Thus had ended the first exchange I’d had with Seso. After it, he’d taken my bag and followed me to the white Land Cruiser that was to be at my disposal for as long as I remained in Lubanda. We’d driven to Tumasi that same day, out of Rupala and up a road that took us past those storied scenes of Africa, small townships, then the villages of the bush, and from there across that broad savanna the Lutusi had immemorially roamed, and to which I believed myself to be bringing my earnest gift of hope.

There are three principal factors in risk assessment, I reminded myself not long after ending my conversation with Bill Hammond: the amount of the loss, the likelihood of incurring it, and in the event of loss, the subsequent possibility of either full or partial recovery. The first two may not be equally weighted, however. For example, the amount of loss might be very great but the likelihood of incurring it very slight. Or it may be that the loss is slight but the likelihood of incurring it is quite high. In all risk assessment there are only two invariables: that loss is possible, and that some things, once lost—innocence, for example, and sometimes hope—are irrecoverable.

For a few minutes after receiving Bill Hammond’s call, I spent some time pondering the considerably less ominous risk of meeting him the next morning. He clearly had some request to make of me, but I reasonably assumed that it was one I could grant or refuse. Either way, there was little risk that my life would change. The odd thing was that Bill’s call had returned me to Lubanda in a way that lingered through the night, so that I again recalled myself as the young man who, some twenty years before, had arrived in the sedate capital of a languid country whose arid central region had for a long time remained pretty much undisturbed.

At that time, Lubanda’s president was a Western-educated intellectual whose idea of social organization and economic development had been a form of pastoral anarchism, derived, as he freely admitted, from the lessons he’d learned from utopian novels, and which he called Village Harmony. His name was Kojo Dasai, and he was round and huggable, with a huge smile and one of those rich chuckles that immediately put everyone at ease. He’d encouraged his fellow Lubandans to call him “Baba,” which means “Father,” but Bill Hammond had early dubbed him “Black Santa,” and indeed, President Dasai had remained quite jolly, chuckling softly almost to the day he’d been hung upside down by Mafumi’s renegade soldiers, stripped of his signature bright yellow dashiki, and hacked to death in Independence Square.

A gruesome video of his murder could still be bought on the streets of the capital when I’d last visited it. In it, the first flag of Lubanda waved at the far end of the square, a huge sunflower against a background of light blue, the design chosen by President Dasai. The flag had later been hauled down, trampled, spat and pissed upon. It was this filthy, reeking bit of cloth in which the president’s body, or what was left of it, had been wrapped, placed on a cement slab, doused with gasoline, and burned. The sound of his sizzling fat had been clearly audible on the video, and it was this detail, according to the hand-lettered sign in the shop that sold the tape, that “made it juicy.”

Unlike Dasai’s murder, Seso’s death had not made news. But in fact, little having to do with either Lubanda or Lubandans had made news after that particularly savage assassination, the sole exception to this general indifference having been the slaughter of the animals held in the national zoo.

I’d long been back in the States, a graduate student at Wharton Business School, successfully studying the risks inherent in almost everything, when I’d heard of it. And although Mafumi’s renegades had repeatedly demonstrated their love of brutality, nothing could have prepared me for the footage by then available on the Internet.

A year after Lubanda’s independence, a wealthy London matron named Charlotte Hastings had decided that what this newly minted nation needed was a national zoo, and so, at her own considerable expense, she’d had one built.

It was small by Western standards, but it housed a collection of deer, goats, a few lions and other big cats, two elephants, and four or five giraffes, along with a small aviary and a pool of snoozing crocodiles.

A few days after President Dasai’s death, Mafumi had declared a “White-Out”—twenty-four hours of celebratory destruction that included the ripping down of “white” advertisements and the looting and torching of “white” buildings and residences. Its culminating act was to be the demolition of Charlotte Hastings’ “white zoo.”

A mob of about two hundred had carried it out, mostly with pangas, but also with knobkerries, which had proven particularly effective on the birds of the zoo’s tightly enclosed aviary. In the films, these airborne clubs could be seen hurtling toward the panicked birds, knocking them from the limbs to which they’d fled. As for the crocs, they’d been roped and cut to ribbons, mostly by teenagers using box cutters. A few of the larger and more dangerous animals had simply been riddled with automatic weapons fire, but the smaller ones had suffered a far more painful and protracted death, their legs hacked off, after which, mere groaning torsos, they’d been slashed and clubbed to death while the zoo’s liberators danced the
toyi-toyi
around them, the women ululating in a strange, bloodcurdling ecstasy as the pangas rose and fell, sending droplets of blood raining down upon the crowd.

These were horrid images of the madness that had befallen Lubanda in the years following my brief stay there. Bill had once said that the road that led from loving Lubanda to hating it was short and straight, and in a sense, I realized as I thought of Seso and opened myself to a dark cavalcade of memories, it was a road I’d taken to its cold dead end.

At precisely that moment, I also came to understand that Bill’s call had sounded in me like a fire bell in the night. Something of that distant, tragic year still floated inside me, insistent, accusatory, reminding me that a grave error is like a rogue star, eternally polluting the vastness with its smoldering trail of miasmic wrong, crashing into this or drawing that into its unforgiving gravity, but always moving, on and on into the vulnerable and unsuspecting expanse.

As if fixed in a mental circuit I could not escape, I went back to that first day, when I’d gotten off the plane and been whisked to an orientation meeting where I was treated to a brief history of Lubanda under French, German, and at last British rule, then directed to a room whose door had been fitted with a neatly hand-lettered sign that said “Tumasi,” surrounded by a circle of paper sunflowers.

I waited in that room for almost ten minutes before a slightly overweight, curly-headed young man entered, thrust out his hand, and introduced himself as Bill Hammond. He’d worked in the Peace Corps before coming to Lubanda, he told me, and had expected to be in the country for only a couple of years. But to his surprise, he’d “developed a crush” on the place, and so had signed on with an NGO called Hope for Lubanda.

“And you?” he asked. “What’s your story?”

“There’s not much to tell,” I admitted. “I’m from a small town in the Midwest. I went to the University of Wisconsin. After that, I moved to New York and got a job teaching.”

“Let me guess, a ghetto school?”

I nodded.

“So you’re the type who, in the sixties, would have been down South working in voter registration drives, that sort of thing.”

“I suppose so.”

“English major?”

“With a concentration in the classics,” I said. “Mostly Greek theater and the Greek myths.”

Bill handed me a large envelope. “You’ll find a few orientation pamphlets in there. Most of it is routine stuff, but you should make yourself very familiar with the Lubandan Constitution, because when you meet government officials, it impresses them if you’ve taken the trouble to learn its provisions and amendments. It’s a show of respect.”

I smiled. “I’ll commit it to memory.”

Bill glanced toward the window, where, just beyond the outskirts of the city, the Lubandan vastness spread out and out, all its mountains and its plains, the twining river that circled the capital, the great savanna over which the nomads roamed.

“It’s strange how the die is cast, Ray,” he said. “The fact that if rhinoceroses could have been domesticated, the Africans might have ridden them to Calais.” He looked at me and smiled. “They’d have been Sherman tanks against those puny little European horses.” His smile turned down slightly, a movement that betrayed his darker line of thought. “Tumasi is in the middle of the bush. Mostly nomads wandering around. There are only a few farms up that way. Strictly subsistence.” He plopped down in one of the metal chairs, swung his arm over the other, the posture of an amiable traveling salesman. “So, is this your first time in Lubanda?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“You’ll never forget it.”

I’d always known that there are short goodbyes and long ones, but with Bill’s call I’d discovered that there were certain things no farewell can put behind you, that we are made, in the end, by the things we can’t forget.

On the heels of that recognition, Martine returned to me in the peculiar, disjointed way of memory. It was not a vision of the first time I’d seen her, nor the last, but of somewhere around the midpoint of the time I’d known her.

In this memory, she is standing in her spare field, a hardscrabble farmer if ever there was one. We have just walked the land line of her acreage, where she’s pointed out the plowed earth and told me what she’s planted. The bright light of the sun turns her red hair to flame. She looks away, then faces me again, staring at me so intently I feel like a small animal in the crosshairs of her gaze.

“What are you thinking, Martine?” I ask her.

She gazes at me a moment, then bends forward, takes up a handful of soil, and looks at it as if, for all the world, she is part of the earth she now lets stream from her spreading fingers. “It’s very odd, I know,” she says with a sudden, radiant smile, “but when I walk these fields, or into the village, or out into the bush, l feel the strangest joy.”

Joy. Yes, that had been it, I thought now as I recalled that moment. Martine had found joy in the very look and feel and tastes and sounds of Lubanda, and amid those richly sensual delights, she had awakened each day as if it were Christmas morning and there, before her, arrayed beneath the glittering tree, bound in bright colors and ribboned with gold, had lain the richest of life’s pleasures to unwrap.

This memory lingered awhile before I returned myself to the risk-aversive world I’d chosen after leaving Lubanda. I knew that had I gone on to have a normal life after Tumasi, been able to forget what happened there, what I did there, I might later have married a woman who, at this critical moment of risk assessment, would surely have asked worriedly, “Why, Ray? Why open yourself up to all that again?”

I knew what my response would have been
.

Because I have to.

“And why is that?”

My answer would have been simple:
Because it is long and sad and red with blood
,
my tale of Lubanda.

And yet, even as I imagined such an exchange, I knew that although my story was Lubandan in the sense of having taken place during my Lubandan interval, Martine’s tale, at least in the larger sense, was not Lubandan at all. Rather, it was the story of one who’d believed she had a home only to discover that she didn’t, believed that love was enough, when it wasn’t, believed that he who’d loved her most would have understood the singular joy that had been hers and helped her keep it. I had no doubt that to believe such things strongly, and follow them courageously, as Martine had done, should have bestowed a measure of victory upon her final act. But that day, as I confronted my year in Lubanda once again, it seemed to me that instead of crowning her with laurel, Martine’s good faith—the very substance of her unique and precious happiness—had merely opened the door to a far more tragic fate, and in doing so proved yet again how lonely are the brave.