A Dancer In the Dust (32 page)

Such was the product of your error,
the Ancient Chorus sang to me,
yours and yours alone.

I abruptly felt like Actaeon, the hunter, who turned into a deer and was set upon and torn apart by his own ravenous dogs. But such soul-lacerating thoughts were more than I could afford. Or at least more than Fareem could afford. I had come to save him, not condemn myself, and so I forcefully returned to my purpose.

I nodded toward the sack that dangled from Ufala’s hand.

“Is that what Seso gave you?” I asked.

She nodded.

I took the sack from her, reached into it, and found a sealed plastic bag. The plastic was thick and almost opaque, so that I got only a glimpse of what was inside, a thin envelope stamped with the crossed pangas of Mafumi’s old regime.

“Thank you,” I said to Ufala.

I turned to leave, and once again noticed the storm fence that had been erected at the entrance to the village.

“The fence looks new,” I said as I turned back toward Ufala. “What’s it for?”

“Lutusi children,” Ufala answered. “The trucks bring them here to drink and wash, then they take them to Rupala.”

“Trucks take them to Rupala?” I asked “Why?”

Ufala shrugged. It had never been her habit to ask questions.

It wasn’t until I’d gotten back to the road, slumped down in a small area of shade, and drawn out the contents of the envelope that it had been revealed suddenly, revealed in the way an image in a camera abruptly comes to sparkling focus, allowing me in that shattering instant to understand the hope Seso had had for Lubanda, and in just what risky, desperate way it had also been Martine’s.

Rupala, 1:47
P
.
M
.

The children press in upon us as Fareem escorts me through the camp that now covers Independence Square.

“Most of these children are Lutusi,” Fareem informs me.

“A noble people, but with a few strange customs,” I tell him. “When they had something valuable to offer, they never brought it with them to the market.”

Fareem smiles as if his spirit is lifted by a sweet memory. “That is true. They left it with someone they trusted. Martine often traded for things she’d never seen.”

He kneels down and the children tighten around him. He cradles them in his arms, and almost immediately one of his aides steps forward and takes a picture.

“I did that once, remember?” I say as Fareem rises. “Took pictures of a president with children on his lap.”

“President Dasai, yes,” Fareem says. “We all went up north.” He appears to recall just how risky that trip had been. “Dasai was brave, you have to give him that.”

“Unfortunately, courage is never enough,” I remind him. “One has to be aware of traitors behind the curtain.”

Fareem nods sagely, a man who has learned this lesson well during his years of opposing Mafumi as comrade after comrade fell. “Yes, it is important to know who’s at your back.”

I think of Nulli Beyani, the shadows within which he may yet lurk. “Do you know who is at your back, Fareem?”

“I am watchful, if that is what you mean.”

I think of my mission, the steps that have led me back to Lubanda once again, the report I’d given Bill after my return to New York, the way he’d stared bleakly at the photograph I’d given him, and which had surely been what Seso had wanted him to see. After that, we’d agreed on what should be done next, and on the fact that this action, like the ones before it, was fraught with risk, as all things human are, a decision whose consequences would be small for us, but great for Lubanda, and yet worth risking.

I glance about the camp and think of Seso’s son, how his death must have severed that lonely man from his last hold on earth, set him to take the risk he took, knowing, as he always had, that the color of his skin would not protect him from murder, the fantasy of Negritude that had orphaned Martine no less a myth in his last hour, as the blows rained down upon his feet, than it had ever been.

Fareem sees some part of this playing in my mind, though he cannot know its terrible detail, and so he says, “We’re doing our best to deal with the problem of Lubanda’s orphans, but, as you can see, their numbers are quite overwhelming at the moment.”

With that, he drapes his long arm over my shoulder. “Come, Ray, let’s go now.”

We walk back to the car and get in.

“Food and shelter are in short supply,” he says. “Once these are secured, we can begin the process of returning these children to their homes.”

We are moving swiftly now, down one of Rupala’s rocky roads. The tumbledown city spreads out in all directions, looking like nothing so much as a vast pile of worthless goods, the remnants of an old largesse, a landscape littered with the spare parts of things that should perhaps never have been brought here in the first place, the shoddy treasure Mafumi came to seize.

“Everything is in disrepair,” Fareem tells me when he notices me staring out the window. “Mafumi did nothing to maintain the infrastructure.”

“He was waiting,” I tell Fareem.

“Waiting for what?”

“Waiting for aid,” I answer. “When people expect it, they wait, and so they don’t initiate anything.”

Fareem is clearly troubled by my remark. “Is that what the think tanks believe now?”

“No, it’s what Martine believed,” I answer. “She wanted Lubandans to be themselves, a people and a place with their own pace and character, one that shouldn’t be distorted by foreigners.”

“Ah, yes,” Fareem says with a look that is surprisingly dismissive of the argument made in Martine’s
Open Letter.
“But does it distort a people to give them running water, electricity?”

“Martine had neither,” I remind him. “And ‘give’ is the operative word.”

Fareem’s eyes narrow somewhat, but he says nothing.

“I remember how she once positioned the hand of the giver over the hand of the receiver,” I add. “The receiver’s hand just waits for something to be dropped into it.” I let this latest remark hang in the air between us, then add significantly, “Martine wanted to save Lubanda from people like me.”

Fareem turns from me and stares out the window. He says nothing more until we reach the Presidential Residence, but I can feel the heat from his relentlessly calculating brain.

When the car pulls up to the Presidential Residence, he turns to me, and I see a great upheaval in his eyes. “I did love her, Ray,” he says with great sincerity. “It wasn’t easy.”

“What wasn’t easy?”

He seems taken aback by the question. “What happened on Tumasi Road. It wasn’t easy for me to go on after that.”

“You took a great risk,” I remind him. “Leaving Lubanda, going to Europe. Coming back is an even greater one.”

“Why?”

I draw in a long, hard breath. “Because you never know who’s at your back. Someone you think a friend or a comrade in arms, but who is actually a traitor.”

Fareem looks at me curiously, but with the intensity of old. “I trust you have brought something other than suspicion to Lubanda,” he says with a quick glance at my briefcase.

“I have brought nothing but hope to Lubanda,” I assure him.

With that assurance, Fareem opens the door and I follow him out into the bright sunlight. The new flag waves in the hot air as we mount the stairs, and I once more feel the weight of what I carry in my briefcase, the terrible risk that in this, too, I may be wrong. Still, I can see no other way, dark and unknowable as this way surely is.

“I have a private office,” Fareem tells me. “Much smaller than the grand one where you waited. Let’s go there. We can talk without fear of being heard.”

“Is that one of your fears?” I ask him.

“No, why do you ask?”

“So you have complete trust in those around you?”

He nods. “Of course. That is important, don’t you think?”

“I do, yes,” I tell him. “Perhaps the most important thing of all. Without it, what is there?”

“Emptiness,” he says.

“And fear,” I add. “You are never afraid, Fareem?”

“Of what?” Fareem asks.

“That your country might not love you back,” I answer starkly.

Fareem stops short, as if by the unexpected warning of a peril equally unexpected.

“No,” he says confidently, though it seems to me an uncertain confidence because he knows that Lubandans, like most mortals, are limited in their judgment but unlimited in their violence, easy to fool, frighten, and enrage.

With that same uneasiness, he turns and we head down a long corridor festooned with the various artifacts of the former regime: portraits of Mafumi posed before iconic places he had never been, the Great Wall of China, the Eiffel Tower, and Mafumi himself, the poster child for idiocy.

“You’re keeping all this?” I ask.

“We plan to build a memorial to Mafumi’s victims,” Fareem informs me. “There is to be a museum, and these things will be exhibited there.” He smiles. “Along with what he thought was Hitler’s pipe. Of course, Hitler did not smoke.” He shakes his head at the sheer lunacy on display before him. “Mafumi spent millions on such fake artifacts. Paintings without provenance. A piece of the moon. Sand from Mars.”

We are nearing the end of the corridor.

“Mafumi was a child of violence,” Fareem tells me. A vague sadness settles over him. “A man is made by the violence done to him, Ray. Mafumi’s parents were both slaughtered right before his eyes.”

“I thought that was just part of his made-up biography.”

We have reached the door at the end of corridor. Fareem opens it and waves me inside, where I take a seat in front of a small desk.

“No, that part of Mafumi’s life is true,” Fareem assures me. “We figured it was this scene of parental massacre that had so deranged him.”

“We?”

“The people around him, I should say.”

“You’ve met people who were around Mafumi?”

“Only when they were shooting at me,” Fareem says with a dismissive shrug. “Or trying to run me down in a car.”

“That’s hardly a place where such information would be exchanged,” I say.

Fareem now appears slightly tense, as if accused of something, under interrogation.

“What do you mean by that, Ray?” he asks.

I lift my briefcase, place it on my lap, open it, and draw out a photograph. “Do you know this man?” I ask as I hand it to him. “He’s standing directly to your left.”

Fareem glances at the photograph, then says. “We were in Janetta, to commemorate the massacre. That’s Nullu Beyani.”

“What is his position?” I ask.

“He’s the head of the National Police,” Fareem answers. He hands the picture back toward me. “Why do you ask?”

“He visited me in New York,” I tell him. “He told me he’d come there to investigate the murder of Seso Alaya.”

Fareem is clearly not surprised to hear this. “That is true. I sent him there myself.”

“Why?”

“Because Seso worked under Mafumi,” Fareem tells me. “In the archive. He may have known state secrets, and when such a person flees the country, and is then murdered… I’m sure you understand why we needed to get to the bottom of it.”

“Did you know that Beyani went to Sura before Seso’s murder?” I ask.

Fareem looks genuinely surprised to hear this.

“Why would he have done that?” he asks.

“He went there to talk to Seso’s old friend Bisara. Do you remember him?”

“I met him a few times, yes. He sometimes came to visit Seso.”

“They tortured Bisara,” I inform Fareem. “Beyani and his thugs.”

For the first time, Fareem appears disturbed. “Why would they have done this to Bisara?”

“Because they were looking for whatever Seso had to show Bill Hammond,” I said. “You remember Bill, I’m sure.”

“Of course,” Fareen says. “He’s now head of the Mansfield Trust.” He looks confused. “What did Seso have for Bill?”

“Something important,” I answer, then permit a dramatic pause to lengthen tensely before I add, “And so Nullu Beyani and some of his agents came to New York and they tortured Seso, but he wouldn’t tell them where he’d left what he wanted Bill to see.”

Fareem merely stares at me.

“He left it with someone Beyani would be unlikely to think had anything of worth,” I add. “In the first place, someone who was not Lutusi. In the second place, a woman.”

“Not Lutusi,” Fareem repeats with a hint of self-accusation, as if this possibility should not have escaped him, but clearly did, a dreadfully unexpected turn in a plan he’d thought successful before now. “A woman.”

Still, he only smiles. “Seso was always quite smart.”

I let my gaze fall to the briefcase, consider my next move for a moment, then make it. “Anyway, I found what Seso wanted Bill to see.”

Fareem watches me silently… and waits.

I take out the envelope in which Seso had sealed its contents and place them on Fareem’s desk. “The pictures were taken many years ago and put away in some forgotten corner of Mafumi’s archive. You might say they’re part of the historical record.”

“The historical record of what?” Fareem asks as he reaches for the envelope.

“The Tumasi Road Incident.”

Fareem’s hand snaps back from the still unopened envelope as if from a serpent, and stares at me silently. Then, as if in response to a dare, he picks up the envelope and spills the photos across his desk.

And so there it rests, fully exposed, the stages of Martine’s torment, pictures taken from a distance but which nonetheless record with awful clarity the terrible choreography of her ordeal. In the first of these pictures, she stands alone as a noose of jeering men draws in around her. The pictures fully reveal the awful terror that gripped her, the
ihahamuka
she had so dreaded. The men are pointing at her, dancing around her. Like hyenas they rush in and yank her hair, then dart away, rush in and slap her, poke her with their crude spears, nip at her with the blades of their pangas, then retreat laughing. It is hard to say how long this goes on before the real assault begins, after which she tries to run, staggers, at last drops to the ground, where they fall upon her, ripping at her clothes, hitting her with stones, slashing her with pangas. The final photograph is a close-up of her barely recognizable face, the distinguishing feature of which remains the flaming red hair that must have given Mafumi all the proof he needed that the witch was dead. Like all the others, it is a perfect picture, save for one thing.