A Dancer In the Dust (8 page)

True, Seso had chosen a symbol that would have meant nothing to anyone who hadn’t known Martine, but darkly suggestive—a potent symbol indeed—to anyone who had. Even so, I couldn’t remotely be sure of the tattoo’s meaning. Perhaps Seso had had his own reason for having it done. Perhaps it was the symbol of some cult he’d joined or some secret organization. Surely it was possible that it had nothing to do with Martine, save that Seso had, in coming here, felt himself no less doomed than she had been.

I had only the memory of a particular night to argue that Seso had always considered himself something of a marked man. “I am an outcast,” he’d said on that occasion. He’d said this grimly, his words weighted with fatality, and he’d never seemed more a boy of the bush than at that moment, a boy who’d seen just how a pack of hyenas surround their isolated prey, their cackling and their cries, the nipping at the flanks of their exhausted victim. There is nothing kind in nature, as anyone who lives at its mercy knows, and Seso had certainly lived that unforgiving life. Even so, I’d come to believe that as he’d lived alongside me, he’d become more trusting not only of me but, dare I say it, of his fellow man, perhaps even his institutions. More’s the pity that he’d abruptly found that trust both unwarranted and dangerous.

I’d been in Tumasi for only a couple of weeks when it happened, and on that particular day I’d been driving about the savanna in an attempt to come up with a helpful project. While I was gone, an official from the Agricultural Ministry who’d stopped in the village had returned to his car to find his binoculars missing. He’d seen Seso loitering about his car and had immediately accused him. Seso had stood silently and with great dignity as the official hurled insults at him. “You are an outcast,” he’d yelled, “a thief like the rest of your kind.” At that point the official had more or less arrested Seso, then taken him to Nulamba, where the National Police had an office.

It was Fareem who’d told me all this when I got back to Tumasi late that same afternoon. He’d been in the village when Seso was accused and had waited there until my return so that he could tell me what had happened. He agreed to go with me to Nulamba, where we’d found Seso locked in a back room of the small, tin-roofed building that served as headquarters for the district police. In a room that doubled as a storage closet, Seso sat on the floor in a humble, squatting posture, surrounded by a bramble of brooms and mops and plastic buckets. He seemed utterly reduced and humiliated, like one whose best efforts had come to nothing.

“They are accusing me,” he said as he lifted himself from the floor, “but I did nothing. I work hard. I am not a thief.”

It was the cry of a young man who’d done everything he could to better himself. To be locked up like a common criminal in this sorry backroom depository of plastic jerry cans and buckets seemed almost more than he could bear. “I am not a thief,” he repeated brokenly. “I do not steal.”

It was seeing noble, hardworking Seso in such a condition that had emboldened me at that moment, so that I’d marched back into the constable’s office and demanded his release.

“I am sorry, but he must be questioned,” the constable said.

He wore no badge on his plain, olive green uniform, so there was nothing to suggest his authority save the decidedly innocuous sunflower pin on his cap, one that would be replaced by crossed pangas a few years later. This shaved-down form of official dress had also been part of President Dasai’s ideology of Village Harmony. In Lubanda, even the attire of authority was to be soft, pliable, unthreatening. That the constable currently wearing it would shift his allegiance to Mafumi when the time was right, get a much-sought-after promotion, and later help to carry out the Janetta Massacre, would never have occurred to Lubanda’s soon-to-be-filleted chief of state.

But the constable’s capacity for violence was plenty clear to me. I could almost see the shadow of jackboots creep over his saintly sandals. He started to get up, then thought better of it, and eased back into his chair, where he rested like a big cat in the corner of his cage. “This prisoner has been accused of stealing, Mr. Campbell,” he explained. “This is a serious crime in Lubanda.”

“Seso is not a thief,” I told him.

The constable smiled. “I have only brought him here. I have not denied him food or water. Father Dasai does not wish any of his children harm. Negritude forbids it.”

I recalled that the Lubanda Constitution had emphatically and repeatedly stated its faith in Negritude, the concept that no black man could do to another black man what white colonists had done, but I’d never heard the word used by a government official.

“Surely you know this,” he added pointedly.

“Of course I do,” I assured him. “I know Lubanda’s Constitution very well, and on the basis of that knowledge, I think it’s fair for me to ask when Seso will be released.”

“This I cannot say, Mr. Campbell,” the constable told me. “There are certain problems.”

“What sort of problems?”

“Where he was when the theft occurred,” the constable answered. “He was near to the official’s car.”

“Tumasi is a market,” I said. “I’m sure there were lots of people near the official’s car.”

The constable didn’t answer, but we both knew the truth. Seso had been accused because of his tribal origins. It was the old, old story of guilt by association, and Lubanda was sunk as deep in that reeking mire as any other place.

“He admits he went near the agricultural inspector’s car,” the constable said.

“So what?”

The constable looked at me with the motionless eyes of the seasoned interrogator he would later become as district commander for the Ministry of Internal Security.

“I cannot say more at this time, Mr. Campbell,” he said, after which he offered a wide, Lubandan smile, all white teeth and cordiality, but in his case, with something steely in it.

“I will come to you with any later questions,” he added, then glanced over to where Fareem stood in a corner, his hands folded in front of him, the posture of a valet.

“Who is this?” he asked me. “One of your… servants?”

“No,” I said. “A friend.”

The constable appeared to find this mildly amusing. “You were in Tumasi when the theft occurred?” he asked Fareem.

Fareem nodded.

The constable looked at me. “He will stay.”

“Stay?”

“He will stay here,” the constable repeated. “To be questioned.”

I looked at Fareem. There was a fierce supplication in his eyes:
Please do not leave me with this man.

“No,” I said. “If you need him later, let me know. I’ll bring him in myself. You have my word on that.”

For a moment the constable stared at me with those same motionless eyes. He was obviously trying to calculate the risk, if there was any, in insisting that Fareem remain behind.

“I will take your word, Mr. Campbell,” he said at last. “You may take your man with you.” His eyes shifted over to Fareem, and I saw in them the faint sparkle of contempt that would later shine so brightly in the eyes of Mafumi, as well as in those of all his officers and minions, his followers and hangers-on, the ululating women who danced at his rallies, the boy army that committed his outrages, a smoldering hatred so intense it was all but blinding.

But that dreadful wave had not yet inundated the country, and so I simply nodded to this officer who had not yet transformed himself into the murderous factotum of a tyrant, glanced at the sunflower pin that winked from his cap, and said, “Good, then we can go.”

With that I waved Fareem toward the door, then turned to leave myself. I had just reached the door when the constable called me back.

“One moment.”

I turned to face him. “Yes.”

“You know that woman, yes? ” he asked.

“That woman?”

“The white woman. The one who has a farm at the end of Tumasi Road.”

“Martine Aubert? Yes, I know her,” I said. “I met her my first day in Tumasi.”

The constable stared at me evenly. “So she also is a friend of yours?”

“Yes, she’s a friend,” I told him.

His large eyes were dark and still. “Good,” he said, quietly, though with a curious edge. “It is good that she has a friend.”

He meant a white friend, as we both knew, and by that he meant someone with influence. Even so, his remark had less than an amiable tone, the suggestion being that Martine would soon be in need of such a friend, and that quite naturally that friend, like Martine, would be white.

“Why is that?” I asked.

The constable only smiled, then nodded toward the door. “Be careful on your way back to Tumasi. It is a dangerous road.”

We walked out of the building, got into my Jeep, and headed back toward Tumasi. Fareem was clearly shaken, and for a long time he said nothing. Then, quite suddenly, he said, “It is as I thought. They are after Martine.”

“Who?”

“The big men in Rupala,” Fareem answered. “She got a letter from them. They want to evaluate her farm.”

“‘Evaluate’? What does that mean?”

“I don’t know, but it is never good when they come here, the people from the capital.”

I tried to reassure him. “Everything is going to be fine,” I said. “It’s probably just some sort of survey. Governments are always taking surveys.”

The sun was going down when we arrived at Martine’s house an hour or so later. She was sitting on the porch as we came to a halt, but rose quickly and was almost upon me by the time I got out of the Land Cruiser.

“There is something wrong,” she said the instant our faces came into view.

I told her what had happened—the theft, Seso’s arrest, our journey to Nulamba, what had transpired there.

“The constable wouldn’t release Seso,” I said at the end of the narration. “But he looked fine. He hasn’t been harmed. I expect that he’ll be released very soon.”

I started to buttress this conclusion with some unfounded notion about legal procedure, the rule of law, the present government’s commitment to these decidedly Western principles, but before I could speak, I happened to glance out and, in the distance, across the plain, I saw a long line of slender figures moving slowly at the far reaches of the bush, their animals moving with them: goats, cattle, camels, a dog or two. It was a group of Lutusi on their way to some watering hole perhaps forty or fifty miles off, slowly and gracefully moving at their own pace.

“It’s beautiful,” I said by way of lightening the mood. “The way they move.”

The tenderness of Martine’s reply touched some previously untouched part of me.

“The Lutusi have their own pace,” she said in that way of hers, with neither admiration nor condemnation, but only as a matter of fact. They had their own time, and it was at one with their immemorial course, immutable as an ocean current. It was neither good nor bad. It simply, intractably… was.

At that moment, as we three stood together watching the line of Lutusi at the horizon, Martine seemed at peace with her homeland, a country so perfectly hers that I could not have foreseen the fury with which it would turn against her, nor that, in the face of that fury, she would set a course down Tumasi Road where, at some terrifying instant, she must have heard a rustling in the brush, then the rhythmic clack, clack, clack of the shells as they sounded behind her, then in front, then tightening like a clattering noose all around.

Rupala, 10:48
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Einstein is said to have welcomed death because it put an end to risk. I have to admit that I’m not quite as sanguine about it. Death doesn’t appeal to me, but sometimes killing does. “The reek of human blood smiles out at me,” one of the Furies says as they close in upon Orestes. I have known that smile, and I must confess that at this moment, I know it once again. The unavoidable truth is that there are times when the rigors of forgiveness defeat us, and we wish only to do damage.

Even so, why could I not have let Seso’s murder go, returned to my secure little office and my safe little life? I think it was because each time I thought of Seso facedown in that alley, I thought of Martine facedown on Tumasi Road, a swarm of black-winged vultures already circling overhead.

“Please stand over there, Mr. Campbell,” a second man tells me as he ushers me into a large room. “Someone will come for you very soon.”

The man who gives me this instruction wears a dark green suit with a yellow tie whose brightness reminds me of the sunflower flag of that earlier Lubanda. But for all that, I suspect that he is a holdover from the old regime, perhaps one of Mafumi’s bodyguards. I make this admittedly unproven assumption because his eyes have the look of one whose acts long ago turned his heart to stone. For that reason, I can’t help but wonder how many times he’s reached for the pistol I glimpse beneath his jacket as he sits down a few feet from me. It is probably a 9mm Browning Hi-Power, Mafumi’s weapon of choice for his Praetorians. Clearly, Lubanda’s new president has not chosen to reduce the lethal firepower of those who are supposed to guard him. But given that they once protected Mafumi, can he really believe that they will as ardently protect the man who all his life opposed that now dead tyrant? Surely not, I tell myself. But then, my life, as well as my profession, has taught me that the greater part of man’s self-created sorrow is caused by his failure to trust the right people. It is our errors of judgment in precisely this regard that insures our deepest doom.

A second man now emerges from an adjoining room. He smiles as he comes toward me. “Please take a seat anywhere you like,” he tells me. “The president offers his apologies. I’m sure you understand.” With an even bigger smile, he says, “He wishes you to be comfortable. We have bottled water. May I bring you some?”

“No, thank you,” I tell him. “I’ll just take a chair. The flight was long, and I’m a little tired.”

He waits while I stroll toward the fifteen or so ornate chairs that line the opposite wall. Until recently this was Mafumi’s library, where those in his favor waited to be received by him. I peruse its shelves, the hundreds of pulp fiction paperbacks the Emperor of All Peoples preferred, novels spiced with sex and fueled by rip-roaring action. Mafumi could not read, and so he was read to by a relay of young girls, the Emperor so aroused by the sex scenes that these reading sessions often ended on one of the zebra skin carpets that cover the floor.