Memory is sometimes like an unlucky traveler, the type who needs only board a train for the bridge that lies before it to collapse. It can attack a man at any point, and mine attacked me at full force in the days following my brief meeting with Max Regal. The classicist returned, and I recalled that King Darius had given one of his servants the specific task of reminding him that Athens had to be destroyed. My mind now acquired a similar servant, this one tasked with insistently returning me to Martine. She was Lubandan, this dutiful servant repeated, a remark inevitably followed by a vision of Martine in her last days, set upon her course, her reasoning quite plain: In fighting for my land, Ray, I am fighting for my country.
Given the force of such a statement, and the tone of her voice when she’d made it, how could she not have returned to me with startling vividness, so that I’d seen the plain blue scarf that bound her hair, the tattered skirt, the frayed sandals. How could a crystal wineglass not have returned me to her dusty bottles of home brew? After all, shouldn’t the many who risk nothing continually remind us of the few who risk everything?
And so it struck me as perfectly natural that in the wake of Seso’s murder I would often find myself adrift in time, remembering Martine in the glow of a sunset, the silhouette of the Lutusi moving across a red horizon while we sat beneath a scraggly tree, peering out over the savanna. Baboons would sometimes slink out of the darkness, grab whatever they could find, then dash off into the bush, squealing with what seemed a raucous joy. Martine never chased them or made much of their thievery, since the food stocks were secure and beyond them there was nothing of great value.
But my memories didn’t always return me to Lubanda itself. One evening as I sat alone in my apartment, I abruptly recalled a conversation I’d had with Bill Hammond shortly after his latest visit to that ill-fated country. By then, the bloody event that the press had dubbed the “Tumasi Road Incident” was almost ten years behind us. Even so, it seemed still to be reverberating in both our minds, perhaps all the more so in view of what had happened since—the fall of Rupala, Mafumi’s savage rule.
“Lubanda is a mess,” he said.
We were at a bar on Bleecker Street. Bill had only recently assumed his position at the Mansfield Trust, and I’d just opened up my consulting firm for risk assessment and management. Though I’d not returned to Lubanda after my abrupt departure, the awful state of things Bill described had not surprised me. I was well aware that under Mafumi the country had descended into nightmare, its “stability” now maintained by force of arms, along with the archipelago of police barracks and makeshift prisons and little concrete torture chambers.
“Mafumi actually encourages crime against any foreigners crazy enough to stumble into the country,” Bill added.
“Why shouldn’t he?” I asked. “He’s a thief who came to seize the aid warehouses and stayed to empty them.”
Bill appeared genuinely puzzled by Mafumi’s extremism. “But what kind of fool would believe that once he’d emptied the warehouses, we’d just fill them again?” he asked.
“It’s been done before,” I reminded him. “Remember Goma?”
The largest relief effort in human history had been carried out in Goma, Congo, a city that lay just across the Rwandan-Congolese border. It was later shown that vast amounts of this aid had gone to the Hutu genocidaires, who’d only recently massacred, mostly with clubs and pangas, nearly a million Tutsi. With this aid, they’d set up restaurants stocked with donor food and established a black market in donor goods, the profits for which had gone into bars, nightclubs, whorehouses, and the automatic weapons necessary to maintain this vast criminal enterprise.
“Besides, Mafumi went to a convent school when he was a boy,” I said. “They tested all the students there. His IQ was seventy-three.” I shrugged. “All he knew was what a panga can do. But he knew that really well.”
The grave nature of this fact clearly made Bill uncomfortable.
“Anyway, crime is rampant in Lubanda now,” he said. “The guy who picked me up at the airport… Christ, Ray, you wouldn’t believe the equipment he had to keep his car from being stolen.” He shook his head at the nightmarish life that had descended upon Lubanda in the wake of Mafumi’s triumph, and for the first time I saw some hint of his own regret at the part, marginal though it was, he’d played in its doomed trajectory. “In addition to the usual electronic alarm, the kind that kills the engine if someone tries to hot-wire it, he’s got a lock on the wheel, a lock on the stick shift, and another lock on the accelerator.” His gaze became quite sad. “Poor Lubanda. People can’t live normally with crime like that. If property isn’t secure, nothing is.”
“Isn’t that what Martine believed and said in no uncertain terms?” I asked him pointedly. “That tyranny gains power by taking your property and holds it by taking your life.”
He looked at me candidly, like one facing a friend who knows all his secrets. “She did, indeed, make her opinions known.”
I saw that even after all these years, his memory of Martine remained both raw and painful, and so I moved to a different subject. “Did you meet with Mafumi while you were in Rupala?” I asked.
He nodded. “Of course. I could hardly ignore him. He controls everything.” He shrugged. “I even got his excuse for one-man rule, namely that Lubandans can only be ruled by a chief.”
“Mobuto said that about Africans in general.”
Bill looked at me solemnly. “You know, Ray, when darkness fills my soul, I sometimes think it might be true.”
I shrugged. “All I know is that there was a time when Lubanda had hundreds of chiefs, and most of them were pretty decent to their people.”
As if to shore up some small collapsing wall within him, Bill took a sip from his Grey Goose martini. “True enough,” he said with the sympathetic look I recalled from years before. Then, to my surprise, he returned to Martine. “I recently read a line that reminded me of Martine,” he said. “As a classicist you’ve probably heard it. It’s what Zeus says about Athena, that she had a wondrous way of bringing men to grief.” Now his expression filled with warning. “It’s risky to fall in love with a woman like that.”
He waited for me to respond to this, but when I didn’t he glanced out the window, where the usual Saturday night street life was flowing by: NYU students on their way to jazz or blues clubs, tourists looking for Positively 4th Street.
“Do you think she ever trusted Dasai?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” I answered. “But she tried to help him.”
I remembered the dusty afternoon when President Dasai’s modest little Nissan had rolled into the northern village of Shintasa. He’d come to make his pitch for Village Harmony, and he’d asked Martine and Fareem to join his entourage because he’d wanted to showcase Martine, a decidedly white Lubandan, and coal black Fareem, two people working a farm that sat pretty much at the geographical center of Lubanda, a position that, he said, was symbolic in itself. Surely if black and white Lubandans could work together, then so could members of the country’s various tribes. Martine had had her doubts about lending herself to this mission, but had finally decided to do it.
Bill had subsequently asked me to go along with Martine and Fareem. It would, he said, be a good opportunity for me to see more of the country. “Just remember, Ray,” he’d jokingly written, “you’re an ambassador for Hope for Lubanda, so no cursing, brawling, or bedding native girls.”
Shintasa’s villagers were Visutu, the same tribe as Mafumi. It was typical of the upper savanna, a scattering of mud huts only a few miles from the country’s northern border. There was the usual cassava, along with a few staples of subsistence farming. For meat, there were goats, chickens, and a few cows, along with grubs that were eaten, still alive and wriggling, in a red sauce.
We arrived in the afternoon after a bumpy journey along roads that were little more than trails, perfect for herding animals but very hard on the president’s car, which was covered with the region’s pale yellow dust by the time we pulled into the village.
Once there, Dasai gave the villagers his big, jolly laugh, then drew groups of children into his cuddling arms so that the folds of his bright yellow dashiki seemed to capture them in a golden light.
“These little ones are the future of Lubanda,” he proclaimed grandly, in response to which the villagers smiled as widely as Dasai himself.
The president and his entourage were then offered the usual village entertainment. Girls danced before us, hopping and twirling to the beat of drums played only by the boys. The president responded enthusiastically, of course, his eyes sparkling with delight.
As a scene, it was picture-perfect, so I quickly reached for my camera, only to find that the battery had died. This was a major problem because Bill had specifically wanted me brought along to take pictures that could later be used in Hope for Lubanda’s promotional material. I had not yet presented him with a project, and now I had even failed at taking a few publicity shots.
“You can use mine.”
It was Fareem, and he was offering me his camera.
“It’s old and has a crack in the lens,” he added. “But perhaps it will do.”
The crack was in the left-hand corner, a distinctive starburst pattern that was certainly large enough to appear quite prominently in photographs, but perhaps not so prominently that it couldn’t be cropped out.
“Thanks,” I told Fareem, then began shooting as President Dasai drew one child after another onto his ample lap.
For the next few minutes I chronicled the president’s visit, snapping pictures of him with Martine on one side, Fareem on the other, each of them looking somewhat embarrassed by his designation of them as “the embodiment of Village Harmony.” And yet at the time, they’d seemed exactly that: two Lubandans, different in sex and race, who’d managed to share a farm, make it work.
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.