21

What have I done?

The question was again ringing in my ears as I made my way south, the vegetation growing more sparse with each step.

And so Bill had been right—it was atonement I sought in coming back to Lubanda, an effort to save Fareem because I’d failed to save Martine by assuming that what I wanted for her should be what she also wanted for herself, an error that had set in motion a chain of events that had quickly spun out of control.

No part of what my error had wrought could now be changed, however, and so my present task was to reach Rupala as quickly as possible, meet with Fareem, alert him to the risk I’d discovered, and hope that he would take my warning seriously.

I’d made it to Janetta within two days of crossing the border, encountering very few people on the way. The ones I met had seen few whites since Mafumi had taken power, and so I was a curiosity to them, but little more than that. I offered them nothing and they owed me nothing, and so they had the luxury of ignoring me or not, according to their own will, which was generally to look up, perhaps wave or smile, then return to the labors and relaxations that were deeply and abidingly their own.

The walk itself was long, and swarms of tsetse flies sometimes attacked me so fiercely I broke into a full run to get away from them. Still, it was the heat that most drained me. It beat down relentlessly, the sun at times so bright I felt that I was staring directly into it. The few villages I passed were baked by it, and everywhere, everywhere, people crouched beneath whatever shade could be found, motionless even as I passed, save for the near-naked children who sometimes rushed toward me, followed me a few yards, then gave up the chase and retreated back into the sheltering shade, movements of engagement and nonengagement that were, for them, as natural as the tides.

Janetta had been the village to which Fareem had fled in the wake of the Tumasi Road Incident. It had sheltered him for several weeks, and for that reason, Mafumi had decreed that its people suffer a terrible retaliation for Fareem’s later activities in Europe, particularly his creation of a Lubandan government-in-exile.

Mafumi’s revenge upon the people of Janetta had been characteristically savage—infants, toddlers, and small children sandwiched between strips of plywood and rolled over by trucks, women nailed to trees, men and boys hacked to death—an outrage that had even penetrated the cloud of mindless celebrity noise that generally engulfs the West. From Paris, Fareem had issued a grave condemnation of these events. I could still remember him standing erect and with great dignity quoting Voltaire to the effect that as long as men believe absurdities, they will commit atrocities.

A few villagers still lived in Janetta, and all of the ones to whom I spoke remembered the visit Fareem had made some months before to lay a wreath beside the large tree at the center of the village.

“It was the tree where they nailed the women,” one of them told me, an old man, clearly one of the village elders. “The president got down on his knees. His shoulders were shaking.” He shrugged. “But he did not stay long. He was on his way to another village.”

“Which one?” I asked, thinking that I might retrace Fareem’s return to Rupala.

“Tumasi. It is all the way across the savanna. I don’t know why he was going there.”

I knew, however, and it seemed typical of Fareem that he would have connected these two towns, each so dark a stain on Lubandan history.

“I know Tumasi,” I told the old man. “I lived there twenty or so years ago.”

“You lived in Tumasi?” he asked, quite surprised to hear this.

“I came there to help Lubanda,” I said with a shrug, “but I didn’t.”

The old man nodded, but I could see that he’d lost interest in the subject. What did he care if some foreigner had once come to help a place far away from his own village.

For that reason I might have dropped the subject, but the day had been long, and the tree above me gave some relieving shade, and so I risked further boring this old man by taking out the one photograph I’d brought with me, as a kind of amulet, a way of reminding me of that lost time, of what I had been, and what they had been, and what had happened to each of us. It showed the key players in my life at that time, all of us standing in front of my house, Seso a little off to my right, Fareem and Martine to my left.

“I lived here,” I said as I offered him the picture. “In that little house.”

The old man took the picture from my fingers, the same weary look in his eyes until a stark recognition suddenly came into them. “He was here,” he said. He pointed to the picture, his finger trembling over Seso’s figure. “He was here that day.”

“What day?”

“The day the president came to Janetta,” the old man said. “I noticed him. We all did. Because he was Lutusi and we do not see many Lutusi here.” His expression showed the oddity of what he’d seen. “Especially alone. The Lutusi are never alone.”

“What was he doing?”

“Just standing,” the old man answered. He pointed to the tree that stood in the distance, the one he’d pointed out before, where the women of the village had suffered such grievous outrage. “All alone,” he added. “Just standing there. The Lutusi do that when there is danger near. A lion or a snake. They stand and don’t move.”

“And he stood just that way the whole time?” I asked.

The old man nodded slowly. “It was sidumo,” he said.

Sidumo was a Lutusi word. It meant “warning,” and I suspected that the old man had used it as a way of determining if I’d ever really lived in Tumasi.

“Did the president see this warning?” I asked.

The old man shrugged. “I don’t know.”

“Did the Lutusi go up to the president, or talk to him?”

The old man shrugged. “I don’t know.”

“When did the president come here?” I asked.

“It was in the summer,” the old man answered. “Very hot.”

This meant that Seso had left Lubanda almost immediately after coming to Janetta. Three months had passed since then, so the “very near” danger about which he’d tried to warn Fareem now had to be very near indeed.

I felt a renewed energy and got to my feet, now determined to reach Rupala as fast as I possibly could.

I reached Kumuli two days later. It was a dismal collection of stalls and small shops huddled at the edges of a nearly impassable road. A few old cars crawled through its labyrinth of alleys like gigantic metal insects, but otherwise everyone was on foot, the women carrying their burdens of wet clothes and bundles of cassava on their heads.

Typical of such places, there were small enclaves of aid workers who, with the death of Mafumi and the rise of Fareem, had already begun to trickle in. As I discovered, they’d taken over a line of tumbledown structures along the river. I knew that they would have access to the Internet, and that was what I needed most at the moment.

The first building I came to sported a large sign out front. A map of Lubanda had been painted on the board, and superimposed over the map, the large-eyed face of a child quite clearly in need of help. There weren’t any flies in the child’s face, but there was enough supplication in those pleading eyes to give a sense of how bad things were here.

The door was open, and so I walked inside. A young man greeted me with a quick “May I help you?” His name was Pearson, he said, and he was the “chief in-country officer” of an NGO called Children First. He was quite enthusiastic, and in many ways he reminded me of myself when I’d first come to Lubanda all those many years ago. There was the same energy, along with the same sense of rising expectations, of personal adventure melded with goodness, the whole intoxicating brew.

“The main problem in Lubanda,” he said, “is displaced children. There are thousands of them. The army’s out trying to find them so they can be taken to Rupala.” He paused as if expecting a question at this point, but I didn’t have one and so he continued. “Of course, the hope is that these children can be taken out of the capital eventually. But that will take a lot of money, so we are hoping to help raise the necessary funds.” He smiled as I once had, proud of the hope he was bringing to Lubanda. “That’s why we’re here. We want to be in a good position to start repatriation projects once the funding arrives.” He was on a good-intentions roll, and I could do nothing but recall how much I must have been like him on the day I’d met Martine.

It was what he said next that surprised me.

“Basically, we’re waiting for the Mansfield Trust to get on board,” he told me. “It’s the key to everything.”

“Everything?”

“The flow of aid.”

“I see.”

He appeared to think he’d gone on about all this for too long, and so he changed the subject. “So, what brings you to Kumuli?”

“I’m on my way to Rupala.”

“Really? Are you a…” Any possibility of guessing what I was seemed suddenly to escape him.

“I do risk assessment,” I told him helpfully.

“What kind of risk?” Pearson asked.

“All kinds,” I answered, and added nothing else on the subject. “Actually, I was wondering if you have an Internet connection, and if so, I was hoping I could go online for a few minutes. Check my mail, that sort of thing.”

“Sure,” Pearson said. “Come with me.”

He led me to an office where I took a seat at the computer. “Thanks,” I said to Pearson, who was lingering at the door.

“Oh, right,” he said, now aware that I wanted a little privacy. “I’ll be on the porch when you’re done.”

He closed the door behind him, and I set to work writing a combination of words into the search engine: Janetta, Lubanda, Presidential Visit.

The search engine’s first result took me to the home page of Lubanda, its flag festooned on an otherwise blank background. I scrolled down a list of possibilities until I came to Janetta Commemoration. When I clicked on the link, Fareem appeared in a color photograph. He was standing solemnly before the tree that had come to represent the massacre. In other pictures, he was seen at the village well or sitting cross-legged with the chief. In all these pictures the impression was that Fareem had come alone to Janetta. But in the last of the photographs, taken as he is about to get into his car, he stands with a group of men in suits and uniforms, several tall, a few rather squat, but only one of them somewhere in between. The man is well dressed, and he stands just at the edge of the group, his hands folded before him in an attitude of great patience, his little Beria eyes peering through the lenses of his gold-rimmed glasses.

Beyani.

Could it be, I wondered, that it was of a danger this lethally near that Seso had hoped to warn Fareem? I could think of only one person who might be able to tell me.

“Thank you for letting me use your computer,” I told Pearson when I joined him on the shaded porch of the bungalow.

“Where are you headed?” he asked.

“Sura,” I answered. “It’s a small village about fifteen miles from here.”

“I could drive you there, if you want,” Pearson said. His smile was open, winning. “I won’t have much to do until the money comes in.”

“There aren’t any drivable roads to Sura,” I said.

Person looked genuinely puzzled. “Then how do you plan to get there?” he asked.

“I’ll walk,” I said, then gazed out across the savanna, an area of the country I still remembered quite well since I’d repeatedly explored it while looking for the perfect place to dig my well.

“Sounds a little dangerous,” Pearson said.

To one who knew nothing of Lubanda, such a walk would look dangerous indeed, I thought, but it was actually quite safe. I had plenty of food and I knew where water could be found. My command of the Lutusi dialect was slight, but I had carefully calculated that it would be sufficient for me to trade a few items in my bag for some sheep stew.

“Well, good luck,” I said to Pearson.

“You too,” he said with a smile as bright as his good intentions.

I walked to the road, then across it into the savanna.

It was the very land the Lutusi had wandered, and which I’d assumed them still to roam. I knew that Dasai had been killed before he could make farmers out of them, and Mafumi had barely seemed to notice them. I’d expected that, sheltered by this indifference, they would be living as they always had, but instead, as I moved deeper into their old territory, I was surprised that I didn’t encounter a single one of them. It was as if they had disappeared from the land in which they’d once so freely roamed. I knew the places where they’d always camped as they moved across the savanna, a route that had not changed in recorded memory. But rather than tribesmen, I found cold fire pits that had not been used for weeks.

And so I walked alone, through one abandoned camp after another, until I reached the outskirts of Sura.

The town itself was little more than a gathering of aid-funded structures, buildings that would have long ago been completed had not construction abruptly stopped after Mafumi took power, leaving whole blocks as little more than concrete facades sprouting steel support rods like iron antennae. These would have been churches and missions and NGO offices and aid-worker housing. Left unfinished, they had sprouted into small open-air markets where the local products—grains, smoked meat, goat’s milk, baskets, and the like—were sold or bartered in the immemorial way of the savanna. Other than the occasional T-shirt or baseball cap, there were few items from the West, an absence that brought to mind Martine’s belief that if there was Lubandan gold, as she’d written in her Open Letter, it should remain in its veins, and that if there were Lubandan diamonds, they should remain in the rough, and that by a similar understanding of the ageless way of things in this quiet country, coffee need not be grown among a people who did not drink it.

It didn’t take long to find Bisara. I had gone to his house with Seso on a number of occasions. He had not moved, but in every other way it was clear that he had changed a great deal over the preceding twenty years. His hair had grown gray and his features were far more deeply etched. Even from a distance, he appeared weathered by the hard years under Mafumi. Fear freezes a man, but terror shrinks him, and Bisara gave every evidence of that shrinkage. He was thinner than before, and frailer, as if his bones were little more than splinters. When he rose, he seemed barely able to support his weight and for that reason gave off the same sense of imminent collapse as the tumbledown shanties that now composed the village.

But for all of his obvious decline, Bisara recognized me immediately. Unlike before, however, he didn’t rise or put out his hand, or smile broadly as I approached, as he had of old, and in that diminished capacity for surprise I saw one of the common effects of extreme misrule, that it deflates life and drains it of some vital energy. By the end of Mafumi’s terror, Lubanda had barely had a pulse.

“Hello, Bisara,” I said quietly.

He looked at me distantly, suspiciously. “What are you doing here?” he asked darkly.

“I’ve come because of Seso,” I told him. “He was murdered in New York City about three months ago.”

Bisara didn’t appear surprised, since he had long lived in a nation whose life was a fabric stitched with murder.

“I’m looking for the men who did it,” I added. I knew that this was not actually my mission, but it hardly seemed the time to complicate matters.

Bisara nodded, but said nothing, a demeanor far different from that of the jovial man I’d met so often during my time in Lubanda.

“The people who killed him put a pair of crossed pangas in his mouth,” I said.

He looked away, like a man calculating the odds of making a huge mistake. Then, after a moment, his attention swept back to me. “Some men came here. They were looking for Seso.”

“When did they come?”

“After Seso left,” Bisara answered.

“Why were they looking for him?” I asked.

Bisara looked away again, a gesture I’d seen before in people accustomed to being terrorized, beaten into submission, made to betray family and friends because they simply couldn’t take the pain any longer.

“They tortured you,” I said softly.

He glanced down. “My feet.”

“Did you tell them where Seso was?”

Without looking at me, Bisara nodded, his gaze now on the ground. “Yes.” A cloud of shame settled over him. “I did not think they would go so far to find him.”

“Is that all they wanted from you?” I asked. “Just to know where Seso was?”

He shook his head. “They were looking for something Seso had. They thought perhaps he had given it to me, or maybe I knew where it was, but this I did not know.”

And so the torture must have been prolonged, I thought.

“In New York, a man told me that Seso had evidence against certain men, and for that reason, he was murdered,” I said.

Bisara thought this through a moment, then said, “Can you trust this man who told you these things?”

“No,” I admitted. “His name is Nullu Beyani. Have you ever heard of him?”

Bisara shook his head.

“Beyani said that Seso had evidence against the men who attacked Martine Aubert on Tumasi Road,” I said. “He said he found it among the documents in the archive where he worked.”

This clearly puzzled Bisara.

“Seso worked in the archive, this is true,” he told me. “But not with documents. It was only pictures.” He appeared briefly afraid to say more, but then, quite suddenly, he stoked his courage and continued. “Mafumi was a big collector of pictures, Seso told me. Dirty pictures sometimes. Sometimes pictures of murders and people being tortured. This is what he liked to see.”

His voice remained soft as he told me all this, barely above a whisper, and he often averted his eyes when he spoke. Under torture, he had betrayed his friend, told his murderers where to find him, and the shame of this act rested upon his shoulders like an iron yoke.

As if they were unspooling from a roll of film, I saw images of myself on those nights when I’d hunched over my desk, penning reports to Bill Hammond, letters Seso had probably read, so that he’d long observed the steadily deepening nature of my life as a spy.

“I know how you feel, Bisara,” I said, and placed a hand on his shoulder. “Believe me, I know.”

Bisara’s eyes turned toward me. “The pain,” he said. “I did not want to tell them.”

I knelt down beside him. “I’ve come back to Lubanda to save a man who I think is in serious peril. Your president, as a matter of fact. Seso knew him well. I think he is in danger, and I think Seso may have come to America for that reason. I think this because he called a mutual friend and told him that he had something to show him. He was murdered before he could do it.”

Bisara took all this in, but said nothing.

“Seso came to Janetta when the president was there,” I added. “He stood all alone, staring at the president. The man who saw Seso at Janetta used the word ‘sidumo’ to describe what he was doing.”

“Sidumo,” Bisara repeated. “Yes, that is the Lutusi word for ‘warning.’” He looked at me gravely. “But it also is the word for ‘accusation.’”

Years before, Martine had warned me that I knew nothing about Lubanda. Now, it seemed to me, I knew even less, so that the nuances within the Lutusi dialect, a pared-down language of no more than a few thousand words, were still unknown to me.

“Accusation,” I repeated softly as I recalled the old man’s description of Seso, the way he’d stood so stiffly and symbolically. Whether this had been a gesture of warning or accusation, or some other nuance of a word I didn’t even know, the situation remained the same: Fareem was at risk.

As if summoned by my sense that time was running out, a memory suddenly returned to me in the way of a gift and took me back to my third or fourth day in the village, Martine standing with an old Lutusi, the two of them obviously in the midst of a trade. I remembered the way she’d agreed to whatever the Lutusi had offered even though he’d stood empty-handed before her, apparently offering nothing, illustrating the fact, as Martine had later explained, that when the Lutusi have something of great value, they do not show it, but give it to someone they trust for safekeeping until the trade is made. To this memory I now added the fact that Seso had been welcomed back to his tribe, though only on condition that he rigorously and unswervingly follow to the letter each of its customs.

Pondering all this, I now wondered if it applied to whatever Seso had had for Bill Hammond. The supposition that came into my mind remained unproven, and yet I found it compelling, for it did seem possible that strictly following Lutusi custom, Seso might not have brought whatever he had for Bill to New York. Rather, he might have left it in Lubanda. Left it with someone he trusted.

I looked at Bisara.

“This thing Seso had,” I said. “Who would he have left it with?”

For a moment, Bisara didn’t answer, but I could see that he was going through a dark risk assessment, calculating the danger of telling me whatever else he knew.

“Someone he trusted,” he said finally. “But someone they wouldn’t suspect, the men who were after him. That is why he did not leave it with me. Because they would have guessed that he might do this.” He shrugged. “I am sorry. I do not know where this thing is. A Lutusi does not reveal the name of the one who has such things to anyone.”

“Do you know where Seso went after leaving Sura?” I asked.

“Tumasi,” Bisara said.

“Tumasi,” I repeated, and instantly felt life’s ever-tightening noose grow tighter, squeezing out every illusion until I was left with the bare truth that whether inadvertent or not, or done with the best of intentions or not, the world is at last the misbegotten creature we make with our mistakes.