There are gravely transformative moments in life, moments when the air abruptly shudders and a darkness falls over you, and you feel that you’ve suddenly awakened in a much more dangerous part of town. Such was my feeling as I thanked Bisara, shook his hand, then turned and headed toward Tumasi.
It was a journey of nearly forty miles, and on the way I let myself open to a flood of memories that detailed my final days in Lubanda, the most vivid of which was of the last time I’d seen Martine.
She’d walked into my office carrying a basket she’d stuffed with supplies.
“I’ve finished my Open Letter,” she said.
“Open Letter?” I asked.
“That’s what I’ve decided to call it,” she said. “An Open Letter to Foreign Friends.”
Her tone was measured, resolved, with something classically fatalistic about it; she seemed to me like a soldier moving up the line toward a battle whose dreadful perils she had already calculated and accepted.
“I was going to address it to President Dasai,” she added, “but I’ve decided to write to all of you instead.” Her smile struck me as deathly pale, a cold, dead smile that made it clear to what degree she had considered the dangers she faced. This was not some naïve foreigner foolishly trusting in the kindness of strangers. This was a Lubandan who well understood the perils of her country. For that reason, she reminded me of that carved wooden Christ I’d seen in Mexico, simply, fatally… waiting. “To Lubanda’s foreign friends, I mean.”
“I see,” I said, though I no longer considered myself a friend of her country. It had thwarted me in too many ways by then.
“Friends because most of you really are friends of Lubanda,” Martine said. “Some of you are here for bad reasons, but most of you are not.” She looked at me quite sincerely. “I do know that, Ray.”
For the first time since I’d met her, Martine seemed fragile, and yet at the same time, unbreakable by any outside force. Her features had deepened in some inexpressible way and her gaze had the steadiness of one at peace with the choice she’d made.
“I really do know the good you want to do,” she told me.
I stared at her silently. What could I say to her, after all, save offer a full confession of my many errors, the latest having been the deepest of them all.
“I’ve written several copies of this letter and I am taking them to Rupala,” she added. “I’m going to give them to the charities there, the NGOs, and to any journalists I can find.”
“What are you telling them in your… open letter?” I asked.
“That they should all go home.”
She saw how absurd, perhaps even cruel, I found her position.
“Look, Ray, the fact is this,” she said. “Others came and took things out of Lubanda, and in the process, they did a lot of damage. Now these same people are bringing things into Lubanda, and in the process, they are doing damage once again.”
“I’m not going to argue the point,” I told her. “Others will do that for the next hundred years. But, Martine, you know they’re out there. Mafumi’s people. Gessee’s people, too. You’re caught between them.”
“So is Lubanda,” Martine said.
“Lubanda is a country,” I reminded her. “Not a woman alone, with enemies on both sides.”
She was silent for a moment before she said, “Do you not love your country, Ray?”
“Of course I do.”
“Then why can you not understand that I love mine, too?” Martine asked.
I searched desperately for an answer to this question, but the only one that came to me put me in Geesee’s quarter, and Mafumi’s. Unhappily, I realized that my conviction that Martine was not truly Lubandan was no less fervent and unbending than theirs.
“I really have nothing more to say about all this, Martine,” I told her by way of sidestepping the question.
She stared at me silently for a moment before she said, “Fareem believes you’re a spy. He told me this before he left.” She looked at me piercingly. “Are you?”
At last I told the truth. “Yes,” I said, “but I haven’t reported anything that wasn’t meant to help you.”
“Help me what?” Martine asked.
“Survive,” I said helplessly, because it was the only answer that occurred to me—one, of course, which left out the fact that I had equated her survival with leaving Lubanda and marrying me.
For a moment, Martine said nothing; she simply stared at me. I feared that this silence might end in an explosion, a lashing out at me in the same way she’d lashed out at Gessee. But instead she seemed suddenly more interested in the spy network of which I had been a part. “Who do you report to, Ray?”
“Bill Hammond.”
“Does he tell the big men in Rupala what you write?”
“I don’t know, but it’s possible, yes.”
“Do they know I’m coming to the capital with my Open Letter?”
“Not from me, no,” I said.
When she said nothing to this, I made one final gesture. “You can still leave Lubanda and put the farm, all this business of growing teff or coffee, all this… struggle behind you,” I said in a tone that was almost pleading.
“This ‘struggle,’ as you call it, is my life, Ray,” Martine said. She lifted her basket into her arms. “I am going to camp here in the village tonight,” she said, “then head down Tumasi Road in the morning.”
“Tumasi Road?” I asked with a level of alarm I couldn’t conceal. “Why aren’t you going cross-country? It would be a lot faster and no one would know where you were at any given moment.”
“Yes, but there are more villages along the road, places to stop and talk. I would like to spread the word a little on the way to Rupala. People will misunderstand what I am trying to do. I am white, and they will use that against me, too. But there may be a few I can make understand my hope for Lubanda.”
With that she turned and walked away.
A few minutes later, I penned a last report to Bill Hammond, one that related this latest conversation with Martine, the fact that she’d written an “open letter,” and that she was bringing it on foot to Rupala by way of Tumasi Road. When I’d finished, I folded the paper, put it in an envelope, then summoned Seso.
“Take this to Rupala,” I told him with a nod toward the Land Cruiser. “To Bill Hammond.” I glanced out toward where I could see Martine beginning to set up her camp for the night. “Martine has decided to take Tumasi Road into Rupala. He might be able to protect her.”
Seso looked at me worriedly. “This is a bad thing,” he said. “You should go with her. But not on foot. You should drive her to Rupala.”
I shook my head. “She would never allow that.”
Seso said nothing more, but simply took the report, the same troubled look still in his eyes.
By the time night fell, Martine had made a fire and was sitting beside it, her knees drawn up to her chest as she silently watched the flames. I was reluctant to approach her, but after a time, my unease gave way and I walked out to her.
“You probably don’t want any company right now,” I said by way of giving her the opportunity to dismiss me.
“Everyone wants company,” she said, and nodded for me to join her. “When are you leaving Lubanda?”
“My year will be over in three weeks,” I told her.
I didn’t expect her to inquire further, and she didn’t. Instead she leaned forward, poked briefly at the fire, then sat back and gazed out toward the road.
“There is a word I learned when I was in Kigali,” she said. “My father had taken me there when I was a little girl, and on trips like that I always picked up new words from the various dialects.” She smiled. “I wrote them down and later I put them all in a notebook.” She shrugged. “I do not know why this one just came back to me.”
“What’s the word?”
“Ihahamuka,” Martine answered. “It means ‘without lungs.’ It is used to describe the sort of terror that takes your breath away.” She looked at me like one from the distant deck of a burning ship. “I am afraid, Ray.”
“I’m sure you are,” I said. “And you should be.”
Her expression was as tender as any I had ever seen. “I wish it actually helped, the things you and the others do. And I know that here and there, it does.” She shook her head. “But in the end, it hurts us more.”
At that moment I felt my own version of ihahamuka, my dread of losing her so fierce, my conviction that she was the only woman I would ever love so absolute, it took my breath away.
“Don’t go to Rupala, Martine,” I said quietly. “You don’t have to do this.”
She poked at the fire again. “Stop, Ray, please.”
“Or wait until Fareem gets back and the two of you can make the walk together.”
“Fareem is already back,” Martine said. “But this is not his fight.”
“But he surely must have pleaded with you not to go or to let him come with you, because—”
“Of course he did,” Martine interrupted sharply.
She was clearly not going to reconsider her decision to walk to Rupala, and so I made no further argument against it.
“No more about this, Ray,” she said sternly, then gave the fire a final stir. “No more—I mean it.”
She was silent for a long time, and I could tell that she was thinking of something. She was staring off into the middle distance, though it was only a wall of darkness now.
At last, she said, “It is strange, Ray, but do you know what really bothers me?” She looked at me very seriously, then said, “It is that no one will visit my father’s grave.” She drew in a long breath, held it for a moment, then very slowly released it, as if savoring the life she still had.
It was a vision of her that overwhelmed me, and so I released the one true thing I knew in vehement whisper.
“I love you, Martine.”
She stretched her arms over her head. “I need to sleep now. I plan to leave at dawn.”
I got to my feet. “Good night, then.”
I turned and headed back toward the house. I got only a few feet before she called to me.
“Ray.”
I faced her. “Yes.”
“You will find her,” Martine said assuredly. “The one for you.”
“Sure,” I said.
In the glow of her dying fire, her smile seemed almost transparent, as if she were already turning into a ghost. “I know you will,” she said. “I really know you will.”
I nodded. “Yes, I’ll find her,” I said.
But I never did.