A Dancer In the Dust Read Online Free Page B

impresses them if you’ve taken the trouble to learn its provisions and amendments. It’s a show of respect.”
    I smiled. “I’ll commit it to memory.”
    Bill glanced toward the window, where, just beyond the outskirts of the city, the Lubandan vastness spread out and out, all its mountains and its plains, the twining river that circled the capital, the great savanna over which the nomads roamed.
    “It’s strange how the die is cast, Ray,” he said. “The fact that if rhinoceroses could have been domesticated, the Africans might have ridden them to Calais.” He looked at me and smiled. “They’d have been Sherman tanks against those puny little European horses.” His smile turned down slightly, a movement that betrayed his darker line of thought. “Tumasi is in the middle of the bush. Mostly nomads wandering around. There are only a few farms up that way. Strictly subsistence.” He plopped down in one of the metal chairs, swung his arm over the other, the posture of an amiable traveling salesman. “So, is this your first time in Lubanda?” he asked.
    “Yes.”
    “You’ll never forget it.”
    I’d always known that there are short goodbyes and long ones, but with Bill’s call I’d discovered that there were certain things no farewell can put behind you, that we are made, in the end, by the things we can’t forget.
    On the heels of that recognition, Martine returned to me in the peculiar, disjointed way of memory. It was not a vision of the first time I’d seen her, nor the last, but of somewhere around the midpoint of the time I’d known her.
    In this memory, she is standing in her spare field, a hardscrabble farmer if ever there was one. We have just walked the land line of her acreage, where she’s pointed out the plowed earth and told me what she’s planted. The bright light of the sun turns her red hair to flame. She looks away, then faces me again, staring at me so intently I feel like a small animal in the crosshairs of her gaze.
    “What are you thinking, Martine?” I ask her.
    She gazes at me a moment, then bends forward, takes up a handful of soil, and looks at it as if, for all the world, she is part of the earth she now lets stream from her spreading fingers. “It’s very odd, I know,” she says with a sudden, radiant smile, “but when I walk these fields, or into the village, or out into the bush, l feel the strangest joy.”
    Joy. Yes, that had been it, I thought now as I recalled that moment. Martine had found joy in the very look and feel and tastes and sounds of Lubanda, and amid those richly sensual delights, she had awakened each day as if it were Christmas morning and there, before her, arrayed beneath the glittering tree, bound in bright colors and ribboned with gold, had lain the richest of life’s pleasures to unwrap.
    This memory lingered awhile before I returned myself to the risk-aversive world I’d chosen after leaving Lubanda. I knew that had I gone on to have a normal life after Tumasi, been able to forget what happened there, what I did there, I might later have married a woman who, at this critical moment of risk assessment, would surely have asked worriedly, “Why, Ray? Why open yourself up to all that again?”
    I knew what my response would have been .
    Because I have to.
    “And why is that?”
    My answer would have been simple: Because it is long and sad and red with blood , my tale of Lubanda.
    And yet, even as I imagined such an exchange, I knew that although my story was Lubandan in the sense of having taken place during my Lubandan interval, Martine’s tale, at least in the larger sense, was not Lubandan at all. Rather, it was the story of one who’d believed she had a home only to discover that she didn’t, believed that love was enough, when it wasn’t, believed that he who’d loved her most would have understood the singular joy that had been hers and helped her keep it. I had no doubt that to believe such things strongly, and follow them