A Dancer In the Dust by Thomas H. Cook Read Free Book Online Page A

so—”
    “So we Lubandans should learn from the history of our neighbors,” Martine interrupted. Now her smile transformed itself into something other than a smile, and I saw a hint of uncertainty in her eyes. “If we can.” She looked at me in what I would come to know as that searching way of hers, like someone trying to bring a distant shore into focus. “Come to my farm for dinner tonight,” she said, “You are a stranger, so it is customary among Lubandans that we give you food. My farm is at the end of Tumasi Road.”
    “Thank you,” I said. “What time?”
    “Before sunset.”
    With that, she turned and moved up the road. I watched for a time, then snapped back to attention and realized that Seso had remained at the Land Cruiser, leaning against it. He was watching the orange-robed Lutusi move through the market, a curious sadness in his face, as if he were looking at old photographs of a time gone by.
    “We should unload,” I called to him, and we immediately set to work. Within a little while we’d unpacked our supplies. We’d brought very little to Tumasi because the house had already been furnished with bedding, a desk, furniture, and I expected to buy my weekly supplies in the market, where, as I saw, there was plenty of grain, meat, milk, and whatever else I’d need.
    “There’s more here than I expected,” I told Seso.
    He nodded. “There is enough for everyone,” he said as one from another country might have said. “There is plenty.”
    I told him about Martine’s dinner invitation, but he didn’t want to go.
    “No, I will stay here,” he said, and offered no further explanation.
    “All right,” I said.
    Toward evening I arrived at a farmhouse that was considerably smaller than what I expected and which I’d already imagined as roomy, with tall windows and comfortably graced by a spacious porch. In fact, Martine lived in what seemed the bush version of a house: unpainted, sloping oddly, ill-suited to endure anything but heat. A single tree sprouted in the front yard. Otherwise there was nothing but plowed fields all about save for a small fence behind which a few goats lazily roamed around, nibbling at the spare vegetation.
    I brought the Land Cruiser to a halt, creating a cloud of red dust that drifted, then curled over and fell back to earth. Even this seemed strange, as if the dust had been unaccustomed to such violent disturbance and had quickly returned to its ancient rest.
    The door of the house was open, but I saw no one inside.
    I tapped at the door. Still nothing.
    Suddenly, Martine came around a corner, carrying a basket of grain on her head.
    “So you have arrived,” she said.
    “It was easy, since there’s only one road,” I told her.
    She took the basket from her head. It had no handles, so she held it in her arms.
    “Please, come in,” she said as she stepped up on the porch and gestured toward the door.
    It would be too late before I fully understood the meaning of Martine’s house, how completely it had both mirrored and expressed her character. In fact, my first thought was no more complicated than the simple observation that she was the opposite of a hoarder. There were a few chairs and a couple of small tables. Two cots, one of which had been done up to serve as a sofa, rested on opposite sides of the farmhouse’s single room. A gray cord made from sisal hung just below the ceiling, and a curtain had been fashioned that could be drawn across the length of the room, presumably for privacy. To these Spartan furnishings, Martine had added a clay oven, and beside it, a stack of wood. All light came from candles, and the only bathroom, as I learned later, was an outhouse whose contents Martine and Fareem emptied by turns.
    In fact, there was only one exception to the spare nature of these furnishings: an old gramophone with a black crank.
    “Does it work?” I asked.
    Martine nodded. “It is the one thing my father brought with him from the Congo. Not the