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

only thing, no. There are some records. Most of them cannot be played on the machine anymore. The heat is bad for them. And the dust. But with a few, it is possible.”
    “Do you ever play them?”
    “Not so much,” she answered, then turned back toward the center of the room. “Would you like a drink? I make it from fermented honey that comes from the hives. It is strong.”
    She walked through the back door of the house, then returned with two bottles of a thick, amber liquid.
    “So, how did you happen to come by this farm?” I asked after the first sip.
    “My father was the first to come here,” Martine answered. “He was very young. For some time, he worked in Rupala, in the coatroom at the French consulate. While he was in Rupala, he learned a few Lubandan dialects, as well as English. In fact, an Englishman had told him about this farm. None of the whites had wanted to stay in Lubanda. They had come for gold and other mythical riches that didn’t exist. With no natural resources of value, land in Lubanda was cheap, particularly in the savanna. He bought the farm with the little money he had saved, and settled it with a Belgian girl he had met one day in the park.
    “My guess is that she had red hair,” I said airily.
    “No, my father did,” Martine said. “It is he who raised me.”
    She appeared quite pointedly to avoid any further discussion of her mother, and so I didn’t make any further inquiry in that direction.
    She shook her head, then took a sip of her home brew. “Do you like it?” she asked with a nod toward the bottle in my hand.
    I did. It was sweet, but the kick was strong.
    “Another glass of this and I wouldn’t make it back to Tumasi,” I said.
    Martine smiled. “If you are drunk, you can leave the road and sleep under the stars. No one will bother you.” She pointed across the room to shelves that lined the wall, laden with scores of books and what looked to be official reports of one kind or another.
    “My library,” she said. “Come.”
    We walked over to the shelves and Martine stood silently while I perused them. There were around a hundred books, most of them in French, a few novels, mostly Balzac and Stendhal. But the great preponderance of her books appeared to deal with African history, much of it recent. True, she had several volumes having to do with the “scramble for Africa,” the history of its colonization. But most of her histories chronicled the continent’s varied struggles for independence, the achievement of nationhood, then what had happened after it had either been gained or granted, the grim narratives of Zimbabwe and Uganda, Kenya, and the like.
    “Have you read much about Africa?” Martine asked.
    “Just some preparatory stuff,” I told her. “And I just got a packet of material from the agency—the Lubandan Constitution and a few other government documents. Back in college I read Mary Kingsley’s book about coming to West Africa.” I laughed. “It was quite funny in places. I remember how she is told to make quick contact with the Wesleyans because they are the only ones with feathers on their hearses.”
    “Hmm,” Martine breathed in that vaguely meditative way of hers.
    “And that book of useful African phrases she reads,” I went on. “I remember that one of the useful phrases was, ‘Why is this man not yet buried?’”
    I’d expected Martine to be amused by these little anecdotes, but instead she shook her head at their absurdity.
    “It is hard to be a foreigner,” she said. “I would never want to be one.”
    She smiled briefly, then became quite solemn and in that mood took a book from the shelf and handed it to me. “This book is a history of the Force Publique .” She watched me silently for a moment, her gaze quite penetrating, as if trying to discover if this meant anything to me. “My grandfather did very bad things in Congo when he was a member of the Force .”She nodded toward the book. “You should read it as a