A Dancer In the Dust by Thomas H. Cook

Author:Thomas H. Cook [Cook, Thomas H.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
ISBN: 9781784081645
Publisher: Head of Zeus

14

Not long after moving to New York, I came to realize that a city of dreams can only grow from soil enriched by broken ones, and that by that measure, New York has the richest soil on earth. You see the still breathing corpses of these old dead dreams everywhere: crowding the bars, walking the side streets, sitting idly in the park. It was impossible for me to imagine Seso as ever being such a person, however, and for that reason I felt certain that he’d not come as a refugee from Mafumi’s tyranny, nor ever planned to stay here.

So why had he come?

And what had he brought with him?

There are mysteries in science, and mysteries in art, but the greatest mystery has always been another person’s deepest motivation.

So what was Seso’s motivation in making so long a journey?

He’d told Dalumi he worked for Martine, which clearly suggested that his coming to New York, along with whatever he’d brought with him, had had something to do with her. In addition, there was the matter of the shell tattoo, equally an image from the past.

To this I could add only that Seso had felt protective of Martine, at least to the extent that on one particular morning he’d warned me, and expected me to warn her, that she should get the hell out of Lubanda. We’d been driving across the savanna when he’d issued this warning, its great expanse suggestive of a limitlessness that was purely fictional. “If she decided to leave now, there would be time,” he said. “She could return to her country.”

I shook my head. “Martine was born in Lubanda. She is the same as you, Seso.”

Seso shook his head. “She is not the same.”

Seso made no further elaboration on this statement, but I should have known from the gravity of his expression that for him the truth of life was this: a tribe need not welcome you simply because you claim to be a member of it, and so is it also with countries.

“She will never willingly leave Lubanda,” I added darkly, and with that recognition, as I would later realize, a fatal shift began.

By then I’d written several reports to Bill, all of which had painted an increasingly intransigent Martine. If Gessee sent those men to walk her property line and set that fire, then he should have known better, I’d written a week or so before Seso offered his warning, because nothing of that sort will ever make Martine grow coffee.

Nothing of that sort.

It was only months later, when I’d been obsessively revisiting my final weeks in Lubanda, that I’d realized just how ambiguous those words were and how differently they could be read—in one way as a suggestion that nothing could change Martine’s mind with regard to growing coffee, in the other that somewhat harsher methods of intimidation now had to be considered. In Lubanda, as I should have known, the second reading would have been the more likely.

And so it had been, as events quickly proved.

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