The Darling

by Russell Banks

  Lord, all those vows, all those promises and contracts—broken, abandoned, nearly forgotten! Throughout the night, I lay in bed waiting for Woodrow’s return, for, all evidence to the contrary, I still believed that this was, at worst, another of the leader’s ways of intimidating and keeping loyal one of the most loyal members of his government. The other members of his government, more dangerous than Woodrow, had long since been disposed of. It was a move typical of Samuel Doe. He was famous for it. Arrest the man for a night, and send his best friend and fellow minister to do the job. It’ll keep the both of them in line.

  While I waited, tossing restlessly beneath the gauzy mosquito netting, I let myself play out little scenarios, dimly lit fantasies that up to now I’d kept pretty much hidden from myself, like a secret stash of pornography tucked in the dark back corner of a closet. I saw myself settled in a small house, like the old Firestone cottage I’d lived in when I first arrived in Liberia, only with an extra bedroom for the boys to share, and located a few miles inland from Monrovia. The four of us would take care of the chimps, my dreamers. That’s all, a simple life. I’d school the boys at home, and I’d read to them at night, and they’d play with the children of the village, while I socialized with the other mothers, went to market with them, and cooked native food the native way on my own. A very simple life. Just me and the boys and the dreamers and the villagers and the jungle.

  And when I grew tired of that fantasy, or it grew too complicated and was no longer sustainable, I envisioned a life here in town, a continuation of my present life, except that now Woodrow was no longer a part of my life, and I was free to be the white American woman with three brown sons living in the big white house on Duport Road with the view of the bay, the woman who ran the sanctuary for the chimpanzees, the woman with the mysterious past who could never return to her native land, who was occasionally seen at one of the better restaurants in town on the arm of an official from one of the European embassies, was sometimes mentioned in the society column of the Post as one of the guests at an embassy party. Or even, why not, seen dancing at a Masonic ball with Minister Charles Taylor. Which would indeed complicate things, no?

  Fantasies of escape really are like pornography. They have to remain simple and untainted by reality, or they cause anxiety. I imagined myself and my sons, all three wearing small backpacks, Americans in Africa, as they board a plane at Robertsfield, leaving Liberia. Then here we are departing from the plane after it has landed at Logan Airport, in Boston. My mother and father, unchanged after all these years, greet us at the gate. Embraces and tears of joy and mutual forgiveness all around. No one else is there, except for other arriving passengers and the people waiting to greet them. No reporters covering the return of a one-time fugitive on the FBI’s Most Wanted list, the last of the Weather Underground come in from the cold. No U.S. Marshals or FBI agents to arrest me. No customs officer asking to see our passports and confiscating mine.

  It would be simple, oh so simple, if Woodrow stayed arrested—stopped, frozen in time at this moment, and not jailed or tortured or beaten or killed, not shot dead by one of those iron-headed men with the AK-47s, big, cold-eyed men from the country. I didn’t want that. As I lay there in my bed and dawn light slid through the shuttered windows, as pepperbirds started their pre-morning ruckus, my tumbling fantasies gradually slowed and then, top-heavy with growing complexity, ceased to move. They buckled under the weight of reality and collapsed. Leaving me to contemplate the undeniable fact. My husband had been arrested by the most powerful man in the country, a man who, with impunity and without reason, was more than capable of killing him. And where would that leave me, me and my children?

  BY DAWN THE SOLDIER guarding us had disappeared from the yard. And Jeannine and Kuyo, I discovered, had fled during the night—not until after Kuyo had removed the bodies of the dogs, I noticed, and Jeannine had swept up the broken glass. They’d gone back to Fuama, where, by noon, news of the arrest of Woodrow Sundiata, the village’s one big man in Monrovia, would have sent every member of Woodrow’s immediate family into hiding, where they’d stay for as long as it appeared that Woodrow was an enemy of the leader, even if it meant hiding in the bush for years or until the leader was overthrown and replaced.

  I didn’t care, I was glad they were gone from the compound. Their presence, no matter how useful their service, oppressed me. Their role in my life, even after all these years, had never clarified itself. They weren’t servants or employees, nor were they family members, the kind you can count on in a crisis to provide aid and comfort. I didn’t know what they were, or who. They weren’t even hangers-on, the sort of people you can shoo away when they’ve become a burden or a bore.

  So they were gone, and the house, for the first time since I moved into it, was empty. Fine, then; that settled it. I made a plan. It was more a piece of theater than a plan, however. In my life here, I had been acting in a play not of my making for so long that it was all I had. A role. As soon as I have fed the boys their breakfast, I’ll dress them the way Woodrow likes to see them, in blazers and ties, like little brown gentlemen enrolling at Choate, and I’ll dress myself accordingly in my long, white, chiffon dress and carry the silly, saffron-colored parasol and wear a soft, wide-brimmed hat against the sun, and with my sons in tow I’ll march into the leader’s office like a latter-day Scarlett O’Hara and demand the immediate release of my husband. After that, I’ll make up another little piece of theater and play it out. And then another, and if necessary, another.

  When I had the boys fed and properly dressed, tasks I normally left to Jeannine, but not today, maybe not ever again, I telephoned Woodrow’s office. To my relief, Satterthwaite—Richard, as I now freely called him—answered. He’d already heard that his boss had been taken in the night by the leader’s security force. Richard was scared, I could tell by his shaky voice, usually so suavely controlled. He was sure that he was about to be arrested, too.

  I told him not to be ridiculous, Woodrow would be released quickly, it was all a mistake and would be settled in a few hours. He partially believed me. I was the boss’s wife, after all. In reality, all I cared was that he make it possible for me and the boys to be driven to the leader’s door in a ministry car chauffeured by the minister’s personal assistant. It was in the script.

  “The best thing you can do now,” I said to Richard, “if you want to keep your job in the ministry, is help me get Woodrow home quickly and safely. Which you can do by driving me and the boys directly to the presidential palace, as if no one has done anything wrong. Because no one has. Have they, Richard?”

  “No. No one. Not Mister Sundiata, for sure,” he said.

  “And certainly not you, Richard. The car is still here at the house, the soldiers left it. So come over here right away.”

  THE BOYS AND I stepped one by one from the tinted interior of the Mercedes onto the white-gravel walkway to the ignominiously named White House, a faux plantation house with tall white columns and verandas, office and residential wings right and left, and tall windows and porticos—like a set for an antebellum movie, Mandingo maybe, or Roots.

  “Wait for us here, Richard,” I said. “We shan’t be long.” I snapped open my parasol, lined the boys up behind me like ducklings, and marched up the wide steps to the guard box at the top, where I waved off the guard with a regal flip of my free hand, as if he had come forward to escort me in rather than to stop me, and kept moving. It was never done, but I was a woman, a white American woman, with her children, and so it was permitted. I and my three somber-faced boys, who must have been as much in awe at that moment of my queenly entitlement as of the colossal scale and splendor of the building that we seemed to have taken possession of, swept on unimpeded, all the way up the wide, curving, carpeted stairs to the second floor, through the outer office and past the startled secretaries to the antechamber of the office of the leader himself, where finally we were stopped, not by a member of the staff, but by a white man emerging from the inner sanct
um just as I and my ducklings arrived at the wide, polished mahogany door.

  It was Clement, Sam Clement, the fellow from the American embassy—in his early forties back then, fair haired and southern, a Princetonian with a tennis-court tan and the beginnings of a bourbon paunch, and wearing, just as you’d expect of our man in Africa, a rumpled, straw-colored, linen suit. I’d caught him by surprise, and he took a backwards step, recognizing me, and delivered his sweet, sad smile, a Virginia Tidewater all-purpose smile passed down in the family, father to son for generations.

  “Why, hel-lo, Dawn!” he said, putting lead-footed emphasis on the name, as if to remind me that he still remembered my real name and, while I might fool the natives, I was no mystery to him. “Missus Sundiata,” he added.

  I gave him a curt nod and pushed past and through the doorway. “I’m here to see the leader,” I announced and entered the large, bright, sunlit room. I brought the boys to my side now, clustering them around me, and heard the door snap shut behind us as if with smug satisfaction, and faced the leader, who stood behind his desk, a small, tight smile on his lips. He grows larger every time I see him, I said to myself. Taller, wider, thicker, like a hippopotamus.

  “Miz Sundiata,” he pronounced, as if announcing my arrival at a formal ball, then chuckled. He may be illiterate, an ignorant pig of a man, but he knows how to play the chieftain, I thought. He clasped his hands below his chin and looked us over like a judge about to issue his verdict. He wore a double-breasted, dark gray suit, bright white shirt and paisley tie, with a floppy silk handkerchief dangling from his breast pocket. “Wife of the esteemed Minister Woodrow Sundiata. And his sons, too, I see,” he added and smiled down at them.

  I knew I had only a little time before he grew impatient with the occasion and had me removed. “President Doe, what are the conditions of my husband’s release?”

  His eyebrows rose into his forehead, then lowered, and his round face darkened from brown to nearly black. I half-expected smoke to blow from his nostrils and ears, his eyes to glow red as coals, and I drew my children closer to me. “You in naw place fe’makin’ demands, Missy!” he told me, lapsing into pidgin, speaking rapidly, almost losing me. Because I knew the subject and could read his emotions from his face, I was able to follow him adequately and look for openings. He told me that my husband was a traitor and a thief. A bad man, top to bottom. Not fit to be the father of these beautiful boys or the husband of a nice lady like me.

  “Me curse de name of de man!” the leader of Liberia declared, and he spat on the vast Oriental carpet.

  My sons grabbed the folds of my dress and moved tightly against me. They knew now that I had lied to them last night. Papa was not the friend of the leader after all. I’d probably lied about the dogs, too. And much else. I calmly stroked their heads and waited for the exhibition, for I knew that’s what it was, to run its course. The man ranted, he roared, he glowered and lowered his voice to a weird whisper, then roared again. This was his theater, his play, too, and he loved it.

  I began to catch the gist of his complaint. Over one million dollars had been secretly extracted—“Em-bezzled!” he kept repeating, as if he’d just learned the word. The money had been taken from funds allocated to the General Services Agency by the State Department of the United States of America. It was money that had been embezzled, therefore, from the generous citizens of the United States. And did I know who was in charge of the Liberian General Services Agency? Did I? Of course I knew! Charles Taylor, my husband’s closest friend and ally, was in charge of the General Services Agency! Over one million dollars, one-point-four million U.S. dollars, to be exact, were missing from the books, gone, fled the country, probably in Switzerland in a secret bank account in the name of Charles Taylor and Woodrow Sundiata, waiting to be wired back to each of their separate accounts here in Monrovia as soon as they thought no one was looking for it anymore!

  “But dat naw goin’ t’ happen,” he solemnly declared. “It naw goin’ fe’ take place,” he said, and then suddenly returned to speaking English and was calm again, as if the two languages determined his emotions rather than served them. “You want your husband freed, Missus Sundiata?” he asked.

  “I do. Of course.”

  “No problem.” He strode to his wide, mahogany desk, an ornate Victorian box, its top entirely free of paper, with a box of Cuban cigars, a chrome martini shaker, and a red telephone on it. He picked up the receiver and without dialing said just two words, “Release Sundiata.” And hung up. “See? No problem,” he beamed.

  “Then why … why did you arrest him?”

  “To flush out the bad man, Charles Taylor. His co-conspirator.” He kissed the word.

  “And…?”

  “Your husband a good boy. Too bad me didn’ think t’ grab him sooner, though, because ol’ Charles Taylor, him gone out of the country now. Skee-da-delled. Wal, not quite. He be halfway ’cross the ocean now. But when him land in New York City,” the president said, smiling broadly at the thought, “there be a big surprise waitin’ for him.”

  “Aha!” I said. “That’s why Mister Clement was here.” I pictured Sam Clement calling his superiors in Washington, ordering the arrest and detention of a Liberian national arriving from Monrovia this afternoon at JFK. I said, “You are a sly fox, Mister President. And my husband? What about him?”

  “Nuttin’. He give me what me want. Now me give him what him want.”

  “Which is…?”

  He herded me and my sons towards the door. “You ask him yourself, missus, when he come home today. G’wan home now, or him be there before you. G’wan home,” he said. “An’ pack your suitcase,” he added and closed the door solidly behind me.

  WOODROW AND I were alone for the first time all afternoon and evening. Finally. He stood in his shirt and loosened necktie and white undershorts and socks, carefully placing his suit jacket and slacks on hangers and into the closet, a tumbler of scotch and ice on the dresser next to him. I sat on the bed, brushing out my hair, and watched him slowly, delicately, almost lovingly, remove and hang his clothes—a man of bottomless vanity. He’d been holding court with relieved friends and neighbors in the living room for hours and was a little drunk. The boys were asleep in bed, Jeannine and Kuyo were back, and except for the dogs, everything seemed to have returned to normal. Throughout the day, since his release, friends and relatives had been dropping by, as if on a casual, neighborly visit, to verify the truth of what they had heard, that Woodrow Sundiata had been arrested by the leader, held for a night, and released unharmed, a sequence almost unheard of in Liberia in those years. Even more unusual, he had kept his old position as minister. The leader was telling people he’d made a mistake. Woodrow was a good boy; Charles Taylor was the bad man, and him the Americans had arrested in New York, caught fleeing the country. Unfortunately, millions of dollars were still missing from the General Services fund, and only Charles Taylor knew where the money was hidden.

  That was not true, of course, and no one believed it. Samuel Doe owned Woodrow now, just as he owned the one-point-four million U.S. dollars that, according to Woodrow, Charles Taylor had siphoned off the General Services fund, transferred to the Barclay’s Bank on Grand Turk in the Turks and Caicos Islands, then carried back in cash in a ministry briefcase when returning to Monrovia from a Caribbean holiday with one of his lady friends. He’d stashed the cash in a safe-deposit box controlled by Woodrow and Charles at the Barclay’s in Monrovia. Now, thanks to Woodrow, President Doe had the cash in his safe deposit box, and Charles Taylor would soon disappear into an American prison. My husband, I knew, would henceforth be like one of the president’s pet bonobo apes, only a little bit free, with a short chain clamped to his thin ankle. I could not believe his stupidity.

  “So, you did steal the money. You and Charles.”

  “No, no, not at all. Charles did that. Charles was the culprit,” Woodrow said and gently bit his lower lip, as if his mind were elsewhere. He picked up his glass and took a
sip of his drink. “I was merely looking into the General Services budget for a little help from the American aid for my own programs. Help I need and deserve, but that the Americans never see fit to provide. They prefer roads to medicines, you know.”

  “Yes, Woodrow, I know.” I didn’t believe him. I studied his hairless legs and wondered anew why they were so scrawny, almost as if he’d had a terrible, wasting disease as a child that he refused to tell me about. And he’d grown thick and soft around the middle in the last few years, making his legs seem even skinnier than they were. I was sure that he and Charles had schemed together to steal as much as they could for as long as they could—it was part of a Liberian government minister’s job description, practically. And I knew that, once arrested, Woodrow had betrayed Charles, who had skee-da-delled. Then Woodrow had purchased his own release by turning over the stolen U.S. funds, now safely in cash currency and part of Samuel Doe’s burgeoning secret treasury, his French Riviera retirement fund. I figured that the leader’s original plan, to have Charles and Woodrow betray each other, hadn’t quite worked. Charles must not have implicated Woodrow, or they’d both be either dead or lying battered and broken in some hut in the bush. Charles, uncharacteristically for a Liberian, had refused to play by the rules of the game. But it had all turned out fine for the leader, since he’d ended up with the money in one pocket and the health minister in the other and Charles, the bad one, the hard one, the dangerous one, tucked away in an American jail many thousands of miles from Liberia. Better than killing them.