The Darling

by Russell Banks

  “I’ll camp here. I’ve got a couch in the office. It’s okay. I’ve done it before.”

  He passed me a flashlight. “Here. You’ll need this. Looks like the power’s off all over the city.”

  He drove away, and I snapped on the flashlight and headed for the office, when suddenly the door opened, and there was Kuyo, and in the shadows behind him, Estelle, both of them wide eyed, frightened. “Why didn’t you come out before, for heaven’s sake?” I demanded. “If I’d known you were here, I’d have gone home with Mister Clement.”

  “We didn’ know it was you,” Kuyo said solemnly. “Might be the soldiers comin’ back.”

  I entered the office and lit a kerosene lamp, filling the room with a dull orange glow. “They were here again? Doe’s soldiers?”

  He said he didn’t think so. Not Doe’s soldiers. Not this time. “Maybe from Prince Johnson. Real wild boys,” he said. They had gone through the place and emptied the petty cash box and had taken the radio and my old manual typewriter. They’d noted the eleven chimps, pointedly counting them, Kuyo said, and they’d told him that as soon as they got themselves a truck, they were coming back.

  “Them gonna make plenty-plenty bush meat, Miz Sundiata,” Estelle said and started to whimper. “Them men are terrible peoples!” she cried.

  “Then we’ll have to move the chimps,” I said.

  And we did move them. It took the entire night, but the three of us managed to transport all eleven dreamers from the sanctuary out to Boniface Island, a small, mangrove-covered islet in the middle of the broad estuary. Chimpanzees cannot swim and are afraid of open water, which made the island, though more of a sanctuary, as much a place of confinement as the renovated prison at Toby had been. In pairs and with the larger adults one by one, we moved the dreamers in the same large, wheeled cage that we had used to bring them to Toby from the blood lab in the first place. The river bank was only a few hundred yards down a narrow lane from the sanctuary, and luckily Kuyo had a friend with an old, leaky Boston Whaler with an outboard motor that hadn’t been stolen by the soldiers yet. For fifty dollars, Kuyo’s friend agreed to let us use the boat for the night. We flattened the bottom of the hull by laying a sheet of plywood into it and used another for a ramp to load and off-load the chimps. Seven times we rolled the cage onto the boat and kept it steady during the three-mile voyage out to Boniface, where we rolled the cage from the boat onto the short, dark beach and released the chimps, strangers suddenly freed in a strange land. Until they discovered, of course, that the land was very small, not much larger than their communal space at Toby, and was surrounded by water.

  With genuine interest and curiosity, the dreamers watched us work. All night long, sweating and grunting from the effort, we bumped and scraped our knuckles and shins against the cage and the gunwales as we fought to keep the cage steady during the crossing. Estelle and Kuyo were both very strong, much stronger than I, and even they were exhausted from the work, but neither complained or held back or asked to rest. Once we had our plan and technique in place, we worked in silence, except to comfort and reassure the dreamers, who seemed somehow to recognize that we were all in great danger and were trying to save their lives. None of them panicked or cried out.

  We moved Doc first, the largest and strongest of the dreamers, their leader. His compliance and trust instructed the others to do likewise. When we released him from the cage and quickly pulled the cage back onto the boat and let the boat drift a few feet out from the beach, I cast the beam of my flashlight onto him. He was crouched on the short beach, peering around at the low mangroves, sniffing the air, taking the measure of the space that surrounded him. He scooted in a quick circle over the island and returned to the beach. He looked out at the boat, then looked aside and down, as if pondering a deep question: Why am I here instead of someplace else?

  “Doc scared, but don’t want nobody to know it,” Kuyo whispered.

  I flicked off the flashlight. “Me, too.”

  By the time we’d moved all eleven of the dreamers, it was nearly dawn, the safest part of the day in Monrovia, when the only people out and about were women and children scouring the city for food and water and kerosene for cooking, stepping over fresh bodies, the night’s kill, and heading quickly back to their huts and shanties to hole up in darkness for the rest of the day and night, avoiding as much as possible being caught alone and unarmed by one of the roaming gangs of men and boys sky high on drugs, palm wine, and murder and lusting for blood and sex and loot. But it felt safe enough for me to walk the few miles from Toby back to Duport Road. I had no other place to go now anyhow and couldn’t stay at the sanctuary waiting for the soldiers to return. Kuyo wanted to leave at once for his village in Lofa, to be with his wife and children, who had fled the city a few weeks ago, but he agreed to pack up my records and logbooks and bring them to Duport Road for safekeeping as soon as he got a few hours’ sleep. Estelle had already locked herself inside her shed to hide and sleep. She had a vague plan of waiting till nightfall and trying then to slip past the checkpoints north of the city. She’d heard that her village was under the control of Prince Johnson and there was no longer any fighting. The looting and rape, for the time being, at least, had been completed out there, and something resembling civil order had returned. These loosely controlled armies roared through the villages like hurricanes, and it was usually safest after one of them had passed on and another had not yet arrived, when they were killing people elsewhere over food, pillage, women, and territory. Right now, all three armies were converging on the city, Monrovia, closing in on it like three hungry lions trying to take down a wounded bull and keep the other two at bay.

  I had no provincial village to return to, no family or tribe to hide or protect me until this war was over. My dreamers were for the time being safe on their island, stocked with enough food to last them a week or so, when I planned to bring over a fresh supply of fruits, vegetables, and leafy greens. But beyond that, I had no plan, except to wait out the war and hope that it would end quickly, possibly in the next few weeks, with Charles Taylor vanquishing Samuel Doe and Prince Johnson alike. I still nurtured the belief that once Charles had removed Doe from power and kept Johnson from coming to power, he’d quickly pacify the rest of the country with the help of ECOMOG and the other regional forces, and in short order he would establish a constitutional assembly and hold elections, redistribute land, create social and economic equality, and bring about a socialist democracy in this little corner of West Africa that would shine across the continent like an alabaster city on a hill. My sons would return to me then. Together we would bury their father properly in the cemetery of the church he so loved. They would heal from their terrible ordeal, and the four of us, mother and sons, would build a coherent, useful life together in the new Liberia.

  It was a flimsy excuse for a vision, a sorry patchwork made of scraps of fantasy, but it had not been willed into being or chosen from among others, for I had no alternative vision available to me then, no plan, no option, no blueprint for action that did not lead me to flee this place, abandoning my missing sons, my murdered husband’s body buried among the flowers behind our house, my dreamers marooned on an island. That tattered vision was my life, the only life I had now.

  YOU MAY REMEMBER my telling early on how the soldiers, returning to the sanctuary, mutilated and killed poor Kuyo—while I drank myself to sleep on half a bottle of warm gin back at the house on Duport Road. You may remember my telling how Estelle and I started to gather the rain-soaked, muddied records I’d taken years to accumulate, when I grew suddenly despondent beyond repair or relief, and instead of saving those records and logbooks, I burned them there in the yard of the sanctuary. And when Estelle asked me, “Why you doin’ that, Miz Sundiata! After we work so hard to collect ’em!” I said, “I don’t know, Estelle. I don’t know why I’m burning the papers. I just don’t. There is no sanctuary here now, Estelle,” I said to her. “It’s gone. Like Woodrow. Like my sons. Like Kuyo. L
ike the chimps. Gone. And if you don’t go home and stay there, you’ll be gone, too,” I told her, and she obeyed me, and I never saw the girl again.

  That same night Sam Clement found me at the sanctuary. He arrived in the backseat of a Humvee driven by a helmeted U.S. Marine with a second, heavily armed Marine in the passenger’s seat, big, pink-skinned southern boys with necks like tree trunks, crisp, camo’d uniforms, their weapons and boots oiled and glistening, so different from the rusting weaponry and motley uniforms of Doe’s soldiers or the bizarre costumes worn by the rebels. For weeks, Marine helicopters had been airlifting embassy personnel and U.S. and other foreign civilians from the U.S. embassy grounds to four destroyers stationed a few miles offshore, there to receive and ferry people north to Freetown, in Sierra Leone, where there were commercial flights to London and charter planes to the States.

  Rain poured down on us in the middle of the muddy yard. We stood in the beam of the headlights, while the Marines stood guard beside it, as if expecting to be attacked. Sam grabbed me by the shoulder. “For Christ’s sake, Hannah, come to the embassy now! You’ll be dead or worse by morning if you don’t. Doe’s dead. This place is turning into a goddamned killing field.”

  “Doe’s dead?”

  “Where the hell you been, girl? Prince Johnson and his boys got him.”

  “Home,” I said. “I’ve been at home. And here.”

  He was disgusted. “I’m surprised you’re still alive,” he said and pulled me towards the Humvee. “Get in.”

  We rode in silence, until halfway back to town I said to Sam, “I’ve got to go by the house first. I need my passport and some papers and a few clothes, Sam. And some money.”

  He didn’t answer at first, then said to the driver, “Sergeant, we’ll make a stop back at Duport Road.”

  “Yes, sir. Same place we was watchin’, I suppose,” the Marine drawled.

  “Yes.”

  When we pulled up to the house, I got out and unlocked the gate and swung it back. The driver drew the Humvee up to the terrace and parked, and Sam and I went inside the darkened house. I lit a kerosene lamp on a table by the door and started for the living room.

  Sam said, “You out of fuel for the generator? Smells like you haven’t had the air-conditioner on for weeks.”

  “I guess there’s fuel. I just haven’t used it. I’ve been going to bed early, I guess, and making do with candlelight and kerosene lamps.”

  He told me to wait while he got the generator started and left me alone in the living room. He was right; the house smelled amphibian. I looked around the room as if I hadn’t seen it in weeks, as if I’d been in another country. Mildew and mold had darkened the walls and ceiling, and the cloth on the furniture and the rugs had started to rot. For weeks I had sleepwalked through my days and dreamlessly slept through my nights and had barely noticed the rapid disintegration of my home. Now, as I lit candles and lamps and walked from living room to dining room to the boys’ bedroom and mine and Woodrow’s, I saw that the house and everything in it and all the memories that it contained were dying before my eyes.

  Returning to the living room, I heard the generator rumble to life, and suddenly the lights came on, and the air-conditioner fluttered and whirred. Sam came inside looking pleased with himself. “Let there be light!” he said. He hadn’t shaved in several days and looked very tired. His rumpled suit was spotted with mud and coffee stains and sweat and looked like he’d been wearing it for weeks. But he was oddly attractive all the same. Fatigue and anxiety became him. They undercut his Tidewater arrogance, his genteel self-assurance, and gave him a more humble mien and manner. He shot me a crooked smile and said, “Too bad we don’t have some time to kill. We could throw us a little party.”

  I looked up at him. “In all these years, Sam, you’ve only hit on me once, when you tried to kiss me out there on the terrace. Remember?”

  “Yes. That was an accident. I was a little drunk, I’m afraid. But I don’t mean that the way it sounds. You are an extremely attractive woman, I can say that. It’s just that I don’t make a habit of coming on to married women.”

  “I never thought of you as especially scrupulous, Sam.”

  He laughed lightly. “I’m not.”

  “What about widows?”

  “Yes, well, that would alter things a tad, wouldn’t it, now? But this is not a good time, Miz Sundiata, for you to be coming on to me. If that is what you’re doing.”

  “I don’t know what I’m doing anymore. Maybe I’m just curious.”

  “Curious, eh? The truth is, sometimes after I’ve been out here in this goddamn heart of darkness I get horny for white people, that’s all. I suppose you do, too. I expect that’s a little of what’s going on with you right now,” he said.

  I exhaled slowly and sat down on the sofa. “No. I’m lonely. And I’m confused. And I’m frightened. And terribly sad, Sam. I’m sad. And suddenly, in this light and in this room, you are a very attractive man to me, and if it would make my loneliness and confusion and fear and my sadness go away for a few moments, I’d like you to make love to me. That’s all.”

  He furrowed his brow and looked steadily at me, as if he suspected a trap was being set for him. “That’s all, eh? I was under the impression that you preferred women,” he said.

  “Oh, really? And what gave you that impression?”

  He laughed. “A boy can tell. Especially one that prefers men. C’mon, m’dear, pack your bag. We can continue this discussion later.” He reached out for my hand and took it and drew me slowly to my feet. The rain pounded against the roof and splashed against the terrace and walkways outside. I thought of Woodrow buried in his shallow grave at the side of the house and my sons’ empty cots, their clothes and books and games still lying scattered around their bedroom.

  “I can’t leave,” I said to Sam.

  His face stiffened. “I’m under orders to bring you to the embassy, Hannah, and get you the hell out of the country.”

  “I have to be here for when my sons come back.”

  “No, you don’t.”

  “I can’t find them. And I can accept that for now. But I have to make it so they can find me. You don’t know, because you don’t have children. You’re not a mother,” I said. “This is what mothers do, Sam. I know. I’m a mother. They wait for their children to come back home. Like my mother did with me.”

  “I was afraid of this,” he mumbled and walked to the TV and turned it on. Nothing came up except snow, both television stations having been captured by the rebels days before and all the broadcast equipment mindlessly looted or smashed. “You got anything to drink?” he asked. “You’re gonna need one, and I’d like one, too.”

  I pulled a bottle of Woodrow’s whiskey and two glasses from the liquor cabinet and poured us each a drink. I noticed that Sam had a videotape in his hand.

  “Sit down, Hannah. I want you to watch this.”

  I sat in Woodrow’s overstuffed armchair opposite the TV, and Sam put the tape into the VCR. He stood aside with the remote in one hand and his drink in the other and fast forwarded past footage of what looked like bands of rebel troops. Then suddenly I was looking at the face of Samuel Doe. He was seated on the floor of a brightly lit room with several men in rebel military uniforms standing over and around him. He was naked, except for a pair of blood-spotted underpants. He was fat, big bellied, his spindly legs splayed before him, his thin arms bound tightly behind him. The camera is shaky and moves erratically off Doe to the others and back again. Two of the men stroke his head, which has red abrasions and cuts and appears to have been roughly shaved with a knife or a dull razor. Doe looks mournfully up at his captors and says, “I want to say something, if you will just listen to me.” I recognize one of the two men stroking Doe’s head. It’s Albert—it’s Sweet Dreams Gladiator. He has a small smile on his face that looks almost gentle. Doe says to him, “You untie my hands, and I will talk. I never ordered anybody’s execution.” The camera swings away from him, b
lurs past the others in the room, some in uniform, some not, and there is Prince Johnson seated at a large desk. Hanging from the wall behind him is a pink and pale blue Sunday-school portrait of Christ carrying a lamb on his shoulders. I can read the legend below Christ: Look at me and be saved. Prince Johnson says, “I’m a humanitarian.” He sniffs and coughs lightly, as if from cigarette smoke. “Cut off one ear,” he says. The camera drifts back to Doe. Someone has a long knife in his hand, but the camera wobbles on Doe, who is pushed over on his back, and I can’t see who is sawing at his ear with the knife. Doe shrieks, and when the man steps away, I see that he is not a man, he is a boy. It is Dillon, my eldest son. Doe thrashes and flips his head wildly from side to side. He manages to sit up and begins blowing on his bare chest, as if to put out a fire. He ceases blowing and looks off camera at his tormentors. “I beg you…” he says. A hand shoves his head back and pushes him onto the floor again, and the knife goes to work on his other ear. He screams, a wail of pain and helpless fury. Then there is a quick swerve of the camera back to Prince Johnson, still at his desk, dangling a human ear above his open mouth, lowering the ear slowly. Chewing. Now Doe is in a garden, entirely naked, his face puffed and bloody, his ears reduced to pulpy stumps. There is a small group of men and boys hovering around him, among them Dillon and William, looking bored and half asleep, as if they’ve just been roused and told to get ready for school but would rather have stayed in bed a while longer. Doe moans and says to someone off camera, “Varney, I’m dying.” A man’s voice says, “We are asking you in a polite manner now. What did you do with the Liberian people’s money?” He speaks slowly in good English, as if for an American audience. Doe shakes his head and then is shown the knife, and he cries, “My penis! No, please, not my penis!” The camera jiggles and moves at a tilt, changing point of view as it gets passed over to William who turns its gaze on the previous cameraman, who is Paul, unsmiling, unafraid, almost blasé-looking. A man off camera says to Doe, “Repeat after me. ‘I, Samuel Kenyon Doe, declare that the government is overthrown. I’m therefore asking the armed forces to surrender to Field Marshal Prince Johnson.’ ” Doe complies, his voice thin and weak. Off camera, someone says, “Fuck.” Doe whimpers, “I want to talk. I need to pee.” The screen fades to white, then black.