Russell Banks - The Darling

At the sanctuary, Kuyo came out of the office lugging a plastic milk carton overflowing with the papers and was met in the yard by three men with guns. I never saw them myself but can all too easily imagine them. You’ve seen magazine photographs of them, I’m sure. Americans, especially white Americans, like to scare themselves with those photos. Most of the fighters in that war wore parts of cast-off nylon exercise suits and torn and filthy tee shirts with American college and sports team logos and oversize high-top basketball sneakers, do-rags and baseball caps turned backwards — hip-hop leftovers looted from the stores and shops and scavenged from the street markets of the villages and towns they had rampaged through on their way to Monrovia. Some of them, especially the young boys, wore women’s clothes — nightgowns and skirts and bonnets — and they flashed fresh tattoos on their arms and bare chests and juju amulets around their necks and white paste on their faces. These were the soldiers I had been seeing for weeks on the streets of Monrovia. The officers in their armies — for there were three armies of Liberians fighting one another at that time, President Doe’s, Charles Taylor’s, and Prince Johnson’s — had put these boys in charge of the checkpoints in and out of town and all across the country, and their actions had been generating tales of random drug-and alcohol-fueled murders and rapes and always robbery, looting, and pillaging. Here in town, when off duty, they were seizing houses, painting their names on the walls — Rambo, Quick-to-Kill, Flashdancer — to claim ownership for their planned return when the fighting was over. So far, no one had claimed our house.

The soldiers had come to the sanctuary for the dreamers. Bush meat. There was a sixteen-year-old girl, also a cousin of Woodrow’s, Estelle, who lived on the grounds and had not yet left for her village. She didn’t know which army the men belonged to, Prince Johnson’s or Charles Taylor’s or the army of the man who was still the president of Liberia, Samuel Doe. She had climbed into a cotton tree to hide from the fighters, and the following day, when she finally dared to come to me, Estelle told me that the men had cut off Kuyo’s penis and made him eat it and then had shot him many times in the mouth. They threw his body into the river, she said, and drove away. She said, “Mebbe they be Prince Johnson men, them was in so big a hurry-hurry to get away from town before Charles Taylor’s men come get them an’ kill them dead. Or mebbe them be President Doe’s men who mus’ be scairt of everybody now, even the peoples.”

My journals, years of meticulous records and data, were still at the sanctuary, scattered across the sandy, blood-spattered yard where Kuyo had dropped them, wet from rain and driven into the dirt by the fighters’ jeep and feet as if they were old newspapers. For hours, Estelle and I gathered up the soaked books and loose sheets of paper, until finally we had them all collected in the plastic milk carton.

I held the carton and looked at the contents for a long moment. Then, halfway through that moment, something inside me cracked and split, and there the dark entered in. Weeping, I dumped the contents of the carton onto the ground at my feet. Without thinking, mindless, as if merely following orders, I doused the pile with kerosene from a lamp, lit a match, and tossed it onto the papers. An auto-da-fé it was. The heap burst into yellow flames and sour-smelling smoke and began to burn. I felt the light inside me, what little of it still shone, dwindle and die, smothered by the dark.

Grabbing my arm, Estelle yelled at me, “Why you doin’ that, Miz’ Sundiata! After we work so hard to collect ’em!”

I shook my head and said slowly, “I don’t know, Estelle. I don’t know why I’m burning the papers. I just don’t.” It was the simple, perplexing truth. I told her that I was sorry not to know, and instructed her then to run home to her village and stay with her family and not to come back to the sanctuary ever again. “There is no sanctuary here now, Estelle,” I said. “It’s gone. Like Woodrow. Like my sons. Like Kuyo. Like the chimps. Gone. And if you don’t go home and stay there, you’ll be gone, too.”

As if before her eyes I had turned into a ghost, the girl simply turned and ran, and I never saw her again. Estelle is probably dead now, if she was lucky. Or a ghost herself. She was a pretty little young woman, from Samuel Doe’s mother’s tribe, the Gio. During the months and years that followed, until the people elected Charles Taylor president to stop him from killing them, most of those women, especially the younger ones and the girls, were lucky to have been killed.

TEN YEARS AND A LIFETIME later, I walked in painfully bright sunlight along the narrow beach outside Monrovia towards the harbor and the town, passing the spot on the beach where, nearly twenty years and two lifetimes ago, Master Sergeant Samuel Doe and his men erected thirteen telephone poles in the sand. I knew the story. I was there. Everyone in Liberia knew the story. Drunk and high on drugs, bloodlust ramping through their veins, Samuel Doe’s men had eviscerated their president, William Tolbert, in his office and carried his ministers, fifteen baggy old men stripped naked, to the beach, where they lashed them to the poles and shot them dead in front of television and home-movie cameras and a crowd of wildly jeering citizens and left their bodies tied to the poles to feed the vultures and the dogs. The poles lie buried in the sand now, and the bones of the corrupt old men have long ago washed out to sea.

At the far end of the beach, where the land elbows into the harbor, I saw the same man in nylon shorts who had fled from me at the gully after the Lebanese truck driver, Mamoud, had let me off. The man stood beside a beached, dark red pirogue, with both hands on the bow in a proprietary way, as if he were about to launch the boat, and watched me approach. So he was a fisherman, then, not a mad scavenger, as I’d first thought, and I must have interrupted him at his morning toilet. He had merely been embarrassed by me, but not frightened. With West Africans, the two sometimes look the same.

A pair of osprey swooped past, dipped close to the glittering surface of the sea, and methodically cruised the length of the beach a hundred yards from shore, searching for breakfast. Now that the man and I could see each other’s faces clearly, I covered my teeth with my lips and smiled, and he smiled back. How strange , I thought, and how nice —a relief, in fact, that a Liberian man and I were greeting each other with friendly curiosity. I hadn’t thought that possible anymore.

I wished the man good morning, and he said the same, and soon we were talking about how bad the fishing had been in the last few months, since the end of the rains, he said. He was named Curtis. He was a young man who looked to be in his early twenties, with a wife, he said, “An’ five pick’nies. But wit’ no fish to catch me can’t feed them, an’ so the wife gone on the streets now, sellin’ pens an’ Bic lighters an’ other suchlike t’ings but ain’t nobody can buy t’ings in dis country no more, so what a man t’ do?” He spoke rapidly, anxiously, as if afraid I’d cut him off. “Can you help me out wit’ a little somethin’, Miz?” He held out his hand. “Can you gimme dash?”

“Do you know Boniface Island?” I asked him. He did, though he’d never been there. I asked if I could hire him to take me there in his boat. “I’ll pay you twenty American dollars,” I said. “To go out and back. And to wait for me for an hour or so. I won’t need to stay long.”

He wondered why I needed to go to Boniface. “Nothin’ t’ see on those little bitty river islands but birds an’ crocodiles an’ mangroves. Turtles sometimes though,” he added.