Russell Banks - The Darling

Then one rainy November night in 1979, seven months after the Rice Riot, I remember waking very late to the sound of deliberately lowered male voices, Woodrow’s and that of another man, coming from the living room. Their rumblings, anxious and urgent, rose slowly and then quickly fell, as if they’d remembered freshly that they didn’t want to be overheard. I slipped from bed and in the dark made my way down the hall towards the living room, and just as I reached the entryway, saw the silhouette of a large, broad-shouldered man leaving by the front door. It clicked shut, and Woodrow sat down at his desk, sighed audibly, and lighted a cigarette.

“Was that Charles?”

Without looking at me, he said, “No.” Then, after a pause, “Yes, actually. He sent you his love, but had to rush off.”

“Why was Charles here this late? Is something wrong?”

“No. Business.”

“Really? Business? It’s almost three, Woodrow.”

“Business.”

“Oh.”

He sighed a second time, giving up for the moment — too much effort to lie. “Yes. Dangerous business, actually. Charles has gone and formed a political party. To oppose the president.” He paused again. “Seems like a terrible idea. Especially now, so soon after the riots.”

“You told him that.”

“I told him that. Yes.” He explained that Charles had tried to convince Woodrow to join this new party, to be called the People’s Progressive Party, and help him organize a referendum to cut short the two years remaining on Tolbert’s eight-year term. If the referendum passed, a new election would be held in the fall. And Charles was thinking of putting himself forward for president. “He wants me to declare against the True Whig candidate and run for the Senate from Gibo, where Fuama is located. My home district.”

“This is a ridiculous idea, right? To cut yourself off from the president and the party? To oppose him?”

“Oh, definitely! Definitely ridiculous. Hopeless. But Charles is an ambitious man. And a rather reckless one.”

“And you’re not?”

“Ambitious, yes. But not reckless.”

We both remained silent for a long moment. He poured a drink from the open bottle at his desk and drank it down. Then looked up at me, half surprised to see me still standing there at the door in my nightgown. “Go to bed, Hannah darling,” he said.

“Are you safe, Woodrow?”

“Yes, yes, of course. I turned him down flat. Go to bed.”

“But does this put you against Charles now?”

“No. Not really. He may not see it that way now, but he will.”

“What about him? Is Charles safe?”

“He’ll be fine, as long as his referendum never gets held. And it won’t. There’s no way the president will permit it. And with no referendum, there’ll be no early election. Good night, my dear. I still have work to do,” he said, and turned back to the papers strewn across his desk. His jaw clenched and unclenched, like a nervous fist. “Hannah, please,” he said without looking up. “Go to bed.”

He’s frightened to death , I thought. He’s pretending to work so as to avoid visions of his own imprisonment and execution. And ours . I suddenly realized that it was a thing he had been doing for many months now. Possibly years. He knew that his life, and therefore ours, mine and my sons’, were precariously held. How stupid I’ve been! I thought. Too self-absorbed, too obsessed with my own memories, dreams, and reflections to see the danger that surrounded us. And for the first time, I, too, was frightened.

YET IN SPITE of my fear, or perhaps because of it, I kept inside my bubble and stayed deliberately detached, rigorously uninvolved, all the way through a series of cascading events, one falling hard upon the next, that threatened to crack the bubble open like an egg. These were events that no one, least of all I, could have anticipated. Charles Taylor did indeed form his People’s Progressive Party and called for a nationwide referendum to void the remaining two years of the president’s term. A week later, the Senate of Liberia unanimously passed an act specifically banning the party, and Charles, to avoid arrest and probable execution, fled the country. He was said to be the house-arrested guest of Libya’s President Ghaddafi, who refused to extradite him back to Liberia. It was a small favor, easily given, one that might someday elicit ample repayment — either from Tolbert, for having kept Charles under lock and key, or, if Tolbert fell, from Charles, for having refused to extradite him.

Back in Monrovia, everyone suspected that Tolbert had lost the support of the Americans. It was thought that the Americans had begun to mistrust the president’s engorged ego and greed and his increasing recklessness and were about to abandon their man in Africa, cutting him loose both of their restraints and of their protection. If you want a big dog, the Americans believed, you have to give him a long leash. But not too long. For a decade, William Tolbert, the president of Liberia, had been one of the Americans’ big dogs. Maybe now they were switching the leash to Charles Taylor. Maybe Charles would return in triumph from Libya and become the next president of Liberia.

It was a not-uncommon syndrome in Africa in those years, in which a puppet president gradually became a self-deluded despot who no longer remembered who was really in charge of his country. After years of feeding and lavishly housing the leader and his cronies, the citizens finally grow hungry and angry enough to riot in the streets. The leader calls out the army and brutally shuts down any and all opposition. Soon, however, the army, unpaid for months, becomes demoralized, and the officer corps gives evidence of increasing unreliability — a reluctance to follow orders passed down from the commander-in-chief, loud demands for back pay or, with national cash reserves having long since dried up and no cash money available, demands for increased emoluments and political payoffs and perks — until finally, with the leader no longer able to buy their loyalty, the officers come together and plot the leader’s overthrow and replace him with one of their own.

Around four o’clock of the afternoon of the coup, Woodrow telephoned and said he had to stay late at the ministry and might have to remain there overnight. “There’s a bit of a crisis over here,” he said with typical understatement. “And by the way, you’d better keep off the streets until tomorrow at least. There’ve been reports of a few rows between the army and the police out there. Nothing serious, you understand, but I’ll send Satterthwaite over, if you like,” he added.

“We weren’t going anywhere, anyhow. No need to send Satterthwaite. He’ll just want to hang around and read his comic books,” I said blandly, Satterthwaite having become my least favorite member of the household. The truth is, though Jeannine and I had grown somewhat more cautious in our movements through the city since the Rice Riot a year earlier, by the same token, because the anger of the rioters had not been directed against our home, we felt oddly, perhaps unrealistically, protected by our high wall and locked gate, our brave dogs, and our status.

“Stay as late as you like. We’ll be fine,” I said, not in the least curious as to the nature of the crisis at the ministry. About once a month, due to a “bit of a crisis” or an unexpected cabinet meeting or the sudden need to entertain a visiting foreign dignitary or corporate chieftain, Woodrow did not come home until dawn or midday the next day, arriving rumpled, exhausted, smelling of whiskey, cigar smoke, and cheap perfume. I never asked him where he’d been. I could guess easily enough, of course, but had no desire to confront him. By then I had come to welcome his shabbily contrived absences. I saw them as earning moral capital for me; moral debt for himself. We were drifting steadily apart, each of us in a different way, I thought, preparing for the inevitable split.