Russell Banks - The Darling

Later that day, in a now-infamous episode, Sergeant Doe and his men hauled thirteen of the ministers, the Supreme Court justice, and the major general who had run the president’s security apparatus down to the beach a mile south of the city, where, before a huge, cheering crowd, they erected fifteen telephone poles in the sand, stripped their victims, most of them fat, old men, to their underwear, tied them to the poles, and shot them literally to pieces. The executioners were drunk, and consequently had to fire hundreds of rounds into the bodies to be sure that the old men were dead. Many in the crowd snapped photos and videotaped the event, and all day long, with loudspeakers mounted on truck beds blaring juju and reggae, the people sang and danced in drunken celebration, while buzzards circled overhead and small yellow dogs worked their way closer and closer to the fly-blown carcasses tied to the poles — meat rotting in the sun.

THOUGH WORSE WAS to come, 1983, my eighth year in Liberia, was a hard one for me. But who knew what was coming? Certainly I didn’t. I was forty now and honestly believed that the truly difficult part of my life was behind me. Oh, sure, I knew I’d have to face individual crises in the future — who doesn’t? My three sons, as they grew into adolescence and beyond, were bound to create episodes of fear and trembling; my marriage to Woodrow someday soon would have to withstand the blows of middle-age, mine as much as his, and the eventual departure of the boys from home, and the culmination, disappointing, of Woodrow’s career, for I knew by then, even though he’d been made minister, a full member of the cabinet, that he was never going to get inside the inner circle of power that was now centered on Samuel Doe. I was already hearing anxious grumbles from Woodrow about my own career — although I still hesitated to call it that, my work with the chimps, my dreamers.

But I pictured these coming events and crises as separate beads on a string, individually not too heavy to bear, collectively merely the defining weight of a life, my life, anyone’s. In the last year, however, I’d begun to believe that all my future dark days, like those of most people I knew, even here in Liberia, would be matched about evenly by future days of brightness. Darkness would be canceled by light, neutralized, evened off, so that when I grew old and died, I’d come out at zero. In the game of life, all I expected, all I hoped for, was to come out even, a zero-sum game.

These aren’t low expectations for a life, exactly. They aren’t high, either. But for me, as I entered my forty-first year, my expectations and hopes had at last met one another and were a solid fit, a balanced scale, yin and yang, hand in glove. No more dreams of revolution, no more millenarian expectations, no more longing for utopia. I called my newly achieved state of mind realism and almost never used words like bourgeois anymore. I was standing on solid ground now. Terra firma. Yes, indeed — realism. My mother and father were still afloat in clouds of unknowing, maybe, but I had finally created for myself a life that neither imitated theirs nor stood in simple reaction to it. After all these years, I could say to myself that I had freed myself from my parents. It may have taken rather too long, but I’d done it.

I’d even begun talking with Woodrow about returning to the States with the boys to visit my parents. Their American grandparents. Could he arrange it with the American embassy, possibly through the cultural officer? Whatzisname, Sam Clement? Or could he speak informally to the U.S. ambassador himself about issuing a passport for Dawn Sundiata, née Carrington, with the boys traveling on Woodrow’s Liberian VIP passport, so there’d be no nasty surprises when we arrived in the States?

“It can be arranged, of course,” Woodrow said. “Bit of a turnaround, though, wouldn’t you say?”

We were at dinner at home, eating on the patio, the five of us, a peaceful moonlit evening at the end of the rainy season. For the first time in months, I could hear the dry clatter of the palms in the warm breeze. “Don’t jump the gun,” I said to him and poured myself a third glass of wine. The boys had left the table and were being bathed now by Jeannine. “I’m only giving the idea some idle consideration,” I explained. “I’ve been thinking about them a lot lately, maybe because hitting forty makes me realize how old they are. I’ve started to worry about their health, actually. And I’m feeling more guilt with each passing year, Woodrow. Guilt for the distance between us. And there’s the boys to think of. Really. I don’t want the boys to grow up without knowing anything more about my parents than they would if I were an orphan.”

“Ah, well, that’s true for me, too, you know.” Woodrow lighted a Dunhill cigarette, pushed back his chair, and crossed his legs. He watched me carefully, as if he thought something new and puzzling might be happening here.

“The boys know your parents. It’s mine I’m talking about.”

“I mean that I myself sometimes think of you as an orphan. But you’re not, are you?”

Most of what Woodrow knew of my past he’d learned years ago, when I first came over from Ghana, from a small sheaf of information gleaned from that file folder slipped to him by the same American cultural attaché, Sam Clement. I didn’t know what was in that file and wasn’t sure I wanted to know, so hadn’t asked. It wasn’t until nearly a year after we were married that Woodrow had actually showed me the folder, and he did it for his reasons, not mine.

He brought it from his office one afternoon and carried it out to the lab compound, where I was sitting at my desk logging genealogical data on the baby chimps. He dropped the folder on top of my logbook, and I opened and read through it quickly and in silence, while he sat on the corner of my cluttered desk and waited. An oscillating fan on the desk hummed and drifted back and forth, riffling the papers in the folder. It wasn’t much, barely two single-spaced, typed pages and fuzzy copies of the photos used for the FBI’s Most Wanted list in 1970, after the Greenwich Village townhouse bombing that sent me and the entire Weather cohort permanently underground.

I sighed heavily at the sight of my old face. It brought me reluctantly to grieve all over again for someone I’d loved and whose death I thought I’d gotten over, not the three friends who’d been killed in the explosion — I never really knew them more than slightly from the various national SDS conventions — but the late, unlamented Hannah Musgrave. Here it all was again: the names and dates, the tired facts of my biography up to then, the description of my few skills and talents. It was the CV of a small-time, would-be domestic terrorist. Sad. Pathetic.

“Why are you showing this to me now? You had it when I got here, when I first came over from Accra, didn’t you?”

“You’re my wife now. If I’m ever asked, I should know what’s true and what’s a lie. In case I have to defend you. I’ve seen files like this before, you know; the president has a cabinet stuffed with files just like this, and they’re mostly lies, lies and false confessions. But bits and pieces are true.”

“Yes,” I said. “But everything’s pretty much true, what’s in there.”

“Pretty much?”

“Except … well, except that I never knew what was happening anywhere other than where I myself happened to be, and I wasn’t responsible for anything that I didn’t do personally. Which wasn’t much, believe me. We weren’t that stupid or naive. We were in these small cells, what we called foco groups, and mine was in New Bedford, Massachusetts. So when that townhouse blew up and killed those three people, I was as shocked as everyone else. I hadn’t heard from any of those people in years, didn’t even know if they were still part of Weather or not. Same with the Pentagon bombing and most of the others. The New York police stations. All of them, actually. That was the idea, to keep the cells separate. Only the three or four people at the top — the Weather Bureau, we called them — knew what all the cells were supposed to be doing, and they knew only in a general way. We were instructed to invent and implement our own individual attacks on the government cell by cell. Some of the cells were really creative and bold. But others, like mine, were incompetent and timid and more or less driven by fantasy. You have to understand, Woodrow, most of us were like actors in a play that on a barely conscious level was mainly about disappearing. About breaking with your past. You know?”