Russell Banks - The Darling

“Your past. I don’t understand.”

“Well, that was me , husband. I was mainly trying to break from my past. Of course, what I thought I was doing…”

“What was wrong with your past?” Woodrow interrupted. “I mean, that you wanted to break from it?”

He was never going to get it. No matter what I said or how far back in my life I went with him, my pain and sorrow and my anger and shame were too weirdly American for Woodrow to grasp what had transformed me from a college coed worried about keeping her real name on the dean’s list to a hard-as-nails terrorist on the run under a false name. Or what had transformed the terrorist into the two-named wife — three names, actually — of the Liberian minister of public health, the mother of his sons. How could he be expected to get those changes when I barely understood them myself? If I told him everything that had been left out of that thin folder, if I made the story of my life real to him, like I’m trying to do for you, he’d be afraid, rightly, that I could be transformed yet again into something equally strange. Or even changed back into what I had been before. The coed. The political activist. The fantasist. The maker of bombs.

I wasn’t going to put that fear onto him, I decided, not after all he’d done for me so far and showed every sign of continuing to do. Despite all, Woodrow was a good and generous man, there was no denying it, and I loved those qualities in him and benefited from them and fully expected to benefit from them for the rest of my life. I was not altogether sure, even early in our marriage, that I loved him , however. The essential Woodrow. Whoever, whatever, that was.

I understood, perhaps better than he, that I could no more make sense of his past than he could mine. We were a husband and wife who could not imagine the texture and content of each other’s consciousness as they had existed prior to the day we first met. Woodrow, too, had been transformed many times. A boy from a West African village had turned into an American college student, a black-skinned foreigner with an exotic accent, a young man who, in time, had become a Liberian cabinet minister married to a white American woman. If I knew his story, the whole of it, I, too, might be frightened by the possibility of still farther transformations to come. What if he became again the boy from a West African village? He seemed on the verge of it whenever we visited Fuama. What if he still secretly was that boy, now become a man, with a second and third wife and still maintained sexual control over his female cousins and nieces? Not just Jeannine. Or became again the black African college boy imitating the white American college boys, drinking too much, playing with drugs, screwing the coeds whether they liked it or not? I’d known some African students like that at Brandeis, although most of them had been enrolled elsewhere, the technical and business schools in Cambridge and Boston proper, out looking for hot, guilt-ridden, liberal white girls turned on by negritude but scared of American blacks.

Consequently, neither I nor Woodrow had sought to learn the other’s story. The rough outline, a few typed pages in a file folder, was enough. No details necessary. No late-night connubial reminiscing for Mr. and Mrs. Sundiata. No lengthy descriptions of anyone other than the husband and wife sitting across from each other at the table right this moment, the man and the woman lingering over the last of the evening’s wine, with the dinner dishes and serving bowls cluttering the space between them, palm trees flipping their fronds in the breezy dark, tree frogs advertising their wares, the giggles and splashes of the boys in their bath, and Jeannine’s low, monitoring scold as she hurries them to dry and into their American pajamas, Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, and Pluto.

WHEN IS IT TIME to flee your country? “When they shoot your dogs,” is what people say. There was no warning — there seldom is — not even the sound of a car or truck pulling up at the high, chain-locked gate. The dogs barked once, more in surprise than fear or anger, a yelp of astonishment, then a rapid set of gunshots, six or seven, and the two Rottweilers were dead. Andy and Beemus — Woodrow’s pride, his beautiful black thugs imported from Zimbabwe, goofy, meat-eating playmates for his children and fierce protectors of his household — lay in the driveway between the rear of the Mercedes and the iron gate, large mounds of bleeding black dirt, as four helmeted soldiers carrying automatic rifles opened the gate as if they had the key — wait, they did have the key: in the dark we saw that one of the soldiers … no, it was a civilian with them, a man wearing a navy-blue suit and tie, looking as if he’d just come from a board meeting, a man whom both Woodrow and I recognized at once, in spite of the soft gloom that surrounded him, when he looked across the yard at us and dropped the key in a showy way into the breast pocket of his suit jacket, at which point Woodrow and I heard a truck rumble to a stop on the street beyond the gate and wall, and a second later the yard was filled with soldiers.

As many as twenty, I would later recall, but to do so I had to concentrate on where in the driveway and yard, patio and house the soldiers had positioned themselves, which was difficult for me afterwards, because mainly I remembered first the dogs’ being shot dead in a single burst of gunfire, Woodrow leaping from his chair and knocking the wine bottle onto the tile floor, where it smashed into tiny green slivers, and my realization that the boys were barefoot.

“Stay inside!” I shouted to them. “Don’t come out here!” I wasn’t as frightened yet of the stone-faced young soldiers as of the broken glass that could cut my babies’ tender, pink-bottomed feet. “Don’t come out here till I sweep!” I yelled, when Woodrow and I were suddenly surrounded by these men, Samuel Doe’s own personal security force. I noticed that much, but since they were with, possibly led by, our friend and Woodrow’s colleague, Charles Taylor, then the soldiers had no imaginable reason to be here.

I remember feeling oddly distant from them and unafraid, in spite of what I knew about these men, their cold-blooded brutality and sadism, their fearful capacity for murder, rape, torture, and worse. The stories I’d heard — rumors is all they were — of drug-fueled ritual dismemberments, amputations, cannibalism, were of a savagery beyond anything I’d ever read or heard of before and still I had not yet decided whether to believe them. One couldn’t believe those stories; human beings just don’t act that way. Anyhow, this wasn’t happening to me. It was as if I were watching a movie, an amateur movie staged as some sort of training exercise made for new recruits from the countryside. This is how you bring in an important man for questioning by the leader. You kill his dogs first. Then with a key obtained earlier from the man’s caretaker — who may well be his nephew or brother-in-law, but not to worry, the man will know the consequences if he refuses to turn over the key — you simply open the gate and quickly seal off all means of escape from the compound. You place the important man and his white American wife under guard with four of your men, the same four who shot the dogs and were the first to enter the compound, while the others round up the three terrified little boys in their pajamas, their useless, hysterical nanny, the sleeping maid — the children and the servants to be kept under guard in a room of the house well out of sight of the mother and the father, preferably a room without windows, the utility room at the back. All this is to take place in thirty to forty-five seconds, during which time you slap handcuffs on the important man. Treat him roughly, as if he were a goat going to slaughter. And keep between him and his wife. Push her against the outer wall of the house. Don’t look at her eyes, her strange, pale blue eyes. Everyone, even including the civilian in charge of the operation, Charles Taylor, who will be known personally to the woman and the important man, will speak only in Liberian, so she won’t understand what is happening or else she’s likely to interfere and complicate matters. Her husband, the important man, will understand all too well.