Russell Banks - The Darling

Fantasies of escape really are like pornography. They have to remain simple and untainted by reality, or they cause anxiety. I imagined myself and my sons, all three wearing small backpacks, Americans in Africa, as they board a plane at Robertsfield, leaving Liberia. Then here we are departing from the plane after it has landed at Logan Airport, in Boston. My mother and father, unchanged after all these years, greet us at the gate. Embraces and tears of joy and mutual forgiveness all around. No one else is there, except for other arriving passengers and the people waiting to greet them. No reporters covering the return of a one-time fugitive on the FBI’s Most Wanted list, the last of the Weather Underground come in from the cold. No U.S. Marshals or FBI agents to arrest me. No customs officer asking to see our passports and confiscating mine.

It would be simple, oh so simple, if Woodrow stayed arrested — stopped, frozen in time at this moment, and not jailed or tortured or beaten or killed, not shot dead by one of those iron-headed men with the AK-47s, big, cold-eyed men from the country. I didn’t want that . As I lay there in my bed and dawn light slid through the shuttered windows, as pepperbirds started their pre-morning ruckus, my tumbling fantasies gradually slowed and then, top-heavy with growing complexity, ceased to move. They buckled under the weight of reality and collapsed. Leaving me to contemplate the undeniable fact. My husband had been arrested by the most powerful man in the country, a man who, with impunity and without reason, was more than capable of killing him. And where would that leave me, me and my children?

BY DAWN THE SOLDIER guarding us had disappeared from the yard. And Jeannine and Kuyo, I discovered, had fled during the night — not until after Kuyo had removed the bodies of the dogs, I noticed, and Jeannine had swept up the broken glass. They’d gone back to Fuama, where, by noon, news of the arrest of Woodrow Sundiata, the village’s one big man in Monrovia, would have sent every member of Woodrow’s immediate family into hiding, where they’d stay for as long as it appeared that Woodrow was an enemy of the leader, even if it meant hiding in the bush for years or until the leader was overthrown and replaced.

I didn’t care, I was glad they were gone from the compound. Their presence, no matter how useful their service, oppressed me. Their role in my life, even after all these years, had never clarified itself. They weren’t servants or employees, nor were they family members, the kind you can count on in a crisis to provide aid and comfort. I didn’t know what they were, or who. They weren’t even hangers-on, the sort of people you can shoo away when they’ve become a burden or a bore.

So they were gone, and the house, for the first time since I moved into it, was empty. Fine, then; that settled it. I made a plan. It was more a piece of theater than a plan, however. In my life here, I had been acting in a play not of my making for so long that it was all I had. A role. As soon as I have fed the boys their breakfast, I’ll dress them the way Woodrow likes to see them, in blazers and ties, like little brown gentlemen enrolling at Choate, and I’ll dress myself accordingly in my long, white, chiffon dress and carry the silly, saffron-colored parasol and wear a soft, wide-brimmed hat against the sun, and with my sons in tow I’ll march into the leader’s office like a latter-day Scarlett O’Hara and demand the immediate release of my husband. After that, I’ll make up another little piece of theater and play it out. And then another, and if necessary, another .

When I had the boys fed and properly dressed, tasks I normally left to Jeannine, but not today, maybe not ever again, I telephoned Woodrow’s office. To my relief, Satterthwaite — Richard, as I now freely called him — answered. He’d already heard that his boss had been taken in the night by the leader’s security force. Richard was scared, I could tell by his shaky voice, usually so suavely controlled. He was sure that he was about to be arrested, too.

I told him not to be ridiculous, Woodrow would be released quickly, it was all a mistake and would be settled in a few hours. He partially believed me. I was the boss’s wife, after all. In reality, all I cared was that he make it possible for me and the boys to be driven to the leader’s door in a ministry car chauffeured by the minister’s personal assistant. It was in the script.

“The best thing you can do now,” I said to Richard, “if you want to keep your job in the ministry, is help me get Woodrow home quickly and safely. Which you can do by driving me and the boys directly to the presidential palace, as if no one has done anything wrong. Because no one has. Have they, Richard?”

“No. No one. Not Mister Sundiata, for sure,” he said.

“And certainly not you , Richard. The car is still here at the house, the soldiers left it. So come over here right away.”

THE BOYS AND I stepped one by one from the tinted interior of the Mercedes onto the white-gravel walkway to the ignominiously named White House, a faux plantation house with tall white columns and verandas, office and residential wings right and left, and tall windows and porticos — like a set for an antebellum movie, Mandingo maybe, or Roots .

“Wait for us here, Richard,” I said. “We shan’t be long.” I snapped open my parasol, lined the boys up behind me like ducklings, and marched up the wide steps to the guard box at the top, where I waved off the guard with a regal flip of my free hand, as if he had come forward to escort me in rather than to stop me, and kept moving. It was never done, but I was a woman, a white American woman, with her children, and so it was permitted. I and my three somber-faced boys, who must have been as much in awe at that moment of my queenly entitlement as of the colossal scale and splendor of the building that we seemed to have taken possession of, swept on unimpeded, all the way up the wide, curving, carpeted stairs to the second floor, through the outer office and past the startled secretaries to the antechamber of the office of the leader himself, where finally we were stopped, not by a member of the staff, but by a white man emerging from the inner sanctum just as I and my ducklings arrived at the wide, polished mahogany door.

It was Clement, Sam Clement, the fellow from the American embassy — in his early forties back then, fair haired and southern, a Princetonian with a tennis-court tan and the beginnings of a bourbon paunch, and wearing, just as you’d expect of our man in Africa, a rumpled, straw-colored, linen suit. I’d caught him by surprise, and he took a backwards step, recognizing me, and delivered his sweet, sad smile, a Virginia Tidewater all-purpose smile passed down in the family, father to son for generations.

“Why, hel-lo, Dawn! ” he said, putting lead-footed emphasis on the name, as if to remind me that he still remembered my real name and, while I might fool the natives, I was no mystery to him. “Missus Sundiata,” he added.

I gave him a curt nod and pushed past and through the doorway. “I’m here to see the leader,” I announced and entered the large, bright, sunlit room. I brought the boys to my side now, clustering them around me, and heard the door snap shut behind us as if with smug satisfaction, and faced the leader, who stood behind his desk, a small, tight smile on his lips. He grows larger every time I see him , I said to myself. Taller, wider, thicker, like a hippopotamus.

“Miz Sundiata,” he pronounced, as if announcing my arrival at a formal ball, then chuckled. He may be illiterate, an ignorant pig of a man, but he knows how to play the chieftain , I thought. He clasped his hands below his chin and looked us over like a judge about to issue his verdict. He wore a double-breasted, dark gray suit, bright white shirt and paisley tie, with a floppy silk handkerchief dangling from his breast pocket. “Wife of the esteemed Minister Woodrow Sundiata. And his sons, too, I see,” he added and smiled down at them.