Russell Banks - The Darling

“You turned over the money to Samuel Doe, then?”

“No, not exactly. I merely knew where it was located.”

“Oh.”

“You’re angry with me?”

“Oh, no, of course not!” I snapped. “You realize, of course, what you’ve risked? And how it might have affected me and the boys? And still may? What were you thinking?”

“Please. This whole mess has been Charles Taylor’s doing, not mine,” he said.

“Well, yes, you’re free, and Charles’s not, and you still have your job. So I guess that proves it,” I said, suddenly feeling a little bit sorry for him. Also, I was exhausted and wanted to sleep, not argue. Then, when I turned my face up to his, I saw that he was terrified. He took a hard swallow from his drink and closed his eyes tightly, then opened them wide, as if hoping the world had changed. I remember thinking, He won’t live out the year .

He did, of course, manage to live out that year and the following seven, too, and he lived them rather well, both with and without me at his side. But at that moment, to me he was a dead man, and I had already begun preparing my grief, for I knew that it would require a certain amount of conscious, willful preparation. I did not love him anymore, if I ever had, and I would not miss him. But I didn’t want him to suffer, and I still needed him. Needed him for my sons and, to a lesser degree, for myself.

“There is, however, one condition that the president has set for my freedom,” Woodrow said in a low voice. He kept his gaze averted from me and unbuttoned his shirt very slowly, as if wanting it to last a long time. “If you can call it that, freedom.”

“Oh?”

“Yes. In exchange for the information he wanted, I asked the leader for safe passage out of the country for you and the boys.”

“Out of the country? Why? ”

“To get you out of danger. But he said—”

“What danger are we in?” I demanded, very loudly, cutting him off.

He inhaled deeply and, inflated with slight disgust, looked down at me, as if he thought me a fool. “Because, Hannah, this country is no longer as safe as it once was for the wife of Woodrow Sundiata. And since I myself cannot leave without permission from the leader…”

“There’s a condition for your so-called freedom?”

“Yes. There is.”

“And…?”

“You.”

“ Me? I’m the condition?”

“In a sense, yes. He wants you out of the country.”

“My God,” I laughed. “Why?”

Exasperated, Woodrow sighed, as if thinking that I just didn’t get it. Women, American women especially, do not understand how the real world works. “Hannah darling, Samuel Doe probably believes that your presence here makes it more difficult for him to control me than if you were not here. If you were a Liberian woman, instead of…”

“It’s not a problem if I’m just another village girl, right?”

“Well, yes, quite right. You’re a complication, let us say. He’s a little bit afraid of you. Of you and who you know and who knows you.” Again he loudly sighed, a man who dreaded what was coming next.

“And the boys? What about them?”

“I’m sorry. They can’t go with you.”

“I must go, but my sons can’t go? That’s it? What the hell are you talking about? Who says this?”

“He says it. Doe. The president.”

“ Why? ” I screamed at him, and it felt very good. I almost never shout, and I never scream.

“Because the boys’ presence will help him control me.”

“Whereas my presence will have the opposite effect.”

“Exactly.”

“Woodrow, please! This is insane! Besides, where does Samuel Doe think I can go on my own? If I go back to the States, I’ll be arrested as soon as I get off the plane, just like Charles. And he can’t expect me to leave my children behind!”

“No, it’s not insane. It’s coldly sane, very calculated, very shrewd. President Doe knows exactly what he’s doing. And you won’t be arrested when you get to the States. That won’t happen. The Americans have agreed that you are not Hannah Musgrave. You are who your passport says you are, my dear. You are Dawn Carrington.”

“Sam Clement’s part of this, then. And my sons? What will happen to them without me?”

“They’re my sons, too. And they’ll be fine with me and Jeannine and my people. Until I can arrange to send them to you, which really shouldn’t be all that long a wait. I can’t speak of it yet, but Samuel Doe is not president for life, you know. This is just something that we’re going to have to do, regardless of what we might prefer to do. Things will change.”

“How long … before things change?”

“I don’t know. Not long. A year. Two, maybe more. Although I hope not.”

It seemed unreal, unfair, and altogether unexpected. I certainly hadn’t desired it, but once put in front of me like this — once it was clear to me that I would have to abandon my husband and children and return alone to the United States, once I saw that I would be alone, safe from prosecution — I realized, gradually at first and then in a rush, that it was exactly what I had wanted all along.

I was being severed from my African husband and torn from my African sons. I was being released from my obligation to care for the chimps. And I had no choice! It was all being forced upon me by my husband’s stupidity and weakness and by the Liberian leader’s greed and paranoiac need to maintain control over his subjects, and by the American government’s desire to use the Republic of Liberia as a chip in a game with stakes too high to bother chasing down a middle-aged, one-time member of the Weather Underground traveling on a phony passport.

I’m not making excuses, I’m just trying to tell you the truth as I understand it now, not as I understood it then. At the time, I didn’t realize that I was once again seizing an opportunity to abandon one life for another. I thought I loved Africa, my new and, compared with my homeland, relatively innocent country. And although I knew that I was not in love with my husband, I thought that I was loyal to him. And my sons — I did love them, but I was not a woman for whom motherhood was a fulfilling, natural role. I’m still not. It’s always been an act. It was only with the chimps that I felt like a natural mother, but I did not love them individually and for themselves, the way I did my sons. I was only leaving my sons temporarily, I told myself. I may have been acting there, too, but I was playing before an empty house. In all my relations with both my sons and the chimps there was a disjunct, a powerful, buried conflict that made it possible for me to abandon both with such remarkable and awful ease that today, when I look back on it, I’m ashamed. I would try to make amends later and promised myself that I would return to all of them, to Africa, to my husband, my sons, and my chimps, and would never leave them again.

Finally, he was undressed. Standing naked before me, he finished his drink, then lit the mosquito coil, snapped off the light, and slipped into bed. When I followed and was lying on my back beneath the top sheet, he flopped an arm across my belly and pressed his face against my breasts, his signal that he wanted sex.

“No, Woodrow. Not tonight,” I said as gently as I could manage.

“Really?” he said, mildly surprised and disbelieving.

“Really.”

“As you wish, then.” He was silent for a moment. “It may be your last chance for a long, long time, you know.”

“Oh, Lord, Woodrow,” I said, turning to him, and smiled into the darkness at the gods of sex who knew everything I knew and more. I felt Woodrow stiffen against my thigh and took him into my arms.