Russell Banks - The Darling

Finally, I gave up searching the city for my sons, and decided to risk driving to Fuama, where I half believed they might have gone, although I couldn’t imagine why. I left Kuyo in charge of the dreamers. He had grown to love them and they him. A few times the soldiers, Doe’s men, had come by the sanctuary to see if I had left yet, and when they saw that I was still in charge of the place, they departed, shrugging and smiling over my foolishness. Except for the bodies of the dreamers themselves, bush meat, there wasn’t much to interest them at the sanctuary, nothing of value to loot or destroy. Estelle, Woodrow’s sixteen-year-old cousin, a sweet country girl who’d come to the city to work for me at the sanctuary, was as loyal as Kuyo to me and the dreamers and had stayed on at Toby long past the time when she should have fled back to her village. When she first arrived from the backcountry, I’d given her an unused room at the sanctuary, an old storage shed, that she had made her home, and I’d begun teaching her to read. She was a pretty, shy girl, not as bright as I might have liked, but kind and eager to please.

For a long time, she and Kuyo and the dreamers had been my only companions, and because I seemed almost magically protected against the depredations of the soldiers, Kuyo and Estelle had come to think of me as their protector, and thus both had stayed on longer than they should have. Everyone in Monrovia had a tribal village they could flee to, but no one knew for sure if it was safe there. Tribes thought to be loyal to Taylor, like the Gio, were viewed by Doe’s men and Johnson’s as the enemy and were therefore legitimate targets of opportunity, even though they were unarmed civilians. Tribes thought to be loyal to Doe or Johnson because of lineage, were slaughtered by the soldiers of one or the other or both of the others, the women and girls raped, their villages razed and rice and cassava and garden stores looted or burned. All over the country, people were in confused flight from one or the other of the three forces, and sometimes from all three. When the fighting had been mostly in the bush, people had fled into Monrovia; but now it had come to the outskirts of the city, and everyone who could had fled back into the bush. Monrovia seemed like the still center of a swirling, countrywide storm, with all its inhabitants waiting, heads lowered, hands tied behind their backs, for the three armies to converge there.

THE ROAD TO FUAMA was littered with abandoned cars and pickup trucks, tires stripped, hoods and trunks open, some of the vehicles still smouldering. The rubber plantations and plowed fields were empty of workers and overgrown, neglected for months now, since Charles’s band of rebels had crossed into Liberia from Guinea at Nimba and Johnson had come in from the north. The villages all seemed to have been abandoned by the inhabitants, and most of the buildings had been burned. Desolation lay all around.

At the river I was met by a group of four boys, two of them carrying AK-47s and bandoliers of ammunition draped over their bony shoulders. They wore do-rags on their heads and cheap wraparound sunglasses that made them look like spindly insects. When they approached the car, I opened the window and said that I wanted to cross the river to Fuama.

They didn’t answer. One boy held out his hand, palm up, and I put a dollar in it. The others did the same, and I put a dollar in each hand and said again that I wanted to cross the river to my husband’s village. I noticed a man, also in sunglasses and wearing a do-rag, camo shirt, cargo pants, and Timberland boots, lounging by a cotton tree nearby, smoking a cigarette and barely watching the boys under his apparent command. Though I had many times over the years made this journey to Fuama with Woodrow and had come to know most of the inhabitants of the settlement, at least their faces, these boys and their commander were strangers to me. Many of Woodrow’s people did not speak English, or spoke it only a little. Perhaps they don’t understand me, I thought.

The man got up slowly and strolled towards the car. I said to him, “My husband is Woodrow Sundiata. His father is headman of Fuama. My sons—”

The man cut me off. “Go home now,” he said. He waved the barrel of his gun in the direction I had come. “Turn and go home.”

Something in his voice was familiar. “Do I know you?” I asked. “What’s your name?”

“You know me.” He took off his sunglasses, and I recognized him at once. It was Albert, Woodrow’s nephew, who had guided me into the village years ago, on my first visit to Fuama, when I’d been left behind, a teenage boy who was in missionary school and hoped to follow Woodrow’s example in life. And indeed he had, or so I believed. He had finished high school in Liberia and, at Woodrow’s expense, had attended business school in Baltimore for two years and had returned to Liberia, where he had taken a job in Loma, up near the border of Sierra Leone, with an American-owned sand-and-gravel company.

“Albert!” I cried. “I’m so relieved it’s you.” His eyes were red rimmed and his expression was cold, utterly without feeling. “You’re a soldier,” I said.

“Everybody makin’ war now. You g’wan home now, missus,” he said and put his sunglasses back on.

“Albert, my sons … are they here? In Fuama? Do you know where they are?”

For a moment he said nothing. He turned to the boys with him and spoke rapidly in Kpelle. They answered with slow shakes of their heads. Then Albert said, “Mus’ be them dead. Most everybody from the family dead now. On account of Woodrow an’ Doe.”

“Woodrow is dead, Albert.”

“I know that.”

“He’s your uncle. Don’t you care?”

“I care, yes. But now everybody in the family, the whole village almost, they dead, too. On account of Woodrow bein’ for Doe an’ against Taylor.”

“It was Doe’s men who killed Woodrow,” I said. “Not Taylor’s.”

“Don’t matter who kill him.”

“No, you don’t understand!”

He started to walk away at that, but I got out of the car and followed him down to the edge of the river, where he stood looking across to the landing on the other side. The river was high from the rains and dark red with runoff from the highlands. “The raft is gone,” I said. “How do you get over to the village?”

“The village gone, too. The soldiers, them come an’ mash it all up. Burn all the houses, kill all the peoples inside an’ shoot the ones who run out.”

“What soldiers? Doe’s?”

“Charles Taylor’s soldiers. He come here with them and help to kill all the people himself. Then he goes on the radio an’ says it a great victory over Samuel Doe’s army boys. But there ain’t none of them here. Never was. Only old men an’ women an’ little babies here. When I hear Charles Taylor on the radio I came very fast from Loma to see what happened. Only these little boys left. Them an’ me, we been buryin’ all the dead peoples.”

“Where did you and these boys get the guns?” I asked him.

“Prince Johnson. He got plenty-plenty guns for people who wants to go against Charles Taylor while Prince an’ his soldiers goes against Samuel Doe in the city.”

We stood side by side in silence. He was a small, frail-boned, young man — like Woodrow a decade ago, before alcohol and middle age thickened him. “Albert, what will you do now?”

“Can’t say. ’Cept to keep killin’ peoples. Till Taylor an’ Doe both dead or run out of the country. Prince Johnson give us plenty protection. Nothin’ can hurt us. No bullets, no machete, nothin’. He promise me a good job after the war an’ a house in the city. My war name ain’t Albert, y’ know,” he said. “No more Albert Sundiata,” he said with pride. “My war name is Sweet Dreams Gladiator. Pretty cool, eh?” He smiled broadly, boyishly. Then, still smiling, he said to me, “I need your car. Woodrow’s car.”