Russell Banks - The Darling

He said he didn’t think so. Not Doe’s soldiers. Not this time. “Maybe from Prince Johnson. Real wild boys,” he said. They had gone through the place and emptied the petty cash box and had taken the radio and my old manual typewriter. They’d noted the eleven chimps, pointedly counting them, Kuyo said, and they’d told him that as soon as they got themselves a truck, they were coming back.

“Them gonna make plenty-plenty bush meat, Miz Sundiata,” Estelle said and started to whimper. “Them men are terrible peoples!” she cried.

“Then we’ll have to move the chimps,” I said.

And we did move them. It took the entire night, but the three of us managed to transport all eleven dreamers from the sanctuary out to Boniface Island, a small, mangrove-covered islet in the middle of the broad estuary. Chimpanzees cannot swim and are afraid of open water, which made the island, though more of a sanctuary, as much a place of confinement as the renovated prison at Toby had been. In pairs and with the larger adults one by one, we moved the dreamers in the same large, wheeled cage that we had used to bring them to Toby from the blood lab in the first place. The river bank was only a few hundred yards down a narrow lane from the sanctuary, and luckily Kuyo had a friend with an old, leaky Boston Whaler with an outboard motor that hadn’t been stolen by the soldiers yet. For fifty dollars, Kuyo’s friend agreed to let us use the boat for the night. We flattened the bottom of the hull by laying a sheet of plywood into it and used another for a ramp to load and off-load the chimps. Seven times we rolled the cage onto the boat and kept it steady during the three-mile voyage out to Boniface, where we rolled the cage from the boat onto the short, dark beach and released the chimps, strangers suddenly freed in a strange land. Until they discovered, of course, that the land was very small, not much larger than their communal space at Toby, and was surrounded by water.

With genuine interest and curiosity, the dreamers watched us work. All night long, sweating and grunting from the effort, we bumped and scraped our knuckles and shins against the cage and the gunwales as we fought to keep the cage steady during the crossing. Estelle and Kuyo were both very strong, much stronger than I, and even they were exhausted from the work, but neither complained or held back or asked to rest. Once we had our plan and technique in place, we worked in silence, except to comfort and reassure the dreamers, who seemed somehow to recognize that we were all in great danger and were trying to save their lives. None of them panicked or cried out.

We moved Doc first, the largest and strongest of the dreamers, their leader. His compliance and trust instructed the others to do likewise. When we released him from the cage and quickly pulled the cage back onto the boat and let the boat drift a few feet out from the beach, I cast the beam of my flashlight onto him. He was crouched on the short beach, peering around at the low mangroves, sniffing the air, taking the measure of the space that surrounded him. He scooted in a quick circle over the island and returned to the beach. He looked out at the boat, then looked aside and down, as if pondering a deep question: Why am I here instead of someplace else?

“Doc scared, but don’t want nobody to know it,” Kuyo whispered.

I flicked off the flashlight. “Me, too.”

By the time we’d moved all eleven of the dreamers, it was nearly dawn, the safest part of the day in Monrovia, when the only people out and about were women and children scouring the city for food and water and kerosene for cooking, stepping over fresh bodies, the night’s kill, and heading quickly back to their huts and shanties to hole up in darkness for the rest of the day and night, avoiding as much as possible being caught alone and unarmed by one of the roaming gangs of men and boys sky high on drugs, palm wine, and murder and lusting for blood and sex and loot. But it felt safe enough for me to walk the few miles from Toby back to Duport Road. I had no other place to go now anyhow and couldn’t stay at the sanctuary waiting for the soldiers to return. Kuyo wanted to leave at once for his village in Lofa, to be with his wife and children, who had fled the city a few weeks ago, but he agreed to pack up my records and logbooks and bring them to Duport Road for safekeeping as soon as he got a few hours’ sleep. Estelle had already locked herself inside her shed to hide and sleep. She had a vague plan of waiting till nightfall and trying then to slip past the checkpoints north of the city. She’d heard that her village was under the control of Prince Johnson and there was no longer any fighting. The looting and rape, for the time being, at least, had been completed out there, and something resembling civil order had returned. These loosely controlled armies roared through the villages like hurricanes, and it was usually safest after one of them had passed on and another had not yet arrived, when they were killing people elsewhere over food, pillage, women, and territory. Right now, all three armies were converging on the city, Monrovia, closing in on it like three hungry lions trying to take down a wounded bull and keep the other two at bay.

I had no provincial village to return to, no family or tribe to hide or protect me until this war was over. My dreamers were for the time being safe on their island, stocked with enough food to last them a week or so, when I planned to bring over a fresh supply of fruits, vegetables, and leafy greens. But beyond that, I had no plan, except to wait out the war and hope that it would end quickly, possibly in the next few weeks, with Charles Taylor vanquishing Samuel Doe and Prince Johnson alike. I still nurtured the belief that once Charles had removed Doe from power and kept Johnson from coming to power, he’d quickly pacify the rest of the country with the help of ECOMOG and the other regional forces, and in short order he would establish a constitutional assembly and hold elections, redistribute land, create social and economic equality, and bring about a socialist democracy in this little corner of West Africa that would shine across the continent like an alabaster city on a hill. My sons would return to me then. Together we would bury their father properly in the cemetery of the church he so loved. They would heal from their terrible ordeal, and the four of us, mother and sons, would build a coherent, useful life together in the new Liberia.

It was a flimsy excuse for a vision, a sorry patchwork made of scraps of fantasy, but it had not been willed into being or chosen from among others, for I had no alternative vision available to me then, no plan, no option, no blueprint for action that did not lead me to flee this place, abandoning my missing sons, my murdered husband’s body buried among the flowers behind our house, my dreamers marooned on an island. That tattered vision was my life, the only life I had now.

YOU MAY REMEMBER my telling early on how the soldiers, returning to the sanctuary, mutilated and killed poor Kuyo — while I drank myself to sleep on half a bottle of warm gin back at the house on Duport Road. You may remember my telling how Estelle and I started to gather the rain-soaked, muddied records I’d taken years to accumulate, when I grew suddenly despondent beyond repair or relief, and instead of saving those records and logbooks, I burned them there in the yard of the sanctuary. And when Estelle asked me, “Why you doin’ that, Miz Sundiata! After we work so hard to collect ’em!” I said, “I don’t know, Estelle. I don’t know why I’m burning the papers. I just don’t. There is no sanctuary here now, Estelle,” I said to her. “It’s gone. Like Woodrow. Like my sons. Like Kuyo. Like the chimps. Gone. And if you don’t go home and stay there, you’ll be gone, too,” I told her, and she obeyed me, and I never saw the girl again.