The Darling

by Russell Banks

  The night of the coup, however, Woodrow surprised me and did not stay out till dawn or beyond. Instead he arrived home around one a.m. Jeannine and I rushed from our bedrooms to the living room to see who or what had caused the dogs to bark. I flipped on the light, and there he was, standing by the door like a burglar caught in the act.

  “You’re home early,” I said.

  “Yes.” Then, speaking slowly, almost with a drawl, he said, “I’m lucky to be home at all, if you want to know the truth. Have you been listening to the radio?”

  “No. I was at the lab till supper, and Jeannine was with the boys all afternoon outside. Why? Did we miss something?”

  “You missed something, yes.” Quickly, he told us what had happened that afternoon and evening and gave us an indication of what would likely happen tomorrow. A dozen enlisted men led by an illiterate master sergeant named Samuel Doe had pushed their way into the Executive Mansion, and facing barely token opposition from the president’s personal security force, had captured Tolbert and placed him under arrest. Their boldness and the suddenness of the attack had bought them sufficient time and unpredictability to let them capture and imprison in a single afternoon all of the president’s ministers, including, of course, Woodrow, along with the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, and the few generals still loyal to William Tolbert. The soldiers simply walked into the offices, homes, and restaurants where the officials happened to be working or dining and took them at gunpoint to the damp, windowless cells at Barclay Barracks. By midnight, Sergeant Doe and his men had released several of the lesser ministers, again including Woodrow, and the generals, in exchange for their pledge of support for the coup. They announced over the radio that they had overthrown William Tolbert’s corrupt and barbarous regime. Sergeant Doe stammered and stumbled his way through the announcement, as if making it up as he went along. Then he and his men eviscerated the president with their bayonets and tossed him and his guts from the window of his office to the lawn below.

  “These boys mean business. They’re going to clean house,” Woodrow said, and poured himself three fingers of whiskey and drank it off.

  “What are you going to do? What are the Americans doing?” I asked.

  “The usual. They’re evacuating most of their embassy staff and any U.S. nationals who want to leave. The cultural attaché over there, Sam Clement, called to check on you and the boys, actually. Kind of surprised me. I guess they still regard you as a U.S. citizen over there. Anyhow, I told him we’ll be all right,” he said.

  “Are you sure?”

  “These new boys, they know they’re going to need a few people like me just to keep things running. They’re enlisted men is all, soldiers, sergeants and corporals, mostly illiterate Krahn country boys, and they’re already scared of what they’ve done. They even want Charles Taylor to come home and help them run the country,” he said, and abruptly gave a pleased cackle. “Ha! I may come out of this with a promotion!”

  Jeannine in her nightgown and cotton robe, castoffs I’d given her, stood listening at the door, half hidden in the darkness of the hallway. “You wan’ some supper, Mistah Sundiata?” she asked. She rubbed her eyes like a child wakened unexpectedly from sleep.

  “No, no, I’m fine! You two go on to bed. I’ve got to check through my files. There are some things I’d just as soon keep out of the hands of anyone who might come looking,” he said, and poured himself another drink. “Can’t be too careful at a time like this.” His face was covered with a film of sweat, whether with excitement or fear I couldn’t tell. Possibly, in this climate, it was the whiskey: Scotch is a northern-latitude drink. Woodrow’s consumption of alcohol had gradually increased over the last year or so, and I’d begun to suspect that he was becoming an alcoholic. I’d never lived with an alcoholic before and wasn’t sure what to expect or how to measure the disease’s stealthy approach.

  “I’ll fix you some chicken,” Jeannine said and headed for the kitchen.

  “Fine, fine, fine. I’ll eat it in here!” he hollered.

  “Good night, Woodrow,” I said, and turned and walked slowly down the hallway to my bed. I wondered if the symptoms of alcoholism were different for Africans than for Americans, for blacks than for whites. A drunk is a drunk, I decided, regardless of his race or culture.

  A while later, from the bedroom, I smelled paper burning. The living room fireplace was mostly for decorative purposes and had a lousy draft, but was cheering on a rain-chilled evening. Woodrow was cleaning out his files, erasing paper trails that might link him to the doomed and despised president and his inner circle, a circle that Woodrow had for so long tried to join but that, despite his best efforts at flattery, servility, and faithfulness, had rebuffed him. No wonder he seemed almost pleased by the coup. No wonder he’d cackled with delight at the prospect of his good friend Charles Taylor’s triumphant return.

  Sometime later, I was wakened by a woman’s light laugh. Jeannine’s? Then silence. I could still smell the smoke of burnt paper, but it was old, cold smoke now. It was nearly dawn, birds were making their first chirps, and Woodrow still hadn’t come in to bed. Then I heard that all-too-familiar thumping, the sound of my headboard being bumped against the wall by Woodrow’s tireless thrusting—only this time, for the first time, it wasn’t my bed, our bed, and the wall wasn’t the one behind my pillow. I knew at once that Woodrow was with Jeannine, and the bed was hers, the wall the one behind her head in the small room beyond the boys’ bedroom. I lay there curled on my side like a question mark, listening, unable to shut out the sound of my husband fucking his niece, my sons’ nanny, my friend, perhaps the only human friend I had in those days. And did I want to do the normal thing—leap from my bed, run down the hall, fling open the door to Jeannine’s room, and shriek bloody murder at the treacherous bitch and bastard adulterer of a husband? Did I want to expose and humiliate them both? Would my relationship with the two of them be forever changed?

  No. None of it. It was as if they had been doing this for years, since the first week of our marriage, and I had come to accept it as normal and even necessary. Simply, it was how we lived now, Woodrow and the boys and I. And, of course, it was payback for my little tryst with Satterthwaite. We were all adulterers. I knew that, restless, agitated, still exhilarated by having come so close to death and escaped, Woodrow had walked into Jeannine’s room and slid into her bed, spread her legs, and begun to fuck her. He was exercising his prerogative as head of the household, and she had merely accepted his heavy, sweating presence atop her as natural and inevitable. I grabbed Woodrow’s pillow and covered my ears with it, muffling the sound of his betrayal and Jeannine’s easy compliance.

  A moment of relative silence, the only sound my own throbbing pulse, and then the thumping of Jeannine’s bed against the wall gradually began to filter through the pillow, and I could hear them again. I took the pillow away and lay on my back listening, as on and on it went, like the steadily pounding piston of an engine, while the ground doves outside my window began to gurgle and pepperbirds began to sing, a rooster crowed, a car drove slowly past the house, and someone in the house next door, in the kitchen just beyond the terrace outside our bedroom, turned on the radio. A man was speaking from the radio, his voice a weird blend of authority and confusion—Samuel Doe, the new head of state for the Republic of Liberia. He was announcing the execution of the president and the arrest of fifteen traitors and giving the time and place of their upcoming public execution.

  Later that day, in a now-infamous episode, Sergeant Doe and his men hauled thirteen of the ministers, the Supreme Court justice, and the major general who had run the president’s security apparatus down to the beach a mile south of the city, where, before a huge, cheering crowd, they erected fifteen telephone poles in the sand, stripped their victims, most of them fat, old men, to their underwear, tied them to the poles, and shot them literally to pieces. The executioners were drunk, and consequently had to fire hundreds of rounds into the bodies to be sure that th
e old men were dead. Many in the crowd snapped photos and videotaped the event, and all day long, with loudspeakers mounted on truck beds blaring juju and reggae, the people sang and danced in drunken celebration, while buzzards circled overhead and small yellow dogs worked their way closer and closer to the fly-blown carcasses tied to the poles—meat rotting in the sun.

  THOUGH WORSE WAS to come, 1983, my eighth year in Liberia, was a hard one for me. But who knew what was coming? Certainly I didn’t. I was forty now and honestly believed that the truly difficult part of my life was behind me. Oh, sure, I knew I’d have to face individual crises in the future—who doesn’t? My three sons, as they grew into adolescence and beyond, were bound to create episodes of fear and trembling; my marriage to Woodrow someday soon would have to withstand the blows of middle-age, mine as much as his, and the eventual departure of the boys from home, and the culmination, disappointing, of Woodrow’s career, for I knew by then, even though he’d been made minister, a full member of the cabinet, that he was never going to get inside the inner circle of power that was now centered on Samuel Doe. I was already hearing anxious grumbles from Woodrow about my own career—although I still hesitated to call it that, my work with the chimps, my dreamers.

  But I pictured these coming events and crises as separate beads on a string, individually not too heavy to bear, collectively merely the defining weight of a life, my life, anyone’s. In the last year, however, I’d begun to believe that all my future dark days, like those of most people I knew, even here in Liberia, would be matched about evenly by future days of brightness. Darkness would be canceled by light, neutralized, evened off, so that when I grew old and died, I’d come out at zero. In the game of life, all I expected, all I hoped for, was to come out even, a zero-sum game.

  These aren’t low expectations for a life, exactly. They aren’t high, either. But for me, as I entered my forty-first year, my expectations and hopes had at last met one another and were a solid fit, a balanced scale, yin and yang, hand in glove. No more dreams of revolution, no more millenarian expectations, no more longing for utopia. I called my newly achieved state of mind realism and almost never used words like bourgeois anymore. I was standing on solid ground now. Terra firma. Yes, indeed—realism. My mother and father were still afloat in clouds of unknowing, maybe, but I had finally created for myself a life that neither imitated theirs nor stood in simple reaction to it. After all these years, I could say to myself that I had freed myself from my parents. It may have taken rather too long, but I’d done it.

  I’d even begun talking with Woodrow about returning to the States with the boys to visit my parents. Their American grandparents. Could he arrange it with the American embassy, possibly through the cultural officer? Whatzisname, Sam Clement? Or could he speak informally to the U.S. ambassador himself about issuing a passport for Dawn Sundiata, née Carrington, with the boys traveling on Woodrow’s Liberian VIP passport, so there’d be no nasty surprises when we arrived in the States?

  “It can be arranged, of course,” Woodrow said. “Bit of a turnaround, though, wouldn’t you say?”

  We were at dinner at home, eating on the patio, the five of us, a peaceful moonlit evening at the end of the rainy season. For the first time in months, I could hear the dry clatter of the palms in the warm breeze. “Don’t jump the gun,” I said to him and poured myself a third glass of wine. The boys had left the table and were being bathed now by Jeannine. “I’m only giving the idea some idle consideration,” I explained. “I’ve been thinking about them a lot lately, maybe because hitting forty makes me realize how old they are. I’ve started to worry about their health, actually. And I’m feeling more guilt with each passing year, Woodrow. Guilt for the distance between us. And there’s the boys to think of. Really. I don’t want the boys to grow up without knowing anything more about my parents than they would if I were an orphan.”

  “Ah, well, that’s true for me, too, you know.” Woodrow lighted a Dunhill cigarette, pushed back his chair, and crossed his legs. He watched me carefully, as if he thought something new and puzzling might be happening here.

  “The boys know your parents. It’s mine I’m talking about.”

  “I mean that I myself sometimes think of you as an orphan. But you’re not, are you?”

  Most of what Woodrow knew of my past he’d learned years ago, when I first came over from Ghana, from a small sheaf of information gleaned from that file folder slipped to him by the same American cultural attaché, Sam Clement. I didn’t know what was in that file and wasn’t sure I wanted to know, so hadn’t asked. It wasn’t until nearly a year after we were married that Woodrow had actually showed me the folder, and he did it for his reasons, not mine.

  He brought it from his office one afternoon and carried it out to the lab compound, where I was sitting at my desk logging genealogical data on the baby chimps. He dropped the folder on top of my logbook, and I opened and read through it quickly and in silence, while he sat on the corner of my cluttered desk and waited. An oscillating fan on the desk hummed and drifted back and forth, riffling the papers in the folder. It wasn’t much, barely two single-spaced, typed pages and fuzzy copies of the photos used for the FBI’s Most Wanted list in 1970, after the Greenwich Village townhouse bombing that sent me and the entire Weather cohort permanently underground.

  I sighed heavily at the sight of my old face. It brought me reluctantly to grieve all over again for someone I’d loved and whose death I thought I’d gotten over, not the three friends who’d been killed in the explosion—I never really knew them more than slightly from the various national SDS conventions—but the late, unlamented Hannah Musgrave. Here it all was again: the names and dates, the tired facts of my biography up to then, the description of my few skills and talents. It was the CV of a small-time, would-be domestic terrorist. Sad. Pathetic.

  “Why are you showing this to me now? You had it when I got here, when I first came over from Accra, didn’t you?”

  “You’re my wife now. If I’m ever asked, I should know what’s true and what’s a lie. In case I have to defend you. I’ve seen files like this before, you know; the president has a cabinet stuffed with files just like this, and they’re mostly lies, lies and false confessions. But bits and pieces are true.”

  “Yes,” I said. “But everything’s pretty much true, what’s in there.”

  “Pretty much?”

  “Except … well, except that I never knew what was happening anywhere other than where I myself happened to be, and I wasn’t responsible for anything that I didn’t do personally. Which wasn’t much, believe me. We weren’t that stupid or naive. We were in these small cells, what we called foco groups, and mine was in New Bedford, Massachusetts. So when that townhouse blew up and killed those three people, I was as shocked as everyone else. I hadn’t heard from any of those people in years, didn’t even know if they were still part of Weather or not. Same with the Pentagon bombing and most of the others. The New York police stations. All of them, actually. That was the idea, to keep the cells separate. Only the three or four people at the top—the Weather Bureau, we called them—knew what all the cells were supposed to be doing, and they knew only in a general way. We were instructed to invent and implement our own individual attacks on the government cell by cell. Some of the cells were really creative and bold. But others, like mine, were incompetent and timid and more or less driven by fantasy. You have to understand, Woodrow, most of us were like actors in a play that on a barely conscious level was mainly about disappearing. About breaking with your past. You know?”

  “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 weir
dly 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.