The Devil that Danced on the Water

by Aminatta Forna

  ‘I really did have malaria,’ I repeated. I told him how I knew – not that my father had already diagnosed it, but that I had had it again twenty years later. Morlai grinned at me. ‘Anyway,’ I added, ‘you thought it was malaria at the time, too. I remember.’ He had gone down with it himself a week or two later. He smeared mint toothpaste on his chest, a local remedy designed to bring the temperature down, devised by people who couldn't afford doctors’ fees. He had put a little on my brow, too. But now he preferred the other version of the story. And so did I, except I knew it wasn't true.

  We lapsed into silence. I took a sip of my tea. Morlai dropped several sugar cubes into his own cup, stirred the liquid and blew lightly across the top of it, wrinkling the surface. I looked out over the balcony of my stepmother's home. A few clouds were gathered on the horizon, the air was silted with the dust. A girl of about fourteen sat under the tree opposite, next to her a basket of smoked fish. She was idling the time away, singing to herself.

  Automatically I scorned the idea that my illness was psychosomatic. Yet I could feel my response to being back in Sierra Leone and it was, in part, physical. Before I left London I woke up in the nights sweating with dread. Now I felt the apprehension: a shrivelling coldness. I shuddered involuntarily although it was late January, the harmattan was blowing itself out, within another month the temperature would reach its zenith.

  The last time I was here, in 1991, there was no talk of war, just a few skirmishes up-country which Brigadier Joseph Saidu Momoh, Siaka Stevens's successor as president, played down to a public only too happy to ignore the inevitable for a little longer. Now I had returned to a scorched country, where anarchy and a civil war fuelled by diamonds and fought by children had been a way of life for four years. The rebel army's hideous trademark mutilation of cutting off the hands from living victims had become the international emblem of this latest of African wars. I had seen the pictures and the footage sitting in my house in London: of farmers with stumps where there should have been hands holding hoes; mothers grasping babies in their truncated forearms; pretty girls with arms hacked off above the elbow.

  The images played and replayed in my mind. I had arrived not knowing what I would find, in a country to which I felt deeply bound, whilst at the same time I feared it. For as long as I had lived my fate had been intertwined with this country. Yet Sierra Leone to me was both utterly familiar and ineffably alien: I knew it but I could not claim to understand it. But I was convinced of one thing. What happened to my family twenty-five years ago was just the beginning. The forces that set out to destroy us ended up destroying everything.

  Santigi appeared to say hello. In all this time he had never left my stepmother's side. He must be over sixty but insists, to general amusement, he is no more than thirty. Mum pointed out that I, the youngest of the three children, am over thirty now, but that didn't deter him. Santigi clearly dyed his hair and was wearing dentures. In my presence he seemed overcome with shyness. He stood awkwardly, hands hanging by his side, while I kissed his cheek. I remembered them both as confident lads: the flares, the sunglasses, the illicit cigarettes, the slang phrases used to impress us. Morlai used to call me ‘sister’ and send me off into giggles every time. For a few minutes Santigi remained close by, leaning against the railing, watching us. Then he disappeared to start his chores, picking up the two chickens Morlai had brought for me to take to the kitchen.

  A pair of live chickens: a precious gift for an honoured guest, all the more precious in the present climate when there was a shortage of chickens – of all food – in the city. By the end of the week we had received over a dozen birds from family and neighbours – mostly roosters, I noticed. They squawked and fought in a pen outside my bedroom window until one afternoon the cook went into the yard with a sharp knife. I had returned home bringing my husband Simon. People acknowledged both these facts with a symbolic offering. Home. But it hadn't felt like home for the longest time. It was lost to me many years ago, sometime in the mid 1970s.

  I was still lying in bed, wrapped in blankets, when the CID men came to search our house. They rounded everybody up together in the sitting room, but they left me in my bed. From behind the veil of the mosquito net I watched the man searching my room. He pulled out each of the dressing-table drawers, rifled the contents and tipped them out. He opened the wardrobe. Printed summer dresses, cotton dungarees, bright shorts and beach shoes joined the heap on the floor. From the top of the cupboard he pulled down our empty suitcases, opened them up and tossed them aside. He wasn't one of the men who had arrested our father, though he had the same look about him: taut body, high forehead, sunken face with jutting cheekbones. He wore a large, cheap watch with a tarnished metal strap. His eyes and body roamed the room. I could hear the voices of other men as they moved through the house, shouting orders to Morlai to unlock doors. A second man put his head round the door and said something. The man searching my room grunted as he started flipping through my books, holding each one by the spine, shaking it, letting each one drop onto the floor face first, pages splayed open. He picked up my recorder from the music stand and put it back, carefully this time. Moments later he left the room, although I didn't register it at the time, without ever looking under my bed to where I kept my animal hospital.

  Afterwards it was quiet. I waited a while. I opened the door of my room and crept out with bare feet. I stood at the door of my parents’ bedroom. Empty drawers hung crookedly open; in the wardrobe a few items of clothing still clung to their hangers; the mattress was slumped between the bed and the floor; scattered at my feet were brown medicine bottles, wooden tongue depressors, gauze dressings – the contents of my father's upended medical bag. Mum was clearing up, and my cousins were helping her. I remember how none of us spoke; instead we worked in silence. Sheka was in his room, carefully replacing each item of his collection of objects back in the correct place on the shelf. Memuna and I tidied our room until everything was back where it had been, until we had made it perfect and obliterated all evidence of the CID's search. They came back time after time, but they never found anything. Once they confiscated a bottle of Mum's perfume, brandishing it as they left, claiming it was gun-cleaning fluid. We laughed at their stupidity – rather desperately, I recalled, because there was so little else to laugh at.

  Morlai and I had not set eyes on each other since those days, but I had never forgotten him and always retained a special fondness for him above all my cousins. He wrote to me when the war was at its height, asking for help sending his children to school. Morlai's own education was interrupted, but he believed resolutely in the value of education. Throughout the worst of the fighting he kept on teaching his children, using a blackboard in the yard of the hut in which he now lives.

  My stepmother appeared and joined us. She was sipping a cup of the decaffeinated tea I had brought for her from London. These days she worried about her blood pressure and her weight. She greeted Morlai warmly in Temne and asked after his family. There followed a rapid exchange and laughter. Morlai grinned, showing broad teeth, pulled his knees up and wrapped his arms around them, shook his head from side to side in a self-effacing manner. Morlai was protesting at something Mum had said, that much I could tell. He looked over at me and translated: ‘Auntie Yabome is reminding me of the time I was a drunkard,’ he said, laughing with embarrassment.

  ‘A drunkard?’ I smiled, a little uncertainly.

  ‘Yes, a drunkard. For many years afterwards, I drank very heavily. I left Freetown, moved to Kamakwie. Auntie Yabome saw me around that time. This is what she is referring to. I was drunk for four years.’ Mum interrupted again, saying something in Temne, but Morlai carried on until he had finished: ‘For four years, just drinking. But I cannot tell you now how I felt, like we were going back into the darkness again.’

  * * *

  I had spent the final year of one millennium trawling through old newspaper reports, writing letters, re-reading my father's letters to me, reading for the first
time those he wrote to other people. I had traced minor and major players from the past, interviewed exiled politicians and his university friends. I had spent two weeks combing the British Foreign Office files released for public scrutiny under the thirty-year rule; I had even flown to Washington to visit the World Bank and to go through the files on Sierra Leone previously held by the State Department, which had been released several years earlier than their British counterparts. I slept in a borrowed apartment and made the two-hour journey every day out to the National Archives in Maryland. I had hundreds – maybe even thousands – of photocopies, dated and filed. I had dozens of tapes, catalogued and transcribed to fill several lever-arch files. I had a row of red A4 notebooks full of my own handwriting. In the end I could put it off no longer. In January of the new millennium I finally made good my resolution and travelled back to Sierra Leone.

  It was impossible to fly direct to Sierra Leone any longer. No commercial airlines were willing to land at Lungi. I travelled to Freetown with Simon, through Banjul, where we spent two nights in a dreary beach hotel. The first evening we went out to get a couple of beers, walked down the dirty sand and past the rows of tourists on package holidays, lying in the sun while local men and children hovered a few feet away. Two plump young women stood up and strolled to the water; a couple of Gambian men fell quickly into step with them. They stood at the edge of the surf and watched while the women bathed and then followed them back up the beach, peeling away just before they reached the roped boundary of the hotel grounds.

  The next day we left our hotel, sidestepped the beach bums loitering outside the entrance, and made our way through the dusty roads and walled compounds to a nearby suburb, to where Nuhad Courban lived. Many people had fled Sierra Leone for the relative safety of the Gambia, including Nuhad. She was beautiful still, her drop-dead elegance intact: copper hair, tanned skin, immaculately manicured fingers. We sat together, surrounded by orange hibiscus blossoms, in the garden of the bungalow where she lived. On the table between us lay a pack of cards arranged in an unfinished game of patience. On the telephone between London and Banjul Nuhad had told me a little of what she knew about the events of 1974, and in the couple of hours we talked she fleshed out her story.

  On 30 July 1974, a few hours after the explosion in the early morning, people had thronged up to Spur Road to take a look at Kamara Taylor's damaged house. Nuhad had accompanied her friend Sarah Tejan, who lived close by. Neither the house nor the garden was cordoned off; the place was empty save for the sightseers who wandered about at will. Nuhad walked up to the balcony to take a look at the shattered windows. From the outside of the house she peered through into the bedrooms. There was something not right. She noticed it immediately, even remarking on the fact to her companion.

  ‘The beds were perfectly made. There were no indentations on the pillow, you know, where your head would lie. The top sheet was neatly pulled up. The broken glass was on top of the beds and hadn't been cleared off. You could see it plainly, the same in every room. Nobody slept in that house that night. I would swear an oath on it.’

  She traced the layout of the house with her finger on the table, showing the position of the bedrooms and where the damage to the masonry, caused by the explosion, had been. I watched: I still remembered the layout of the house perfectly. The bedrooms upstairs all looked out onto a veranda, exactly the same as the one below, which curved around the back of the house. The dynamite had been thrown up onto the balcony.

  ‘Later on everyone was remarking that no one slept there. Also, because no one was injured. No scratches . . . yet the glass splintered everywhere and the blast had gone off a foot or so away. By evening the whispers were all around town.’

  Nuhad leaned back and took a breath. She offered me a cigarette and lit one for herself, apologising over the local brand. That evening when the family had re-emerged, she had even seen one of Kamara Taylor's sons. He had recounted his story, insisting, she noticed, that he had been in bed asleep when it happened. In turn she congratulated him on his escape. She remembered she had added something about his hair – that he was lucky not to have any glass caught in his Afro; she'd felt a little silly as she said it.

  Nuhad was arrested at her home later the same week and taken down to the CID offices. She was shown into a small room, full of shadows. There were several men in the room. None of them spoke. Nuhad was shown to a chair at the edge of the room, where she sat down. There was a name on the desk plate: Bambay Kamara, the deputy chief of the CID, a man she knew only by his reputation. The silence lengthened. A young woman was brought into the room and made to sit on a chair in front of the desk. One of the men began to question her. From the gist of the questions and the woman's frightened replies, Nuhad gathered that she was somehow related to Mohamed Forna, a cousin perhaps or a sister-in-law, and she was one of those who had been rounded up and was being held at Pademba Road. The woman pleaded. One of the men stepped forward and struck her sharply across the face. The woman screamed on and on: her cries served to incense her assailant all the more, and he struck her repeatedly until she slumped into silence. Nuhad watched in fear. The purpose of this awful display was not lost on her.

  Bambay Kamara snapped his fingers and told one of the men to bring Nuhad a beer. She declined. He ignored her and repeated the order. The first woman was removed and a second brought into the room. She was cowering and Nuhad could see she was already badly bruised; a putrid odour arose from her. As the beating began again, Nuhad turned her face to the wall.

  Later in the day Nuhad made a statement. She insisted upon writing it herself. She kept it brief, stating she was a friend of Mohamed Forna. The last time she had seen him was on Sunday when the family had been her guests at the beach. After she made her statement Nuhad was allowed home. By then, she guessed, members of her family must have begun to make calls to find out what had happened to her.

  She was made to report to the CID every morning for a week, and on each visit she was made to wait, met with sly glances, calculated remarks, sexual innuendo, variations on an intimate intimidation. Finally a friend in the government recovered her passport and not long afterwards, at the urging of her mother to be gone as quickly as possible for her own safety, she flew out of the country, to Las Palmas, where she usually summered. She stayed away from Freetown for the next four months.

  I left the Gambia the next day with Simon, catching an internal flight from Banjul's modern concrete and glass airport, built to impress the tourists on whom the country's economy depended entirely. We, who had not arrived as part of a package deal and were flying farther into Africa instead of out of it, received none of the honours reserved for holidaymakers. We arrived at six o'clock in the morning for the flight to Freetown and we waited there until midday. In between we stood in an interminable queue while our names were written by hand on the passenger list, queued again to have our bags searched, then sat on the concrete plinth around one of the pillars and played cards with a porter.

  When at length the flight was called we crossed the tarmac to the plane and climbed the ladder. From the outside the West Coast Airlines aircraft looked respectable enough; inside was another matter entirely. The seats were tattered and stained, many of the seatbelts were broken, the overhead lockers were wooden and refused to open; instead our hand baggage was taken from us and thrown into a void in the tail of the aircraft.

  As we waited in our seats before take-off I watched the two Russian pilots making their way to the cockpit. I wondered, briefly, what in the world could have brought these men to be here, commandeering an ageing aircraft in and out of unstable African states? Just as quickly, I put the thought out of my mind.

  I spent the entire two-hour flight staring out of the filthy window at mangrove swamps, jungle and stretches of breathtaking coastline. My palms sweated. I was terrified we might crash. And then again, I was just as nervous of arriving, of being back in that country. As we circled in to land, where once there were fields of crops I saw
precise rows of military tents, a helicopter landing pad, white tanks bearing the blue emblem of the United Nations. We taxied down the runway to a standstill, the only aircraft in the whole place.

  Inside the old hall, which once thronged with people, three customs officials stood facing us. Between us on a bench lay our suitcases. They showed no signs of wanting them open, although I was already turning the combinations of the padlock. The officer nearest me, who had a peaked cap and tribal marks on his cheeks, waved for me to stop. He got straight to the point: ‘What do you have for us?’

  I wasn't sure I understood. ‘There's nothing inside but clothes, personal stuff. I'm here to visit my family.’

  ‘No’ He leered at my evident stupidity. ‘What do you have for we?’ He tapped his chest and then gestured along the line of customs officers.

  ‘I don't have any leones,’ I stalled. ‘We've only just arrived. Maybe next time.’

  He sniggered, ‘Oh, we take all currencies,’ sharing the joke with his friends. ‘Sterling, dollars, ha, ha!’

  I hesitated: I had been told to expect this. It was impossible to clear customs and immigration without bribing someone. I had a tape recorder and notepads in my bag, Simon had a set of professional cameras. They could make life very difficult and if I complained to their boss he would doubtless only demand an even larger sum from me, or worse, threaten to put me back on the plane. I dug into my bag and found a pound coin, reluctantly handed it to him. He inspected it and then passed it to one of his mates, who put it into his pocket. This is what we had come to. There was nothing particularly new in a customs officer looking for a tip. The change was in his attitude: corruption so shameless it didn't even attempt to hide. The man did not appear to know, much less to care, that there was a right way to behave.