A tide mark of dirt circled the cream-painted walls of the ward. It was possible to make out, from the stains on the wall, where a bed had been moved or taken away. The blanket on which Morlai lay looked discoloured, whether through age or lack of washing I could not tell. I had felt the grit on the floor underfoot as I walked the length of the ward to his bed. Above our heads flies spun around each other in lazy figures of eight. There was one nurse, no sign yet of a doctor.
Later, as Yabome, Simon and I stood outside the doctor's surgery waiting to talk to her about Morlai's treatment, I stared at the floor by my feet and watched an army of ants swarm over the corpse of a gecko lizard and start to devour the eyes. There were no seats. I stood away from the wall, but as the hour passed I found myself reluctantly leaning against it. A family appeared at the top of the stairs and slowly made their way towards us. At the head came two young men, propping up an elderly man. The old man was dressed in a trailing, white gown and could barely support himself on his own legs. Agonisingly, inch by inch, they progressed towards us down the corridor. When they drew abreast one of the young men switched places with his sister at his grandfather's elbow and knocked on the door of the doctor opposite.
After a few moments the door opened and the doctor surveyed the family. ‘Wait downstairs,’ he said and turned to go back inside. The young man explained they had been sent upstairs by the receptionist. The doctor shook his head firmly. ‘No. He should not have sent you up here. Wait downstairs.’ The door closed. I watched as the family retraced their steps.
The row of wooden shelves at the hospital pharmacy was empty. There were no customers. A crowd of people begged at the door, not for money but for medicine. The pharmacist stared at the list of drugs and equipment the doctor had given us and snorted. He suggested we try the privately owned Lebanese chemist nearby.
By the time we returned to the hospital the day was almost at an end. Sarah had arrived after work, still wearing her police officer's uniform. Her sons and her small daughter were with her. She would sleep the night on the floor by Morlai's bed. We handed her the gauze, needles, intravenous tubes and bandages. The drugs had been left with the doctor, who warned us to lock the rest of the things away, for there were a great many thefts among the patients at night. Sarah's monthly salary came to a fraction of the money we had just spent on antibiotics and medical equipment. The cost to us had been thirty pounds.
We had spoken to Morlai to say goodbye. We were due to leave in the morning. Morlai apologised over and over, but I felt like the guilty one. I berated myself for not noticing how much pain he had been in during the past few weeks. I had acquired a tunnel vision, nothing else mattered, I was fixated only upon my own purpose. Every day I pressed on, thinking only of what new information I had acquired, where my next goal lay. When Morlai tried to tell me he was unwell I had failed to listen to him properly. Finally he had ceased to make the effort. While we spoke I saw the nurse at the end of the ward rise and begin to usher the visitors outside. I kissed Morlai on the forehead and Simon shook his hand. I could see the effort had exhausted Morlai. We walked slowly away from the bed.
At Hastings there was still no sign of the airport staff. Beyond the gates the hall stood empty. The number of people around us had grown and a young street entertainer had begun to work the crowd. The man was a natural comic. He had drawn everyone's attention by addressing a weeping woman, one of the passengers, in a loud voice. Pretending to be her lover or her husband, he strutted and shouted, swore he would not leave her – she had but to say the word. At first, believing this to be a lovers’ quarrel, we had all rather uncharacteristically looked away, though I had found myself unable to resist surreptitiously watching him. When I caught his eye and saw the smile he gave me I realised this was an act. He passed his hat around, pronouncing to the crowd, who by now were laughing out loud – all except the tearful girl, that is: though he was but a beggar he had made it his ambition to be the prince of beggars. He deftly retrieved his hat and at the approach of a security guard he slipped through the crowd and was gone.
A second performer stepped forward. He was a man of about sixty dressed in a pair of outsized canvas trousers cut off at the knee and tied at the waist with a piece of string. He had a small moustache and a streak of almost white hair across the top of his crown. On the ground he spread out a blue plastic sheet containing his props: a small pile of rice, a bottle of water, a glass, a tin plate. He straightened up and a moment later he went down on his hands, flipped his legs up and over him until he was upright again. Then he collapsed into the splits. I caught my breath. I watched him tumble, first holding a plate of rice in one of his hands, next holding a glass of water, tumbling so fast that the glass performed an entire revolution and yet he never lost a drop. It was an act I had once known almost by heart.
Musa. That was the name of the man who had entertained a small girl at a party she believed was her sixth birthday. Through all this time he remained a performer. I tried to make him remember the day. Perhaps it was the emotion of all that had occurred in the last few weeks, in the last two days especially: it suddenly became overwhelmingly important to me that Musa remember. I felt as though I had stumbled upon a vital witness to the past. The old entertainer smiled and nodded at me. I tried to describe the day at Minister's Quarters thirty years ago. He was still smiling, looking through me, evidently humouring me. After a while I let him go. It was enough to have seen him there.
The gates opened and we were pushed through with the swell of bodies. Suddenly there was barely time to say goodbye to Yabome. At passport control we stood in front of a young woman and her two male colleagues seated at a rough wooden desk. We handed our documents over. The young woman stared at the inside page of my passport, her expression sullen. ‘Forna?’ Her tone was brusque.
‘Yes,’ I replied. I waited.
‘What kind of business has brought you to Sierra Leone?’ I told her I was visiting family. The woman arched her eyebrows.
The man next to her, who was in his fifties, looked at the passport. ‘Which Forna?’ he asked. The familiar pattern: I had become used to it again.
‘Mohamed Sorie,’ I stated boldly. ‘Dr Mohamed Sorie Forna.’ The expression on the face of the woman officer remained unchanged. Obviously the name meant nothing to her. She opened her mouth to ask me another question and snapped it shut as her colleague elbowed her.
‘Nineteen-seventy-five?’ He looked at me and I nodded, yes. He took Simon's passport and lifted my own from the hands of his colleague. ‘Please go through,’ he said. ‘Someone will bring your papers.’ We stepped past the desk, past the scramble of passengers, and into the waiting area.
I took a seat. I sat and stared out of the open-sided building at the runway, watching the steam begin to rise as the sun heated the damp tarmac. I remembered how, once, my brother and sister and I had hired a taxi to bring us home from Lumley beach; Mum was at work, there was no one to collect us. The taxi-driver had chatted on the way home and asked us the same question. I remember the astonishment on his face as he swivelled around in his seat, taking his eyes dangerously off the road. He had a good look at us. When he dropped us outside the gates of the house, holding onto our wet towels and snorkels, he had waived the fare.
An hour later a small aircraft landed and taxied to a stop. By now the last of the passengers had made their way through the check-in, through health and immigration. The woman from the immigration desk approached and sat next to me on the moulded plastic seats. She handed me our passports, freshly stamped with exit permits, and then lingered as we both watched the Russian pilot step down from the cockpit of the plane and walk towards the building. As I struggled with my hand luggage she offered to carry one of the bags and walked with us to the end of the queue to board the plane. Then she shook my hand and disappeared.
47
Progress had stalled. I had flown back to Sierra Leone in December of 2000 on a Ghana Airways flight loaded with people returning home for
Christmas. At the check-in desk Simon and I had waited more than two hours while passengers ahead of us, overburdened with two, three times the baggage allocation, tried to persuade the airline staff to allow them to board. When our turn came the baggage clerk gratefully waved through our two small holdalls and we watched them trundle out of sight on the conveyor belt, in between the boxed microwave cookers and the folded pushchairs. After an overnight journey we were delayed for twelve hours in Accra, where we waited for our connecting flight. It turned out the plane that should have carried us to Freetown had belly-flopped onto the runway in the previous week. Air Ghana was down to a single plane: the aircraft on which we had arrived. In the meantime the plane had been sent to collect passengers who had been stranded in Abidjan for the last four days. When it returned to Accra it would take us to Freetown.
We boarded at six in the evening, just as the darkness was beginning to close in. The air was surprisingly cool, the sky overcast as we waited on the tarmac, holding boarding passes that bore no seat numbers. An hour later the plane stopped over at Abidjan, where we sat on the runway for nearly three hours more while the ground staff tried to open the hold and retrieve the suitcases belonging to the disembarking passengers. The mood among those still on board was growing tense: with the curfew hour rapidly approaching in Freetown we were in danger of having to turn back. After eleven o'clock air traffic control at Lungi would not be able to give us clearance to land.
I called to the flight attendant nearest me and explained the problem: ‘Umm,’ he agreed urbanely. ‘We are doing the best we can. I'm sure we will be taking off soon.’ He smiled pleasantly and returned to his position by the cabin door. I walked up to him and repeated myself. I asked him to take my message to the captain. I had the impression he did not understand me. His manner remained pleasant, but he did not move. I sat back down. A few minutes later, unable to contain my frustration, I walked up the gangway and through the First Class cabin to look for the captain myself. I found him, standing with his back to the cockpit door, surrounded by angry passengers already engaged in trying to persuade him to fly straight to Freetown instead of Monrovia, which should have been our next scheduled stop. Eventually, and to my surprise, the captain concurred and made an announcement over the tannoy. We relaxed. Then he flew to Monrovia anyway.
We landed at Lungi two hours after I had resigned myself to returning to Accra. A senior airport official on board had used the plane's radio to alert the airport authorities, bypass the regulations and keep the runway lights burning. At one in the morning, after a thirty-hour journey, we passed through immigration. That night we slept at the airport, on an old sofa in the VIP lounge. People lay with their heads on their hand luggage, on the seats and floor around us. The toilets were blocked; there was no running water. I looked around, taking in the heavy velvet drapes hanging from the floor to the ceiling across a tall window that looked out onto a view of the runway; the shag carpet, matted and stained; the semi-defunct air-conditioner rattling and wheezing on the wall opposite. The decor hadn't changed at all, not since I hid in the same room when I was just six years old, waiting to fly out of Sierra Leone and into three years of exile.
Since the day of our inauspicious arrival I had directed my efforts at tracing every one of the Mende soldiers court-martialled for their part in the alleged coup attempt. There had been nine. Five of them were dead. Upon their release from prison three had taken work in Kenema in the south. They had become security officers: two at the Sierra Rutile mine and the third at the Tongo Fields diamond mine. I went to the Ministry of Mines to check their records of employment and the feasibility of travelling to Kenema. I discovered the mines had been overrun by the rebels in 1992. Many of the staff were taken hostage; others had fled or been killed. The diamond mine was now controlled by the RUF, who used the income from the sale of so-called blood diamonds to buy arms. Of the whereabouts of the last remaining soldier there was no word. It was just as likely he was dead, sucked into the void of the war and the fighting between the RUF and the Kamajors. The life expectancy in Sierra Leone of a soldier, even a former soldier, was short.
My search for the mysterious Steven reached the same conclusion. I hadn't even managed to discover his surname. There was something odd, bizarre even about his anonymity, in a country such as this, where blood ties counted for so much. It made him seem like an imaginary character and I began to wonder if he existed at all. Uncle Momodu had no idea – he hazarded a guess that Steven might have gone back north and probably joined the rebels.
Morlai had been discharged from Connaught Hospital in June after almost three months. All the time he was there I kept in contact through Yabome and worried he might die of something else, a secondary infection picked up from the unhygienic surroundings. His joint had been drained and a small piece of metal removed, the cause, apparently, of the infection. He still walked with the slightest of limps, but in almost every other way he was back to his former self.
Together Morlai and I pursued a further lead, this time to find an ex-fisherman and street boy by the name of Alimamy Bakarr. He had featured at the trial, though his evidence had not mentioned my father. He was rumoured to have been the person who threw the dynamite at Kamara Taylor's house – this last piece of information came from the defendants. This was the talk, apparently, among the soldiers during the time they were all in Pademba Road together. Alimamy Bakarr, Morlai Salieu and Bassie Kargbo all came from the same area of Port Loko: S. I. Koroma's constituency.
Bassie Kargbo, for a sum of money, promised to locate Alimamy Bakarr who, he said, had moved from Waterloo, where he had lived for many years, to a Freetown slum near the harbour known as Saw Pit. We had twice arranged a rendezvous and each time Bassie Kargbo showed up alone at our agreed location – the rice shop on Bai Bureh Road. On both occasions he had demanded more money from me before he would promise to try to set up another meeting. I had begun to doubt whether Bassie Kargbo was telling the truth, so Morlai offered to go to Saw Pit himself, accompanied by Bassie Kargbo, to find Alimamy. I wanted to go with them, but Morlai was adamant: it was far too dangerous a place and I would only attract attention. He would be better off alone.
Alimamy Bakarr's digs turned out to be a drug den. Morlai described it to me later: people lying together on the floor of an upstairs room, openly injecting drugs, smoking cannabis and heroin. Morlai could not disguise his revulsion. Alimamy Bakarr appeared swathed in heavy gold chains. At first he had agreed to speak to Morlai. But each time Morlai went back Alimamy made a different excuse and once slipped out at the back while Morlai sat on the wall at the front with his notebook and the list of questions I had given him. Finally Alimamy stopped answering the door altogether, leaving Morlai waiting, watching the addicts arrive edgy and nervous and leave, sated, a long time later: slow moving and glassy eyed as chameleons.
One afternoon I lay on my bed, inert with mental fatigue, enumerating my many frustrations with the country and with the task I had set myself. It had taken me months of work to get this far, and every step of the way I felt I was pushing against some mighty, unspoken resistance. Time and time again I had felt that hardly a fact or a single item of information had been volunteered; every day I made half a dozen telephone calls; I trekked out to interview anyone who would talk to me, then found myself returning to the same place to ask for more information – questions I had omitted to ask, chase details they did not think, or perhaps wish, to supply. This was as true of people who had no reason to dissemble as of those who did. As I lay there, in the hot room, staring at the ceiling, I did something I had never done before: I allowed the dark thoughts to crowd in one by one and my anger turned towards my father. How could he have been so trusting of his so-called friends, even of his sworn enemies? This was the question I asked myself over and over. How could he have flouted the warnings, allowed the danger to come so close?
‘Leave them in their ruined country,’ I wrote in red ink in the pages of my notebook, ‘surrounded by rui
ns, ghosts, flies, motherless children. Fly back to Britain – comfort. How could he have trusted them? Ever? Ever?’ I made a list of everything that infuriated me. ‘Fatalism. Disloyalty.’ I wrote leaning heavily on the nib of the pen so that now the words appear strident: ‘No conscience. No personal responsibility. Who cares about accountability?’ On the opposite page I wrote: ‘They say God has punished them all. But look around you! Look around! It's not over yet.’
Yabome must have realised my frustration, for I made no attempt to hide it. The next afternoon, on our way back to the house from running an errand in town, she directed Dura off the main road and up a short street just off Main Motor Road at Congo Cross. We climbed down from the car in a compound containing two houses and a round open-air seating area, just like a village barrie. Something about it felt familiar. I had been here once before, long ago.
The house belonged to Frank Jalloh, head of the CID in 1974 at the time of the arrests. We sat on an old velour sofa in a spacious and somewhat underfurnished reception room while someone went to fetch Frank Jalloh. In due course he appeared: a short, fleshy man with dark skin and a thick neck, dressed in cotton pyjamas. The three of us – Yabome, Simon and I – sat on the sofa, while Frank Jalloh took a large chair opposite us.
Somewhere along the line on her mother's side Yabome and Frank Jalloh were related, it turned out. This was so often the way in Sierra Leone. Yabome opened with the traditional greetings, declined the offer to send out for cold drinks. After a few minutes she turned to the reason for our visit. She explained what I was doing, appealed to him to speak to me.
The Devil that Danced on the Water Page 43