The Devil that Danced on the Water

by Aminatta Forna

  In solitary confinement in his cell at Pademba Road, Saidu Brima could hear prisoners being brought in, the comings and goings of the guards. After a few days he was moved from Wilberforce block to Clarkson. Two weeks later he was brought back to the CID headquarters, along with Bassie Kargbo, Morlai Salieu and other men selected to become potential witnesses. Bambay Kamara called them into his office one by one. When Saidu Brima's turn came the new boss of the CID set down in front of him a statement. It looked exactly like the one he had made when he was first brought in. Bambay called for rice and plassas to be brought for the men. It was the first decent meal Saidu Brima had eaten since his arrest. Bambay watched while they ate their fill, calling for more rice to be heaped upon empty plates. Then he told them why they had been brought to the CID building.

  ‘What did he offer you in return?’ I asked.

  For the first time since he had started talking Brima looked up at me. ‘Nothing, madam. I promise you. Only that if I did not cooperate I would be charged. And if I made any mistake. They said if I even spoke to anyone about it when I was released, anyone at all, they would arrest me again. Bambay said they would be watching me.’ I could see he wanted to be believed, and I did believe him.

  It was not Newlove but a different officer, someone he did not recognise, who took him into a separate cell to coach him. The statement he memorised was not the same as the one he had originally made. It contained one difference. The names of Mohamed Forna and Ibrahim Taqi had been inserted, alongside a description of a meeting at which they were all supposedly present at Milton Street. The statement also said he had seen both men at Murraytown cemetery late on the night of 29 July, when he was among the group of men assembled ready to go out and kill two government ministers and the commander-in-chief of the army. Brima learned his new statement by heart. He followed Bassie Kargbo into the witness box. His initial testimony, given at eleven o'clock one morning over a week into the trial, lasted one hour. He did not make a single mistake. He went back to prison. A few months later, in January, he delivered the same false testimony at the court martial of the soldiers.

  It was strange how every new piece of knowledge served to wipe my mind and leave me devoid of feeling. I had wanted to know and yet the knowledge seemed to defeat me. It was like a virus running through my body: it left me weak and helpless. I had wanted to know, but I had never paused to consider what effect knowing might have upon me. To know now, twenty-five years too late, left a feeling of overwhelming powerlessness, of a kind I had never experienced before. I had the knowledge I had desired for so long – and what good did it do?

  For a moment I was frozen, sitting where I was, my eyes fixed on the delicate patterns of the tablecloth while I pulled my mind back from the past. Saidu Brima excused himself to go. I looked up to find him standing there, waiting.

  ‘May I go now, madam?’

  ‘Yes, yes. Of course.’ I could barely summon a response. I retreated into a display of manners. I stood up. ‘Thank you very much for coming here. You've been most helpful,’ I mouthed automatically.

  He pushed his chair back into the table, still hovering. He spoke again: ‘I am sorry for all of this, madam. For all of you. I am sorry.’

  There it was. I had wondered if it would ever come. Finally I had stopped waiting for it. The first and only time anyone had ever expressed regret for all that had occurred. In my search I had come face to face with just a fraction of what my father had endured: the moral absence and dissociation of people like Morlai Salieu, still full of rancour that he had never been paid for his services. Morlai Salieu had done it all so easily and for the promise of so little. Lawyers and judges had willingly completed the work of corrupt men, men who used the law but had no respect for it. I didn't blame the man in front of me. Saidu Brima was just about the only person I didn't hold responsible. He was a poor, uneducated man in a barren country. His destiny did not belong to him.

  The strangest thing of all was that Unfa Mansaray came to Yabome and pleaded for her to help Saidu Brima, who was out of work. And so she did. She hired him for the duration of my stay to cook and carry out some of the extra chores around the house. Some mornings I would sit and watch him from the veranda as he laid the breakfast table. He worked his way round from setting to setting, silently, unaware of my eyes upon him, moving as fast as his arthritis allowed. I gazed at this man and reflected on how we came to be together under the same roof – and I wondered at the unreality of it all.

  I had planned to stay in Sierra Leone a little over two weeks. There was talk of elections in February and once the campaigning started emotions in the country would begin to run high. I needed my work done before that happened. Simon and I were staying on over Christmas, but the only reservations we could get were on a flight leaving three days later. We would not be able to see in the New Year in Freetown. As it was the Christmas break coincided with the end of Ramadan. The government had declared a three-day holiday and relaxed the curfew; the people were in high spirits. It was almost possible to forget we were a country at war.

  The day after Boxing Day we left the picnic at a beach known as Number Two River, where the river meets the sea, ahead of the other guests, in order to return to the house. Lami Sidique had traced Ibrahim Ortole and sent a message more or less ordering him to come to the house and meet me. It seemed a long shot, and Yabome was doubtful he would show, but I was determined that I would be there if and when he turned up.

  The car park at the beach had been full of UN and NGO vehicles when we arrived and the beach was crowded. We sat in the shade of a small, privately hired rondavel, and ordered fresh grilled fish, salad and beers. As we ate a beggar worked the rounds, swinging himself on his crutches across the rough grass and sand, going from one party of westerners to the next. His face bore an elaborate expression of appeal, of studied tragedy, as he stretched out his hand for money. One of our companions, a man I had met on our previous trip who worked for a European government, objected to the beggar's presence. The waiter shooed the man away. There had been a brief discussion, I remember, about professional beggars and bogus operators who pretended to be war amputees. It was a shame, it was generally agreed, because people were losing sympathy with all the amputees as a result.

  An hour later, as I made my way back to the car to fetch my swimming costume, I passed the same man, who was now sitting in a wheelchair under a tree. His crutches leaned against the tree behind him. Despite the conversation I had just listened to, I felt badly for him. His feet, swaddled in thick socks, did look strangely truncated, as though his toes were missing. I walked over and promised I would give him something before we left.

  As we loaded our belongings into the back of the borrowed jeep I looked around for the beggar, but he was nowhere to be seen. We had been persuaded to give a lift to a local woman, a sister to one of the waiters, and she asked her brother what had happened to the beggar. We learnt he had already gone, about half an hour earlier. The waiter assured us the man was there every day, but I knew we would not be coming back.

  The drive back to Freetown was about fourteen miles and took at least an hour. Parts of the road were in an appalling condition where the rocks and earth had erupted through the ancient tarmac. As we approached one of the worst stretches, where the road climbed sharply and the foundations had been destroyed, leaving nothing but fifty yards of exposed, ragged rocks, I saw ahead of us the beggar in his wheelchair pushing himself along the empty road. Simon pulled over next to him as I dug in my purse for a few notes. I climbed down and handed them to him. I wondered where he could possibly be headed along this deserted highway. ‘Where do you live?’ I asked.

  He supplied the name of a village I did not recognise. I turned to the woman sitting in the back of the Jeep with her basket on her lap. She raised her eyebrow and grimaced before she replied. ‘It's very far.’

  Once the wheelchair was loaded into the back, its owner climbed up and sat behind me. As we set off I turned and asked his
name: ‘My name is Mohammed,’ he replied, smiling at me. ‘And I am very grateful.’ He was a young man, I observed, and when he smiled it was remarkable how the cowl of the beggar slipped from around him, revealing a good-looking youth with a cheerful, handsome countenance. Mohammed liked to talk. With a little prompting he told us how he made the ten-mile journey to Number Two River every day to beg. Sometimes he was lucky and had a lift, but not often. Where the road was at its worst he would wait by the side until someone offered to help him across. The wheelchair was his pride and joy. He had won it in a wheelchair race organised by a western charity and held in the stadium in Freetown. Many of those wounded in the war had competed, but it was Mohammed who had won and gone off with the coveted prize. Simon and I exchanged a glance at the gladiatorial image his description conveyed.

  The rest of Mohammed's story emerged as we covered the miles towards Freetown. This is what he told us:

  He was born and raised in the south, in Kenema. He was a panel beater by trade. When the mechanic's shop where he worked closed down he travelled north to Makeni, where he found work making machetes and panga knives. When the rebels invaded Makeni they had sliced off the ends of his feet. Salamatu, his young wife, to whom he had been married for only a few months, was seized and carried off. She did not return home for more than a year. When she did come back both her feet had been hacked off above the ankle as punishment for trying to escape. They had a small hut in a village just outside Freetown, one of the many small settlements lining the road along the coast. But Salamatu was too ashamed to be seen in public – she even refused to use her crutches – and so it was up to him to beg for them both. He was still smiling as he told us all this. I had the impression he was grateful to have some listeners. His smile widened when he described the change to his life. Things were getting better: Salamatu had just given birth to their first child, a daughter.

  The three of us listened in silence. The waiter's sister, who must have heard similar stories many times in the last few years, had not uttered a word for a long time. She looked profoundly saddened. Simon was staring at the road ahead. I was gazing at Mohammed.

  Just past the checkpoint into the next village Mohammed directed us off the road to the left, where he asked Simon to stop. We were in front of a small, traditionally built house. Like everything else in the village it was covered in a heavy layer of the dust from the road, which settled in the grooves, outlining the shape of each brick as though they had been painted to look that way. As we brought the wheelchair down from the back, Simon whispered to me to give him a few thousand extra leones. I called to Mohammed, but instead of taking the money he reached for my other hand, and with this disarmingly carefree gesture he pulled me along behind him: ‘Give it to Salamatu, give it to her. Wait until you see how pleased she will be.’

  We made our way down the side passage. Mohammed and Salamatu lived in a tiny clay brick hut in the back yard of the house. He introduced me to his landlady, telling me how kind she had been in allowing them to live there. In front of a hut a woman sat on the ground by a smouldering cooking fire. She was nursing a baby. As I approached she covered her breasts, then reached up and shook my hand. She was not more than about twenty: skin unblemished, hair woven into neat braids. Salamatu and Mohammed must have made a striking pair on their wedding day, it occurred to me. She sat with her legs stretched out in front of her and inadvertently I glanced down. As I did so I saw she made a move to pull her lappa across her legs, but not before I had seen the horror that contrasted with the serenity of her face. These were not neat amputations performed by a surgeon's knife. One foot had been sheared off below the shin, the other sliced diagonally across the ankle bone. The skin around the wounds was rough, the flesh chapped and grey – the appearance was more of hide than human skin. Above the missing feet the flesh was thick, dense and splayed as though she had, at some point, tried to walk and at some point, tried to walk and the body had compensated by building up layers of tissue. They looked like the feet of an elephant.

  Mohammed retrieved the baby and handed her to me. She was a few weeks old, with the skin only the newest babies have: shiny and wrinkled like a fresh leaf unfurling in the early morning.

  ‘Guess what she is called?’ said Mohammed loudly and exuberantly. I looked at Salamatu for an answer.

  ‘She's called Aminatta,’ she replied with the gentlest of smiles. Mohammed, the father of Aminatta. It wasn't a truly remarkable coincidence – they were probably two of the most popular names in the country – but I was pleased with it, pleased it should occur to me on my last day in Sierra Leone.

  After we left Mohammed and Salamatu I began wonder all over again whether I was right to come here, seeking salve for old wounds among people whose own suffering was so raw. And yet Salamatu, Mohammed and Aminatta's fate was linked with my own. My childhood had borne witness to the trickle that would one day break the dam. This was what my father had foreseen with the first, early manifestations of tyranny: the end of the rule of law and the descent into anarchy. ‘Let history be my judge,’ he wrote at the end of his letter to Stevens on the day he resigned from the government. Let history be my judge. Salamatu and Mohammed represented to me the anguish of this nation, as well as its hope.

  Needless to say Ibrahim Ortole did not turn up to face me. I waited on the veranda, watching the road, for two hours, just in case. I did not know what he looked like, but all the same I searched for his face among the people returning home from the mosque at the end of Ramadan, on the eve of Holy Day. The people were swathed in robes; those who had been to Mecca wore a white head-dress loosely draped over their heads. They were hastening home before dusk, to prepare tonight's feast. In the house Saidu Brima had taken delivery of a dozen dishes sent to us by our neighbours. He laid each bowl or plate out on the table and covered them in cloths. We were alone in the house. Yabome had already begun the long round of evening visits. Ola and the rest of her cousins were out.

  We were leaving at midday the following day. There might just be time, before the flight, to go and find Ibrahim Ortole on the other side of town. Simon was ready to give it a try. I walked slowly across the floor to the telephone to call Lami Sidique. I sat on the edge of the sofa for a long time, listening to the ringing tones at the other end. Nobody was home. I replaced the receiver. As I did so I had already made up my mind I would not try again. It was over. I was finished here, really finished. Someone who knew once warned me that this time would come, and that it was really a moment to welcome and not to regret. If only I were writing a novel, I would contrive a neat ending with the strands of the plot ail tied up into a bow. But if I was looking for the ultimate proof of guilt of the people who had been our enemies, then wasn't it all around me: in the rebel war, in the fate of people like Salamatu and Mohammed, in the wanton destruction of a country's future?

  I knew it would take me many months to absorb all that I had learned. To begin to live with my new past. I had shed my old past, the one filled with unanswered questions, secrets and ghosts. From now on, when I met people who belonged to the past I would not ask myself: Who are you? What did you know? What did you do? One day doubtless I would come back to this country of mine without the sense of apprehension, without the feelings of incalculable despair the very thought used to promote. For the moment all I wanted to do was sit on the veranda in the evening air and watch the people on their way to celebrate Holy Day.

  A man was walking up the hill. He was wearing a striped green gown and hat, making his way purposefully towards the house. In the contrast of sun and shadows I did not see his face. I stood up and leaned over the railings to try to get a view of him but he stood out of sight behind the metal gates, while he waited to be let in. I had been told Ibrahim Ortole was plump, while this man was tall and straight. I felt a conflict of emotions; my sense of duty struggled against the new inertia. The watchman bent down and opened the gate to allow the stranger inside and I watched as he walked up the drive. He looked up at me and
waved. For a moment I failed to place this man, dressed in flowing gowns. He was carrying something in his hands. Then I recognised him. It was Unfa Mansaray with a cake he had baked himself: a gift on Holy Day.

  49

  Running. Running. Feet down steps. Quickly, quickly. One, two, three. Memuna, Sheka and me.

  We ran down the back stairway of our house in Kissy, skirted the edge of the crevasse and went inside through the door into the kitchen of the family below. The front room was crowded, everyone from both families: Mum, Morlai, Santigi, Musu, Esther, Sullay and all the people who lived there. There were upwards of fifteen of us. We sat quietly and listened to the sounds of the ISU soldiers as they arrived at our house: shouts, slamming tail gates, boot soles hitting the dust, the dull clank of heavy metal, ammunition belts rattling like chains, and the dog Apollo barking impotently, on and on, as the men raced in every direction until they had us surrounded. No one spoke, nobody breathed. We sat around on the chairs in the middle of the room, staring at the floors and the walls and the windows, like people on a bus, avoiding each other's gaze and the temptation to utter a sound.

  Upstairs now. I could hear them there. Muffled thuds and footsteps on our floors. Voices and words. What were they saying? Someone in command. Where were they now? In our sitting room. Along the passage. Quiet. Strange sounds, shuffling. Hovering feet maybe. The pistol-sharp crack as the lock on a door gave way to a shoulder or a boot. Not my room then – I had left our door unlocked in the scramble. The scrape of furniture along the stone floor. I turned my ear upwards to the sounds. Doors slammed. The thud of our books and belongings as they fell to the floor. Papers fluttering. The distinctive tinkle of a mirror breaking. Seven years’ bad luck. The sounds merged and unfolded, repeated in waves over and over, all except the barking dog, who was silent now.