The Devil that Danced on the Water

by Aminatta Forna

  I looked at the faces around me: glistening foreheads, darting eyes, a head cocked, eyes watching the ceiling as though they might penetrate the layers of plaster and polystyrene tiles. There were not enough chairs for us all. Santigi stood with his back to the wall, feet apart, shirtless in shorts. He had been doing the washing when the soldiers came. Musu pressed her nails into her palm, again and again; her chest heaved with the effort to control her breathing. Chief Sumano's wife, the owner of the house, got up and moved quietly about the room. Preparing herself. In case they knocked on the door.

  Time passed. Slowly we crept to the window. A whisper marred the silence. Someone moved the curtain aside and we looked out. Two trucks were parked at the front of the building, alongside a white CID Volkswagen. A man stood with his back to us. He wore a red beret and had a rifle slung over his shoulder. Another figure, identically dressed, was away to the right. The stone-breaker and his family were outside their panbody: hands over their heads, eyes on the dirt in front of their feet. By the door was an untidy pile of their pathetic horde of belongings: enamel bowls, aluminium pots, a gas canister, a few limp clothes. A third soldier ducked out through the opening and passed them by. He did not so much as glance at them, and the stone-breaker and his wife did not look up at him. We hovered behind the glass, in the discreet silence of the room. God, please let them not come over here. Someone touched my shoulder, edged me back from the window sill. It was open, but we dared not risk closing it.

  A movement over to the left. I turned my head. Someone on the stairs at the side of the house. Coming down. On the landing now. Three pairs of legs. Two in khaki, one in brown slacks. A pair of familiar shoes. Brown suede shoes. I held my breath. One step, two – they were almost in view. I pushed my face up to the window. The whisper floated on the stillness of the room: ‘It's Daddy.’ I turned to Memuna and Sheka. My scream tore through the silence: ‘Daddy!’

  A hand over my mouth. Pushed it away. I struggled against the other hand on my shoulder, the same someone pressing me hard against them. Across my chest, holding me. Slip down and slide. Onto the floor. I crawled away past their knees. Towards the door. Hands reaching, too slow. Nobody fast enough for me: Sheka, Memuna, we three. He was going, walking in the direction of the trucks. We reached the door: ‘Daddy!’

  My father stopped in his tracks and slowly turned. Time hovered like a dragonfly above the water. None of us moved.

  ‘Let them go,’ I heard somebody in the room behind me say. ‘Let them go.’ Who was it, a man or a woman? I remember the words, but not the voice. Let them go. Somebody who saw that it was impossible to hold us. Or perhaps there was some other reason, known to them but not to me. Perhaps it was Morlai. Years later he looked me in the eye, smiled at me and said: ‘Remember how you ran? How you ran?’ I felt the hands begin to relax their grip, one by one, releasing me.

  Somewhere in those infinite seconds, as I shook off the last of my restraints, I saw my father turn to his guard. I saw the man shake his head. I was out of the door. I was running away down the length of the house. I called again. He must see me. Memuna and Sheka ran at my side. The guard hesitated, then he took the key and released the handcuffs. My father turned round and stretched out both his arms to receive us.

  I cannot remember what we said to each other. I cannot remember him being led away again. I remember nothing really, except having my arms around his waist, only the railings of the veranda separating us. I ran so fast I felt as though I would run through them. Instead I hit them hard, almost bruising my ribs. I didn't care at all. He held us all close, the four of us together. He spoke some words, reassured us, promised he would see us soon. I remember that. I believed him utterly. Perhaps that was why I let him go? I don't know. But somehow he was gone, taken away from us.

  The next I recall I was upstairs in my room waiting behind the closed door while the soldiers went on searching our house. Memuna sat on her bed and I sat on mine, as we had been ordered to do. I had my feet on the floor and my hands in my lap. We were facing each other.

  ‘Are you scared?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes,’ said I.

  ‘Don't be frightened. Come on.’ She stood up and put her arm around me. ‘Let's look out of the window and see if we can find the little brown dog you saw this morning.’ We colluded, the older and younger sister: we both wanted a reason to look out of the window again.

  There was no brown dog to be seen. Instead I could hear Apollo barking at a soldier, one of those still surrounding the house. The dog was being persistent, inching forward, jumping back at the slightest movement. The soldier swatted at him like a fly. The dog backed off and came at him again with bared teeth. A few moments later the soldier had had enough; he stepped forward and kicked Apollo in the ribs. His companions laughed at that. The soldier took his rifle off his shoulder and mockingly took aim. Others paused to watch the fun. They were loading the truck, herding the people in: the family from downstairs, the stone-breaker. I saw them climb up one after the other, in front of a soldier who pointed his gun at them. They stood together in the back like cattle, while another soldier fastened the tail gates.

  Memuna was pointing away in the distance, keeping up our pretence that we were really looking for a stray dog. I looked over in the same direction. Neither of us saw the soldier approaching until he appeared below our window. He shouted at us and gestured with his arm to come down. We ducked away from the glass, ran back and sat on our beds the way we had been before, the way we were supposed to be doing. I prayed the soldier would go away. But he didn't. I could hear him yelling at the open window. I ran across and sat with Memuna. Now, I really was afraid. I didn't want to be arrested and taken away to prison.

  We waited. The soldier was still shouting. His voice was harsh with anger and authority. Bo you there! Commot. Memuna and I looked at each other: ‘We'll have to go down.’ She said it first. We walked to the door and opened it. Morlai was in the hallway. We babbled at him in our fear.

  Morlai walked to the window and looked out. The soldier shouted to him to send us down. ‘Please, they're only children,’ Morlai called back. Yes, I thought. That's what I am. I am just a child.

  The soldier took Morlai instead, ordering him to come down and get into the back of the truck.

  ‘It'll be all right,’ said Morlai as he went. ‘I'm coming back later.’

  I nodded, grateful, allowing myself to fall backwards into the synthetic comfort of his lie. My brain was empty of everything, even guilt, washed with relief that it wasn't me they were taking away.

  After Morlai had gone, and the soldiers too, I went in search of the others. I couldn't find Mum. Sullay was wandering around the house. Tears leaked from his eyes and down his face. He didn't wipe them away. His nose was streaming too. Why doesn't he care? I thought. Sullay opened his mouth and uttered a cry, a huge frightening noise, as deep as a cavern. I stared at him. I had never seen a man cry before. I had never seen anyone cry like that.

  * * *

  I built myself a hut in the bush in front of the house where the builders had left a tall stack of concrete blocks. I couldn't shift them – they were too heavy for me – so I used one of the recesses and built a roof over myself with old cardboard boxes I had salvaged from the storeroom. This was the place where they found the snake, but I didn't care. The snake couldn't harm me. I built a hut and I stayed inside it for the longest time. Nobody knew where my hut was, with the exception of Edward, who had helped me build it. I went back inside the house for my meals and to sleep. The rest of the time I wandered around by the slaughterhouse stream.

  It was Christmas time. Auntie Binty was staying and so were Elizabeth and Edward. This Christmas we did not go to the beach. In the middle of the afternoon on an ordinary day I put the book I was reading down on the floor of my hut and I walked into the house. Memuna was sitting on the settee in the middle of the room. Auntie Binty was next to her, her arm clasped around my sister. Everybody in the house was there, too. Edward
was standing a little distance away, hands by his sides. Elizabeth, I discovered later, had been sent to her room. Auntie Binty, sitting on the arm of the chair, was hugging Memuna, clasping her to her side, making crooning sounds of comfort. ‘She should never have said that. She didn't mean it.’

  I walked up behind them. They didn't see me. Memuna didn't cry very often and so I was curious, just curious mostly. Not exactly concerned. ‘What's the matter?’ I asked loudly.

  Auntie Binty turned and looked at me. ‘Nothing – Mem's just a little bit upset, that's all. But she's going to be all right.’ She gave Memuna a squeeze and looked at the top of her head. ‘Aren't you?’ Back to me she smiled: ‘You don't have to worry.’

  Memuna still had her hands covering her face. I could barely see her in there, so many people were crowded around her. ‘Is it true?’ I heard her voice. ‘I want to know if it's true.’

  ‘Of course not. Elizabeth doesn't know what she's saying,’ replied Auntie Binty.

  ‘What did Elizabeth say?’

  Auntie Binty looked at me. That smile she gave me, it was too wide and too – what exactly? It was too still. It didn't turn into a laugh, get any bigger, or drop by so much as a millimetre. It was one of those grown-up smiles designed to deceive. Her eyes gave it away; they were fixed upon me. And her body too was rigid. She didn't want me there, I could tell, and so I determined to stay.

  ‘Elizabeth and Mem had an argument, that's all. It's over now. Elizabeth ended up saying something that upset Mem. She's sorry and she's gone to her room. She won't have any supper. So you might as well run along. Go on. You too, Edward.’

  ‘What was it she said?’ I asked the question again. Santigi, Esther, Musu – none of my cousins were looking at me. They began to move, as though waking from a sleep or a stupor, suddenly deciding they had chores to do, a pretence of being busy created with the purpose of discouraging me. They did not want to answer. One by one they left the room, off to the kitchen, where I knew they would sit around on the rice sacks and talk about whatever it was that had happened. Whatever they were trying to keep from me.

  I moved closer and tried to peer at Memuna. All I could see was the top of her head; her hair was untidy where Auntie Binty had ruffled it.

  ‘I want to know what Elizabeth said,’ one more time, louder.

  Memuna looked up at me, past Auntie Binty. Her face was blotchy, eyes red; she had been crying for some time. She took a breath and her chest heaved and subsided. Then she spoke:

  ‘Elizabeth said Daddy was in prison and that he was going to die.’

  50

  On Tuesday eight coffins, built of unfinished, bleached timber, were delivered to the gates of Pademba Road Prison. There were several witnesses to their arrival and the word soon spread around the city.

  On Wednesday Mum was in downtown Freetown, at the travel agent booking her ticket to come to England and meet us at the end of term. Auntie Fatu had accompanied her. Mohammed Swartaka Turay was scouring the city. He had been to her small apartment above a garage in Wilkinson Road and found it empty. Mum had moved there after our landlord, Chief Sumano, was arrested. The chief's mother had been to plead with S. I. Koroma for her son's release. She told Mum what he had ordered her to do: ‘Get rid of Forna's filth.’ The two Armenian brothers who owned the garage were the only people who would take her on as a tenant, and they even waived the rent.

  Mohammed Swartaka drove around town until he saw her car parked outside the travel agency. He stepped through the glass door just as she paid for her ticket. Leave the country, Yabome, he told her. My stepmother replied she was leaving anyway. Look She waved the ticket. No, he was insistent, you have to leave now. Somehow he made her understand: he persuaded the clerk to book her on the next available flight, departing at ten o'clock on Friday night.

  Exactly eight months previously, on 16 November 1974, the jury at the trial in Court Number One of the high court retired for just one hour before returning a unanimous verdict. Guilty. All defendants on all counts. Judge Marcus Cole placed the black cap on his head and pronounced the sentence in a voice devoid of emotion. In the gallery the families of the defendants wept. Mum left the court, walked past the crowds, with Auntie Binty at her side, holding onto her own tears until she reached the sealed anonymity of the car.

  The appeal, twenty-one days later, was turned down instantly. The matter was passed to the Mercy Committee. The Chief Imam led a delegation to see S. I. Koroma at his offices, as did some in the legal profession, belatedly stricken by their consciences. The protests were muted. Stevens had cut the tongue out of the populace. Instead people began to wear their hair in a new style: Mohamed Forna and the fourteen others. Seven braids descending on either side of the crown and a single braid in the centre, running from the peak of the forehead to the nape of the neck. Nancy Steele gathered her APC women's group together and marched through the streets demanding the executions be carried out in public.

  At Christmas Mum drove with the three of us to State House and left us waiting in the car outside while she went to the gates and asked to see the president. ‘Will you get his autograph for me?’ I had asked stupidly. I continued to let the small pieces of knowledge I had acquired float on the surface of my awareness, refusing to draw them under for fear of drowning. ‘Don't you know who he is?’ Memuna asked me angrily as we watched Mum walking away from us towards the gate house. But I did and I didn't. I could not absorb the idea of a country in which the president was a man of hate. Mum waited for an hour at the gate house while we bickered and sweated on the plastic seats. Finally the president's office telephoned down: the president would not see her today. Or any day thereafter, as it turned out. Mum went back time and time again, always to be given the same message.

  Outside Kamara Taylor's house we sat on the back steps and stared at our old mango tree. Memories flew up from the silt at the bottom of my consciousness: of how we used to pick the green fruit and sprinkle them with salt; of Milik telling his stories in the shade cast by the branches; of the solitary figure of the bodyguard sitting apart and alone. Mum left us there, warning us not to mention to a soul we used to live here. I looked around me, at the Ministers’ Quarters, the gardens, our life as it once was. It created an uncanny feeling, of real and unimagined déjà vu, of lives already lived, lives past and forgotten. I didn't know, then, everything that had taken place at that house on Spur Loop. I just wanted to tell someone that this was once my home.

  Day after day we did the rounds with Mum while she pleaded for our father's life. Kamara Taylor would not see her; nobody would. We didn't go with her to S. I. Koroma's house, although Mum went to his office once with some of the wives of the other condemned men. It did no good, no good at all.

  At Easter we spent our holidays in cheerless, chill Hackney with Mum's younger brother, a law student in London, in his student digs. In June, when we were all back at school, the Mercy Committee turned down the plea for clemency. All hope now rested with the president.

  At Pademba Road eight of the prisoners were taken up to the cells closest to the gallows. The others were moved to cells below. Those on the lower floor began to be given exercise privileges. One day, when the guards were busy, Abu Kanu climbed up to one of the windows on the upper storey of the block. Knowing what was to come, he and my father said goodbye. In all the time they had been in prison together, throughout the trial and the sentencing, Abu had never seen his friend shed a tear. My father had told him, ‘When I cry I will cry only for my children.’ The remainder of the time my father lay there alone, wearing a dark-blue sweater with the letter C crudely cut out of white canvas and stitched onto the front, rising to eat the single plate of rice pushed under the door every day.

  What must it be like, I have often wondered, to find yourself at the mercy of your enemy? One after the other, he watched the hopes retreat into the darkness. Was there ever a moment when he did not think of it? Did he ever manage to forget, to dwell on happier thoughts? What were his reg
rets, if there were any at all. And what did he say in his prayers? Who among us can imagine what it feels like to lie alone at night while the thoughts chase sleep away, to escape into dreams for a few hours, and to awaken into those elusive moments of peace, grasp them briefly in your fingers – before they are plucked away? Even though, far away, the palest light of dawn brightens the sky, the blackness descends once more to shroud the vivid colours of the dreams. No one ever asks a condemned man these questions – or perhaps they do but receive no reply. For what words could describe the wait until the end?

  In the afternoon of 18 July the condemned men were taken out of their cells into a separate room and weighed. Each of the weights was recorded in a large ledger. That afternoon my father and Ibrahim Taqi stood at the small square of window in their cell doors and sang to one another – an old tune, one that my mother taught herself to play on the guitar and the five of us liked to sing together in Koidu:

  ‘Hang down your head, Tom Dooley,

  Hang down your head and cry,

  Hang down your head Tom Dooley,

  Poor boy, you're bound to die.’

  It was Bai Bai Kamara who whistled the tune for me the day we sat in the restaurant together in Freetown, three verses the whole way through and the refrain. In 1975 he cried: ‘Stop singing, Doctor,’ from his cell below them. ‘This is a bad night. Pray! Pray instead of singing.’ He was suffering from malaria; he let go of the bars of his window and fell back to the floor. Sometime in the early evening Bai Bai Kamara, Unfa Mansaray, Albert Tot Thomas and Abu Kanu were moved out of the block and taken to cells in Wilberforce.