In college, Paul minored in art history, focusing particularly on sacred African carvings. When he was offered the post in Monrovia, where Jane could finally join him, his first reaction was excitement at having a chance to see, in person, examples of carvings from the region.
“You can get a job there, if you want,” he told Jane. “We’ll meet people, have dinner parties.” He made it seem like a partnership. But at the dinner parties they threw in Monrovia, he crowded their table with local intellectuals and foreign development workers who drank wine and ate the expensive imported cheeses Paul kept hidden in the fridge. Jane sat at the foot of the table patiently as he held court, regaling the guests with the stories he’d learned when he studied the sacred art—tales of the Leopard Society and the masks they used to frighten other tribes, and the masks he wanted to see, and the ones he was desperate to buy. She found it hard to edge the subjects into areas where she was an expert, where she could contribute. Nobody cared that she was a biologist, that or that she’d been an excellent teacher. Paul and the others were passionately worldly and could talk for hours about international politics and the issues of doing development work in third world nations. Jane knew little about those subjects.
Jane assumed that she would find a job in Liberia. People told her international schools were always looking for teachers, and that finding work would be easy. She even contacted an elephant conservation NGO that worked on antipoaching efforts in the Sapo National Park. But somehow after she arrived here, she felt sapped. She drove out to the American school once to meet with the principal, but their talk was awkward. She’d felt ill that day but forced herself to go. The whole time she sat in the office, making small talk and trying to seem capable and prepared, her head pounded and the vague feeling of needing to vomit hung in her belly. Later, the principal called her to say that although there were no full-time staff vacancies, she would be number one on the list of potential substitutes.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “This is tropical Africa, teachers will be calling in sick all the time.” School had been in session for two months already. Jane knew that. He hadn’t called her once. She wished she cared, but she didn’t. The heat here weighed her down, drained her motivation. Occasionally she thought of Kenya, and she remembered how crisp the morning air was when she and Muthega would begin their day and the way the mourning doves cooed the sky awake just before dawn. She saved the details of Narok, of the Mara, in her mind, pulling them out now and then to examine. On some level, she realized that when they came to Liberia she’d expected it to be more like Kenya. The utter difference was a bruise of disappointment, and the hope she’d felt before they arrived here turned to lethargy. When she missed her period twice in a row, she felt vindicated. This had to be the reason for her exhaustion.
Holding her secret close, Jane spent her days reading and walking along the wide stretch of beach in front of their house. Occasionally, she’d slip into her bathing suit and sit in the sand on a towel, watching the surf. In the late afternoons, showered and changed, she’d dab perfume behind her ears, and wait for Paul to return. She was never alone; Mohammad was there, too. Silently wiping dust from the framed pictures on the wall, organizing the kitchen or chopping things for the dinner he’d cook for them. Evenings were Jane’s favorite time of day. When Paul was home, he’d always turn on the stereo and the house would be filled with jazz. She and Paul would sit down for dinner, and Mohammad would light the candles and place their plates in front of them. Jane felt like royalty when Paul was there and it was just the two of them. And dinner was a time of anticipation, too, because Jane knew it was always then, in the later evening, when the Charlies would come.
The “Charlies” were roving groups of folk-art sellers that fascinated Paul. Jane never figured out what their name meant. Even Paul couldn’t tell her. The Charlies bought their goods cheaply from villages in the densely forested up-country, packed everything into market bags and came to the capital city to sell them door-to-door to foreigners. They brought West Africa and all its dark secrets out of the jungles right up to Paul and Jane’s back porch, rapping softly at the back door.
When the Charlies came, Jane and Paul slipped out the kitchen door, closing it tightly behind them to keep the air-conditioning in. The Charlies set low wooden stools on the polished concrete floor of the back porch. The things in the Charlies’ bags were new to her, mostly unattractive in her opinion.
“I’m looking for a passport mask,” Paul said one night, and the Charlies dug through their bags to draw out some examples of the small carvings, dark and delicate and as compact as shells.
“What are they for?” Jane asked.
The Charlie sitting nearest her turned and said, “The juju can come to you wh’n you are sleeping.”
He was tall and had long fingers. He held a cigarette in one hand, and tipped his head back to spout white smoke into the darkness above their heads. It hung there like a ghost.
He continued. “If you can see the forest spirit, Gle, wh’n you are dreaming, you can tell the carver how that Gle was looking, and he will carve it for you like making a photo. When you dream, juju can come. It can tell you things you must know.”
Jane looked at the masks Paul held; they were hardly bigger than his palm. One was a woman’s face topped with intricately carved braided hair; the other was a man’s with a pattern of tribal cuts fanned out across his wooden forehead. Jane wondered what those dreams whispered to their owners, and where the people who had commissioned the masks were now.
Paul went straight for the dark heart. He didn’t turn away when the Charlies mentioned that one wooden figure had been placed under a dead body to help usher the man’s spirit to a better place. It didn’t faze him when they told him the mask he was holding had been steeped in the blood of a sacrificial goat and that’s what gave it its strange, dark patina. Jane was different from her husband in this way: she liked the new things better. The freshly carved pieces that seemed unfettered by a history of use, those were the ones that Jane would have chosen. She was afraid of the darkness.
Mostly the Charlies concentrated on Paul—his authority and masculinity made Jane invisible—but that night one of them gave something to her, as well. He murmured, “Madam, just take a look.” He pressed a necklace made of smooth, brown seeds into Jane’s palm, then a carved wooden doll a little girl would have carried and dressed and named.
“It’s nice, isn’t it?” Jane ran her finger over the small wooden face, and felt the strands of fabric hair.
Paul glanced over and chuffed a small laugh. “Hon, that’s nothing more than a village Barbie doll. It’s not even old.”
Jane smiled apologetically at the Charlie who’d offered her the doll and handed it back.
Nights when Jane sat next to Paul, watching him work, she felt she didn’t understand him at all. When he’d stopped traveling without her, when they’d finally settled into a marriage where they were together more than they were apart, Jane assumed they’d cement the closeness they felt when they were first dating. In those early days, they’d sketched out a future together, they’d built the scaffolding of a marriage, and Jane hoped he would be one of best friends, true partners and lovers. But somehow, after they came to Liberia, they kept missing each other. Each was visible to the other but untouchable, like the images on a movie screen to the audience: she could see him, she could hear him, but he couldn’t see her back. She waited for the right moment to tell him he was going to be a father. It would change everything, she knew. Put it all right and Paul would see her again.
Days were too quiet and too long, and when Paul came home in the evenings, she was too eager to see him. She had no stories to tell him about her quiet days, and instead she pelted him with questions. She was desperate for attention, and it made her ashamed. She’d never been like this before, and she didn’t want to tell him about the baby while she felt so weak. If she did, he might worry,
and that would risk cementing her like this in his eyes; a dependent, weak wife cast in the amber of his mind. At night she dreamed of Narok. Of elephants that walked on hacked and bleeding legs, of babies reaching their trunks up to nurse and sucking on nothing but blood. She woke from those dreams sweaty and terrified. She wanted nothing more than to protect this baby, her baby, the way she hadn’t been able to protect Twiga or Muthega or her mother.
In Liberia there were tales of up-country tribes who lived by the rules of black magic and curses. There were stories of how drummers could talk to each other over miles of air, through miles of thick forest, with the drums they pounded. There were the masked stilt walkers who danced in the streets and stopped passersby to ask for money. If you didn’t give them what they were looking for, they would use their juju against you. In Liberia it was impossible not to believe these stories. It was impossible not to believe in magic. Jane felt the juju would hurt her.
One night as Jane sat in the dark next to him, she heard Paul whistle low, through his teeth, “Oh, that’s a fantastic piece!” She saw what he was reaching for and then shut her eyes tightly, but the mask couldn’t be unseen. Two roughly carved eyeholes pierced a piece of dusky, gray wood. The nose was wide and straight, and the forehead split slightly, so that a scar ran down the hard, angry-looking brow. The crack had been mended with bits of wire that gave the effect of crude stitches. Under the nose was the slash of a mouth, stiffly open as if the wooden face were trying to scream, and embedded in the mouth were six or seven yellowed, cracked teeth.
“C’est les vrai, vrai dents des gens, quoi,” one of the foreign Charlies murmured proudly. Jane noticed another salesman edge away from the wooden face, refusing to look in its direction.
“It’s a Dan mask,” he whispered to Jane in a voice that made her quiver. “When the witchdoctor must put on curse. That one be the mask for killing someone.” Paul didn’t see the man leaning away from the mask. He didn’t put it on and tease him with it, or tell him he shouldn’t believe what he did.
Jane hated the mask. She hated Paul for buying it. She wondered how it was that he could look at the masks and the carvings the Charlies brought to them and say exactly when they were carved and by whom, and even why. He could spin stories of up-country ceremonies that made his friends at their dinner table gasp with glee and revulsion. But lately, when he looked at Jane, she didn’t know what he saw. Jane knew he missed her independent self, the strong, curious scientist he’d fallen in love with. But she didn’t know how to retrieve that old version of Jane. It scared her that Paul wasn’t curious about her anymore.
The morning after Paul bought the mask, he excitedly installed a hook on the wall between the bathroom and the guestroom. He stepped back to make sure it was centered and straight. This time, he didn’t ask Jane if she thought it would look nice there. At night, when Jane got up to use the bathroom, she edged past the mask with her eyes closed. During the day she avoided it as much as possible. She didn’t want the hollow eyes to follow her; she didn’t want to see the real teeth. She thought about the mask constantly. She wondered if the teeth had been plucked from a dead person or, worse, if they’d been broken out of someone alive, someone whose mouth would have filled with blood and empty spaces.
* * *
The president was shot in his sleep just before dawn and dismembered by his own army. When the static on the speakers cleared and the radio announced the coup d’état in shouts and chants, the army had already declared victory. “In the cause of the people,” the voices on the radio shouted from the kitchen, “the revolution continues.”
After the president’s murder and the coup, the Charlies stopped coming. The army enforced a strict curfew—dusk to dawn, penalty of death. From the balcony overlooking the beach, Paul and Jane watched soldiers in their camouflage pants and torn T-shirts sleeping in the sand. Even during the day, when he went to work, Paul advised Jane not to walk down the beach.
“It’s not that they want to hurt Americans,” he assured her. “This is a local thing—it’s not ours. But they’re drunk and armed and not to be trusted.”
He wanted this to make her feel better, safer. He smiled when he said it, even held her hand. But it made Jane feel even more foreign to this place, like a ghost that nothing—not the juju and not her husband—could see. She was an interloper—as foreign and displaced as a broken bead on the forest floor.
A week after the coup, thirteen ministers and cabinet members of the old ruling party were sentenced. The accusations were shouted on the radio, and the announcer’s gleeful voice said, “Justice will be served.” The announcement sent a shiver down Jane’s spine, and she told Mohammad to turn the radio off. She didn’t want bad news today; she didn’t want to be sad or anxious. She’d been to the embassy doctor, who confirmed what Jane already guessed. She wasn’t alone in her body. She held the secret close. She wanted to think of a special way to tell Paul the good news. She wanted this to be a moment that would make him really see her again—as his wife, as the mother to his unborn child.
In the predawn darkness the next morning, the shouts of soldiers on the beach woke Jane up. She tiptoed to the bedroom window and peeked out. By the slashing beam of flashlights, she saw a line of men unloaded from the back of a truck. They were led, single file, over the gray sand by a sinewy-armed man who wore his mirrored sunglasses even though the sky was dark. Waving a heavy-looking gun, he shouted at them to be quiet, to kneel where he pointed.
The sun rose and the telephone rang. Paul’s boss needed him at the office; documents had to be secured, loose ends tied up. The political situation had turned, the army in charge was angry; they were murdering dissenters in the streets. Any minute there might be evacuation orders for Americans.
“This could go up in smoke,” Jane heard Paul say into the phone, and she begged him not to leave the house. The day slid dangerously in front of her—too long for her to be alone with the terror she felt and the chaos outside—the drunken soldiers and the guns. The iron garden gate, and the elderly guard who sat in front of it all day, seemed too thin a line of defense.
“Just stay in the hallway,” Paul implored Jane before he left. “Stay away from the windows—stray bullets!” He didn’t want her looking out at the beach or sitting on the balcony where she could be exposed. She slid to the floor and leaned against the windowless wall. She could hear the radio on in the kitchen. Mohammad was listening to the news again. He was afraid, as well, and that made Jane even more frightened. Jane took a deep breath and rubbed the place where, inside of her, she imagined cells splitting and multiplying, and she was glad she hadn’t told Paul. She didn’t want the idea of the baby spoken aloud in the world yet. It was better for now, she thought, to keep even the words tucked safely in her mind.
Jane sat in the hallway, waiting for Paul to come home. It was hot and not light enough to read. Her muscles ached from not moving, and her skin felt sticky. The mask was there in the dark, inner hallway, too. She felt it staring down at her. She didn’t want the mask near her baby, didn’t want its empty eyes boring into her belly. It was an evil thing. The anger surprised her. It was drawn like water up a tree’s roots; filling her veins with heat, making her heart beat faster and her face flush hot.
After the dim hallway, the sun was sharp in her eyes. She blinked and squinted and crawled out the balcony doors as quietly and as slowly as she could. She kept her body close to the floor. She didn’t want anyone on the beach to notice her. The soldiers were everywhere. Some lay in the sand, others stood smoking in groups. When the breeze shifted, Jane could smell the acrid smoke. A few soldiers took turns pulling what looked like large tree branches out of the back of a truck.
None of the soldiers engaged the thirteen men still kneeling silently. They’d been in the same position since before dawn, and now the white sand glistened like ice under the high, hot sun. The ocean had shifted from the deep black of the early morning to
jade green. The thirteen men waited, hunkered down and sweating.
Jane slid on her stomach away from the sliding balcony door and past the wicker chaise she loved to sit in and read. She didn’t want Mohammad to walk by the doors and see her. Edging her body under the rustling leaves of the potted palm, she watched the men on the beach through the decorative openings in the balcony’s brick wall.
While she sat, thirteen thick tree branches were pulled from the truck and whittled into posts. The posts were set upright, anchored deeply in the sand. The thirteen waiting men were ordered in loud voices to peel off their shirts. The men were tied with green plastic rope to the posts. None of the men tried to escape, none of them screamed or begged for mercy. They simply stood, their hands tied to the wooden stakes behind them. They seemed tired, even bored. Jane imagined the terror they felt and how it could make them listless.
Jane was shocked by the sudden snap of thirteen bullets—one after the other, BAM, BAM, BAM in even intervals of split seconds. The bullets sounded distant to her, sliding high above the noise of the tide coming in. It was over quickly. Each bullet hit its mark. The bodies slumped, one by one, crumpled in upon themselves in puddles of blood that spread out in the sand and were absorbed into it. Jane couldn’t breathe; she couldn’t move. She sat there in the sun, her heart shattering in her chest. Her body shook involuntarily and her breath was short and ineffective. She clenched her palms over the beginning of the baby in her belly and she felt a new sensation of fear physically. It forced its way inside her; it coursed thickly through her blood; she felt it curling around her organs like a writhing, headless snake.
The Brightest Sun Page 10