Authors: Russell Banks
I ran from the bathroom, slammed the door shut behind me, and leaned against it, breathing hard. Though the room in the fading, evening light was half in darkness, I could now see cockroaches there, too—whole legions of them marching across the cot and pillow where minutes earlier I had lain my head. Why hadn’t I seen them before? Had I been that disoriented, that distracted by fatigue and the noise of the chimpanzees? The insects swarmed over my duffel, scattered from clusters on the kitchen counter, and regrouped on the hot plate. They raced across the dusty surface of the small dresser in the corner. They were everywhere, spreading over the formica-topped table as if spilled from a pail and shuddering over the floor and across the threadbare braided rug—hundreds of cockroaches, thousands, fleeing from my sight into pockets of darkness between walls, behind and beneath furniture, plates, and utensils, as if I had unexpectedly caught them doing a forbidden thing, a black mass or an obscene sexual act.
I held my breath and didn’t move. The cockroaches seemed to do the same, as if watching, waiting for me to attack them or run. I began to tremble, from my hands up my arms to my body and onto my face. I felt my lips purse involuntarily, and my right cheek started to twitch, as if with neuralgia.
What is
wrong
with me?
I wondered. Even though alone, I felt embarrassed.
But this is the way things
are
in Africa
, I reminded myself.
It’s the tropics, for heaven’s sake!
What did I expect in a house that’s been empty for weeks or months? I’d had to displace cockroaches and rats before, in my apartment in Accra and before that in dozens of rented rooms and filthy apartments and so-called safe houses in the States, and had disinfected my living quarters, set traps, put out poisons, washed floors with lye and scrubbed counters down with ammonia water. And though the chimps were louder and more raucous than I might have expected, I’d heard laboratory animals before—monkeys and bonobos yelling to be fed at this time of day—and had not been frightened by them, only worried that someone might not be there to feed them on time and clean their cages and change their water.
Slowly, carefully, as if walking on loose sheets of paper, I crossed the room and stepped onto the small open porch.
The dirt yard needs sweeping
, I noticed.
I’ll buy some candles and mosquito coils at the little corner shop we passed coming in, and tonight when I sleep I’ll burn them near the bed
. With relief, I saw a bundle of mosquito netting tied to a ceiling hook above the bed.
Tomorrow I’ll scrub down the cottage and put out traps and poison. Tomorrow I’ll dispossess these tenants and take over the place, make it my own. I’ll meet the people who are supposed to care for the chimps, and I’ll learn their schedules and tasks, so that I can fill in for them when they’re late or for some reason can’t come in to work. And, in fact, right now I’ll see if I can figure out how to calm the chimps myself somehow. Perhaps all they need is fresh water, and maybe what and how to feed them will be obvious to me. As soon as I can, possibly this very evening, I’ll present myself to the woman who Mr. Sundiata said runs the lab and the man who feeds the chimps and cleans their cages, and they’ll tell me what sort of work I am to do here. I’ll work hard, very hard, and they will quickly find me irreplaceable. I’ll find good friends here, men and women. Liberians speak English, after all, and they’re said to like and admire Americans. It will be easy and enjoyable. I may call myself Dawn Carrington, or I may say I am Hannah Musgrave, and I’ll make a useful, satisfying, aboveground life for myself here in Liberia. And someday I’ll return to the United States, and at last I’ll see my mother and father again
.
These were my thoughts as I crossed the compound and approached the door of the Quonset hut. I neared the windowless building, and the screams of the chimpanzees rose in volume and intensity, as if the animals could somehow see and hear me coming. The door was padlocked, like the doors to the cottages. I took from my skirt pocket the ring of keys that Satterthwaite had given me and tried the keys at random until one of them snapped the lock open. Removing it, I swung back the heavy door and faced a black wall of impenetrable darkness.
A vegetative stench gushed from the interior and washed over me. It was oily, hot, and dense, like composted fruit mixed with fresh barnyard manure, but cut with an ingredient that I had never smelled before, something acidic and glandular and starkly repellent, like the brain chemicals of a psychopath. The howls and screeches of the chimpanzees and their compulsive, arrhythmic banging against their cages had merged and become a congealed and hardened quantity of sound, as if it were an object, a quarried thing, a room-size block of stone. My eyes grew slightly used to the darkness, enough to make out a light switch on the wall just inside the door. I reached in and flipped it, and the building filled with cold fluorescent light. Then I stepped across the iron threshold and entered.
The barred cages, racked in two layers from the front of the Quonset hut to the rear, were actually not as small as I’d pictured, not as small as the cages they’d used in the lab in Accra. These were the size and dimensions of a large kitchen appliance, a stove or dishwasher. At first I couldn’t see the creatures inside the cages, and for a second I wondered if the cages were empty and all the noise were just a tape-recording being played at high volume, some kind of special effect, as if a bizarre fraud were being carried off here. I looked around the large chamber, half expecting to see a wizard of Oz playing a diabolical noisemaker in the corner. Then I saw the chimpanzees—saw their wild eyes and pink lips and flared, flat nostrils, their almost human faces, their thickly knuckled hands wrapped around the bars, their hunched bodies—and I thought,
Oh, my God, they’re much too large for their cages, they’re huge, much bigger than I’d ever imagined. They’re the size of human beings!
There were some who were children, looking stunned and almost comatose, lying in the corners of their cages. Others, with barely enough room to pace a few short, angry steps, back and forth, back and forth, were evidently adolescents. A half-dozen more, full-grown adults—females, I could tell from their huge genitalia—were forced to stand bent over, nearly filling the cages with their bulk. Farther down, I saw four or five even larger adults shaking the bars with terrible force—clearly males, with surprisingly small penises, although I didn’t know why I was surprised and was embarrassed for having noticed at all. The big males spat at me and threw garbage and chunks of their feces in my direction, glowered, and showed me their cavernous, wide-open, nearly toothless mouths. I couldn’t understand. Why were they toothless? Their teeth, their powerful canine teeth, must have been removed, yanked out with pliers. The chimpanzees’ shoulders and chests were scabbed, and they had pulled out patches of hair all over, the young as well as the old. And, good Lord, what a stench of brutality filled that place! The animals were in more physical and emotional pain than I was capable of imagining.
Why is this happening? Who has done this?
I could not absorb what I was seeing. It had no meaning. The scene bewildered me, as if it had been contrived by a species other than human, a species as clever as ours, as organized and rational, but demonic. I stood a few feet inside the doorway and stared at the dark faces of the chimpanzees, and I couldn’t stop myself, I suddenly began to weep. I cried for them, certainly, their pain and suffering, and then I wept for the humans who had imprisoned them. And then I felt my stomach knot and unknot, and in confusion I cried for myself. When, suddenly, I felt a touch on my shoulder. The dead weight of a hand. I glanced at my shoulder and saw a black hand with long, slender fingers lying there, and I leapt away from it.
“Ah, forgive me, Hannah. I didn’t mean to startle you.”
It was Woodrow—Mr. Sundiata to me then—facing me with a benign smile. It was the dark-brown face of the man whom in a few short months I would marry, the man whose three sons, in less than two years, I would bear. The husband whom I would deceive and abandon and to whom I would later return. The man who would betray and forsake me and who would later beg for my forgiveness and receive it. The man who would be chopped down and killed before my eyes. You may not believe me, but in those few brief seconds I saw what was coming. It was as if in the darkened room of my future an overhead light had been switched on and immediately, as soon as the room was illuminated, turned off again, dropping the room back into pitch darkness, and though I would remember what I had seen, the way one remembers a week-old dream, I would not glimpse it again until after it was long past and gone.
“I’m a bit early, I know,” Woodrow said, still smiling. “My apologies, dear Hannah. But I wanted to show you a little of our fair city before darkness descends.”
I fell into his arms, weeping freshly, out of control, ashamed of myself and feeling foolish, a silly, weak-kneed American girl falling into the arms of a big, strong African man. But I couldn’t explain, I couldn’t tell him what it was that had made me weep and practically ask him to hold me. I didn’t know if it was the sight of the mutilated, imprisoned chimpanzees that had made me weep or this awful, roach-ridden, rat-infested place. Or the fear of Africa, of being so alone this far from anything or anyone familiar to me. Zack, who had made Africa seem almost friendly and as already known to me as it was to him, was no longer there. I’d come so far away that everyone I had ever known was gone from my life now. Then I thought that perhaps it was the shock and relief from having suddenly found myself no longer living underground. Yes, that’s why I’m weeping, I decided. Replacing my false identity and the fears and comforts that accompanied it with my ill-fitting old identity and its fears and comforts had to be a sharp blow to the psyche. It had happened so suddenly and unexpectedly that I was reacting to it only now.
Or was it the quickly fading vision of my future?
Or all of these at once?
Woodrow eased me from the building to the yard outside, where it felt comparatively cool. For the first time since entering the building I inhaled deeply. Woodrow drew the heavy door shut behind us, clicked the lock onto the hasp, and walked me slowly towards the waiting car, all the while murmuring into my ear that I was surely exhausted, that I needn’t worry about the chimps. He had roused their attendant, Haddad, from a nap, and the man was on his way over now to feed and water the poor beasts. And a nice air-conditioned ride about the city would revive me, and then, over a leisurely dinner on the terrace of the Mamba Point Hotel overlooking the sea, we would get to know one another better and more personally.
“Hannah, I want you to know that I have decided to take an interest in your situation,” he said. “Does that please you?”
I didn’t answer him. But the truth is it did please me. It pleased me immensely.
FOR THE FIRST
few months of our courtship, as in the old days with Zack, I felt that one of us, Woodrow or I, was wearing a mask. But I had no way of knowing which. With Zack, it had been as if both of us peered through eyeholes, so no problem: Zack and I were each two people, and knew it.
Maybe it was this
courting
business. Over the years I had been involved with many men—not many, actually, even though it’s the sixties and early seventies we’re talking about here, and my twenties.
Numerous
, let’s say. And I had believed at least twice that I was in love, once for as long as six months, both times wrongly and inconsequentially. They were crushes, infatuations, fixations, maybe, and there’s no point in my going into detail here. The truth is, I had never really been in love. And, perhaps more important, I had never been courted before. This was new and strange and exciting, and although the process confused me, I plunged ahead anyhow.
I wondered if this was how it had been for my mother and father. “When your father and I were courting…” my mother’s illustrations from her youth frequently began, but when it came to matters of the hearts and minds and men and women and the language used to portray them, I was a pure product of my generation and thus hadn’t a clue as to what she was talking about.
Two or three times I’d stopped my mother’s story and asked directly, “What do you mean, ‘courting’?”
“You know, dear, when Daddy and I were first together. When he was in med school and I was still at Smith…”
“What do you mean, ‘together’?”
“Well,
dating
, I guess. And all that. Getting to know one another. The way one does,” she said, her voice rising. “Before one marries, I mean.” Her eyes darted nervously away from my gaze, as if I’d accused her of having done something disgraceful. “Why are you asking this, Hannah? I was only telling a little story.”
Why, indeed? I knew what my mother meant. I knew my mommy’s language, her silences and euphemisms, her code words and coy abbreviations, knew them better than I knew the language of my friends. My mother was right to feel defensive and angry. I was attacking her. But for what? For her timidity concerning the subject of sex, I suppose. For her placid reliance on words like
courting
and
dating
, as if they meant the same to every woman of every age and thus could be used politely under any and all circumstances to conceal as much as they revealed.
I wanted to say, Do you mean when you and Daddy were first
fucking
, Mother? Is that what you’re remembering at the start of your twenty-times-told tale of the day that he took you to meet his parents for the first time? And while you all sat in the parlor—it was a
parlor
, not a living room, right?—waiting for the maid to call you to lunch, the three of them, Daddy and Grandfather and Grandmother Musgrave, silently read, Grandmother from her Bible, Grandfather from the
Wall Street Journal
, and Daddy from a medical textbook; and you, Mother, sat alone on the wide, hard sofa with your legs crossed primly at the ankles and stared at your lap, silenced by the silence of the others, as if the three of them were not reading but were lost in private prayer.