Authors: Russell Banks
This was before I learned how to approach the chimps—eyes lowered, teeth covered, face slightly canted, as if in deference. It was Number 34 who taught me. From the first, he’d been neither angered by my presence before his cage nor frightened of it. With him, I had a chance to experiment, mimicking his approach to me and afterwards applying it to the others, who gradually began to accept my approach, then, over time, seemed to welcome it.
Hello, brother ape. Greetings, sister ape. How are you today? What are your thoughts, brother ape? Is everyone in the chimp house okay? No one sick? No one injured?
I looked steadily at Number 34, and he looked steadily back. He was the boss, I decided, the chief. That’s why he’s given me the time of day and hasn’t been frightened or angered by my dumb lack of ceremony. He’s seen that I’m just an ignorant human, and because I’m not Benji or Elizabeth and haven’t been involved in the capture and transport and imprisonment of him or any of the others, I’m relatively harmless. He was long faced, with a grizzled muzzle and a huge paunch and a habit of pouting with his lips as if about to whistle. His facial expression reminded me somehow of a surgeon, scalpel poised, ready to cut—thoughtful, concentrated, deliberate. I named him Doc.
I suspected that Elizabeth and even Benji had favorites among the chimps and might even have given some of them names. But I told no one about Doc, and gradually over the following weeks I named them all, one by one, even the babies. There was Ginko, a scrawny adolescent male who had a pale, greenish cast to his skin; and Mano, a stubby, tough-looking male whose full name I realized later must be Mano-a-Mano; and Wassail, round bellied and freckled and reminding me of Christmas somehow, one of Santa’s elves; and Edna, a slope-shouldered female with dark, stringy hair who made me remember for the first time in years a crafts counselor I’d had at Camp Saranac the summer I was nine, a kindly woman mocked by all her charges, including me, for her slow speech and low, mannish voice. Their names bubbled into my head as if sent by thought-transference from the chimps themselves, and it was only later that I’d realize I was naming them after people whom the chimps reminded me of, people I’d long forgotten. The names were sounds that for mysterious reasons I liked saying to myself, sounds that were keys capable of unlocking blocked memories, lost sensations, ignored associations.
Words replaced the old file numbers, absorbing the data that made up each chimp’s biography, and just as with a family member or a close friend, the name became the same as the bearer. I knew that I was making a mistake and soon would no longer be able to see the chimps as numbers, as data, and that in time I would want to free them from their cages. But I couldn’t help myself. For my job had lost its tedium, and the edge of despair had begun slowly turning into a cause. An old pattern. It’s how since childhood I have made my daily life worth living, by turning tedium and despair into a cause.
In any case, by the time Woodrow and I were married, I had come to love my job.
“
BUT WHO’S GOING
to replace me?” I asked him. It was the very first morning after we’d returned from our two-day honeymoon. We were finishing breakfast on the terrace adjacent to our bedroom, and Woodrow had informed me that I might prefer to stay home today, since I no longer had to work. I would not have to give notice that I was quitting; he’d already done that for me. Jeannine refilled my coffee cup and padded barefoot back through our bedroom to the kitchen.
“Not your problem who’ll replace you, Hannah. The woman, Elizabeth, she can fill in for you until the Americans send someone over. They know about the need, I’ve already informed them that you will have to be replaced. They tell me they have some big, rich foundation ready to expand funding for the position, so they can afford to send an American graduate student over soon, which is nice and what they prefer anyhow. One of their own. The new person should be along shortly. A matter of weeks. Maybe days. So you needn’t concern yourself. Nothing will be lost in your absence, my dear.”
“Terrific. Great. Elizabeth is barely literate,” I said. “She’ll screw everything up. Do you have any idea how long it took me to get those records straight and reliable when I first took over, after she’d been ‘filling in’ for the previous clerk of the works? It took months!”
“Hannah darling, they’re
chimpanzees
. Animals. Animals and numbers, that’s all. Anyhow, what does it matter?” He touched the corners of his mouth with his napkin and stood up to leave. “It’s just a way to keep money flowing from one hand to the other.”
“No, it’s science! Medical science.”
Woodrow looked down at me as if I were a child, and laughed, genuinely amused. “I’ll see you this evening, my dear little bride,” he said, and strolled to his waiting car.
Woodrow was right—the lab was a shabby, inept operation, and it was ridiculous to call it a “lab” and think of the work done there as science, much less medical science. It was the broken-down tail end of an elaborate scam, a way for a pharmaceutical company to gather data that would back up its claims for a product; a way for a university to get funding for professors’ and graduate students’ salaries and brand-new lab equipment, possibly a whole new university department; a way for Woodrow’s underfunded ministry to get a few American health workers and some decent medical equipment into Liberia and paid for by someone else. And it had been a way for me to finance my stay in Africa, avoiding arrest in the U.S., and most important, a way for me to come up from underground.
Everything in Liberia worked like this. No one in the country gave a damn if a system or an organization didn’t work; no one cared if roads financed by U.S. aid weren’t built or buildings never finished or machinery, trucks, buses, and cars never repaired—as long as the money to build, finish, and repair kept moving from one hand to the other. The country was a money-changing station. Corruption at the top trickled all the way down to the bottom.
AND SO BEGAN
the period when my life made no sense to me. I stayed home and shopped and cooked with Jeannine and supervised her care of my sons, the care of my house, even the care of my husband, and did little else, and acted as though it were normal, even desirable, to live this way. Time passed quickly, as it does when you don’t question the role you’re playing, when you’re barely even aware of it as a role. Everything and everyone else fits—the script is written, all the other actors know their cues and lines and where to stand, and the play continues without intermission or interruption day in and out, twenty-four hours a day, season after season, year after year, until you don’t even know you’re in a play.
All the while, however, the larger world of Liberia was following a different script. I was little aware of it—oh, I listened to the news, the gossip and rumors, Woodrow’s nightly reports, heated discussions among our friends. But because I was not a Liberian myself, I listened as if they were talking about events in a distant land. Instead, I let myself be caught up in the solidly quotidian details of the daily life of a genteel Americo wife and mother—living like my mother in the fifties and sixties, who, until her daughter managed to get herself onto the FBI’s Most Wanted list, went sweetly and quietly and cooperatively about her proper business—clipping flowers for the table; making lists and menus for the cook, guest lists for parties, travel arrangements for her husband; shopping for curtains, clothing for her children; making doctors’ and dentists’ appointments for her children; enrolling them in uplifting and socially advancing classes.
But there was so much else that I could and should have been doing with my life then that it embarrasses and hurts me to be telling it now. For this I
do
feel guilt, and not mere embarrassment. What
was
I thinking? A woman in her mid-thirties, out from under the shadow of her parents at last, no longer underground or on the run, I was free to float, moved only by the current of my real character. And my character had led me into this quiet eddy of nearly stilled, slowly circling water. I’d washed up in a small, backward, provincial country in Africa, where I was a privileged member of the elite, not merely an expatriate or a foreign national employed by her government or by some huge American or European corporation, like all the other white people here. Distinct from the other whites in spite of my skin color, I was rather grandly financed by a man who held a high government position. I had three small children to keep me distracted and more or less busy, a handful of practically indentured servants to leave me time for naps and leisurely walks in my garden, a ready-made social circle of men like my husband and women whose roles matched mine, except for the fact that they were all native Liberians and preferred to keep relations with me, the unavoidable outsider, superficial and strictly social. I was neither one thing nor the other, neither expat nor Liberian national, and thus had no responsibilities to anyone but myself, my children, and my husband, who essentially made no more strenuous demands on me than a small den of Cub Scouts might make on their den mother.
And everyone wanted me to stay exactly where I was.
You’re beautiful, Hannah darling, don’t ever change. Stay in your box
. Woodrow liked boxes. He liked keeping his colleagues, his friends, his sons, me, and his people all in separate compartments, one stacked upon the other, like the cages that held the chimps. His life at home, his work at the ministry, and his political and associated social lives were one stack of boxes, which he kept in the city. A second stack he stashed in the bush, in Fuama, where, for all I knew, he had a second or even a third wife in a box and had other children, though he certainly never mentioned that possibility, and I did not ask. Nor was I at all clear as to where the box with me inside was positioned, other than in the city stack. Somewhere near the middle, probably, once we were married. That box, unbeknownst to me, was slipping gradually towards the bottom.
The Liberians we saw socially in Monrovia preferred to position me at the polite edge of their circle, men and women alike, which was understandable, given my ignorance of their deeper ways and experiences and our vast differences of background, and which was how I preferred it myself. It made it easier for me to keep track of who I really was, to keep my several not-quite-serial identities from overlapping or becoming confused with one another—Hannah Musgrave, Dawn Carrington, Hannah Darling, Mammi, Miz Sundiata, each with her own past, present, and, presumably, future. Since childhood, compartmentalizing had been one of my strengths, after all. That and numbers. Like Woodrow, perhaps. Not boxes inside of boxes, or in a vertical stack like his, but rather side by side, boxes next to boxes, a row of them stretching from one horizon of my awareness to the other. And I could slip unseen from one to the next, as if each had a secret doorway connected to the box beside it.
When I look back now, so many years later, an old lady sitting on her porch here in Keene Valley or sipping her beer at the Ausable Inn or out on the lawn in the shade of a maple tree, telling my story to a friend and remembering the world I lived in then, I know what I could and should have been doing with my time and riches and my abundant privileges. I was surrounded daily, after all, by abject poverty so pervasive and deeply embedded that, though I could never have alleviated it in the slightest, I could have altered significantly the lives of at least a few individuals, people to whom I was related by marriage, for instance, and people who worked for us, and even neighbors, for, although we lived in one of the poshest neighborhoods of Monrovia, there were huts and tiny, sweltering, tin-roofed cabins tucked into the warren of back alleys nearby that housed whole families just barely scraping by and always on the verge of starvation. But even within that small circle of desperately needy family members, friends, and neighbors, I provided no meaningful, lasting help. Whether the poverty inside that circle was truly unalterable, like that of the rest of the country, I couldn’t say even today, but it seemed to me then a fixed and hopelessly unfixable condition, as permanent and unalterable as a gene code.
Beyond that small circle, of course, poverty was indeed fixed. If I bothered to walk ten blocks beyond our Duport Road enclave, I’d find myself in the middle of a workers’ quarter jammed with mostly illiterate young men from the country, tens of thousands of them with only a farm boy’s skills who had drifted into the city to find work, and finding none, had stayed to see their lives die on the vine, unplucked. They became thieves, pickpockets, extortionists, and beggars. They became drunks and drug addicts. Or they joined the army solely for the shelter and clothing it promised, and because they almost never got paid, they continued to steal, extort, and beg, only now with a gun in their hands. Joining them, plying their trade on these narrow streets at night, were loosely organized troops of prostitutes, most of them girls from the country following the boys, or girls kicked out of their villages by their husbands for having gotten pregnant in adultery or by their parents for having gotten pregnant out of wedlock. There were the so-called rope hotels, muddy, room-size squares of ground surrounded by a head-high cinder-block wall with a thatched roof on poles. Inside the walls, at the height of an adult’s armpit, ropes were strung like clothesline across the enclosed space. For a dime, a homeless man or woman could drape his or her weight over the rope like a blanket and sleep all night, dry and more or less safe from the dangerous streets and alleys. Babies, naked and crusted with fly-spotted sores played listlessly in puddles of sewage. Vast midden heaps at the edge of the city were ringed by settlements of huts made from refrigerator cartons, the rusted carcasses of wrecked cars, cast-off doors and broken crates—whole villages of human scavengers sifting the towering, constantly expanding piles for scraps of cloth or paper that could be used or sold, kids and old women fighting with the rats and packs of wild dogs for bits of tossed-out food. It all seemed so hopeless to me that I averted my gaze. I did not want to see what I could not begin to change.