Authors: Russell Banks
In vain. All of it in vain. It’s always been that way, yet we keep on doing it. For tens of thousands of years, since before Biblical times, since the species first learned to make weapons and tame fire, women have fled carnage and returned later to gaze at the wreckage of their plundered homes, stunned by the violence of the destruction and its force, and tried to understand why we came back to it, if this is all we can come back to, and why we fled in the first place, since we have no choice but to return, and nothing but loss and permanent grief await us there.
SOMEHOW THE CHIMPANZEES
are central to my story, and I can’t tell it without them. My heart stops when I picture them in my mind. And I can’t think of my husband or my sons at all, beyond naming them. Not this early in the story. And so I’ll tell you instead of what happened to the dreamers.
Before I fled the war, for a few days I had help in transporting them to the island from the Toby sanctuary, help I needed, especially with the adults and the adolescent males. We took them out in Kuyo’s borrowed motorboat. Kuyo was the man who had worked at the house for us for years, a cousin of Woodrow’s, and for a long time he had shown no more interest in non-human animals than most Americans do. Less, actually. To a poor Liberian, an animal that can’t be eaten and can’t be put to work or serve as trade goods is a liability and deserves only to be punished for it. But somehow the dreamers had begun to invade Kuyo’s imagination. Or maybe it was merely my love for them that lit up his sympathies, for he had always regarded me with genuine interest and apparent affection.
I remember sitting on the back steps bottle-feeding a wide-eyed baby girl named Gilly. Kuyo, a tall, dark brown, almost black man, flat chested with wide, bony shoulders, stopped in the patchwork shade of the cotton tree, leaned on his rake, and asked me, “Why you wanna take care of them monkeys alla time, ma’m?”
I tried explaining to him that soon, if we don’t take care of the chimps, they’ll be gone from the planet forever, and Kuyo’s grandchildren and mine will live and die without having seen one. Our grandchildren’s grandchildren won’t even know that such a creature ever existed, except in legends.
He pushed his lips out and asked me, “Was there, long time before now, way way long time, some kinds of animals, d’you think, that we don’t know about? Strange animals to us that we be scairt of in our dreams, but not so strange an’ scary-scary to the ancestors? Animals we got no names for no more?” He chewed on his lower lip and studied Gilly for a long moment.
As if the tiny chimp knew the man was watching her and for the first time in his life was contemplating the fate of her species, Gilly rolled her head slightly towards him and returned his look. Kuyo said, “Mebbe one day soon I come out to Toby wit’ you an’ view these monkeys for myself. See if mebbe I can give ’em a little care now an’ then. Just to check what they really like close up an’ all.”
“That’s a fine idea,” I said. “Why don’t you go over on your way home? I’ll be there then feeding them, and you can help me.”
Which he did, and soon he was a regular visitor at the sanctuary, and within the year he’d forsaken his job as our yard man and had become one of the caretakers at the sanctuary. And that was where he was killed, later, after he’d helped me move our clan of dreamers away to Boniface Island, where we hoped to hide them until the war was over.
What an absurd pair we made, Kuyo and I, carrying the babies and leading the adolescents by the hand, as if they were frightened schoolchildren and we humans were their teachers, shuttling the older dreamers in the wheeled cage along the winding pathway to the dock on the river where the boat was hidden, ferrying our terrified charges in twos and threes under the shroud of darkness across the broad, moonlit estuary, putting them carefully ashore, and returning to the sanctuary on the west side of the city for more. A couple of confused, frightened, latter-day Noahs we were. What naiveté and vanity on my part, faithfulness and belief on Kuyo’s, and trust on the part of the dreamers, who squatted on the island among the mangroves and out on the muddy landing and watched the humans head back towards Monrovia, knowing somehow that we would return with the others, until finally all eleven had been moved there.
We left them food enough for a few days—bananas, rose apples, squashes, and several baskets of leafy greens—promised we would soon return, and departed for what turned out to be the last time. The dreamers did not know that we were not saving them, we were abandoning them. Nor did we. The dreamers did not know that Kuyo and I, as if in cahoots with the soldiers, had trapped and imprisoned them on the island.
I walked alone to my silent, empty house on Duport Road, in town. The streets were deserted, and everyone who had not fled the city had barred his door and shuttered the windows. I heard the occasional stutter of distant gunfire from Waterside and the rumble of military trucks and jeeps entering and departing from the Barclay Barracks, where the remnant of the president’s special Anti-Terrorist Force was encamped. In darkness I sat out on the patio, exhausted, utterly unsure of what to do next, now that I had done what seemed to me the only and the last thing I actually could do. Half a bottle of gin was sitting on the patio table with a filthy glass next to it, inadvertently left behind, no doubt, when the servants fled. I filled the glass and drank it down slowly, bit by bit, and filled it again, until I had drunk half a quart of gin with no tonic and no ice, a thing I’d never done before. Then I went inside and lay down on the sofa, and with all the windows and doors of the house wide open and the gate to the street unlocked, slept for twelve hours, till evening the next day.
Kuyo had gone back to the deserted sanctuary in Toby southeast of town to gather up the record books, the ledgers and data we’d accumulated over the years, to carry them to me for safekeeping. He’d wanted instead to flee the city for his family’s village in the back country of Lofa and hide there and had argued against going back to the sanctuary. “Them’s only papers, Miz Sundiata, ain’t no point to gettin’ ’em now wit’ all them soldiers about.” But I had insisted. This was the last time that I still believed I could somehow protect valuable documents for the duration of the war—for who, I wondered, would want to destroy numbers, calculations, the birth, death, and kinship records of chimpanzees? Despite everything that had already happened, I’d still not imagined the discovery by men and boys of the pleasures of pointless destruction. Back then, at least until that night, murder, rape, pillage, and the butchery and roasting of animals, even chimpanzees, when it occurred, still had to have a political point—the sad but necessary consequences of warfare.
At the sanctuary, Kuyo came out of the office lugging a plastic milk carton overflowing with the papers and was met in the yard by three men with guns. I never saw them myself but can all too easily imagine them. You’ve seen magazine photographs of them, I’m sure. Americans, especially white Americans, like to scare themselves with those photos. Most of the fighters in that war wore parts of cast-off nylon exercise suits and torn and filthy tee shirts with American college and sports team logos and oversize high-top basketball sneakers, do-rags and baseball caps turned backwards—hip-hop leftovers looted from the stores and shops and scavenged from the street markets of the villages and towns they had rampaged through on their way to Monrovia. Some of them, especially the young boys, wore women’s clothes—nightgowns and skirts and bonnets—and they flashed fresh tattoos on their arms and bare chests and juju amulets around their necks and white paste on their faces. These were the soldiers I had been seeing for weeks on the streets of Monrovia. The officers in their armies—for there were three armies of Liberians fighting one another at that time, President Doe’s, Charles Taylor’s, and Prince Johnson’s—had put these boys in charge of the checkpoints in and out of town and all across the country, and their actions had been generating tales of random drug-and alcohol-fueled murders and rapes and always robbery, looting, and pillaging. Here in town, when off duty, they were seizing houses, painting their names on the walls—Rambo, Quick-to-Kill, Flashdancer—to claim ownership for their planned return when the fighting was over. So far, no one had claimed our house.
The soldiers had come to the sanctuary for the dreamers. Bush meat. There was a sixteen-year-old girl, also a cousin of Woodrow’s, Estelle, who lived on the grounds and had not yet left for her village. She didn’t know which army the men belonged to, Prince Johnson’s or Charles Taylor’s or the army of the man who was still the president of Liberia, Samuel Doe. She had climbed into a cotton tree to hide from the fighters, and the following day, when she finally dared to come to me, Estelle told me that the men had cut off Kuyo’s penis and made him eat it and then had shot him many times in the mouth. They threw his body into the river, she said, and drove away. She said, “Mebbe they be Prince Johnson men, them was in so big a hurry-hurry to get away from town before Charles Taylor’s men come get them an’ kill them dead. Or mebbe them be President Doe’s men who mus’ be scairt of everybody now, even the peoples.”
My journals, years of meticulous records and data, were still at the sanctuary, scattered across the sandy, blood-spattered yard where Kuyo had dropped them, wet from rain and driven into the dirt by the fighters’ jeep and feet as if they were old newspapers. For hours, Estelle and I gathered up the soaked books and loose sheets of paper, until finally we had them all collected in the plastic milk carton.
I held the carton and looked at the contents for a long moment. Then, halfway through that moment, something inside me cracked and split, and there the dark entered in. Weeping, I dumped the contents of the carton onto the ground at my feet. Without thinking, mindless, as if merely following orders, I doused the pile with kerosene from a lamp, lit a match, and tossed it onto the papers. An auto-da-fé it was. The heap burst into yellow flames and sour-smelling smoke and began to burn. I felt the light inside me, what little of it still shone, dwindle and die, smothered by the dark.
Grabbing my arm, Estelle yelled at me, “Why you doin’ that, Miz’ Sundiata! After we work so hard to collect ’em!”
I shook my head and said slowly, “I don’t know, Estelle. I don’t know why I’m burning the papers. I just don’t.” It was the simple, perplexing truth. I told her that I was sorry not to know, and instructed her then to run home to her village and stay with her family and not to come back to the sanctuary ever again. “There is no sanctuary here now, Estelle,” I said. “It’s gone. Like Woodrow. Like my sons. Like Kuyo. Like the chimps. Gone. And if you don’t go home and stay there, you’ll be gone, too.”
As if before her eyes I had turned into a ghost, the girl simply turned and ran, and I never saw her again. Estelle is probably dead now, if she was lucky. Or a ghost herself. She was a pretty little young woman, from Samuel Doe’s mother’s tribe, the Gio. During the months and years that followed, until the people elected Charles Taylor president to stop him from killing them, most of those women, especially the younger ones and the girls, were lucky to have been killed.
TEN YEARS AND A LIFETIME
later, I walked in painfully bright sunlight along the narrow beach outside Monrovia towards the harbor and the town, passing the spot on the beach where, nearly twenty years and two lifetimes ago, Master Sergeant Samuel Doe and his men erected thirteen telephone poles in the sand. I knew the story. I was there. Everyone in Liberia knew the story. Drunk and high on drugs, bloodlust ramping through their veins, Samuel Doe’s men had eviscerated their president, William Tolbert, in his office and carried his ministers, fifteen baggy old men stripped naked, to the beach, where they lashed them to the poles and shot them dead in front of television and home-movie cameras and a crowd of wildly jeering citizens and left their bodies tied to the poles to feed the vultures and the dogs. The poles lie buried in the sand now, and the bones of the corrupt old men have long ago washed out to sea.
At the far end of the beach, where the land elbows into the harbor, I saw the same man in nylon shorts who had fled from me at the gully after the Lebanese truck driver, Mamoud, had let me off. The man stood beside a beached, dark red pirogue, with both hands on the bow in a proprietary way, as if he were about to launch the boat, and watched me approach. So he was a fisherman, then, not a mad scavenger, as I’d first thought, and I must have interrupted him at his morning toilet. He had merely been embarrassed by me, but not frightened. With West Africans, the two sometimes look the same.
A pair of osprey swooped past, dipped close to the glittering surface of the sea, and methodically cruised the length of the beach a hundred yards from shore, searching for breakfast. Now that the man and I could see each other’s faces clearly, I covered my teeth with my lips and smiled, and he smiled back.
How strange
, I thought,
and how nice
—a relief, in fact, that a Liberian man and I were greeting each other with friendly curiosity. I hadn’t thought that possible anymore.
I wished the man good morning, and he said the same, and soon we were talking about how bad the fishing had been in the last few months, since the end of the rains, he said. He was named Curtis. He was a young man who looked to be in his early twenties, with a wife, he said, “An’ five pick’nies. But wit’ no fish to catch me can’t feed them, an’ so the wife gone on the streets now, sellin’ pens an’ Bic lighters an’ other suchlike t’ings but ain’t nobody can buy t’ings in dis country no more, so what a man t’ do?” He spoke rapidly, anxiously, as if afraid I’d cut him off. “Can you help me out wit’ a little somethin’, Miz?” He held out his hand. “Can you gimme dash?”
“Do you know Boniface Island?” I asked him. He did, though he’d never been there. I asked if I could hire him to take me there in his boat. “I’ll pay you twenty American dollars,” I said. “To go out and back. And to wait for me for an hour or so. I won’t need to stay long.”
He wondered why I needed to go to Boniface. “Nothin’ t’ see on those little bitty river islands but birds an’ crocodiles an’ mangroves. Turtles sometimes though,” he added.