The Darling

Chapter IV

I FLEW FROM BOSTON to New York in an early January snowstorm that delayed the flight three hours, then sat on the runway at JFK for another three hours before taking off, and landed in Robertsfield the next morning in bright sunshine with a sparkling blue sky above and palm-lined, white sandy beaches below. As the wheels touched down, the passengers, most of them Liberians returning from the States, suddenly bloomed with applause, and I happily joined in. We were safely home again. We’d come to where we knew we belonged.

Woodrow and the boys and Jeannine and Satterthwaite were gathered together to greet me at the terminal — my African family, which from that moment and for the coming years I regarded as my only family. My true family. My best family. For all its tensions, disconnections, divisions, and conflicts of interest, this little tribe was my claque and cohort. I hadn’t realized it at the time, but on the day I helped break Charles out of prison, I had cast my lot, not just with him, but with them as well. And I could do this, of course, nowhere but at my home in Monrovia. So when Samuel Doe, for reasons then unknown to me, offered me the chance to return to Liberia, I had no choice but to accept it.

I’d made up my mind long before the plane landed at Robertsfield, however, that things would not be the same as they had been. A consequence of my having tied my fate to my little household’s fate was that I now felt empowered to make demands and take on responsibilities that I had never made or taken before. And I planned to set a few wrong things right very quickly.

After the hugs and kisses inside the sweltering, crowded terminal, we piled into the Mercedes, set the air conditioner to blowing, and headed for Monrovia, Satterthwaite driving and Jeannine beside him in front, Woodrow, the boys, and me crowded into the back. We rode in a pleasant, well-behaved silence that I found both amusing and peculiar, as if everyone were waiting for me to do exactly what I fully intended to do — take charge. As if, for reasons both known to me and unknown, they each individually felt guilty, and in the months of my exile, to the degree that they had been collectively weakened by guilt, I had been strengthened.

I was not imperious, merely firm and clear. “Satterthwaite,” I said to him. “I’ll no longer need you to drive me and the boys. I’ll be doing my own driving from now on,” I announced. “And if for some reason I need someone else to drive the car, I’ll arrange it through the ministry or hire someone from town myself.”

“Yes, m’am,” Satterthwaite said and did not turn or even glance at me in the rearview mirror.

Woodrow noisily cleared his throat. “Are you sure, Hannah darling? Satterthwaite’s quite—”

“I’m sure,” I said, cutting him off. “I’m an excellent driver. Requisition another car for your own use, if you want. I’ll keep this one strictly for household needs. I’ll need it all day every day, anyhow. For taking the boys to school and picking them up and for shopping. And for my work,” I added.

“Your work?”

“Yes. And, Jeannine, I won’t be needing you to help me with the boys. I’ll look after their meals myself. It’s quite enough if you’ll just do the housekeeping. Especially since you should be going to school now yourself. I’ll pay you an hourly wage and will pay all your school expenses. But I’ll have to ask you to find another place to live.”

“ ‘Nother place to live?” she asked, incredulous.

“I’ll need your room for my office. I’m sure Woodrow can find you a place to live in town.”

Woodrow quietly said, “Really, Hannah.”

“And, boys, from now on you won’t have Jeannine or me following you around, picking up your clothes and cleaning up your messes and treating you like little princes anymore. You are little princes, of course, but you’re going to learn how to be good men, too, and the first step is learning not to expect women to do all your housework for you. That includes cooking and washing dishes and making your own beds and, as soon as you’re able, doing your own laundry.”

Woodrow said, “Men don’t do laundry, Hannah.”

“In my house, Woodrow, everyone washes his own clothes. Even you.”

“Missus,” Jeannine said. She did not turn around. “Can’t I stay inside the garden house? I can put a cot in wit’ the yardman’s t’ings.”

“No, you can’t. I’m sorry, but I’m no longer going to tolerate what went on before,” I said and looked straight at Woodrow, who turned away and stared out the window at the passing scenery.

“Mammi,” Dillon said, “is this the way American boys do? Do they have to wash their own clothes and cook and stuff?” In the six months I’d been away, Dillon had added half a foot in height and fifteen pounds of muscle. The twins, too, had outgrown their little boys’ bodies.

“Not always. But when they don’t, who do you think does it for them?”

“Their mammies.”

“Right. But lots of American mammies have jobs they go to every day. So, who does it then?”

“The boys do, I guess.”

“Right.”

“Well, I think it’s okay then. We can be like American boys. So, are you going to have a job, too? Like American mammies?”

“Yes, I am.”

Willie said, “Me and Paulie think it’s okay, too. We want to be like American boys.”

Woodrow said, “You’re going to have a job?”

Ignoring him, I said to my sons, “You’re going to have to be even better than American boys. They grow up to be American men. But you’re going to grow up to be Liberian men, the kind of men this country will be proud of. And I’m going to help you.”

“Thanks, Mammi,” Dillon said, and the twins said it, too. “Thanks, Mammi.”

Still gazing out the window, Woodrow in a morose, resigned tone said, “Tell me about this job. And why you want Jeannine’s room for an office. There’s no need for the wife of a minister in the government to work outside, you know. It will make me look bad, Hannah.”

“Everyone in this country who can should go to work. And I can, so I will, yes.”

“Will you work for an American company? Or at the embassy?” he asked hopefully.

“I’ve got plans. I’m going to do something that’s never been done in this country before.”

“And what is that?”

“I’m going to build a sanctuary for chimpanzees. For the chimpanzees that have been abandoned by the lab, if any of them is still alive. And I’m going to buy up and save as many chimps as I can find, those pets on chains and in cages that are sold in the markets and in back alleys. And the chimps that people try to smuggle out of the country to be sold as pets or used in experiments in Europe and America. I’m going to restore them to health and sanity, if I can, and eventually I’ll return them to the jungle, where they belong.”

Woodrow looked at me, as if checking to be sure I was the same woman who had left his home barely six months ago. “That’s … insane,” he declared,

“Can we help with the chimpanzees, Mammi?” Dillon asked.

“Yes,” I said. “And so can you, Woodrow.”

“How? No one cares about dumb animals. Not even the lab. That whole monkey program is dead. Been dead for years.”

“I want you to tell President Doe that I have an offer to make that he’ll not be able to refuse.”

“Why?”

“Because I do.”

“Indeed,” he said.

And then I saw that we had arrived at Duport Road, home, with the two huge, drooling mastiffs behind the gate. They were staring cold eyed at a white man in a rumpled white suit and Panama hat who stood in the street a safe distance from the gate. Sam Clement. When the dogs saw the car, they backed off and wagged their thick tails and smiled as Satterthwaite got out and unlocked and swung open the gate. He patted the dogs on their bony heads and told Sam to come on into the yard, then returned to the car and drove it up the driveway. Sam waved at us as we passed him, and by the time we arrived at the door, he was standing at the top of the steps to greet us.

WHEN I FIRST cared for the dreamers, back when the lab was still functioning, I saw them as creatures less evolved than we, as weaker, as deprived of essential and powerful abilities to reason and communicate. Later, when I knew them better, and they knew me, I saw, not that the dreamers in amazing ways closely resembled humans, but that we in equally amazing ways closely resembled them. As a result, I revised those early assumptions and came to believe that I could empathize with the dreamers.

But then, during the months that I was away from my little colony of apes, I began to see the built-in limitations of empathy. Perhaps because of my relationship with Carol and the rivalry with Zack, and because I am a woman, I came for the first time to believe that even the best-intentioned man, one who truly does empathize with women, is nonetheless incapable of knowing how the relations between men and women feel to a woman. Mainly, he is incapable of knowing how he is perceived by her. And therefore she, despite her likeness to him, remains opaque to him, unknowable.

This doesn’t mean that conflict between them is inevitable or inescapable. But there are useful parallels in the relations between men and women, between whites and blacks, between people without disabilities and disabled people, and between human primates and non-human primates. We who have more power in the world, like men with good intentions, try to empathize with those who have less. We try to experience racism as if I who am white were black, to see the world as if I who am sighted were blind, and to reason and communicate as if I who am human were non-human.

And thus I dealt with my chimpanzees as if I were one myself. And what was wrong with this? What was ethically and even practically wrong with having empathy towards the other? For a long time, I answered, Nothing. Nothing at all. It’s good politics. I see a blind man about to cross a street and think, He can’t see the whizzing traffic, he needs me to see it for him, to take his arm and escort him over to where he clearly wishes to go. Operating on the assumption that, if I were blind, I’d need me to help me, I grab the man’s arm and pull him panic-stricken into the traffic, terrifying and endangering him. Because I am sighted, I have relied and insisted on using a guidance system that utilizes sight as its main source of data. But the blind man has his own system for crossing the street. The blind man hears what I merely see, isolates bits of information that are lost on me, and coordinates and remembers data that I’ve not even registered.

I’m talking here about the difference between empathy and sympathy, between feeling for the other and feeling with the other. The distinction came to matter to me. It still does. When you abandon and betray those with whom you empathize, you’re not abandoning or betraying anyone or anything that’s as real as yourself. Taken to its extreme, perhaps even pathological, form, empathy is narcissism.

WOODROW DECLARED that he could not do without the car, promising that I would have a car of my own in a few days. I couldn’t wait, however, and the morning after my arrival home, as soon as Satterthwaite had driven the boys to school, I pedaled my bicycle out to the old lab, knowing fairly well what I’d find there. In my backpack I carried as many fruits and vegetables as I could stuff into it, along with my lunch and the video camera that I had shipped back from the States. Woodrow had assured me that in my absence the dreamers had been fed and their cages kept clean by Elizabeth and Benji, but I knew how casually and carelessly they would have done their work. I feared the worst.

The lab was a wreck. The office had been looted of nearly everything that remained — every stick of furniture, the filing cabinets and most of their contents, the remnants of medical equipment, all of it either gone or smashed to pieces. Plumbing fixtures and electric lights had been ripped out. The doors to the three cabins swung open, and the window frames had been pulled out and were probably way across town by now, installed in a permanently unfinished cinder-block hut. In those days half of Monrovia had been vandalized to build the other half, and work on the other half had unaccountably ceased. A strange sort of stasis had settled over the city.

I smelled the dreamers before I saw them. From halfway across the yard, the stench enveloped me — rotted fruit and urine. The old, rusted Quonset hut was silent as I approached. The padlock was gone, and the door hung half-open on one hinge, as if someone had tried to rip it off and had given up. Thus the stench, I thought, but I would have smelled it even if the door had been shut and locked. It was overpowering, putrid, like nothing I had smelled before, and though in subsequent years I became almost familiar with that odor, I knew at once that it was the smell of dead bodies, if not human bodies then enough like human to smell the same, to repel and frighten me in the same primal way and fill my throat and mouth with the soured contents of my stomach.

I untied my head scarf and covered my nose and mouth and swung the door back, reached blindly into the darkness and found the switch. Miraculously, the fixtures and fluorescent tubes were still in place and working, protected against theft no doubt by the awful smell of death. The pale, flickering light drove the thick darkness from the building. I could almost hear the darkness flee. But the stink remained. There was no movement in the cages. Brown and black lumps of hair were all that remained of my dreamers. I staggered along the row of cages and one by one said their names, as if taking a macabre roll, and as I passed, first one of the lumps of hair, then another, came slowly to life, rolled its head into view, showed me its flattened, expressionless gaze. They were shrunk to half the size they had been when I’d last made this walk from cage to cage and called their names and they’d leapt to the front of the cages to greet me with glad hoots and hollers. Now they barely stirred at my passing. They lay in their feces and urine and the rotted remains of their last feeding, which from the looks of it had taken place weeks ago. Some of them did not move at all. Others turned their faces to me, but did not open their eyes.

Of the twelve dreamers I’d left behind six months ago, only eight survived. Four cages had a dead body locked inside: Ginko’s, Mano’s, Wassail’s, and Edna’s. I flipped the switch of the video camera and slowly, back and forth in front of the cages, from one foul end of the Quonset hut to the other, I shot close-ups of the dreamers’ flaccid faces, their emaciated, scab-covered bodies, their sores and self-inflicted abrasions and wounds, and I took lingering footage of the dead. Then I stepped to the center of the hut and panned the length of it, filming a slow, sweeping medium shot of the rack of cages. Doc lifted his huge head, and when he looked at me, I switched to zoom and closed on his blank gaze and held it for a full minute.

I brought water to those that still lived and distributed the food I had carried in my backpack, and afterwards hurried to the nearest market and brought back a large sack of fufu leaves and cabbages. I stayed with the dreamers for hours, coaxing them to eat and drink. It was mid-afternoon before I had managed to remove the bodies of Ginko, Mano, Wassail, and Edna from their cages and drag them outside to the yard, and by dusk I had buried them together, side by side, in a small plot of bare ground at the rear of the Quonset hut. The last thing I did was make a circle of rocks around the grave. Then I returned home to my family of humans.

A DAY LATER I had my own car, and after dropping the boys off at school, drove myself straight to the Executive Mansion and once again marched up the long, wide staircase as if on a mission from the American ambassador himself and presented myself at the office of the president. Samuel Doe welcomed me with a warm smile and a familial hug. I shrugged out of it and stood away from him.

“It is a wonderful t’ing that you have returned to us,” he began and sat slowly behind his vast desk.

“Yes, well, I have something for you.” I pulled the video cassette from my purse and set it on his desk before him.

He pursed his lips in surprise and curiosity, then gave me a lecherous grin. “Aha! An American movie! You know my taste in movies?”

“This is a Liberian movie, Mister President,” I said. “Let’s watch it together, you and I.” I looked around the room for the television set and VCR that I knew would be close at hand, for, indeed, I did know of his taste in movies. His addiction to pornography was a nationwide joke. In the corner was a cart with a TV and VCR ready to go. I walked over and snapped them on and inserted the cassette, then came and stood next to the president.

Together, in silence, we watched the film. A ghastly study of pain and cruelty, it ran for about fifteen minutes. Neither of us spoke for the entire time. Yes, it was only a video of some apes in their cages, dead and dying of hunger and thirst and neglect, but flattened out on the screen like that in unedited documentary mode with no soundtrack, it was as shocking and indicting as footage of the hold of a slave ship.

The film ended, and I rewound and retrieved it. The president said, “These them chimps from out at the old American blood-testing place?”

“Yes.”

“Why you showin’ them to me?” he asked, genuinely puzzled. “I was expectin’ some other kind of movie,” he said. “You know the kind.”

“I have a proposal to make to you, Mister President,” I said. I began to lay out my plan in very simple, straightforward language. I told him that, with his help and protection, I would establish a permanent sanctuary for the chimpanzees someplace not far from Monrovia. I would need a building and a secure open space for them and enough funding to care for and feed them and to pay a small staff. I would need money to purchase, whenever possible, chimps that were being sold illegally for pets. I explained that I intended to develop a national program designed to protect this internationally protected species. It would provide him and his administration with good public relations worldwide, especially among the Americans, and people would come from all over the world to visit the sanctuary. The Americans would make films of the project to show on American television, and Liberia would finally become known as something other than a place to register foreign oil tankers.

He lighted a cigarette and waved me to the chair nearest his own. “Sit down. Would you like a drink with me? Not too early, is it?”

“That depends on your answer to my proposal.”

“My answer.” He smiled and smacked his lips with his red tongue. “I like them chimps, y’ know.”

“Yes, I know.”

He laughed. “I mean not just for eatin’. I like ’em. I t’ink this a very good idea. Good for the chimps, an’ good for me. Good for Liberia. So I’m gonna say yes to your proposal, to this sanctuary idea.”

“Then it’s not too early for me to drink with you, Mister President.”

He laughed again and pulled a bottle of Johnny Walker and two glasses from the drawer at his knee and set them before us on the desk and poured three fingers of scotch in each. Raising his glass, he said, “To the chimps, then.”

“To the chimps,” I said and did the same.

Before I left the room, Samuel Doe by phone had ordered his chief of staff to turn over an old, unused military prison located in Toby, five miles east of Monrovia. He knew the place well, he said, because he had once been stationed there. It had twenty cells and an exercise yard surrounded by a high electrified fence. It was in decent repair and could be modified for the chimps easily and cheaply. From the desk drawer where his whiskey had been stashed, he pulled handfuls of American currency, hundred-dollar bills, and counted out one hundred of them, ten thousand dollars, as if counting out playing cards. He wrapped the bills with an elastic band, handed the wad to me, and said, “You on the unofficial presidential payroll now. An’ when you need some more money for your sanctuary, come straight to me. Don’ go no place else. An’ when the place ready and open for business, we’ll make us a big ceremony out there at Toby. Lots of press people. Television. All the foreign ambassadors. ’Specially the Africans! I want them peoples to see what us Liberians doin’ here for the poor endangered species of Africa!”

“Thank you, Mister President,” I said.

He refilled our glasses and raised his again. “To the chimps!” he said and drained it.

“Yes. To the chimps.”

AND SO BEGAN my life as keeper of the chimps, as their rescuer and champion of their cause in Liberia. All right, as their surrogate mother. My human children seemed to require little of me. Perhaps because they were boys and because of my inescapable peculiarities — I don’t want to say my neuroses or personal deformities — but from the beginning, my sons were more Woodrow’s than mine, more African than American, more black than white. I looked after them, of course, made sure they were properly fed and clothed and bathed, drove them to school and picked them up, oversaw their education and social lives in town, but did it in a general, distant way, and left the details to others. Left them to Woodrow, mainly, who guided their religious training, encouraged them to become sportsmen, and, increasingly, took them to visit their grandparents and the rest of the Sundiata clan in Fuama, where they were being prepared for initiation into the Poro society, which, of course, would distance them even farther from me. They were good boys, well behaved, obedient, smart, and only occasionally mischievous or troublesome, and it was not difficult for us, despite our daily proximity, to grow distant from one another. They seemed to welcome and utilize that distance as much as I. Certainly neither they nor I complained of it.

Was I altogether without a maternal instinct? Let’s say I was ignorant of it, that in me it was deflected early on. It was an instinct not so much repressed as stunted, bent, deformed, so that I could not engage and express it in the normal way. In my twenties, in Weatherman, I so severely attacked what we think of as natural instincts, so pruned and cropped them, cutting them back to their roots and in a few cases pulling up the roots as well, that in my thirties and forties I was nearly incapable of cultivating them. My youthful radicalism of necessity masculinized me. To feel regret for having thwarted so many of my so-called natural instincts I would have had to feel regret for my youthful radicalism and the idealism that drove it, and I could not do that. I still can’t.

I was a bad mother, yes, but not a neglectful one. And I was an inattentive, detached wife, but not a cruel or malicious one. And though I was a solitary, self-absorbed woman, I was nonetheless socially compliant and friendly to all, just as I am today with Anthea and the girls who work at my farm and with my neighbors here in the valley. I was as devoted then, and am still today, to certain abstract values like justice and equality as I was in my early years, and if the price I paid in my early years for that devotion was anger and violence against those who were unjust and oppressive, then in my later years the price was cool detachment from those who loved me and whom I claimed to love. Over the years, as I grew older, the dark shadow I cast slowly paled and turned white.

AN ADULT MALE CHIMP can weigh over two hundred fifty pounds and is strong enough to overturn a car or hurl an adult male human across a large room. Adult female chimps are considerably smaller and more pliant, although they can be and often are fiercely protective of their young. Both male and female adolescents are like human adolescents — awash with hormones, amorous, quarrelsome, competitive, energetically testing themselves against one another and adult authority, and capable of fond attachments that seem nearly homoerotic. It’s the babies and youngsters, of course, that we know from circuses and kiddie shows on television. It’s the babies that get captured and sold as pets, after their mothers and other protective adults have been gunned down and sold for food or consumed by the killers on the spot.

All species are in danger of being killed by humans, even the human species, but only a few are as endangered as the one that most resembles us. Like us, they have no tails; like us, they have fingernails and toenails and not claws. They have elbows and knees. They have necks thick and thin, and soft, round bellies when they grow old. They have reproductive systems and endocrine systems and interior organs — heart, liver, kidneys, lungs, and intestines — that are located and shaped like ours. Though they cannot speak, they communicate with one another and with other species with subtlety and ease and efficiency. They have eyes located at the front of their head and open ears attached to the sides of the skull, and they vary in the same degree as humans in complexion and pigmentation and hair color and facial features from one to the other. Because of the extra Y chromosome carried by the males and the number of specific genes attached to it, a male chimpanzee is genetically closer to a male human than to a female chimpanzee, and a female human is closer to a female chimpanzee than to a male human. They are not our distant ancestors; they are our close cousins.

If humans, like the rest of the animals, could not speak, we would all live together in peace, devouring one another solely out of necessity and instinct, our positions in the food chain nicely balanced by need and numbers. If we were as speechless as my collies on the farm or the hens and sheep and the geese, if we barked or baa’d or clucked or if like the chimps we could only hoot and holler and otherwise had to depend on body language, we would not kill one another or any other animal solely for the pleasure of it. The power of speech is the speech of power. Vows of silence are pledges to peaceableness. Silence is indeed golden, and a golden age would be silent.

FOR A FEW YEARS, then, and for the first time in my life, I not only had a cause, but was able to pursue it with measurable success. There were few to witness my success, few who mattered to me. My father was dead; my mother was thousands of miles away and wouldn’t get it anyhow; and everyone from the Movement from the top to the bottom was scattered and lost to me, many of them gone over to the other side. Those who remained on the Left, from what I gleaned from occasional newspaper and magazine accounts, were more interested in designing holistic lifestyles than in working for radical social and political change. The very idea of revolution, which in the late sixties and early seventies had seemed ready for immanence, had been turned into a comic metaphor for self-indulgent self-delusion. Not for me, however. Not in those later years in Liberia, where, while I awaited the return of Charles Taylor at the head of a rebel army, imagining him as a latter-day African Fidel Castro, I busied myself with saving a little troop of chimpanzees in a renovated prison a few miles east of Monrovia, tirelessly working to keep them from being exploited or killed, as if they were my disadvantaged neighbors and I, by accident of birth, had the power and privilege and the right to do so.

People called me “Monkey Lady,” and sometimes “Madame Sundiata of the Chimps,” and several times I heard myself referred to as “Queen of the Apes,” like a female Tarzan. The first time I heard that one it came from Sam Clement, not long after I finished the renovation of the prison and had completed transferring the dreamers from the Quonset hut, a job that required considerable help from a crew of four strong men, a flatbed truck, and a four-foot-by-four-foot, specially constructed cage on wheels that we used for transporting the adults and larger adolescents. The cage had a sliding door that we opened and placed next to the door of the old Quonset hut cage. We slid both doors open, and one by one, sometimes with the younger chimps two by two, they entered the larger, wheeled cage; then we slid the doors closed, locked and wheeled the cage to the truck and loaded it and drove it out to Toby, where we repeated the operation, releasing the chimps into the cells that in the Tolbert years had been built to hold humans, but which were five or six times larger than the Quonset hut cages. The chimps entered their vast, new space, where I had placed fresh water and food to welcome them and had suspended tires from ropes and built racks of iron pipe for climbing and swinging and cocoa-leaf mats for sleeping nests, and made themselves at home. It wasn’t exactly a minimum-security prison, but it was an enormous improvement over their previous conditions of confinement.

The last to be transferred to his new prison cell — I can’t call it his home—was Doc, who must have felt, as he saw his troop diminished one by one, that we were executing them one by one, for as each left the Quonset hut, he grew sadder and more downcast, until at the end, when we came for him, he lay curled in a corner of his cage, a huge, dark hill of depression, as if prepared for burial. But at Toby, as soon as we removed the wheeled cage from the truck and pushed it up to the open door of the cell that was to be his, which was located at the command center of the block and from which all the other cells were visible, he stood and looked out at his troop — his subordinate males and his female consorts and his children and their playmates and companions — and grasping the bars of the cell, he shook them with spectacular delight and display, as if he himself had arranged all this and it had gone precisely according to plan.

I was feeding the dreamers, passing large chunks of watermelon through the bars, when I heard a voice behind me. “So you’re the Queen of the Apes now. And this is your palace.” I turned. It was Sam Clement. Our American friend. It wasn’t the first time since my return that I’d seen him; he had been at our doorstep to greet me on my first arrival and had visited the house for dinner once since. But it was the first time that we’d been alone with no other humans present.

Sam smiled and stood next to me and for a moment studied Doc, who studied him back. “That’s a big fella,” he drawled. “What’s his name? I expect you’ve given them names.”

“Doc. Yes, they have names. Though I don’t know what they call one another. Kind of an interesting question, don’t you think? Whether animals have names for one another.”

He laughed. “I suppose they grunt, ‘Hey, you,’ with various inflections and tones and get answered, ‘You talkin’ to me?’ Hey, show me around, will you?”

I walked him through the prison, and he admired, or pretended to admire, the way I’d recycled the cells and the exercise yard and had converted the old interrogation rooms into storage and had made what had once been a windowless room, probably used for torture or solitary confinement, into a nursery for the babies. As we walked we touched delicately on the subject of his role in facilitating my return to Liberia and the aid and comfort I was now receiving from President Doe.

“Sam, were you keeping track of me through Woodrow while I was in the States?” I asked him. “Or were there other, more official sources of information?”

“Oh, Woodrow kept me posted well enough. Our paths crossed at the embassy every now and then. Say, is it possible to get close and actually touch these beauties?” he asked and took a step towards the cell where Tina and her daughter Belle were happily sharing half a watermelon. From his cage Doc saw him and raised an ear-splitting protest, and Sam backed off. “Whoa! Steady there, big fella.”

“He sees you as competition,” I warned. “He thinks you want his wives.”

“They aren’t my type, believe me.”

“I haven’t really thanked you, Sam,” I said. “For speaking for me. With Doe, I mean. I assume it was you who brought him around.”

“Yes, sort of, but he didn’t need much convincing. The guy he’s pissed at, and damned afraid of, too, is Charles Taylor.”

“Oh,” I said and changed the subject. “Actually, if you want, you can play with the babies. In the nursery. I’ll bring them in for you. They’re still a little frail, but quite gentle and sweet.”

“No, thanks. Not for me. I’m a people person, if you know what I mean.”

We’d ended the tour at the front of the sanctuary, where I’d taken over the prison chief’s office. It was a large, bright, freshly whitewashed room furnished with a desk and filing cabinet, where I’d started combining as much of the data left over from the old lab with the data that I was now accumulating, birth, medical, and behavioral information, along with a rapidly swelling file of correspondence from primate sanctuaries in other countries, mostly African, but also a few located in the United States, in Ohio, Georgia, and South Carolina, and one in Canada. I was finding allies and teachers everywhere.

“Well, m’love, I ought to be getting back to the office,” Sam said. Out the window I saw his Land Rover with the U.S. seal on the side. His driver was chatting with several of the men I had hired to help me move my dreamers to their new home. “You heard about Taylor, didn’t you?” Sam said.

“Heard about him? No. What?”

“He escaped from prison. In the States.”

“He was in prison?”

Sam smiled, that warm, Virginia, white man’s smile reserved especially for silly women. “Yes, Hannah. He was in prison. A federal prison in Massachusetts. Not too far from where you grew up, Hannah.”

“And he escaped?”

“It wasn’t but minimum security, so he didn’t need a hacksaw blade in a cake. I guess he just sort of walked off the place.”

“Where … where is he now?”

He opened the door and stepped into the glare of the yard. “Who knows?”

IN THOSE DAYS, rumors passed through Liberia like weather systems, one following hard upon the other. To me it seemed unlikely if not impossible, but Charles was supposed to have fled the United States for Mexico, not Libya. And from there to Cuba, where Fidel Castro was providing him with military training and sanctuary. Then we heard he was in jail in Ghana for plotting to overthrow the government of President Rawley. Or he’d recently been seen in Abidjan trying to raise money to finance an invasion of Liberia from Côte d’Ivoire. Or he was up in Freetown, in Sierra Leone, making arrangements to invade Liberia by sea. The next week he was in a training camp outside Tripoli, building an alliance between Samuel Doe’s old Americo enemies in exile, a cadre of ex — Black Panthers, and a battalion of young pan-African communist revolutionaries. It went on like that, month after month, year after year. He was said to have gotten married. He was getting divorced. He was said to have become a Baptist. For a month we heard he was in the pay of the CIA. A month later the CIA was trying to assassinate him. And so on, until the only way for me to process the rumors was to discount them altogether, to go about my daily rounds at home and at Toby, and wait.

Meanwhile, as the boys approached puberty — and they were close enough in age to arrive there more or less together — Woodrow started taking them to Fuama with increasing frequency and for longer and longer stays. They made these trips without me, as I was unwilling to leave my dreamers in the care of others for longer than a day. At least that’s what I told Woodrow and the boys, until they stopped inviting me to join them — happily, it seemed, almost with relief, as if my presence out there embarrassed them. The bamboo wall that separated me from Woodrow’s family and village was cultural and linguistic, not racial or even economic, and I should have been able to scale it and join them on the other side, but I was unwilling, perhaps unable, to do fieldwork on my own family. Woodrow’s people and their world, especially as the boys became increasingly comfortable and knowledgeable there, frightened and threatened me. Consequently, I coped with my ignorance and feelings of exclusion by backing away from that wall, instead of learning how to climb over it, and only increased the distance between me and Woodrow’s people, between me and Woodrow himself, and between me and my sons.

This allowed us to keep deep and wide secrets from one another. Of Woodrow’s village life, whether he had one wife in Fuama or many wives or none, whether he had fathered children there with other women or, except for my three sons, was childless, I knew nothing and did not ask. And of my sons’ tribal initiation, of the secret Poro rites that moved them out of childhood and taught them the ancient ways of becoming men among their father’s people, I knew only that these rites had taken place in the bush and at night and that women were not permitted to inquire about them, a restriction I complied with easily. And though during those years I was no one’s lover or mistress and certainly no one’s wife but Woodrow’s and underwent no ritual initiation or life-changing religious experience, public or private, I had secrets, too. Mine were the secrets of my past: deviancies, as Woodrow surely would have viewed my relationship with Carol and earlier with other women; and brief and furtive sexual dalliances, as with Satterthwaite; and a certain long-held dream of violence against people and institutions and governments that exploited the poor and the weak — a dream that over the years had faded and nearly been forgotten, but that had been called back vividly into service by Charles Taylor. It was my biggest secret. Once again I was caught up in that old fantasy of the imminent arrival of justice. Though I appeared to be a dutiful mother and spouse and the successful manager of a locally famous primate sanctuary, I was underground, again.

FOR A LONG TIME, we heard no more rumors concerning Charles, and I began to fear that something bad had happened to him, that he had indeed been jailed or possibly even assassinated. But then one morning in early December 1989, news came of a formal armed assault against the government of Samuel Doe. It had been launched along the border in Nimba County by a small force calling itself the National Patriotic Front of Liberia and led by Charles Taylor. The second in command was a “strange man” named Prince Johnson, but there was little else known about the group. No one seemed to take the incursion seriously, since it had occurred in the jungle far to the east, some two hundred miles from Monrovia, and this National Patriotic Front of Liberia, the so-called NPFL, was said to number no more than a few dozen poorly armed men.

On December 26, we got word of a second raid in Nimba, this one conducted by a much larger force augmented by men and boys recruited from Butua and Karnplay, the Gio villages out there, Charles Taylor’s mother’s tribespeople. In the papers and on the radio the men and boys of the NPFL were being referred to now as rebels. But the fighting was still taking place in remote villages, and with no reliable firsthand reports available, no one, except for me, took the incursions seriously. Finally, in late February, Doe sent a battalion of his soldiers to Nimba County with orders to drive the NPFL back into Côte d’Ivoire and claimed a few days later to have gone to the front himself to assess the seriousness of the situation. Upon his return, he assured the nation by radio and TV that there was no cause for alarm, for the Armed Forces of Liberia had everything under control, and the rebels were in disarray, fleeing for the border. Within a few days rumors came that Doe had never made it to the front, that halfway there he’d abruptly turned back, trailed by persistent claims that Taylor’s men were protected by special powers, juju charms and magic waters, that the fighters were “gun proof,” and that often in the midst of battle they became invisible.

By April, the rebels had captured Ganta. Around this time, the AFL, Doe’s frightened and disorganized army — in a vain attempt to terrorize the villagers and keep them from providing recruits, food, and shelter to Charles’s rapidly growing force — had started committing atrocities in the distant villages. The rebels advanced with an ease and speed that surprised everyone. Everyone except me. Things were unfolding just as I’d expected. Just as I’d dreamed. By May the rebels had reached Buchanan, and by June they were in the Bong Mines region. Doe kept showing up on television to assure us that his army had suffered no casualties, that Charles Taylor had lost three hundred fifty men in Kakata, his second-in-command Prince Johnson had lost a hundred fifty fighters in Careysburg, and both were in retreat. Which to us meant only that Charles Taylor had advanced as far as Kakata, barely thirty miles from Monrovia, and Prince Johnson was in Careysburg, eighteen miles from the capital.

I did not know what Charles Taylor would become and what he and the thousands of men and boys who followed him would do to the people of Liberia and to my family and to my dreamers. I could not have imagined it. I believed not so much in him as in his rhetoric, which I had welded to the remnants of my youthful ideology and disappointed idealism. And when I ask myself now what I should have done, once I had made it possible for Charles to escape the cage he’d been put in and I had been granted permission by Samuel Doe to return to my husband and sons, to my home, and to the dreamers, I have no answer other than what in fact I did: I came, like John the Baptist, I thought, to prepare the way; or like Mary Magdalen, to welcome him at the gate, and until he came, to do good works: keeping house.

I wasn’t alone in this. As the season wore on, it began to look as though the rebels might actually succeed in overthrowing Samuel Doe. Support for Charles Taylor quietly spread across the country. It didn’t hurt that in July he broke with Prince Johnson, supposedly over depredations and atrocities committed by Johnson and his followers in villages around the Bong Mines near Kakata. Members of Doe’s government, his press secretary, the minister of transport, and some members of the legislature fled the country. There were demonstrations in Monrovia and Buchanan, led by prominent churchmen, calling for Doe’s resignation. All the while, from a portable radio station somewhere in the jungle, Charles was telling us of his progress and intentions, explaining his principled break with Prince Johnson, condemning Johnson and Doe as if the two were in cahoots together, and we all, Woodrow, too, secretly listened and silently cheered him on.

Doe fought back, of course. Many of his more outspoken critics — journalists, academics, churchmen, and even a few government officials — were brutally murdered by death squads, non-uniformed thugs who came out from under rocks at night and left the mutilated bodies of Doe’s enemies on the streets and door stoops to be found in the morning. Violence begat more violence. Single incidents of murder, disfigurement, and torture quickly justified massacres, villagewide amputations of limbs, gang rape, and the forced recruitment of children. Tribal war erupted. Doe’s Krahn soldiers started imprisoning and executing Gios and Manos, and in the countryside Charles Taylor’s and Prince Johnson’s men started killing Krahns, Doe’s tribe, and Mandingos, a tribe that in legal and extralegal commercial matters had long been favored by him. One of Doe’s death squads massacred hundreds of civilians huddled for safety in a Lutheran Church. Another raided a hospital and singled out Gio and Mano tribespeople and slew them in their beds.

Now the whole of West Africa was threatened by the conflict. Entire villages, towns, and cities from Senegal in the north to Nigeria in the south and inland east of Guinea were made up of Mandingos, Krahns, Gios, and Manos. Consequently, in mid-August, a fourth army, one made up mostly of Ghanaians and Nigerians, entered the war. Ill equipped and barely trained, they were sent into Liberia by the Economic Community of West African States. The new army was called ECOMOG, or the Economic Community Monitoring Group, and it was supposed to keep the warring parties apart and somehow broker a peace settlement. It did nothing of the sort. The Ghanaians and Nigerians simply joined the fray, and soon they, too, were brutally murdering civilians and being murdered back. Unbelievable tales of massacres committed by all four armies, bizarre accounts of ritual killings, random executions, rape, cannibalism, and pillage accumulated and became believable, and people who could leave Liberia for safe havens in the U.S. or other West African countries packed up and fled. Those who could not or would not leave — among them Woodrow for his reasons and I for mine — kept inside their houses and prayed that the war would soon be over and the horror would stop.

ONE AFTERNOON late in August, the rain was falling like drapery, and Sam strolled into my office, only the second time he had come there, which meant he had a purpose. Even under a big black umbrella in a heavy downpour, he never seemed to hurry or stride along: he sauntered like a boulevardier, as if he had no place special to go and all the time in the world to get there. Which in those months was unusual, especially for a white man, when everyone in Liberia, even the locals, either hurried from one place to another or else slunk from door to door and, if you looked away and back again, was gone from sight. Sam folded his umbrella and perched on a corner of my desk and glanced at the logbook open before me.

I put down my pen and closed the book and said hello.

“Secrets?”

“You interested in the ovulation cycles of female chimpanzees?”

“Not really.” He whistled a tuneless tune through his teeth for half a minute while I waited in silence. We’d reached that point in our relationship where we could be both present and absent and not take it personally. Not exactly intimacy, but on its way there.

The rain drummed against the tin roof. Finally, Sam sighed and, without looking at me, said, “Things are going badly for Doe, you know. Very badly.”

“Yes. I know.”

“We’ve started advising American citizens to get the hell out of here while they still can. The country’s a house of cards, Hannah. Doe’s going to fall any day, and when he does, things will get savage for a spell. Between Johnson and Taylor and ECOMOG, there won’t be much wiggle room. It’s time for you and your boys to leave, Hannah.”

“I can’t leave. I’ve got the chimps. And the boys, they’re not Americans anyhow. They’re Liberians. Where would we go?”

“Please. Don’t play dumb with me. I’ve got exit visas for them and for you and Woodrow, too, in case Doe’s people give you shit at the airport. I’ve also got you entry visas for the U.S. All non-essential embassy personnel are flying out tomorrow. After that, getting out will be dicey at best. C’mon, Hannah, go home and pack.”

“Woodrow won’t leave. Not as long as Samuel Doe is president. He’s still a faithful member of the cabinet. And if he can’t go, neither can I or the boys. We’ll be all right. Besides, like I said, who’ll take care of the chimps?” I smiled up at him.

There was a break in the rain, and suddenly the room was very quiet. Sam walked to the window and peered out. “Doe’s a sinking ship, and all the rats who can are jumping off. Including Woodrow. And Doe knows it. He’s going nuts over there. Jesus, I hate this time of year,” he said suddenly and laughed. “I feel like Noah, collecting Americans for the ark, two by two.” He was silent for a moment, then said, “You’ve got five seats on the eleven o’clock to JFK tomorrow. If you’re not at Robertsfield by ten to claim them, there’s a whole bunch of gringos who will have been waiting all night, and they’ll happily take your place. It’s not the last flight out, but damned near it.”

“Have you spoken to Woodrow? Does he know about this?” I heard low hoots from Doris and Betty and then Doc down the hall, advising me that it was feeding time. In a moment the others would take up the call.

“Yesterday. I went by the ministry.”

“Yesterday? He never mentioned it.”

“I didn’t think he would. He said you wouldn’t leave your ‘dreamers,’ but mainly he still thinks Doe can pull it off as long as Johnson and Taylor are fighting each other. Doe thinks the Marines are gonna land and save his sorry ass. He’s wrong, of course. And ECOMOG’s not gonna save his ass either. All they’ll do is pick up the pieces after he’s gone and keep as many of them as they can for themselves. No, Woodrow’s deluded by Doe, who’s self-deluded. Your husband’s been in government too long. It was useless talking to him. That’s why I came by to talk to you. Woodrow said he planned to ship the boys out to his village, Fuama. But that won’t do you or him any good. And when he goes down, it won’t do the boys any good either. Or anyone else connected to Woodrow, so long as Woodrow stays connected to Doe. That’s going to be a death sentence, Hannah. Even for you.” He grabbed his umbrella and opened the door. Without turning, he said, “If Woodrow insists on sticking it out till the end, let him. But you and the boys, you get out, Hannah. In a few months things’ll be back to normal again, believe me. Charles Taylor will be sitting in the Executive Mansion, and Prince Johnson will either be dead or, if he’s lucky, in a cell, maybe right here alongside your ‘dreamers,’ ” he said and laughed lightly.

“You know that,” I said.

“I know that,” he answered and stepped outside and closed the door behind him. Seconds later, the rain resumed pounding on the roof. Then the chimps raised their voices in unison, hollering for their meal, each trying to outdo the others in volume and intensity. What began as a mild signal to their keeper rose to screeching rage, accompanied by the steady, rhythmic drumming of the rain.

WOODROW’S CAR PASSED through the gate and up the driveway at the usual time, five o’clock. He drove himself, however, which was not usual. I stepped from the kitchen, where I had started preparing supper, to the terrace and said, “No Satterthwaite?”

“No. Where are the boys?” He came rapidly towards me, ignoring the dogs, who looked after him with downcast but still expectant faces. Woodrow always arrived home with a small bag of meat purchased at a roadside stand and made a big show of feeding it to the dogs. But not today, evidently. Disappointed, they flopped in the shade at the rear of the car.

“In their room, I suppose. I’ve been in the kitchen. Why? What’s the matter?”

“Can’t you hear that?” he said and brushed past me.

Yes, I heard it, I’d been hearing it for weeks, the chatter of gunfire in the distance coming from the other side of the river in Logan Town, beyond Bushrod Island. We’d been hearing it off and on and had grown almost used to it, as if it were not the sound of men and boys shooting to kill people, but some mild form of celebration in a neighborhood we seldom visited and where we knew no one. When, after the first few days, it no longer seemed to be coming closer to our part of the city, I’d more or less tuned it out, and since my daily route to the boys’ school and the sanctuary in Toby and Woodrow’s route to the ministry were all in the opposite direction of Logan Town, the scattered bursts of gunfire we heard in the evening and during the night, seldom in the morning, came to us as if broadcast over the radio from some other part of the country. Despite the war, we’d managed to maintain so much of our normal daily life and routines that we felt not just protected from the war, but as if it were taking place somewhere beyond the border, in Guinea or Sierra Leone. You can do that in a war for a long time when you have enough money and your family and friends are still able to cling to power.

I followed Woodrow into the boys’ bedroom. Dillon lay on his bed, huge, eyes closed, lost in his Walkman, a muscular, barefoot giant of a boy in his green Boston Celtics tee shirt and gym shorts. The other two sat facing each other cross-legged on the floor. They were practicing their newly acquired skill in sign language, learned from a chart I’d brought them after having tried and failed to teach a few basic signs to my dreamers, the signs for yes, no, mother, father, baby, and My name is… William and Paul had quickly mastered the signs and now could carry on lengthy, utterly silent conversations with each other without our knowing a word of what they were saying.

“Come, come, boys, pay attention!” Woodrow snapped.

Dillon opened his eyes and removed the earphones. He sat up slowly, as if waking from a nap. The twins’ hands went silent.

“Hi, Papa,” William said and sweetly smiled.

“What’s the matter, Papa?” Paul asked in a small voice. He looked to me as if for an answer.

Woodrow stepped over the clutter of the small room and went into the closet, where he rummaged through its contents for a moment before emerging with my old duffel bag, unused for nearly four years, except to store temporarily the boys’ outgrown clothes before donating them to the church. He emptied the bag on the floor and tossed it to Dillon. I suddenly noticed that Woodrow was sweating and smelled of anxiety and fear. His movements were abrupt and ill coordinated, as if he’d been drinking. He turned to me and said, “Get them packed,” and I smelled the whiskey.

“Packed? What for?”

“I’m taking them to Fuama,” he said and roughly pushed Dillon on the shoulder and the twins by the back of their heads. “Hurry up! We goin’ now.”

“What about the checkpoints? Prince Johnson controls the road to Fuama, doesn’t he?”

“We’ll get through. I got money. It ain’t Johnson I’m worried about anyhow.”

“Who, then? Not Charles. Charles is our friend,” I said. “Remember?”

He ignored me and set about helping the boys, tossing random articles of clothing, sneakers, and a few books into the duffel. “Hurry, hurry, hurry!” he said. “For God’s sake, hurry up! Hannah!” he shouted and abruptly turned to me. “Go wrap some food, as much as you can. Rice, tinned beef, beans, anything. Hurry!”

I did as instructed, and by the time I’d put together a large string sack of provisions, Woodrow appeared in the kitchen, ready to go, the boys coming along behind him, bewildered and frightened.

“Hurry up,” Woodrow ordered. “You comin’ wit’ us,” he said to me.

“I’m not staying in Fuama,” I said. “What on earth are you running for anyhow? Who are you running from? Look at the boys, you’ve got them terrified. I’m terrified, Woodrow.”

He grabbed me by the wrist and pulled me towards the door. “You go where I say you go. Don’t vex me now, woman,” he warned. “Wit’ you in the car, them soldier boys’ll let us pass the checkpoints.”

“No! I’m not leaving this house, I have to be here for my dreamers. And you can’t take the boys until you tell me what’s happening.”

He looked me coldly in the face, as if at that moment he despised me and wished he’d never married me. “Sam Clement seen you at Toby today, didn’ he?”

“Yes, he came out for a few minutes.”

“An’ you think Doe don’t know that?”

“What if he does?”

He shook his head sadly. He no longer despised me; he pitied me. “This man Doe is crazy, but crazy like a fox. Look, he knows the Americans got their hand in this war from the beginnin’. He knows they been secretly backin’ Charles. He knows you an American, missus! An’ ’cause of that old business ’bout me an’ Charles, Doe been puttin’ two an’ two together. He sent two of his soldier boys aroun’ for me this afternoon, but I knew it was a trick, so I sent Satterthwaite across to the Barclay Barracks where Doe and his top boys all holed up, tol’ him to say I be right along, an’ when Satterthwaite didn’ come back, I know what Doe got in his head for me.” He passed me at the door and scooted the boys outside. “Get in the car,” he ordered.

“What about Bruno and Muhammad Ali?” Paul asked.

“Never mind them dogs, they’ll guard the house. Jus’ get in the car. Jeannine or Kuyo or somebody’ll take care of ’em.” He turned and grabbed my wrist again and yanked me outside.

“Let me get the food,” I said, and he released me, and I returned to the kitchen.

“Wait a minute, Papa,” Dillon said. “I forgot something, too.” He followed me into the house and jogged into the living room, and when he returned he carried the camera bag and video camera. Except for the video I made for Samuel Doe, no one but Dillon had ever used it. He had become fairly proficient and had accumulated a small collection of home movies, mostly of his friends and sports events, but a few family events as well, which we usually watched once after they were shot and not again.

“Might be something interesting out there to tape,” he said, as together we passed out of the house. I locked the door and walked to the car, where Woodrow waited impatiently. Dillon got in back with the twins, and I walked to the gate, while Woodrow backed the car down the driveway and out to the street, where he stopped and waited for me to lock the gate. It was our routine.

This is how it happened. As I turned to clip the padlock onto the gate, I saw them waiting for us, Satterthwaite with three men I didn’t know, civilians in sweat-stained sleeveless shirts and caps and sneakers, street kids, the kind of feral young men without jobs or family whom I’d gotten used to seeing hanging out on corners and stalking the alleys in Monrovia over the last few years. Satterthwaite moved on me, his face expressionless; the others, carrying machetes, went for the car. Satterthwaite lifted his shirt and showed me a pistol against his bare belly. “Go back inside,” he said and pushed me through the gate, then quickly closed and locked it. The dogs, sensing my alarm, barked once; then, having recognized Satterthwaite, stopped.

“Woodrow, go!” I screamed. “Drive! Drive, for God’s sake!”

He didn’t move. Several seconds passed as the men walked to the car, two of them on Woodrow’s side, the other on the passenger’s side. Satterthwaite leaned his back against the gate and watched the car. Woodrow, round faced, wide eyed, looked over at me, a prisoner locked in our yard behind the iron-barred gate, and the boys did the same. They stared at me as if I were standing on the deck of a departing ship and were waving goodbye to them.

“Leave, Woodrow! Go!” I yelled.

It seemed they had done this many times. The men moved slowly and methodically to the sides of the car. The one on the far side opened the rear door and pointed his machete at the boys and said something to them. Another opened the driver’s-side door, and the third reached in and grabbed Woodrow by the arm and pulled him from the car to the street. It happened in an instant. While the first man stood by the open rear door and kept the boys inside, the other two forced Woodrow to his hands and knees. One of them pulled Woodrow’s head back, forcing the small of his back down and his narrow shoulders up, and the other flashed his machete on a deadly path parallel to Woodrow’s back and shoulders towards his head, then lifted the machete, and with a single blow separated my husband’s head from his body.

There was no sound, not a word or a cry from any of us, no screams, no weeping. Nothing. The dogs remained silent. There was only the sound of the birds and the cicadas and the frogs and the evening breeze in the trees. Woodrow’s body collapsed onto the street and poured blood into the dirt. The boys, as motionless as a photograph, stared out the car window at their father’s body. The man with the machete looked at the other, who held Woodrow’s head in his hands. He pointed at the head with the tip of his machete and laughed, an odd, high-pitched, silly laugh, and the other tossed the head across the street into the gutter like a rotten melon.

Satterthwaite turned to me and brought his face close to the bars between us. I remember his yellowed eyes, his handsome broad nose, his thin moustache and sharply defined lips. I remember his loathing. In a low, cold voice, he said, “Take your boys now, an’ go home to America wit’ ’em.” Then he joined the others, and the four nonchalantly walked down the street together and were gone.

The boys were still inside the car, peering out cautiously as if at a forbidden movie. I shouted, “Stay there! Don’t leave the car! I’ll be right there for you! I have to fetch another key for the gate!” I cried and ran for the house, cursing myself for not having kept a duplicate on the ring with the house key. I found it in Woodrow’s desk drawer and raced back outside and, fumbling with thick fingers, managed to get the padlock open and off the hasp and pushed the gate back. I stepped quickly past Woodrow’s body without looking at it and flung open the rear door of the car.

The car was empty. My sons were gone.

I REMEMBER DRIVING through the city like a madwoman chasing ghosts. There was very little traffic — a few military vehicles was all, trucks and jeeps carrying soldiers who handed open bottles to one another, laughing and, when they passed by, ignored me as if I were invisible. A pack of teenage boys in looted clothing ran from an electronics store lugging stereos and armloads of CDs, the Indian shopkeeper gazing mournfully from the doorway. A few cars with household possessions lashed to the roof were headed inland to some imagined place of safety. It was not quite dark, and plumes of black smoke rose ominously in the south from the vicinity of the airport, where Charles Taylor’s forces were rumored to be dug in, battling the remnants of Doe’s ragtag army. From Mamba Point the sea was glazed red by the setting sun. Across the harbor there was more smoke rising. Prince Johnson’s bands of marauders were advancing towards the city, looting, burning homes, killing and raping women and girls as they came. A large crowd of people was gathered outside the closed gate of the American embassy, shouting to be let inside. Behind the gate a pair of stone-faced Marines with automatic weapons stood ready to fire if the crowd tried to climb the wall or rush the gate to get inside, where they imagined entry visas to the U.S. were there for the grabbing. People shook their fists, held up their babies, and waved their hands pleadingly as if for alms. I recognized some of the faces of my neighbors and several people we knew from the government agencies and ministries, a judge, a doctor and his wife with whom Woodrow and I had occasionally played bridge, the man who owned the big appliance store on Broad Street, a teacher from Saint Catherine’s. Still I drove, left and left and left, in a gradually widening circle, like a rat seeking its way out of a maze. Out by the hospital, when I came to a barrier of burning tires, I stopped, reversed, and started turning right and right and right, until I got held at a checkpoint by a half-dozen soldiers and was forced to turn back. My sons had disappeared, that’s all I knew. I didn’t think they’d been marched off at gunpoint by their father’s murderers or by Doe’s soldiers. I hadn’t left them alone in the car long enough for them to have been captured and taken away. But how long were they alone? How much time passed when I ran into the house and got the key to unlock the gate? I didn’t know. It could have been sixty seconds, it could have been five minutes or even ten. But what good would it do anyone to imprison the three sons of Woodrow Sundiata, now that Woodrow was dead? It was Doe who had him killed, I knew that. Probably from the beginning Satterthwaite had been working for Doe and not Woodrow. Until the end, because of what Satterthwaite reported back to him, Doe believed he had nothing to fear from the small man who ran the Ministry of Public Health. But now, with Charles closing in from the south and Prince Johnson from the east and north, with his army abandoning him in droves, and then with the Americans stepping stealthily away from him and Sam Clement visiting first Woodrow and later me, suddenly Woodrow must have seemed dangerous or, at the least, disloyal. But in this chaos, no one was loyal. Alliances were made and broken hourly. Betrayal was standard operating procedure for everyone.

It was dark now, and I couldn’t get out of the city. I heard the hard clatter of gunfire from the port where the Nigerians were stationed and the boom of artillery and the occasional shriek and explosion of a rocket grenade coming from the direction of the Barclay Barracks. It was useless, driving in circles around the city like this. My sons, wherever they were, did not want me to find them. I drove slowly past the homes of their schoolmates, the few whom I knew. The city was entirely in the dark. No streetlights, no house lights. Even the hotels and restaurants were without electricity. Candlelight and kerosene lanterns danced behind windows, and now and then, crossing ahead of me, the headlights of prowling military vehicles. I drove past the several houses where I knew the families, people whose children at one time or another had played with my children, houses where Dillon or the twins had once stayed overnight, but I could not bring myself to leave the safety of the locked car and walk to the darkened door and knock and ask, Have you seen Dillon, William, and Paul? I looked away for a moment, and suddenly they were gone. They watched their father being murdered, and I had to leave them alone for a few seconds, and when I returned, they had disappeared. I couldn’t imagine saying that to anyone.

Finally, hours later, I found myself parked in an alleyway outside the narrow, wood-frame shack where Jeannine had gone to live with her aunt and uncle and their children. I got out of the car and walked up the rickety steps and knocked quietly on the door. There were no lights inside, not even a candle. After a moment, I heard Jeannine’s voice, little more than a whisper. “Who that?”

“It’s me. Hannah.”

The door opened a crack, then a little wider, and I made out Jeannine’s round, brown face in the gloom. I sensed others behind her, as if the room were crowded and I had interrupted a meeting of conspirators. Jeannine said, “What you want here?”

“I … need you. I need you to help me. I’ve lost the boys. I don’t know where the boys are, Jeannine.”

“No,” she said. “The boys not here.” She started to close the door, and I held it back with my hand.

“Wait. Woodrow … he’s been killed. Woodrow’s dead, Jeannine.”

She looked at me blankly, as if I’d said my telephone wasn’t working. “Plenty-plenty people dead. Go ’way, missus.”

“Please, Jeannine. I need you. I can’t find my sons.”

“You don’ need me for nuthin’. Missus.”

We looked at each other in silence for a moment. We had been servant and mistress, then she the teacher and I the student, then friends. We had shared my husband, and then, at my doing, had become servant and mistress again. Now we were enemies. The truth of our relationship had finally become its reality.

“Will you come back to the house with me, Jeannine?”

She did not answer. She pushed the door closed on me, left me standing on the little porch alone in the darkness.

Slowly I drove down Duport Road towards our house and realized that I would have to pass Woodrow’s body and would somehow have to bring it into the yard and wrap it and bury it. I would have to search in the gutter in the dark for his head and carry it, too, into the yard and bury it with his body. I didn’t know if I was capable of performing this grisly task alone, now, in the middle of the night, but decided that I had no choice, I had to do it for the boys. For Woodrow. For myself. I was not going to leave my husband’s body lying in the street for the rats and wild dogs and the buzzards.

I steeled myself and slowed the car and pulled up before the closed gate. I didn’t remember closing the gate, but must have, to keep the dogs inside the yard. But had I locked it? I wondered, for I saw in the headlights that the padlock had been hooked into the hasp and was snapped shut.

I got out of the car and walked to where Woodrow had been murdered. There was a splash of moonlight through the trees on the ground where he’d been forced to kneel and a pool of blood where he’d fallen. But his body was gone. I crossed to the gutter where his head had been tossed like garbage and grimaced as if I were already looking at it in the muck and refuse. But it was not there. Someone, something, had taken my husband’s decapitated body and his head, his remains. Someone had taken first my children and now the remains of my murdered husband.

I stumbled back to the car, and as I got inside, looked up and saw that the gate was swung wide open, and standing behind it in the driveway was Sam Clement. He waved me forward, and I drove the car in from the street. As I stepped from the car, Sam clanked the gate shut again and locked it.

“You left the key in the lock,” he said. “Not a good idea. It’s lucky I came by before anyone else did, or you wouldn’t have much to come home to.”

My entire body was shaking, and I started to cry. Sam put his arms around me and held me until I could finally speak. “Woodrow … he’s dead, Sam. They killed him. And the boys, my sons, they’re gone. I don’t know where they are! I’ve been driving around all night trying to find them. Can you help me, Sam? I don’t know what to do anymore.”

“C’mon inside,” he said in a low voice. “I know about… Woodrow. I saw his body when I got here.”

“His body! They cut off his head, Sam. It was Satterthwaite, him and three other men. They weren’t soldiers, but I know Doe sent them.”

“Probably, yes. He’s gone all paranoid and wiggy and is sending out all kinds of headhunters. They’re doing their dirty work all over the city. C’mon, I’ll get you a drink. I found some candles inside and Woodrow’s whiskey. Hope you don’t mind,” he added as we crossed the terrace and went inside.

“But the boys, Sam? Doe wouldn’t take my sons, would he?”

“Can’t imagine he’d bother,” he said and in the flickering candlelight stepped quickly to the liquor cabinet and half filled a glass with scotch. “Besides, they’re Americans.”

“What?”

“Well, half and half.” He handed me the drink, took up his own, and sat in Woodrow’s easy chair.

I fell back into the chair opposite, suddenly exhausted. The whiskey burned my throat, but it calmed my shaking limbs and brought my thoughts more or less back into focus. I realized that I hadn’t heard or seen the dogs. “Where are the dogs?”

Sam exhaled heavily. “Yes, well, the dogs. When I got here, with Woodrow’s body out in the street and the car gone and the house dark and silent, I was afraid something equally bad had happened to you and the boys. I had to get inside. I unlocked the gate easily enough, due to your leaving the key in it, but the dogs wouldn’t let me pass. I’m sorry, Hannah. I had to shoot them. There was no other way to get inside the house.”

“Oh, God, you shot our dogs?” I put down my glass. “Sam, you carry a gun?”

“I do.” He touched the breast pocket of his suit jacket.

“Christ,” I said. After a few seconds of silence, I asked him again about the boys. “I’m terrified. They’re my babies, Sam.” I started to cry again. “Damn it, I hate my fucking crying!” I yelled, and stopped immediately.

Sam asked if the boys had seen Woodrow killed.

“Yes. They watched from the car. Satterthwaite and three others pulled him out of the car and made him get down on his hands and knees. And then one of them cut off Woodrow’s head, Sam. It was … awful. He did it with a machete. And the boys … they watched it happen.”

He stood and refilled his glass at the bar. With his back to me, he asked, “Did they know it was Doe who had Woodrow killed?”

“Dillon, I think Dillon knew. Woodrow came home afraid and crazed and insisted on driving to Fuama with the boys tonight. He said Doe had turned on him. I’m sure that registered with Dillon and very likely with the twins, too. They’re fourteen and thirteen, Sam. They don’t miss much.”

“So they know,” he said, still with his back to me.

“Yes.”

He turned and sat back down in Woodrow’s chair. “That’s too bad, then.”

“Why? I don’t understand.”

“Yes, you do,” he said quietly. “You just don’t want to admit it to yourself. You probably knew it the second you realized they were gone.”

For a long moment neither of us said anything. Distant gunfire rattled the windows. Otherwise, silence. Finally, I said, “You’re right. I’ve been driving all over the city tonight as if I were looking for my sons. But I knew the whole time I wouldn’t find them.”

“So you understand that by now they’re either with one of Prince Johnson’s outfits on the other side of the river or else with one of Charles Taylor’s.”

“Yes.”

“More likely Prince Johnson’s. Charles’s people are still pretty much locked down at Robertsfield for the time being. Johnson’s just over the bridge.”

I nodded. I understood what was happening, I was living inside it; it was my life, but I couldn’t quite believe that it was real. I asked Sam if he had moved Woodrow’s body.

“Yes. I dug a shallow grave out there in back of the house. It’s in the flower garden. When this is over, you can put together a proper funeral for him. I’ll show you later where I buried him.”

“You found … the head, too?”

“Yes, I’m afraid so.”

“Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

“Sam, what am I going to do? What can I do?”

He took a swallow from his drink. “Only one thing you can do now.”

“What?”

“Get the hell out of Africa.”

BUT I DIDN’T LEAVE. For a while I was able to continue searching for my sons and caring for my dreamers. There was murder and mayhem all around me during those weeks, but strangely very little of it touched me directly. At least at the time it seemed strange. Later, I understood.

Every morning I drove through the nearly deserted streets of Monrovia, passing bodies, many of them mutilated and half devoured by dogs and other scavengers during the night, with smoke rising from the outskirts where fighting continued between Doe’s dwindling forces and Prince Johnson’s bands of men and boys in the eastern suburbs. Charles Taylor’s forces were approaching from the south. Rumors of Doe’s imminent collapse and surrender floated through the city like errant breezes. There were hourly radio broadcasts and declarations of victory by all three parties to the war, each of them in turn denying the claims of the other two, until it became impossible to gauge the direction or flow of the conflict. Because I seemed to be immune to its effects, of so little value or threat to any of the warring parties that I was able to pass through the checkpoints more or less at will, I was able to ignore the daily advances and retreats and dealt with the war as if its outcome would have nothing to do with me or my sons or my dreamers. I was too numb with fear and grief, too horrified and shocked by the killing of Woodrow and my sons’ disappearance, to worry about the larger effects of the war.

And so I moved more or less freely throughout the city, while the war raged around me. There were checkpoints all over now, run by boys not much older than Dillon, heavily armed and wearing looted clothing and gear, bizarre combinations of women’s clothes, formal wear, and shirts and shorts plastered with the logos of American sports teams. They wore juju amulets that were supposed to make the boys bulletproof and heavy gold chains and medallions that made them look like deracinated rap singers. Regardless of the time of day or night, they were high on drugs and raw alcohol, their minds deranged by what they had seen and done in the war. At every stop they demanded money from me, and as soon as I gave them a few dollars, they let me pass. Every time I saw a new group of boys coming towards my car with their guns cocked and their hands already out for money, I asked them if they knew the whereabouts of the sons of Woodrow Sundiata, and usually they cackled and laughed at my question, as if I’d asked if they knew the whereabouts of Michael Jackson, or they ignored my question altogether, took my money, and waved for me to go on.

Finally, I gave up searching the city for my sons, and decided to risk driving to Fuama, where I half believed they might have gone, although I couldn’t imagine why. I left Kuyo in charge of the dreamers. He had grown to love them and they him. A few times the soldiers, Doe’s men, had come by the sanctuary to see if I had left yet, and when they saw that I was still in charge of the place, they departed, shrugging and smiling over my foolishness. Except for the bodies of the dreamers themselves, bush meat, there wasn’t much to interest them at the sanctuary, nothing of value to loot or destroy. Estelle, Woodrow’s sixteen-year-old cousin, a sweet country girl who’d come to the city to work for me at the sanctuary, was as loyal as Kuyo to me and the dreamers and had stayed on at Toby long past the time when she should have fled back to her village. When she first arrived from the backcountry, I’d given her an unused room at the sanctuary, an old storage shed, that she had made her home, and I’d begun teaching her to read. She was a pretty, shy girl, not as bright as I might have liked, but kind and eager to please.

For a long time, she and Kuyo and the dreamers had been my only companions, and because I seemed almost magically protected against the depredations of the soldiers, Kuyo and Estelle had come to think of me as their protector, and thus both had stayed on longer than they should have. Everyone in Monrovia had a tribal village they could flee to, but no one knew for sure if it was safe there. Tribes thought to be loyal to Taylor, like the Gio, were viewed by Doe’s men and Johnson’s as the enemy and were therefore legitimate targets of opportunity, even though they were unarmed civilians. Tribes thought to be loyal to Doe or Johnson because of lineage, were slaughtered by the soldiers of one or the other or both of the others, the women and girls raped, their villages razed and rice and cassava and garden stores looted or burned. All over the country, people were in confused flight from one or the other of the three forces, and sometimes from all three. When the fighting had been mostly in the bush, people had fled into Monrovia; but now it had come to the outskirts of the city, and everyone who could had fled back into the bush. Monrovia seemed like the still center of a swirling, countrywide storm, with all its inhabitants waiting, heads lowered, hands tied behind their backs, for the three armies to converge there.

THE ROAD TO FUAMA was littered with abandoned cars and pickup trucks, tires stripped, hoods and trunks open, some of the vehicles still smouldering. The rubber plantations and plowed fields were empty of workers and overgrown, neglected for months now, since Charles’s band of rebels had crossed into Liberia from Guinea at Nimba and Johnson had come in from the north. The villages all seemed to have been abandoned by the inhabitants, and most of the buildings had been burned. Desolation lay all around.

At the river I was met by a group of four boys, two of them carrying AK-47s and bandoliers of ammunition draped over their bony shoulders. They wore do-rags on their heads and cheap wraparound sunglasses that made them look like spindly insects. When they approached the car, I opened the window and said that I wanted to cross the river to Fuama.

They didn’t answer. One boy held out his hand, palm up, and I put a dollar in it. The others did the same, and I put a dollar in each hand and said again that I wanted to cross the river to my husband’s village. I noticed a man, also in sunglasses and wearing a do-rag, camo shirt, cargo pants, and Timberland boots, lounging by a cotton tree nearby, smoking a cigarette and barely watching the boys under his apparent command. Though I had many times over the years made this journey to Fuama with Woodrow and had come to know most of the inhabitants of the settlement, at least their faces, these boys and their commander were strangers to me. Many of Woodrow’s people did not speak English, or spoke it only a little. Perhaps they don’t understand me, I thought.

The man got up slowly and strolled towards the car. I said to him, “My husband is Woodrow Sundiata. His father is headman of Fuama. My sons—”

The man cut me off. “Go home now,” he said. He waved the barrel of his gun in the direction I had come. “Turn and go home.”

Something in his voice was familiar. “Do I know you?” I asked. “What’s your name?”

“You know me.” He took off his sunglasses, and I recognized him at once. It was Albert, Woodrow’s nephew, who had guided me into the village years ago, on my first visit to Fuama, when I’d been left behind, a teenage boy who was in missionary school and hoped to follow Woodrow’s example in life. And indeed he had, or so I believed. He had finished high school in Liberia and, at Woodrow’s expense, had attended business school in Baltimore for two years and had returned to Liberia, where he had taken a job in Loma, up near the border of Sierra Leone, with an American-owned sand-and-gravel company.

“Albert!” I cried. “I’m so relieved it’s you.” His eyes were red rimmed and his expression was cold, utterly without feeling. “You’re a soldier,” I said.

“Everybody makin’ war now. You g’wan home now, missus,” he said and put his sunglasses back on.

“Albert, my sons … are they here? In Fuama? Do you know where they are?”

For a moment he said nothing. He turned to the boys with him and spoke rapidly in Kpelle. They answered with slow shakes of their heads. Then Albert said, “Mus’ be them dead. Most everybody from the family dead now. On account of Woodrow an’ Doe.”

“Woodrow is dead, Albert.”

“I know that.”

“He’s your uncle. Don’t you care?”

“I care, yes. But now everybody in the family, the whole village almost, they dead, too. On account of Woodrow bein’ for Doe an’ against Taylor.”

“It was Doe’s men who killed Woodrow,” I said. “Not Taylor’s.”

“Don’t matter who kill him.”

“No, you don’t understand!”

He started to walk away at that, but I got out of the car and followed him down to the edge of the river, where he stood looking across to the landing on the other side. The river was high from the rains and dark red with runoff from the highlands. “The raft is gone,” I said. “How do you get over to the village?”

“The village gone, too. The soldiers, them come an’ mash it all up. Burn all the houses, kill all the peoples inside an’ shoot the ones who run out.”

“What soldiers? Doe’s?”

“Charles Taylor’s soldiers. He come here with them and help to kill all the people himself. Then he goes on the radio an’ says it a great victory over Samuel Doe’s army boys. But there ain’t none of them here. Never was. Only old men an’ women an’ little babies here. When I hear Charles Taylor on the radio I came very fast from Loma to see what happened. Only these little boys left. Them an’ me, we been buryin’ all the dead peoples.”

“Where did you and these boys get the guns?” I asked him.

“Prince Johnson. He got plenty-plenty guns for people who wants to go against Charles Taylor while Prince an’ his soldiers goes against Samuel Doe in the city.”

We stood side by side in silence. He was a small, frail-boned, young man — like Woodrow a decade ago, before alcohol and middle age thickened him. “Albert, what will you do now?”

“Can’t say. ’Cept to keep killin’ peoples. Till Taylor an’ Doe both dead or run out of the country. Prince Johnson give us plenty protection. Nothin’ can hurt us. No bullets, no machete, nothin’. He promise me a good job after the war an’ a house in the city. My war name ain’t Albert, y’ know,” he said. “No more Albert Sundiata,” he said with pride. “My war name is Sweet Dreams Gladiator. Pretty cool, eh?” He smiled broadly, boyishly. Then, still smiling, he said to me, “I need your car. Woodrow’s car.”

“My car? No!”

“We need to take your car. This Benz belongs to Prince Johnson now and no more to Samuel Doe.”

I argued, I protested, I begged, but it did no good. He’d gone stony on me. The boys had crowded into the car, ready to travel, pushing and punching one another playfully, as if headed out for a day at the beach.

Albert said, “Gimme the keys.”

“No! If you take the car, how will I get back?”

“Not my problem. Gimme the keys now.”

We stood there arguing a moment longer, when one of the boys walked over with the keys dangling from his fingertips. I’d left them in the ignition. He handed them to Albert, Sweet Dreams Gladiator, and that was the end of our argument. Albert headed for the car, and I said, “You’re not leaving me here,” and ran for the passenger’s side, flung open the door, and yanked the boy sitting there out of the car and took his place. “There! Now get in back with the others if you want to ride,” I said to him and locked the door.

Albert laughed and got behind the wheel, while the sour-faced boy fought for a place in back, where the others were jammed together with their guns and ammunition. They were little more than children, twelve and thirteen years old, one minute killers, the next playful and innocent-seeming as puppies. Albert said to them, “Better do what Mammi say, before she put the eye on you.”

WE PASSED THROUGH the town of Millsburg to the far side of a cinder-block school, where several troop carriers and seventy-five or a hundred men and boys and a small number of women and girls loitered around campfires. It was nearly dark. I smelled food cooking — palm oil, rice, and meat. Albert parked the Mercedes next to a vehicle I recognized, a white Land Rover with the seal of the U.S. government on the door and U.S. embassy plates.

Immediately, a gang of fighters surrounded the Mercedes, admiring it and praising Albert for having brought it in. He turned and said to me, “Maybe I can get you a ride back to town.” He nodded in the direction of the Land Rover, then got out of the car. “Wait here. I’ll bring Prince to decide things,” he said and walked into the school with most of the crowd in tow.

A few moments later they returned, with Albert still at the center but walking a few feet behind a tall, very dark man in a proper military uniform, Prince Johnson, evidently, and striding along beside him, Sam Clement, his face barely concealing a sly smile.

I got out of the car and stood by the door, waiting. Johnson had the look of a successful preacher, a crowd-pleasing, handsome, back-slapper happiest when surrounded by admirers and impossible to imagine alone and in a reflective mood. He came straight to me and took my hand in both his huge hands and said, “I mus’ tell you how sad I am for the cruel an’ untimely death of your husband. I only jus’ now heard about it from my good friend, Mister Sam Clement. Please accept my heartfelt condolences, missus.”

I stammered a thank you and glanced at Sam, whose expression told me nothing at all. Johnson continued to talk. His English was very good, and he thanked me on behalf of his people and all the people of Liberia for the gift of the Mercedes, which had been bought and paid for by the poor people of Liberia and was now being returned to them, its rightful owners, and I could be sure that when this war was over there would be a proper public tribute to me, full government honors and privileges to be granted to me before all the citizens of Liberia. “We Liberians love the Americans,” he declared. “An’ we remember all their many generosities.” Then he moved close to the car and swung open the driver’s door and leaned in, examining it with obvious pleasure.

Sam came up to me and took my arm and in a low voice said, “Get in my car, I’ll take you back to town.” He walked me around to the passenger’s side of the Land Rover and opened the door. I climbed inside and waited while he exchanged a few words with Johnson, who now sat proudly behind the wheel of the Mercedes. Then Sam was beside me in the Land Rover, and we were driving very fast out of town, heading towards Monrovia.

For a long while neither of us spoke. Finally I said, “What were you doing there?”

“More to the point, darlin’, what were you doing there?”

“I had no choice. They wanted the car.”

“I mean, what were you doing way out here in the bush, for heaven’s sake?”

“My sons, Sam! My … lost boys. I thought maybe someone in Fuama would know … and would help me. Would help me find them and bring them home.”

“Ridiculous. All the Kpelle have scattered into the jungle or headed for the border. Except the ones who’ve signed on with Johnson. Like your young friend there. One of Woodrow’s people, no?”

“Yes. Albert. All he wants to do now is kill people loyal to Doe or Taylor.”

“He’s got reason.”

“Yes. I know.”

“Hannah, give it up,” he said. “Don’t go looking any further for your sons.”

“I have to, Sam.”

“They don’t want to be found. Believe me, I’ve asked around. The sons of Woodrow Sundiata, they’re well known, Hannah, and they’re either under the protection of that crazy sorry-ass Johnson, or Taylor, who isn’t much better.”

“They could have been back there, back at Johnson’s camp?”

“Exactly. And if they wanted you to find them, darlin’, you’d find them without looking. They know where you are, m’dear.” He was silent for a moment. “If you won’t leave the country, Hannah, and I can’t force you to leave, then for God’s sake stay at your house. I’ll make sure it’s secure. We’ve hired some locals to protect certain properties from looting and certain individuals from harm. But if things keep getting worse, we’ll have to close down the embassy completely, and if we do, I won’t be able to help you, Hannah. You’ll be on your own here. A white woman all alone in hell.”

“Who do you think will win the war, Sam?”

He didn’t hesitate. “Taylor. This guy Johnson is nutty as a fruitcake, a real piece of work. But Taylor, him we can deal with.”

“I’ll be all right then.”

Our route back to town passed near Toby, and I asked Sam to let me stop at the sanctuary for a moment to check on my dreamers. With things falling apart so fast, I couldn’t be sure of Kuyo’s and Estelle’s willingness or ability to cover for me. When we pulled up in front of the office, the place was dark, and no one came out of the building to greet us. The headlights of Sam’s Land Rover flooded the small yard, and long, fluttering shadows from the cotton tree in the center of the yard flashed across the gravel. While Sam waited in the car, I walked quickly to Estelle’s cabin and knocked on the door and called, “Estelle? You there?”

No answer. Returning to the car, I said to Sam, “You go on. I’ve got to feed and water the chimps. I think my helpers have run off.”

“How’ll you get home?”

“I’ll camp here. I’ve got a couch in the office. It’s okay. I’ve done it before.”

He passed me a flashlight. “Here. You’ll need this. Looks like the power’s off all over the city.”

He drove away, and I snapped on the flashlight and headed for the office, when suddenly the door opened, and there was Kuyo, and in the shadows behind him, Estelle, both of them wide eyed, frightened. “Why didn’t you come out before, for heaven’s sake?” I demanded. “If I’d known you were here, I’d have gone home with Mister Clement.”

“We didn’ know it was you,” Kuyo said solemnly. “Might be the soldiers comin’ back.”

I entered the office and lit a kerosene lamp, filling the room with a dull orange glow. “They were here again? Doe’s soldiers?”

He said he didn’t think so. Not Doe’s soldiers. Not this time. “Maybe from Prince Johnson. Real wild boys,” he said. They had gone through the place and emptied the petty cash box and had taken the radio and my old manual typewriter. They’d noted the eleven chimps, pointedly counting them, Kuyo said, and they’d told him that as soon as they got themselves a truck, they were coming back.

“Them gonna make plenty-plenty bush meat, Miz Sundiata,” Estelle said and started to whimper. “Them men are terrible peoples!” she cried.

“Then we’ll have to move the chimps,” I said.

And we did move them. It took the entire night, but the three of us managed to transport all eleven dreamers from the sanctuary out to Boniface Island, a small, mangrove-covered islet in the middle of the broad estuary. Chimpanzees cannot swim and are afraid of open water, which made the island, though more of a sanctuary, as much a place of confinement as the renovated prison at Toby had been. In pairs and with the larger adults one by one, we moved the dreamers in the same large, wheeled cage that we had used to bring them to Toby from the blood lab in the first place. The river bank was only a few hundred yards down a narrow lane from the sanctuary, and luckily Kuyo had a friend with an old, leaky Boston Whaler with an outboard motor that hadn’t been stolen by the soldiers yet. For fifty dollars, Kuyo’s friend agreed to let us use the boat for the night. We flattened the bottom of the hull by laying a sheet of plywood into it and used another for a ramp to load and off-load the chimps. Seven times we rolled the cage onto the boat and kept it steady during the three-mile voyage out to Boniface, where we rolled the cage from the boat onto the short, dark beach and released the chimps, strangers suddenly freed in a strange land. Until they discovered, of course, that the land was very small, not much larger than their communal space at Toby, and was surrounded by water.

With genuine interest and curiosity, the dreamers watched us work. All night long, sweating and grunting from the effort, we bumped and scraped our knuckles and shins against the cage and the gunwales as we fought to keep the cage steady during the crossing. Estelle and Kuyo were both very strong, much stronger than I, and even they were exhausted from the work, but neither complained or held back or asked to rest. Once we had our plan and technique in place, we worked in silence, except to comfort and reassure the dreamers, who seemed somehow to recognize that we were all in great danger and were trying to save their lives. None of them panicked or cried out.

We moved Doc first, the largest and strongest of the dreamers, their leader. His compliance and trust instructed the others to do likewise. When we released him from the cage and quickly pulled the cage back onto the boat and let the boat drift a few feet out from the beach, I cast the beam of my flashlight onto him. He was crouched on the short beach, peering around at the low mangroves, sniffing the air, taking the measure of the space that surrounded him. He scooted in a quick circle over the island and returned to the beach. He looked out at the boat, then looked aside and down, as if pondering a deep question: Why am I here instead of someplace else?

“Doc scared, but don’t want nobody to know it,” Kuyo whispered.

I flicked off the flashlight. “Me, too.”

By the time we’d moved all eleven of the dreamers, it was nearly dawn, the safest part of the day in Monrovia, when the only people out and about were women and children scouring the city for food and water and kerosene for cooking, stepping over fresh bodies, the night’s kill, and heading quickly back to their huts and shanties to hole up in darkness for the rest of the day and night, avoiding as much as possible being caught alone and unarmed by one of the roaming gangs of men and boys sky high on drugs, palm wine, and murder and lusting for blood and sex and loot. But it felt safe enough for me to walk the few miles from Toby back to Duport Road. I had no other place to go now anyhow and couldn’t stay at the sanctuary waiting for the soldiers to return. Kuyo wanted to leave at once for his village in Lofa, to be with his wife and children, who had fled the city a few weeks ago, but he agreed to pack up my records and logbooks and bring them to Duport Road for safekeeping as soon as he got a few hours’ sleep. Estelle had already locked herself inside her shed to hide and sleep. She had a vague plan of waiting till nightfall and trying then to slip past the checkpoints north of the city. She’d heard that her village was under the control of Prince Johnson and there was no longer any fighting. The looting and rape, for the time being, at least, had been completed out there, and something resembling civil order had returned. These loosely controlled armies roared through the villages like hurricanes, and it was usually safest after one of them had passed on and another had not yet arrived, when they were killing people elsewhere over food, pillage, women, and territory. Right now, all three armies were converging on the city, Monrovia, closing in on it like three hungry lions trying to take down a wounded bull and keep the other two at bay.

I had no provincial village to return to, no family or tribe to hide or protect me until this war was over. My dreamers were for the time being safe on their island, stocked with enough food to last them a week or so, when I planned to bring over a fresh supply of fruits, vegetables, and leafy greens. But beyond that, I had no plan, except to wait out the war and hope that it would end quickly, possibly in the next few weeks, with Charles Taylor vanquishing Samuel Doe and Prince Johnson alike. I still nurtured the belief that once Charles had removed Doe from power and kept Johnson from coming to power, he’d quickly pacify the rest of the country with the help of ECOMOG and the other regional forces, and in short order he would establish a constitutional assembly and hold elections, redistribute land, create social and economic equality, and bring about a socialist democracy in this little corner of West Africa that would shine across the continent like an alabaster city on a hill. My sons would return to me then. Together we would bury their father properly in the cemetery of the church he so loved. They would heal from their terrible ordeal, and the four of us, mother and sons, would build a coherent, useful life together in the new Liberia.

It was a flimsy excuse for a vision, a sorry patchwork made of scraps of fantasy, but it had not been willed into being or chosen from among others, for I had no alternative vision available to me then, no plan, no option, no blueprint for action that did not lead me to flee this place, abandoning my missing sons, my murdered husband’s body buried among the flowers behind our house, my dreamers marooned on an island. That tattered vision was my life, the only life I had now.

YOU MAY REMEMBER my telling early on how the soldiers, returning to the sanctuary, mutilated and killed poor Kuyo — while I drank myself to sleep on half a bottle of warm gin back at the house on Duport Road. You may remember my telling how Estelle and I started to gather the rain-soaked, muddied records I’d taken years to accumulate, when I grew suddenly despondent beyond repair or relief, and instead of saving those records and logbooks, I burned them there in the yard of the sanctuary. And when Estelle asked me, “Why you doin’ that, Miz Sundiata! After we work so hard to collect ’em!” I said, “I don’t know, Estelle. I don’t know why I’m burning the papers. I just don’t. There is no sanctuary here now, Estelle,” I said to her. “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,” I told her, and she obeyed me, and I never saw the girl again.

That same night Sam Clement found me at the sanctuary. He arrived in the backseat of a Humvee driven by a helmeted U.S. Marine with a second, heavily armed Marine in the passenger’s seat, big, pink-skinned southern boys with necks like tree trunks, crisp, camo’d uniforms, their weapons and boots oiled and glistening, so different from the rusting weaponry and motley uniforms of Doe’s soldiers or the bizarre costumes worn by the rebels. For weeks, Marine helicopters had been airlifting embassy personnel and U.S. and other foreign civilians from the U.S. embassy grounds to four destroyers stationed a few miles offshore, there to receive and ferry people north to Freetown, in Sierra Leone, where there were commercial flights to London and charter planes to the States.

Rain poured down on us in the middle of the muddy yard. We stood in the beam of the headlights, while the Marines stood guard beside it, as if expecting to be attacked. Sam grabbed me by the shoulder. “For Christ’s sake, Hannah, come to the embassy now! You’ll be dead or worse by morning if you don’t. Doe’s dead. This place is turning into a goddamned killing field.”

“Doe’s dead?”

“Where the hell you been, girl? Prince Johnson and his boys got him.”

“Home,” I said. “I’ve been at home. And here.”

He was disgusted. “I’m surprised you’re still alive,” he said and pulled me towards the Humvee. “Get in.”

We rode in silence, until halfway back to town I said to Sam, “I’ve got to go by the house first. I need my passport and some papers and a few clothes, Sam. And some money.”

He didn’t answer at first, then said to the driver, “Sergeant, we’ll make a stop back at Duport Road.”

“Yes, sir. Same place we was watchin’, I suppose,” the Marine drawled.

“Yes.”

When we pulled up to the house, I got out and unlocked the gate and swung it back. The driver drew the Humvee up to the terrace and parked, and Sam and I went inside the darkened house. I lit a kerosene lamp on a table by the door and started for the living room.

Sam said, “You out of fuel for the generator? Smells like you haven’t had the air-conditioner on for weeks.”

“I guess there’s fuel. I just haven’t used it. I’ve been going to bed early, I guess, and making do with candlelight and kerosene lamps.”

He told me to wait while he got the generator started and left me alone in the living room. He was right; the house smelled amphibian. I looked around the room as if I hadn’t seen it in weeks, as if I’d been in another country. Mildew and mold had darkened the walls and ceiling, and the cloth on the furniture and the rugs had started to rot. For weeks I had sleepwalked through my days and dreamlessly slept through my nights and had barely noticed the rapid disintegration of my home. Now, as I lit candles and lamps and walked from living room to dining room to the boys’ bedroom and mine and Woodrow’s, I saw that the house and everything in it and all the memories that it contained were dying before my eyes.

Returning to the living room, I heard the generator rumble to life, and suddenly the lights came on, and the air-conditioner fluttered and whirred. Sam came inside looking pleased with himself. “Let there be light!” he said. He hadn’t shaved in several days and looked very tired. His rumpled suit was spotted with mud and coffee stains and sweat and looked like he’d been wearing it for weeks. But he was oddly attractive all the same. Fatigue and anxiety became him. They undercut his Tidewater arrogance, his genteel self-assurance, and gave him a more humble mien and manner. He shot me a crooked smile and said, “Too bad we don’t have some time to kill. We could throw us a little party.”

I looked up at him. “In all these years, Sam, you’ve only hit on me once, when you tried to kiss me out there on the terrace. Remember?”

“Yes. That was an accident. I was a little drunk, I’m afraid. But I don’t mean that the way it sounds. You are an extremely attractive woman, I can say that. It’s just that I don’t make a habit of coming on to married women.”

“I never thought of you as especially scrupulous, Sam.”

He laughed lightly. “I’m not.”

“What about widows?”

“Yes, well, that would alter things a tad, wouldn’t it, now? But this is not a good time, Miz Sundiata, for you to be coming on to me. If that is what you’re doing.”

“I don’t know what I’m doing anymore. Maybe I’m just curious.”

“Curious, eh? The truth is, sometimes after I’ve been out here in this goddamn heart of darkness I get horny for white people, that’s all. I suppose you do, too. I expect that’s a little of what’s going on with you right now,” he said.

I exhaled slowly and sat down on the sofa. “No. I’m lonely. And I’m confused. And I’m frightened. And terribly sad, Sam. I’m sad. And suddenly, in this light and in this room, you are a very attractive man to me, and if it would make my loneliness and confusion and fear and my sadness go away for a few moments, I’d like you to make love to me. That’s all.”

He furrowed his brow and looked steadily at me, as if he suspected a trap was being set for him. “That’s all, eh? I was under the impression that you preferred women,” he said.

“Oh, really? And what gave you that impression?”

He laughed. “A boy can tell. Especially one that prefers men. C’mon, m’dear, pack your bag. We can continue this discussion later.” He reached out for my hand and took it and drew me slowly to my feet. The rain pounded against the roof and splashed against the terrace and walkways outside. I thought of Woodrow buried in his shallow grave at the side of the house and my sons’ empty cots, their clothes and books and games still lying scattered around their bedroom.

“I can’t leave,” I said to Sam.

His face stiffened. “I’m under orders to bring you to the embassy, Hannah, and get you the hell out of the country.”

“I have to be here for when my sons come back.”

“No, you don’t.”

“I can’t find them. And I can accept that for now. But I have to make it so they can find me. You don’t know, because you don’t have children. You’re not a mother,” I said. “This is what mothers do, Sam. I know. I’m a mother. They wait for their children to come back home. Like my mother did with me.”

“I was afraid of this,” he mumbled and walked to the TV and turned it on. Nothing came up except snow, both television stations having been captured by the rebels days before and all the broadcast equipment mindlessly looted or smashed. “You got anything to drink?” he asked. “You’re gonna need one, and I’d like one, too.”

I pulled a bottle of Woodrow’s whiskey and two glasses from the liquor cabinet and poured us each a drink. I noticed that Sam had a videotape in his hand.

“Sit down, Hannah. I want you to watch this.”

I sat in Woodrow’s overstuffed armchair opposite the TV, and Sam put the tape into the VCR. He stood aside with the remote in one hand and his drink in the other and fast forwarded past footage of what looked like bands of rebel troops. Then suddenly I was looking at the face of Samuel Doe. He was seated on the floor of a brightly lit room with several men in rebel military uniforms standing over and around him. He was naked, except for a pair of blood-spotted underpants. He was fat, big bellied, his spindly legs splayed before him, his thin arms bound tightly behind him. The camera is shaky and moves erratically off Doe to the others and back again. Two of the men stroke his head, which has red abrasions and cuts and appears to have been roughly shaved with a knife or a dull razor. Doe looks mournfully up at his captors and says, “I want to say something, if you will just listen to me.” I recognize one of the two men stroking Doe’s head. It’s Albert — it’s Sweet Dreams Gladiator. He has a small smile on his face that looks almost gentle. Doe says to him, “You untie my hands, and I will talk. I never ordered anybody’s execution.” The camera swings away from him, blurs past the others in the room, some in uniform, some not, and there is Prince Johnson seated at a large desk. Hanging from the wall behind him is a pink and pale blue Sunday-school portrait of Christ carrying a lamb on his shoulders. I can read the legend below Christ: Look at me and be saved. Prince Johnson says, “I’m a humanitarian.” He sniffs and coughs lightly, as if from cigarette smoke. “Cut off one ear,” he says. The camera drifts back to Doe. Someone has a long knife in his hand, but the camera wobbles on Doe, who is pushed over on his back, and I can’t see who is sawing at his ear with the knife. Doe shrieks, and when the man steps away, I see that he is not a man, he is a boy. It is Dillon, my eldest son. Doe thrashes and flips his head wildly from side to side. He manages to sit up and begins blowing on his bare chest, as if to put out a fire. He ceases blowing and looks off camera at his tormentors. “I beg you…” he says. A hand shoves his head back and pushes him onto the floor again, and the knife goes to work on his other ear. He screams, a wail of pain and helpless fury. Then there is a quick swerve of the camera back to Prince Johnson, still at his desk, dangling a human ear above his open mouth, lowering the ear slowly. Chewing. Now Doe is in a garden, entirely naked, his face puffed and bloody, his ears reduced to pulpy stumps. There is a small group of men and boys hovering around him, among them Dillon and William, looking bored and half asleep, as if they’ve just been roused and told to get ready for school but would rather have stayed in bed a while longer. Doe moans and says to someone off camera, “Varney, I’m dying.” A man’s voice says, “We are asking you in a polite manner now. What did you do with the Liberian people’s money?” He speaks slowly in good English, as if for an American audience. Doe shakes his head and then is shown the knife, and he cries, “My penis! No, please, not my penis!” The camera jiggles and moves at a tilt, changing point of view as it gets passed over to William who turns its gaze on the previous cameraman, who is Paul, unsmiling, unafraid, almost blasé-looking. A man off camera says to Doe, “Repeat after me. ‘I, Samuel Kenyon Doe, declare that the government is overthrown. I’m therefore asking the armed forces to surrender to Field Marshal Prince Johnson.’ ” Doe complies, his voice thin and weak. Off camera, someone says, “Fuck.” Doe whimpers, “I want to talk. I need to pee.” The screen fades to white, then black.

Sam and I remained silent for a long moment. Finally, I said, “Where… how did you get this?”

“Friends in high places,” he said and popped the video from the VCR and slid it into his jacket pocket. He refilled his glass and then mine, leisurely, as if we had all the time in the world. “No, it’s a bootleg copy. Half the foreign journalists in West Africa have seen it by now.” He sat down on the sofa and stretched his long legs out and crossed them at the ankles the way Zack used to. “Hannah, we’re shutting down the embassy tomorrow. I’m leaving the country tonight, and you are, too.”

“I can’t.”

“You haven’t much of a choice. It’s simple suicide for you to stay here now. In a week, Monrovia, the whole country, will belong to Taylor. And he’ll come after you, Hannah. Believe me.”

“Charles? I’m in no danger from Charles,” I said. “Since we’re both truth-telling, Sam, I’ll tell you this: I helped Charles. In the States. I was the one who helped him break out of jail.”

He smiled, cold and knowing. “I’m well aware of that.”

“You are?” I said, and then suddenly all the lights went out. “Shit! That’s the end of the fuel for the generator, I guess.” I couldn’t see a thing, as if I were blindfolded. I started to get up and search in the dark for a candle or kerosene lantern, but my body wouldn’t obey, as if my arms and legs were bound. Into the darkness I said, “Oh, Sam, what is going on? What do you mean, you’re well aware that I helped Charles escape?”

His voice came out of the darkness. “Back then, the last place we wanted Charles Taylor was in a cell in Massachusetts. We wanted him here in Liberia. Our man in Africa.”

“ ‘We’?”

“We didn’t quite count on Prince Johnson showing up at the party, of course. But we more or less got what we wanted. At least Doe’s out of the picture. But Charles Taylor ain’t your friend, Hannah.”

“I don’t understand.” The rain had let up, and in the sudden silence our voices seemed amplified, as if we were miked. I heard Sam loudly sigh. I said, “What are you telling me? That you somehow arranged Charles’s escape from prison? That’s impossible. No one knew I was there. No one out here knew, certainly.”

“Some of it was dumb luck, I admit. We were going to use your friend, Zack, who wasn’t all that steady a hand. But then you turned up, and ol’ Zack was happy to step aside, long as he thought he’d still get him a sizeable payday out of it.”

“And I suppose he did.”

“Yeah, eventually. We all got what we wanted out of it. Zack wanted a big payday, and you wanted to help Charles turn Liberia into a socialist democracy, which he might yet do, but don’t count on it. And we wanted Charles to get rid of Samuel Doe. We just didn’t get what we wanted in the form we’d imagined or planned. But that’s history. Zack’s happily back in business in Accra, buying and selling artworks, nicely protected and properly licensed. The man must be a millionaire ten times over by now. And I expect Charles will be an improvement on Doe. He’s a whole lot smarter than Doe and nowhere near as crazy, but he ain’t Nelson Mandela. Hell, even Nelson Mandela’s no Nelson Mandela.”

“I was working for you, then. The Americans. The CIA.”

“Let’s just say you were a protected asset. Still are. Which is why, Miz Sundiata, it’s time to get your ass out of Africa. You know too much for Charles to let you stay here alive.”

“Such as?”

“Such as how he got out of an American prison. First thing he’ll do when he takes Monrovia is send some of his nastier boys over here to Duport Road looking for you. Then he’s going after Prince Johnson and everyone else in that video. He’s probably got his own copy and watches it every night, making his hit list. Charles definitely did not want Doe dead. He wanted a televised show trial that would establish his own legitimacy and right to run the country.”

I heard Sam get up and grope his way from the room out to the terrace, where he called to the Marines and asked for a flashlight. A moment later he returned with the circle of light dancing in front of him. “C’mon, girlfriend, pack your bag. We got us a helicopter waiting out there on the basketball court at the embassy. You’ll be home in Emerson, Massachusetts, by tomorrow night,” he said. “I assume that’s where you’ll want to go.”

Home? Whose home? Not Hannah Musgrave’s. And not Dawn Carrington’s. And not Mrs. Woodrow Sundiata’s home. All the women I have been disappeared from the planet that night. “I don’t want to go to jail, Sam,” I said. “If I go back, I stand a good chance of being arrested. I’m still a fugitive, Sam.”

“You won’t be arrested. You still got that old fake passport, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“It’ll do. You haven’t been underground anyhow. Not for a long time. We got those old Chicago bail-jumping charges against you dropped before you went back in eighty-three. You’ve been clean as a whistle for years, Hannah. Practically a virgin.”

“Sam, I hate this.”

“Yeah, well, that’s about the size of it, Hannah.” He took both my hands in his and pulled me to my feet. “C’mon. It’s time to turn this war and this damned country over to the Africans again.”

“As soon as the war is over, I’m coming back. This is my home, Sam.”

“Maybe so, darlin’, but I’ve got a feeling that by the time this war’s truly over you’re going to be an old lady.”