My poor animals; they were mine to protect, the creatures I loved nearly as much as I loved my husband and sons and whom I tried, vain and proud and deluded, to save by placing them onto an island. Which I suppose was only what I wished someone would do for me. Place me onto an island.
A fantasy, that’s all it was. Just another fantasy of self-sanctification. It was futile then, and probably futile now, all of it. Even here on this little island.
And yet, that day in the midst of the war, when I boarded that final flight out of Monrovia, if I’d known my true motives for leaving, if I’d examined them closely enough at the time, they might have seemed puny to me, puny and unworthy, and I would not have left at all. I wouldn’t have made it to this enchanted isle, my farm — in the good, cheerful company of Anthea and the girls and my faithful collie dogs, all of us caring for sheep and hens and my beautiful gardens — with its inhabitants, me included, sanctified and blessed. And I wouldn’t have been obliged to return to Africa one more time as I did last year.
Mainly, we return to a place in order to learn why we left. Nothing else. That’s what all those nostalgic novels of return are really about. Had I known at the time my true reasons for leaving in the first place, I probably wouldn’t have ended up doing what women have done for eons: I wouldn’t have become one of those wives and mothers walking mournfully through the wreckage and desolation made by men and boys trying to kill one another. I wouldn’t have become one of those howling widows searching like some ancient Greek woman for her slain husband’s body, so that he can be properly buried, would not have become a doleful mother asking for the whereabouts of her lost sons, so that her sons’ rage can be calmed, their fears assuaged, and their wounds cleansed and dressed. I would not have gone out to the river island where I had so cleverly placed my dreamers, my charges, and when I got to the island found only their hacked, burnt bones and broken skulls.
In vain. All of it in vain. It’s always been that way, yet we keep on doing it. For tens of thousands of years, since before Biblical times, since the species first learned to make weapons and tame fire, women have fled carnage and returned later to gaze at the wreckage of their plundered homes, stunned by the violence of the destruction and its force, and tried to understand why we came back to it, if this is all we can come back to, and why we fled in the first place, since we have no choice but to return, and nothing but loss and permanent grief await us there.
SOMEHOW THE CHIMPANZEES are central to my story, and I can’t tell it without them. My heart stops when I picture them in my mind. And I can’t think of my husband or my sons at all, beyond naming them. Not this early in the story. And so I’ll tell you instead of what happened to the dreamers.
Before I fled the war, for a few days I had help in transporting them to the island from the Toby sanctuary, help I needed, especially with the adults and the adolescent males. We took them out in Kuyo’s borrowed motorboat. Kuyo was the man who had worked at the house for us for years, a cousin of Woodrow’s, and for a long time he had shown no more interest in non-human animals than most Americans do. Less, actually. To a poor Liberian, an animal that can’t be eaten and can’t be put to work or serve as trade goods is a liability and deserves only to be punished for it. But somehow the dreamers had begun to invade Kuyo’s imagination. Or maybe it was merely my love for them that lit up his sympathies, for he had always regarded me with genuine interest and apparent affection.
I remember sitting on the back steps bottle-feeding a wide-eyed baby girl named Gilly. Kuyo, a tall, dark brown, almost black man, flat chested with wide, bony shoulders, stopped in the patchwork shade of the cotton tree, leaned on his rake, and asked me, “Why you wanna take care of them monkeys alla time, ma’m?”
I tried explaining to him that soon, if we don’t take care of the chimps, they’ll be gone from the planet forever, and Kuyo’s grandchildren and mine will live and die without having seen one. Our grandchildren’s grandchildren won’t even know that such a creature ever existed, except in legends.
He pushed his lips out and asked me, “Was there, long time before now, way way long time, some kinds of animals, d’you think, that we don’t know about? Strange animals to us that we be scairt of in our dreams, but not so strange an’ scary-scary to the ancestors? Animals we got no names for no more?” He chewed on his lower lip and studied Gilly for a long moment.
As if the tiny chimp knew the man was watching her and for the first time in his life was contemplating the fate of her species, Gilly rolled her head slightly towards him and returned his look. Kuyo said, “Mebbe one day soon I come out to Toby wit’ you an’ view these monkeys for myself. See if mebbe I can give ’em a little care now an’ then. Just to check what they really like close up an’ all.”
“That’s a fine idea,” I said. “Why don’t you go over on your way home? I’ll be there then feeding them, and you can help me.”
Which he did, and soon he was a regular visitor at the sanctuary, and within the year he’d forsaken his job as our yard man and had become one of the caretakers at the sanctuary. And that was where he was killed, later, after he’d helped me move our clan of dreamers away to Boniface Island, where we hoped to hide them until the war was over.
What an absurd pair we made, Kuyo and I, carrying the babies and leading the adolescents by the hand, as if they were frightened schoolchildren and we humans were their teachers, shuttling the older dreamers in the wheeled cage along the winding pathway to the dock on the river where the boat was hidden, ferrying our terrified charges in twos and threes under the shroud of darkness across the broad, moonlit estuary, putting them carefully ashore, and returning to the sanctuary on the west side of the city for more. A couple of confused, frightened, latter-day Noahs we were. What naiveté and vanity on my part, faithfulness and belief on Kuyo’s, and trust on the part of the dreamers, who squatted on the island among the mangroves and out on the muddy landing and watched the humans head back towards Monrovia, knowing somehow that we would return with the others, until finally all eleven had been moved there.
We left them food enough for a few days — bananas, rose apples, squashes, and several baskets of leafy greens — promised we would soon return, and departed for what turned out to be the last time. The dreamers did not know that we were not saving them, we were abandoning them. Nor did we. The dreamers did not know that Kuyo and I, as if in cahoots with the soldiers, had trapped and imprisoned them on the island.
I walked alone to my silent, empty house on Duport Road, in town. The streets were deserted, and everyone who had not fled the city had barred his door and shuttered the windows. I heard the occasional stutter of distant gunfire from Waterside and the rumble of military trucks and jeeps entering and departing from the Barclay Barracks, where the remnant of the president’s special Anti-Terrorist Force was encamped. In darkness I sat out on the patio, exhausted, utterly unsure of what to do next, now that I had done what seemed to me the only and the last thing I actually could do. Half a bottle of gin was sitting on the patio table with a filthy glass next to it, inadvertently left behind, no doubt, when the servants fled. I filled the glass and drank it down slowly, bit by bit, and filled it again, until I had drunk half a quart of gin with no tonic and no ice, a thing I’d never done before. Then I went inside and lay down on the sofa, and with all the windows and doors of the house wide open and the gate to the street unlocked, slept for twelve hours, till evening the next day.