Gunter was the first to drag himself out of bed. He lit a lantern and went to the door, followed by Daniel and then Robert on his crutches. Alexander, Rex, Prince, and Ladipor hung back, watching. The corporal said there had been some trouble and his sergeant had ordered him to put guards on the Pujehun Project compound, as a precaution against looting. He had posted soldiers at the gate.
Robert asked him what kind of trouble.
“Well, I no saby, sah, I t’ink say some bad Mende people make hala-hala.” There had been damage to houses in the outskirts of Pujehun, he said, but the soldiers had come and scattered the troublemakers, arresting some and taking them away. It was quiet now.
Was there shooting? The corporal said he didn’t know; maybe some bad people had been shooting guns, but if they had he was sure they had been arrested. Robert asked if the survey teams would be permitted to drive out into the bush and continue their work. The corporal said they could go where they wanted. They questioned him for a while longer, but it was evident he knew as little as they did.
They went back inside and sat about the table talking and slapping at mosquitoes. Alexander grumbled that he was going back to bed. The others drifted off to their rooms, dressed, and returned to the table. Robert sent for Regina and asked her to prepare coffee.
“I think it is the Mende making trouble again,” Prince said. “Like they did in the civil war.”
“The President will not let them do it again,” Daniel replied. “The soldiers will stop the rioting very firmly.”
“It was not a civil war,” Ladipor said resentfully—he was a Mende, and all this talk about Mende trouble-making annoyed him. “The villagers were talking against the price of rice and the soldiers killed some of them. It made the people angry. It is the same now, it is the First Vice-President’s people doing it, not the Mende. The Mende people never made trouble, the Mende support the President’s New Order.”
“Some Mende support the President,” Rex admitted, to mollify Ladipor. “Remember last year there was that big hala-hala when Dr. Timbo’s men caught one of the First Vice-President’s men burying juju things in the Timbo compound before the election. A lot of people were killed. That was not a Mende problem?”
“First Vice-President Minah can do nothing here. Paramount Chief Kamara is the most important man in Pujehun, and he is firm in his support of the President’s New Order,” Daniel said.
“That is what he says,” Ladipor muttered.
The talk continued in this random, gossipy vein while Regina made the coffee and served it with bread and jam.
“I suppose we ought to decide something,” Robert said. “Do we finish the survey and return to Bo like we planned or do we stay close to the resthouse?” He looked round the table.
They looked at one another in silence. No one spoke.
Finally, Robert spoke again. “Daniel—what d’you say?”
Daniel shrugged. “I do not think there is any danger when we get out of Pujehun. The villagers do not care about these problems. The troublemakers are in Pujehun.”
Robert looked at Ladipor.
“The people in Pujehun are angry about the price of rice,” Ladipor said. “The trouble is here, not in the bush.”
The others nodded.
“Prince?” said Robert.
“Ladipor is right. The people in the villages know nothing of these quarrels. I think we are safer in the bush, away from these quarrels.”
“Gunter?”
“Perhaps we should prepare ourselves to go and when it is full light check on the situation. If it’s quiet, we can finish it.”
Rex said, “Yes, that is what we should do. We can talk to the police and the soldiers and if everything is quiet, we can go. We will have to go soon anyway, even if it is only to return to Bo.”
Robert looked around the table. “It seems we agree.”
At dawn Gunter left with one of the soldiers. He returned a half-hour later and told the assembled teams that the sergeant knew little. There had been a disturbance—he thought there had been shooting from the rioters, but he wasn’t sure, it could have been soldiers. When asked if the survey teams could go about their business, the sergeant said yes, they could go where they wanted.
They sat at the table for a few minutes more and decided they would finish and return to Bo as they had planned. They carried their bags and the unused supplies down the stairs, paid Regina for the meals they’d eaten, and gave her and the watchmen the expected tips. Robert’s doublecab left first, Gunter’s van going off in the opposite direction.
The doublecab headed toward the silver ball of the sun, throwing up a cloud of dust. Normally they would have seen farmers in fields or walking along the road with headloads of wood, or with cutlasses and hoes, but on this white-skyed, foggy morning the men and women stood in clusters in bare yards and at crossroads near traders huts, talking. Soon they were in the bush on a dirt road.
They were not far out of Pujehun when they came out of a foggy bottom and saw a roadblock—a tree branch laid across the road—with soldiers hurrying into position behind it. The soldiers wore a patchwork of uniform parts and carried an assortment of rifles—turn-of-the-century Springfields, vintage M1s, AK47s. They looked childishly young, and frightened. On either side of the road, beyond the barricade, a clutch of farmers had been talking to the young soldiers; they drew back expectantly.
Pa Bangura stopped. The soldiers fingered their weapons. A corporal approached cautiously. He returned Pa Bangura’s greeting with a suspicious nod, peered inside the doublecab at each of the passengers, walked to the rear where he leaned in, poked at the bags and boxes, then went around the back of the vehicle and approached Robert’s side.
Robert had already gotten his work permit and his identification out of his knapsack. He handed it to the corporal, who scrutinized the picture, looked at Robert, looked again at the picture.
“Usai you de go?” he asked suspiciously.
“Lake Mabesi.”
“Wetin du?”
“For talk for dem farmer—for help am.”
The corporal looked at Pa Bangura, said something in Temne. Pa Bangura passed his identification across to the corporal, who took it, scrutinized it, passed it back. He looked in the back window, said something to Prince and Daniel.
Daniel passed his identification to the corporal. Prince followed suit.
“Krio,” the corporal said contemptuously, tossing the identification booklets back to Daniel. He said something to Pa Bangura, who started the doublecab and drove it off the road. He turned the engine off, saying, “He de say we get for wait, sah. For ’im leftenant.”
Robert looked over his shoulder at Daniel. “What’d he say to you?”
Daniel shrugged. “He said the Krios oppress the people. I told him we are loyal Sierra Leoneans, that you are an important man, that you know many important people.”
“Does he want money? Is that the reason he’s stopping us?”
Daniel hesitated. “I think if you give him money he will let us go.”
Robert opened the door and stepped down and Daniel put his head out the back window. “Robert. Be careful how you approach him. He is nervous—and he’s quite suspicious of you.”
Robert approached the corporal, who had returned to his men at the road block. “Padi, duya, make we talk.”
The corporal eyed him.
Robert explained that his friend Third Assistant Minister Kargbo had asked him to help some of the farmers of Pujehun and that he and his colleagues had come to find out what the farmers needed. Of course he understood that the corporal and his men must perform their own duty as well, which was one of vigilance. Could they not find a way for both to perform their duties?
The corporal stared at him. Several soldiers came around them.
Robert suggested that perhaps he could give the corporal a piece of paper explaining his purpose, which he could give to his officer. As evidence of his good faith he would gladly leave something of value—perhaps some money. The soldiers stirred and slid their eyes at one another and a murmur went round. But the corporal said nothing, merely stared at Robert. Robert began to think he had made a mistake.
“Five hundred leone,” the corporal said abruptly.
Robert was startled by the demand; he had been thinking fifty leones. But he recovered quickly. “You can give we pass for other soldiers?” he asked.
“I no get papah.”
“I go give you paper.”
“I no able for write,” the corporal said, his expression once again clouding with suspicion.
Robert knew it had gone as far as he could take it. He opened his knapsack and extracted some bundles of two-leone notes. He was glad that he had enough in his knapsack—he did not much like the idea of having to open a briefcase full of leones in front of the corporal.
As they drove away Prince muttered that he did not like the way the soldier talked to them.
“It is because we are near Pujehun,” Daniel said. “It will be better in the bush.”
Komuku village was small—a scatter of mud and wattle huts occupied by a few fishermen and their wives and scores of dusty, mostly naked children. Nothing recommended it to the visitor except its location, at a crossroads on a dusty slope between the muddy flats of Lake Mabesi and a grove of trees along a low ridge.
It was market day. One of the market women pointed to the cloud of dust along the shore and murmurs of alarm spread among the other women. They scooped their dried fish and cassava roots and potato leaf and the peppers and the little mounds of rice into baskets, which they lifted to their heads, and hurried off to their huts or up the trail toward the trees. The old Mazda flatbed that in better times came once a week with passengers and farm produce for the crossroads market had not come for a year, so the vehicle making the dust had to be the government lorry, full of soldiers, coming to check market prices. No one paid any attention to the price controls except bands of soldiers who saw opportunity in the law: the soldiers forced market women to sell them produce at ruinously low controlled prices, then took the produce to towns like Bo, Pujehun, Sefadu, and Makeni where they sold it at prevailing, and illegal, market prices, pocketing good profits.
When the doublecab came into view the villagers saw that there was a white man inside and that there were no soldiers. They came chattering and laughing out of the houses and down the hill from the trees.
The sun was low and turning yellow when they finished at Komuku. They had planned to visit one last village farther up the lake before starting back to Bo, but they had been delayed by two road blocks. The road blocks had made them uneasy, but Daniel quite rightly observed that it was nothing new, that soldiers had always extorted money from the people in this way. Robert and Daniel and Prince talked of these and other things as Pa Bangura navigated the doublecab into deepening gloom eastward along the lake shore. Daniel looked for and found much that validated his original project. The upland villagers needed protein in their diet, and that had to come from fish. It was clear that they were too poor to buy dried fish from the coast, even if there was transport to bring it upline, and even if the coastal fishermen produced enough to sell—which they didn’t. It was clear that the only practical way to meet the need would be by growing their own fish, in ponds.
As Robert looked out into the fading day and listened to Prince and Daniel it felt like those distant evenings when he and Prince and Daniel sat on the steps of Prince’s house in Bo and drank palm wine and beer, and argued development theory and the legitimacy of Siaka Stevens’ one-party constitution, and the place of western democracy in Africa, and of Africa in the modern world. And women, always women. In that time Prince and Daniel had been his teachers—two ambitious young professionals full of energy and confidence and hope, doing their time in the trenches in exchange for the Big Man’s favor while they learned how to be a Big Man; each confident that one day he would be the Big Man dispensing favor; generously sharing their knowledge and experience with their friend, the white sojourner; happy to train the bright young dilettante from America. Now the sojourner was the native, the dilettante was the expert, the student was the teacher, the acolyte was the Big Man—the Big Man whom Prince the thief had petitioned for mercy. Robert listened to Prince in the framework of these subtleties, understanding the humiliation of his old friend. He wondered if he could convince Kevin.
The doublecab lurched and bounced over the deep potholes and gullies, making five kilometers per hour as the sun, a shimmering red disk, slipped slowly into the slot of night. When the last wavering sliver winked out darkness spread over the world.
Pa Bangura got them lost several times, though he did not admit it even once. Despite the old man’s objections Robert often ordered him go one direction when Pa Bangura knew they ought to be going in another; or made him stop at some dark collection of huts to confer with a bevy of sleepy locals who knew how to get to the next village but were hazy about which road went to Pujehun or Bo. After midnight they finally came upon a true road, a potholed strip of dusty earth, which they recognized and knew was only a few miles from the ferry crossing at Taniniahun village. There they would cross the river and find the road to Bo.
Generously refraining from telling Robert that “I done tol’ you, sah,” Pa Bangura put the doublecab into third gear and pressed the accelerator. The vehicle danced and rattled as he pushed the speed to thirty-five kilometers per hour. After hours of creeping along bush trails that were more foot path than road, at little more than walking speed, that moderate velocity seemed to Robert like racing. The sensation of speed became even more marked when the vehicle entered the brilliantly under-lit tunnel of trees just outside Taniniahun.
Robert was thinking about whether he wanted to try a crossing in the dark. The ferry was little more than a rusted-out barge covered by rough-sawn planks, and it was a tricky business even when the river was running low. When they got to the village they would talk to the ferrymen. They came around the curve just outside the village and saw a palm tree laying across the road. Several soldiers scurried across the clearing behind the tree, rifles in one hand, shirts and trousers flying, their eyes squinting into the brilliant head lamps. The lorry skidded to a stop, dragging a cloud of dust behind it, the dust rolling forward over the vehicle and over the fallen tree and the soldiers behind it.
“Shit,” Robert muttered. He spoke over his shoulder to Daniel and Prince, both of whom had been sleeping. “Another road block. Pass me my knapsack, I’m gonna need some—”
PA-PA-POW—a sparkling web of light sprang across the windshield, concussion slammed his ears, engulfed his body; brought a thousand pricks of bee-sting pain to his face and arms. “No de shoot we, no de shoot we!” Prince yelled, and from the darkness there came a huge bellow, followed by silence; then Pa Bangura said with surprising steadiness, “Sah, he de say we get for lef de lorry.” Robert, unmindful of the blood beading up like sweat on his face and upper arms, opened the door, stepped to the ground, and without command thrust his arms toward the stars.
The light was brilliant, blinding: twin halogen head lamps on high beam, burning his eyes from twenty feet. His whole head hurt: his eyes from the light, his face from the cuts and scratches, his lips and ear from the bruises administered by the sergeant’s fist. The screaming had stopped—Prince was now an inert and shockingly deflated lump of bloody stuff on the dusty earth among the opened bags and the scattered clothing and the empty beer bottles. Daniel sat on the ground beside Robert, his eyes swollen shut, the front of his shirt dark with blood. They had dragged Pa Bangura off beyond the lights.
The village—a scatter of huts in the trees near the ferry landing—was deserted, the villagers having fled in panic when the sergeant attacked Prince. He had bewildered even his soldiers with the suddenness of his violence. Robert had stepped toward the sergeant, saying, “Padi, I beg, no de hit am, no de hit am, I beg,” and with the light in his eyes he had not seen the fist, just the dark bulk of the man turning, and then that shocking thunderous WHAP had sent him sprawling and left the side of his head tingling and his ears ringing as he looked up at the under-lit canopy of trees—amazed that this was happening to him: he was a white man; a white man. Prince crying and pleading in Temne; Daniel sobbing, in terror of drawing the sergeant’s violence. Robert not wanting to move, but forcing himself to a sitting position, also fearing the sergeant’s attention—making himself at least try to rise because it was his duty to protect—and guiltily glad that his head spun, that the world tilted, that he could not rise, that he had to put his hands behind him feeling for the earth, as he pleaded for Prince: “Padi, duya, I beg—” but not finding the earth, and letting himself go. Thankfully, guiltily, he’d remained motionless while the grunts and the thuds continued, the cries diminished, and then stopped; then for a few seconds there was only the panting of an animal, and a murmur as someone clambered up on the bed of the doublecab and heaved the bags to the ground. Robert had gathered himself, rolled over, and pushed himself to a sitting position, and watched the sergeant tearing at the bags like a greedy out-of-control child going at Christmas presents, scattering clothing and toiletries and books. There was the sound of doors opening and slamming, and cries of surprise and excitement: they’d opened the briefcase. Then they’d emptied Robert’s knapsack on the ground and scrambled for the bundles of two-leone notes, kicking his notebooks off to the side. And they’d discovered that the old tire patch kit, which he’d carried for five years, contained jamba and papers and matches, and they’d rolled the jamba into joints, which they lit and smoked while they emptied his Bo bag, scattering the checks and his work permit and his identification card and his Salone driver’s license; and then someone got into the two cases of Star Beer, and suddenly every hand contained a beer; at which point the sergeant saw that he was losing control of the young soldiers, that they were working themselves up to something that he did not like, and he waded into them, knocking one down, cowing the others. Contemptuously, he shoved them away from the briefcase, closed it. He’d opened one of Robert’s note books—the one containing his field notes, with the many sketches of village layouts showing water and roads and markets and meeting places—and studied the drawings; turning to Prince again, apparently greatly provoked by the drawings, and kicking him, again and again, kicking him so fucking hard, like he was kicking a door down, so hard the air grunted involuntarily out of Prince’s unresponsive body and the sweat flew from the sergeant’s face as Daniel crouched beside Robert, groaning and shivering and finally pissing his pants; Prince too far gone to even cry out from his many hurts, the sergeant finally turning away in rage and coming to Robert, panting, sweat dripping; dragging Robert to his feet and knocking him down, then kicking him again and again, finally stopping when he was breathless and unable to kick any more. Then he started in on Daniel. But Daniel was lucky, the sergeant was too tired to do much more than bloody his nose and close his eyes. After that the soldiers drank the beer and smoked the jamba and talked excitedly among themselves beyond the light.
Robert heard Pa Bangura’s voice, the words coming in Temne. And then there were more thuds and grunts, and Pa Bangura’s voice raised in a bellow. A moment later two soldiers shoved him into the light and made him sit in the dirt with Daniel and Robert. The two soldiers disappeared behind the lights and there was a hiss of bottles opening, the clink of glass, smacking lips, nervous voices.
“Why are they doing this?” Robert whispered.
“He de say you na English mercenary man. He de look you book, an’ say look am, na spy book.”
“Why did he attack Prince like that?”
“He de saby Prince, he de say Prince talk-talk beaucoup ‘bout over-t’row gommint. He de say Prince na traitor, he de say Prince get Green Book—” He worked his mouth, spat some blood off to the side. He told Robert that the sergeant had seen Prince talking against President Siaka Stevens and about President Momoh’s New Order. But why this violence? Robert asked. Because there had been trouble in Freetown and Bo. The soldiers thought that some Lebanese, some mercenaries, and the Freetown Krios had taken over the government and killed a lot of soldiers in Freetown. The soldiers believed other mercenaries waited out there in the darkness with guns to kill them. They wanted to leave but the sergeant wouldn’t let them. As he talked, Pa Bangura stared at the lump laying in the dirt in front of the doublecab. He paused, then whispered, “De soldiers done kill Prince?”
Daniel, who had been sitting with his head hanging, looked up. “No! He’s not dead!”
The sergeant appeared, walked past them toward the river. He came back a few minutes later and said something to the soldiers, who bustled about gathering their food, ammunition, and personal things into plastic shopping bags, then lifted Prince and threw him into the bed of the doublecab. Pa Bangura, with the sergeant in the passenger seat beside him, drove the vehicle through the village and down to the ferry landing, while Robert limped along beside Daniel and the soldiers brought up the rear.
The road ended at the landing, a concrete pad in a lazy back eddy created by a breakwater of stones, beyond which the river ran flat and swift. A rectangular hull floated low in the water against the concrete pad. Angle-iron stanchions rose from the deck at the bow and at the stern, the top of each stanchion closing in a loop over a cable that ran from a pylon behind the concrete pad across the river to an identical pylon on the other shore. Pa Bangura stopped the doublecab on the pad. Its headlamps shot out over the ferry and the brown river into the trees on the other side.
The sergeant got out and went on the ferry. He turned and signaled for Pa Bangura to drive forward. The hull listed alarmingly as Pa Bangura edged the front wheels onto it. He stopped. The sergeant studied the deck of the ferry from one angle, then moved and studied it from another. As if he knew what he was doing, he showed the flashlight along the waterline, then dropped to his knees and looked through the planks into the bilge. It was half full of water. He chewed his lip thoughtfully, then shrugged. He motioned to Pa Bangura to drive the doublecab aboard.
Three men arranged themselves at the cable and the sergeant shouted something. The men grasped the cable and pulled. The ferry, very low in the water, drifted sluggishly away from the concrete pad—one boat length, then two, and then it was out of the eddy and in the current, and it groaned downstream, pulling the cable like a bow string, shuddering forward as water piled up on the upstream side. The hull tilted slowly until water edged up on the deck and flowed down into the bilge, increasing the list and the flow of water into the bilge, until it was a cascade. The sergeant was shouting and the soldiers did not understand, and then one soldier lost his footing and slid screaming into the water, dragging another with him. With a groan the rear cable stanchion tore loose at the deck, and the stern of the ferry swung downstream. As it swung with the current the doublecab lurched sideways and rolled ponderously over into the river, Daniel clinging to the side. Robert dropped to the deck and held on as the hull bounced up and down. The doublecab, its lights still on, righted itself and floated off downstream, the lights sinking below the surface and glowing eerily for a few seconds.
The ferry dangled on the taut cable, groaning, and then the current wrenched the remaining stanchion out and the ferry drifted into the darkness, water pouring in through the broken bow. A ghostly gray hump appeared in the darkness close alongside, and they were past it before Robert realized it was the doublecab, gone aground, the river washing around it. “Daniel!” he screamed into the darkness. No answer, nothing but the cries of the young soldiers, some in the water, some still with him on the ferry, then the water was over the deck and Robert was swimming.