The Dragons, the Giant, the Women, стр. 48

EIGHTEEN

“Agnes? Can you hear me?” I said on a call back to America a few days later.

For three years after the Second Liberian Civil War, which ended in 2003, a casual acquaintance, Agnes Fallah Kamara-Umunna, hosted a show called Straight from the Heart from a UN-sponsored radio station in Monrovia. She had visited a slum and found a shanty with fourteen former child soldiers she later interviewed, and thereafter she began to air the testimonies of victim rebels on her show. She gathered testimonies, interviewed victims and warlords, and even convinced some former child soldiers to testify at Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings. She was the only person I knew who had access to the postwar rebel communities in Liberia.

“Yes, I can hear you,” Agnes responded in that hybrid Sierra Leonean and Liberian accent.

“Good. Listen, Agnes, I’m in Liberia. I came back and I think … I think I’d like to find a rebel soldier. A woman.”

“What?” she asked from what sounded like a moving car.

“Yes. One of Taylor’s rebels,” I said. “Her name is Satta. She was from Cape Mount, but that’s all I know.”

“I know too many with that name,” she laughed. I tried to explain the story, though I knew I was unclear, stuttering. What was there to tell? Mam sent a woman to get us out of the war. I had come back. I wanted to find her.

“Listen, you should talk to somebody on the ground in Liberia. I can’t help you,” Agnes said, and instead convinced me to take the number of one of her contacts who would. “He is safe, don’t worry,” she said. Agnes convinced me that if he did not know Satta, he was the most likely person to know how I could find her.

After writing down the name and ending the call, I closed my notebook. For eight months my dreams had been seized by the image of that woman. A teenage girl, younger than I am now, a scarred, plainclothes rebel, a gun slung over her shoulder, a jug of oil in her grasp—she came bearing gifts.

I opened my notebook again, transported to that moment in Lai as I gazed at the number. Agnes had given me the name of a man who fought during the First Liberian Civil War as a general under Prince Johnson’s faction, INPFL. For a couple of days after getting the number, I hunted opportunities to tell Papa and Mam. I brought up our time in Lai more than usual, with a strong focus on the day Satta came.

“I told you everything I know,” Mam sighed with exasperation. “Do you know how hard it will be to find a woman named Satta Fahnbulleh in Liberia? That’s like looking for Maria Gonzalez in Mexico.”

My parents grew impatient with my questions, and I found myself taking walks around the university’s Fendell Campus, where they worked and had an apartment. Papa once casually mentioned that the security guards were mostly ex-rebels, and like a mosquito drawn to rainy season skin, I loitered near their stations in wonder. First I asked for directions to Papa’s office in the engineering school. They smiled so widely it reduced their eyes to slits, they were courteous, friendly, all welcoming me to their neighborhood and spaces. The questions ballooned into suggestions for how to improve my colloqua, the Liberian pidgin that had become ruler in the mouths of the country’s youth. By the third day, I walked to one of their stands at the side gate, where a man named Deek sat in an old wraparound school desk from six thirty in the morning to seven at night. Over the week, the conversations got longer each day, after I insisted to Mam that I’d stroll to Papa’s office, or wanted to give Deek a bottle of water after we’d arrived home from a day of exploration and reunions. I had a bottle of water on the day that I finally decided to speak to him about the war.

“Hi there.” I waved and he ran toward me, to lessen my effort.

“Hey Ma,” he said, reaching me, a short and stocky man with dark skin and hopeful eyes. “You got something for me today?”

“Water again,” I said, and stomached the disappointment that coated his eyes.

I offered chitchat about my day and his, and perhaps it was general anxiety about the question, or my intentions, but I blurted: “I want talk to you about the war.”

“The war?” he asked, confused.

“Well, yeh. I’ve been trying to find a woman who was a rebel, and I heard maybe you knew some rebels.” I tripped over the words, then quickly tried to front an ease, but it was too late. His eyes glazed over and at once the wall that stood between us was revealed as smoke, and the false hope that I could have such a conversation without an introduction, a caveat, as a foreigner, as he understood me, and any Liberian who spent the years I did away from home, punched my throat, and I was immediately sorry.

“Who you looking for?” Deek asked, placing his hands in his pocket, and my heart pounded and those dark memories returned in flashes.

“A woman who fought, but we will talk. We will talk,” I said, turning quickly from him and returning to my parents’ apartment, not looking back, although I heard him say “Okay” or “See you tomorrow, Ma” or “Thank you for the water” and I could not believe I was so daft, so foolish, so brazenly audacious. I dared not look back.

Inside the apartment, Mam was in the kitchen while Papa sat in the living room