by Alan Cumyn
Parker’s voice narrating on and on, his students scratching down every word, like notching scars into bone.
Then his voice stops and we all watch his fingers prying loose something else, stopping to whisk, prying again. In a minute he has it, a tiny bronze medallion. “Some relative will look at this …,” he says, his voice breaking, narration forgotten. Tears come and I turn and nearly vomit. I expect Joanne’s hand to hold me up, but she too has stepped off a ways and seems to be fighting off nausea.
“The bones belong to real people,” Parker says simply.
Sometime later the helicopters arrive. We’re on the third excavation and my stomach is sick and hungry at the same time but I feel I can’t leave, it would be sacrilegious somehow not to stand by, as if there are people who might be rescued alive, like victims of a building bomb. The sound of the helicopters changes all that, fuses my spine. I catch Joanne’s gaze and know she’s thinking the same thing: that it’s soldiers come to repeat the atrocity, bury the commission in the same soil as the villagers. The wind of the rotors picks up the sides of the tent and blows sticks and glops of mud through the air. I rush outside with the others to see a military cargo helicopter touch down in the small landing space, while two others hover some way off. A gunner points straight at us and looks emotionless as an insect behind his dark glasses. Two other soldiers disembark, guns at ready, and I stand gaping, shocked, until finally Suli Nylioko steps off, a thin woman in blue holding her hand out for steadying. The two soldiers and Suli hurry towards us, bending low under the chopper blades, and the wind picks up again as the helicopter lifts off and another moves into position.
It’s the press, of course. It takes fifteen minutes to disgorge them all, a few dozen men with notebooks, tape recorders, cameras. They overrun the camp, swarm us, change the proceedings from a solemn disinterment to a circus act.
The young man from The Islander, Dorut Kul, approaches me dressed in loose-fitting black pants, slick shoes, and a white silk shirt with the sleeves rolled up, smokes in the shirt pocket. He asks what the commission has discovered to date. I give him a two-or three-sentence no comment but he presses me.
“Have you found mass graves?”
“Dr. Parker and his crew are excavating systematically. They have found a number of skeletons so far. The people were apparently executed with shots to the head. But it will take time to fully determine …”
We have no press strategy. I have no idea how much I should say in response to his questions.
“Why have you heard testimony from no military, IS, or police sources?”
“I believe that we have a number of such figures slated for later in the …”
“Do you feel that Sin Vello is truly acting in an independent manner? He was appointed by Minitzh and has many connections to the old regime.”
“The chief justice is doing a wonderful job as far as I can tell. I’ve been very impressed by Justice Sin and I’m sure …”
“How do you feel about the entente signed between the government and the Kartouf? Do you agree with the limited protection from prosecution offered as part of the deal?”
I stare at the young man, his pen making tiny flick marks on his pad but his eyes fixed so intently on mine.
“This is the first I’ve heard of–”
“So Truth Commission members were not consulted before the limited immunity was offered?”
“I was not consulted–” He scratches the words down, for once waits for me to finish my thought. But I’ve nothing more to add.
Suli begins making a speech at the entrance to the excavation tent, so all reporters and cameras are drawn to her. They’re a motley bunch, irreverent, hasty, as journalists are everywhere, it seems. Yet they’re the ones who’ll tell the story. Their eyes, their words, their opinions are the ones that matter. Suli leads them into the tent and they follow, the whole clatter of them, with their lights and battery packs, tape recorders, attitudes. Suddenly I have no stomach for it. I stay outside, drift to a rock outcrop down the hill, past the last of the utility tents. There I sit and watch as the sun makes a rare appearance, burning between cloud banks suddenly to show a glimpse of mountains, the valley far below. A good place to watch and breathe.
In a while I hear Joanne’s approach, the strength of her steps, sure but light. “I was wondering where you’d gotten to,” she says.
“I couldn’t see anyway.”
“You could pretend to be a member of the commission.”
“Yes. I suppose. I’d have to have an ID card.”
“Would you?”
“Probably. Probably they wouldn’t put you on a commission without an ID card.”
She sits beside me on the rock. A funny phrase comes to me – “a little bit of all right.” Who wrote that to me? Leanne what’s-her-name from Amnesty International in London. She was writing about the new house she’d bought with her new husband whose new job meant they could afford something better than the miserly flat they’d been living in. “Now this is a little bit of all right,” she wrote.
So I say it to Joanne: “This is a little bit of all right.”
“Is it?”
Sitting in fresh air, in rare sunshine, quietly, beside someone I love.
“Yes.”
Little tingles of energy up my spine. Sips of breath. Some small sense of wellness breaking through.
“I just, uh, I thought maybe I should explain about last night,” I say.
“Oh.” Startled. Oh.
“I thought maybe you might have come to some wrong conclusions.”
“Wrong conclusions?”
“About my behaviour.”
“Oh listen, Bill–”
“You listen first. You might have thought from all my stumbling around–”
“Really, Bill–”
I stop talking and then she stops. Far down below a big bird – eagle? hawk? – circles the treetops, disappears into a stretch of cloud, then reappears.
“You might have thought from all my stumbling around that I was trying to make a clumsy pass at you. I just want to put to rest any sort of misconceptions you might have had. I wasn’t trying to make a clumsy pass at all. I was trying to be–” Choosing my words, not looking at her but down at where the big bird disappeared. “–smooth and subtle and … attractive. I just felt … probably you would need that interpretation since I was in fact hopelessly clumsy. Just so there’s no misunderstanding.”
No big bird. I look and look but it doesn’t reappear. Clouds move in on the sun again and the air picks up a fresh scent of rain, which in a moment I can see closing in from the right, sweeping up the mountainside, steely grey and inevitable.
“And I love you,” I say, for punctuation.
“And you love me?”
“Yes.” Not looking. Trying to keep the breath regular, to keep that tingle in my spine. It’s a funny feeling. Just as I think of it, it moves across my skull and parks on my chin. I reach for her hand, squeeze it, don’t look.
The patron saint of lost causes. A funny thought. Is there one?
In a moment the helicopters start up again, the wind nearly blows us off our rock. It’s the reporters heading out to post their stories in time for the evening’s news or tomorrow’s edition. I feel oddly lightheaded – relieved, I suppose, to tell her and to know that I don’t have to labour under my illusions any longer.
“I don’t know what to say, Bill,” she yells into my ear as I get up.
“It’s okay. You’ve said it!” I yell back, like something someone would say in a movie.
If I walk it’ll be better. She won’t have to say anything.
So I walk. It’s funny, all the breath has gone just like that and my whole body feels on the edge of a spasm. But one step and it’s less, one step and then another. That’s how you get past things. A step and a step and another.
I’m surprised to find Suli has not left with the reporters but stays talking to Sin Vello outside the excavation tent. They
’re quite a pair, the enormous chief justice and the wraith-like president. He leans on his silver cane, perspires from the simple act of standing, while she balances lightly, her spine straight, her shoulders a fraction of the width of his. When she sees me she looks at me – how? With rapt attention, as if I’m someone she has been eagerly awaiting.
“How are you, Bill? Ms. Stoddart, how are you both? I’ve been getting such good reports about the commission–”
“Have you?”
“Yes! It’s been such a relief for people. Well, you’ve seen the crowds waiting to talk to you.”
“The sorialos. Yes.”
“I’m getting such mail. Two thousand pieces a day! So many people are writing in–”
“But what about this deal with the Kartouf?”
“We just signed it today. It’s historic. Finally we have peace on the island after nearly twenty years of war.”
“But we’re not supposed to prosecute Kartouf members?”
“Except for human-rights crimes,” she says hastily. “Which you define. If it’s serious enough you can recommend prosecution.”
“Why would they agree to something like that?”
“Because they want peace, Bill. Finally!”
The conversation extends into the mess tent where we sit like old friends, Suli making a point in Kuantij to Justice Sin, another in English to me and Joanne and Dr. Parker. Luki scrambles to keep up with it all. Suli, vibrating like a bow of energy, fires off her ideas, observations, questions on everything: micro-banking, shelters for women, programs to reduce child poverty, education grants for girls, clean-up crews for public works, rehabilitation schemes for first offenders, international trade missions, what to do about homelessness and poverty.
“They’re killing us,” she says at one point. “The currency speculators. Every time we try to launch something, they feed on us. How can we do anything if our money isn’t worth its weight in banana skins?”
Later: “Did you know that murders have gone down 35 per cent since the elections? Do we have more police? No. It’s a sense of peace. I don’t know how else to describe it. The people have a sense of peace and co-operation. Suddenly we’re all poor but we’re building together. It’s just an idea, but even the drug dealers have stopped killing one another. Can you imagine? What’s going to happen if we don’t deliver? Bloodbath. And it’ll be my head for betraying them.”
And on the police: “They’re tiptoeing around, have you noticed? Even the traffic cops have been polite lately. It’s your doing, the commission. They know certain questions are going to be asked and they’re afraid and ashamed of who they’ve been and what they’ve done. So now they’re consulting on everything. Do I want so-and-so arrested? Should they proceed with this trial? I tell that coward Fulika it’s his department, his responsibility. You can’t keep asking the president whether to arrest somebody for shoplifting. He’s petrified of an inquiry.”
Sin Vello laughs when the talk turns to Fulika, the chief superintendent of police, and he tells a long story that gets briefly translated as being about Fulika’s four mistresses ganging together to stop a rape charge levelled by a pregnant teenager. The four argued in court that they kept the chief superintendent so tired he couldn’t have had enough energy to commit rape even if the desire were there. Finally the young woman accepted a settlement: a cash amount, monthly stipend, apartment, and guaranteed tuition for the child at the foreign university of his choice.
“He knows such stories!” Suli laughs, pointing her thumb at Sin Vello, a sign of disrespect in this culture but meant affectionately, it seems. I watch them closely – either they are consummate actors, and can hide their mutual distrust brilliantly, or they get along much better than Suli let on that night when I met her in her office.
Sin Vello tells another story about the personal interest Minitzh would take in certain trials. In a famous one, Santa Irene’s foremost cricket player was accused of accepting bribes to lose to Sri Lanka in an important match. Minitzh had lost a small fortune betting on the outcome, and phoned Justice Sin to make sure the cricketer fried in hell.
“But, Mr. President,” Sin supposedly said, “it’s up to a jury to decide whether or not he is guilty.”
“And if he’s not guilty,” Minitzh supposedly said, “then you will bowl the next match and the fans can rip your limbs from your body.”
Joanne asks what the justice decided and Sin looks down slyly. The translation comes slowly, long after Sin, Suli, and Luki have had their laugh. “Fortunately for everyone the man escaped to Sri Lanka before the verdict. It’s the only time I’ve ever found the CIA useful.”
Supira, laughter, serious talk, hours stretching into early dawn, Suli picking up energy, others drifting off one by one until Suli and I are alone with the sound of cicadas in the jungle, the glow of the kerosene lamps, the discomfort of the metal chairs. I want to move, find my tent, catch some sleep, but I also want to stay here with Suli, I don’t know why – to let Joanne know that there’s no reason to worry about me and our conversation before, that I won’t be imposing my clumsy body on her again. But also because of Suli, her sense of spirit, this intoxicating talk of rebuilding an entire country, the whiff of power and responsibility, of history surrounding this woman. It’s heady stuff, and there’s an old sense too that, since she’s a woman, a small one at that, she could use my help – as if I have anything to offer. I’m surprised to find myself thinking this way, yet there it is. Maybe everyone feels this way: she’s no arrogant, untouchable General Minitzh, but tiny Suli Nylioko, brave as an angel but she needs our help, she can’t do it alone … and so we give it freely.
“Have you heard from your family?” she asks, a question that catches me off-guard.
“I get e-mails from my son,” I say. “He’s only eight. He isn’t a particularly informative correspondent.” And I don’t often remember to write back, I fail to say.
“I lost my son,” she says. “After Jono was killed. I tried so hard to hang on to him, but I lost him.” The clear eyes, calm hands, her face so suddenly sad. “Nothing could be right again for him. The harder I tried to hold him to me the more he pushed away. You know how adolescents can be. He went for everything that would take him away. The friends, drugs, interests … it was all designed to add distance. My daughter stayed with me. My daughter became my closest friend.”
I ask where she is now and she searches through her handbag, comes up with a photo of a dark, sinuous young woman holding an infant, beaming, with a tired-eyed white man standing behind her, his hand the size of her shoulder.
“Safe in England. Living a very conventional life. Happy, happy life. We talk nearly every day.”
“And your son?”
Eyes down, hands spreading out on the tabletop, fingering the edges of the photo.
“I don’t know where Jacob is. It’s a terrible, hollow feeling, not to know. Except that I have a sense that I’ve lost him, that it’s irrevocable. I don’t know why. I suppose there always should be hope. But I don’t feel it. What I feel … I think it must be close to what a woman here feels who has lost a son or husband or father to the IS, only there was no news, it was simply a disappearance and they won’t even admit to having taken him. It’s just – empty. Their struggle is with the IS but somehow mine is with God. I had a husband who was a brave man and we were steps away from safety, so why didn’t God give us those few steps? And I had a son I loved more than … more than God, and I think I got the Old Testament God, you know, the jealous one who couldn’t stand to be second in any way. That is not the God I pray to, but I fear it’s the God who took Jono and Jacob because I loved them too much.
“I’m drunk, you see,” she says, “so you mustn’t remember any of this. But part of why I came back to Santa Irene and stood up when it was time was to show Jacob that I’m still here. How could I face those soldiers? Was it prayers to the God who took my family? No. Not all of it. It was partly too to have my face and name sped around t
he globe so Jacob could be proud. He doesn’t have to be ashamed of who he is.”
Breaking down now, this tiny iron-willed lady. I stand, nearly totter over myself from stiffness and the need to pee. “Come on,” I tell her, gently pulling her out of her chair. “You should go to bed. Where’s your tent?”
“I don’t think I have one. I didn’t mean to stay. I don’t sleep anyway. I just need to sit.” Small voice, not the fireball of earlier in the evening but a deflated, tired soul.
We step out of the tent into the grey light of a chilly dawn. A black and yellow spider knits the last strands of an elaborate web stretched between a tent rope and the ground; a lizard flashes for cover off the path ahead of us; overhead a bird stops its song as soon as we come into view. I take Suli to the rock where Joanne and I sat the day before. Down below the valley is sunk in mist, but the first gold bands of sunlight are poking between mountain peaks.
“Stay with me,” Suli says.
“I’m exhausted. I need to find my cot.”
“Stay with me.”
She folds her legs beneath her, straightens her back, closes her eyes as the sunlight soaks her face. I sit much less formally, my knees drawn up, and look not at the valley but at her. If I had a camera and could capture this light, then here’s my Gandhi at the spinning wheel – Suli in meditation. The lines on her face soften, her shoulders relax, she clasps her hands in front of her, almost, but not quite, in prayer. I need to pee badly now, there’s no escaping this mundanity, and I don’t know why she doesn’t have the same need – unless she does and this is all a show, like arriving here yesterday with the reporters, like visiting the sorialos.
I leave her finally, sleep fitfully, and when I rise for breakfast she has gone, back into the maelstrom of nation-building.