From somewhere in the jury box came the sound of quiet whimpering.
“And what if he’s guilty of other crimes!” shouted someone from the back of the courtroom. It was the chief detective, who after months of silence could bear no more. “Crimes of which we have, as yet, no knowledge! Crimes that could be even worse than what he’s accused of now! Crimes he could have done countless times!” Two bailiffs began dragging him to the exit. “Will all of you simply stand by and do nothing? Could you live with yourselves? Could you look your children in the eye?” As he was yanked through the door, the chief saw the judge frowning and wagging an index finger at him, in discreet warning. “You and your damn faxes!” the FBI man shouted back, just as the double doors were closing. “If you’re not careful, that Satanmidget will go free!—”
The judge rubbed his forehead and tried to compose himself. What could he have meant by ‘faxes’? he practiced saying, in his head, to an imaginary investigator. He cleared his throat and tried to look stern. “Mr. Unwin? Your closing argument. Please!”
“Your Honor, for reasons that are, um, obvious, once again I must ask for a mistrial.”
The judge touched his ears as if in pain. “Not that word again. Mr. Unwin, the jury didn’t even hear him.”
The defense attorney sputtered his astonishment at this assertion.
“Oh, all right, I’ll fix it.” The judge faced the curtain and spoke in a rapid monotone: “The-jury-will-please-disregard-that-unfortunate-outburst-from-a-law-enforcement-officer-which-hasbeen-stricken-from-the-record-thank-you.” He sighed and turned back to Unwin. “Proceed.”
Now, Unwin had always had the greatest difficulty with closing arguments. In fact, as he had confessed to Winkie that same morning, nothing in the world made him more nervous, and none of his recent triumphs in this case seemed to make any difference. If anything, his anxiety was worse than usual. He took several deep breaths. Once again the crucial moment had come, and though he tried and tried, he simply could not compose himself.
“Ladies and, um, gentlemen of the, the, the, the,” Unwin said. “This is, is, is, is—is not—This case is not, is not, is not about—” He began shuffling through his notes. “My client, Mr. Winkie, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is …”
Françoise and Mariana stared at their shoes. Winkie watched Unwin’s whole body shift one way and then another, as he passed from one stutter to the next. “When, when, when—if, if, if—surely, surely, surely …” But though the bear knew his future was at stake, he couldn’t help but feel that these syllables made a rare kind of sense, that his lawyer was speaking a truth about him that no other utterance could have. It wasn’t to be deciphered or interpreted; it was as simple and straightforward as birdsong. “We are here today, we are here, we are, we—” The bear leaned forward, as if toward a warbling shadow in a bush. He didn’t want to miss a note.
The rest of the courtroom, however, was growing ever more agitated. Many would call the Winkie closing one of the most painful performances in the history of the legal profession. After more than twenty minutes, Unwin managed at last to speak just one complete sentence: “My, my, my client, surely then, surely, surely then, is, um, um, innocent—innocent!”
At that, the judge banged his gavel once and quickly said, “Thank you, counsel.”
Unwin seemed to shake himself from a nightmare. “What?—”
“Thank you,” the judge firmly repeated. He looked around the rest of the courtroom, which gazed back at him with grateful relief. “All right, then, if there isn’t anything else, we’ll proceed to final instructions for the jury.”
“No, but I—I—”
Crack!
4.
The police van came to a halt, and the doors burst open: sunlight, flashbulbs, a wall of bodies screaming behind the barricade. “Free Winkie!” they yelled. “Kill Winkie!” they yelled.
The jury had deliberated more than two weeks. Past the cameras and the mob the little bear was led up the too-bright steps, down the dim hallway, and into the windowless anteroom where they always had to wait until the judge was ready.
The little room was an oval but otherwise perfectly nondescript—white walls, Formica table, metal chairs with black vinyl cushions. Here it was utterly silent, and neither Deputy Walter nor Agents Mike and Mary Sue nor the bailiffs spoke a word. Even Charles Unwin sat in complete silence, chewing his nails. The hemmed-in air was neither warm nor cool. Winkie’s shackles cut his ankles but he didn’t bother to twitch. He stared ahead. He didn’t know how long it would be before the judge and the jury were ready for him.
He tried to think good thoughts. He hadn’t known that his life would come down to this—a quest for hope. Long ago, on that fateful afternoon when Baby Winkie was born, it had seemed to the bear that at last he’d found hope forever. Now it appeared to be his quest forever.
One of the guards cleared his throat, and the small purgatorial room was quiet again. Winkie seemed to see hope flickering before him then, like a big, bright coin spinning in the blank, oval space between the walls—the ghost of a coin, turning slowly, appearing and disappearing in the air a few feet in front of his eyes. If it turned sideways, you couldn’t see it; or like the moon you saw half of it, or a quarter, a sliver, whatever, or even all of it, briefly, round and golden. And the dazed air in which that spirit-coin spun was palpable as fog; hope hid in these particles or showed itself, turning, flickering; and that bright, elusive shape seemed to make the air the air, the room the room, the moment the moment. Winkie watched. As in a dream, there had to be a rule, and the rule in this case was that you couldn’t reach out and touch the hope before you, no more than Lot could look back. Not that the bear even had a choice. Hope spun; Winkie watched it. It shown between the particles of the present, or it didn’t; he simply watched it.
“Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, in the matter of the People versus Winkie, have you reached a verdict?”
Even the question seemed to hang in the air a moment. Winkie gazed at the blue curtain puckering slightly in a draft.
“No, Your Honor.”
The bear drew his chin back in surprise, and the courtroom began chattering wildly. The judge banged his gavel until silence reigned again.
“Am I to understand that you are hopelessly deadlocked?” he asked.
“Yes, Your Honor.” The voice could have been male or it could have been female; Winkie couldn’t tell. “We have been unable to reach a verdict.”
The judge looked very annoyed. “On all nine thousand six hundred seventy-eight counts?”
There was the brief sound of papers shuffling. “Nine thousand six hundred and seventy-eight. Yes.”
The judge sighed. “So be it!” Crack! Crack!
The gavel rang with its usual finality, as if the bear’s fate would never be decided. A young reporter ran out of the courtroom yelling, “Hung jury!” Everyone began talking at once. Winkie was still trying to understand what had happened when Unwin lifted him from his seat. “We did it!” he cried, hugging him tightly. “I, I, I can’t believe it! Congratulations, Mr. Winkie!”
The bear felt his lawyer’s tears of joy plopping on the top of his head. He hardly dared ask, but he had to know for sure. “I’m … free?”
Unwin pulled back. “Um, not exactly … ” He laughed in embarrassment and set the bear down again. “But, but, but—well—well …”
Winkie turned to find Françoise and Mariana in the crowd, but they looked almost as confused as he was. Françoise waved and tried to smile. Others were jeering at him; maybe they always would.
“Order!” the judge was shouting, as usual. Gavel, gavel, gavel. “Mr. Prosecutor—will the people be seeking a new trial?”
Winkie’s ears stiffened with alarm. He began tugging Unwin’s sleeve, but the lawyer was shaking someone’s hand and paid no attention. At length the courtroom settled down and the judge repeated his question.
“We most certainly request a new trial!” came the prosecutor’s r
esounding reply. “And we request that the defendant remain in custody, without bail!”
Winkie—revolutionary of family life and of the very laws of nature and narrative—was not yet free. The bear gulped, Unwin stammered his protest, and the wrangling began all over again.
A Teddy Bear in the World
Winkie wandered through the vast marketplace, taking in the extraordinary sights—camels, limousines, donkey carts filled with beat-up furniture, baskets of spices, bins of cassette tapes, women carrying huge trays of freshly baked pita atop their veiled heads. Amid such bustle and variety, no one even noticed—or no one cared—that Winkie wasn’t a man but an old, stuffed bear.
This was fortunate, because he wasn’t supposed to be here. Though he’d been granted bail after all, and the Free Winkie Committee had gladly paid it, Winkie still wasn’t allowed to leave the United States. So Françoise took him along to Cairo in her carryon bag. She was here visiting her mother, who had had a minor stroke.
Winkie wore a sky blue caftan and a small, maroon fez perched between his ears. Though Françoise spent mornings with her mother at the hospital, her afternoons were free, and she walked alongside the bear now in a flowered headscarf, speaking with animation, gesturing in chopping motions with her long, brown hands.
“It is a mere contrivance for tourists,” she said. She was talking about the weekly performance by the whirling dervishes at the ancient mausoleum. “It is totally, totally fake.”
Winkie liked how Françoise said the ts in “to-tal-ly,” her accent having grown stronger here, but he nevertheless was looking forward to seeing the dervishes tonight. In fact, he was relieved not to have to expect authenticity. He lifted his two cotton paws in an attitude of come-what-may. “The faker, the better,” he said.
Immediately the little bear feared he might have offended her, but Françoise laughed out loud. “Then I must see them as well!” she answered. It seemed they were becoming better and better friends.
In the tall windows of the Khan al-Khalili sparkled hundreds of tiny perfume bottles in ornate shapes and iridescent hues, edged with gold or silver. They were tiny as doll vases and topped like minarets. The blue-dark alleys wound and intersected in a maze, giving way to shops of silver, brass, or inlaid wood. Each was stacked to the ceiling with goods—jewelry, rugs and woven things, chess sets, and obelisks of stone. Evening approached. Winkie could hear the call to prayer blaring from a high loudspeaker, plaintive and overamplified.
So here he was. It would be a miracle and a surprise for him to be anywhere now instead of jail. But to find himself in this bustling city full of surprises, a place more than equal to his own sense of wonder: It was a gift of fate, and that in itself was another small miracle. People were everywhere. The marketplace went on and on. He and Françoise made their way past bolts of fabric, racks of plaid short-sleeve shirts, and used jeans with decorative stitching, then stalls piled with old radios, stereo speakers, avocado green princess phones. A slender woman shrouded entirely in white glided by as if in a dream, carrying on her head the largest and greenest lettuce the bear had ever seen. Just then he happened to glance to his right and saw through an open doorway hundreds of men prone in white and blue gowns like his own, the intricate singing of evening prayers drifting over that stillness. Winkie paused a moment, holding Françoise’s hand in silence; then the two were jostled and moved forward again. “A beautiful sight,” whispered Françoise, “but the mullah of that particular mosque is a rabid fundamentalist.”
Soon, by a route that Winkie never could have retraced, they came upon the spice market. As Françoise began to argue in Arabic with a portly merchant, the old tan bear stood on tiptoe sniffing a pyramid of bright orange powder mounded taller than himself. It was an odor he’d never encountered before, dusky, woody, and pungent. Being entirely new to him, it could suggest no particular memory, and yet it made him think of Baby Winkie. For it was so fresh, and so unprecedented—he breathed in again the orange sharpness—that it evoked the possibility of all new experience and therefore of all memory.
From now on, Winkie thought, whenever he encountered it, this particular scent—a subtle fireball in the nose—would always bring back this particular moment when he had thought of his child, a moment that of course would be lost anyway, like all moments. Gazing now at the other pyramids of color, oblivious to Françoise’s shouts at the turbaned spice seller, Winkie began thinking of all the steps both chosen and chanced that had brought him to this time and place—all that he’d learned, everyone he’d loved—and felt momentarily at peace with his own nostalgia. Today Françoise had reminded him that he didn’t have to go back to America and stand trial again if he didn’t want to, and the bear allowed himself to enjoy, for now, the fact that he hadn’t yet decided what to do.
Françoise and the merchant came to an agreement, money was exchanged, and she and Winkie left the market carrying several small, fragrant packages wrapped in speckled gray paper. Passing between crumbling buildings the color of pale sand, the two reached yet another busy street. Cars, trucks, and taxis vroomed past. In the cab from the airport, Winkie had noticed that there didn’t seem to be traffic signals anywhere in the city, or they were broken so often that no one paid any attention, or maybe everyone would have ignored them anyway. The bear hesitated at the curb. Battered vans brimming with passengers barreled past, and the slender, dark young men hanging out the windows laughed and pointed at a small group of European tourists who were, like Winkie, afraid to cross.
“You just have to let them know you exist,” said Françoise. As Winkie watched, she murmured a prayer, set her foot down onto the dusty pavement, and simply moved forward into the fray. She had waited for only the slightest lull, and now the many autos, vans, and scooters slowed, stopped, or went around her. No one even honked. From the other side of the street, Françoise smiled and called back to the bear: “Not too slow, not too fast. Like this.” She pantomimed the attitude of assurance that she had only just demonstrated—head bent in a certain way, arms relaxed yet determined at her sides.
Winkie, too, then placed his coarsely stitched foot in the road and made his way to the other side without incident. From then on, whenever he did so, it was a small and thrilling act of faith, and the slowing and parting of the cars and trucks and especially the countless beat-up little taxis enacted a minor miracle. The many vehicles seemed implacable, caring nothing for anyone or anything besides their destinations, yet somehow they made way for him, a little bear, and each time Winkie crossed he felt as though he had waded into the very flood stream of life and paradox.
“You just have to let them know you exist.”
Acknowledgments
I’m grateful to my editor, Lauren Wein, for her remarkable sense of both structure and nuance and her unfailing belief in this book; to my agent, Maria Massie, for her expert guidance and unwavering support; and to Gabrielle Glancy, Wayne Kostenbaum, Robert Marshall, and Lisa Cohen for their inspired suggestions and insights through repeated readings. Thanks also to David Rakoff, Kevin Bentley, Catherine Kudlick, Carol Chase, Helen Chase, Noelle Hannon, Brian Kiteley, Barbara Feinberg, Bruce Ramsay, Ralph Sassone, Erin Hayes, Maggie Meehan, Michelle Memran, Bernard Cooper, and Frederic Tuten for their astute comments on all or part of the manuscript. For research help and/or stimulating conversation, I’m indebted to Sharon Novickas, Mike and Jean Kudlick, Ann Ruark, Katherine Dieckmann, Fatima Shaik, David Gates, Etel Adnan, and Simone Fattal.
Special thanks to Christopher Lione for art direction and Photoshop wizardry for the image of Winkie in “Egypt” and to John Kureck for the backdrop photo of the pyramids and his advice and help on all of the images. I’m grateful as well to Tai Dang, David Gavzy, and Barry Howard at Newsweek for processing, printing, and scanning; to American Medical Imaging in Brooklyn for the X-ray of Winkie; and to Gretchen Mergenthaler for designing the book’s cover and Claire Howorth for handling publicity.
Thanks to Brian Kiteley for inviting me to read
at the University of Denver at a crucial juncture; to Blue Mountain Center and the New York Foundation for the Arts for their support while I was working on this project; to Ken Weine, Roy Brunett, Karen Wheeler, and Diana Pearson at Newsweek for giving me time off to write; and to Paul Lisicky and Aldo Alvarez of Blithe House Quarterly and Robin Lippincott and Ellen Balber of bananafish for publishing chapters from this book early on (in somewhat different form).
Finally, my love and gratitude to Ruth Chase, 1915–2006, who gave me her teddy bear and her playfulness, and who held Winkie next to the rose.
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