by Liam Durcan
José-Maria Fernandez had become famous to North Americans in that very Latin American way; his black-and-white picture, à la Ché, speckled by layers of photocopying from an already grainy newsprint image, was all that remained of him. It became a central image in the case. The photo often shared the television screen with footage of Hernan handcuffed and moving from one holding cell to another or with stock photos of the field where Fernandez’s body was found. Fernandez’s photo was only one of many such photos from Latin America in the 1980s. His story was neither more tragic nor poignant than any other, but for various reasons it resonated. Hernan’s actions could be explained in the larger political context and his victims categorized as opponents of the regime, but for the true weight of the accusation, a victim with a name was needed.
Patrick had read accounts of people who had covered the tribunals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia. These were hardened journalists, men and women who had catalogued the machete-shorn limbs and shallow, self-dug graves and seen every permutation of horrific behaviour; they would be the last to sentimentalize the tribunal’s proceedings. Yet they all reported that among the atrocious acts discussed and admitted to, they felt a presence in the courtroom. Perhaps this was nothing more than liberal guilt or a shared sense of belated responsibility, but when Fernandez’s name was mentioned, Patrick could sense such a presence, concentrating, almost condensing into a mist to sit on his skin.
The heightened drama invoked by Fernandez’s name was defused by the lateness of the day. It was almost four o’clock now, and the proceedings were losing speed. Not even Fernandez could change that. As one of the justices was speaking, Hernan García dipped his head and brought his right hand up to his face. A bright red container was visible through his fingers. He cupped his hand in front of his mouth. Amid the summing-up and gathering of belongings and the barristers closing their cases, Patrick suspected few people noticed it. Hernan raised his head, and Patrick saw him more fully, the wider-eyed state, the pallor, evident even across the gallery, through the glass. Hernan teetered for a moment and an arm extended to brace against the glass wall of the defendant’s booth. The heel of Hernan’s hand pressed against the glass surface, producing a pale, featureless island of flesh. Patrick had edged to the lip of his chair, and he looked around to see who else was watching. Roberto was stretching, eyes closed, apparently unaware. Patrick then looked over to Elyse Brenman. Her eyes were fixed on Hernan.
Patrick got to his feet quickly and then froze, stalled in that moment of uncertainty over what was happening, unsure of what he should do. He almost pointed to the kiosk where Hernan wavered, ashen-faced. Then, as quickly as Hernan’s colour drained, it returned. Hernan steadied. By getting up so quickly among a crowd whose preparations to leave were of the same glacial pace as the proceedings, Patrick had attracted more attention to himself than to Hernan’s condition. People stared, always eager to try deciphering the alarm on someone else’s face. Reduced to just another gallery oddball, Patrick sat down again. He turned around to see Elyse staring at him, registering everything.
The proceedings were adjourned, and Hernan was led away. Surprisingly, he looked solid on his feet. Elyse remained in her seat, fervently massaging the keyboard of her laptop. A few rows ahead, Roberto sat forward, rubbed his eyes, and stared at the tribunal’s empty courtroom and the defendant’s dock. Then he turned around to find Patrick in a field of empty seats. They acknowledged each other, a fellowship of stragglers.
Roberto gathered his coat and two-stepped out of his row, coming up the steps toward Patrick, who was still freshly sore enough that this was a menacing sight. Roberto must have realized it too because he seemed to relax, a posture slackening from threat to non-threat as he got near.
“Jesus, your face is messed up.”
Patrick had been sitting so the damaged parts hadn’t pulsed or throbbed in a while. “It doesn’t feel so bad.”
Roberto checked his watch. He surveyed the gallery and saw Elyse in the far corner, pounding out another non-fiction award-winner.
“Man, that girl is everywhere I look,” he said, a little too loudly for it to have been just for Patrick’s benefit. “Can’t get enough blood from the Garcías.”
Together, Roberto and Patrick walked out of the tribunal building. The sun had disappeared behind some Belgian clouds and the sky looked fluorescent-lit, as though it were about to start flickering. Patrick thought about Hernan and his episode of what must have been chest pain. He should be getting medical attention now. Patrick tried to remember where the examination room was at the tribunal, that labyrinth of hallways that led to the doctor, but after a day and a resolving concussion, his memory of that was bundled in gauze. The most he recalled was the room he awoke in, Celia waiting there, leaning against the wall.
“Has Hernan been ill?” Patrick asked.
Roberto turned, considering the question as he pulled a cell phone out of one pocket and his wallet from another. He stared back in a distracted way, then sat down on one of the benches outside the tribunal building. Patrick joined him.
“He sees a doctor here,” Roberto said as he lay down the phone. He pried open his wallet and thumbed through currency notes and scraps of paper, looking for something. He pulled out a business card, then opened his phone. “Celia wanted him to see another doctor, someone who didn’t work for the tribunal. But my father refused, of course. Nothing my father can’t handle.”
Roberto dialled a number and put the card down on the bench. Patrick saw that it was the business card for the pension in Den Haag where they were staying. It wasn’t difficult to pocket the card without Roberto noticing, his attention focused on the long tonal blips Patrick could faintly overhear. Patrick had no qualms about taking it. Nina came on the phone and immediately Roberto was on his heels, backing away from what Patrick assumed was a barrage of questions. He listened to Roberto try to answer, the telegraphic speech of a person begging to end a conversation.
“I don’t know, Nina, maybe she’s still at the meeting. Yup. Okay. Bye.” With that, Roberto closed the phone. “Celia hasn’t checked in. She doesn’t believe in cell phones.” He was obviously relieved to be speaking to someone other than Nina.
“She’s meeting with Oliveira,” Patrick said. Roberto understood it wasn’t a question. He nodded.
“She’s been discussing ‘our options’ with the Democratic Voice. As though we had options.”
“You don’t sound too happy about them.”
“They’re here, whether I like it or not.” Roberto was looking around the ground by the bench, then patted his pockets until he gave a small shrug. “So, Celia tells me you do this brain research thing.”
“Yeah.”
“Can you tell me how his brain works?”
“No. Can you?”
“Not a clue. But I don’t need some brain scan to tell me he fucking did it.” Patrick knew better than to interject when someone’s engines were revving, but nothing more happened. Roberto seemed surprised at having made his admission.
“Did he say anything to you?”
“Us? No. We’re just his family. We get to find out like everybody else.” Roberto pulled his jacket more tightly around him. “My father is still a child in some ways, you know? Years, we’ve had to face this shit. It would have been easier if he had admitted it at the start. But he honestly believes he’s done nothing wrong.” A group of six people in business suits and carrying briefcases walked past them, organized into a tightly packed cluster of movement, like a flock of indigenous birds. It distracted even Roberto for a moment. “And now he won’t even talk about it. Won’t talk at all. It doesn’t surprise me. He’s always been in his own little world.”
“Some people see it another way.”
“Oh yeah? Who?”
“Your sisters.” Roberto fixed him with a caustic stare, forcing Patrick to dig deeper. “And he has his supporters at the Democratic Voice–”
“They have their own reasons for being her
e. Listen to the people who are testifying, the real victims, and you’ll hear what the Democratic Voice is all about.”
“I don’t think Celia feels the same way.”
“What the fuck do you know about Celia?” Roberto said angrily. “All she can see is that they’re helping. She’s actually happy after she speaks to Oliveira, at least for a couple of hours. And it kills me because I know what they stand for and I know they’re playing her, but what am I going to do? She has hope, even if it’s totally blind. She can’t even admit what he’s done. I wish the Democratic Voice and these witnesses they found and all these people who support my father could see what he did to our family. I wish they could see what it did to my mother. If he had admitted it, just said he’d made a terrible mistake, she could have dealt with it. I’m sure of it. She loved him. But he never admitted anything. He never explained himself to her. That’s what killed her.”
Roberto looked so old now. Watching him, it wasn’t hard for Patrick to imagine how anger, fed and fanned and stoked, wasn’t that much different from a ball of malignant cells or a blood clot when it came to claiming someone. The Roberto he knew was dead, his charisma nothing more than a headstone. Making his excuses, Patrick got up to leave. Roberto asked him where he was going and it was easy for Patrick to fashion a quick lie. Roberto would be angry if he knew where Patrick was going. He was angry enough.
On his way back toward the tribunal, he met Elyse marching across the plaza. To avoid having to speak to her, he was prepared to do anything–duck under her gaze like a guilty child or turn and run–but, quite unusually, she didn’t break stride. Elyse offered up only the smallest wave and she continued to walk past. Patrick turned his head to follow Elyse, his surprise turning to alarm as he saw her heading toward where Roberto sat on the bench. There was a time when he would have stopped to watch, indulged in the joy of the fracas that was sure to follow, but he hadn’t the heart or the time and so kept walking.
The guards couldn’t hide their amusement at Patrick’s reappearance at the tribunal building’s main entrance. It was Friday, late in the day for a government building, no matter how tight the security, and Patrick got the feeling they were entertained by him and his exits and re-entries. He was like a space shuttle that wouldn’t explode.
A guard who had already leafed through the pages of his passport several times that day now looked at him with puzzlement. “Where to now, Dr. Lazerenko? We’re getting to being closed.”
“I need to speak to your medical personnel. Dr. Bolodis, I think.”
“For the face?”
“Yes, the face is giving me trouble.”
Somewhere in the tribunal building a pager went off, and like all pagers that go off at twenty to five on a Friday, it must have stung on the beltline like the passing of a kidney stone. When the doctor arrived at the desk, though, he appeared placid, as if he had been idling in an alcove somewhere for just such a deployment. His serenity could have been a Dutch thing or a UN thing or a pharmacological thing; whatever the explanation, Patrick was impressed.
“Hello again, Dr. Lazerenko. How can I help you?”
Bolodis didn’t look at all familiar from the previous morning. Prosopagnosia, loss of ability to recognize faces. No, more likely to be just part of the overall amnesia after the concussion.
“I’m sorry, I don’t recognize you. We met yesterday?”
Bolodis smiled and nodded. “Yes, I am Bolodis. I treated you after the altercation.” He was a little older than Patrick. European thin and wearing a linen suit a bit too tight and worn enough that the material around his elbow had organized itself into corrugations, like the bendable part of a drinking straw. He wore his hair gelled and combed back, gathered into little furrows and ridges that reminded Patrick of the pomaded hair of his Ukrainian uncles.
Bolodis regarded him the way Patrick imagined he had looked at patients with brains in varying states of disarray, estimating the wreckage before setting to work. Work wary. Brain wary. In full view of the guards, Bolodis lifted his hand to Patrick’s face, put his middle finger just under the angle of Patrick’s jaw and examined the contusion closely. It was something only a doctor would have the nerve to do, a gesture at once intimate and distanced, a public act that drew no attention from the guards at their kiosk.
“You didn’t go to the hospital.”
“No.”
A fraternal grimace. Patrick knew he understood.
“Follow me, Dr. Lazerenko.”
Bolodis led him down a stairway–they had been downstairs, that much he remembered–and from the first hallway the familiarity of place emerged, previously laid-down tracks rolled out with each corner turned, and he was able to recall the entire maze of corridors that ended in the medical office and the infirmary. The lights were still on and the screen saver on Bolodis’s computer flashed a medley of UN-approved Den Haag architectural cheesecake photos: the Vredespaleis, the Grote Kerk, and even the tribunal building got a glamour shot, photographed next to a reflecting pool to make it look like a twelfth-century castle rising from its moat. Bolodis extended his hand and Patrick sat up on the examining table.
“Bolodis. That doesn’t sound Dutch.”
“It’s not. I’m from Latvia. Riga,” Bolodis said, and opened a file. “I came in 1994, a few years after the Soviet Union fell.”
“Do you ever think of going back?”
He looked up at Patrick. “Why do you ask that?”
“No reason. It just seems that with the new freedoms…”
“I could have stayed,” Bolodis answered, shrugging like the thought was a wet coat he wanted to shed. “You’re American?”
“I work there. I’m naturalized.”
Bolodis pulled a piece of loose paper out of Patrick’s chart: “We make a photocopy of the passports of anyone seen here, and I couldn’t help but notice you are an American citizen, but you still have a Canadian passport.”
“I kept it. Some places you have to show your passport to get in.”
“I gave up my Latvian status.” Patrick nodded. “Why are you here at the tribunal?”
“I knew Hernan García when I was young. I grew up in Montreal and worked for him then. The two women–”
“Celia and Nina, his daughters. Yes, I know,” Bolodis added, sitting on the desk opposite the examination table. “Well, let’s have a look at you.” Bolodis got up and washed his hands. He snapped on a pair of latex gloves and asked Patrick to open his mouth, his fingers on the skin over the joint to determine how the jaw was opening. He pulled a penlight out of his breast pocket and clicked it into a knifepoint of light. Bolodis held the light in front of Patrick’s face, swinging it from one eye to the other. Blindness followed, the intermittent, sequential blindness between the bright lights. The light was painfully intense, and impossibly had the sound of a bonfire when it came near.
“Do you have headaches?” he asked.
“Some. More last night.”
“Follow my finger. Are you dizzy?”
“When I move quickly.”
“Dizzy like spinning or dizzy like being on a boat?”
“Like a boat.”
Bolodis brushed the tips of his index fingers over the skin on Patrick’s forehead. The cheeks and chin were tested next: “Do you feel this?” Patrick nodded. “Close your eyes, please. That hurts?”
“Yes.”
“Now please open your mouth.”
The doctor shone the light into Patrick’s throat. When he had finished, Patrick asked him how many doctors worked at the tribunal.
Bolodis clicked off the penlight. “I am the only one. If you’d like to see another–”
“No, no,” Patrick replied, and Bolodis disengaged, leaning back on his desk, as though expecting what was coming next. “I didn’t come for me. I came because I wanted to speak to Hernan’s doctor. I’m worried about him.” Bolodis nodded. He crossed his arms and brought one hand, fingers curled into a loosely held fist, to his mouth. It looked as th
ough he needed to cough.
“What exactly are you worried about?”
“His health.”
“Tell me what you’re worried about. Exactly.”
“He’s sick. He’s obviously having angina. Every time I see him, he’s using his nitrospray. Today, I thought he was having a heart attack.”
Bolodis paused. To Patrick, he was a man thinking of job security and working conditions in Riga. “I can’t tell you anything. His medical information is confidential. Please understand.” Bolodis took a piece of gauze and dabbed it against Patrick’s swollen lower eyelid. Despite the delicacy of the act, Patrick winced. From what he could see, the gauze was moist but not discoloured.
“No infection,” Bolodis said, happy to get back to the routine of minor trauma. “These are tears.”
“I’m a doctor, I’m a friend of the family.”
“So much more the reason for discretion.”
“Can I see him then, to ask him if he’s okay?”
“You know he’s refusing visits. That is his right. Would it reassure you to know that we’re aware of every detainee’s medical history? The fact that he is taking medication in front of you should put your mind at ease, I would hope. And please let me remind you that we have never had a case of someone suffering at our hands…”
“It’s not that–”
“You don’t practise, do you, Dr. Lazerenko?”