Accusation

by Catherine Bush

  He used his hands as he spoke, his flexible fingers shaping the air. Where was he from? Sara puzzled through what had to be his bio, in Danish. Raymond Renaud his name was. Canadisk. Canadian. Fra Montreal. A shift occurred in the nature of her curiosity once their shared nationality was revealed. Yet there was his placeless accent and occasionally odd diction. How, she wondered, had he come to be in Addis? His age was hard to determine: he looked young but not too young, perhaps close to forty, and therefore around the same age or slightly older than she was.

  And the children, the performers, what was it like for them to be in Copenhagen, so far from Addis Ababa, breathing in the cool air and the smell of the sea, and already at this time of spring living through the great expanse of a northern twilight. How much did they see or get about in the places where they travelled? There were, yes, sixteen of them, plus the musicians. It would be expensive to tour a group like this. They were performing three shows plus two daytime performances for schoolchildren, funded, to judge by the logos in the program, by various levels of various governments.

  Please tell all your friends, the young woman said, in English and Danish. The children were making their way offstage, the man — their founder, director, leader — stood out in his white shirt, guiding the performers like a shepherd, one hand briefly hovering between the shoulder blades of one of the younger boys.

  In the middle of the next week, back in Toronto, Sara pulled open the door of a Queen Street art gallery, shaking off a skitter of rain, to find herself in the path of her old friend Juliet Levin and Juliet’s partner, a photographer, on their way out of the clamorous opening of a show of pinhole photographs. Max, leather-jacketed and feline, had his arm around Juliet, gamine in a pink coat and shiny boots that ran up to her knees. Juliet had the same nervous prettiness and slant to her posture, as if she were rushing into a wind, that she’d had since their university days in Montreal.

  Sara kissed Juliet’s warm and perfumed skin and felt the press of Juliet’s lips against her own, one cheek then the other. They exchanged the usual phrases — how are you, it’s lovely to see you — while Sara scanned the room beyond Juliet’s pink shoulder for a glimpse of Soraya Green, the friend and fellow journalist whom she was meeting and to whom she was going to give the lowdown on the conference in Copenhagen.

  Every encounter with Juliet carried a whiff of the past that had to be shucked off or contained. There it was, fainter than previously, yet not entirely neutralized. Juliet, daughter of a socialist doctor, had once told a story about going into a bar back home in Winnipeg and asking for a whisky sour only to find that the barman didn’t know what that was. In telling this story, she’d seemed to want to affirm how far she’d come from her place of origin. Juliet had been good to Sara. She had provided Sara with a place to live when Sara had nowhere else to go and had given her unwavering support in the months leading up to the trial, after Sara had been charged with theft and fraud. Juliet had offered of her own accord to stand as a character witness in Sara’s defence. One night, early in her stay in the apartment on avenue de l’Esplanade, Sara had walked into Juliet’s bedroom to find Juliet, wrapped in a wool cardigan and flannel nightgown and hockey socks, studying at her desk, and said, I did not steal that woman’s wallet or use her credit card. And Juliet had turned, her face bright in the lamplight, and said, I know you didn’t.

  They had not become friends in the Feminism and Sexuality seminar in which they’d first met. Juliet had been one of the ones who took a lot of notes and didn’t talk much, and who hesitated when she did talk. Once, during that semester, a year and a half before the trial, they had run into each other filing out of a dance performance in a loft on Saint-Laurent. Going to see dance was something Sara did on her own. Not many undergraduates went off-campus to see shows, but she was older than most, four years older, and already had, to her mind, an adult life, and was in a phase during which she liked to sit in the dark, immersed in the fierce movement and physical conviction of the dancers’ bodies, feeling the sustaining heat of her still-secret relationship with Graham Finnessey deep in her belly and limbs. Most of the people she knew in political science, or historians, like Graham, weren’t interested in dance. She wore a sheepskin coat and tall black boots and felt alluring and vital as she strode through the Montreal streets. And there was Juliet Levin, with some friends, fellow fine arts or humanities students, all dressed in black, congregating near the door where the dancers would appear. How upright, beneath her silky sweater and skirt, Juliet’s posture was, how obvious her longing to be if not a dancer then mistaken for a dancer or someone like a dancer. In the gallery entrance, in Toronto, a trace of this moment still quivered in her.

  We’re on our way out to dinner, Juliet said as Max bounded ahead of her through the door and into the street, while Juliet allowed herself to be borne back inside, along with Sara, leaving the doorway to a laughing couple on their way in.

  Juliet sounded apologetic, as if she hoped to give the impression of wanting to chat for longer, even if she couldn’t.

  I saw something in Copenhagen last week that might interest you, Sara said. The thought had not occurred to her until this moment. Although she and Juliet had not gotten together in some time, years in fact, there remained a sense of indebtedness in her toward Juliet for all that Juliet had once done, and simultaneously a violent longing to be free of this feeling. I was in Copenhagen for a conference and saw a children’s circus from Ethiopia founded by a guy from Montreal. They were performing, they’re great, they do a lot of acrobatics. They tour internationally and are involved in social outreach, mostly in Ethiopia, from the sound of it. It might be a good fit for your show.

  For the past three years, Juliet had been a producer for a national television arts show. Yet now, at these words, she looked strained. The show’s been cancelled.

  Oh, Julie, I’m sorry, I had no idea. What happened?

  They want to reinvent it, they said. Make it more youth-oriented.

  Are you definitely out of a job?

  I don’t know yet.

  Well, this could be something youth-oriented. He’d be telegenic, the circus founder. There’s the Montreal angle. And the kids. Maybe you can do something with it anyway?

  Juliet nodded offhandedly and pulled a little black notebook out of her handbag. Do you have any contact info?

  His name is Raymond something. Renaud, Renouf, something like that. And the circus is Cirkus Mirak.

  Max, in his leather jacket, pressed his face to the gallery window and waggled a finger at Juliet, who stuffed her notebook back into her bag and, already in motion, said, Thanks.

  Two days later an email arrived from Juliet repeating her thanks for the tip about the circus. The day after that, as Sara sat at her desk in the newsroom, within its enclosure of carpeted dividers, beneath the flash of TV monitors, spumes of paper covering the wide surface in front of her, her phone rang, and it was Juliet Levin.

  I found a website, but can you tell me more about the show you saw? What the children do exactly?

  There was a lot of juggling, stilt-walking, acrobatics and balancing acts, and live music. There’s an Ethiopian inflection to all of it, to the music and the costumes. Oh, and a couple of them juggle with fire and they all leap over a flaming rope at the end.

  So it’s all children, and it was started by this Canadian?

  As far as I know, yes.

  And you thought they were good.

  Yes.

  And he’d be good to talk to.

  I think so. Yes. He goes to Addis Ababa and founds a circus. There has to be a story there.

  Have they ever been here?

  I don’t know that.

  Almost two weeks in the past, glimpsed on another continent, the vividness of the elastic-limbed girl contortionist and the small boy in blue who had somersaulted over the rope of flame had begun to fade. They had touched and briefly intrigued Sara, but the daily swell of the newsroom diminished them: its warren of divi
ders and desks within cells personalized by a choice of mug or photographs or cute cat cartoons or the swoop of a screensaver across a computer monitor; the ranks of hunched bodies, the clocks, the map of the world above the wall of photo files, the blare of telephones, voices, the urgent rattle of fingers across keyboards pressed themselves around her. Then there was her need to add two hundred words to the piece on Romanian orphans who had found new homes in Canada and to do it in the next hour, since the piece had to be edited and filed by the end of the day. Nuala Johnson, the national editor, was waiting for it. After that, she’d have to come up with ideas for the next day’s story meeting, something, say, about the recent influx of Russian criminals who were building mansions with their laundered money, and — she’d need something else. Meanwhile, the headlines in the newspaper open across Sara’s desk shouted about the ferry sinking off the coast of Haiti and the massacres of Hutus by Tutsis in Burundi.

  Okay, Juliet said. There’s a number on the website. Maybe I’ll see if I can get hold of him.

  Three and a half months later, one Monday afternoon in mid-July, Alan Marker, deputy editor on the foreign news desk, made his way along the channels between office chairs, broad as a tugboat in his striped shirt, holding aloft a piece of fax paper like a sail, and boomed, An arrest warrant’s been issued for Karadzic. Alan was as obsessed with justice in the case against the Bosnian Serb leader, former president, now indicted for war crimes, as another might be over a lover. In Sara’s ear, from a law office in a tower mere blocks away, David said, The appointment’s at twelve on Thursday.

  And if he was taking his wife, Greta, in for a CT scan at noon on Thursday, it was pretty much a foregone conclusion that Sara would not see him on Wednesday evening, the night on which they usually met. Greta’s last scan, three months before, had been clear, no sign of the return of the first tumour, nor any sign of the second one, the small inoperable walnut of an astrocytoma that had appeared, six months after Greta had received her last all-clear, in the left frontal lobe of her brain.

  But next week absolutely yes, David said, and his tone conveyed a confirmation of all they did share, despite the circumstantial strangeness of their connection, the steadiness of a hand held out.

  You know it’s fine and I assumed as much, Sara said. How are you feeling?

  Arctic winds poured from vents in the ceiling, so ferociously that Sara found herself longing for a toque and parka, her sweater no more than a flimsy second skin, the diminishing heat from her cup of coffee barely penetrating her as she hunched toward the phone and David through it, Alan Marker’s voice surging in the background.

  Hopeful but terrified. The doctors sound optimistic, yet I can’t be a libertine with hope, it’s too dangerous.

  On the last scan all was well. Hold on to that. Hope. Better to hope. I’ll be thinking of you and holding out all my hope from here.

  What a peculiar angle of interest hers was: and yet impossible not to offer hope and mean it. What kind of monster would she be if she could not do this? Of course she wanted Greta to be well, to make a full recovery from the cancer and the attendant neurological symptoms, the fatigue, the memory loss, the slips in speech that David had described to her and which Greta had been in rehabilitation to overcome.

  Thursday was Sara’s birthday. David seemed to have forgotten, and how could she blame him. She would be a poor sport to remind him of it, at least right now. Anyway, neither of them had ever been the sort to set much store by birthdays and their attendant celebration, although Sara did remember the date of David’s, February 22. Nor did they have the sort of relationship in which they spent their birthdays together. That was fine. This triangulation, entanglement, whatever you wanted to call it. She had chosen it. She was turning thirty-six; it was not an exceptional year, just one more on the road to forty.

  David said, We won’t have results for a while, so there’ll be that agony of waiting.

  Let me know how it goes, Sara said. Call at any point if you need to.

  After she hung up the phone, she rose to her feet and paced back and forth on the patch of carpet behind her desk, as if walking along a humming wire, Nellie Wuetherick craning over her own phone on one side of her, Paul Rosenberg deep in the embrace of his keyboard on the other. She banged up against an internal wall with David, but this was exactly what she wanted because it stopped her from getting too close and if she kept this distance then he could not hurt her.

  Months before, there’d been an evening when David had poured dollops of single malt into a pair of her mother’s old crystal tumblers from the bottle that he kept in her kitchen, and they’d made their way, tumblers in hand, down the hall toward Sara’s living room, and David had turned to her and asked, Did you know that Karadzic, the Serb leader, wrote poetry? Sara said she did, someone at work had told her, and someone she knew in England, another journalist, had even sent her a translation into English of one of his poems. The shocking thing, or one of the shocking things, being that, while it was bilious with anger, it wasn’t as awful a poem as you might expect.

  David, she’d said, I love that you’d know I’d want to know something like this.

  His shirt collar was loosened, he was barefoot, showered, and when he touched his cool glass to her back, between her shoulder blades, the gesture moved through her body, her blood vessels pulsing in a thick, languid tock after sex. Beneath his surface formality lay a physical fluency, a fluency they shared. Then there was his care, their unusual intersection of interests, and the other ways in which he continued to surprise her. One night, they’d gone out for dinner, as they sometimes did in her neighbourhood, and he’d told the two men at the table next to theirs that she and he were Canadian journalists living in Russia home for a visit. The men, chatty, had begun by asking them what they did, and then wanted to know about Russia, and on the spot they’d had to fabricate this other life out loud. Sara had no idea what had possessed David to say such a thing, other than that he knew she’d spent a few years of her childhood in Moscow and could trot out a few Russian phrases, endearments: zaika moya, solnyshko moyo, my little rabbit, my little sunshine. Also, her parents lived in Moscow, her father having returned to work at the embassy there, after the years spent in Ottawa and in other overseas postings: Berlin, Brussels, Kiev.

  When Sara asked David, later, why he’d done it, he said because it was no one else’s business what they were to each other. Yet there were far more straightforward ways than this to create a veil of privacy around themselves.

  In her living room, they’d folded themselves onto the old sofa, clasping their tumblers of Scotch, and debated why dictators and despots might decide to write poetry. Didn’t Gaddafi write poetry too, or just prose? Sara asked.

  Saddam Hussein wrote novels, David said, and poetry. Goebbels wrote plays.

  Lenin wrote poetry before he became a dictator, Sara said. Maybe there’s an impulse toward poetry not only as something potentially beautiful but also controlling, a way to give formal shape to experience, emotion, rhetoric, and so sway people. You think? There’s probably no way to generalize why dictators or sociopaths write poetry. It could be from some private, dissociative urge.

  A belief that words can sway, David said. Beautiful order brings power. Or there’s a desire to create a façade of the sensitive and artistic. With his large head and compact body, he threw himself almost physically into a consideration of the question, neck torqued, forehead furrowed. Copyright lawyer, avid and complicated man, who held on to his own forms of self-containment. All Sara’s attention, physical and mental, was drawn to him, and yet when he left the house she would be flooded with relief. Okay, David said, I’ve entertained that question long enough. But beautiful constraint. He clinked his crystal glass to hers, their thighs pressed together. Let’s drink to that. Or let’s put it this way, to the beauties of constraint.

  He was talking about them. In their case, constraint also meant secret. David was not just her private life but a secret one, as sh
e was his. By now they’d shared nearly three years together, and Sara was supposed to keep this to herself as, generally, she did.

  No sooner had she swung herself back into her desk chair, the newsroom churning around her, more swirls of gelid air pouring from above, than her phone rang again, and when she reached to answer it, Juliet Levin said hello, then something like, Are you going to the Cirque de Lumière benefit on Thursday?

  Am I what?

  The Cirque’s doing a benefit performance for Cirkus Mirak, the Ethiopian children’s circus, and I wondered if you’re going.

  I don’t know anything about this. That night in Copenhagen wafted back into view, the air full of twisting and tumbling children.

  Oh. It was Juliet’s turn to sound surprised. I thought you’d have heard.

  I don’t always pay attention to things like this. I’m sure Anne in the arts section knows. Are you going?

  I’ll be filming. Sorry, sorry, I’ve been meaning to tell you. I’m shooting a documentary about the children’s circus.

  You are?

  I’m so busy. It’s been a total whirlwind. Breathlessly, Juliet filled Sara in: how, back in the spring, she’d contacted the circus founder and director, Raymond Renaud, through the phone number listed on the website, and reached him shortly after his return from Europe.

  I told him I’d heard about the circus through a friend. I said I was interested in doing something and asked if anyone had and he said there’d been a short documentary made for German television. But that was all. Nothing in North America, and since he’s interested in bringing the circus to North America, he really liked the idea. Originally I thought I’d approach funders and broadcasters first but he told me to come sooner than later, as soon as I could, because summer’s the rainy season and he said it didn’t make sense to come then, and then they’re touring again later in the summer and fall. And so I breathed deep and put the trip on my credit card and went in May, for two weeks, and brought along a Ryerson film student as my assistant and sound guy, and we shot on video, and I’ve decided it’s okay for it to look a little raw. And you were right, he’s been fabulous and generous, the whole story is amazing, the social circus angle, and the children, and he’s great on film.