Accusation

by Catherine Bush

  The door behind her had been left ajar and through it a faint conversation between women could be heard. Sara could not stop herself from rising and stepping across the threshold into a dim hall along which the scent of spices and more children’s voices drifted. Juliet had said there was a room used as a classroom, and a lunchroom, where a woman prepared the children’s lunches over a propane stove. What was the name, again, of the local leader, of the kebele, the district, Mr. Yonas Something. Juliet had written it down, along with a phone number, and Raymond had mentioned how this man had generously offered the circus office space and a place to rehearse. Circus is the new faith, he’d said on tape. Sara pulled out her notebook.

  There was no one in the first small office along the dim hallway, but in the second, a woman in a jacket and flowered skirt rose to her feet behind a wooden desk, and there were no lights on in this room either, no power at all perhaps, which might mean this quadrant of the city was in the midst of its weekly day without power, for the city and the entire country were rationed in this way, so someone at the hotel had told her.

  Is Raymond Renaud here, or Mr. Yonas Berhanu?

  No, they are not here, the woman said in strongly accented English. Some perfume clung to her, or hint of frankincense. Please, I ask you to leave.

  Already it felt as if the circus had a cordon thrown up around it, and it was not possible to be a curious visitor only a trespasser in a place where once people from nearby neighbourhoods had wandered over in the evenings to be ushered into the community hall to waiting rows of benches or had stood outside the windows to watch the children rehearse, as Juliet had described, and an Italian photographer and Canadian filmmaker and even a sociologist had all been welcomed to observe the circus.

  Can I ask you when they will be here?

  I do not know it.

  In her years in the field, she had of course dealt with far worse setbacks.

  When Sara stepped outside once more, she found no sign of the boy. Through the open windows of the community hall streamed shouts, the magnified slap of hands and feet against mats in a high-ceilinged room, and when she approached across the grass and dirt, and edged close to a window, there were the children, older, younger, in T-shirts and tights and nylon trackpants, moving about in the wide room of painted cinder block that she had seen on Juliet’s tapes. Through the middle of the room ran a row of cinder-block pillars, and large squares of diaphanous cotton hung from the ceiling. Directly in front of her, boys tumbled into somersaults on mats that looked identical to the blue vinyl ones tossed on the floor of every gym of her childhood. Four girls worked in pairs, also on mats, one on her stomach while her partner stood between her extended legs and pulled upon the first girl’s arms and torso to stretch her body back in an inverted C. Was that safe? And yet all this seemed ordinary, the T-shirts, the trackpants, the children’s absorption in what they were doing. They exhibited no obvious signs of stress —

  She looked again: in one corner of the room a boy kept his balance on a rectangular piece of wood that teetered on top of a piece of metal pipe while juggling, was it five?, small white balls in the air as another boy reached from behind him, stole a ball from one side then tossed it back into play on the other. In another corner, a girl of perhaps twelve or thirteen in a backbend so deep her head nearly touched the floor juggled three balls in this position, while four younger girls reached the apex of a balance pose: one girl extended upside down in the splits, hands gripping the hands of the girl who supported her from underneath, this girl balanced in turn on the torsos of two girls arched over, feet and hands on the ground. None of which was ordinary.

  Were they ordinary children who had trained to perform such marvels or were they children gifted with extraordinary flexibility and daring who had found their way to the circus, or some of each? And what knowledge did they carry within them, in their minds, in their bodies, of what had happened between Raymond Renaud and the runaways?

  On the far side of the room, near the door, an Ethiopian man, not tall but muscled, in a white T-shirt and green nylon trackpants, was talking to two boys. Nearby the boy, Segaye, sat on a bench, waggling his feet. Sara could see no sign of the note she’d given him. On the wall above him hung a flag with horizontal bands of green, yellow, red, the Ethiopian colours. Presumably the man was Tamrat Asfaw, who had been a wrestler, Juliet had said, until the day he saw the circus perform and showed up at the hall and said to Raymond, I want to help. She must have moved, or her presence made itself felt like a touch upon Tamrat Asfaw, who glanced over his shoulder and across the room. When she called his name through the open window, he didn’t respond, only turned to say something to Segaye, the mood in the whole room shifting, the children halted in their practice. The boy bolted out the door as Sara made her way toward it.

  In the open air, Segaye waved his arms. He work.

  Can I make an appointment to speak with him?

  Yes, she could barge in on Tamrat Asfaw and the circus children, but perhaps she had been precipitous in setting off without Alazar Wolde, Amharic speaker, in her desire to do a reconnaissance by herself.

  Please, will you tell Mr. Asfaw that I will come back later or tomorrow? Oh, and, Segaye, do you know a boy named Yitbarek Abera?

  Recognition registered on his face, also his surprise at hearing this name come so unexpectedly out of her mouth. His yes sounded like a question.

  A few months ago, did he have an accident?

  He gave a barely perceptible nod.

  Did he get hurt?

  He looked extremely nervous, as if he’d been told not to speak of this, or the very idea of Yitbarek’s accident frightened him.

  Did he fall?

  He fall.

  How is he now?

  Okay.

  Segaye, where is Yitbarek?

  His house now, Yitbarek house.

  And where is that?

  That way. He pointed back toward the lane, his extended hand taking in an indeterminate stretch of trees and sky.

  Where that way?

  He shrugged.

  Before he was in his house, where was he?

  This question seemed to confuse him, so she tried again. Where did Yitbarek live before?

  Mr. Raymond house. The boss house.

  She showed Alazar the little map on which Juliet had drawn the location of Raymond Renaud’s house, marking the corner lot, which they were approaching in Alazar’s car, the house enclosed within a wall of red brick topped by spears of glass, broken pieces of bottle embedded in a line of cement, their points piercing upward. The sky still threatened rain, slate-coloured clouds turning yellowish where the sun tried to poke its way through them. Emerald fronds of bamboo shimmered above the height of the wall. Raymond’s garden, where he had sat in a pinkish T-shirt, on a white wooden chair, in a rustling breeze, and spoken to Juliet. The rusty cylinder of a water tank perched on the roof of the house, which was modest in size as glimpsed through the front gate. The boss house, the boy had said. The house where three boys had also lived and other children had stayed over and hung out. Maybe Yitbarek had indeed recovered from his fall, which would be the best news. From his side of the locked gate, a watchman in a yellow rain slicker stepped toward them, a little brown dog yapping at his feet, but the man made no move to swing the gate open. There was no sign of a white truck, and the windows offered no clues as to what life lay within.

  In the car, Sara had told Alazar that she was hoping to speak to the man who ran, who’d run the children’s circus. She’d seen the children perform in Denmark, met the man in Toronto, and wanted to visit them here. She was a journalist but wasn’t, strictly speaking, working, she was helping a friend, a filmmaker, who was making a film about the circus. This seemed to be the best explanation she could offer for herself, for what she was doing, for the moment.

  On foot she and Alazar stepped up to the gate, her blonde hair pulled back in a ponytail, his T-shirt, she noticed, coming loose over the waist of his trousers. Th
e difficulty, always, in the matter of translators, was the surrender of control. The watchman wore a pressed dress shirt and neatly ironed khaki trousers beneath his yellow slicker. She had to trust Alazar —

  Since she could not understand a word that he and the watchman were saying. In Spanish, she caught some sense because of her French, which was on the way to fluent, and in Russian and Arabic and even Polish, gleaned greetings and occasional phrases, depending on the speed of the speaker, but in Amharic, as in Pashto or Urdu or Tamil, not much at all. Okay, one word, amesegenallo, thank you, in a day she’d learned that much Amharic, no, two, ishee, okay. All else was reduced to intonation, gesture, the music and choreography of speech. The little foxlike dog sat alert at the watchman’s side.

  There was also the question of where to look, at Alazar as he spoke for her, in order to help channel her thoughts through him, or at the watchman, to whom Alazar was speaking, and addressing for her. Alazar kept glancing at her, his gesture of inclusiveness. What she could make out so far: he was voluble, genial, and would probably attempt to extract information by generating good feeling. The watchman’s replies were monotone, and when he spoke, he rubbed a cautious finger back and forth along his right sideburn, ducking his head every now and again to keep an eye on the perked ears of his little dog.

  He is not here, Alazar said at last.

  Not here right now or he’s gone away? She felt a sudden spasm of anxiety.

  He has gone away, and he does not know where he has gone or when he comes back.

  Did he take the truck? Is he in the country or has he left the country? Does the watchman know where he is? Sorry, that’s a lot of questions.

  Maybe the country. The watchman is not certain of it.

  When did he leave?

  Last week, he says.

  Is there anyone living in the house at the moment?

  Right now he says not.

  So the boys, the children who lived here, where are they?

  I will ask it.

  Oh, and does he have any idea when Mr. Renaud’s coming back?

  After a further exchange in Amharic, Alazar said, He says you must speak to the people from the circus for this information.

  Okay.

  Do you wish me to ask anything else?

  Did he leave in a hurry, pack up his things like he was moving, or like he was going on a trip?

  I already ask this. He says, all the big possessions are still here. He left like he is making a trip.

  Who’s paying his salary, the watchman’s, now, is it still Mr. Renaud?

  You want me to ask this?

  Yes, if you would, please.

  The watchman’s gaze jetted between them and a vinyl-covered kitchen chair, the padded seat cover moulded by long use, set up in the compound to one side of the gate, and was he the gardener or was it Raymond himself who had made bougainvillea bloom and ferns flourish? Through the watchman’s flat volley of speech Sara made out two names.

  He says, he believes it is Mr. Renaud who pays but Mr. Asfaw gives the money this week.

  Can you ask him if a boy named Yitbarek Abera lived here, and if he was injured, and if he knows where the house of Yitbarek Abera is?

  Yitbarek Abera?

  Yes. He was in the circus. Can he tell you the way to Yitbarek’s house?

  Back in her hotel room, Sara tossed her jacket and daypack onto the bed, her key onto the desk. It was hard, now, not to surrender to disappointment. And self-recrimination. In the field, there was always that initial, elusive hope that the people you wished to meet would materialize exactly where and when you wished to speak to them. If you had a good fixer, as they were called, that helped: driver, translator, all-around facilitator. You landed on the ground and depended, often enough, on your fixer’s contacts to get you to whomever and wherever you needed to go. Alazar seemed a good translator, a good-enough driver, not quite an ideal fixer. That Raymond Renaud was gone was not Alazar’s fault. But they had failed to find Yitbarek Abera’s house. Of course she had no idea what instructions Renaud’s watchman had given. Perhaps they had been designed to confuse. The boy is lame, Alazar had said to her. He cannot walk.

  Is he paralyzed? she’d asked, which would seem to be the case.

  It is possible, Alazar said.

  They’d ended up on foot in a warren of un-signposted lanes, craterous, full of puddles and open drains, too narrow for the car to drive through, surrounded by yelling children, but found no one who seemed to know about the boy or where he lived. Alazar had been profuse in his apologies. Fear underlay them: that he would not measure up and she would find someone else. I will find the way, he said. Tomorrow.

  And Raymond Renaud. He had not lied about Yitbarek’s accident, she had to hold on to this. In his story there was this much truth.

  Sitting on the end of the bed, Sara unlaced her boots and slipped her bare feet into flip-flops. There was no power, she realized, when she flicked the light switch in the bathroom, and no hot water, and the faint diesel odour wafting from the hall into her room likely came from a generator chugging somewhere outside, which was powering some things but not others. Then, mysteriously, the light came on, flickered and fizzed, and settled at a lower wattage than usual. A generator and/or possibly a voltage stabilizer. The ambient sounds of a place like this.

  She poured herself a sliver of duty-free whisky and added some water from the bottle labelled Ambo. She’d noticed people asking for water by this name, as in, I’d like a bottle of Ambo. Then she fought successfully with the catch on the door leading out to the tiny balcony.

  There had always been the risk that he would not be here, and it was ludicrous to think that giving him advance notice of her visit would have provided him with any reason to stick around.

  His truck wasn’t at his house, and so perhaps he was somewhere in the truck, as in not far away, and would return. Someone would pass on to him the written message that she’d left at the circus compound. He was still in shock. He was somewhere close by, hiding out, and only saying that he was gone. Guilty or innocent, he would have to create some distance between himself and the circus while whatever investigation there was took place.

  In the garden below, a path led through pine trees or cedar to the gauzy blue of a swimming pool, where despite the chilly air an Ethiopian man seemed to be teaching an Ethiopian woman how to swim, their chuckles rising. The circus children whom she’d seen rehearsing that morning had not looked terrorized or kept against their will. The ones who’d returned from Australia, including Segaye, hadn’t fled. She had not, despite Tamrat’s ire at her, sensed fear and quaking submission in the room. This was no more than a first impression.

  Inside once more, she picked up the receiver of the old black phone and punched in the circus number from the website. Juliet had said she thought the line rang in Raymond Renaud’s house.

  Raymond, Sara said into his answering machine. It’s Sara Wheeler, from Toronto. I’m in Addis Ababa. When I dropped you off in Montreal, you said if there was ever anything you could do for me to ask. So I’m asking. I came here because of the circus. I’d like to talk to you. I’d like to hear your version of what’s going on.

  The phone rang and she swam up from sleep toward the braying sound, opened her eyes to the brash face of her travel alarm clock, just before seven a.m., somehow she’d slept through the amplified Orthodox Christian call to prayer that, like a muezzin, had woken her before six the previous morning — and was it David, to whom she’d spoken the night before, for whom it would now be nearly midnight and who almost never called her from home unless it was an emergency, who’d reminded her, during their conversation, both that she’d missed Thanksgiving and that Greta was going in for a new round of tests that week. Or could it be Raymond?

  Wildly, Sara plucked at the receiver and managed a hello as she scrambled to sit up. The voice that greeted hers was male, Ethiopian, not Alazar’s, more strongly accented, blunter, saying, This is Sara Wheeler — the words a questi
on.

  Yes. Within the casing of the sheet, she propped herself against the headboard and placed the squat black telephone, attached to its cord, between her feet.

  I am Tamrat Asfaw.

  Yes. Thanks. Thanks so much for calling. She did not know if there was aggression in his calling so early, an intention to disturb her as she was so obviously disturbing him, or if the timing was a matter of necessity. She was desperate to pee, needed pen, paper, glass of water, tape recorder, another minute in which to clear her head.

  Who you are and what you want?

  She told him: she was a friend of Juliet Levin, the filmmaker who’d been shooting in May; she’d met Raymond Renaud in July in Toronto through Juliet and he’d invited her to visit the circus; she was travelling through Addis and hoped to meet some of the children and speak to Raymond.

  He is away.

  Okay. Can you tell me where he is or how I might get hold of him?

  I cannot.

  She did not know if this meant he truly could not or would not tell her.

  Is he still running Cirkus Mirak?

  I do it.

  So he’s not involved in the circus at the moment?

  He is exhaust.

  Is it because of what happened in Australia?

  What you know of it?

  I know that some of the performers ran away, asked for asylum, and made some allegations against him.

  The one who say these thing. They decide it. Then they say these thing.

  So you — she found a pen on the night table, a museum brochure to write on, her tape recorder nowhere in sight. The phone cord was not that long and it seemed unwise to ask Tamrat if she could put down the receiver in order to search for the recorder in her jacket pocket or bag, given that her connection to him and his willingness to speak to her felt so tenuous. Why do you think they ran away? Is there any truth to their allegations?

  They want to run, that is it.