Accusation

by Catherine Bush

  Were you in Australia?

  No, I stay. He go.

  What did Raymond say about what happened?

  I said it.

  Has he made any kind of statement or denial?

  He deny. And I am here. I see.

  The other children in the circus, the ones who were on tour in Australia, or here — what do they think happened, or has any of them made any similar claims or complaints —

  The ones who run, they say these thing, the others do not say it. We work hard to make circus. We do it. For good of circus. How else to do it? They want it. I want it. And I say, if any run, we never go away again.

  You told them they mustn’t run away from the circus. And they say —

  Yes, yes, they see it. I go —

  Tamrat, there’s a boy, Yitbarek Abera. Back in July, Raymond told me he had a fall —

  One time this happen. One time. It is accident. We watch. We take care.

  I’m not implying you don’t. So he did have a fall —

  Yes.

  How is he now?

  We work.

  What was that?

  I go.

  What about an investigation, into the allegations against —

  I go.

  Tamrat, can I visit you at the circus? Today, tomorrow, any day this week?

  Not possible.

  She sat with the phone receiver in her hand, the line dead, a confusion of sensation welling in her, a wild top note at Tamrat’s word that Raymond had denied the allegations, which registered as relief.

  At eight, Alazar picked her up and Sara settled herself in the seat beside him. Out along the Wollo Road, streams of schoolchildren in uniform traipsed along the dirt path at the side of the road, some sweatered, some in white shirts, girls in dark skirts or pinafores, puddles yawning in the reddish dirt, the clouds piled high and swelling. He told her, as he drove, how one of his first jobs as a driver had been during the big famine, many years ago now. He had been part of a UN convoy transporting food-aid workers into the north. It had been good work, full-time, good pay, he’d never had such good work since, he had even met the rock star Bob.

  Goats lolloped along the drainage ditch in front of them. Exhaust spewed from a passing truck. They would find the lame boy, he said. And then, carefully: Did she have any plans to travel north? Did she know anyone who needed a full-time driver? Sara said she didn’t but would ask around, didn’t know yet if she planned to leave the city, told Alazar about her own trip up through the Kenyan desert to the camps near the Sudanese border, where there’d been no rock stars.

  They pulled in and waited in the car in front of the Agip station. Although the circus children had been rehearsing up in the community hall the previous morning, Sara had no idea if they arrived at that hour every day, if they rehearsed and did their schoolwork onsite rather than going to a regular school. No children appeared and began to make the steep climb up the laneway, nor was there any sign of Tamrat Asfaw in his dark-green tracksuit. Some of the local children whom Sara had encountered the day before shouted at them from outside the car and, when she rolled down the window, called out, Sister, mother.

  Alazar said, They think you are a missionary. All the white people who first come here are missionaries so now they think all white people are this. It is where these names come from.

  When Berhailu, the boy in the fedora, approached, Alazar rolled down his window and asked something in Amharic that involved Yitbarek’s name. Berhailu opened the back door of the car and settled himself inside.

  He says he will show us where the boy’s house is, Alazar said, then turned and shouted at the other children who had crowded around the car windows.

  Are the circus children coming today? Sara asked, turning to Berhailu. Beneath the brim of his fedora, he had long, beautiful eyelashes.

  Yes, sister, he said.

  Are they there already?

  He shook his head.

  Juliet had given her names: Tesfanesh, Kidsit, Lelise, Girma. Do you know Kidsit or Lelise? Are they coming?

  Yes.

  Tell me about the classes you take at the circus.

  Is good.

  Where did you learn English, in school? Although she had doubts about whether he went to school.

  Circus.

  Does Mr. Raymond teach the classes?

  They do it.

  By them she assumed he meant the circus performers. Even English classes?

  Mr. Raymond do it.

  What do you think of him? And the others, do they say he is a good man, or a bad man?

  Good, sister. Though he might be telling her what he thought she wanted to hear.

  Can you show me something you learned in the circus class?

  She had to ask Alazar to repeat the request in Amharic. I’ll give him money, she added.

  He has no mat, Alazar said, after the two of them had conferred.

  Nevertheless, Berhailu, shoeless, leaped out of the car and, after some urgent discussion with another boy in a windbreaker, performed a dance that involved foot stomping and hand clapping and eager waving of their thin arms, though these boys lacked the obvious skill and grace of the trained performers. Sara snapped a couple of photographs.

  Back in the car, while Berhailu folded coins into a pocket in his grimy shorts, Alazar said, He says the circus children, they will not come until later because this evening they have a show.

  A show?

  A small show, a practice show.

  Sara turned again to Berhailu. Can you tell us where?

  Alazar, in conversation with Berhailu, drove the car at a crawl through a different warren of stony, rutted streets than those they’d navigated the day before and pulled up at last in front of a corrugated iron gate flimsy on its hinges, gaps around its frame, its two wings secured with a padlock, locked from the outside. A hint of a rusty metal roof and a black meander of an electrical line were visible overtop the gate. A crowd gathered: men in wool hats, women with cloth wraps hiding their hair, a throng of children. Sara joined Alazar among the shouting children as he rattled the gate and they both peered through the gaps at the dirt yard inside, the glimpse of a worn wooden door, blue paint flaking from cracked plaster walls. All he could confirm, Alazar said, after speaking to those assembled, was that the woman who lived in the house was out. She had lived in the house for about a month. There was a convoluted story about who had lived in the house before this. And Sara, too, from the few who spoke a bit of English: Yes, a boy lived there. The boy who stayed in the house. When he left, he travelled in a chair.

  A capped guard in a booth activated the security bar that rose and allowed them to enter the walled parking compound of the Red Cross offices, downtown near the central stadium. Row upon row of white four-wheel-drive Toyotas greeted them, a shining army, along with a few ranks of motley cars, some with drivers leaning against the doors, the building itself brick and bunkerlike. Up on the third floor, Sara stepped from the elevator to find a large man in a tweed jacket surging down the hall toward her.

  Once in his office, door closed, Ed Levoix said, Have a seat. Renaud’s left town. Have you heard? I just heard. What a disturbing business this is, and I can’t say it looks good he’s taken off.

  Sara took the chair in front of his desk while Ed Levoix moved to the far side of the desk, the window at his side. He made no move to sit but scanned about, as if searching for something else to be revealed. A large man but not flaccid, with a kind of restless strength like that of a Percheron horse. Back in the spring he’d sat at this desk while Juliet filmed him joking that he’d come to Addis and ended up in show business.

  How did you hear he’d gone? Sara asked.

  From someone who works for Save the Children UK who was supposed to have a meeting with him and ran into the man who works with him —

  Tamrat Asfaw.

  Ah, you know him, you’ve met him? A keen gaze atop the restlessness.

  Talked to him.

  And you’re here
because, tell me again. You’re writing something or it’s to do with your friend’s film?

  It’s a curious-enough story. I wanted to see what more I can find out.

  So you might be writing something.

  I don’t know yet.

  You don’t need to be coy with me. Why wouldn’t you? The cocked eyebrow. That keenness. He looked as if he knew the usual thing would be to sit but for some reason unwillingness gripped him and he scanned the room again. When Sara asked him if he knew where Raymond Renaud had gone, he said he had absolutely no idea. He checked his watch. I know it’s early-ish, but do you feel like going somewhere for lunch? Or coffee? Have you had the coffee ceremony yet?

  Sara offered her car for transport, but Ed Levoix said, Oh, no, we’ll walk. The Finfine. Unless you want to drive and meet me there. We’ll stop and tell your driver where we’re going. It’s not far. He’ll know it.

  Out in the street, beyond the attendant’s booth and security barrier, the usual mayhem met them: a furious stream of vehicles, a clamour of street children, mostly boys. Without a word of preamble, Ed Levoix set off across the road, not at an intersection, surging into traffic while dodging both speeding cars and children, almost balletic, as if this were sport to him, a mad sport, while Sara tried to keep to his side.

  He did not slow until they were within another gate and walking up a paved drive through a garden, at which point, mildly breathless, he said, My daily exercise. Otherwise there’s what, there’s polo. You can’t walk too much here.

  Do you have a driver?

  Oh, no, I drive.

  A maître d’ in a white coat led them to a table laid with a white cloth in the spacious restaurant through which were scattered a few tables occupied by men in business suits and two nicely dressed women, then to a second, more secluded table that Ed Levoix approved of.

  Do you eat meat? he asked from his carved wooden chair. Do you eat raw meat? I do, or I do here, but don’t feel any compulsion to try it. There was a discreet little maple-leaf pin on his lapel. He had a wide mouth, told her he’d grown up in Moncton, New Brunswick, good Catholic family, made it out of town on a university hockey scholarship. She figured the best thing to do with a man like this was sit back and see, amid the self-display, what he revealed to her. There was some skittishness beneath all his bravado. It’s almost noon, he went on. No beer until noon is my modus operandi, but we can at least order before noon as long as you have no objection. He clapped his hands to attract the attention of a waiter, as one of the Ethiopian men had done.

  It’s a long way to come out of curiosity, he said with another keen look.

  Sara asked him if he knew if there was an investigation underway.

  Oh, undoubtedly there will be, but in a place like this, and especially since this all got started in Australia, it may take time. Do you know many people here?

  Mostly Juliet Levin’s contacts.

  After he’d ordered two bottles of Axum beer and food for them both, she asked him about rumours, were there any, and he said, settling back in his chair, Not about the sort of things he’s been accused of. Or not that I heard over the last four years, which is most of the time he was in operation. Possible money trouble. Recently. That they were running out of money, and he wasn’t the world’s best administrator and had a few grandiosity problems. I am so very, very sad about all this.

  Her bag was wedged between her feet. She was trying to decide whether to take out her notebook.

  He liked to think big, Ed Levoix said. Not necessarily a bad thing, but he might have been better off sticking closer to home. One circus. With a social mission. Working with needy children here. That’s it.

  He poured the beer when it arrived into two glasses and clinked his to hers.

  What about embezzlement?

  No, no, not that I ever heard. Oh, I don’t know. You’re not recording this, are you? Ed Levoix looked around him. If you are, I won’t say another word.

  He leaned in closer. Sometimes, you know, it’s just children, the problems of working with children, they’re so — risky — or organizations that work only with children are. What is one to do? Give anyone who works with children monitoring bracelets? Was it suspect that he didn’t have a team of people working with him? Should he have thought of that? There’s the issue of money and what one can afford. We knew children lived with him, we knew it informally, but where else were some of the ones from out-of-town to go. Maybe he should have boarded them with families and paid the families. Or set up a dormitory? Where? He had space other people don’t have. He didn’t seem like one of those guys who bounce from one child-service organization to another, the creeps. I really don’t know what to think. He seemed very committed to this particular project, not like it was an excuse for — and it was a heck of a lot of work, I’ll tell you that much.

  He frowned. Their food arrived, dolloped portions of meat and curried lentils, including a raw beef mixture called kifto, atop a wide tin plate of pancakelike injera, and Ed Levoix dove in, shaking his head, ripping off a piece of injera and swabbing up the meat mixture with it, all with one hand, red spice staining his fingertips. What’s sad is that we won’t be able to fund while there’s this cloud of suspicion. Who knows if the organization’s sustainable, which is a shame for the children.

  Did you see him socially?

  Oh, once or twice.

  He has only been accused, Sara said. Not charged.

  Yes, Ed Levoix said, staring at his red fingers. You saw the circus perform, didn’t you? Did you have any contact with him?

  I met him in Toronto.

  Again, the keen look. Oh, you did, and spoke to him?

  Yes.

  And?

  He seemed intensely committed to the work.

  He stared into the middle distance, wiping his stained fingers on his napkin. It’s all so tricky, he said. Moral outrage on the one hand and on the other not wanting to scapegoat and trying to figure out what to do or think.

  Then, with a gust of spirit, as if he’d come to some decision: There’s a thing on at the Larsens’ this evening. The people your friend Juliet stayed with. A little soiree. Did they mention it to you? You should come along with me. I’ll let them know. I’m sure they’d be delighted to meet you. There’s someone who may be there. You might want to talk to him, and I know he’ll want to talk to you. If he’s not there, we’ll figure something else out.

  At the end of the afternoon, as the light began to soften, Alazar parked the car near a cluster of small shops and pointed across the road to a stretch of open ground backed by trees. When Sara stepped out of the car, the smell of raw meat, flesh and fat, curdled from an open-fronted shop, the wooden sign above its roof outlined by white fairy lights spelling the word Butchery. From elsewhere wafted the odour of grilling meat, and the tremolo of a song from a radio, and up on an electrical wire, stretched across the shifting blue of the sky, the receiver and cord from a telephone dangled plainly yet mysteriously.

  After lunch, they had gone back to Yitbarek Abera’s house, but the gate was still locked from the outside. From there, they returned to the Agip station, rain smearing across the windshield, hard drops drumming on the roof of the car. As the rain abated, Sara caught sight of Tamrat Asfaw in his dark-green tracksuit, walking on the far side of the road from the direction of town, gnawing on a cob of roasted corn. As he, in turn, with a glance across the road, seemed to catch sight of her, or at least saw something, a white woman through a car window, that brought an irritated flex to his features. From the other direction, a file of children in school uniforms appeared until Tamrat was encircled by them, chattering, wheeling, darting, black heads, lithe limbs. A bus blew past, dirty, mid-century in design. With a baleful glance across the road, Tamrat steered the children up the laneway. Sara wanted to yell after him, This is not a stakeout.

  She said to Alazar, I would really like to speak to some of the circus children and if possible to their families. Can you help me arrange this? />
  I will do it.

  Is this your car? she asked as they set off once more, because, returning to it, and him, after her lunch with Ed Levoix, she’d had the sudden feeling that it wasn’t, its interior too impersonal, Alazar’s belongings — money, two cassette tapes — reduced to what he could carry in his small black nylon bag.

  I borrow it.

  He told her as they drove off that he was waiting to get married until he found a full-time job.

  Under an early evening sky now cleared of clouds, amid the bustle of the small, tin-roofed shops, they waited for something to happen on the far side of the road. At last, an old minivan pulled up beside the open area, and the side doors slid wide, and circus performers, in costume, some of whom Sara was beginning to recognize, spilled out. From the driver’s seat, Tamrat exited, and then, also from the back of the van, climbed two men in suit jackets, whose presence felt initially forbidding, until the men began to help unload equipment — mats, speakers, unicycles, an amplifier, musical instruments. It became clear, as they set up, they were musicians, presumably replacing the other, younger musicians who’d fled.

  There was no way to make herself invisible. No headscarf would truly hide her; it wouldn’t alter the colour of her skin. Sara had to hope that Tamrat, directing the performers to spread a large tarpaulin over the ground, was too preoccupied to notice her among the stalls on the other side of the road from where he was. The old frisson: how one’s motives, desires, one’s very self could be mistaken without one being able to do anything about it, and come to have a life of their own.

  Atop the tarpaulin the children lined a double row of blue mats, then spread a second tarpaulin over the first. People drew close, some running across the road, as Sara did, along with Alazar, once the performance had begun.

  Two boys set metal pipes on top of a smallish circular platform mounted on what looked like blocks of wood, and, on these, side by side, they laid wooden boards on which they stood tippily. As in the rehearsal hall the day before, they began to juggle. From the back of the crowd, Sara had to weave between heads to see them. One girl helped another climb up the boys’ bodies to stand, one foot perched on the shoulder of each, all three keeping their balance as they circled white pins through the air. Someone trilled and ululated. The musicians, off to one side, tugged at guitar and bass, creating a twangy, rhythmic accompaniment. From the front of the crowd Tamrat watched, arms gripped across his chest. When Sara glanced beside her, Alazar was grinning. The scent of his body offered a kind of comfort. A boy balanced a wooden chair on his chin, then hooked it by the back legs onto another, and raised them both, building a delicate tower of four chairs in the air. How had all these items, the chairs, the wooden platform, come out of one small van?