Accusation

by Catherine Bush

  Raymond. It was as if he had no idea of the precariousness of his position, at least as seen from where she was. To remind him of the fact that some months ago he had said if there was ever anything he could do for her seemed ludicrous because it was like a promise made before a bomb went off, and trying to retrieve a small thing plaintively across the wreckage of a bombsite. This is your chance — I’m giving you this chance to respond to the allegations. Maybe you want to take this opportunity —

  Why? Okay, wait, what kind of call is this. Respond how? Are you saying these things have been reported on? There?

  Yes. Yes, here.

  You’re reporting on them. Your calling me is part of your job.

  It’s not just a job. Please believe that, but yes.

  He didn’t swear but from the sucking in of his breath he might as well have done — to him what she was doing registered as betrayal. In his eyes, how could it not? How could she possibly defend herself?

  I went looking for you in Addis Ababa.

  When was this?

  After I heard what happened in Australia, which I read about by chance online, in one of the Australian papers. That some of your performers fled, about the allegations. Three weeks, a little more than three weeks ago. You’d already left Addis.

  I don’t understand, you happened to be there.

  No, I went to Addis. It seemed pointless to say to him, You invited me to Addis.

  Why?

  I wanted to see the circus.

  After you heard about the allegations.

  I wanted to see the circus, what Cirkus Mirak was. And speak to you.

  What the circus is, because you will know then, it still very much is, despite what happened, despite that some people are trying to destroy it.

  So what is your version of what happened?

  And you will write all this up in an article for your newspaper, is that it?

  With your permission. But you know if I don’t, someone else will. I’m taping this, I need you to know that too.

  Maybe if I call you back later?

  No, Raymond, but if there’s somewhere that’s quieter — where are you, in the director’s office? Do you have your own office?

  Her heart beat fast at her own foolishness, because she’d given him an out, an opportunity to slip away. And she was an old hand at this. He could put down the phone, put her on hold, never return. Then again at every instant he had the choice to hang up on her.

  A minute, please, he said, and he did put down the phone, and his footsteps tocked across a stretch of floor, and his voice spoke quite conversationally in Creole to someone, a woman who murmured something in reply, and Sara closed her eyes, as if that made it easier to take in everything she could of him, close herself off from the clocks and the bodies surrounding her, Alan Marker in a pink shirt, and then a door closed, and Raymond Renaud’s footsteps came close again, and he picked up the phone.

  Maybe I should not have taken them overseas. Maybe that was a mistake. They saw what life is like outside Ethiopia and they did not want to go back. For this, can I blame them? Others leave all the time. They started talking to people in the expat communities, Ethiopian expats, or these people spoke to them, when they came to our shows. I know this happened. And people in the communities started feeding them lines, maybe this didn’t happen until Australia. Does he do this to you or this? Is he cruel? Does he beat you? They say, You will have to say this, and they ask, Does he touch you? and when they say, Yes, because when I work with them, yes, I touch their bodies to show them how to do things, the expats say, These are the kinds of things you will have to say if you want to stay. They weren’t thinking of me, they were thinking of themselves. I was in the way.

  You’re saying you think they made the allegations up in order to make an asylum claim.

  Exactly.

  These are pretty strong accusations — physical and sexual abuse, profound mistreatment. The words were like stones in her mouth.

  Well, yes, they needed something strong to make a refugee claim. You would know this. It never occurred to me, never, never, they would do a thing like this. Say these things. It makes me sick. I thought we had a dream, we all shared it, we were all making it together, in a place it had never been done before.

  Though it’s a children’s circus, and the ones who fled are teenagers, aren’t they?

  They could teach, help, we were building other circuses, you know? Yes, it’s hard work, it takes commitment, a desire to think beyond yourself.

  So you’re saying you did not do what they accused you of.

  No. I didn’t.

  What about Yitbarek —

  What about him?

  There were children, boys living in your house. And after the accident, from what he said, you were quite intimately involved in his care.

  I can’t believe you would imply anything about that. I cannot believe it. You went there and —

  I’m not implying, I’m simply asking questions. I have to ask. You did not abuse Yitbarek?

  No. No, this is sick. He has a terrible injury. I helped care for him. What would you have me do?

  And the other boys?

  They needed a home. You think they’re better off in the street?

  Raymond, I have to ask you one more question. There’s a man, Mark Templeton, who ran an orphanage outside of Awassa, where I believe you went to set up a circus program, am I right? But you knew him from before, is that right, in Sri Lanka?

  The sucking in of his breath, again, but this time a rising volatility, of anger or panic? The shriek of a chair’s feet underneath him. You’ve been digging around. You’re not trying to help me, are you? I don’t even know what questions you asked Yitbarek. Of all of them.

  I’m trying to give you a chance to speak. Do you, did you know this man —

  We met, we met as travellers do.

  Which is how? What was he doing there, when you met him?

  What was he doing — travelling, teaching at a school.

  And how did you meet?

  In a restaurant, you know, fellow travellers, we noticed each other, we started talking, but that’s it.

  Where was that?

  In Kodikanal, near the beach.

  Did you travel together?

  Briefly.

  How did you re-encounter him in Ethiopia?

  He got in touch with me about the circus. Out of the blue. I had no idea he was there. None.

  You know what happened at the Hope Village — that he left, why he left?

  I heard before I left Addis. You go to Addis to visit the circus and come back with all of this —

  Someone told me what happened at the orphanage. I went —

  I see exactly what you’re trying to do. You think I don’t see it, but I do. You who know what this is like. You tell me a story about being wrongly accused. Yes, I remember that. And I think, Okay, I will talk to you. I will trust you. I tell you my story, what has happened to me. And now. You’re trying to trap me. I can’t believe it.

  Raymond, I’m not.

  On a turbulent island a long way to the south, he dropped the receiver and was bolting or striding away from the phone, past the woman whose voice had murmured. Or he was standing aghast at a desk, the phone jammed in its receiver, as Sara leaped to her feet, bent forward, Paul Rosenberg glancing at her from his chair. She stopped the tape and pulled her earphones from her ears and stuffed tape recorder and cord and earphones and notepad into her knapsack and shoved her arms into her coat sleeves, the room catching at her throat. The desire to justify her actions was irresolvable. How and why should Raymond care what her motives were? From the middle of the room, Alan, too, had turned in her direction, as if some kind of silent clamour radiated from her, and as soon as he knew what she’d done, Alan would want her to write up her interview as fast as possible. It was a job. And had she not succeeded in doing exactly what she’d hoped to do. She grabbed her bag and took off.

  At the multi-limbed inte
rsection where King Street met Queen, Sara climbed out of a cab. Even before she’d stuffed her change into her coat pocket, the cab had vanished. The wind that caught against her face was raw and smelled of murky lake water, the lake just visible beneath churning clouds, beyond the dip of land where ribbons of railroad tracks and the roaring highway lay. It was only a little after eleven in the morning.

  Halfway across the footbridge that arced over the highway and led to the lake, she stopped. It would be easy to take the tape of her interview out of her bag and drop it over the metal railing to be crushed by speeding cars below, or walk a little farther and fling it into the grey depths of the water and watch geese swim toward it as wavelets settled over it and it sank. She could pretend she’d never spoken to him. Yet what would be the point of that? She’d found him, which was what she’d wanted. He had denied the allegations. Wasn’t this also what she’d hoped for?

  What did a true denial sound like? If accused, you were speaking, always, into the wind of the possibility of not being believed, you had to try to convince your listener, and anything might sound defensive or overcompensatory or strident, you battered yourself against the wall of what you had not done but others claimed you had, and somehow you had to dissolve this wall or leap over it. She had read somewhere that when a liar retells an account, he or she will often use the same details, offer a version that is too coherent. But the stories of liars who convince themselves they are telling the truth might not be coherent at all.

  Back at the intersection of Queen and King, another taxi did a U-turn in front of her, suspension jouncing. A woman with a brace on one leg came out of the Coffee Time and asked, Can you spare a dollar? A small child beneath a small sheet with eyeholes cut in it came toward her, clutching a woman’s hand. It was Halloween, or was that tomorrow night?

  Whatever she had hoped for in speaking to Raymond — certainty, clarity — she hadn’t got it yet. But she would write out his denial. Make his explanations plain. Do this for him. It would not take her long to work up something, drop Sheila Gottlieb or Alan a note saying that she’d have the piece in by the end of the day. It was not her job to say whether she believed him, only to make room for his words.

  A cutout of a witch loomed in the window of a bakery as Sara strode north. In giving voice to his denial, she would have to mention where he was, not name the orphanage, but the city, reveal enough of his location that it would no longer be possible for him to hide there. She would out him.

  That night, she turned the porch and downstairs lights off, while costumed children roamed the streets begging for candy. Upstairs, in her study, whisky in one hand, Sara pressed play on her tape recorder and Raymond’s voice filled the room once more, blunt, shocked, defensive, and her voice as it probed his, persistent and shocking in its own way. It did not take that long to play the tape; they’d talked for close to fifteen minutes, including the gap in the middle when Raymond had walked across the room, spoken to someone, closed a door, returned. From the middle of the room, Sara listened. For moments at a time, she believed him utterly. His version of events made sense. Touch misinterpreted, touch twisted. Their need to tell a story that would succeed as an asylum claim. His defensiveness and anger didn’t necessarily spell guilt. That he’d be distraught, and particularly agitated when she began to question him about Mark Templeton, was more than understandable.

  Memories of Port-au-Prince at night came back, as she’d glimpsed it from the vantage point of her hotel two years before: the yipping of feral dogs, the report of distant gunfire, orange tufts of firelight from the streets that spread below her, the holler of a speech on a watchman’s radio.

  The doorbell rang, and rang again, and a third time, though it was late enough that most children had gone home. Raymond’s voice rose. I see exactly what you’re trying to do. You who know what this is like. His pained calling upon the fellowship of the accused.

  On the dark porch, visible through the glass in the front door, were teenagers, a boy with a painted-on black eye, a boy in a hat, a girl wearing a pink Afro, five in total, holding out pillowcases, and when Sara opened the door to them, they seemed almost surprised, raucous and drunk or just intoxicated by feeling invincible and being a bit threatening — as she had once been a teenager like them. One Halloween night, she and three other girls had snuck out of their Ottawa dorm room wrapped in bedsheets to run through the streets, toss eggs at doors and wrap toilet paper around car antennas. Candy-less, she reached for her wallet and gave them what money she had.

  Hey, lady. Thanks, lady.

  When Sara entered Sheila’s windowless office on the newsroom’s periphery, the next Tuesday morning, Alan Marker was also there, seated in one of the two chairs positioned in front of Sheila’s desk. Sheila had called her to come in as soon as she’d arrived at work. Alan heaved himself to his feet and Sheila looked up from her desk, over top of her reading glasses, beneath the sprung coils of her bleached blond hair. There was something weathered and wild and perspicacious about Sheila, who had seen so much in the field, who either seemed about to leap or caught mid-leap. The sense of scrutiny from the two of them was intense. Nothing suggested this meeting was about more praise, or further reprints. Someone had decided to sue for libel, despite all the care they’d taken in the wording of her copy. Or Gerard. Of course. Gerard Loftus had come up with something.

  Have a seat, Sheila said. Ex-smoker, jaw working, she held out a blister pack of gum, to which Sara, seating herself, shook her head while Alan closed the door.

  If it’s about the piece, Sara said, can we get right to it?

  Sheila, who was never much given to pleasantries, asked, Have you had any further contact with Raymond Renaud, the circus director, since you interviewed him?

  No.

  Alan saw something come in over the wire this morning. AP, from Port-au-Prince. He was found dead in the room where he lived, gunshot wound, apparent suicide. Nothing about the circus, just that he was a Canadian.

  Everything in the world contracted to this point.

  Still on his feet, Alan said, The orphanage where he was teaching reported him missing.

  When did this happen?

  It doesn’t say.

  There was the commotion of Sheila saying, You must not take this on. And from Alan, Are you okay? As Sheila continued, I was going to ask if you would be able to write an obit, we want to run something, but on second thought, maybe Alan can do it, Alan, can you? Or I’ll ask Anne and see about someone in Arts. But we’ll need access to your files.

  Can I go now?

  Sheila sounded fierce, not strident. It’s a shock. But you must not, must not feel responsible because this person has chosen to do this thing. For his own reasons, whatever they are. Alan, can you pick up the files? You’re free to take the rest of the day off.

  Sheila, who had reported in her time from the Middle East and Central America and had seen deaths, bodies, body parts, more death, was no sentimentalist. A paper clip shone on the floor beneath her desk. Alan’s thick hands squeezed a pen. As Sara, too, had experienced deaths in the fields, near-deaths, body parts, run from bombs and mortar fire, cement dust clinging to her hair. This was different.

  Back at her own desk, phone to her ear, she waited for an official at the Canadian embassy in Port-au-Prince to return to the line, her throat a rock, her desperation for more information overwhelming the urge to cry.

  After what felt like nearly half an hour on hold, the man gave her a number for a police station where the French of the on-duty officer was extremely hard to understand.

  Yes, in his room, a second police officer said at last. It is a very poor neighbourhood where he lived. The shot is in his head. A man in another room found the body. This is how it is written in the police report. There was identification by him, but he left no note. It is very clear from how he is found that he did it.

  When, she asked, did the other man find him?

  Thursday night.

  Do you know or does a
nyone know when?

  When what?

  When did he kill himself?

  Thursday sometime.

  Paul from the desk next to hers materialized behind her shoulder and said, Alan told me what happened. Are you okay?

  Her hands were in her lap, her hair not yet dry from her morning shower. Not now. But I’ll be okay.

  His cousins must know, including the polite young man she’d spoken to in Montreal. Someone would have to make plans for a funeral.

  At La Maison des Enfants de Beau Soleil, Monsieur le directeur was not available, so Sara asked the secretary, in French, The man, the instructor, who died, who killed himself, I called and spoke to him by phone the other day, Thursday, do you know, did he go back to class or did he leave right away?

  He left.

  And did he have a gun all along or had he gone out then to find one, immediately after talking to her. Walked out the gates of the orphanage into a tumult of heat and trucks and people and a surging of wild dogs on a wide road where spools of barbed wire ran along the wall-tops, though all this barely registered given the state he was in. Perhaps in Addis Ababa, he’d first thought of suicide, and thought to outrun it. The children sat in their classroom or wandered away from their desks waiting for him to return, yet he did not. He bought a gun. It could not be so difficult in that place to buy a gun. Or he walked for hours first, through the heat and clamour, before deciding to buy a gun. Her voice in his head, for how, whatever else was churning through him, could he not have given some thought to their conversation and to what she was going to do. Did he eat or drink first? Did he lock the door of his room or leave it unlocked? He was alone in a room. His voice in his head. He was alone in a room with a gun. Did people startle at the sound of the shot, or in a place where gunshots were common, did it pass as the smallest disturbance and hours go by before his discoverer stumbled on him, his body on bed or floor, blood and brains on the sheets and running down the walls, the edges of the bloodstains already drying, the flies the first to find and feast on him.