He was in the doorway of the hall, in T-shirt and ball cap, gesturing, ordering Kebede and another boy, was it Dawit, to carry some clangy metal poles outside.
Gelila and Kebede stood outdoors against a yellow wall, clad in the T-shirt and tights, T-shirt and trackpants that they had been wearing in the previous sequences. A hard pulse beat at Kebede’s chest.
Do you want to stay in the circus? asked Juliet’s off-screen voice.
Yes, Gelila said in English with a great, wide smile, her headful of tiny braids quivering. Oh, yes. I wish to stay with circus always.
And Kebede nodded, his gaze veering off and returning.
What will you do when you get too old, if it’s a children’s circus?
Maybe, Kebede said. We make two circus. One small, one big.
You mean, one circus for children, one for — not children? Have you talked to Raymond about that?
He say we teach, Gelila said. I be secretary to circus.
I teach, Kebede said, nodding vigorously. The faint line of his moustache hovered along his upper lip.
Rewound, in motion again: Do you want to stay in the circus?
Yes, Gelila said. Oh, yes.
In the next shot, Raymond approached across the bumpy ground, pine trees behind him, children leaping around him and hurrying to keep up with him, bodies close to his, girls, was that Kidsit?, and others whom Sara had begun to recognize, Segaye in his floppy running shoes who had delivered her handwritten message to Tamrat. Joy sprang from their feet and swinging arms, an ease with him, and he with them, or something that looked like joy. Behind them, as they approached the door of the rehearsal hall, Kebede and Gelila stood against the wall, Kebede’s mouth whispering in Gelila’s ear.
Kebede and Dawit dragged rolls of coloured canvas out through the door that Segaye held open while, off to one side, Raymond crouched and listened as Yitbarek and another younger boy chattered to him.
In his nylon tracksuit, Kebede walked through a door in a wall that led into a cramped yard. A reverse-angle shot revealed a small house, mud-walled, at the far end of the yard, with two glassless windows to either side of its open door, through which an older woman stepped, clad in white, sandals on her feet, a white veil over her head, dressed no doubt in her finest, self-consciously opening her arms. Kebede stood stiff within her embrace, her arm around his shoulder. Her speech unfurled in quick Amharic, and when she broke off, an off-camera male voice, Ethiopian, speaking accented English, said, The circus is good because it helps him get a better job and then his mother has a pension.
Outside the community hall once more, Kebede and Gelila and one of the other older girls pulled close to one another in whispered conversation, glimpsed as if at the end of a long corridor, in silhouette, sunlight beyond them, recognizable by the shake of their braids, the line and curves of their changing bodies, by hips and breasts and muscled arms and legs, oblivious, it seemed, to being filmed, and probably Juliet had held the shot because of the beauty of form and light and gesture, the shadow play of it. Until they noticed Juliet, or whoever was filming, and the whispering — again the whispering — broke off.
The ringing of the phone woke Sara, pushed her up through crowds of children, acrobats, streets filled with bodies, and the absent man whom she was searching for, it was the phone, and daylight, brighter than it should have been, a golden brightness, lit the room, the bedside clock turned to face the wall. When had she done that? And what of her alarm? Alan Marker’s voice poured out of the answering machine and up the stairs, Sara, are you there? Where are you? Did you hear about the plane hijacking?
She threw on a robe, though he’d hung up before she reached the phone in her study, the shadows of all those bodies clinging to her.
She phoned Alan back, the sky outside so rivetingly blue it was making her blink, and the time: holding the phone to her ear, the bare wood floor shooting cold up through her feet, she woke the computer and checked, closing in on ten. Alan? What plane?
Word came in almost an hour ago, Alan said. Why aren’t you at work? Are you sick?
I slept through my alarm. Downstairs, breathless, in the living room, she switched on the television, which sprang to life with a staticky hum, found an on-the-hour newscast, the blue of a TV newsroom, the urgent anchor’s voice overridden by Alan’s louder voice in her ear. An Ethiopian airliner went down off the Comoros Islands. It looks like the hijackers, three young men, wanted the pilot to fly to Australia. 175 on board. Apparently a few survivors but looks to be the deadliest airline hijacking ever.
Why Australia? Sara sank down on the sofa and muted the television’s sound, everything making her feel as if she must still be asleep, yet dry-mouthed and achy, and thus possibly hungover. And dizzy, the world too full of connectivity: her hands, her dreams, her feet, the brush of bodies. As if all young, desperate Ethiopians longed for a new life in Australia.
I don’t know why. They wanted political asylum? All I know is the pilot told them there wasn’t enough fuel to get there and they insisted so the plane went down and it’s a miracle anyone survived.
Behind the coiffed and made-up male news anchor appeared a still photograph of a jetliner, then a map with a red dotted trail that led down the African coast before swooping out into the Indian Ocean.
Alan, do you need me? I’ll be in soon.
We’re trying to find out who was on board, Canadians, et cetera. You know people in Addis. Can you call them and get back to me?
The longing to contact David was strong and instinctive and no longer possible to fulfill. It was what they’d done for so long, reached out to each other at moments like this: Did you hear, have you heard? A pang. But that time was over.
From the kitchen, wet hair wrapped in a towel, Sara carried a mug of black coffee and a piece of toast clutched between her teeth back to the living room. There were others whom she could call: Matt from work, Soraya, to whom she had confided over the years about David’s presence in her life and now his absence although she had never told Soraya his name. On the cable all-news channel, a woman behind a sprawling newsroom desk was saying, The hijackers were little more than teenagers. There was fighting in the cockpit when they noticed the plane hadn’t left the coastline of Africa. The pilot turned out over the ocean and headed for the Comoros Islands and managed to bring the plane down in shallow water not far from a tourist beach. We have Amélie Brousson, a French tourist, on the line from Grand Comoros Island. Can you tell us what you saw, Amélie?
A crackly, disembodied voice said, First we thought it was an air show for us. People were playing in the water and windsurfing. Then the crash, it was terrible. People screamed and ran. They took all the boats, motorboats, fishing boats, rowboats, the catamaran, and went to look for survivors.
Had Gelila or Kebede or Senayit or any of the other former circus performers in Melbourne, Australia, heard about this? The coincidence of it. And the hijackers, were they madmen or just desperate, or mad and desperate, intent on transforming the world as they knew it and taking others, innocents, down with them.
On the first three tries, the Larsens’ line in Addis Ababa rang busy. On Sara’s fourth attempt, Elsa Larsen picked up. It’s awful. It’s so awful. Mariam Hailemariam, you remember her from that night? We were celebrating her new job. She has two young children. And a husband. She was so eager to be going to Nairobi. Peter worked with her for years. She was going to meet her new Kenyan colleagues. It could have been any of us. We’ve all been on that flight, the milk run. It hops across the continent. I can’t talk long.
Anyone else you knew?
Peter also said maybe someone else, this doctor, Trevor First, he’s Canadian, he works for a small NGO in the south. A photographer from here. We don’t know for sure who’s among the dead.
The coincidence, the randomness. Two months ago, Mariam Hailemariam, a robust woman in a flowered dress, had stood laughing in the Larsens’ living room. She’d stepped onto a plane to go to a meeting and hours later fo
und herself plunging out of the sky.
Elsa, I won’t keep you, but can I ask one more thing? About the paralyzed boy —
They’ve left that house now and moved in with another family. Alazar looked into it. I’ve got the contact information somewhere. And the circus is planning a benefit.
If I want to get some money to him, wire some money, can you help?
Yes, but not now.
Any word from Gerard, any sign he’s come back through Addis?
Nothing. If I hear, I’ll let you know. But I need to go, someone else could be trying to get through.
By the time Sara made it in to work, Alan had confirmed that the doctor, Trevor First, had been on the plane and was thought to be among the dead, and Paul turned in his chair as soon as she appeared at the end of their little aisle, and said, The pilot survived two other hijackings, can you believe it? Rumours about the hijackers swirled: they were religious fundamentalists, political extremists, they’d had a bomb on board, they’d escaped from an insane asylum. Whatever humanity they’d once possessed was lost; so many visions of evil adhered to them.
Amid this, there were immigration stories to attend to: that of the young Chinese-Canadian singer recently murdered with a crossbow in Vancouver in retaliation for her lawyer father’s tampering, back in Hong Kong, with the immigration applications of several prominent businessmen desperate to get out in the last months before Hong Kong was turned over to the Chinese.
Beneath the cover of the immigration story and the hullabaloo about the hijacking, Sara sent a message to the Yellowknife District Education Authority, grateful for the embracing silence of email. Had a man named Raymond Renaud taught in any school there sometime in the 1980s? She thought he’d said something about this in her car. He had definitely mentioned Yellowknife in the interview that Juliet had done. He’d left Montreal, worked for a few years somewhere on the West Coast, then gone north. At home, she was building a file on him: the transcript of her interview, the photograph, Juliet’s transcribed interviews and shot lists, the notes that she was making as she watched Juliet’s tapes. Her back ached. She sent a nudge of an email to Rafael Nardi: had he made any progress getting closer to the Ethiopian asylum seekers?
The next morning, an emailed message was waiting for her from Melanie Purchase of the Yellowknife District Education Authority: Raymond Renaud had taught grade seven for a year and a half at Sir Alexander Mackenzie Middle School in Yellowknife in the 1986–87 and 1987–88 school years. A year and a half was odd, and suggested that he’d left in the middle of the year, but the note offered no further explanation. Sara tried calling both the Education Authority and the school. Elsa Larsen’s email confirmed both Trevor First and Mariam Hailemariam among the dead. Paul Rosenberg peered around their divider and said, Did you hear a tourist shot some footage of that plane going down?
By the next day the footage was all over the newsroom TV screens: the silver cylinder of an airliner flying low across a line of water, one wing tilling the surface, spewing a wake, as the fuselage tilted and skimmed before erupting in a burst of steam and metal and flame. Blue sky above, the calm and blurry blue of ocean below. Debris bobbed amid the undulations.
Sara placed another call to the principal of Sir Alexander Mackenzie Middle School and this time got put through.
Is there an explanation for his teaching only a year and a half?
Our records show he left at the end of February on medical leave, Carol Lafontaine said. But a complaint was also filed. He drove two boys home from school, which is illegal.
Is there anything else? Were you at the school then?
That was before my time. That’s all the information I can give you.
But that’s what the record says.
Yes.
Nothing more than that he drove them home.
Yes. He should have known not to do that.
On one occasion?
The complaint originates from one occasion.
Were there any extenuating circumstances? Like it was in a blizzard or extremely cold?
The file doesn’t say.
Who lodged the complaint, the parents?
I can’t tell you more than what I’ve told you.
He had driven two boys home from school, at least once, and someone had filed a complaint. Why? Simply because he’d driven the boys home and broken the rules? Someone hadn’t liked that he shrugged his shoulders at authority, wanted to take down his sense of entitlement, or was the visible objection covering up something else that was known or suspected? Inuit boys, Métis boys, white boys? She had to wonder why he had chosen to run this risk: because there were extenuating circumstances, or because he thought the rule arbitrary. Out of kindness? Out of desire? He’d gone north, so far from where he’d come from, where he would have been a different sort of outsider and, with his pale-brown skin and mixed background, perhaps less of an outsider than in other places. He’d left the Yellowknife school ostensibly for medical reasons, and never returned. He’d set off for the far side of the world, Sri Lanka, Thailand, before landing in Ethiopia, where he’d begun to teach again. In her car he’d said, what was it?, it was difficult to prove the negative of something that people believe to be true. Had this happened to him in Yellowknife? Pedophiles could be socially charming. They tended to repeat their behaviour.The images of the exploding plane, the cubicle dividers, the back of Sheila Gottlieb’s head, the newsroom clocks, offered no answers to these mysteries.
That night, Sara pushed the one tape that she could watch at home into her videocassette player, not one that Juliet had shot but one that Raymond must have copied for her. 1991, Juliet had written on a label, Early Circus. Sara had watched it before, each time with the thought that something else might make itself visible, if she sat on the floor rather than on the sofa, or stared at the images through the altering lens of this new knowledge: the complaint filed against him for driving two boys home from school in Yellowknife in 1987, a year after she was charged with stealing a wallet in Montreal. She sat on the floor with a glass of whisky beside her.
He was bearded, but his hair was buzzed short, and he looked younger, his youth visible in his lithe slimness. He was juggling on a street, dirt under his feet, a low cement wall behind him. Children in unwashed clothes sat agog on the wall, and Ethiopian men and women formed a loose, inquisitive semicircle in the background. Not juggling balls or pins but green apples: he plucked an apple, took a bite, tossed the apple with a flourish back into the air. He’d said despair had driven him to juggle in the street, and defiance, but there was also a lightness in him and some of the bravura charm that Sara had seen herself in the Highway 401 service centre. So vital. Who was filming him? Someone had shared this experience with him, white, brown, Ethiopian or other, a witness whose presence he had never mentioned.
Raymond lit two metal juggling torches, and at the gusts of flame, adults in the audience shrank back and children clapped their palms across their mouths. He tipped back his head, breathed over the torch held in front of his mouth until flames jutted from it. Then he righted his head, as if the flames were nothing, and beckoned his audience closer, his whole body rippling, alive to the risk of the moment, ferociously alive.
A different shot: children stood in rows, or attempts at rows, on a patch of ground enclosed by rugged shrubs and held water bottles and detergent bottles that looked to be filled with dirt, perhaps to give them weight. In front of the children, Raymond held two juggling pins, one in each hand, and demonstrated the motion of tossing the first pin from one hand to the other, the second pin in reverse. There was sound, but it was impossible to hear much beyond the chatter of voices. In the back row stood two tall boys, and one of them was Kebede, a younger, curly-haired Kebede, and the other was perhaps Dawit. With severe attention, Kebede watched Raymond and tossed his plastic bottles from one hand to the other. And so Kebede had been with the circus from when it began.
The second-last tape brought Juliet and the circus to Shas
hemene: they’d travelled south to Sodo, and were returning from the south, packed into three white minivans. At the end of an afternoon, in a smallish stadium, the sinuous musicians swayed to one side of the mat-covered playing area, amplifiers stacked on either side of the stage, and Raymond darted here and there as the costumed performers, wireless microphones fixed to the edges of their mouths, spoke and sang and bounded across the mats in front of wooden stands full of people: black heads, glimpses of white veils, children.
In the brighter light of morning, on a stadium field now empty of performing gear, Raymond, Kebede, and a couple of others gave a juggling lesson to a group of local boys, teenagers, even a few adult men, using balls and dirt-filled plastic water bottles. The camera swooped in close to their eager faces, arms, torsos, before pulling back. Two balls in the air, now three. On another part of the field, Gelila and Senayit, the singer, worked with a group of girls, leading them in an arm-swinging, energetic dance. There were no obvious signs of reluctance and resistance from the older performers.
Out on the field, just the two of them, Gelila and Raymond were engaged in conversation, Raymond’s head inclined as if listening, while Gelila, with a toss of her braids and her expressive hands, seemed intent on holding his attention.
In baseball cap and sunglasses, Raymond loomed before the camera, peered into the lens, and said giddily, Soon there’ll be circuses everywhere, everyone wants to learn how to do this. Circus has such power. I had no idea it had such power.
At a restaurant table, the brim of his ball cap swivelled to the back of his head, Raymond sat beside Tamrat, and a couple of the musicians, and Justin, Juliet’s assistant, beer bottles scattered between them, while at the next table, Gelila, Senayit, Kebede, and a couple of other teenagers swabbed up curry with scraps of injera and murmured among themselves, Kebede in a ball cap like Raymond Renaud’s but with brim to the front. Across from the boys, Senayit whispered to Gelila and they both giggled. Tamrat looked less disturbed than when Sara had seen him in life yet watchful, as if he were keeping an eye on Raymond, the animated centre of the group. Raymond glanced at his watch, rose to his feet, and said to the teenagers, It’s late. You need to go to bed. Scurrying them off with one hand. Now they breathed reluctance, even resentment as they pushed back their chairs. Raymond left the frame, returned with a fresh bottle of beer, a jut to his hip as he walked, dropped into his chair, loose-limbed, even drunk. A wildness about him. He turned to the camera. It’s crazy. This whole thing, it’s so crazy. How do we make it work? We have no money. I’m serious. We have no fucking money. How am I to hold it all together? We’re running on air.
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