Accusation

by Catherine Bush

  Sem Le said, This has got to be quick. I don’t even know why I am talking to you. Are you writing something more about this? I will be making an appeal for them to stay on compassionate grounds, an appeal based on artistic merit. It is a unique case, as it has always been. And they say it is all or none. Either they all stay, or they all go. And there is no question of their exploitation, this man went into an extremely poor country and exploited some extremely vulnerable young people.

  What about the specific allegations of sexual abuse?

  They were forced to work under extremely dangerous conditions, sometimes to the point of serious injury, were bullied, shouted at, suffered inappropriate touching, and a lot of money was made off them whilst they were never paid a wage.

  What about those specific allegations?

  The story is more precise now, Ms. Wheeler. It is clearer. We are moving forward with the leave to stay on compassionate grounds.

  A story of exploitation isn’t a refugee story.

  The air kept ringing: she was alone in the dark with this rising thing. They had changed their story or the story had changed, as stories did, because it was necessary to have a credible story, a watertight story that held up to repeated tellings in front of a tribunal or a judge. If something sexually abusive had occurred, perhaps its nature had been murky, or it was something they’d observed, and it would be difficult to prove, and also it wasn’t useful in legal terms since he wasn’t doing it any longer. Whatever the truth was, there was damage. Someone, somewhere, had been betrayed.

  She was cold in a way that no blast from the furnace was going to touch, frost grown like a forest over the windowpane, real cold seeping in around the frame.

  At three-fifteen, Rafael Nardi said, You’re not sleeping. Here I’ve just stepped in and am making a cup of tea. That’s me slopping milk into it. Have you tried drinking? And it hasn’t worked. I take it you hadn’t heard.

  About their claim being denied. No, but it’s not that, it’s the other thing, which their legal agent is also no longer willing to talk about. I reported allegations, only allegations of sexual abuse, but the power of an allegation. Raf, what have I done? I feel sick.

  This is the one that’s gotten under your skin. There’s always one, or more than one.

  I’ve tried that line of thought. There must be others, betrayals, deaths, because of things I’ve, or you, or any one of us has — think of all those children lying without supplies in the hospital in Najaf, so many of them likely to die, and I felt implicated then, politically, and personally, there are all the things not written about as well as the things that are. But this — can I tell you why this feels so personal?

  She was lying on top of the comforter, wrapped in another quilt, shivering as the bedside lamp shared its huddle of light — and he, never a lover, not that kind of spark. Rafael had been married when they’d crossed out of Jordan in that little convoy, although his marriage was disintegrating. Two journos, two photojournos plus one driver-cum-fixer in a white van. She’d seen Rafael unshaven, smelled him unshowered, breathed in the particular odour of fear and adrenaline that was released through his pores as she stared at the black hairs at the back of his neck. Rafael had been sitting in the front seat beside Raed, their driver, when a man stopped them in a Najaf street and pointed his cocked semi-automatic through Raed’s open window. The man wore no uniform, maybe he was a former insurgent, and political betrayal was mixed in with his anger at the Americans sticking it to the Iraqis with their embargo and no-fly zones, leaving those like him on the ground to get slaughtered by government soldiers. None of the four of them was American or British, and maybe that enraged him further or it didn’t matter, they were outsiders from the so-called West. He shot a bullet through the back windshield, just missed Tobias, the Norwegian, told Raed to get out of the driver’s seat, yelled in English that he was going to kill them all. Maybe his desire was simply to blot them out, take the van, their stuff. They offered him money. He took their money. Somehow Rafael and Raed managed to talk him out of killing them.

  She told Rafael about seeing the circus in Copenhagen, and her night drive with Raymond Renaud from Toronto to Montreal, and how hearing about the teenagers’ allegations had stirred up what had happened to her years before in Montreal and spurred her trip to Addis Ababa. Maybe my own experience made me less objective, but all I’ve wanted was to leave space for the possibility of a wrongful accusation, in part because such allegations are so damning. I’ve always been prepared to believe them, and yet now I can’t help feeling like I’ve destroyed or helped destroy someone, and I don’t know what to do about it.

  It’s bound to be complicated.

  What is?

  Whatever happened.

  Yes, yes. So on this tape, he’s holding one of the boys on his lap. Maybe he does nothing more than this, but there’s desire. And they observe enough of his behaviour to sense it. Have you met them, Raf? Have you spoken to them? Do you know if they’ve said anything about anything like this to, what’s her name, Louise?

  Not that she’s told me. And nothing to me. I did go out the other evening with them and the lovely Louise.

  The lovely Louise?

  Former gymnast, yoga instructor. I admit at this point to being intrigued — all of this, I remind you, I have undertaken on your behalf. Up before dawn, off to this converted garage in Footscray. And if there are a few perks, well. However, I have not completely trampled on my so-called objectivity. I’ve seen their billet, these two shoddy rooms they’re all squashed into, a kitchen and two mattresses. I can’t tell you what you want to know from anything I’ve heard or seen.

  Your marriage?

  Long over. And Louise. She’s the sort who’s able to draw things out of people. She has the knack. I can attest to it. She and some mates have a plan afoot to start a circus school and found some new sort of outreach-oriented circus, so she says, and are on the lookout for a warehouse space, and want this crew involved, I gather that’s part of the plan. To work with immigrants and refugees and indigenous communities. They seem very keen on the philosophy that anyone who wants to should be given the chance to try the trapeze, and even those who don’t want to should be strenuously encouraged.

  As in you, Raf? According to the lovely Louise?

  I am currently a target of this democratizing impulse, yes.

  Raf, I’m having the wild thought of flying out, not on a trapeze but — and trying to talk to them, to any of them in person. I keep asking myself, What do I owe him now, and what do I owe them? Do you think they would talk to me? Any one of them?

  I’ll ask Louise. Wild-ish, but can’t you write a trip off, and will it help you sleep? Whatever happens. Not just tonight but all the nights ahead. That’s my allegiance, sleep, my ship of state. Seems the best way to judge these things.

  When the phone rang, it was still dark. Perhaps she’d slept, sleep that grazes the surface of all that churns beneath. And because she was on the verge of travelling, her exhausted fumbling toward waking came with the conviction that it had to be someone calling from far off: Rafael Nardi or her mother or one of the circus performers or Sem Le ready to tell her that the teenagers were altering their story once again. She’d left the phone close at her bedside, just in case. Her desert-dry voice said hello, mind struggling to catch up, and again hello. An ocean of static met her ear, the pause so long that Sara was on the verge of hanging up except that the static itself suggested distance, the familiar sound of someone placing a call in a faraway place and waiting for her voice to reach them.

  Did I wake you, Sara? (What time was it anyway? The glowing hands of the old clock when grasped and turned toward her read nearly six a.m.) I’ve been trying to reach you —

  The voice was instantly recognizable, for all that it failed to identify itself and despite the static and her not having heard from Gerard Loftus since the week before Raymond Renaud’s suicide.

  When have you been trying to reach me, Gerard? Sliding to
her feet, Sara pulled the quilt around her shoulders, as the bed, the floor, and the chest of drawers heaved themselves out of the dark.

  Last night and the night before and at work.

  I never got a message.

  I didn’t leave a message and you can’t call me back. A motor scooter or car horn beeped behind him above the din of a street and a volley of voices, and the cry of a baby mingled with a clatter of dishes as if he was in some porous place, an interior open to the outside, a house, a fluorescent-lit bar with turquoise walls and clear plastic bags hanging above the counter to ward off flies — somewhere in Africa, or —

  Where are you, Gerard?

  I can’t tell you where I am, but I have some news for you. Mark Templeton is opening another orphanage. In northern Tanzania, in a place called Longido, near Arusha, close to the Kenyan border. He wants to call it Rainbow House. He’s building a school —

  Wait a sec. How is he managing to do this? How did you find this out?

  I can’t tell you how I know, but if you look into it, you’ll find it’s true.

  How did he get into Tanzania?

  Well, he must have got a visa. There was nothing keeping him in the States. He hasn’t been charged with anything there. He’s getting money from a church group, and he has friends, people like him, and orphans, everyone’s always eager to help orphans.

  Have you gone to the police?

  The police?

  Wherever you are, can’t you alert the authorities? Or let the police in Tanzania know? Or the organization that’s funding him. There were charges laid against him in Ethiopia.

  I thought you could do that. I don’t really want to have anything to do with the police because of some stuff that happened to me in Ethiopia.

  Are you in Longido?

  Sara. I said I can’t tell you, but I can tell you it’s a very out-of-the way place where he is, and I’m sure he thinks he’s safe, and I have worked very, very hard to get this information to you.

  You’re giving me hearsay, Gerard, rumour. No contacts. Can you spell out the name of the place at least? Or give me the name of the church group?

  She dragged the quilt behind her across the floor, out of her bedroom and into the hall, resisting him as something in her had always wanted to resist him, his importunate requests, their moral obligation, his insinuations, the risks of his zealousness to be set against his dedication and utility. His pain. What was he tugging her into, back into, she was heading one way and he was pulling her another, with his ineluctable ability to complicate everything?

  You can look into it, Gerard Loftus said. You’ll see. I’m trying to help.

  During the only trip Sara had taken alone with her father, he had told her a story, which still sometimes returned to her, again as she sat in a jetliner aimed west across the continent, the setting sun tinting the clouds below her window, a bright beam of light radiating from the hard plastic cabinet above her.

  They were driving across the province to visit his mother, her grandmother, in St. Mary’s, six hours from Ottawa and two hours west of Toronto, not far from the even smaller village where her father had grown up. The visit to her grandmother had been of less interest than the trip itself: the hours in the car alone with her father, seated in the front passenger seat where her mother, off visiting her own family in Nova Scotia, ordinarily sat.

  It was early evening. The light was lowering. Her father, shirt sleeves rolled up, sunglasses shielding his eyes, at ease in a way he seldom was, said as they rolled through the cornfields of southwestern Ontario, I’ll tell you about a thing that happened to me when I was a boy.

  He used to spend long hours with a friend named Sam Atlin. Along with the other boys, they played in the fields and the woods outside of town and came home for dinner and in the summer headed out to play again until dusk.

  In a field just beyond the town stood an abandoned house that had suffered a fire, and the fire was bad enough the family who owned the house had moved out, her father said. It had started as a kitchen fire, and most of the damage was on the first floor, and the house was left standing with its smashed and blackened windows, until one day someone came along and boarded the first floor up. Which all the boys knew, because as soon as word got out about the house being boarded up, they went out to inspect it.

  One evening, maybe the same day or a few days later, Sam and I were sitting on a fence with the abandoned house in view when I saw a light shining in one of the second-floor windows. The house was a field away, but the light was bright, like a candle flame or a torch. It wasn’t dark yet. I guessed someone had broken in, older boys, teenagers, a hobo. This was during the war and there weren’t many men around, but there were a few hobos. There were no other signs of anyone, no car or truck pulled up by the house, or a bike.

  So I pointed out the light, which to me was obvious, and Sam turned to me and said, What light? I don’t see any light.

  I showed him the window the light was in. Then the light, whatever it was, winked out, and again Sam said, I don’t see any light.

  Did you go to the house? Did you find out what it was? she asked her father, sitting with a bag between her legs that her mother, before leaving on her own trip, had packed with various picnicky things, two leather-covered water flasks, a bag of grapes, some muffins, and she’d felt a possessive pride to be sitting in her mother’s seat, in charge of the foodstuffs, while her father told his story to her.

  Maybe I should have gone out right away, her father said. I’m pretty sure I didn’t. It was about to get dark and Sam wouldn’t go with me. I did go the next day with another boy and there were no obvious signs of entry. Maybe someone had let themselves in and when they left nailed up the board they’d taken off? That would be strange, but the boards on all the doors and windows were still in place. Then we ran into Sam and again he said he hadn’t seen a light. I didn’t know if this was because he was frightened or because he really hadn’t seen anything.

  It seems like a small thing, right? But from then on a rift began to open between us even though we’d been the best of friends. He insisted he hadn’t seen a light. I insisted I had. And we had no way to resolve our difference. I wondered if I’d made it up, but I knew I’d seen something. It was like I carried around a secret that wasn’t a secret. And somehow this thing that had happened started to separate me not just from Sam but the other boys. And there didn’t seem to be anything I could do about it. And so, when the time came, I decided to go to university far from home and with my Rotary Scholarship went to Mount A in New Brunswick, and there I met your mother.

  Sara had not particularly wanted to be reminded of her mother at that moment. She did wonder, then and later, what her father wanted her to take from this story. He might have told it as a ghost story but hadn’t. Nor had he told it as a story you would tell a child; in part it had felt like he was talking to himself. He had wanted to point out how small differences can become irreparable. That some mysteries will remain mysteries. Perhaps talking about one thing was a way of gesturing toward something else that could not otherwise be spoken of. He’d said he was pretty sure he hadn’t visited the house that first night. Sara had never asked him what he’d meant by any of it. She could still ask him. It was a story that helped explain how he’d come to be who he was and leave the small place that he’d called home.

  One other thing stood out about that trip. Her father had decided not to drive back the way they’d come but to take a northern and more scenic route home. They had stopped for a night at a guest house in Bancroft, and the next morning the car wouldn’t start. The woman who ran the guest house offered to take Sara for the day while her father stayed in town to get the car fixed. And so she had gone off with the woman and her husband to a nearby lake where the woman’s family had a cottage, and for a day she was gathered into someone else’s family as if she were someone else’s child. The woman was someone who projected the sense of loving children without anxiety, although she didn’t have any of
her own or didn’t yet have any. She was full of brio and warmth and had an irrepressible laugh, and for a day Sara had run about in the glow of this woman’s attention, which was so unlike her mother’s distracted love, the sense of being surplus in her parents’ lives. When they’d left Bancroft the next morning, she’d climbed into the car beside her father, sun-sated and gluttonous with longing, after hugging the woman and her husband one last time goodbye. Four months later, they’d headed back overseas to her father’s next posting in Berlin. She never saw the woman again.

  Dusk was falling in Melbourne, the sky a smudgy square of aqua, a plane groaning above the patio where Sara sat with Rafael Nardi, outside the room that he called the lounge. My parents are coming back to Canada, she said. My mother called a few days ago. Moving back to Ottawa. I’m still a bit in shock. I keep wondering if something’s wrong, though she didn’t say anything was.

  When was the last time you saw them, Rafael asked, his shadow falling across Sara’s feet, her arms, her shadow climbing the wooden slats that fenced them in, the building’s small parking lot beyond, lorikeets chirruping in the branches of a eucalyptus tree. Her second day in Melbourne: it did no good to think about what time it was anywhere else.

  Ah, years? Let me count, they were back on a visit, oh, four years ago?

  In any event, they’re alive.

  Yours?

  Aren’t.

  So you’re suggesting I still have a chance to sort some things out.

  Rafael tapped at a crumpled box of Iranian cigarettes, tilting the box in Sara’s direction. She shook her head. She’d smoked one with Rafael for old times’ sake but one, raw and bitter, was enough, the burn in her throat eased by the can of beer that was perhaps a mistake since it was making her sleepier.

  Rafael lit another cigarette, exhaling smoke to his left in a little cloud. He said he loved the taste of Iranian cigarettes, got people to bring him boxes whenever he could, an attraction that was either fetish or nostalgia. Indonesian kreteks were easier to get, but he could only take so much of the clove thing. He’d smoked 57s and Bahmans in the Intercontinental in Amman before they’d set off for Iraq and again on their return, though not while they were in Iraq. He said he had no contact whatsoever with his ex-wife.