by D. W. Buffa
“Certainly a reasonable precaution,” Darnell remarked. “Tell us, if you would, what that team of physicians discovered. What kind of diseases were these primitive people suffering from?”
Leland Phipps fixed him with an icy stare. When he spoke, his voice was hollow, metallic and disengaged.
“They found no disease.”
“No disease? They had no doctors, no science, and there was nothing wrong with them?”
“Apparently not, but that doesn’t mean that we were wrong to take that precaution, to bring doctors and medicine. What if we hadn’t and -”
“You’re not on trial here, Commissioner Phipps. No one is questioning your judgment.”
A tight smile passed over the commissioner’s mouth. The look in his eyes became a shade less hostile. Darnell tapped two fingers on the jury box railing.
“You went to the island to determine for yourself what needed to be done to bring – I think the words you used was ‘progress’- to these people. The first thing you found was that they didn’t need any of the miracles of modern science – modern medical science – to keep them healthy and able to function. But let me turn that around and ask the question another way. If they had been suffering from the kind of diseases you had feared they might, did you, or the physicians who were with you, find any evidence that they would have been able to treat them? In other words, so far as you were able to determine, did they have any way to treat disease – serious disease – apart from the body’s own defenses, the ones we’re born with?”
“There was no evidence of any medical knowledge of any sort or description, which is again the reason I took the steps I did, why I brought medicine and a team of doctors -”
“We’ve been through that. The question was whether they had any way to deal with disease. You said they did not. But that means, does it not, that if a child was born with some debilitating disease - a heart condition, or something that affects the brain - there would have been nothing anyone on that island could have done about it – isn’t that true?”
“Not so far as I know,” replied Phipps with reluctance.
“Not so far as you know? They couldn’t, and you know it. You just said so. When you saw the defendant standing at the funeral pyre, raising his hands to heaven, that was the first time you had seen the child, wasn’t it?”
“I hadn’t seen either one of them before.”
“So you cannot tell this jury anything about the physical condition of the child before its death, can you?”
“No, I can’t.”
“You cannot tell the jury that it was in good health, free of a disease that would have condemned it to a life of unimaginable pain with no hope of ever getting better, can you?”
“As I say,” replied the high commissioner, “the first time I saw either the defendant or the child was after the defendant killed it.”
Killed a child that as far as you know was already dying and in pain.” Phipps tried to say something but Darnell cut him off. “Let’s move on. The doctors, the medicine – none of it was needed, - but what about those rules of governance you thought they would need? Or did you find that they were equally unnecessary?”
“It’s really too early to know what kind of changes we’ll need to make.”
“Changes? From what, exactly?”
“From the way they have been doing things.”
“What way is that?”
“As I said, it’s too early to tell.”
Darnell threw up his hands.
“Too early to tell the way they have been doing things? You were there! You saw how they did things, didn’t you? Or is it that you didn’t understand what you saw: that they live peaceably with each other and that everyone has a task, something they do to contribute to what is needed?”
“They seem to have their traditions, but the subject needs much more study.”
Barely able to contain himself, Darnell bounced on the balls of his feet.
“More study, more time? – Have you learned their language? Has anyone?”
Leland Phipps became defensive.
“It’s very difficult; no one yet seems to have been able to learn more than a few words. But we will, with time we will.”
“And in the meantime – let me guess! – they’ve learned ours?”
“Yes, some of them - that’s true. They seem to have a peculiar facility for it, a kind of instinctive grasp of sounds and what they mean. Or so at least I’m told.”
“Because you yourself…?”
“I couldn’t be expected to learn the languages of all the people we have to deal with. I have more important -”
“Yes, I’m sure you do. But let me make certain I understand. When you testified earlier, you told us that these people – people who can now speak our language, while we can’t speak theirs – had no education. You told us – the phrase you used was ‘couldn’t even read a newspaper.’ But now it turns out that they learn more quickly than we do?”
“I didn’t say that. I said that they seem to have a capacity to learn languages. That’s not so unusual, when you think about it. People without a written language often have a better ear for the sound of words. It’s a well-known historical fact that people who depend on an oral tradition are often more poetic: They rhyme the words to help them remember what they hear.”
“In other words, commissioner, we would all have better memories and would learn – at least learn languages – more quickly if we had not learned to read?”
Leland Phipps grew red in the face. He stared at Darnell with contempt.
“Never mind,” said Darnell, dismissing it as a matter of no great importance. “I want to find out more about this question of governance. You assumed that they would need medicine and the help of trained physicians, but they did not. You assumed they would need – or rather, that you would need – to make changes in the way they governed themselves, but you don’t yet know what those changes might be. Is that a fair summation?”
“Not entirely. I said the situation required more study; but obviously certain things are clear already.”
It was a trap, and Darnell knew it. He could see it coming in the way that Phipps leaned forward, eager – too eager – to put Darnell on the defensive. It was exactly what Darnell had been waiting for.
“And what are those, Mr. Phipps?” he asked with all innocence.
“Laws to stop the barbarous practice I was forced to witness: the murder of a newborn baby, to say nothing of the incest that led to it!”
“So it’s now your testimony that at the time this act took place there was no law that made it a crime? Just a moment ago you told us that you knew nothing about the condition of the child, whether the child had a chance to stay alive without suffering unspeakable pain. And now we learn that not only was there no law to prohibit what was done, but that, for all you know, there could have been a law that required that a child that could not survive not be allowed to suffer!”
Leland Phipps was halfway out of the witness chair.
“I said no such thing!”
Darnell had turned to the jury. He wheeled back and fixed the witness with a lethal stare.
“That’s precisely what you said. You said it was too early to tell what kind of change would need to be made because the subject needed more study. You said the language was too difficult, that no one really knew anything about their way of life, except that they had one. You don’t know anything about these people – you admitted it – so you can’t know – can you? - that they didn’t have a law requiring exactly what I said!”
“Even if they did, it’s barbarous and it can’t be tolerated,” insisted the commissioner.
“We’re not interested in your opinion, Mr. Phipps; we’re only concerned with the facts, and it doesn’t seem that you have very many,” Darnell shot back. He took a second to calm himself and then tried a different approach. “You’ve told us about what you observed on your first visit to the island. Did you learn a
nything more on your second?”
“My next visit is scheduled several months from now.”
“That first visit was your only visit? You haven’t been back since?”
“I have responsibilities all over the Pacific. This is just one island.”
“So you came there, eager to help these primitive people begin the transition to the modern age, and then, when they didn’t need your modern science and you couldn’t learn their language, you had one of them arrested, forced another one to come here as a witness, and left the rest of them to their own devices?”
Hillary Clark was on her feet, objecting to what she called “a blatant attempt by defense counsel to distort the truth.”
“At least you didn’t accuse me of distorting anything this witness has said,” he retorted. And then, before she could think of a reply, Darnell waved his hand in the air, a signal that he had had enough. “No further questions, your Honor. I’m quite finished with this witness.”
One by one, Darnell recalled each of the other witnesses for the prosecution and made them confess their ignorance. No one could say that what Adam had done had been against the laws as he knew them; no one could say, on the contrary, that he had not been required to do what he did. This was Darnell’s strategy, the only hope he had, to hammer constantly on a single theme: that the prosecution could not prove that, under the only law that could have applied to him, what Adam did was criminal.
For her part, Hillary Clark did all she could to insist that ignorance cut both ways. Through an artful cross-examination, she got each of the witnesses she had called before to admit that if they did not know if there was a law on that island that allowed the defendant to do what he did, neither did they know, what would seem more likely, that there was a law that prohibited it.
“But even if there was a law that allowed it,” she made sure to ask each of them, “wouldn’t you agree that a law like that is barbaric and can never be used to excuse what anyone with a conscience would know – that it’s never all right to take the life of an innocent child?”
It was an effective, if not quite legitimate, rebuttal; one that, ignoring the obligation of the prosecution to prove every element of its case, played to the emotions of the jury and the belief that the only truly moral principles were the ones they shared. Each time she did it, asked the witness, and through the witness, asked the jury, to judge what others did by what they would have done themselves, Darnell felt a little more of the ground he had begun to gain start to slip away. He was trying to argue logic, but she was pleading passion, and in a fight like that reason almost always loses. Finally, there was only one more prosecution witness he had left to call.
When Darnell had insisted upon his right to interview Alethia, he had done it mainly to give Adam and the girl a chance to spend a private hour together. After everything he had learned, after what he had seen that day in court when she was called to the stand by Hillary Clark and could not take her eyes off Adam, he knew there was not any danger that he might be helping to facilitate the intimidation of a witness. He did not leave them alone, but he let them sit together on the sofa in his office while he worked at his desk. He did not understand their language, but that was not necessary to understand that they were as much in love as any two people could be. It was embarrassing – he tried not to look – he felt a base intruder on a delicate intimacy, each time she reached up to touch with her fingertips Adam’s cheek or Adam’s eyes. When it was time for her to go, she did not break down in tears or plead for just a few more minutes; she had too much dignity for that. She thanked Darnell for giving them the chance to see each other and asked him if there was anything she could do to help.
“No, nothing,” Darnell told her. “Just tell the truth, and when you do, make sure the jury knows how you feel. That’s important. We have to make them understand that what happened was not because you were irresponsible, but because you loved each other, and because you loved the child.”
“Isn’t there anything you want to ask me now, before you ask me at the trial?”
She had the most beautiful eyes Darnell thought he had ever seen, a bluish green that bore a strange resemblance to the twilight water near an island shore.
“No,” he had answered, “I know everything I need to know, and perhaps even more than I should.”
Alethia came to court in the same outfit she had worn before, a simple shift and sandals on her feet. She stopped when she drew even with the counsel table and looked across at Adam. She was calmer and more composed, and, as it seemed, more certain of why she was there. Every eye in the courtroom was on her, but if she noticed it did not bother her. Like Adam, she appeared to live much within herself, aware of other people and concerned with how they felt, but not dependent on what they thought for what she thought about herself. Watching her, Darnell suddenly realized what he had missed, the comparison that had kept nagging at him and that at times had seemed whisper close, but that until now had always eluded him. He had seen it, years before, a famous painting, part of a touring exhibition that had passed through San Francisco: Adam and Eve in the garden, the story of paradise and lost innocence but, more than that, the dawning awareness of themselves, beings become conscious of their own existence with the power to make a life of their own. That was the real story of Genesis, that the beginning of the human condition was the freedom, and therewith the necessity, to choose what kind of life was worth living. It all came together in Darnell’s mind: the things that Holderlin had told him about where they came from, and the way they looked, Adam and Alethia, the last descendants, and the new beginning, of an ancient race. Approaching the girl on the witness stand, he had the uncanny sensation that though she was not yet eighteen, she was the oldest woman he had ever known.
“Do you regard the defendant, the young man we call Adam, as your husband?”
“Yes,” she said immediately.
“Do you also consider him to be your brother?”
Again there was no hesitation.
“Yes.”
“And you regard yourself as his sister?”
“Yes.”
“Would you tell us please the names of your parents?”
“I can’t; I don’t know.”
Darnell pretended to be both surprised and baffled.
“Well, can you tell us the name of Adam’s parents?”
“No, I can’t do that either.”
“Because he’s never told you? You’ve never met them?”
“He doesn’t know who they are. None of us do.”
“You don’t know who your parents are, and your husband doesn’t know who his are. Then why do you think he’s your brother and you’re his sister?”
“We’re all brothers and sisters,” she explained patiently. “Everyone of the same generation.”
“Everyone of the same…? I think you need to explain that, if you would.”
Without any prompting, entirely of her own accord, Alethia turned to the jury. In a haunting lilt she described as if it were completely normal an arrangement that shocked them to the core.
“No one knows who their parents are. When a child is born it is given to the nursemaids who have the care and custody of the newborn. The child never knows its mother. All the children are raised together in what you might call an orphanage, a single, open structure where everything they do can be observed. There is no such thing as privacy, at any age. We believe – or rather, I should say we were raised to believe, because we – Adam and I – don’t believe it now, that nothing in the education of children should be left to chance. Every child is taught that she is part of the same family, that all the other children are her sisters and brothers, and that every adult is her parent. We don’t belong to anyone as children because, you see, we belong to everyone.”
Darnell stood in front of the witness stand, his shoulders hunched forward, his hands clasped behind his back. A solemn, brooding expression twisted slowly across his mouth.
“If no o
ne knows their parents, and if everyone of the same generation considers themselves brothers and sisters, what happens when you’re old enough to have children? In this tightly controlled system you’ve described, where nothing is left to chance, who decides who marries whom?”
A bitter smile brought a shadow to the girl’s countenance. Her eyes darted quickly to Adam, and then, reluctantly, came back.
“We don’t marry; everyone belongs to everyone in common.”
“I’m sorry, I don’t quite understand,” said Darnell, as the courtroom seemed to hold its collective breath. “Everyone belongs to everyone in common? What are you trying to say?”
“When it’s time, when men and women need to couple, the pairings are determined by lot. No one is allowed to be with the same person a second time until each has been with all the others. It’s the way we’ve always had. Everyone has what everyone has. The men have all the women, and the women have all the men, all of them together the mothers and the fathers of all the children that come of it.”
“But you didn’t want that, did you?” asked Darnell, encouraging her to go on, to explain what she and Adam had done. “You didn’t want anyone else. You wanted only Adam.”
“From before I can remember, from the time I was just a child, I could no more stand to be apart from him as I could think to be without my own body. He was more a part of me than I was myself; I wasn’t anything without him. It didn’t matter, all the things I was taught; it didn’t matter, all the things I believed. I knew the way I felt was wrong, what I knew I needed. I tried to fight it, I tried to be like all the others; I didn’t want to be a source of shame. But I couldn’t do it, I couldn’t be what I was supposed to be, and after a while I didn’t care. I didn’t care about anything except being with him. I decided I would kill myself rather than be forced to be with someone else.”
“Did you tell Adam that? What was his reaction?”
“Tell Adam that? He already knew. He knew it before I did. Adam knows everything. He knew what was going to happen before we ever committed sin, before we made love in a place no one else could see us. He told me that we would have to give up everything and live alone, and that if we did that, if we made that our choice, we could never change our minds. But I had made that choice long before, the first time I saw him and thought I was looking at a god.”