Accusation

Accusation

Also by Catherine Bush

Claire’s Head

The Rules of Engagement

Minus Time

Into the street the Piper stept,

Smiling first a little smile,

As if he knew what magic slept

In his quiet pipe the while;

And how could we save ourselves from suspicion? There is no deliverance from suspicion! Every way of behaving, every action, only deepens the suspicions and sinks us the more. If we begin to justify ourselves, alas! Immediately we hear the question, ‘Why, son, are you rushing to justify yourself? There must be something on your conscience, something you would rather hide, that makes you want to justify yourself.’ … Everyone crouched, fell to the ground, and thought in fear, ‘I am accused.’

She pushed her chair back from the desk as the awful word on the screen entered her, and the name of the man linked to the word.

Mid-afternoon on Labour Day Monday: heat filled the room, the upper floor of her house, the streets of Toronto, the air above them, and more sweat pooled under her arms and at her throat and across her chest, as she stood, trying to calm the blood speeding through her veins. Outside, when she paced to the window, beyond the Norway maple, a car passed and with it the ordinary mystery of strangers going somewhere. The cry of a cicada soared, and out of the stillness, a jet fighter, part of the holiday weekend air show, roared into tumult, shaking the walls and window glass.

If she had gone away for the weekend instead of lolling at home and, obsessive journalist that she was, following the news on TV of the Iraqi march north toward Kurdistan, if she had not gone upstairs to her computer to check what more she could find online in the scroll of press newsfeeds, she would not have come across this mention of him.

She turned back to the room, which seemed full of his presence. She saw him as she had first seen him, on stage in Copenhagen, alive with pride and adrenaline, a tall, light-brown man in a white T-shirt, head tucked beneath a red baseball cap, the child performers of the circus crowded about him.

Months later, she had met him. One night in July, a little more than a month ago, in the passenger seat of her car, he had canted forward in distress, urging her onward. She had driven him those long hours through the night, helping him get to Montreal and from there back to Addis Ababa and the circus children.

At her desk, quickened fingers seeking more, she located a day-old article from the
Sydney Morning Herald
.

She knew nothing for certain. It was only an accusation. Abuse: the article didn’t even specify what kind. Yet, as she knew, an accusation, regardless of truth, has its own life when let loose in the world. Experience had taught her this. The words, released, went on uncoiling themselves. A pulse rapped in her head.

What to do?

Do nothing. Or call Juliet Levin to tell her what she had discovered.

Sara had flown to Copenhagen at the end of March to attend a conference on migration, as the Danes called it — immigration, she would have said. She had been invited along with Rivka Mendelsohn, the Israeli-Canadian academic who worked with Tamil populations in Toronto. Rivka had recommended her to the Havn Foundation, which was sponsoring the conference, as someone who wrote about immigration and multiculturalism issues: this was now her beat. And how different this trip was from the ones she’d taken when working for the foreign news desk and in the years when she’d traipsed as a stringer through Eastern Europe and the Middle East.

In her room in the lovely old hotel by the waterfront, a wrapped chocolate lay like a scarab atop the linen pillowcase, and at the conference itself, in the breaks between papers delivered by the German, Danish, Dutch, and Spanish social scientists and bureaucrats, eleven in all, plus Rivka, a quiet young woman rolled a trolley bearing the finest coffee in bone china cups to one end of the long mahogany table.

All the Europeans, none an immigrant, spoke in clear English about the problems of the Turks in Frankfurt and the North Africans in Amsterdam and the flood of Poles into London. All Sara’s expenses were paid, and she had no responsibility other than to listen and feel coddled and occasionally guilty about being coddled amid all this luxury and talk. No helmet, no fixer, no flak jacket. At dinner, they went out and drank a very good wine on the foundation’s tab, and the Europeans asked her questions about multiculturalism and she got drunk as she talked about the possibilities of the immigrant nation, she, the granddaughter of Scottish and Welsh immigrants, sounding as optimistic as she could given that the Europeans were so curious about it.

At the end of the second day, she plunged out of the hotel into the early evening, desperate to smash through an invisible screen, gulping for air. Ropes clunked atop the masts of ships along the waterfront as a breeze carried in the tang of the sea, and with a long stride, turning a corner, she came face to face with a poster: on a blue background, dark-skinned children in leotards formed acrobatic poses. The words
Cirkus Mirak fra Etiopien
aroused her curiosity: an Ethiopian circus, here in Copenhagen. She had never had much interest in circuses, but given where she was and what she was doing, going to see this circus seemed suddenly appealing. She debated trying to cajole some of the others into joining her, but that would mean stealing them away from another boozy dinner. Back at the hotel, she left a note for the conference organizer, another for Rivka, then, like a truant schoolgirl, took off, foraged a quayside dinner of mussels and beer for herself, and caught a cab to the warehouse theatre where the circus was performing.

Inside a white room that functioned as a lobby, tall, blond people milled about, wide-shouldered men in grey coats with mufflers cinched at their necks, women holding the hands of babbling children. Being tall and blonde herself, in her black boots and black coat, Sara passed as a likely Dane among them. There were a few others not obviously Danish: a dark-haired woman glittery with gold jewellery who spoke what might have been Hungarian to her diminutive male companion, a handful of Ethiopian expats though not many: a quartet of older Ethiopian men in suits with firm postures and long, strong faces and arched brows conversed in the staccato sounds of what was probably Amharic; a few young men and two couples, along with a family of mother, father, and three boys accompanied by an older woman in a wool coat, a white veil trimmed with a glint of colour thrown over her head, also stood close by. Most Ethiopian immigrants, Sara surmised, would not have been able to afford the price of a ticket.

She had been to Africa once, to Kenya, five years before. The paper had sent her on from Istanbul, where she happened to be, to Nairobi, from where she’d headed north with a convoy of aid workers, in trucks and white Land Rovers, up through the scrub desert of Turkana, called by someone
the frying pan of the world
, to the wastelands of the Kakuma refugee camp. The van she’d travelled in had blown three tires on thorns on the last stretch of the journey, and each time the van juddered to a halt, she and her companions had clambered out to help fix the tire or crouched by the road in the appalling heat, the view a terrain of desiccated thorn trees and scorched riverbeds, which nevertheless was touched with austere beauty. Even when the land looked empty, people appeared: a Turkana woman wanting to change an American hundred-dollar bill; a teacher — dark skin shining, in dark suit and tie, despite the heat. After the third tire blew, a truck full of American evangelical Christians stopped and offered them a replacement tire. In the camp, children clutched at Sara: Somali, Ethiopian, Sudanese. Hands tugging at her clothes, they begged her to take them away with her. At night the earth became a field of tiny fires. All day she swept at the constant eye-bombing swarms of flies. It had been hard to contain her despair, though this was matched by admiration at the resilience of those who’d walked for weeks, even months, to reach this place, and there was reassurance in the thought that ordinary tasks — washing, cooking, tending children — went on here as everywhere. Out of these internal states rose the insistence that there was meaning in documenting the stories of people in a place like this: the thing she did. She hadn’t needed a helmet or flak jacket here either, not that she ever went into front-line war zones, only into borderlands of turbulence and uncertainty. She had been drawn to extremity but had no appetite for deepest danger. And then, a year and a half ago, she’d given it all up, the risk, the search for authenticity by giving voice to the ground truths of such places, in favour of a life that kept her close to home.