Accusation (13 page)

When, after the night flight from London, Sara stepped from the metal stairs leading off the plane and onto the tarmac of Bole Airport, a furious wind attempted to clear her jet-lagged head. Men in uniforms stood guard with guns, and this felt familiar from other places she had travelled, just as the musk of the official inside the terminal, who waved her toward an endless passport-control lineup, tugged her back to places where people didn’t use deodorant or shower as often as they did at home, where the scents of the body were normal. At long last, the man with the metal stamping machine stared at her photograph and visa and asked her the purpose of her visit. He did not ask if she had a police record. In the early days, after she’d left Montreal, this was a fear. She hadn’t been convicted but had been fingerprinted and charged. Once, driving up to a border crossing into New York state, the uniformed man in the booth had asked, Have you ever been charged with anything? She’d said, Yes, but I was cleared. It was a mistake. He had taken her passport and disappeared, returned, asked her to come with him. She’d waited for two hours in a small room, so late for an interview in Syracuse that the whole exercise grew pointless. The man came back and said he could refuse her entry but this was her lucky day, he would let her go this time. Since then, she’d gone through the formal process of having all traces of her record removed. She’d had to go back to Montreal to do this, back to the Palais de Justice.
Palace of Justice.
To the Ethiopian official she said, Tourist.

As she endured a second long wait, this time for her bag, an old sensation of sharp competence and ferocity bubbled up in her. Outside the terminal waited blue-and-white taxis among which men wandered; Juliet had told her how much the trip into town should cost. It would not be hot in Addis, Juliet had said, because of the elevation, and it wasn’t. The late-September morning was damp and cool. Sara zipped up her fleece jacket. Goats or sheep or goats that looked like sheep milled about the wide road, while files of people in jackets or sweaters made their way along footpaths ground into the dirt by the side of the road.

At the front desk of the Hotel Berhailu, which acquaintances of Juliet’s had recommended when Sara had asked for the name of somewhere clean, with a restaurant, and if possible at least three phone lines, in case one or more than one failed to work, she was handed a metal key as long as her finger. A guard, or watchman, stood in the entryway, eyeing the small gated compound outside. An elevator barely big enough for two, which shuddered with every lift of its cable, carried Sara up to the fourth floor, where she wiggled the key into a keyhole large enough to spy through and entered a room, courtyard-side, that might have been any number of hotel rooms in her past: the twin beds had thin brown covers and plain, wood-panelled headboards, the desk and clothes cupboard were stained a shiny brown. In the bathroom, a red webbed plastic garbage pail set beside the toilet was presumably to be used as a repository for toilet paper, although no sign explained as much, and the shower water, when she tried the tap, burst first in an explosively hot stream then petered to a frigid trickle. None of this dismayed her. Instead her arrival felt like re-entry into a world and way of being that she hadn’t realized she’d missed.

After fortifying herself with a bottle of water,
Ambo
written in orange letters on its sky-blue label, and a not-bad macchiato from the bar downstairs, she left messages at the embassy and the city police department seeking word about the status of any investigation into the allegations, another message for the Larsens, Juliet’s contacts, who had arranged a driver for her, and confirmed a meeting with Ed Levoix. She did not try to reach Raymond Renaud directly, having decided, after purchasing her airline ticket, that surprise might be her best option, which left him no opportunity to avoid her.

Juliet had been surprised by her decision to make the trip. Juliet herself seemed to have no inclination to return. Anyway, I can’t afford to, she’d said. But I’m glad you’re doing this. At work, Sara had asked her editor, Nuala Johnson, for a week’s vacation but had not told Nuala or anyone else what she was up to, just that something had come up. You okay? Nuala had asked, and Sara had said fine. As soon as she paid for her ticket, her plan seemed more foolhardy than ever, but by then it was too late to do anything other than throw herself into it.

After lunch, she took another taxi to the National Museum, through streets crowded with people, children, wandering boys with small wooden crates. Locked on her arrival, the museum’s doors were opened at last by a sole guard-cum-tour-guide who led Sara and an American couple from room to room, switching on lights and opening shutters as they went, until, ahead of her, Sara heard the American woman squeal in delight, Here’s Lucy. It wasn’t until she returned to her hotel that she discovered that the real bones of Lucy, famous little Australopithecus, millions of years old, found in an Ethiopian valley, were elsewhere, that the ones on display were fake.

The next morning at nine, as she entered the hotel lobby, a man, darker-skinned than the others around him, in a much-washed T-shirt and ironed khaki trousers, launched himself out of a vinyl armchair at the sight of her.

Alazar Wolde?

I am he. His handshake was firm, and he had a very white grin, offset by a questing tilt to his head. From her daypack, Sara pulled out her notebook, into which she had transcribed Juliet’s directions to the circus compound and to Raymond Renaud’s house, and showed the directions to Alazar. Her mini tape recorder, wrapped in a bandana, was a small weight in the pocket of her jacket, her camera stuffed in her bag.

Can we go there?

It’s possible.

Is it difficult to get to?

No, no, he said. We will take the Wollo Road.

Have you ever seen Cirkus Mirak perform?

I have heard of it, but I have not seen it.

He offered to carry her daypack, but she shook her head as they made their way out to the hotel’s pull-in area, where an old beige Fiat lounged beside a bank of scrubby rosebushes, the uniformed watchman alert by the open gate. Circling the car, Sara climbed not into the back but into the front passenger seat.

When with a hired driver, she preferred to sit in the front, especially if in a car rather than a van. Unless sitting in the back was unavoidable, for safety reasons. You saw more from the front seat. You were not always staring at the back of someone’s neck. Things did not feel so obviously hierarchical, although they were hierarchical, she wasn’t kidding herself.

Here, she needed no headscarf — unlike the time in Islamabad when, as she’d stepped out of her fixer’s fumy car into an eddy of wind, her scarf had fallen back and all the men lounging in polyester pants against a row of street stalls had hissed, and the journalist with whom she was travelling, male, who’d exited through the car’s back door before her, had, before she could do anything, reached over to tug her scarf back into place. For her sake, he’d insisted afterward, although as he said this he couldn’t meet her gaze. Probably, if wearing a skirt or dress in Addis Ababa, she wouldn’t have wanted to expose her knees, but when it came to attire, she did not so far feel more restricted than this.

Through the closed car window, as Alazar set off, came the scent, at every moment, of something burning. It was true, as Raymond had said, as Juliet had said, that people — children — shouted at you. Whenever the car slowed, children ran toward them shouting. As they hadn’t in Kenya, where people waved and, even at gas stations, held out their hands for you to shake. Along the side of the road, small boys carrying wooden shoeshine boxes called out, Listro, listro, to all passers-by, and at one intersection, an Ethiopian man in a business suit stood in front of one such crate, reading a newspaper as a boy knelt in front of him and rubbed his raised shoe with a rag.

Can we stop at a supermarket or somewhere I can buy a few supplies?

It is possible.

When Alazar pulled up at the curb in front of an old, wide-fronted shop with a wooden sign, Sara asked if he minded waiting in the car.

It is possible.

Inside, among a warren of narrow aisles full of shelves of dark wood that reached to the high ceilings, she found water, bananas, packets of the high-protein soy biscuits given to children for nourishment in refugee camps. It was only as she returned to the car that it struck her that Alazar’s repeated phrase wasn’t the deflection she’d first heard but something closer to No problem or Sure, okay.

The road they followed led away from the centre of town. At every intersection, more children, spying Sara, ran toward the car shouting. Some long minutes after that, on her right, as Juliet had said, appeared an Agip station, the fire-breathing black lion rearing on its yellow sign, and there, on the far side of the road, rose the pole with the painted wooden circus emblem at the top, of the boy standing on his hands, legs upraised, bright paint grown worn.

The surprise of seeing things you’d first glimpsed on film, beyond the confirmation of their actuality, was that nothing ever looked as you’d imagined it, those glimpses being no more than distorted signposts to a world that was inevitably wilder, deeper, and more unpredictable than what you had imagined. The road felt less wide and there were buildings, shacks, close to the circus sign, and more greenery enclosed the hillside that rose on the far side of the road, all thickly coloured beneath a slate-grey, rainy-season sky. When Alazar slowed and pulled into the gas station lot, a man in greasy coveralls stepped out of a cinder-block building, wiping his hands on his thighs, and children burst from behind the station building and out of shacks whose rust-red, corrugated metal roofs were held in place by stones and began to shout.

Sara pointed to the lane, on the far side of the road, that led up the hillside into trees. Without another word, Alazar swung out of the gas station, making a U-turn so jolting in its force and speed, especially given the transport truck barrelling toward them and the women walking in single file along the dirt path on the far side of the road, that Sara’s seat belt was jammed against her chest. Then they were pulled up on the verge on the other side, and more children were running toward them from behind more shacks and ranks of skinny eucalyptus trees.

Alazar scanned the dirt lane that led up to the circus compound doubtfully. And, indeed, the track looked more eroded by rain and fissured with deeper channels than when Juliet had filmed it in the spring. You want me to take that road? he asked.

Do you think you can make it up without getting stuck?

He gave a grin that made the seams of bone across his wide forehead grow more prominent, and said, not, It is possible, but, I think not. Stones protruded like teeth from the red path. If they’d had four-wheel drive, they might have made it up, but the Fiat didn’t.

So then I’ll walk up. Shouting children crowded around the outside of their parked car.

I will come with you. He was torn: she could see that he did not want to leave the car untended.

You don’t need to, Alazar, I’ll be fine. She handed him some money for a Nescafé and told him, glancing at her watch, to meet her at the Agip station in two hours, hoping that would be long enough. Okay?

Ishee, he said.

The moment Sara stepped out of the car, avoiding the puddle at her feet, children surrounded her, jabbed at her jacket with their fingers, brushed her with their arms and worn clothes, shouting, Ferengi, give me money. A girl in a ski jacket held out a plastic comb, a lottery ticket, and said, Buy it. A boy in a wool hat shouted, Where you go? You go to circus? Who are you? What is your name? Far more English than she knew of Amharic. A chorus of voices: What is your nation? What you do?

Are you artist? This last, from another boy, wearing a fedora, assertive and businesslike.

She was amused, intrigued. What makes you think I’m an artist?

He pointed at her clothes: jeans, fleece jacket, boots. Maybe anyone, or any white person making her way up the hill to the circus compound, was viewed as some kind of artist. Or it was flattery.

She told him her name was Sara, and she was from Canada. Have you seen the circus?

Some of the children said yes, some said no, and it was impossible to be sure who was telling the truth.

Do you know the man who runs the circus?

Mr. Raymond. We see him.

Have you taken any classes at the circus? For both Raymond and Juliet had mentioned classes for street children.

Yes, said the businesslike boy, and gave another tug to her clothes. Sister, give me money.

What’s your name?

Berhailu. Which was also the name of her hotel.

What did you do in the circus class?

He hopped and skipped and glanced at his feet, as if a steep track was not the best place to show off such skills.

Why aren’t you in school?

When they reached the top of the hill, he and all the other children fell back, drifting down the lane they’d climbed on. Ahead, on the stretch of dirt that passed for a parking area, two aged and mud-spattered cars were parked. Through will or tenacity or practice or faith they had managed the climb, but there was no sign of Raymond’s white truck. Beyond the vehicles, across an expanse of scrubby grass and dirt and within an outer ring of pine and eucalyptus trees, stood two yellow buildings, the administrative building and the community hall, as Juliet had called them, the hall being where the circus rehearsed.