Accusation (14 page)

There were children out on the grass, practising a series of exercises atop a large square tarpaulin. Spotting Sara, they stopped, whispered among themselves, then dashed back toward the door of the farther building, the community hall. Through its open windows travelled a lilt of children’s voices, the stamping of feet. More corrugated rooftops winked behind the trees, the smudged scent of charcoal drifting close.

Through the doorway of the first building, the one with the porch that, Juliet had said, housed the offices of the community leader and the circus, surged a boy in nylon trackpants and sneakers worn without socks. He marched down the wooden steps and, when he reached Sara, said, Please. You go. No visitors today.

I’d like to speak to Mr. Raymond. Which was what the street children had called him.

He is not here. A light voice, still unbroken. The boy was perhaps twelve, not yet adolescent, amber-skinned and slim, his furrowed forehead giving him a preternaturally aged air. He looked possibly familiar from Juliet’s tapes.

Is he at home? Will he be back later? Presumably, even if Raymond was not, other adults lurked somewhere.

He is not here.

My name is Sara Wheeler. She held out her hand and, after a flicker of hesitation, the boy took hold of it between his cool, dry fingers. And you are?

Segaye.

Segaye, are you in the circus?

He nodded.

Are you an acrobat, a juggler? She mimed juggling.

Once more he nodded. I do it.

Have you been in the circus a long time? His glance skittered, as if he’d been told not to enter a conversation with the stranger.

Two year.

Do you like being in the circus?

Yes, is good.

Is Mr. Raymond good to you?

Yes, good. But his body was pulling away.

Have you been on tour with the circus?

She could feel as much as see his withdrawal from her.

Wait. Segaye, is Mr. — she had to dive into her daypack for her notebook, ruffle through its pages — Mr. Tamrat Asfaw, is he here?

He work.

Perhaps even now someone was watching them, fluttering in the shade behind a window. Was that not, from the near building, the percussion of a typewriter, the click of a latch.

Can you give him my name and ask if I can have a word with him?

Sara lowered one knee to the red dirt, balanced her notebook on the other, and wrote out her name in printed letters on a clean page, then deliberated over what else to write: friend of Juliet Levin did not seem useful, since she was not convinced Tamrat Asfaw would remember Juliet by name or that he’d feel anything but aversion at the prospect of Juliet’s film; friend of Raymond Renaud was stretching it, and she had no idea how Tamrat Asfaw would respond to that, so she simply added the name of her hotel and its phone number, and beneath her name, from Toronto, thinking that perhaps her message might find its way to Raymond himself. She wrote, I would like to talk to you, then, impulsively, added another sentence, Raymond Renaud asked me to get in touch, hoping that covered all bases.

With the edge of the paper held in his hand, as if he might at any instant let go of it, the boy set off, shoes flapping at his bare heels, in the direction of the second building, the rehearsal hall.

Sara started to follow him, then thought better of it, and sat to wait on the porch steps of the first building, under the roof’s wide overhang. How odd to think of Juliet Levin as the only person she knew, save Raymond Renaud, to whom she could say the rehearsal hall, or the administrative building, or the circus compound and Juliet would know exactly what she was talking about.

The door behind her had been left ajar and through it a faint conversation between women could be heard. Sara could not stop herself from rising and stepping across the threshold into a dim hall along which the scent of spices and more children’s voices drifted. Juliet had said there was a room used as a classroom, and a lunchroom, where a woman prepared the children’s lunches over a propane stove. What was the name, again, of the local leader, of the kebele, the district, Mr. Yonas Something. Juliet had written it down, along with a phone number, and Raymond had mentioned how this man had generously offered the circus office space and a place to rehearse. Circus is the new faith, he’d said on tape. Sara pulled out her notebook.

There was no one in the first small office along the dim hallway, but in the second, a woman in a jacket and flowered skirt rose to her feet behind a wooden desk, and there were no lights on in this room either, no power at all perhaps, which might mean this quadrant of the city was in the midst of its weekly day without power, for the city and the entire country were rationed in this way, so someone at the hotel had told her.

Is Raymond Renaud here, or Mr. Yonas Berhanu?

No, they are not here, the woman said in strongly accented English. Some perfume clung to her, or hint of frankincense. Please, I ask you to leave.

Already it felt as if the circus had a cordon thrown up around it, and it was not possible to be a curious visitor only a trespasser in a place where once people from nearby neighbourhoods had wandered over in the evenings to be ushered into the community hall to waiting rows of benches or had stood outside the windows to watch the children rehearse, as Juliet had described, and an Italian photographer and Canadian filmmaker and even a sociologist had all been welcomed to observe the circus.

Can I ask you when they will be here?

I do not know it.

In her years in the field, she had of course dealt with far worse setbacks.

When Sara stepped outside once more, she found no sign of the boy. Through the open windows of the community hall streamed shouts, the magnified slap of hands and feet against mats in a high-ceilinged room, and when she approached across the grass and dirt, and edged close to a window, there were the children, older, younger, in T-shirts and tights and nylon trackpants, moving about in the wide room of painted cinder block that she had seen on Juliet’s tapes. Through the middle of the room ran a row of cinder-block pillars, and large squares of diaphanous cotton hung from the ceiling. Directly in front of her, boys tumbled into somersaults on mats that looked identical to the blue vinyl ones tossed on the floor of every gym of her childhood. Four girls worked in pairs, also on mats, one on her stomach while her partner stood between her extended legs and pulled upon the first girl’s arms and torso to stretch her body back in an inverted C. Was that safe? And yet all this seemed ordinary, the T-shirts, the trackpants, the children’s absorption in what they were doing. They exhibited no obvious signs of stress —

She looked again: in one corner of the room a boy kept his balance on a rectangular piece of wood that teetered on top of a piece of metal pipe while juggling, was it five?, small white balls in the air as another boy reached from behind him, stole a ball from one side then tossed it back into play on the other. In another corner, a girl of perhaps twelve or thirteen in a backbend so deep her head nearly touched the floor juggled three balls in this position, while four younger girls reached the apex of a balance pose: one girl extended upside down in the splits, hands gripping the hands of the girl who supported her from underneath, this girl balanced in turn on the torsos of two girls arched over, feet and hands on the ground. None of which was ordinary.

Were they ordinary children who had trained to perform such marvels or were they children gifted with extraordinary flexibility and daring who had found their way to the circus, or some of each? And what knowledge did they carry within them, in their minds, in their bodies, of what had happened between Raymond Renaud and the runaways?

On the far side of the room, near the door, an Ethiopian man, not tall but muscled, in a white T-shirt and green nylon trackpants, was talking to two boys. Nearby the boy, Segaye, sat on a bench, waggling his feet. Sara could see no sign of the note she’d given him. On the wall above him hung a flag with horizontal bands of green, yellow, red, the Ethiopian colours. Presumably the man was Tamrat Asfaw, who had been a wrestler, Juliet had said, until the day he saw the circus perform and showed up at the hall and said to Raymond, I want to help. She must have moved, or her presence made itself felt like a touch upon Tamrat Asfaw, who glanced over his shoulder and across the room. When she called his name through the open window, he didn’t respond, only turned to say something to Segaye, the mood in the whole room shifting, the children halted in their practice. The boy bolted out the door as Sara made her way toward it.

In the open air, Segaye waved his arms. He work.

Can I make an appointment to speak with him?

Yes, she could barge in on Tamrat Asfaw and the circus children, but perhaps she had been precipitous in setting off without Alazar Wolde, Amharic speaker, in her desire to do a reconnaissance by herself.

Please, will you tell Mr. Asfaw that I will come back later or tomorrow? Oh, and, Segaye, do you know a boy named Yitbarek Abera?

Recognition registered on his face, also his surprise at hearing this name come so unexpectedly out of her mouth. His yes sounded like a question.

A few months ago, did he have an accident?

He gave a barely perceptible nod.

Did he get hurt?

He looked extremely nervous, as if he’d been told not to speak of this, or the very idea of Yitbarek’s accident frightened him.

Did he fall?

He fall.

How is he now?

Okay.

Segaye, where is Yitbarek?

His house now, Yitbarek house.

And where is that?

That way. He pointed back toward the lane, his extended hand taking in an indeterminate stretch of trees and sky.

Where that way?

He shrugged.

Before he was in his house, where was he?

This question seemed to confuse him, so she tried again. Where did Yitbarek live before?

Mr. Raymond house. The boss house.

She showed Alazar the little map on which Juliet had drawn the location of Raymond Renaud’s house, marking the corner lot, which they were approaching in Alazar’s car, the house enclosed within a wall of red brick topped by spears of glass, broken pieces of bottle embedded in a line of cement, their points piercing upward. The sky still threatened rain, slate-coloured clouds turning yellowish where the sun tried to poke its way through them. Emerald fronds of bamboo shimmered above the height of the wall. Raymond’s garden, where he had sat in a pinkish T-shirt, on a white wooden chair, in a rustling breeze, and spoken to Juliet. The rusty cylinder of a water tank perched on the roof of the house, which was modest in size as glimpsed through the front gate.
The boss house
, the boy had said. The house where three boys had also lived and other children had stayed over and hung out. Maybe Yitbarek had indeed recovered from his fall, which would be the best news. From his side of the locked gate, a watchman in a yellow rain slicker stepped toward them, a little brown dog yapping at his feet, but the man made no move to swing the gate open. There was no sign of a white truck, and the windows offered no clues as to what life lay within.

In the car, Sara had told Alazar that she was hoping to speak to the man who ran, who’d run the children’s circus. She’d seen the children perform in Denmark, met the man in Toronto, and wanted to visit them here. She was a journalist but wasn’t, strictly speaking, working, she was helping a friend, a filmmaker, who was making a film about the circus. This seemed to be the best explanation she could offer for herself, for what she was doing, for the moment.

On foot she and Alazar stepped up to the gate, her blonde hair pulled back in a ponytail, his T-shirt, she noticed, coming loose over the waist of his trousers. The difficulty, always, in the matter of translators, was the surrender of control. The watchman wore a pressed dress shirt and neatly ironed khaki trousers beneath his yellow slicker. She had to trust Alazar —

Since she could not understand a word that he and the watchman were saying. In Spanish, she caught some sense because of her French, which was on the way to fluent, and in Russian and Arabic and even Polish, gleaned greetings and occasional phrases, depending on the speed of the speaker, but in Amharic, as in Pashto or Urdu or Tamil, not much at all. Okay, one word, amesegenallo, thank you, in a day she’d learned that much Amharic, no, two, ishee, okay. All else was reduced to intonation, gesture, the music and choreography of speech. The little foxlike dog sat alert at the watchman’s side.

There was also the question of where to look, at Alazar as he spoke for her, in order to help channel her thoughts through him, or at the watchman, to whom Alazar was speaking, and addressing for her. Alazar kept glancing at her, his gesture of inclusiveness. What she could make out so far: he was voluble, genial, and would probably attempt to extract information by generating good feeling. The watchman’s replies were monotone, and when he spoke, he rubbed a cautious finger back and forth along his right sideburn, ducking his head every now and again to keep an eye on the perked ears of his little dog.

He is not here, Alazar said at last.

Not here right now or he’s gone away? She felt a sudden spasm of anxiety.

He has gone away, and he does not know where he has gone or when he comes back.

Did he take the truck? Is he in the country or has he left the country? Does the watchman know where he is? Sorry, that’s a lot of questions.

Maybe the country. The watchman is not certain of it.

When did he leave?

Last week, he says.

Is there anyone living in the house at the moment?

Right now he says not.

So the boys, the children who lived here, where are they?

I will ask it.

Oh, and does he have any idea when Mr. Renaud’s coming back?

After a further exchange in Amharic, Alazar said, He says you must speak to the people from the circus for this information.

Okay.

Do you wish me to ask anything else?

Did he leave in a hurry, pack up his things like he was moving, or like he was going on a trip?