Accusation (15 page)

I already ask this. He says, all the big possessions are still here. He left like he is making a trip.

Who’s paying his salary, the watchman’s, now, is it still Mr. Renaud?

You want me to ask this?

Yes, if you would, please.

The watchman’s gaze jetted between them and a vinyl-covered kitchen chair, the padded seat cover moulded by long use, set up in the compound to one side of the gate, and was he the gardener or was it Raymond himself who had made bougainvillea bloom and ferns flourish? Through the watchman’s flat volley of speech Sara made out two names.

He says, he believes it is Mr. Renaud who pays but Mr. Asfaw gives the money this week.

Can you ask him if a boy named Yitbarek Abera lived here, and if he was injured, and if he knows where the house of Yitbarek Abera is?

Yitbarek Abera?

Yes. He was in the circus. Can he tell you the way to Yitbarek’s house?

Back in her hotel room, Sara tossed her jacket and daypack onto the bed, her key onto the desk. It was hard, now, not to surrender to disappointment. And self-recrimination. In the field, there was always that initial, elusive hope that the people you wished to meet would materialize exactly where and when you wished to speak to them. If you had a good fixer, as they were called, that helped: driver, translator, all-around facilitator. You landed on the ground and depended, often enough, on your fixer’s contacts to get you to whomever and wherever you needed to go. Alazar seemed a good translator, a good-enough driver, not quite an ideal fixer. That Raymond Renaud was gone was not Alazar’s fault. But they had failed to find Yitbarek Abera’s house. Of course she had no idea what instructions Renaud’s watchman had given. Perhaps they had been designed to confuse. The boy is lame, Alazar had said to her. He cannot walk.

Is he paralyzed? she’d asked, which would seem to be the case.

It is possible, Alazar said.

They’d ended up on foot in a warren of un-signposted lanes, craterous, full of puddles and open drains, too narrow for the car to drive through, surrounded by yelling children, but found no one who seemed to know about the boy or where he lived. Alazar had been profuse in his apologies. Fear underlay them: that he would not measure up and she would find someone else. I will find the way, he said. Tomorrow.

And Raymond Renaud. He had not lied about Yitbarek’s accident, she had to hold on to this. In his story there was this much truth.

Sitting on the end of the bed, Sara unlaced her boots and slipped her bare feet into flip-flops. There was no power, she realized, when she flicked the light switch in the bathroom, and no hot water, and the faint diesel odour wafting from the hall into her room likely came from a generator chugging somewhere outside, which was powering some things but not others. Then, mysteriously, the light came on, flickered and fizzed, and settled at a lower wattage than usual. A generator and/or possibly a voltage stabilizer. The ambient sounds of a place like this.

She poured herself a sliver of duty-free whisky and added some water from the bottle labelled Ambo. She’d noticed people asking for water by this name, as in,
I’d like a bottle of Ambo
. Then she fought successfully with the catch on the door leading out to the tiny balcony.

There had always been the risk that he would not be here, and it was ludicrous to think that giving him advance notice of her visit would have provided him with any reason to stick around.

His truck wasn’t at his house, and so perhaps he was somewhere in the truck, as in not far away, and would return. Someone would pass on to him the written message that she’d left at the circus compound. He was still in shock. He was somewhere close by, hiding out, and only saying that he was gone. Guilty or innocent, he would have to create some distance between himself and the circus while whatever investigation there was took place.

In the garden below, a path led through pine trees or cedar to the gauzy blue of a swimming pool, where despite the chilly air an Ethiopian man seemed to be teaching an Ethiopian woman how to swim, their chuckles rising. The circus children whom she’d seen rehearsing that morning had not looked terrorized or kept against their will. The ones who’d returned from Australia, including Segaye, hadn’t fled. She had not, despite Tamrat’s ire at her, sensed fear and quaking submission in the room. This was no more than a first impression.

Inside once more, she picked up the receiver of the old black phone and punched in the circus number from the website. Juliet had said she thought the line rang in Raymond Renaud’s house.

Raymond, Sara said into his answering machine. It’s Sara Wheeler, from Toronto. I’m in Addis Ababa. When I dropped you off in Montreal, you said if there was ever anything you could do for me to ask. So I’m asking. I came here because of the circus. I’d like to talk to you. I’d like to hear your version of what’s going on.

The phone rang and she swam up from sleep toward the braying sound, opened her eyes to the brash face of her travel alarm clock, just before seven a.m., somehow she’d slept through the amplified Orthodox Christian call to prayer that, like a muezzin, had woken her before six the previous morning — and was it David, to whom she’d spoken the night before, for whom it would now be nearly midnight and who almost never called her from home unless it was an emergency, who’d reminded her, during their conversation, both that she’d missed Thanksgiving and that Greta was going in for a new round of tests that week. Or could it be Raymond?

Wildly, Sara plucked at the receiver and managed a hello as she scrambled to sit up. The voice that greeted hers was male, Ethiopian, not Alazar’s, more strongly accented, blunter, saying, This is Sara Wheeler — the words a question.

Yes. Within the casing of the sheet, she propped herself against the headboard and placed the squat black telephone, attached to its cord, between her feet.

I am Tamrat Asfaw.

Yes. Thanks. Thanks so much for calling. She did not know if there was aggression in his calling so early, an intention to disturb her as she was so obviously disturbing him, or if the timing was a matter of necessity. She was desperate to pee, needed pen, paper, glass of water, tape recorder, another minute in which to clear her head.

Who you are and what you want?

She told him: she was a friend of Juliet Levin, the filmmaker who’d been shooting in May; she’d met Raymond Renaud in July in Toronto through Juliet and he’d invited her to visit the circus; she was travelling through Addis and hoped to meet some of the children and speak to Raymond.

He is away.

Okay. Can you tell me where he is or how I might get hold of him?

I cannot.

She did not know if this meant he truly could not or would not tell her.

Is he still running Cirkus Mirak?

I do it.

So he’s not involved in the circus at the moment?

He is exhaust.

Is it because of what happened in Australia?

What you know of it?

I know that some of the performers ran away, asked for asylum, and made some allegations against him.

The one who say these thing. They decide it. Then they say these thing.

So you — she found a pen on the night table, a museum brochure to write on, her tape recorder nowhere in sight. The phone cord was not that long and it seemed unwise to ask Tamrat if she could put down the receiver in order to search for the recorder in her jacket pocket or bag, given that her connection to him and his willingness to speak to her felt so tenuous. Why do you think they ran away? Is there any truth to their allegations?

They want to run, that is it.

Were you in Australia?

No, I stay. He go.

What did Raymond say about what happened?

I said it.

Has he made any kind of statement or denial?

He deny. And I am here. I see.

The other children in the circus, the ones who were on tour in Australia, or here — what do they think happened, or has any of them made any similar claims or complaints —

The ones who run, they say these thing, the others do not say it. We work hard to make circus. We do it. For good of circus. How else to do it? They want it. I want it. And I say, if any run, we never go away again.

You told them they mustn’t run away from the circus. And they say —

Yes, yes, they see it. I go —

Tamrat, there’s a boy, Yitbarek Abera. Back in July, Raymond told me he had a fall —

One time this happen. One time. It is accident. We watch. We take care.

I’m not implying you don’t. So he did have a fall —

Yes.

How is he now?

We work.

What was that?

I go.

What about an investigation, into the allegations against —

I go.

Tamrat, can I visit you at the circus? Today, tomorrow, any day this week?

Not possible.

She sat with the phone receiver in her hand, the line dead, a confusion of sensation welling in her, a wild top note at Tamrat’s word that Raymond had denied the allegations, which registered as relief.

At eight, Alazar picked her up and Sara settled herself in the seat beside him. Out along the Wollo Road, streams of schoolchildren in uniform traipsed along the dirt path at the side of the road, some sweatered, some in white shirts, girls in dark skirts or pinafores, puddles yawning in the reddish dirt, the clouds piled high and swelling. He told her, as he drove, how one of his first jobs as a driver had been during the big famine, many years ago now. He had been part of a UN convoy transporting food-aid workers into the north. It had been good work, full-time, good pay, he’d never had such good work since, he had even met the rock star Bob.

Goats lolloped along the drainage ditch in front of them. Exhaust spewed from a passing truck. They would find the lame boy, he said. And then, carefully: Did she have any plans to travel north? Did she know anyone who needed a full-time driver? Sara said she didn’t but would ask around, didn’t know yet if she planned to leave the city, told Alazar about her own trip up through the Kenyan desert to the camps near the Sudanese border, where there’d been no rock stars.

They pulled in and waited in the car in front of the Agip station. Although the circus children had been rehearsing up in the community hall the previous morning, Sara had no idea if they arrived at that hour every day, if they rehearsed and did their schoolwork onsite rather than going to a regular school. No children appeared and began to make the steep climb up the laneway, nor was there any sign of Tamrat Asfaw in his dark-green tracksuit. Some of the local children whom Sara had encountered the day before shouted at them from outside the car and, when she rolled down the window, called out, Sister, mother.

Alazar said, They think you are a missionary. All the white people who first come here are missionaries so now they think all white people are this. It is where these names come from.

When Berhailu, the boy in the fedora, approached, Alazar rolled down his window and asked something in Amharic that involved Yitbarek’s name. Berhailu opened the back door of the car and settled himself inside.

He says he will show us where the boy’s house is, Alazar said, then turned and shouted at the other children who had crowded around the car windows.

Are the circus children coming today? Sara asked, turning to Berhailu. Beneath the brim of his fedora, he had long, beautiful eyelashes.

Yes, sister, he said.

Are they there already?

He shook his head.

Juliet had given her names: Tesfanesh, Kidsit, Lelise, Girma. Do you know Kidsit or Lelise? Are they coming?

Yes.

Tell me about the classes you take at the circus.

Is good.

Where did you learn English, in school? Although she had doubts about whether he went to school.

Circus.

Does Mr. Raymond teach the classes?

They do it.

By them she assumed he meant the circus performers. Even English classes?

Mr. Raymond do it.

What do you think of him? And the others, do they say he is a good man, or a bad man?

Good, sister. Though he might be telling her what he thought she wanted to hear.

Can you show me something you learned in the circus class?

She had to ask Alazar to repeat the request in Amharic. I’ll give him money, she added.

He has no mat, Alazar said, after the two of them had conferred.

Nevertheless, Berhailu, shoeless, leaped out of the car and, after some urgent discussion with another boy in a windbreaker, performed a dance that involved foot stomping and hand clapping and eager waving of their thin arms, though these boys lacked the obvious skill and grace of the trained performers. Sara snapped a couple of photographs.

Back in the car, while Berhailu folded coins into a pocket in his grimy shorts, Alazar said, He says the circus children, they will not come until later because this evening they have a show.

A show?

A small show, a practice show.

Sara turned again to Berhailu. Can you tell us where?

Alazar, in conversation with Berhailu, drove the car at a crawl through a different warren of stony, rutted streets than those they’d navigated the day before and pulled up at last in front of a corrugated iron gate flimsy on its hinges, gaps around its frame, its two wings secured with a padlock, locked from the outside. A hint of a rusty metal roof and a black meander of an electrical line were visible overtop the gate. A crowd gathered: men in wool hats, women with cloth wraps hiding their hair, a throng of children. Sara joined Alazar among the shouting children as he rattled the gate and they both peered through the gaps at the dirt yard inside, the glimpse of a worn wooden door, blue paint flaking from cracked plaster walls. All he could confirm, Alazar said, after speaking to those assembled, was that the woman who lived in the house was out. She had lived in the house for about a month. There was a convoluted story about who had lived in the house before this. And Sara, too, from the few who spoke a bit of English: Yes, a boy lived there. The boy who stayed in the house. When he left, he travelled in a chair.