Accusation (19 page)

She would have said, given her complicated history with lawyers, that to be intimate with a lawyer was also the last thing she wanted. Unless her very antipathy had made David attractive, a desire to transgress against herself. He was not a criminal lawyer. He represented patents, not people. All his work was, you could say, about potential theft. He put it this way: he was interested in the rights of people, particularly those who made things up, discovered things, and needed to secure their rights to these things, in definitions of originality, fairness rather than truth.

Working out a good contract is like playing a good game, he’d said, and is as revealing of the crazy parade of human nature and all that people try to get away with. Isn’t everyone in the business of seeing what they can get away with? He’d given a funny smile at that, then asked Sara whether she cared, as a journalist, if the people she spoke to were telling her the truth. They were in her kitchen, newly showered, leaning against the counters. Yes, she said. At least I want them to want to tell me the truth, or what they think is the truth, even if many people aren’t very good at it. My job is to try to report what they’ve said accurately.

He hadn’t been practising when she’d met him. There were wanderings in both their childhoods, David’s military father having taken his family from a posting in Venezuela, where David was born, to a base in Germany, before their move back to Canada, to Trenton, Ontario, when David was eight. One of those first nights, maybe the first night, as they lay in her bed, by lamplight, after sex, he told her, The first word I ever spoke was door. I was nearly two. And that was weirdly prescient, since when I was thirteen my mother walked out the front door of our house and we never saw her again. He went on staring at the bedroom ceiling. When Sara laid a hand on his arm, his body had a kind of braced calm yet registered her touch.

Did you ever hear from her?

No. My father tried to track her down but gave up. My sister and I tried again when I turned eighteen and we got an address, but then we decided there was no point really, what was the point of contacting someone who didn’t want to be found. I think we all felt that way.

Did she love you? The question burst from her. Oh, the unbearable, damaging things that people did to each other.

Yes. He turned to look at her, still that teenager, holding her gaze, wanting a witness or something more. And then something broke, he said.

It’s hard to explain what happened with my parents, she said to him, then or on another night. More lamplight in the bedroom. It had to do with my father’s neediness and my mother’s inability to look after both of us. There’s something very insulated and insular about them. It’s as if having a child bewildered them. And then they were away, not like your mother, but they did go away and there was a gradual falling out of regular contact.

In the hotel room, she paced across the dingy carpet and peered through the large keyhole into the hall, while the moth went on thrumming against the window.

She did not know what David felt, what he let himself feel. Greta’s next round of tests was coming up in a couple of weeks. In January, Greta would, if all continued to go well, be cancer-free for a year, and thus truly in remission. She did not know what to think of herself, that she’d let things come to this pass, love returning to her, though she’d sworn she wouldn’t let it, her longing to be with this man always. Did she want love in this form? Could things go on and on like this? Was there another way? What did she truly want, what did he? All these questions knocked against her in Addis Ababa. Yet here was love, unsayable, undeniable, and it was hers, whatever David felt, and maybe in its beautiful uselessness was where its meaning lay.

Alazar led her out of the hotel to where a small yellow car waited, a Lada, Sara noted as they drew close. He seemed cheerful, filled with compensatory hopefulness, wanting her to be pleased, to make amends for the day before, for everything to work out.

This is a good car, he said. Look. He knelt, and beckoned Sara to kneel beside him, and showed her the steel plate bolted to the bottom of the chassis, rapping at the metal with his knuckles so that it gave a sharp tong. Then he stood and kicked the metal, and Sara, after giving the steel a knock with her own knuckles, nodded. A Russian-built Lada, butt of so many car jokes, hardly instilled her with confidence, but, what the hell, she would trust herself to it, and to Alazar. Okay, she said. Looks good, let’s go. She handed him her suitcase, which he loaded into the trunk beside the small satchel he’d brought for the overnight trip to Awassa, their bodies beginning to move in a synchronized dance, his gestures and manner growing familiar. How intimate, and domestic, the relationship with one’s driver could be.

I know Awassa well, Alazar said as they headed out of the city, past the Edible Oil Factory and the Jesus Rendering Plant. I am from this part of the country, near Shashemene. This is the junction town where we will take the road that leads to Awassa.

Do you know the orphanage called Hope Village?

Maybe, but I have not lived there for a long time.

She told him that the man from the circus, the former director, had visited the orphanage. She did not know what Alazar might have picked up over the last few days, what rumours he might have caught in the midst of conversations in Amharic that Sara did not understand or conversations with other drivers and watchmen that she had not been party to. If she were to reveal more about Gerard’s story and her interest in the orphanage, Alazar might feel uncomfortable, even morally compromised, especially given Ed Levoix’s assertion that any sort of homosexuality was an abomination here. Allegations of pedophilia might completely repulse him. If he discovered exactly what she was investigating, he might refuse to accompany her any farther.

As they crossed flat plains in which the only trees were carried in chopped pieces on people’s backs, then through leafy copses strangely reminiscent of southern Ontario, Alazar spoke carefully about the growing restlessness of the Oromo, his people, since the current government, which had come to power five years before, after the dictatorship had fallen, and about which so many had had so much hope, was giving power to certain groups and not others, which led to the wish, in certain parts of the country, for greater autonomy. I myself have hoped for more change, and more opportunity, especially more economic opportunity, he said. It is hard to hope and then lose this hope.

By the side of the road stood a man in a long white robe under a parasol glittery with gilt thread, beckoning.

Alazar, sorry to interrupt, but what’s that man doing?

He’s a priest. He wants us to visit his relics.

Raymond Renaud had travelled through this country, likely many times. Juliet, too, must have travelled this road on her trip south with the circus, another layer in a palimpsest of journeys.

Okay, please go on.

There, Alazar said as they entered the town of Shashemene, passing two men in a pony trap with bells jingling on its harness and boys playing at an ancient foosball table set up by the side of the road. See that flag with the tree on it, that is the flag of the Oromo, my people.

What will you do, Alazar?

What will I do?

Given the way things are going politically.

Oh. He grinned as several things flashed across his face. I will look for more work.

The nice hotel, as Alazar called it, and to which he brought her, was set close to a lake, Lake Awassa, where fish hawks perched in the trees near the water’s edge and monkeys swung among the green branches. Mosquito nets screened the windows of the room to which Sara was shown, a good sign. Having dropped her off, Alazar seemed anxious to be on his way — he would stay in town, he said, and pick her up at eight the next morning.

They had located the orphanage on a road outside of town before coming to the hotel. They had also stopped in the town itself, first at a roadside market, then in a café for espressos and spaghetti bolognese. Sara had asked Alazar to ask people what they knew of the orphanage and what they thought of it. No horrific rumours came their way. White men run it, Alazar told her after one conversation. Men? Yes, men, and it is a neat place. Neat, Alazar? Clean, they say it is tidy. Better to make their approach first thing in the morning, Sara decided.

At dusk, as she returned from a walk along the lake, distant bluish mountains visible over the indigo water, frondlike leaves quivering above gnarled tree trunks, Gerard’s words kept springing from under her feet:
a ring of them
.

It seemed too early for dinner, but after washing up, Sara set off down the hall to the dining room, ready for a drink, voices burbling ahead of her. Sometimes, even in the most remote places, she was beset by the possibility that, upon entering a room, she would find Colleen Bertucci, her accuser. Or Marie-Hélène Laberge, the Crown prosecutor, so ferocious behind the demure disguise of her baby-blue shirt in her attempt to undermine anyone’s, everyone’s belief in Sara. Would they recognize her after all these years? She was pretty certain, if not absolutely convinced, that she would recognize them. What a mess of emotion these thoughts aroused. Something riotous and charred. And rage. What could you possibly say to people who professed not to believe anything you said? Do you believe this? Or this? Or this?

Had Colleen Bertucci ever succumbed to any wrinkle of doubt, or did she, all these years later, remain self-righteously fixed in her conviction that the theft had happened as she said it did. The wallet: brown, leather, containing a Visa card, a YMCA membership card, her driver’s licence, fifty or so dollars in bills, some change, a fortune from a Chinese fortune cookie, a snapshot of her niece. As for Madame Laberge: had she simply been doing her job and fought for Colleen because she’d been paid to do so, or did she have to convince herself, at least partly, of her client’s version of events?

Sara had fantasized about running into Graham too but never had. He was married, she’d heard, to another much younger woman and had two small children.

Don’t get angry, Paul Kastner had insisted before their day in court. They had practised cross-examination techniques for hours. There was, in her story, the problem of having no good alibi after she’d left the Y for the span of time when the transactions with the stolen credit card had taken place. Alone, she’d wandered up Saint-Urbain and west along Sainte-Catherine, knapsack on her back, in no rush to get back to the apartment on de Maisonneuve, knowing that Graham would not be home until after five, oblivious to the fact that someone had decided she was a thief. The only shop she’d entered had been a drugstore, a Jean Coutu, where she’d bought a packet of condoms. Yes, she’d admitted that in court. The relationship had ended, she’d also said. This had been if not the most, then one of the most painful and humiliating moments on the stand. Paul Kastner’s voice kept repeating itself in her head: The most important thing is to stay calm. Don’t sound angry. It won’t help at all.

In the dining room, two white men, Australians by their accents, waved Sara over to their table. From Adelaide, they said. They were biking across Ethiopia. Yeah, it’s mad. We have stones thrown at us every day. Ah, but the country’s beautiful and we’re masochists. Fancy joining us for some doro wat?

I have to work, Sara said. She nodded to the notebook and pile of paper that she’d brought from her room. I’m a private consultant looking at some child-focused organizations and in the midst of a report.

They looked offended that their company didn’t suit her, or at the clumsiness of her excuse, but let her wander off to a table by the window, where night was eliminating the mountains and the lake and leaving white fairy lights to wind their way among the branches of the trees.

There were so many different kinds of lying: the conscious, expedient lies of social navigation, lies told to protect others and to shield yourself, the elisions, partial seeing, necessary secrets, deeper lies told to spare the self from pain, not to mention the inevitable rearranging of memory and the lies that weren’t really lies at all but alterations believed by those who told them, the problem of getting things wrong and needing to get things wrong because the truth was impossible to reach or impossible for the self to contain.

At the end of their time together, Sara had asked Paul Kastner if it mattered to him whether his clients were telling the truth. She had been genuinely curious about this. And Paul Kastner, the now so-very-successful Montreal criminal lawyer whose name cropped up every so often in the news, usually when he was defending someone notorious, had said no, he worked with what people told him, although what he liked were cases where the credible version of what had happened was not the obvious one. Then there were cases, like hers, in which nothing was resolved, other than that Colleen Bertucci’s version could not be proved beyond a reasonable doubt. Anyway, he’d said, people can believe they are telling the truth even when what they believe is far from what actually happened, as in, they aren’t, psychologically or physiologically speaking, lying.