Accusation (21 page)

The room seemed very bright as she asked this, her mouth chalky. Richard Langley began to flush, colour rising from his jawline up through his cheeks, and she couldn’t decide what his pinkness meant: terror, horror, rage, chagrin at the fact that his skin was doing something uncontrollable. Or was he trying to hide something. I believe there was some talk of starting a circus program here and he visited to discuss this proposal. Nothing happened with it. Nothing will happen with it.

Are you aware of the allegations against him?

I’ve been told.

Gerard said he visited a few times.

As I said, this proposal was discussed and I believe he taught some classes in circus arts, yes. But there will be no more.

For groups of kids or children on their own?

Presumably for groups. That’s my understanding. I wasn’t here.

Have the children, the boys, been asked if anything, if he did anything?

I have had no word of this.

Can I speak to any of the boys, to Abiye and the other victims?

If they agree to speak to you. And if you do, I hope you will be very clear what you intend. Because they’re victims, Ms. Wheeler. Remember that. And you wouldn’t want what you’re doing to turn into another form of abuse.

He stood, as if dismissing her. But first I’m going to show you what we do here. Because you should also see that for yourself, don’t you think?

He led her back through the outer office, under the watchful gazes of Barney Wilcox and Mrs. Fesseha, and, once more, out into the empty yard. Yes, the older children were in their classrooms, Richard Langley said when Sara asked. At noon, they would break for lunch.

Ahead of them, from a round hut, a traditional thatch-roofed tukul set behind the white-walled buildings, beneath the shade of a large tree, issued the babble and shrieks of young children. As they drew close, the hut’s open doorway filled with the off-key, high-pitched sound of singing. Worn toys — plastic blocks, part of an alphabet set, a doll, a deflated ball — lay scattered across the ground outside, and when Sara and Richard Langley stepped through the door, the children, perhaps a dozen or so, who had been seated on a rug laid on the hardened earth, clapping their hands, broke and skittered toward them, despite the admonitions of their minders, two women with kerchiefs holding back their hair. A few toddlers tottered about in loose diapers. Little children with runny noses and moist hands clutched Sara’s trousers, and even here called out in English, Mother, sister, one birr, two birr. Two girls tried to take her hands. Richard Langley lifted a small boy with a large head into his arms, his blue shirt bunching. He did not strike her as a man who truly liked children, or liked holding them, or liked holding these children, who might or might not be aware of what had happened here. Richard Langley dropped the boy and patted the head of a girl in a dirty white party dress. Only after introducing her to the two women, Meseret and Hawa, did he make introductions to Worku, the boy, and Liya, the girl.

From across the yard came a thrum of music and the faint strains of reedy Bob Dylan: Alazar, running the tape deck off the car battery. He was not in the car but conversing with the watchman in the shade of a patch of metal roofing that formed a raw hut for the watchman, rain or shine. Sara wondered what Alazar and the watchman were discussing, what the watchman had told Alazar about the orphanage. From outside the tukul, she raised a hand and nodded so that Alazar knew she was fine.

Behind the children’s buildings lay a semicircle of staff flats. Richard Langley pointed them out, across what passed for a lawn at the end of the rainy season, some hazy tufts of green, bright flowers, geraniums, pushing up from beds at the base of the windows. He said his wife and two boys were back home in Philadelphia.

Sara asked him if each staff member had a separate flat. No, he said, most were shared, but the director had his own. Which was his? He pointed to the second from the end, on the left. Was that where Mark Templeton had lived? No, he said curtly. That one was removed. What about guests, visitors, where did they stay? She was wondering where Raymond Renaud had slept. There was a guest suite, Richard Langley told her, in one of the shared houses.

He gestured toward the children’s latrines, took her to the wood-working studio, then to the multipurpose hall, also round and thatched, but plastered and painted pale green and enclosed by a porch, its interior filled with stacks of chairs. He agreed that she could take a few photographs. They moved on to the refectory, where rough wooden benches lined either side of a row of trestle tables covered in plastic cloths. From the kitchen came the clattering of pots. And there was Bethlehem, the cook, stirring a vast vat of pasta while chatting to a tall and astonishingly good-looking blond man who introduced himself as Olaf Olafsson of Sweden. Why did the presence of these white men, and only men, feel odd, and the extreme good looks and blondness of Olaf Olafsson seem somehow tainted? Sara couldn’t look at anyone, Bethlehem, Olaf, and not wonder what they knew or had seen or suspect them of some guilt. Through proximity or collusion. She wanted to reach into their heads and pull out exactly what they knew.

In the dormitories, an assortment of thin wool blankets and sheets covered nearly identical rows of wooden bunkbeds devoid of any personal effects. Yet the children must keep at least a few personal things somewhere: in a shared closet, a cupboard drawer. All this being so unlike the dorm room of her youth — in the Ottawa boarding school for wayward girls — the posters on the walls, plush toys hogging the bed covers, toys that she herself had despised, preferring to keep a volume of Anaïs Nin’s diaries under her bed.

At last Richard Langley led her toward the building that housed two small classrooms, the junior and the senior, each with a door opening onto a narrow porch. The junior class was in the midst of English recitation, led by a slim white man in pale short shirt sleeves, the bob of dark heads, girls’ and boys’, turning from within the room to follow Sara and Richard Langley as they passed along the porch. I am very well, the children chorused. There is no problem. I haven’t a clue.

When they reached the senior classroom, the teacher, also male but Ethiopian, broke off and stepped toward the door. Some students looked up quizzically at their arrival, some stared with little expression. They didn’t wear uniforms, but there was some attempt at uniformity, the girls all in skirts, all the boys and girls in T-shirts, occasionally with jackets or sweaters over them, the girls’ hair pulled back in neat braids or corn rows. The children, some of them teenagers, sat on wooden benches, like those in the refectory, at long narrow metal tables that served as their desks. There were some rather battered-looking books on a shelf, a dusty chalkboard with multiplication equations sketched upon it. The boys. How did you identify those who had been violated? Though the ordinariness of these children was different than that of the circus children. These children didn’t have families or some did and their families had abandoned them because they couldn’t support them. Only a few students spoke among themselves during the pause provided by Richard Langley’s low-voiced conversation with the teacher. When the teacher, tapping his metal watch, returned to the front of the classroom, all fell silent.

Minutes later, a tall boy in an old windbreaker worn over a striped shirt and shorts that stopped high above his knees came scuffing across the yard. Yellow flip-flops flapped against the soles of his feet. In the classroom, he’d sat at the end of the middle row, beside the window. At the interruption of their entrance, he’d glanced toward the door, then returned to gazing outside. Now he kept his hands in the pockets of his shorts and his eyes lowered as he approached. When he reached them, he looked up in astonishment or manufactured astonishment. The gaze that he offered Richard Langley was so direct as to seem provocative.

Abiye, Richard Langley said. He held himself stiffly, as if proximity to Abiye’s body filled him with fear. This is Sara Wheeler and she wants to talk to you.

He did not say what about. In any case Abiye probably had some idea why he had been singled out to talk.

Sara extended her hand — Hello, Abiye. Some physical gesture seemed wanted, his clasp dry and without weight.

He was surely not eleven or twelve, perhaps thirteen, or even older, nearly as tall as her chin. No facial hair, and she had yet to hear his voice more than the mumble of his reply. A broadening across the shoulders and through the chest, beneath his striped shirt, suggested middle adolescence. There was shame and awkwardness in the air. Sara wanted to do something to set him at ease.

Why don’t you two go over to the multipurpose hall, Richard Langley said. It will be quiet there.

What she had expected was that Richard Langley would lead them back toward his office or an office, somewhere he could lurk outside the door or rustle on the edges of her consciousness, and yet here he was suggesting that she take this boy to a place where they would be wholly or largely unmonitored.

Abiye’s English is very good, Richard Langley said. He’s a very bright boy. Then he flushed, as if he wished he hadn’t said this or as if his secret wish was that Abiye vanish.

Abiye began to move off in the direction of the multipurpose hall, his feet in their pale flip-flops scuffing up dust. Red dirt crawled over Sara’s black walking boots as she strode after him. He led her up the steps of the round, windowed building, where, a short while before, she had stood with Richard Langley. Instead of continuing through the door, Abiye lowered himself to the cement floor of the porch, at her feet, his back to the wall, legs outstretched, one ankle crossed over the other, his dusty bulbous toes still clutching their flip-flops.

Then his choice made sense: from where he sat, he had a view of most of the yard; he was largely hidden by the low wall enclosing the porch yet could reveal his hiding place by doing no more than moving his legs into the gap where the porch steps led up to the door.

Richard Langley’s pale-blue back returned to his office. Alazar and the watchman chatted beside the yellow Lada, the front gate beyond them. Abiye’s view was more extensive than Richard Langley’s from his office window.

Sara considered bringing out chairs, or a chair, but instead stepped over Abiye’s outstretched legs and settled herself beside him, broom tracks visible in the trailings of dust left where wall met floor, aware of Abiye’s body, his legs, close but not too close to hers.

Do you often come here by yourself?

He shrugged. Sometime. His voice was a high, light tenor.

Where do you meet the counsellor?

Mrs. Azeze? One time maybe here. Now in the free office. This one that was Gerard office.

Richard Langley was right: his English was good, the English he’d presumably learned from Mark Templeton, the man who had abused him. As soon as Sara took out her tape recorder and set it on the ground, Abiye picked the recorder up and turned it between his fingers, until Sara showed him how to press the buttons to switch it on and off, rewind and fast-forward, and asked him to speak into it.

In English.

Yes. You can hold it if you wish but you don’t have to.

Ishee.

An ordinary boy with thick-soled, dusty feet and grey patches of dry skin and the whiter streak of fingernail marks where he had recently scratched his left calf, a scab on his knee, a yeasty musk, a boy desultorily swatting away a fly before it landed on his shin. He did not strike her as obviously docile or easy to take advantage of. Maybe he had once been.

She told him she was a journalist from Canada and she wanted to talk to him about what had happened to him with Mark Templeton, what Mark Templeton had done to him. He nodded, although she felt him vacate part of himself. She wasn’t asking him to recount anything he hadn’t spoken of before. This was what she did, not cross-examine people but ask questions, often of people in extremity. Sometimes she, too, had to vacate part of herself. Most people, though not all, wanted to tell their stories.

How did it happen? Gerard said you went to Mark Templeton’s house. He asked you to his house.

Abiye wandered a fingertip through the trails of dust. Mr. Mark, he teachèd me. He teachèd me many thing. We like him. We play games. He say, we are family. Then he say, Come. You are special boy. He teachèd me English. He say, I look after you. He say, I love you. He touchèd me. I touch. He slep with me like a woman. He pay me two birr each time. He say, It is good.

What kind of games did you play with him?

Tag. Hide-go-seek. He play with all children.

Even after you knew what he wanted, you went to his house.

Abiye nodded.

Abiye, I’m so sorry for the things he did to you.

He nodded again.

How long did this go on?

Two year. I do not tell. Now they teachèd us it is bad thing.

He looked down at his finger and spoke as if he’d been schooled to speak of these matters in this way.

Why did you decide to talk to Gerard?

Gerard askèd me. Abiye’s neck, the delicate back of his neck, his ear lobe, rose before her, as he began to pick at the scab on his right knee. He say, I help.

He asked you what?

What I do. He watchèd me come and go to that man house. He say, This is bad thing. We go to doctor and police. Gerard and Sifisse. Abiye offered her a sudden, ravishing smile. Then he yanked the scab free and rubbed at the place where the scab had been.

Who’s Sifisse?

He work here. And Gerard. They gone.

Did you know there were other boys?

Something contracted in Abiye’s body. In the begin I not know it.

The haze of the sun crept toward the two of them under the overhang of the roof. An ant crawled along the line of dust where floor met wall. Hugging his knees to his chest, Abiye watched the ant. Sara wondered if he felt there was anything to be gained in speaking to her. He had trusted Gerard and Gerard had helped him. He had trusted Mark Templeton also.

Abiye. She waited for the tremour of his attention. I believe all these things you’ve told me.