Accusation (38 page)

She and Rafael made their way to the door, where after tugging on the locked handle, Rafael gave the metal surface a couple of sharp raps.

An Ethiopian boy, in T-shirt and sweatpants, opened it, bashful, a wrangle of limbs. He ducked his head of longish, curly hair and mumbled something, and Rafael leaned close, canting toward the boy before turning. Alem, Sara. Sara, Alem. Gaze still lowered, Alem held out his hand, and Sara shook it, aware of the energy of bodies and voices and movement behind him, the air thick with the smells of sweat and chalk.

An archipelago of running shoes and sandals and flip-flops extended in front of them, and as the musicians started up again and a reverberation of amplified sound hit them, Sara slipped her heels free of her sandals, and Rafael tugged off his running shoes, reduced to greying socks. Beside the shoes: two skateboards. To her left, behind two small amps, were three young men: saxophonist, guitarist, and bass player. The saxophone and bass players she recognized from the show in Copenhagen, and from Juliet’s tapes. They stopped at the end of their riff, leaving an amplified buzz in their wake, as if they’d just taken in the arrival of strangers. She lifted a hand in greeting and they nodded. The guitar player, not familiar, was also Ethiopian. He’s from here, Rafael said. And there was Senayit, the singer, Gelila’s friend, in sweatpants and T-shirt, a red kerchief over her hair, sitting on a bench against the far, mirrored wall, chugging from a plastic water bottle.

Alem, who had picked up a set of white juggling balls from the floor, was speaking into the ear of a girl around his age, also in trackpants and T-shirt like Senayit and the boys. Beside them, an older teenaged boy in a fedora kept his own juggling balls in motion, until, with a shout from the girl, Alem began to circle his four balls, and from behind the taller, fedora-wearing boy, the girl grabbed one of his white balls as it rose upward and passed it to Alem, then caught one of Alem’s and passed it to the older boy, who was a moustache-less Kebede. They were real, and they were here. And they were aware of being watched. How could they not be? What was she to them? Their desires being so different from hers.

A sea of blue mats spread behind the jugglers, beneath the caged lamps that hung in a row from the high ceiling. In the middle of the long and narrow room, a body flew in a somersaulting dive over the head and outstretched hands of another: two more Ethiopian teenagers worked with two non-Ethiopian young men. And these were Tewodros and Dawit, Rafael said. And the girl juggler was Nazanette. The whoop of voices. Louise called and waved from the far end of the room, where a figure, in tights, Gelila — it had to be Gelila — balanced upside down on one hand atop a tower of bricks. Louise was spotting her. As they approached along the mats, Gelila began to reverse herself, lowered her legs slowly to the ground without losing her balance or disturbing the bricks, more extraordinary than ever in her extreme flexibility and fluid calm. Upright, she shook herself out, hair still in its tumbling little braids, though she looked leaner, having lost an adolescent plushness that she’d had when Juliet had filmed her. She wiped her chalked hands over her black tights. Even on tape, she’d had such self-composure, which her actual presence made more ripply and intense.

Without hurrying, Gelila stopped to pick up a square of towel bunched on the bench and patted her face with it, lifted a water bottle, and drank in short bursts as she and Louise drew close. The others, Sara thought, must also be aware of what her visit was about, even if they went on doing what they were doing. When she glanced over her shoulder, Kebede stood with his arms at his sides. The jugglers had stopped.

Louise said with a grin to Rafael, voice raised in the din, Don’t hug me, I’m all sweaty, but it sounded like a dare, and Rafael hugged her anyway, then said to Gelila, Can you teach me to do that thing you were doing? Which made Gelila smile.

Gelila, Louise said, this is Rafael’s friend, Sara. You’ve met Rafael.

Gelila’s handshake was hot from her exertions, palm sticky with chalk, a drop of sweat visible at her throat, breath beating beneath her white T-shirt.

I saw you perform in Copenhagen, Sara said.

Oh. Yes. Pleasure lit Gelila’s face; then she extinguished it.

I’m amazed by what you do. Even if you tried to teach me, I don’t think I could do it.

Gelila nodded.

I came here, did Louise say, because I want to talk to you about the circus and what happened to you and how you came to be here. Not necessarily now. It can be now or whenever’s a good time.

Yes. I know it. Gelila’s speech was direct and firm. Louise tell me. She tell us what you do, what you want. We think about it, we talk about it. We all talk about it. We decide together. And this is it.

She drew herself upright, vibrating with conviction and hope. We do not wish to speak about these things to you. We wish to begin again.

From: Ed Levoix <
[email protected]
>

Subject: Re: circuses

Date: March 19, 1997 2:00:18 PM EST

To: Sara Wheeler <
[email protected]
>

Sara,

I’m not sure where you are but hope this reaches you. I was in Nairobi reading newspapers at the embassy a couple of weeks back and saw the brief piece on Mark Templeton. But it was not by you. Anyway there was a lot of relief here, as you can imagine, plus amazement at his capture, and that after he managed to slip across the Tanzanian border into Kenya — someone must have tipped him off — he’d get on a plane in Nairobi that stopped over in Addis. I suppose he thought they didn’t know or they’d never take him off the plane. Anyway, when they did, it was all over the English-language paper here, and I gather he’ll be staying in jail in Addis until he goes to trial. But this is not why I am writing. Last week I was on my way back from the south and saw something I think will interest you. I was preparing to overnight in Awassa and pulled into town at the end of the day and saw a crowd at the roadside and stopped to see what the commotion was. Tumblers, jugglers, children, a circus act, plus acting and singing, and the leader of all this was, as maybe you’ve guessed, Abiye Alemu. Apparently he led a little insurrection, some months back, walked out of the orphanage taking a lot of the other children with him, and they’ve set themselves up in a house in town. I have no idea how they are managing to support themselves, but they have a local woman looking after them. I didn’t know who he was until I spoke to him after the show, which is rudimentary but performed with huge amounts of verve. I told him I would put him in touch with the man who’s now running the circus here in Addis, and see if we might be able to help with some funding. He’s interested in putting together an AIDS awareness show. Also, there’s a British actor I’ve met here who wants to get involved. Abiye hadn’t heard the news about Mark Templeton until I told him. Please don’t think me an opportunist for offering to help after some previous comments made regarding the future of circuses in this country. Things have changed, and I believe what is going on now is different than what was going on previously. And Abiye is a remarkable young man, so self-directed, so full of energy and talent. He has great plans for his circus, and if you come back this way you really must go down and see it. He performs, by the way, an amazing fire-breathing act.

Regards,

Ed

Hello

Thanks a lot for you to contact me our Circus is alive if some body likes to know about us any body welcome You must know it, we are here

Heartfelt thanks to those who read early drafts of the manuscript, including Michael Helm, Terry Jordan, Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer, Michael Redhill, and Shyam Selvadurai.

Thanks to the following funding agencies for their generous support: the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Toronto Arts Council. Thanks also to the Writer-in-Residence programs of the University of Alberta, the University of Guelph, McMaster University, and the University of New Brunswick.

Thanks to all who shared their stories and helped in my research, including Stephen Anderson, Sophia Bush Anderson, Dan Brodsky, Jennifer Bush, Robert Everett-Green, Marina Jiminez, Clare Pain, Robert Rotenberg, Richard Scrimger, Kathleen Smith, Cheryl Sourkes, and Shelley Tepperman.

Particular thanks to Nigel Hunt for generously sharing the written files for his documentary
The Unexpected Circus
. I’m also indebted to a series of articles in
The Guardian
by Audrey Gillan. Also
There Is No Me Without You
by Melissa Fay Greene and
Youth Gangs and Street Children: Culture, Nurture and Masculinity in Ethiopia
by Paula Heinonen, and
Identifying Child Molesters
and
The Socially Skilled Child Molester
by Carla van Dam.

The epigraphs are from Robert Browning’s
The Pied Piper of Hamelin
(London, UK: Frederick Warne and Co., 1888) at
http://www.indiana.edu/~librcsd/etext/piper
, and from Ryszard Kapuscinski’s
The Emperor
(English translation copyright © 1983 by Ryszard Kapuscinski, New York: A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book / Harcourt Brace Jovanovich).

Thanks to agent Samantha Haywood for her belief in this project and for taking me on at a crucial moment, and to Bethany Gibson for being the ideal reader and everything I could possibly hope for in an editor. Thanks to everyone at Goose Lane. And to Mike Hoolboom, for listening so closely to all these words and for shining a light that saw me through the final stages of this project.

All individuals and most organizations described in this novel are fictional, including the circuses. Yet there is an actual and vibrant Ethiopian circus movement, part of the larger social circus movement in which circus skills are a means of educating and reaching out to at-risk populations in various parts of the world. For more information on the contemporary Circus Ethiopia, please go to
www.circusethiopia.org
.