Burridge Unbound (27 page)

“I don’t know what to say, Bill,” she yells into my ear as I get up.

“It’s okay. You’ve said it!” I yell back, like something someone would say in a movie.

If I walk it’ll be better. She won’t have to say anything.

So I walk. It’s funny, all the breath has gone just like that and my whole body feels on the edge of a spasm. But one step and it’s less, one step and then another. That’s how you get past things. A step and a step and another.

I’m surprised to find Suli has not left with the reporters but stays talking to Sin Vello outside the excavation tent. They’re quite a pair, the enormous chief justice and the wraith-like president. He leans on his silver cane, perspires from the simple act of standing, while she balances lightly, her spine straight, her shoulders a fraction of the width of his. When she sees me she looks at me – how? With rapt attention, as if I’m someone she has been eagerly awaiting.

“How are you, Bill? Ms. Stoddart, how are you both? I’ve been getting such good reports about the commission–”

“Have you?”

“Yes! It’s been such a relief for people. Well, you’ve seen the crowds waiting to talk to you.”

“The
sorialos
. Yes.”

“I’m getting such mail. Two thousand pieces a day! So many people are writing in–”

“But what about this deal with the Kartouf?”

“We just signed it today. It’s historic. Finally we have peace on the island after nearly twenty years of war.”

“But we’re not supposed to prosecute Kartouf members?”

“Except for human-rights crimes,” she says hastily. “Which you define. If it’s serious enough you can recommend prosecution.”

“Why would they agree to something like that?”

“Because they want peace, Bill. Finally!”

The conversation extends into the mess tent where we sit like old friends, Suli making a point in Kuantij to Justice Sin, another in English to me and Joanne and Dr. Parker. Luki scrambles to keep up with it all. Suli, vibrating like a bow of energy, fires off her ideas, observations, questions on everything: micro-banking, shelters for women, programs to reduce child poverty, education grants for girls, clean-up crews for public works, rehabilitation schemes for first offenders, international trade missions, what to do about homelessness and poverty.

“They’re killing us,” she says at one point. “The currency speculators. Every time we try to launch something, they feed on us. How can we do anything if our money isn’t worth its weight in banana skins?”

Later: “Did you know that murders have gone down 35 per cent since the elections? Do we have more police? No. It’s a sense of peace. I don’t know how else to describe it. The people have a sense of peace and co-operation. Suddenly we’re all poor but we’re building together. It’s just an idea, but even the drug dealers have stopped killing one another. Can you imagine? What’s going to happen if we don’t deliver? Bloodbath. And it’ll be my head for betraying them.”

And on the police: “They’re tiptoeing around, have you noticed? Even the traffic cops have been polite lately. It’s your doing, the commission. They know certain questions are going to be asked and they’re afraid and ashamed of who they’ve been and what they’ve done. So now they’re consulting on everything. Do I want so-and-so arrested? Should they proceed with this trial? I tell that coward Fulika it’s his department, his responsibility. You can’t keep asking the president
whether to arrest somebody for shoplifting. He’s petrified of an inquiry.”

Sin Vello laughs when the talk turns to Fulika, the chief superintendent of police, and he tells a long story that gets briefly translated as being about Fulika’s four mistresses ganging together to stop a rape charge levelled by a pregnant teenager. The four argued in court that they kept the chief superintendent so tired he couldn’t have had enough energy to commit rape even if the desire were there. Finally the young woman accepted a settlement: a cash amount, monthly stipend, apartment, and guaranteed tuition for the child at the foreign university of his choice.

“He knows such stories!” Suli laughs, pointing her thumb at Sin Vello, a sign of disrespect in this culture but meant affectionately, it seems. I watch them closely – either they are consummate actors, and can hide their mutual distrust brilliantly, or they get along much better than Suli let on that night when I met her in her office.

Sin Vello tells another story about the personal interest Minitzh would take in certain trials. In a famous one, Santa Irene’s foremost cricket player was accused of accepting bribes to lose to Sri Lanka in an important match. Minitzh had lost a small fortune betting on the outcome, and phoned Justice Sin to make sure the cricketer fried in hell.

“But, Mr. President,” Sin supposedly said, “it’s up to a jury to decide whether or not he is guilty.”

“And if he’s not guilty,” Minitzh supposedly said, “then you will bowl the next match and the fans can rip your limbs from your body.”

Joanne asks what the justice decided and Sin looks down slyly. The translation comes slowly, long after Sin, Suli, and
Luki have had their laugh. “Fortunately for everyone the man escaped to Sri Lanka before the verdict. It’s the only time I’ve ever found the
CIA
useful.”

Supira
, laughter, serious talk, hours stretching into early dawn, Suli picking up energy, others drifting off one by one until Suli and I are alone with the sound of cicadas in the jungle, the glow of the kerosene lamps, the discomfort of the metal chairs. I want to move, find my tent, catch some sleep, but I also want to stay here with Suli, I don’t know why – to let Joanne know that there’s no reason to worry about me and our conversation before, that I won’t be imposing my clumsy body on her again. But also because of Suli, her sense of spirit, this intoxicating talk of rebuilding an entire country, the whiff of power and responsibility, of history surrounding this woman. It’s heady stuff, and there’s an old sense too that, since she’s a woman, a small one at that, she could use my help – as if I have anything to offer. I’m surprised to find myself thinking this way, yet there it is. Maybe everyone feels this way: she’s no arrogant, untouchable General Minitzh, but tiny Suli Nylioko, brave as an angel but she needs our help, she can’t do it alone … and so we give it freely.

“Have you heard from your family?” she asks, a question that catches me off-guard.

“I get e-mails from my son,” I say. “He’s only eight. He isn’t a particularly informative correspondent.” And I don’t often remember to write back, I fail to say.

“I lost my son,” she says. “After Jono was killed. I tried so hard to hang on to him, but I lost him.” The clear eyes, calm hands, her face so suddenly sad. “Nothing could be right again for him. The harder I tried to hold him to me the more he pushed away. You know how adolescents can be. He went for everything that would take him away. The friends, drugs,
interests … it was all designed to add distance. My daughter stayed with me. My daughter became my closest friend.”

I ask where she is now and she searches through her handbag, comes up with a photo of a dark, sinuous young woman holding an infant, beaming, with a tired-eyed white man standing behind her, his hand the size of her shoulder.

“Safe in England. Living a very conventional life. Happy, happy life. We talk nearly every day.”

“And your son?”

Eyes down, hands spreading out on the tabletop, fingering the edges of the photo.

“I don’t know where Jacob is. It’s a terrible, hollow feeling, not to know. Except that I have a sense that I’ve lost him, that it’s irrevocable. I don’t know why. I suppose there always should be hope. But I don’t feel it. What I feel … I think it must be close to what a woman here feels who has lost a son or husband or father to the IS, only there was no news, it was simply a disappearance and they won’t even admit to having taken him. It’s just – empty. Their struggle is with the
IS
but somehow mine is with God. I had a husband who was a brave man and we were steps away from safety, so why didn’t God give us those few steps? And I had a son I loved more than … more than God, and I think I got the Old Testament God, you know, the jealous one who couldn’t stand to be second in any way. That is not the God I pray to, but I fear it’s the God who took Jono and Jacob because I loved them too much.

“I’m drunk, you see,” she says, “so you mustn’t remember any of this. But part of why I came back to Santa Irene and stood up when it was time was to show Jacob that I’m still here. How could I face those soldiers? Was it prayers to the God who took my family? No. Not all of it. It was partly too to have my face and name sped around the globe so Jacob
could be proud. He doesn’t have to be ashamed of who he is.”

Breaking down now, this tiny iron-willed lady. I stand, nearly totter over myself from stiffness and the need to pee. “Come on,” I tell her, gently pulling her out of her chair. “You should go to bed. Where’s your tent?”

“I don’t think I have one. I didn’t mean to stay. I don’t sleep anyway. I just need to sit.” Small voice, not the fireball of earlier in the evening but a deflated, tired soul.

We step out of the tent into the grey light of a chilly dawn. A black and yellow spider knits the last strands of an elaborate web stretched between a tent rope and the ground; a lizard flashes for cover off the path ahead of us; overhead a bird stops its song as soon as we come into view. I take Suli to the rock where Joanne and I sat the day before. Down below the valley is sunk in mist, but the first gold bands of sunlight are poking between mountain peaks.

“Stay with me,” Suli says.

“I’m exhausted. I need to find my cot.”

“Stay with me.”

She folds her legs beneath her, straightens her back, closes her eyes as the sunlight soaks her face. I sit much less formally, my knees drawn up, and look not at the valley but at her. If I had a camera and could capture this light, then here’s my Gandhi at the spinning wheel – Suli in meditation. The lines on her face soften, her shoulders relax, she clasps her hands in front of her, almost, but not quite, in prayer. I need to pee badly now, there’s no escaping this mundanity, and I don’t know why she doesn’t have the same need – unless she does and this is all a show, like arriving here yesterday with the reporters, like visiting the
sorialos
.

I leave her finally, sleep fitfully, and when I rise for breakfast she has gone, back into the maelstrom of nation-building.

“A
nd what did you do then?”

We have returned to the
Justico kampi
, to the endless testimony, but for now we have moved on to questioning some men from the military. Sin Vello takes his great head off his hands and pulls a glass of water to his mouth. Mrs. Grakala’s eyes flutter from behind her spectacles and I wait for her body to slump, completely asleep. I’ve been waiting for her to fulfil the promise Suli predicted, but so far she’s been a void in this commission, has barely shaken herself to utter a word. So the chief justice and I take turns with the questioning and Luki tries to keep up with the translation. The man in the centre chair is a helicopter gunner not so different, perhaps, from the one who pointed his machine-gun at us in Hoyaitnut. He’s young and wiry; his moustache is thin enough to look painted on. Without the glasses and helmet, though, he loses the look of cold efficiency – he’s just a skinny young man now, scared to be here.

“Answer the question,” Sin Vello says. “What did you do then?”

“I opened fire on the women on the hillside.”

“As you had been ordered?”

“Yes.”

“Who ordered you?”

“Captain Velios.”

“He was your captain?”

“No. He was from a special unit.”

“What unit?”

“He was part of the
IS
.”

“How did you know?”

“Everyone knew.”

“Did he give you this order in person?”

“No.”

“Did you ever meet Captain Velios?”

“No.”

“But you knew that the order had come from him?”

“Yes. That’s what we were told.”

“By your commanding officer, Major Tuk?”

“Yes.”

“Why was a major taking orders from a captain?”

“I don’t know.”

“But you felt that since the orders had come from Captain Velios it would be all right to shoot down these women on the hillside?”

“I was following orders.”

“Did they look like terrorists?”

“No.”

“What were they doing?”

“Gathering wild yams.”

“For terrorists?”

“I do not know.”

“What did you do with the bodies?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“We flew away.”

“So you have no idea if anyone survived?”

“They were all dead.”

“But you flew away?”

“They were all dead.”

“And it’s all the fault of this Captain Velios?”

“I followed my orders.”

Captain Velios. In a week of questioning military personnel, this shadowy figure emerges as the villain of nearly every abuse. It was Captain Velios who ordered the slaughter at Hoyaitnut, the poisoning of the wells at Tylios and Gumptavinka, the kidnapping of union leaders in the capital. Velios who said to take no prisoners, Velios who ordered the execution of the village boys, Velios who said to drive over the journalist Ho Kionga with the van. Velios who commanded the secret special operations unit about which nothing is known. Velios who made the plans, gave the orders, knew exactly where to attack, when and why and how.

But no one has met him. Not Major Tuk; he only heard Velios’s voice on the telephone. Not Colonel Loros; he received his orders from Velios via General Kuldip, who died last month of a heart attack. Why were a general, colonel, and major taking orders from a captain? Because Velios was understood to be the voice of President Minitzh.

Who’s also dead.

It is my turn to question. The corporal sits small and uncomfortable in the witness chair, his uniform faded and wrinkled, his shoes ragged runners instead of proper military footwear.
He leans to the left – probably only one speaker in his headphones is working.