Burridge Unbound

by Alan Cumyn

  I don’t have this much time to waste. Sin Vello, Mrs. Grakala, and me – we all look as if we could expire at any moment. But Sin Vello seems happy to pontificate; Mrs. Grakala reads till her eyes droop. And I sit here, silent, stewing, understanding nothing. This isn’t a show for me, not with my heart the way it is.

  As with yesterday there is a sumptuous luncheon. This time we’re seated with a number of township mayors who have no connections to the commission at all, but appear to have used the excuse to come to the capital. There are photos and toasts and phony smiles, and through it all the veneer of my courtesy becomes more brittle. I make a point of crossing the room to corner Minister Tjodja and inform him that the translation service has been useless so far.

  “Mr. Burridge, please do not worry yourself over such technical difficulties,” he says. “My staff is fixing them as we speak. Have you met Junta Gund from the Chamber of Excellence?” Junta Gund rises from his dessert and I give him the barest nod before turning back to Tjodja.

  “Well, until the service is up and running, perhaps you could provide summary translation for me for this afternoon’s session. Your English is excellent, Mr. Minister.”

  He blanches. “If only I had the time,” he says. “But we are fortunate that there is no afternoon session planned for today, and I am certain everything will be functioning tomorrow. It’s all formalities, anyway, Mr. Burridge.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean so far. Justice Sin has been setting up the administrative workings. It’s nothing for you to concern yourself with.”

  “Then perhaps I do not need to attend,” I say sharply. As I expect, he backs off.

  “Tomorrow will be very different,” he says quickly. “But please have patience with us. We are just a backward country. What would be done with a snap of the fingers in the West is much more difficult here.” His head droops slightly as he delivers this last spineless comment, but I manage to leave before I say anything insulting.

  “You’re awfully quiet,” Joanne says in the taxi back to the hotel. We’re stuck in traffic again. We could have walked, but even yesterday’s wall of rain was more inviting than today’s oppressive heat and pollution. The cloudburst will come later. For now the air is sweating and breathless and mildly poisoned, and it presses down on us heavily.

  I tell her about liir, island spirit. “It’s a funny term, meant pejoratively–” As soon as I mention the word both Nito and our driver turn and smirk, although they can’t follow the rest of my explanation. “There has been such a parade of colonial powers through here – the Spanish, Dutch, British, Americans – that for centuries it’s been considered a patriotic duty to make sure nothing runs smoothly. So when Tjodja dips his head and tells me I can’t expect a functioning translation service in such a backward country, he’s really expressing a perverse sense of superiority. All these rulers have never changed us – what makes you think you will be able to get anything done?”

  Joanne grins. “You’ve just described most places on this planet,” she says. “The trick is to figure out how to keep from having that whatever – liir – swallow you up.”

  Our driver tries to turn left at an intersection, but no one will let him through and we get caught. The light turns red but we can’t clear, it’s jammed up ahead. We can’t go back because a tritos is trying to bull through behind us. The oncoming traffic fills up whatever space was left. Now the light cycles fruitlessly: red, green, yellow, it doesn’t matter. We honk and the tritos honks and everybody else too. We inch forward and stop, inch forward, stop. A man on the corner wades into the thick of it and waves people on, stops others, yelling instructions and collecting tips. Inch and stop and inch and honk and pay and inch and stop again.

  “Where there’s a will there’s commerce,” Joanne says, shaking her head.

  In the evening we are invited, suddenly, to a gala folk-dance performance at the Minitzh Arts Centre. The name is yet another reminder of his legacy, like the airport, like the soccer stadium, and the Minitzhi katra dinga, the central post office. There is little time to prepare – a messenger delivers the invitation just as we’re finishing dinner in the Happy Mouth Lounge. I’ve brought nothing as fancy as a tuxedo, and have given up even on neckties, so my batik island shirt will have to do, and Joanne wears a simple black cotton travelling dress with a string of pink coral bought at a stall outside the hotel. We ride this time at high speed in a black limousine along avenues that seem to have been cleared of traffic for the event. Nito is much more nervous than in any falling-apart taxi we’ve been in so far. He glances frenetically out the various shaded windows at the tropical darkness. I see nothing but shadowed buildings, checkpoints, soldiers in armed Jeeps patrolling the side streets.

  “It looks like they’re getting ready for a coup,” Joanne says nervously.

  But it’s not that, it’s a night out with the spoiled upper-class lumito. The Minitzh Centre stands glittering and new, flooded in purple and pink lights, the one corner that was blackened by fire in the riots looking in this light softened, like a bruise. We leave our limousine and walk arm in arm past a phalanx of photographers. Everything is excessive – the jewelled and sequinned gowns, the slicked hair, the perfume, the teetering shoes and tinkling chandeliers and delicate glasses of champagne handed out with the programs as if the country were overflowing in riches.

  We sit front-row centre, drawn and pressed here by the crowd, stuck to this spot. The dance is a solo by Marika Contala, the most brilliant feriko dancer of her generation – it says so in the English insert of my brochure. So why can’t I get translation for the commission? Feriko is a complex series of sudden, sinuous movements brought to a periodic halt, the pose held five to ten drumbeats before the dancer melts into other movements, hands and arms snaking, legs twisting and stretching, eyes doing most of the communicating. Only one story is told in this type of dance, but in several variations, of the attraction between the pure Princess Tarlan and Gnotka, the horned ruler of the underworld whose heart has not held love since Mother Earth abandoned him as a young man. In some versions – again, according to the program – the innocence and purity of Tarlan wins out, and in others Gnotka’s darkness envelopes them both. Marika plays all the parts, soft and slight yet tall as Tarlan, a rigid and powerful little toad as Gnotka. Joanne quickly becomes entranced by the performance, but I can’t relax. I feel oddly complicit. They need me here, I think, to validate their opulence amidst suffering and poverty. I look around, wonder if Suli Nylioko will make an appearance. But later, when she doesn’t show, I realize that the People’s President wouldn’t come here. Not even Sin Vello and Mrs. Grakala came. I was the only one and this is my last time.

  It’s hard to stay awake. The music seems strained, difficult, the clues and messages of the dance too obscure and coded to pick up. When it’s finished – Tarlan has won, I gather; Gnotka has been transformed into a shining prince – there’s a reception, but I plead fatigue, try to keep the disgust out of my voice.

  My bad mood carries over to the next day. Joanne has a hard time marshalling me through medicines and breakfast, and we arrive late at the Justico kampi. Sin Vello is already talking to his assembled aides; Mrs. Grakala is already nodding in her seat, the papers piled around her. I walk directly to my regular seat and snap on my earphones as I sit down. That familiar deadness. It’s not working. They’ve done nothing. I jam through the channels: janal lito, janal ista, janal trikos, janal kolian … Dead, dead, dead.

  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m just …”

  “Calm,” says Joanne beside me, but I can’t stay calm. I smash my fist on the table and rattle my headphones.

  Mrs. Grakala starts awake and looks to see what the disruption is. Justice Sin opens his palms in a gesture of monumental concern and powerlessness, and two aides rush to my side to fiddle with the connection, as if that’s the problem.

  “You haven’t got anybody translating! Don’t treat me like a bloody idiot!” I start
to gather the new papers – no, for God’s sake, they’re all in Kuantij! So I scatter them in the open area in the middle of the room, where our witnesses are supposed to testify. If we ever get around to calling any.

  A clamour, of course. Aides rise, try to smooth the feathers of the ruffled foreigner. But none of them can speak English! The minister, Tjodja, appears, not the least bit embarrassed about having told me yesterday he was too busy to deal with the commission. “I need a full translation service,” I tell him, trying to keep my temper from going completely off the rails. “I’m not going to sit here and validate what I can’t even understand. And I want to see your president today, or else I’m going home!”

  “Bill,” Joanne whispers, her hand on my back.

  “But Suli is not available!” Tjodja says. Squeaking in panic.

  “Well, maybe I’ll have to make myself unavailable!” I say and storm out, Joanne in tow, papers dripping from my briefcase, who cares?

  Tjodja begs me down the hall, but I tell him, again and again, what my conditions are. I’m not here to see this commission become a joke. I’m not lending my name to a sham and a farce.

  In the hotel room Joanne sits reading a novel and I steam, pace, fume, mutter.

  “You gave your conditions,” she says, turning the page, not looking up.

  “I did. I made a stand. This whole situation is ridiculous.”

  “Absolutely,” she says.

  I slam the bed with my foot. Several useless stacks of commission paper jump, then settle back.

  “Why don’t you do your animals?” she asks languidly.

  “I can’t. I can’t relax.”

  “But I thought the animals were supposed to help you to relax.”

  “They’re to help me kill people who attack me,” I say. “Then I can relax.”

  “Listen – the ball is in their court and it might not come back for a while. Who knows where Suli is or how long it will take them to get the translation service working?” She doesn’t look up, but sits engrossed in her book, stays infuriatingly calm, like some wife who’s been thinking rings around me for years.

  How long am I prepared to wait? Through room-service lunch, the fruit plate that’s already growing tired, and stale bread that seems purposely unappealing, as if part of a larger conspiracy to make me leave. What’s the point of staying in a luxury suite if the food is bad? Through the long afternoon of nothing but fuming and self-doubt. Through the sun sinking back into the other side of the ocean, but false somehow, like a cheap effect liable to fall over at any moment.

  “Look, you’re driving me nuts!” Joanne says. “Would you stop that pacing?” She’s finished her book, is suddenly much more aware of my restlessness. “You’re starting to remind me of Dennis.”

  “Dennis?”

  “Just sit, will you? Would you be of some use? Can you play the piano?”

  I stride over to the gleaming grand and hammer out “Chopsticks.” Then I return, push her feet off the sofa, and sit down.

  “Tell me about Dennis,” I say. “Make it last several hours.”

  She doesn’t want to at first, but I insist. If she won’t tell me about Dennis I’m going to start pacing again.

  “Okay, okay!” she says in mock panic. “Dennis was our driver in Sudan. I forget where he was from. Michigan? He’d left a program in international relations so he could get some field experience. And he was an All-American lacrosse player. He really wanted to see the world. So there he was, our driver, in this little camp covered in dust. The end of the world. Jerry, an Australian doctor, came up with that. It was so hot and barren, everything was covered in fine grey dust, you couldn’t escape it. Dust in your eyes and your mouth. We breathed it in even through handkerchiefs. There was dust in the water.

  “Just boys in these camps, from the south. The lost boys. They’d been kidnapped by the Muslims, brought north and made to fight against their own people. These ones had escaped somehow and walked back south to find their families. Only their families were gone. The boys were starving, many of them were going to die. Some had only the strength to lie on their cots hooked up to an intravenous. The others would sit in the shade and stare at nothing. Such silence. I’ve heard it twice, in southern Sudan, and in Rwanda when all those Tutsis were force-marched back from Burundi. The scale of it kills something inside you, or makes you feel like something’s been killed. Silence and suffering times tens of thousands. All those fifteen-year-old boys internally shut down, seeing but not saying a word. Beyond words. Beyond anything that can help. I lasted three months and then I swore I wouldn’t work in those conditions again. It was the hopelessness. I felt the words get sucked right out of me, a vacuum of silence and any sound, any thought or feeling I might want to express would be drawn out and dissipate into nothing. In the face of all that. A few drops of water in a bone-dry desert.”

  She looks down at the rug, her fingers drum absently on her shin.

  “What about Dennis?”

  “Oh, yeah, Dennis, the driver. We didn’t stay in that camp. It wasn’t safe after sundown. We didn’t have the security. So every evening Dennis picked us up and drove us back to our own camp, which was twenty kilometres away. The militias took over the refugee camp at night. We had no control over what went on. We didn’t know and we didn’t ask, and nobody talked about it. It was one of those things, you know, beyond our control. God grant me the wisdom. In the morning we’d drive back, very slowly, because different groups mined the road at night. The village kids would mark the mines with little sticks for us. Every so often we’d have to all get out of the truck and check to see if it was a marker or just a stick. And when we got to the camp in the morning sometimes there were bodies. Well, in the morning often there were bodies. We couldn’t always tell if it was the malnutrition or the dysentery or the militias. We didn’t look too closely, to tell you the truth. We just focused on what we could do in the present moment.

  “But Dennis had a hard time with that. He brought in our supplies and had to deal with the militias more than most of us, and of course he was the one driving over that mined road. Sometimes the food got through and sometimes it didn’t. There was a lot of pressure and Dennis had such a great image of himself, you know, All-American jock. But this was another universe, this was everything tilted and upside down. He started raging against it, he couldn’t stay still, he wanted us to take on the militias, arm ourselves, do something! God, he was scary. There was huge Dennis armed with a butcher’s knife in the mess tent, and wiry little Jerry. He was mostly bald and laughed at everything. He talked so softly, and finally after two hours he led Dennis out and put him in a straitjacket. We all watched. It was awful. It was the very lowest point.”

  Tap, tap, tap, her fingers against her shin.

  “The moral is,” she says, smiling, a real Joanne smile, “you have to play cribbage. That’s what we decided. Dennis never played cribbage with us in the evenings. So he thought about all the crap too much. That kills you in this type of work. You have to play cribbage.”

  She gets up and goes into her room, returns a moment later with her medical bag and a deck of cards.

  “Meds first, then we’ll play.” And out they come, the rattling little bottles of pills. We go through the ritual silently, and I swallow everything down with practised gulps of the bottled water provided by the Merioka. Quick and painless.

  “Where’s the board?” I ask.

  “There’s no board in this type of cribbage. You have to keep track of your own points in your head. And your opponent’s. If you find he’s cheating or has made a mistake, you call him on it.”

  “How can you tell?”

  “You have to be sharp. It doesn’t allow you to think of anything else.”

  She shuffles the cards like a Vegas pro.

  “I haven’t played for ages,” I say. “How do you score?”

  “I can see you’re going to have a great time,” she says. “Maybe we need to add some money to make it inte
resting.”

  I’m awful at it, but it is interesting, and keeps my circuits full until nearly midnight, when Joanne goes to bed. I play a few more hands against myself, completely absorbed, when the phone rings. A male voice says, “Suli would like to see you. You can come now?”

  I’m groggy with the late hour, with fatigue and indignation and too much mental cribbage. It doesn’t occur to me right away that my walking-out stunt might have worked.

  “It’s awfully late,” I say. “Perhaps in the–”

  “A car is downstairs. You can come now?”

  I knock softly on Joanne’s door and tell her the news.

  “She wants you now?” she asks.

  “It does sound odd, doesn’t it?”

  “Say you’ll see her in the morning.”

  I go back to the phone to set up a meeting for tomorrow. But Suli herself comes on the line.

  “Bill,” she says, strangely familiar, as if resuming a conversation, “I know this is unusual, but it looks like my schedule has changed for tomorrow and then I’m travelling for the next while, so I’m not sure when I’ll be able to meet with you properly. And it’s important that we do meet right away. If you’re not too tired.”

  “No. Of course,” I blurt.

  “You’ll find my personal guard waiting outside your door. You have nothing to worry about with them. They would step in front of a train to protect you.”

  “Let’s hope there are no runaway trains.”

  “Yes, of course.” Her words are clipped, slightly hurried. I think I hear someone in the background going on in Kuantij.

  I tell Joanne the details through the door and she asks if I want her to come with me.

  “I should be all right,” I say. “You get your rest.”