Accusation
Also by Catherine Bush
Claire’s Head
The Rules of Engagement
Minus Time
Copyright © 2013 by Catherine Bush.
All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher or a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). To contact Access Copyright,
visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call 1-800-893-5777.
Edited by Bethany Gibson.
Cover image detailed from “Balance on one foot that’s equilibrium opposites attract and retract, that’s a fact” © 2012 Sophie Schwartz, sophieschwartzphotography.com.
Cover and page design by Julie Scriver.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Bush, Catherine, author
Accusation / Catherine Bush.
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-0-86492-900-6 (bound). ISBN 978-0-86492-780-4 (epub)
I. Title.
PS8553.U6963A33 2013 C813’.54 C2013-902176-0
C2013-902177-9
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Into the street the Piper stept,
Smiling first a little smile,
As if he knew what magic slept
In his quiet pipe the while;
— Robert Browning, The Pied Piper of Hamelin
And how could we save ourselves from suspicion? There is no deliverance from suspicion! Every way of behaving, every action, only deepens the suspicions and sinks us the more. If we begin to justify ourselves, alas! Immediately we hear the question, ‘Why, son, are you rushing to justify yourself? There must be something on your conscience, something you would rather hide, that makes you want to justify yourself.’ … Everyone crouched, fell to the ground, and thought in fear, ‘I am accused.’
— Ethiopian palace official, from Ryszard Kapuscinski, The Emperor
1996
She pushed her chair back from the desk as the awful word on the screen entered her, and the name of the man linked to the word.
Mid-afternoon on Labour Day Monday: heat filled the room, the upper floor of her house, the streets of Toronto, the air above them, and more sweat pooled under her arms and at her throat and across her chest, as she stood, trying to calm the blood speeding through her veins. Outside, when she paced to the window, beyond the Norway maple, a car passed and with it the ordinary mystery of strangers going somewhere. The cry of a cicada soared, and out of the stillness, a jet fighter, part of the holiday weekend air show, roared into tumult, shaking the walls and window glass.
If she had gone away for the weekend instead of lolling at home and, obsessive journalist that she was, following the news on TV of the Iraqi march north toward Kurdistan, if she had not gone upstairs to her computer to check what more she could find online in the scroll of press newsfeeds, she would not have come across this mention of him.
She turned back to the room, which seemed full of his presence. She saw him as she had first seen him, on stage in Copenhagen, alive with pride and adrenaline, a tall, light-brown man in a white T-shirt, head tucked beneath a red baseball cap, the child performers of the circus crowded about him.
Months later, she had met him. One night in July, a little more than a month ago, in the passenger seat of her car, he had canted forward in distress, urging her onward. She had driven him those long hours through the night, helping him get to Montreal and from there back to Addis Ababa and the circus children.
At her desk, quickened fingers seeking more, she located a day-old article from the Sydney Morning Herald.
Nine performers in the Ethiopian children’s circus, Cirkus Mirak, have defected and are applying for asylum in Australia, the migration agent representing the performers has announced. The performers fled the circus last Thursday night and claim that circus founder and director Canadian Raymond Renaud consistently abused them. The circus was on a ten-day tour of Australia, and appeared most recently at the Sydney Alternative Arts Festival, its acrobatic performances hailed by critics and crowds alike.
She knew nothing for certain. It was only an accusation. Abuse: the article didn’t even specify what kind. Yet, as she knew, an accusation, regardless of truth, has its own life when let loose in the world. Experience had taught her this. The words, released, went on uncoiling themselves. A pulse rapped in her head.
What to do?
Do nothing. Or call Juliet Levin to tell her what she had discovered.
Sara had flown to Copenhagen at the end of March to attend a conference on migration, as the Danes called it — immigration, she would have said. She had been invited along with Rivka Mendelsohn, the Israeli-Canadian academic who worked with Tamil populations in Toronto. Rivka had recommended her to the Havn Foundation, which was sponsoring the conference, as someone who wrote about immigration and multiculturalism issues: this was now her beat. And how different this trip was from the ones she’d taken when working for the foreign news desk and in the years when she’d traipsed as a stringer through Eastern Europe and the Middle East.
In her room in the lovely old hotel by the waterfront, a wrapped chocolate lay like a scarab atop the linen pillowcase, and at the conference itself, in the breaks between papers delivered by the German, Danish, Dutch, and Spanish social scientists and bureaucrats, eleven in all, plus Rivka, a quiet young woman rolled a trolley bearing the finest coffee in bone china cups to one end of the long mahogany table.
All the Europeans, none an immigrant, spoke in clear English about the problems of the Turks in Frankfurt and the North Africans in Amsterdam and the flood of Poles into London. All Sara’s expenses were paid, and she had no responsibility other than to listen and feel coddled and occasionally guilty about being coddled amid all this luxury and talk. No helmet, no fixer, no flak jacket. At dinner, they went out and drank a very good wine on the foundation’s tab, and the Europeans asked her questions about multiculturalism and she got drunk as she talked about the possibilities of the immigrant nation, she, the granddaughter of Scottish and Welsh immigrants, sounding as optimistic as she could given that the Europeans were so curious about it.
At the end of the second day, she plunged out of the hotel into the early evening, desperate to smash through an invisible screen, gulping for air. Ropes clunked atop the masts of ships along the waterfront as a breeze carried in the tang of the sea, and with a long stride, turning a corner, she came face to face with a poster: on a blue background, dark-skinned children in leotards formed acrobatic poses. The words Cirkus Mirak fra Etiopien aroused her curiosity: an Ethiopian circus, here in Copenhagen. She had never had much interest in circuses, but given where she was and what she was doing, going to see this circus seemed suddenly appealing. She debated trying to cajole some of the others into joining her, but that would mean stealing them away from another boozy dinner. Back at the hotel, she left a note for the conference organizer, another for Rivka, then, like a truant schoolgirl, took off, foraged a quayside dinner of mussels and beer for herself, and caught a cab to the warehouse theatre where the circus was performing.
Inside a white room that functioned as a lobby, tall, blond people milled about, wide-shouldered men in grey coats with mufflers cinched at their n
ecks, women holding the hands of babbling children. Being tall and blonde herself, in her black boots and black coat, Sara passed as a likely Dane among them. There were a few others not obviously Danish: a dark-haired woman glittery with gold jewellery who spoke what might have been Hungarian to her diminutive male companion, a handful of Ethiopian expats though not many: a quartet of older Ethiopian men in suits with firm postures and long, strong faces and arched brows conversed in the staccato sounds of what was probably Amharic; a few young men and two couples, along with a family of mother, father, and three boys accompanied by an older woman in a wool coat, a white veil trimmed with a glint of colour thrown over her head, also stood close by. Most Ethiopian immigrants, Sara surmised, would not have been able to afford the price of a ticket.
She had been to Africa once, to Kenya, five years before. The paper had sent her on from Istanbul, where she happened to be, to Nairobi, from where she’d headed north with a convoy of aid workers, in trucks and white Land Rovers, up through the scrub desert of Turkana, called by someone the frying pan of the world, to the wastelands of the Kakuma refugee camp. The van she’d travelled in had blown three tires on thorns on the last stretch of the journey, and each time the van juddered to a halt, she and her companions had clambered out to help fix the tire or crouched by the road in the appalling heat, the view a terrain of desiccated thorn trees and scorched riverbeds, which nevertheless was touched with austere beauty. Even when the land looked empty, people appeared: a Turkana woman wanting to change an American hundred-dollar bill; a teacher — dark skin shining, in dark suit and tie, despite the heat. After the third tire blew, a truck full of American evangelical Christians stopped and offered them a replacement tire. In the camp, children clutched at Sara: Somali, Ethiopian, Sudanese. Hands tugging at her clothes, they begged her to take them away with her. At night the earth became a field of tiny fires. All day she swept at the constant eye-bombing swarms of flies. It had been hard to contain her despair, though this was matched by admiration at the resilience of those who’d walked for weeks, even months, to reach this place, and there was reassurance in the thought that ordinary tasks — washing, cooking, tending children — went on here as everywhere. Out of these internal states rose the insistence that there was meaning in documenting the stories of people in a place like this: the thing she did. She hadn’t needed a helmet or flak jacket here either, not that she ever went into front-line war zones, only into borderlands of turbulence and uncertainty. She had been drawn to extremity but had no appetite for deepest danger. And then, a year and a half ago, she’d given it all up, the risk, the search for authenticity by giving voice to the ground truths of such places, in favour of a life that kept her close to home.
Along with her ticket to the circus, she was handed a program in Danish, largely inscrutable, but there were photographs, in grainy black and white, of the child performers forming human pyramids and airborne in front of a crowd of children squatting on what was presumably an Ethiopian hillside.
As Sara took her seat in one of the raked rows, musicians filed to a cluster of instruments and amplifiers in front of a raised and curtained stage. Not children but late teenagers. A hush fell over the audience as one of the young men settled the strap of a saxophone across his shoulder, another took up an instrument that resembled a lyre, yet another cradled a long-necked, single-stringed instrument and shook out his other arm, which held a bow, and an older girl, willowy and slight in a loose white costume, curved a cordless mike into place over one cheek.
When the curtains parted, the young woman began to sing, her sinuous voice rising, the wail of the saxophone rising with it, above the pluck and vibration of the strings, a pulse starting. Across the stage lay a row of blankets, humped forms beneath them, all still, until the one in the middle began to stir, limbs in a bright-blue leotard protruding, limbs that then shucked off the blanket to reveal an elfin boy, who soared into a backflip. The blankets to either side of him shifted, rose up, and were tossed off as two other boys, clad in yellow and red, tumbled into somersaults, and beside these, two more forms lifted their blankets upward and were revealed to be girls, in looser white outfits, like that of the singer, bodies balanced on forearms and chests, legs arced back above their heads, blankets dangling and twitching from their feet.
There wasn’t precisely a story, although the three boys who’d come from beneath the blankets seemed to be on a journey in which they encountered groups of other performers, who were eager to show off to the boys what they could do, as were the boys, in turn, so that an air of lighthearted one-upmanship passed back and forth. There was some comic miming: one of the boys disappeared and had to be searched for. A trio of girls helped. Jugglers appeared, and stilt-walkers, two slim earnest boys atop tall wooden legs. The boy in blue reappeared on a unicycle, arms waggling, chased by the boys in yellow and red, then by an older, menacing boy on stilts. The music was fervent, propulsive, at moments almost a lament. Some of the children seemed as young as eight, or ten, and others were teenagers, one of them tall and strutting, with the wisp of a moustache. All of this Sara imagined describing to her lover, David.
A fleet-footed flock of boys rushed into sight and rippled across the stage in barrel rolls, bending at the waist and diving into the air. Boys climbed atop the shoulders of other boys and sprang into somersaulting dives. A row of four boys held out their hands to three, who hoisted themselves upon the shoulders of the first row, then two more climbed atop those, toes curled around the shoulders of the boys below, and the boy in blue was lifted into place atop the pyramid, the boys at the ends of each row holding their arms out while the other boys gripped the legs of those above them, the tower wobbling yet intact, the boys’ faces alight with exhilarated concentration, the boy in blue grinning at the top. To a shower of applause, he toppled forward, caught in the arms of two girls.
More girls shook their shoulders in a dance, a host of tiny braids tumbling around their ears, then arched into backbends and again formed a human pyramid; atop a row of three, two, an older girl balanced on arms and shoulders curved her torso and legs so far around that her feet dangled like hands beside her head. There were perhaps sixteen performers in total, although it was difficult to count, all the bodies in motion, their energy infectious, their agility so beguiling that Sara was caught up, entranced. Two boys entered carrying flaming torches and began to toss them back and forth. What she felt from them: such pleasure, such excitement.
The music, like the performance, reached a crescendo, sound and movement, the female vocalist’s voice sailing high as if soaring among the bodies and pressing them onward, and the saxophone offered its own fevered surges. Two solemn, almond-eyed boys dragged out a span of thick rope and, from either side of the stage, began to turn it like an enormous skipping rope. The tall, moustached boy held a match to it and flame licked its way along the span, leaping along it as the performers began to hurl themselves over the flames, one after another, the blue boy, after a series of speeding backflips, hurtling over the burning rope last to land, still grinning, arms outstretched.
Applause erupted as the children bowed, sweaty, breathless, the flaming rope extinguished, before they, too, began to clap, and two boys slipped into the wings and tugged a man into sight.
Tall, he ducked his head so that his face was hidden beneath his red baseball cap, as if he were bashful or wished to reduce his height. Not obviously Ethiopian: he did not have the distinctive look of the Amhara, anyway. A muscled, supple-limbed, pale black man in a white T-shirt, who pulled off his cap to reveal cropped hair and a radiant and dimpled smile. He held up his hands to applaud the children before opening his arms to the audience and taking a deep bow himself. The children and teenagers crowded close to him, flushed and quivery, as if drawn to him, and he in turn vibrated in their presence, his gaze alight. He pressed his hands against his jean-covered thighs. After motioning to the audience to quiet themselves, he began to speak. In English. A young blonde woman, holding a microphone
at the side of the stage, translated his words into Danish.
Thank you, he said, thank you so much for coming. His lilting voice unfurled itself, and Sara thought she heard the hint of an accent, although she couldn’t place it.
We are so very thrilled to be with you on our second tour to Europe. We have travelled very far in five years. In five years the world knows of us, and we are happy to show the world what we have achieved in this time, to say this is what is coming out of Ethiopia, not starving children, but this energy, this accomplishment.
There was a touch of self-consciousness in the way he used his voice, as if he were playing an instrument, yet his warmth and combination of fervour and charm overtook whatever was manipulative. He breathed out a generosity that made him the kind of man you felt compelled to watch.
He waited for the young woman to translate his words before continuing. We have taken some of the traditions of Ethiopian music and dance and wedded them to circus. There is no tradition of circus in Ethiopia. Five years ago when I came to Addis as a teacher, I had no idea to create this. We began with nothing and made one show, and there was such enthusiasm that now we have a circus and a circus school, and other circuses are forming in other towns, and in other parts of East Africa, an entire movement. We work with children of the street, but this is not all we do. We work with all children who come to us, who wish to study circus, and we have a great amount of support from the NGOs, the non-governmental agencies, who love how we go into communities to perform and bring social messages to people through our shows and offer children this opportunity for self-affirmation and self-discipline. What I wish is to show children what is possible, create a magic, for children, for everyone, to transform things, to say this is what a circus can do and what children can do, wherever they are in the world. There are flyers about us in the lobby, and there is also a donations box if you wish to give more to our projects. We are grateful for any support.
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