Accusation

by Catherine Bush

  I’ll get to it. I need to tell you the other stuff first. Did Ed tell you how I lost my job?

  No. She felt like she was tugging something out of him, a ribbon out of his mouth bit by bit, out of the knot of desires twisting in him. How did you lose your job?

  I got fired. For helping the boys go to the police. The boys who were the victims of the former director, Mark Templeton. The sexual predator. You haven’t heard about any of this? No one’s said anything to you?

  No, Sara said. The important thing was to stay calm, not leap to any conclusions, go on eliciting information, the trick of professionalism, of necessary dissociation whatever her throat was doing or her heart. Or her hands. She had her notebook in her lap; she wrote down the man’s name. In front of her the lips of Gerard Loftus were saying these things.

  What happened between the former director and the boys?

  I was there for like a year, okay? And I’d be doing things, fixing things, because that’s part of my job. And I’d see boys coming and going to his house. He had them bring him dinner sometimes. Because he had to work late. He said. Or he offered them special English lessons. One at a time. He liked the smart ones. He never wanted the same one to come too often. That would attract attention. But I noticed. It was only boys. When I asked, one or two of them said he paid them. I thought that was strange. There was one boy, Abiye, he was a little older and he went kind of often. So I asked him more questions. And he told me what was going on. I said I would help him write a statement and take it to the foundation and the police.

  Gerard was staring at her, gauging the nature of her attention to him. He kept an eye on her hand taking notes. He leaned across the table to check the tape recorder himself.

  What about other people on staff? What were they doing? Didn’t anyone else notice anything?

  No one else wanted to notice, but I knew because I used to work in this other school, in northern Alberta, where the same thing happened. So I knew what to look for. Anyway, maybe as soon as Abiye and the other boys stopped going to him, Mark figured out something was up. Before he heard from the foundation or the police. One day he said he was going to Addis and never came back. Then the new director, Richard Langley, he came out and he didn’t want to talk about Mark or where he’d gone or what had happened. He said he’d left the organization, and then he read out a statement to all the staff saying there’d been an episode of misconduct and mismanagement, something like that, but they had dealt with it internally and it would never happen again. And we were supposed to protect the children by not talking about it. And he was furious with me because Mark had vanished. It was like because I helped the boys, it was my fault. But there were others. And they needed to get compensation too, because they were also victims.

  Other boys? What sort of compensation?

  Money from the foundation. Like Abiye got.

  So more boys came forward?

  I helped ten more make statements.

  Ten. After they knew they would be compensated.

  Yes.

  Though that compromises their testimony. Don’t you think? If they know they’re going to get money for it.

  Yes, but they’re victims. Why shouldn’t they get something for all they’d been through?

  Gerard — She took a deep breath. Okay. Do you have any idea where Mark Templeton is now?

  Maybe the US. Someone in Addis said they saw him getting on a plane. Listen. The foundation doesn’t want to see it. They want it to be one boy, one man. They fired me because I refuse to be quiet about it. It wasn’t just him, Mark, either. He’d have friends over to visit. They knew where to go to do their thing. Where they think they’ll be safe. It was a ring of them.

  A ring?

  There was another man, Leo Reseltier, he works in southern Sudan, he came, and I know he propositioned one boy, Tedesse, because Tedesse told me, he told him he’d pay him money, three birr, Tedesse said, to come to his room. But Tedesse wouldn’t do it. And Renaud visited. He knew Mark from before. I bet you didn’t know that. Mark told me. They’re old friends. They’d met years before in Sri Lanka.

  How often did Renaud come — alone, with the circus?

  Once with the circus. Twice by himself. He was supposed to be starting up a program at the Village, like a proper circus. So he taught a few classes, but the circus thing never happened. He taught a bit of juggling, stuff like that. You know, like, his cover.

  How fervent he was, she thought, spit on his lips, the craning body, how nearly lascivious in his need and his certainty. Did you see anything, or hear anything about anything happening while Renaud was there?

  Not specific, but he’d hang out, and he’d take kids off in ones and twos to teach them.

  Boys, girls?

  Boys and girls.

  Did any of them ever say anything, complain, did you ask?

  No. But everyone wants to do the circus thing so no one’s going to interfere with that. And now there are the other allegations against him.

  So you know about those.

  Everyone knows about them.

  Allegations he denies. People should know that too.

  Well, they all deny them. Someone has to do something. You need to look into this, you know you do.

  Are you religious? Evangelical?

  Am I what? No. Why? What sort of question is that? Not anymore. What does that have to do with any of this?

  You’re from Alberta. I wondered. Doesn’t matter. How old are the boys, and where are they?

  Ten, eleven, twelve. They’re at the Village. Where else do you think they’re going to go?

  I don’t know what to do, Sara said to David from the bed in her hotel, where she was sitting cross-legged, the squat black phone in front of her like a body that she was addressing, or the receiver was her route to David’s body, the magic capsule into which she poured her voice as his poured from it, from high in an office tower in downtown Toronto, where he was at work in the middle of his afternoon. In Addis Ababa, the lamp at her side glowed orange rather than yellow but did not go off, and a moth swung out of the dark and began to bash itself against the window. I don’t want to go. I barely have time to go all the way there. And my driver’s car has broken down. Then there’s this. The thing about him that makes me not want to believe him. Because he’s so insistent about his version of things. It’s a question of tone, his voice, his manner. Which makes me not want to trust him. Because he makes me so uncomfortable, I have a hard time imagining him being taken into the confidence of these boys without his somehow forcing himself onto them. Maybe that’s wrong. And he’s making these insinuations about Renaud without offering any proof. Which is also a reason to go. Maybe he’s done nothing but good and this is all me.

  How she’d wished, as soon as Gerard Loftus had loped away from the interior bar, while she waited to pay, that she had never met him. That Ed Levoix had never taken it into his head to introduce them. She felt a senseless anger at Ed, at Gerard, at herself. Longed for Gerard Loftus, his matted hair, his bulky sweater, his lips, his presumptions, his vindictive if crusading ardour, his moral certainty, to vanish off the face of the earth. This was not helpful, it was real but radically unhelpful. Her desire to, well, punch him out. This energetic mirroring in which her dislike made her more like him. She and David had discussed such things before: the antipathy she sometimes felt toward people she interviewed, his toward clients. And what was Ed Levoix’s stake in all this. Make up your own mind. Yet he’d felt she needed to know Gerard’s story.

  Having paid the very dark-skinned bar man with the slash across his cheek, either a former wound or ritual scarring, Sara had made her way back through the corridor of tony boutiques filled with crafts like those in the Larsens’ house and out the front door into the spreading, treed grounds that surrounded the Hilton, where she found no sign of Alazar and the Fiat. Nor was there any sign of him after half an hour, or after an hour, although, on the doorman’s direction, she vigorously searched the lot fu
ll of drivers, brown-skinned men in T-shirts lounging outside their cars. He must have dropped her off and left immediately; no one had seen a man or car that fit her description. After an hour, in exasperation, she took an ordinary taxi back to her hotel.

  The question you need to ask yourself, David said in that calm, calm way of his, is if you come home and don’t pursue this, how will you feel?

  I can’t not go. I know how I’ll feel. I won’t be able to live with myself. I’ll chastise myself. I can’t not do it.

  It was as if all those with an interest in Raymond Renaud were mapping themselves or versions of themselves on top of him, she thought. That’s what it felt like.

  There had been no message waiting from Alazar when she arrived back at the hotel. When she’d tried to phone the number she had for him, which, she remembered him saying, did not ring in his home, he didn’t own a telephone, the line rang fifteen times before an ancient-sounding man answered, who barely spoke English and who vanished for several long minutes before returning to tell Sara that Alazar, he work. That afternoon, she and Alazar had been supposed to visit Kidsit and her mother, try once more to speak to Yitbarek, also Yonas Berhanu, the kebele leader. She had three days left in her trip. She’d heard nothing from Raymond Renaud in response to her phone message. He wasn’t here or anywhere near here. He’d gone as far away as he could.

  How long will it take you to get to the orphanage? David asked.

  A few hours, several. I don’t think it’s possible to get there and back in a day. She’d asked the taxi driver who had returned her to the hotel and he’d said five or six hours and for an astronomical sum of money he’d drive her. Alazar, when he reached her at the hotel at last, his anxiety like a force field through which he pushed words, said, The car broke. Awassa, Mrs. Wheeler? It will take six hours. When do you wish to go? Sara felt him strain to hold back the new wave of anxiety breaking over him. Is tomorrow possible? she’d asked, and he’d said, I will see.

  Anyway, whether I go tomorrow is dependent on if my driver shows up or if I have to hire someone else. And that I won’t know until the morning.

  You’re good at improvising, David said. You’ve been in these situations before.

  And you’re so good in emergencies. Your fabulous ability to stay calm.

  This isn’t an emergency.

  No, okay, it’s a general statement.

  Will you be all right? I really should get back to work.

  I’ll go. I know I have to go. Take good care of yourself.

  Take good care of yourself. It was the thing they said to each other at the end of every conversation. Tenderly. They had not spoken directly of Greta. Yet she was there.

  No sooner had Sara hung up the phone than the other word, the forbidden word, came surging up, up through her abdomen, like a fist, making her leap to her feet and double over. Love, the force of it. She loved him. Of course she did. Love coursed its way through her. She missed him, far away. Love clamoured. It was not just longing and desire but grace, forgiveness, tenderness. It was in her body, a physical thing struggling to get out. It had followed her around the world. It tumbled down the phone line, came in through the closed window here in Addis Ababa, where the moth still battered itself against the glass. She had tried to deny it. It did no good. She opened her mouth. If she said these words to him, he’d freeze. He would say no, and don’t. He had said, Don’t. He would turn away from her. It is not possible.

  Did she love him because he was forbidden? Married, claimed, and therefore not accessible. She’d had time to wonder this about Graham too. If part of Graham’s appeal, at least in the beginning, had been the transgressive pleasure of sleeping with him and then walking into his classroom, knowing she shouldn’t be doing this and how perturbed and excited their secret made him. Was the forbidden a thing she did, a thing she longed for? Not forbidden in the same way as what Gerard was talking about but still.

  She would have said, given her complicated history with lawyers, that to be intimate with a lawyer was also the last thing she wanted. Unless her very antipathy had made David attractive, a desire to transgress against herself. He was not a criminal lawyer. He represented patents, not people. All his work was, you could say, about potential theft. He put it this way: he was interested in the rights of people, particularly those who made things up, discovered things, and needed to secure their rights to these things, in definitions of originality, fairness rather than truth.

  Working out a good contract is like playing a good game, he’d said, and is as revealing of the crazy parade of human nature and all that people try to get away with. Isn’t everyone in the business of seeing what they can get away with? He’d given a funny smile at that, then asked Sara whether she cared, as a journalist, if the people she spoke to were telling her the truth. They were in her kitchen, newly showered, leaning against the counters. Yes, she said. At least I want them to want to tell me the truth, or what they think is the truth, even if many people aren’t very good at it. My job is to try to report what they’ve said accurately.

  He hadn’t been practising when she’d met him. There were wanderings in both their childhoods, David’s military father having taken his family from a posting in Venezuela, where David was born, to a base in Germany, before their move back to Canada, to Trenton, Ontario, when David was eight. One of those first nights, maybe the first night, as they lay in her bed, by lamplight, after sex, he told her, The first word I ever spoke was door. I was nearly two. And that was weirdly prescient, since when I was thirteen my mother walked out the front door of our house and we never saw her again. He went on staring at the bedroom ceiling. When Sara laid a hand on his arm, his body had a kind of braced calm yet registered her touch.

  Did you ever hear from her?

  No. My father tried to track her down but gave up. My sister and I tried again when I turned eighteen and we got an address, but then we decided there was no point really, what was the point of contacting someone who didn’t want to be found. I think we all felt that way.

  Did she love you? The question burst from her. Oh, the unbearable, damaging things that people did to each other.

  Yes. He turned to look at her, still that teenager, holding her gaze, wanting a witness or something more. And then something broke, he said.

  It’s hard to explain what happened with my parents, she said to him, then or on another night. More lamplight in the bedroom. It had to do with my father’s neediness and my mother’s inability to look after both of us. There’s something very insulated and insular about them. It’s as if having a child bewildered them. And then they were away, not like your mother, but they did go away and there was a gradual falling out of regular contact.

  In the hotel room, she paced across the dingy carpet and peered through the large keyhole into the hall, while the moth went on thrumming against the window.

  She did not know what David felt, what he let himself feel. Greta’s next round of tests was coming up in a couple of weeks. In January, Greta would, if all continued to go well, be cancer-free for a year, and thus truly in remission. She did not know what to think of herself, that she’d let things come to this pass, love returning to her, though she’d sworn she wouldn’t let it, her longing to be with this man always. Did she want love in this form? Could things go on and on like this? Was there another way? What did she truly want, what did he? All these questions knocked against her in Addis Ababa. Yet here was love, unsayable, undeniable, and it was hers, whatever David felt, and maybe in its beautiful uselessness was where its meaning lay.

  Alazar led her out of the hotel to where a small yellow car waited, a Lada, Sara noted as they drew close. He seemed cheerful, filled with compensatory hopefulness, wanting her to be pleased, to make amends for the day before, for everything to work out.

  This is a good car, he said. Look. He knelt, and beckoned Sara to kneel beside him, and showed her the steel plate bolted to the bottom of the chassis, rapping at the metal with his knuckles so tha
t it gave a sharp tong. Then he stood and kicked the metal, and Sara, after giving the steel a knock with her own knuckles, nodded. A Russian-built Lada, butt of so many car jokes, hardly instilled her with confidence, but, what the hell, she would trust herself to it, and to Alazar. Okay, she said. Looks good, let’s go. She handed him her suitcase, which he loaded into the trunk beside the small satchel he’d brought for the overnight trip to Awassa, their bodies beginning to move in a synchronized dance, his gestures and manner growing familiar. How intimate, and domestic, the relationship with one’s driver could be.

  I know Awassa well, Alazar said as they headed out of the city, past the Edible Oil Factory and the Jesus Rendering Plant. I am from this part of the country, near Shashemene. This is the junction town where we will take the road that leads to Awassa.

  Do you know the orphanage called Hope Village?

  Maybe, but I have not lived there for a long time.

  She told him that the man from the circus, the former director, had visited the orphanage. She did not know what Alazar might have picked up over the last few days, what rumours he might have caught in the midst of conversations in Amharic that Sara did not understand or conversations with other drivers and watchmen that she had not been party to. If she were to reveal more about Gerard’s story and her interest in the orphanage, Alazar might feel uncomfortable, even morally compromised, especially given Ed Levoix’s assertion that any sort of homosexuality was an abomination here. Allegations of pedophilia might completely repulse him. If he discovered exactly what she was investigating, he might refuse to accompany her any farther.

  As they crossed flat plains in which the only trees were carried in chopped pieces on people’s backs, then through leafy copses strangely reminiscent of southern Ontario, Alazar spoke carefully about the growing restlessness of the Oromo, his people, since the current government, which had come to power five years before, after the dictatorship had fallen, and about which so many had had so much hope, was giving power to certain groups and not others, which led to the wish, in certain parts of the country, for greater autonomy. I myself have hoped for more change, and more opportunity, especially more economic opportunity, he said. It is hard to hope and then lose this hope.