The Truth Commissioner

by David Park

  The walk back to the house is weighted with the words in his head arranged all wrong like the flowers he bought for her birthday and cack-handedly tried to shape in a vase. How many layers of their life will be pulled away by what he has to tell her? And what will be left when he has finished? He thinks of the stillness at the heart of the lake and tries to tell himself that love can endure. Even this. But he’s no longer sure of anything he tells himself, of what he can believe and what is just another deception, designed to smooth his way, so it feels as if he knows nothing any more and that everything he wants to hold tightly slips through his fingers like water.

  He hesitates at the door then goes in. Maybe she will stretch out her arms to him. Maybe she will tell him that he’s cold and enfold him in the embrace of her sleep-stirred warmth. Then after a while she will say, ‘What does a girl have to do around here to get a cup of coffee?’ and he will slip reluctantly from her side.

  She looks at him as he stands in the doorway of the bedroom watching her.

  ‘Well, Danny, is the lake still there?’

  He doesn’t answer and she sits up in the bed, shaking the black shock of her hair away from her face.

  ‘What’s wrong, Danny?’

  He looks into her eyes and takes a single step into the room.

  ‘My name isn’t Danny.’

  She’s looking at him and then she starts to smile but stops. No other way. It’s the price that must be paid. The water is cold against his skin. He steps further into the room and each slow step is weighted with fear. More fear than he’s ever felt and he knows there are no words.

  STANFIELD PRESIDES WEARILY OVER the chamber and glances regularly but surreptitiously at the clock and feels as if he’s slowly drowning in words. Day after day, it’s as if the dam is breached and out pours a torrent of rising levels of hurt that have been stored over long winters of grief. They come to the chamber to let it finally burst its banks and their breathless flood threatens to engulf him. He lifts his head and tries to draw breath because it always feels as if there’s not enough air in the room so he’s grateful, at least, for the seemingly straightforward brevity of the case in progress. There’s been an admission of responsibility, an apology and even a seemingly sincere little appeal for forgiveness. All that remains is for him to ask Mrs Latimer, or her representative, if she would like to sum up her feelings about her husband who on a summer evening twenty years earlier opened his front door to his killer. He’s glad they’re reaching the conclusion because it feels as if they’re sinking in the hollow of the afternoon where the movement of time has wilted and collapsed into a lethargic slumber.

  He glances down at the elderly woman who’s not spoken a single word so far. She looks frail, withered, like a desiccated leaf that might blow from the tree in the next wind, but there’s also something about her that unsettles him. Is it the fixity of her gaze? Her refusal to look at the man who killed her husband? The way her thin and knobbed hands clutch the Bible that she holds in her lap so tightly?

  ‘Mrs Latimer, would you or your representative like to make your final address?’ he asks gently, hoping that it will be mercifully short, then nodding encouragingly as she slowly stands and makes her way to the microphone. She walks, more quickly but it’s not to the microphone and then as Stanfield blinks his disbelief and time seems suspended, or unfolding in some unpredictable sequence as if in a dream, she has a knife in her hand – Stanfield can’t be sure but thinks it’s come from inside her Bible – and is lunging towards the killer of her husband. It’s the physical change confuses him and takes away what little breath he has. What once seemed withered has hardened into an angular rigidity, her limbs stiff as rods, like a scarecrow suddenly come to life. People are screaming, chair are toppling over as her intended victim tries to raise an arm to shield himself, but the knife skewers over its top and embeds itself in his shoulder blade. Stanfield stands up but for a second freezes before he shakes himself into action, presses the panic button on his desk and almost immediately police arrive.

  She stands perfectly still, the knife dropped to the floor, with the appearance of the catatonic, unseeing, unhearing, unresisting as she’s led away. There are medics in green uniforms kneeling over the victim and then the blare and static of radios set in motion. Stanfield slumps back in his chair for a moment before standing again and loudly calling, ‘Clear the chamber, clear the chamber!’

  The next day Stanfield looks round the table at his gathered team and reads the spreading disillusionment in each of their faces and hears it, too, burrowing into their voices. He would like to be able to take some perverse pleasure in it but is unable to because he worries that if the process continues to slide, then sooner or later some of the slimy mess of failure will stick to him and perhaps damage his future interests. He’s already started to compose his letter of resignation but needs to find some point of principle on which to hang it before the whole gimcrack edifice tumbles like a house of cards.

  Now his team sit silently and look at him for inspiration. His eyes flit round their faces, lingering lightly on Laura before moving on. He knows it’s the moment when he should deliver a rousing call to battle, when like some Roman general he should ride along their line with drawn sword. But at first he can’t bring himself to muster anything more than a few unconvincing observations.

  ‘What happened yesterday was terrible and shocking. Thankfully it seems as if the wound isn’t life-threatening but if anything was designed to show us the importance of what we’re trying to do here it was that moment. There will be people who will seek to use it for their own particular gain but we’ve got to move on. We’ve had failures, we’ve had setbacks, but in a risk-filled process like this these were inevitable. We knew it was never going to be easy. We have to be prepared for early setbacks and cynical attacks on the integrity of the process but we need to remember we’re trying to do something in this country that’s never been done.’ He pauses. Perhaps he might rise to the occasion after all. ‘We also need to remember that we’re working in a society that’s been deeply divided for thousands of years. This is probably the most challenging thing it’s ever been asked to do and sometimes it’s going to falter and it’s going to get frightened but if we can carry this off, then it’s the most important step this community can possibly take towards lasting healing.’ He can’t quite believe he’s just used the word ‘healing’. But clearly he has underestimated himself: their heads are nodding. Is it just the sun sidling surreptitiously into the room or have Laura’s eyes widened? Even Matteo has altered his posture and thrown off his former slump to sit straight backed and alert. ‘And don’t let anyone for a moment forget that we’ve also witnessed remarkable things, the coming together of former enemies in ways, perhaps, we could only have imagined. So now let’s not falter in our convictions because we’ve encountered difficulties.’ And so he continues until his words ignite some new passionate resolve and there is a babble of voices all offering a contagious and collegiate response.

  After they’ve gone he goes to the window and looks to the other side of the city street where there’s a juice bar which each morning sets three small metal tables and chairs on the pavement in an incredibly optimistic belief that passing punters might attempt to brave the slicing wind; a travel agent’s desperately trying to fight off the internet and do-it-yourself hols which fills its windows with misspelled special offers and a minimalist optician’s where there appears to be nothing inside. How much he would give to be on a plane to somewhere else and whatever destination he imagines he’s always accompanied by Kristal and he’s always there to observe her pleasure in what he can show her, what he can teach her.

  Things indeed have gone more badly than he could ever have anticipated. After an earlier attack they installed a band of protective glass across the witness stand and now they’ll have to site a metal detector in the building’s entrance. As well as the two incidents of violence there have been regular examples of verbal abuse and threats
shouted with an intensity that he’s never heard before. Now there is a permanent police presence that he can summon with the press of a button but some days he feels as if he’s sitting in an abattoir, where all around him is the raw carcass of human suffering being boned and filleted while the steady drip of human hate coagulates on the floor of the chamber.

  The families of the victims have started to reclaim their dead and forgotten loved ones and given this brief moment of public restoration, they parade to the chamber carrying portraits of their murdered relatives and candles that gutter in the wind tunnel of a street. The portraits of children are the most disturbing as they force the viewer to try and project how they now would look and in the imagination construct the life they never knew. But there is no elegy played out in the increasingly elaborate rituals that grief has created, only a fractious, bitter stirring of the water to which people rush with earnest hope of healing. He has presided over some truth but little reconciliation and as each day goes by it becomes increasingly obvious that what the plaintiffs want is truth and the justice that they feel they’ve been denied. Stanfield has come to recognise it in their eyes, their need for the final assertion of some weighty moral imperative that will sweep the perpetrator to divine justice. Instead they get some formulaic, pre-learned response that expresses a vague regret for the pain caused and then presents the get-out-of-jail card that avoids personal guilt or moral culpability by stating that they believed they were fighting in a war. When it’s all over, Stanfield sees, too, the void opening up inside the bereaved, when they understand that this is all they are to be given and they realise it’s not enough. Often at the end they have to be helped from the chamber as if they haven’t grasped that it’s all over, that their time has finished, and then they shuffle towards the exits, their confused, white-salted faces glancing back over their shoulders.

  However, it’s also true that there are days when something else happens and someone’s story rises up like a sad aria that, for all its artlessness, its lack of structure and simple language, sings out and fills the chamber. Some stories – and he can never predict them or see them coming – take on the mysterious power to reach beyond the external world and touch the quick of everyone who hears them. There are even moments when some kind of synergy is created and a fusion of relief or some long-diminished need compels the antagonists briefly towards each other like Priam kneeling to kiss Achilles’s hand, before pulling apart again suddenly conscious of their actions.

  But an idea, he tells himself, that’s come too soon. He has to find some way out – he was wrong to have sneered at the lecture circuit. Perhaps even a visiting professorship in a West Coast university. Each day as he sits in the chamber he feels himself imbibe some more of the toxins that seep from the buried corrosive and carcinogenic emotions that have been given permission to come to the surface. Sometimes he feels a tightness in his chest, senses shallower breathing and he worries about his health. Perhaps he should play that tennis. Perhaps if he could buy out her lease there might be some way that frees Kristal to move in with him.

  The killers and their co-conspirators don’t look good, whatever side they come from. Even with the cheap suits and their spruce-up jobs, time hasn’t been kind to them. Often they come with a well-publicised litany of convictions for petty crime bolstering their CVs, tarnishing whatever claim to idealism they once harboured, and their inarticulacy makes Stanfield squirm with embarrassment. And always the unspoken question hangs over their evidence as to what gave such inferior forms of life the right to take someone else’s. Sometimes they arrive with their supporters huddled round them in a tight phalanx, protective arms on their shoulders shepherding them into the building, and they look like punch-drunk fighters being led into the ring by their trainers. Afterwards the cameras show them lighting cigarettes, their heads huddled together to form a windbreak, or else solitary figures hurrying away with pulled-up hoods.

  He has his own ritual after each case. It’s evolved gradually and serves to throw off what tries to cling to him like a thickly spun web. He makes the debriefing session as short as he can, deflecting as many of the unresolved issues as possible and attempting to appear to be answering Matteo’s pertinent questions while at the same time mentally consigning them to the shredder. Then he walks the five minutes to a nearby restaurant where the same table is reserved for him each night and they serve decent food and have waiters who don’t say ‘cheers’ when they’re tipped and on to the apartment where he showers and changes his clothes before sitting with a glass of wine at the window overlooking the river. By the second glass and accompanied by the right music he begins to peel away some of the fine filament that fastens to him. He needs music to help reconstruct the equilibrium of his internal life, to reassure himself that he has journeyed to the underworld and safely returned. So although he’s devoid of any religious impulse he listens to choral music by Tavener and sometimes Vaughan Williams’s ‘The Lark Ascending’, although the only bird the river seems able to supply as a visual accompaniment is the occasional seagull.

  He knows, however, he will never be able to see out this far-flung tour of duty, that if he’s to stay, someday he will sit here and not even the music will free him from the spiral of depression; that slowly the welter of words and the ugly raw faces he has to endure each day will insidiously take up permanent residence inside his head. Of course there’s Emma but despite their meeting he’s started to tell himself that he has to be prepared to let her go, that this hair shirt should finally be discarded. The intensity of feeling he experienced on meeting her again has started to fade and there was no response to the card he sent her with the simple, deliberately understated and unthreatening message that it was lovely to see her and he hoped they might repeat it. He doesn’t think that he’s ever spent quite so long composing so few words. The card’s cover reproduced da Vinci’s cartoon of the Virgin and Child with St Anne and its tender beauty reminded him of how long it’s been since he’s had the pleasure of looking at paintings. For a second as he sips the wine he imagines himself with Kristal in the Louvre or the Hermitage and how lovely she would look against the snow and the golden domes of St Petersburg. When he completes his first cycle of two months of sittings, he has a month’s break before resuming the second cycle – perhaps he should try to arrange some reinvigorating trip abroad.

  But will he ever see his daughter’s child? Will she ever let him be a grandfather or even a father again? He supposes that without the assistance she requested his chances are remote. Stanfield smiles bitterly as he acknowledges the power of Martine’s revenge. The closeness she established with their daughter precludes any attempt on his part to discredit her, or even in the gentlest of ways point out some of her flaws and suggest that perhaps she was not an easy woman to live with. But is this what Martine truly wanted? Is this what she envisaged as his punishment? He can’t believe that even at the end she hated him so much as to want this.

  It’s his favourite choral track – ‘Love Bade Me Welcome’ – and there is something intensely soothing in the ethereal purity of the voices and something also that stirs a pleasurable sense of sadness. Perhaps it’s the music, perhaps it’s the wine, perhaps even the impeachable emptiness of the apartment arcing over him again, that makes him turn to the memory of what he first felt when his daughter sat in front of him with her hair sprinkled with beads of water and a new life swelling inside her and he knows he doesn’t want to let her go just yet.

  In the morning he’s another interview to do. The world’s media have arrived and taken up temporary residence – he’s told that the city’s running out of hotel rooms. There seems no corner of the globe that hasn’t sent a reporting team and, shortly after the first wave, a second wave of circus freaks attracted by what exactly Stanfield isn’t sure has blown in. So each morning camped outside the building one might encounter a group of Navaho Indians who do some dance that claims to evoke the spirits of the dead, a Buddhist monk who attempts to give flowers to
those who enter or a violin-playing survivor of Kosovo. It’s only slightly reassuring to see also the homegrown stalwart Ulster evangelical jostling for his space with a text-covered sandwich board that asks where everyone will spend eternity.

  He gives his well-practised little soundbite to a young Japanese reporter and her television crew. Afterwards for some bizarre reason she blurts out that she likes U2 and she wants to see the Giant’s Causeway. He smiles and nods encouragingly then extracts himself as quickly as possible. In the afternoon he presides over a session that he finds stultifyingly boring and he has to force himself to concentrate to avoid slipping into a disinterested lethargy. He’s moved on, left this case behind, and in his imagination he’s already presiding over the case of Connor Walshe and he knows that when he looks down it will be the face of Maria Harper he will see and behind her, if not in the flesh, the face of his daughter.

  These people’s faces, their guttural voices, are long merged into some soapbox drama that leaves him desperate to reach the end. He looks around the chamber counting off the resident members of the press; the regular attenders in the public seats who in his imagination increasingly resemble caricatures and grotesques that Dickens would have been proud of and have queued for the privilege; the officials and recorders; the medical staff, counsellors and ministers, He feels an increasing immunity to the suffering that is served up for his inspection – by now it is a cold dish, rarely distinguished by an articulacy or differentiation from all that has gone before. Sometimes he has to stifle a yawn and his frequently asked questions as to whether anyone needs a brief adjournment are driven only by self-interest.