Accusation (32 page)

At the bottom of her street, wet but not soaked through, she passed her old white Toyota, the speckled gleam of it. There was no sign of David’s car anywhere ahead of her, amid the row of parked cars. He wasn’t on the porch. The house was lightless.

From inside the front door, the red light of her answering machine blinked on its stand at the other end of the hall. Two messages. The first: not David. Sara, it’s Rafael, from Melbourne — cheerful and astonishing — they’re here, your kids, the younger ones are boarding with a family, the older ones together in one rental unit. They can’t work, but they’re taking English lessons and spending a lot of time hanging out at a community storefront in Maribyrnong. I’ve met a woman who’s teaching them, and I believe I saw two of the boys out juggling, busking on the river walk, yeah? But when I tried to approach them, they scampered off. I’ll keep working on the teacher, her name’s Alice, and see what else I can turn up.

The machine beeped, even as Sara was picking up the phone. He hadn’t left his number. His business card was somewhere, probably upstairs, or his number scribbled on a scrap of paper. The second message: Sara? Are you there? I guess you’re not. The bewilderment in her mother’s voice: and the old mystery of her mother’s closed-off fear, her mother’s stern parents hovering somewhere behind it.

Upstairs, Sara swept her arm across the surface of her desk, searching for Rafael Nardi’s card. The little rectangle found in the side drawer, on top of the audiotape of her interview with Raymond Renaud. The phone rang its Australian ring eight times before the line clicked to a machine: Rafael here, I’m not here. Leave a message, will you?

When she pressed the keyboard, the swirls of the screensaver were replaced by black-on-white text and in the top right corner a clock: nine-ish, and so a little after eleven in the morning in Melbourne. What did her mother want? She hadn’t said.

Seated, head in her hands, bereft, she waited while the modem sang its dweedling song of connection, then pulled up her email account. Clicked to create a new message, entered Juliet Levin’s address, Juliet whom she hadn’t heard from since their broken-off conversation about Raymond Renaud’s suicide.

She heard nothing from Juliet for days, and began to think she wouldn’t hear from her.

Once more Sara sat within the dark walls of an edit suite. And there he was: outside on a white wooden chair, in a pink T-shirt, beardless, cropped hair, a beige stuccoed wall behind him, as Juliet’s close but invisible voice called out, Say anything, through a whooshing that must be the wind. Tell me what you had for breakfast.

A cedar branch quivered above Raymond’s head. Through the sound like sheets flapping, he said, Oatmeal, coffee, juice.

Another male voice, presumably that of Justin, said, The sound’s bad. Juliet’s back appeared, huge, in a mauve sweater, jeans, boots, receding as she walked toward Raymond, and leaned over him, her hair falling across his face, her voice audible, through the crackles and pops of his microphone. She unclipped the mike and moved it from his chest to his T-shirt collar, an intimate gesture that looked intimate, the two of them whispering. How’s that? Juliet asked. Raymond’s hand brushed hers as he responded, Okay. Juliet turned, pink-cheeked, and Raymond began calling out numbers, five, four, three, two, the air still whinnying until Justin’s voice broke in, That’s not going to work. The tape cut out.

When Raymond reappeared, in the same shirt, same chair, microphone pinned again at his chest, he was seated, as Sara remembered from when Juliet had first shown her the selections from her tapes, in front of the blue wall of his garden, the gaudy orange beak of a bird of paradise flower swaying behind him. And, like that first time, she was struck by his air of hopeful and generous engagement. She’d been thinking a lot about innocence. How it was a state that could only be perceived by someone able to conceive of its opposite. To proclaim your own innocence was to be capable of imagining that you might not be innocent. A true innocent would have no awareness of this. She searched his face and body for signs of strain. Or evasion. Hints that he was dissembling. Projecting a mask. Could staring bring revelation — a glimpse of what lay beyond words? What was felt? She stopped him with the little joystick in her right hand, his mouth half open, eyes narrowed, then set him in motion again. He turned his head full-on to the camera. She felt — Exactly what kind of intimacy had he shared with Juliet?

Can you tell me how you came to Addis Ababa? Juliet called to him.

At the end of the interview the camera was switched off. Then someone turned it back on. Raymond still sat in his chair, miked, but his posture had relaxed, and he settled forward, resting his clasped hands and forearms on his thighs. So when you come back, he was saying, You have to go. There’s no one else I can tell this to who will understand how weird it was. I drove up to Lalibela, this was two years ago. Most of the tourists, they fly. It’s easier. Driving takes three days. You go by the Chinese highway and then you go into the mountains, and the roads, well, they are a bit wicked. I had the truck. I was giving lifts to people all along the way. Sometimes — he moved, and the mike crackled and Sara lost some of his words — switchbacks. You feel like you are heading for the roof of the world. But the churches. I think it is thirteen in total, all carved, not built but carved out of the rock, okay? You’ve seen photographs, haven’t you? It is so medieval. There are hermits living in holes in the walls of the courtyards, on beds of straw. I love it. I find this tourist shop. Really it’s a shack. And I’m looking at these little wooden diptychs and triptychs of religious scenes — crackle — the Larsens — they like that kind of thing. There’s a book I notice on a shelf, surrounded by other objects. It has a paper wrapper, and I pick it up because that’s odd. To find a book. And then the wrapper, it’s a page from a German-to-English language lesson. Someone has taped it over the actual cover. I open the book. Guess what it was?

There was a teasing liveliness in him as he spoke that Sara had never observed before. It was different than what he projected in public, when his manner was more performative, and he seemed to have a need to be in control, and when she had spent time with him, those dark and delirious hours, even when things had relaxed between them, there had inevitably remained in him an undercurrent of turmoil and fear and exhaustion. Was this lightness something that Juliet elicited from him? A sign of intimacy, an aspect of their intimacy?

Unseen Juliet said, How can I possibly guess?

Juliet was frightened of disappointing him and, indeed, a flicker of disappointment crossed his face. His shifting face and body were the screen upon which their entire conversation registered. He said, Astonishing novel. By a writer from Montreal.

Something by Mordecai Richler?

No. Again, the flare of disappointment, matched by new anticipation. Okay.
Beautiful Loser
by Leonard Cohen.

Oh, Juliet said. Right. You mean
Beautiful Losers
.

Raymond twitched toward impatience. Have you read it, do you not know it?

No. Juliet’s voice sounded small and humiliated.

Ah, so all this is lost on you. This is like explaining a joke.

Can you tell me, please?

Now he turned performative. Whatever that earlier quality was, it vanished. He hadn’t slept with Juliet. It is a very sexually explicit book, it is a bit wild, so you know discovering it there was just so, so, like a little bomb going off. How did it get there? Someone must have left it. What were they thinking?

What did you do?

How do you mean?

Did you buy it, take it?

I don’t even know if it was for sale. No, no, I left it, for someone else to discover and have their own shock.

Juliet had left the tapes in a box on Sara’s porch. One evening near the end of November, Sara arrived home from work to find the box pushed against the wall beneath her mailbox. There was no delivery slip with it, only her name and address written on the top, and a return address on Havelock Street. If Juliet had delivered the box in person, she had done so at an hour when Sara was unlikely to be home. When Sara lifted the box, which was not heavy, its contents rattled, the giveaway shifting of the plastic cases of videocassettes. Seated on the sofa with the box on her lap, she ripped off the tape that sealed the top and lifted the cardboard flaps to find a row of mini Hi8 tapes, clasped in their hard grey covers like miniature books, tapes that, she realized, she wouldn’t be able to watch on her home videocassette player. She would have to find professional equipment on which to do so. Along one side of the box’s interior, Juliet had stuffed a regular-sized VHS cassette, and some file folders, which, when opened, revealed the shot lists from her original tapes, time codes, and next to them descriptions of what the tape contained at that instant: 5:11:05: girls getting into pose, photo shoot; 5:12:33: another pyramid, reverse angle, Raymond watching. A separate folder held the shot list of her abandoned film. There was no accompanying note of any sort. Nor had she included Justin’s email.

A TV journalist friend, Carol Frank, said, Sure, you can use the equipment here, what do you need, like a couple of hours?

Longer than that. Maybe I’ll rent somewhere. There’s a lot of footage.

Yours?

No, someone else’s.

She was in a room nearly identical to the one in which she and Juliet had sat together at the beginning of the fall, when the days were still long and heat had pressed itself against the walls outside, not in the video post-production facility where Juliet had rented space but in another smaller facility in a smaller warehouse farther west. Her coat hung on a hook on the back of a door and she had arrived in the dark, after work, and would leave, hours later, in the dark, disappearing into the cascade of images in between these times. Leaning back in her chair, Sara stretched out her arms. Was she editing something? Not a film, but editing thought. From the very first jerky shots trained down a hillside toward a wide dirt playing field where men in hats raised a blue canvas scaffold to upright, and one of the men, in a red baseball cap, turned to peer up the hill, she was following Juliet through her trip.

The hungry mouth of the tape player swallowed another small cassette: on the monitor, the interior of the rehearsal hall of painted cinder blocks appeared, and eager children in dirty clothes, who kept looking at the camera, wiggled and hopped in the line they’d been made to form by Gelila Melesse and Kebede Gebremariam and two other older performers. Gelila and Kebede divided the street children into groups, sending boys to one side of the room and girls to the other. Gelila and her partner led the girls in a series of backbends on the blue mats, Gelila shouting to be heard, while beyond the row of cinder-block pillars, Kebede demonstrated how to toss and catch two juggling pins, then three, and the street boys tossed their pins in the air and tried to catch them and sometimes did and at other times pins fell to the floor and rolled or bounced. One boy skittered madly about the room on a unicycle, gleeful arms waving, and two more boys tottered about on stilts. The noise of the room was cacophonous. Raymond was nowhere in sight.

A new shot, still in the rehearsal hall. In a corner of the hall, half-turned from the camera, Raymond wound black electrical cord around one arm, voice raised, directing some of the boys to help him. He wasn’t miked. His words weren’t clear, only the short bursts of his directions. Something didn’t seem to be understood. He appeared to be speaking a mixture of English and Amharic. He set down his looped coils, knelt, pulled out more length of cord. He sounded stern, at instants even sharp with the boys.

He was in the doorway of the hall, in T-shirt and ball cap, gesturing, ordering Kebede and another boy, was it Dawit, to carry some clangy metal poles outside.

Gelila and Kebede stood outdoors against a yellow wall, clad in the T-shirt and tights, T-shirt and trackpants that they had been wearing in the previous sequences. A hard pulse beat at Kebede’s chest.

Do you want to stay in the circus? asked Juliet’s off-screen voice.

Yes, Gelila said in English with a great, wide smile, her headful of tiny braids quivering. Oh, yes. I wish to stay with circus always.

And Kebede nodded, his gaze veering off and returning.

What will you do when you get too old, if it’s a children’s circus?

Maybe, Kebede said. We make two circus. One small, one big.

You mean, one circus for children, one for — not children? Have you talked to Raymond about that?

He say we teach, Gelila said. I be secretary to circus.

I teach, Kebede said, nodding vigorously. The faint line of his moustache hovered along his upper lip.