Accusation (22 page)

He nodded.

After a moment, she asked, Are you angry?

Some time.

How are things now that Mr. Richard is here?

He stared toward the milky horizon. Okay.

She asked him if he’d known his birth family and he said they had left him here when he was very small, during the big famine. They had come down from the north, maybe from Gonder. He did not know how they had made the trip or if they were alive or how to find them.

What will happen to you, and the others, when you are through school, because isn’t the Village only a place for children?

In another year, he told her, he would move to a house in town called Transition House where he would learn to fix things, bicycles, maybe televisions, then try to find a job. A chicken whirred and clucked close by, underneath the porch.

She asked him if Mark Templeton had ever had friends or other men visit the orphanage, and when Abiye said yes, she asked if anyone else ever asked him to do the bad things or any other boy that he knew of to do them? He seemed to consider this question before shrugging. Maybe.

Do you have any names?

He shook his head.

Gerard told me about a boy named Tedesse. He said a man approached him.

Mr. Leo. He say he has job for him in Addis Ababa.

Is Tedesse here?

He go.

To Addis?

Abiye nodded.

Do you believe Mr. Leo had a job for him?

He looked at her as if she were a fool. No.

There’s a man, Mr. Raymond, who runs a children’s circus in —

Oh. Something sprang open in Abiye at the sound of this: joy, excitement travelling out through his legs, his arms. You know it? The circus come. They do it here. The jugglery, the acrobatic. They teach us it.

Abiye, the circus man, Mr. Raymond, did he ever approach any children here, or the children in his circus, did any of them say anything about him doing the bad things Mr. Mark did?

No. One time, Mr. Mark he takèd me and Tedesse and Gerard to see circus in Shashemene.

Gerard came?

Yes. To the big football place, how you say?

A stadium?

That is it. Maybe thousands, so many see it. Lights. Big music. And children, they make all of it.

Do you know if Mr. Mark and Mr. Raymond are friends?

Maybe. Mr. Raymond, he say to me, I make circus here.

He was going to start a circus in the Village?

They teachèd us. The ball toss. The hand walk. I show you.

Abiye scrambled to his feet, lowered his hands to the ground, and tipped himself upside down, flip-flops still attached to his toes, his jacket bunching around his upper arms. Hand over hand, legs in the air, he shuffled over the cement floor.

Abiye, take off your jacket. It looks dangerous, caught around your head like that.

Sara, too, clambered to her feet as Abiye lowered his legs with a thump, stripped his jacket from his arms before upending himself once more, and, legs waggling but perpendicular, made his way along the cement, slap, slap, slap. Out of sight, from around the curve of the porch, came the uneven skitter of his turn, then he reappeared, still up-ended, and made his way back to her. Coming to a standstill, he arched his legs all the way over until his feet met the ground in a backbend, and from there leaped breathlessly upright, then sprang into another, and another backbend. Sara clapped; he was not as agile as the children of Cirkus Mirak but made up for that in strength and the ferocity of his attention and the wildness of his pleasure. And she found pleasure in the presence of his.

Abiye, can I take your photograph?

Someone’s feet made a swift passage across the yard. Abiye stopped abruptly as Sara turned, and Olaf Olafsson raised a hand to her.

Abiye said quietly, When Mr. Raymond come, I show him what I do. Or I go to circus in Addis Ababa.

No, Abiye. That’s probably not a good plan. Addis is dangerous and a long way off. And, listen, I know Mr. Raymond said he’d come, but I don’t think he can come now. He went away. Another man, Tamrat Asfaw, runs the circus.

She’d dealt him a blow. Once more something in his body contracted: a dream that he’d been holding on to snatched away. This was what she’d done for him, ripped away his last, best hope.

Abiye, it’s better for you to stay here. Can you do circus here? Make a circus of your own. In the Village. With the other children. There are circuses starting up in other towns too.

Mr. Richard does not like it.

Circus? No, I don’t think he does. Can you do it even so? Or do it in secret. Remember the things you saw the children do in the stadium. Practise. Here, in this place. Make up your own acts.

The scraping back of wooden benches sounded through the windows of the classrooms and children’s voices rose, along with the clapping of a pair of hands and a man’s voice trying to establish order.

Sara pulled her camera out of her bag. Here she was, hypocrite, suggesting Abiye contain another secret. And stay in the place where he’d been violated. Richard Langley might well try to put a stop to any breath of circus. Yet how in her right mind could she counsel Abiye to set off for Addis?

Through the dirt yard, the other children were making their way toward the refectory in weaving lines.

When Abiye asked her if she was coming back, she said, It’s not likely. Not soon. I have to go home to Canada. But I will tell Mr. Asfaw about you and the Awassa circus.

The Awassa circus?

Your circus.

She would attempt to tell Tamrat, anyway. She scribbled the Cirkus Mirak phone number on a piece of paper torn from her notebook and handed it to Abiye, knowing how unlikely it was that he would be able to make a phone call, but whatever he chose to do, at least he would have this talisman, and he folded the paper carefully and tucked it in the pocket of his shorts.

You can do this, she said, because, having stolen his story, it seemed the best thing that she had to give him.

Lunch was eaten at one end of the refectory, Sara seated with the two teachers, Richard Langley at her elbow, each of them chewing on the same moist pasta as everybody else. There was something subdued about all the children: she did not know if this was because of what they had been through or was an effect of Richard Langley’s new reign of order.

After lunch, he directed her to the free office, as Abiye had called it, which had been Gerard’s, although Richard Langley did not mention this provenance and the office had been stripped bare of any personal effects, leaving nothing but two chairs and a desk. He brought two more boys to her: Tesfaye, then Daniel, both younger than Abiye, perhaps ten or eleven or twelve. Sara was aware of their round heads, the delicate shape of their skulls through their cropped hair, as she listened to them, their voices higher, softer, their English more halting than Abiye’s. She could have called for Alazar’s help. She didn’t. The dinners, the special English lessons, the things the man had done to them. What about the circus man? They shook their heads. Tesfaye said, I do the jugglery. And Daniel said, I do backflip. As if these, too, were messages they needed to get out to the world. So there was this trace and legacy of Raymond Renaud. And as yet no confirmation of his participation in any
ring
.

A hoarse-voiced boy named Solomon sat working pleats into his trouser legs, swinging his feet in dirty pink plastic sandals, and muttered, He tell me to say the untrue thing.

Who did?

Gerard did it.

The next day, back in Addis Ababa, Sara called the counsellor, Fasika Azeze, who did not seem happy to hear from her but was prepared to talk despite her concern about the possible effects of any public attention on the children.

It is their shame I worry about — Ms. Azeze, at her end of the line, seemed to be thinking out loud. Restitution, it is important, and it is important for them to tell their story when they wish it, but there is the problem of their shame. Yet it is terrible for perpetrators to get away with such crimes, and it is a danger to keep these things hidden.

In person, in her office off the Bole Road, Fasika Azeze was both fierce and polite, a woman of about Sara’s age, a scattering of dark freckles across the bridge of her cheeks, her nails painted to a pearly sheen. The room bore a scent of hair oil. She had spent ten years in Italy, working with immigrant women and sexual abuse cases there, she said. Born in Addis. She’d heard about the circus, the allegations, knew only that there would be an investigation. She travelled down to Awassa every other week. I do not think they will tell you all of it. Her voice was reedy but firm. Because they are too damaged. Something in Sara balked at the insistence on their damage.

Because they are confused and frightened, Fasika Azeze went on. They do not know what they should say and they want to say what they think is the right thing to say. I would not nor I cannot tell you exactly what went on in that place, or precisely how many children or for certain how many men. I do not know it yet. Maybe more, but they have all been betrayed.

In the yellow Lada, Sara and Alazar bumped along the maze of dirt and stone-laden streets that led to Yitbarek Abera’s house. A dog slunk along beside the car, beneath the overhang of a cinder-block building. A goat stared hypnotically in their direction before bolting out of the way. This time, the flimsy corrugated metal gate was not clamped with a padlock. When Alazar stepped out of the car and knocked upon the metal, the whole expanse shook. He cupped his hand around his mouth and shouted, and a moment later the gate began to judder open, backward upon its shaky hinges, in clanky reverberations, drawn by an as yet invisible person. Alazar drove them through into a small, bare yard in front of a small house. Weedy bamboo pushed up through the corners of the fencing. Behind them, a middle-aged woman in a saffron sweater and flowered housedress fought to close the gate. Three limber boys in the white shirts and dark shorts of school uniforms had slipped out through the open door of the house and stood staring at the car, shifting their balance from foot to foot like delicate storks, until the woman shooed them back inside. Circus children: they looked familiar. The introductions were all in Amharic, Alazar doing his convivial best — Sara caught her own name, and the woman’s, Dassala. She is Yitbarek’s aunt, Alazar said, as Dassala led them, Sara with her knapsack in one hand and a bag of groceries in the other, through the front door.

The room they entered was disorientingly dark. Then: in the dim, far corner of the room, a boy lying upon a cot turned his head in their direction. The bright flash of his eyes. The other boys, murmuring, moved toward him and cut him off from sight. A television, high on a wooden console in the opposite corner, was flickering greenly at low volume, girls in white shaking their shoulders, folkloric dancing that no one seemed to be watching. Along the near wall, a pair of crutches leaned against a stuffed armchair. There was a second armchair; both had white antimacassars folded over their tops. A cement floor. A curled bedroll tied with a rope was stuffed behind the first chair. At the foot of the cot, a rudimentary wheelchair was parked, the folding kind, with canvas seat and back unfolded, and on the seat lay a square of foam molded in the bumpy shape of egg cartons. David had mentioned using such foam at the worst points of Greta’s illness, when she’d been bedridden, to prevent bedsores.