Burridge Unbound (21 page)

“Look, you’re driving me nuts!” Joanne says. “Would you stop that pacing?” She’s finished her book, is suddenly much more aware of my restlessness. “You’re starting to remind me of Dennis.”

“Dennis?”

“Just sit, will you? Would you be of some use? Can you play the piano?”

I stride over to the gleaming grand and hammer out “Chopsticks.” Then I return, push her feet off the sofa, and sit down.

“Tell me about Dennis,” I say. “Make it last several hours.”

She doesn’t want to at first, but I insist. If she won’t tell me about Dennis I’m going to start pacing again.

“Okay, okay!” she says in mock panic. “Dennis was our driver in Sudan. I forget where he was from. Michigan? He’d left a program in international relations so he could get some field experience. And he was an All-American lacrosse player. He really wanted to see the world. So there he was, our driver, in this little camp covered in dust. The end of the world. Jerry, an Australian doctor, came up with that. It was so hot and barren, everything was covered in fine grey dust, you couldn’t escape it. Dust in your eyes and your mouth. We breathed it in even through handkerchiefs. There was dust in the water.

“Just boys in these camps, from the south. The lost boys. They’d been kidnapped by the Muslims, brought north and made to fight against their own people. These ones had escaped somehow and walked back south to find their families. Only their families were gone. The boys were starving, many of them were going to die. Some had only the strength to lie on their cots hooked up to an intravenous. The others would sit in the shade and stare at nothing. Such silence. I’ve heard it twice, in southern Sudan, and in Rwanda when all those Tutsis were force-marched back from Burundi. The scale of it kills
something inside you, or makes you feel like something’s been killed. Silence and suffering times tens of thousands. All those fifteen-year-old boys internally shut down, seeing but not saying a word. Beyond words. Beyond anything that can help. I lasted three months and then I swore I wouldn’t work in those conditions again. It was the hopelessness. I felt the words get sucked right out of me, a vacuum of silence and any sound, any thought or feeling I might want to express would be drawn out and dissipate into nothing. In the face of all that. A few drops of water in a bone-dry desert.”

She looks down at the rug, her fingers drum absently on her shin.

“What about Dennis?”

“Oh, yeah, Dennis, the driver. We didn’t stay in that camp. It wasn’t safe after sundown. We didn’t have the security. So every evening Dennis picked us up and drove us back to our own camp, which was twenty kilometres away. The militias took over the refugee camp at night. We had no control over what went on. We didn’t know and we didn’t ask, and nobody talked about it. It was one of those things, you know, beyond our control. God grant me the wisdom. In the morning we’d drive back, very slowly, because different groups mined the road at night. The village kids would mark the mines with little sticks for us. Every so often we’d have to all get out of the truck and check to see if it was a marker or just a stick. And when we got to the camp in the morning sometimes there were bodies. Well, in the morning often there were bodies. We couldn’t always tell if it was the malnutrition or the dysentery or the militias. We didn’t look too closely, to tell you the truth. We just focused on what we could do in the present moment.

“But Dennis had a hard time with that. He brought in our supplies and had to deal with the militias more than most of
us, and of course he was the one driving over that mined road. Sometimes the food got through and sometimes it didn’t. There was a lot of pressure and Dennis had such a great image of himself, you know, All-American jock. But this was another universe, this was everything tilted and upside down. He started raging against it, he couldn’t stay still, he wanted us to take on the militias, arm ourselves, do something! God, he was scary. There was huge Dennis armed with a butcher’s knife in the mess tent, and wiry little Jerry. He was mostly bald and laughed at everything. He talked so softly, and finally after two hours he led Dennis out and put him in a straitjacket. We all watched. It was awful. It was the very lowest point.”

Tap, tap, tap
, her fingers against her shin.

“The moral is,” she says, smiling, a real Joanne smile, “you have to play cribbage. That’s what we decided. Dennis never played cribbage with us in the evenings. So he thought about all the crap too much. That kills you in this type of work. You have to play cribbage.”

She gets up and goes into her room, returns a moment later with her medical bag and a deck of cards.

“Meds first, then we’ll play.” And out they come, the rattling little bottles of pills. We go through the ritual silently, and I swallow everything down with practised gulps of the bottled water provided by the Merioka. Quick and painless.

“Where’s the board?” I ask.

“There’s no board in this type of cribbage. You have to keep track of your own points in your head. And your opponent’s. If you find he’s cheating or has made a mistake, you call him on it.”

“How can you tell?”

“You have to be sharp. It doesn’t allow you to think of anything else.”

She shuffles the cards like a Vegas pro.

“I haven’t played for ages,” I say. “How do you score?”

“I can see you’re going to have a great time,” she says. “Maybe we need to add some money to make it interesting.”

I’m awful at it, but it
is
interesting, and keeps my circuits full until nearly midnight, when Joanne goes to bed. I play a few more hands against myself, completely absorbed, when the phone rings. A male voice says, “Suli would like to see you. You can come now?”

I’m groggy with the late hour, with fatigue and indignation and too much mental cribbage. It doesn’t occur to me right away that my walking-out stunt might have worked.

“It’s awfully late,” I say. “Perhaps in the–”

“A car is downstairs. You can come now?”

I knock softly on Joanne’s door and tell her the news.

“She wants you now?” she asks.

“It does sound odd, doesn’t it?”

“Say you’ll see her in the morning.”

I go back to the phone to set up a meeting for tomorrow. But Suli herself comes on the line.

“Bill,” she says, strangely familiar, as if resuming a conversation, “I know this is unusual, but it looks like my schedule has changed for tomorrow and then I’m travelling for the next while, so I’m not sure when I’ll be able to meet with you properly. And it’s important that we do meet right away. If you’re not too tired.”

“No. Of course,” I blurt.

“You’ll find my personal guard waiting outside your door. You have nothing to worry about with them. They would step in front of a train to protect you.”

“Let’s hope there are no runaway trains.”

“Yes, of course.” Her words are clipped, slightly hurried. I think I hear someone in the background going on in Kuantij.

I tell Joanne the details through the door and she asks if I want her to come with me.

“I should be all right,” I say. “You get your rest.”

She opens the door. She’s wearing a long T-shirt too thin to hide much of the fullness of her body. Those long naked legs. “Listen,” she says. “How are you feeling?’

“All right,” I say guardedly.

“No, really,” she says. “You were losing it most of today. You collapsed in the bathroom yesterday. Bad things happen when you get overtired. Maybe you should rest.”

“I’ll be fine. It feels all right. So far.” I knock on the wood of the doorframe. I don’t know where to look, she’s so beautiful. My life preserver. Here’s my safe thought: Joanne in this T-shirt. Finally I turn to go.

In the hallway I find three hulking, grim, fit-looking men in island casual-dress loungewear. Their hair is military short, though, and they all wear the same style of pointy, polished brown or black leather shoes. The fourth man is Nito, grubby, small, and out of place beside them. Just for a second I imagine one of these elite guards lunging at me and me coiling forward with the dragon.

Wordlessly down the elevator then through the lobby. The desk clerk looks on impassively. I can’t actually see any weapons on these men, but they look armed. How do I know? Maybe I’m just hoping they’ll be able to protect me. The five of us crowd into a white van that roars down the deserted avenue. I look back but no one is chasing us. Maybe they always drive this way. The rain has slackened but the streets are slick, the blackness even more profound. My guards smoke soundlessly as we rocket along.

I know the smell of those cigarettes. It used to mean utter terror. But I’m oddly calm.

We wheel around to a back entrance of the Pink Palace. I wasn’t sure that Suli would take this as her residence, but perhaps it makes sense: a symbolic seat of power, and it’s nicely guarded by a heavy wall, with room for a battalion of soldiers if it comes to that. In the darkness the pink is barely discernible, but for a moment I think of Minitzh and his faded regime. All those glittering parties, his own Versailles for the
lumito
. How ironic that their skins have been saved by the widow of an assassinated opposition leader.

We walk up a back staircase, then along a hallway lined with carved teak panels. The lost art of the Watabi? The artist race wiped out by the British. It was Franja who offered to show Maryse and me his collection. Originally bought with blood. The carvings show scenes of village life revolving around rice cultivation and maintaining a fabled valley of terraced paddies that climb up the mountainsides in gleaming slivers of water. I’ve seen pictures of the terraces and of these carvings, but the effect in the hall is disconcerting, as if I’ve wandered into the valley floor and find myself surrounded by fragile layers of brown water and mud that could easily slide down to swallow me.

Suli’s office is at the end, on the right. The three elite guards remain subdued, but little Nito, eyes wide, rubbernecks the whole way. They leave me at her imposing, solid-teak, half-opened door. My eyes have a hard time adjusting because of the low light – candles only, perhaps fifteen or twenty spread about the high-ceilinged room. They cast deep shadows on the shelved books, the stacks of files, newspapers, and letters, the large bamboo desk that seems naked without a computer perched on top. She blends in so completely I miss her at first, but there she is bent by a candle at the desk, quietly scratching with a fountain pen, one hand supporting
her cheek, her short black hair sharply framing her face. She looks up.

“Mr. Burridge – Bill, thank you so much for coming,” she says, rising but staying tiny, coming out from behind the desk in her famous blue
saftori
, her body lean and light and straight. “I’m sorry for all this cloak-and-dagger stuff. Sometimes the day’s schedule gets beyond me, and this is the only way I can meet people. Can I pour you some tea or
supira?”
Her voice, in person, at this late hour, is lower than I expect, not quite the same as on the phone, satiny somehow, unsettlingly familiar and intimate. She closes the door. No aides, no advisers. This must be the personal style that Suli is becoming known for.

“Supira
would be fine.” I don’t know why I ask for it, except that the situation seems to call for something stronger than tea.

Clearly she wants to speak, to make this her meeting. But I blurt my piece nervously. “I feel I have to come forward, for the good of this commission,” I say. “I’ve put everything on the line to return here, to contribute. Yet communications within the commission are very poor. The first day no one informed me about the schedule. I had to read it in the newspaper – which was wrong, as it turned out. Now I find there’s no translation service, so I have no idea what anybody’s saying. We agreed I wouldn’t get buried in details, but this is preposterous.” I sputter on the word, deliver it like an actor who doesn’t know what’s coming next. Settle down, I think.

She’s extraordinarily beautiful. Her cinnamon skin, ageless, her deep brown eyes, the stillness that surrounds her. Her thin shoulders that have borne so much, seem so ready to be embraced.

“Please, sit down,” she says tranquilly, making me feel I’ve made a poor first impression. I try a low, carved teak double-seater by the window. It’s ornate and undoubtedly expensive,
but straight and hard as a prison bench. All the seats are similar. I suppose guests are meant to be impressed, and not stay long.

Suli walks into the shadows – even, measured, balanced steps – and emerges in a moment with two delicate, bulbous glasses half full of the golden-brown liquid. I take mine but put it down immediately.

“You must understand what this means to me,” I sputter. “My time is limited. I cannot be days and days sitting in a hearing room understanding almost nothing of what’s going on. That’s a complete–”

“I have ordered funds for a full translation service to be created,” she says.

“–farce as far as I’m concerned. I’m sorry to be so blunt but … What did you say?”

“A full translation service will be created. It will take a few more days, but please understand, you have my complete backing for this commission. We just aren’t quite ready for you yet. You weren’t expected to attend these first few meetings, since they are devoted to administering bureaucratic details. We’re happy that you’ve taken such an interest–”

“But nobody
told
me!”

“I think,” she says, “more from embarrassment than anything else.”

It takes a moment for this to sink in, and for my own embarrassment to flush through my face and up my scalp.

“I want to be involved in the details,” I say. “That’s what I’m here for. How are we choosing our witnesses, for example? What’s the scope of our inquiry? What powers of investigation and enforcement are we going to have? Will anybody be bound by our decisions?”

Suli takes a deep breath, then a sip of her
supira
, and leans
back against her desk. “Again,” she says, “there was going to be a proper briefing on this. We do things more slowly here. But you are quite right to ask. You have to understand, this commission is central to our national mourning. The commission will be our official means of examining the past, finding our way to justice, and of burying our dead. So it must be seen to be fair and thorough, and I do not want anyone to feel they are being excluded. So I have recommended to Justice Sin that you open the doors as wide as possible, in the beginning at least, simply allow anyone who feels the need to register and then testify. There will be a prescreen, of course – officials will take preliminary testimony and schedule the witnesses according to groups: whether they are from the same village, for example, or were affected by one particular atrocity.”