Burridge Unbound (26 page)

I talk stupidly about the girl I’d met that evening at a party, of all things. How I was distracted by the news of my brother but not distracted enough that I didn’t find her attractive. Only I didn’t follow up on it right away. It was only much later, at the end of the school year, the day before my final exam, that I saw her again, in a laundromat. She’d remembered my talking about Graham and had asked how he was, and I said he was making a full recovery, isn’t that great? Some really lucky things happen in life. She was wearing a tank top and short shorts and was reading Hegel. And all the way home I thought, why didn’t I ask her out this time? Because it was the end of the year and I was graduating and it was too late.… I got all the way home, dumped my laundry, and ran back to see her, but she was gone by then. This silly question of timing. Of knowing when to do the right thing.

I tell the story and Joanne rubs my back and I think, what if I turn over and pull her towards me? It seems as if it would be the easiest thing to do. Well, if the cot were bigger or more stable. I imagine myself rolling over and dumping us both. Would that be so bad? We’d laugh and then I could pull her towards me …

I think about it but can’t make myself move. There’s every reason not to, starting with the fact that I’m married – still married, it still means something to me. Doesn’t it? But such a simple act – turning and reaching. Men fall in love with their nurses all the time; sometimes nurses with their patients. Sometimes.

“You’ve stopped talking,” she says, leaning close so I’m filled with the smell of her. Nothing store-bought – just pure, alive, mountain-camp woman. There’s a right time, I think. It can’t be missed.

“Are you asleep?” she asks.

Breathing, breathing. There’s a right time and it can’t be missed.

She rises, extinguishes the light.

“Joanne.”

“Yes?”

Breathing, breathing. In the next moment everything will be different. One way or the other. I turn and was right – catch myself tipping. Joanne bends down to help and I pull her so that she falls on top of me.

“Aak!”
she says, starting backwards. I let go reluctantly.

“Did I hurt you?” I ask. We scramble to our feet clumsily in the dark. There’s a right time and it can’t be missed … but this isn’t it. Words come out –
fine, okay, sorry –
and the moment passes. Joanne steps on the plate and knocks over my water. It doesn’t matter. Her haste to leave. I step towards her and kick over the cot by mistake. We could never fit on it anyway. Stupid.

“Good night,” she says while I’m struggling with the cot. I don’t have any matches either to relight the lamp. I mean to ask her but shouldn’t – just let her go.

I pee into the waterglass and fling it into the darkness outside my tent, lie on the cot rigid, breathing poison, listening for mosquitoes.

“W
hen we’ve located the field,” Dr. Parker says, “the first thing we do is mark it off with cords and pickets. In this case, because of the rain, we’ve put up the tent to keep the ground dry. We don’t want people running around, digging indiscriminately.” His voice becomes oddly modulated when speaking to us, as if he’s narrating a nature show, talking to a camera. He pauses and Luki fills in the Kuantij for Justice Sin, who is balanced in a canvas field chair – I’m not sure how it supports his weight.

“We scrape off the entire overburden first,” Parker says. “The first several inches – grass, shrubbery, loose sticks. Just enough to expose the soil. The key is to make sure nobody roars ahead and starts digging up particular spots. It must be done systematically, like an archaeological dig.”

There’s an odd light in this huge tent. It’s raining outside and grey, but the tent glows, and Parker, especially in his khaki clothes, looks almost fluorescent. He has several assistants with him – young master’s students who dress in jeans and old army shirts, the men all sporting new beards, the one woman
striking-looking with a beaked nose, long, greasy blonde hair, and large-veined hands.

“You can tell by the way the soil is drying just where the graves are,” Parker says. “The older soil is greyish on top. The earth that was disrupted more recently has a darker tinge to it. It isn’t settled and packed in the same way. Can you see that?” He points to a faint oblong patch in the dirt. Once my eyes get accustomed I pick out seven or eight similarly discoloured areas in the space around us. “No picks, no shovels, no hoes. We know where we’re digging. Slow and steady, trowels and brushes. We don’t disturb anything, we’re just – exposing it.” Parker bends as he talks, whisks at the dirt with a small brush. Two of his students join in. Nothing happens quickly. It’s even slower, in a way, than listening to testimony. My legs start to tremble, so I walk for a bit then come back, stand while they poke and whisk. Some while later I have to go out again, and when I come back this time something starts to emerge from the dirt.

“All right, we have a ribcage,” Parker says finally, his voice still calm, still narrating the documentary. “Notice that we don’t pull anything out. We want to leave everything as intact as possible. Notice too that we’re being very careful to observe every small piece of evidence in the vicinity. Is there a bullet nearby? Is there anything that will give a clue as to the cause of death? If we want to put the perpetrators away we need evidence. It’s as simple as that. Don’t get too close.”

The ribcage seems small, the bones stained with black soil and some green mould. They’re only down a foot or two, but the dug-up dirt is already accumulating on the side. One of Parker’s students combs through it to see if anything has been overlooked. It takes so long, but this time I can’t pull away, I’m chained here, fascinated, as the skeleton slowly emerges – twisted,
shrunken, strangely peaceful, a deflated person with stained trousers, bits of shirt, belt still intact. The sandals made from old rubber tires. The blue kerchief still tied around the eyes. Parker marks down everything in excruciating detail – the name and position of every bone found, the numbers of the photographs his assistants take, the condition of the artifacts.

“Note the twine that we’ve found down here, the position of the hands and wrists. How do we know that it’s a male? By the arch in the iliac crest of the pelvis, the narrow sciatic notch, the triangular pubis. In the cranium the large mastoid processes, the strongly developed nuchal musculature ridges. We can tell that the victim is left-handed because of the relative length of the left upper-extremity bones compared to the right. As well, note the extra bevelling on the scapular posterior glenoid rim which is not evident on the right side. Now, when we look at the cranium, we can see from the bevelling here that the first bullet entered in the posterior left parietal.…”

Parker’s voice narrating on and on, his students scratching down every word, like notching scars into bone.

Then his voice stops and we all watch his fingers prying loose something else, stopping to whisk, prying again. In a minute he has it, a tiny bronze medallion. “Some relative will look at this …,” he says, his voice breaking, narration forgotten. Tears come and I turn and nearly vomit. I expect Joanne’s hand to hold me up, but she too has stepped off a ways and seems to be fighting off nausea.

“The bones belong to real people,” Parker says simply.

Sometime later the helicopters arrive. We’re on the third excavation and my stomach is sick and hungry at the same time but I feel I can’t leave, it would be sacrilegious somehow not to stand by, as if there are people who might be rescued
alive, like victims of a building bomb. The sound of the helicopters changes all that, fuses my spine. I catch Joanne’s gaze and know she’s thinking the same thing: that it’s soldiers come to repeat the atrocity, bury the commission in the same soil as the villagers. The wind of the rotors picks up the sides of the tent and blows sticks and glops of mud through the air. I rush outside with the others to see a military cargo helicopter touch down in the small landing space, while two others hover some way off. A gunner points straight at us and looks emotionless as an insect behind his dark glasses. Two other soldiers disembark, guns at ready, and I stand gaping, shocked, until finally Suli Nylioko steps off, a thin woman in blue holding her hand out for steadying. The two soldiers and Suli hurry towards us, bending low under the chopper blades, and the wind picks up again as the helicopter lifts off and another moves into position.

It’s the press, of course. It takes fifteen minutes to disgorge them all, a few dozen men with notebooks, tape recorders, cameras. They overrun the camp, swarm us, change the proceedings from a solemn disinterment to a circus act.

The young man from
The Islander
, Dorut Kul, approaches me dressed in loose-fitting black pants, slick shoes, and a white silk shirt with the sleeves rolled up, smokes in the shirt pocket. He asks what the commission has discovered to date. I give him a two-or three-sentence no comment but he presses me.

“Have you found mass graves?”

“Dr. Parker and his crew are excavating systematically. They have found a number of skeletons so far. The people were apparently executed with shots to the head. But it will take time to fully determine …”

We have no press strategy. I have no idea how much I should say in response to his questions.

“Why have you heard testimony from no military, IS, or police sources?”

“I believe that we have a number of such figures slated for later in the …”

“Do you feel that Sin Vello is truly acting in an independent manner? He was appointed by Minitzh and has many connections to the old regime.”

“The chief justice is doing a wonderful job as far as I can tell. I’ve been very impressed by Justice Sin and I’m sure …”

“How do you feel about the entente signed between the government and the Kartouf? Do you agree with the limited protection from prosecution offered as part of the deal?”

I stare at the young man, his pen making tiny flick marks on his pad but his eyes fixed so intently on mine.

“This is the first I’ve heard of–”

“So Truth Commission members were not consulted before the limited immunity was offered?”

“I was not consulted–” He scratches the words down, for once waits for me to finish my thought. But I’ve nothing more to add.

Suli begins making a speech at the entrance to the excavation tent, so all reporters and cameras are drawn to her. They’re a motley bunch, irreverent, hasty, as journalists are everywhere, it seems. Yet they’re the ones who’ll tell the story. Their eyes, their words, their opinions are the ones that matter. Suli leads them into the tent and they follow, the whole clatter of them, with their lights and battery packs, tape recorders, attitudes. Suddenly I have no stomach for it. I stay outside, drift to a rock outcrop down the hill, past the last of the utility tents. There I sit and watch as the sun makes a rare appearance, burning between cloud banks suddenly to show a glimpse of mountains, the valley far below. A good place to watch and breathe.

In a while I hear Joanne’s approach, the strength of her steps, sure but light. “I was wondering where you’d gotten to,” she says.

“I couldn’t see anyway.”

“You could pretend to be a member of the commission.”

“Yes. I suppose. I’d have to have an
ID
card.”

“Would you?”

“Probably. Probably they wouldn’t put you on a commission without an
ID
card.”

She sits beside me on the rock. A funny phrase comes to me – “a little bit of all right.” Who wrote that to me? Leanne what’s-her-name from Amnesty International in London. She was writing about the new house she’d bought with her new husband whose new job meant they could afford something better than the miserly flat they’d been living in. “Now this is a little bit of all right,” she wrote.

So I say it to Joanne: “This is a little bit of all right.”

“Is it?”

Sitting in fresh air, in rare sunshine, quietly, beside someone I love.

“Yes.”

Little tingles of energy up my spine. Sips of breath. Some small sense of wellness breaking through.

“I just, uh, I thought maybe I should explain about last night,” I say.

“Oh.” Startled.
Oh
.

“I thought maybe you might have come to some wrong conclusions.”

“Wrong conclusions?”

“About my behaviour.”

“Oh listen, Bill–”

“You listen first. You might have thought from all my stumbling around–”

“Really, Bill–”

I stop talking and then she stops. Far down below a big bird – eagle? hawk? – circles the treetops, disappears into a stretch of cloud, then reappears.

“You might have thought from all my stumbling around that I was trying to make a clumsy pass at you. I just want to put to rest any sort of misconceptions you might have had. I wasn’t trying to make a clumsy pass at all. I was trying to be–” Choosing my words, not looking at her but down at where the big bird disappeared. “–smooth and subtle and … attractive. I just felt … probably you would need that interpretation since I was in fact hopelessly clumsy. Just so there’s no misunderstanding.”

No big bird. I look and look but it doesn’t reappear. Clouds move in on the sun again and the air picks up a fresh scent of rain, which in a moment I can see closing in from the right, sweeping up the mountainside, steely grey and inevitable.

“And I love you,” I say, for punctuation.

“And you love me?”

“Yes.” Not looking. Trying to keep the breath regular, to keep that tingle in my spine. It’s a funny feeling. Just as I think of it, it moves across my skull and parks on my chin. I reach for her hand, squeeze it, don’t look.

The patron saint of lost causes
. A funny thought. Is there one?

In a moment the helicopters start up again, the wind nearly blows us off our rock. It’s the reporters heading out to post their stories in time for the evening’s news or tomorrow’s edition. I feel oddly lightheaded – relieved, I suppose, to tell her and to know that I don’t have to labour under my illusions any longer.