The Dutch Wife (7 page)

Rachel nodded, but she was thinking of how interesting Rowland Vanderlinden looked. And what a brave man he must be to say such things to her father.

ON THE MORNING OF THE SENTENCING,
she made up her mind to go to the courthouse in the hope of seeing Rowland. The court was packed so she had trouble finding a seat at the back. She looked around and was disappointed to see no sign of her father’s visitor.

A bell rang and a policeman called for silence. Simmonds was brought into the dock by two guards. He was wearing a blue prison uniform, a small, apologetic-looking man with wide eyes and thin hair slicked back.

The clerk called on everyone to rise. Now her father, all in black, came solemnly into the courtroom. He went to the bench, carefully adjusted his robes, sat down and waited for complete silence. He watched the clock till it was exactly on the hour. Then, in the sonorous voice Rachel sometimes heard him practise in his study, he told the prisoner to rise.

Simmonds did so, with the two guards standing on either side, towering over him.

The Judge now picked up a cloth that lay on the bench before him: the black cap. He unfolded it slowly and carefully placed it on his head. He cleared his throat and solemnly pronounced the awful words that reverberated through the crowded courtroom: “By the power . . . hereby sentence you . . . on an appointed day . . . to be taken from this place to a place of execution . . . hanged by the neck until you are dead. May God have mercy on your soul.”

Simmonds didn’t seem to like the sound of that, for he staggered and leaned on the dock. When he went back to the cells, he had to be helped by the two guards.

THAT NIGHT AT DINNER,
the Judge was in a very good humour and sipped the glass of red wine he allowed himself on such occasions.

Rachel, who’d never been to a death-sentencing before, asked him about it. “Isn’t it hard, sending men who are younger than you are to a premature death?” she said.

“Not at all,” he said. “We all have to die. In fact, these men are luckier than the rest of us—they at least know the exact moment they’ll be leaving.” He looked very serious.

“Well,” Rachel said, “that doesn’t sound very lucky to me.”

He put his glass down on the table and began to laugh wholeheartedly—a rare phenomenon. He never allowed anyone else to know that he was capable of laughter.

“Simmonds looked so harmless,” she said

The Judge smiled at her affectionately. “That’s a good lesson for you to learn,” he said. “You can’t tell a man from a monster just on the basis of looks.”

Watching him, Rachel couldn’t help wondering how he would look to her if he were not her father but her judge. She imagined him sitting on the bench pronouncing sentence on her. Then those same glittering eyes and thin-lipped smile might make him the most frightening of men. She wondered, too, what Rowland Vanderlinden thought of him: she feared he might have disliked her father and assumed that she would be too much his daughter.

– 9 –

HER FIRST REAL MEETING WITH ROWLAND
didn’t occur until the following summer. She’d come to Toronto to spend a morning shopping and decided to visit the Museum on the off chance of seeing him. It began raining quite heavily as she went along University Avenue, so she ran the last hundred yards. Inside the lobby of the Museum, she had barely caught her breath when she saw him coming out of an office and heading towards the door, with an umbrella in hand and a notebook protruding from his coat pocket. She looked around her in a general way, as though wondering where to go, making sure she remained in his path. He almost bumped into her, apologized, then looked at her closely. “The Judge’s daughter!” he said. “Aren’t you Judge Dafoe’s daughter?”

She put on a puzzled look.

“I’m Rowland Vanderlinden,” he said. “You let me into your house at the time of the Simmonds trial, remember? In Queensville? I had to talk to the Judge.” She remembered that nervous energy in the way he talked and she liked it.

“Oh, of course,” she said.

“What are you doing here?” he said.

“I just came in out of the rain,” she said.

He laughed. “If it weren’t for rain,” he said, “museums would have to close down.”

She laughed too.

“I was just about to go for lunch,” he said. “I usually go by myself and read while I eat. I don’t suppose you’d like to join me?”

“Yes,” she said, “I would like it.”

“Great!” he said. “Let’s get out of here.”

They went out the door and he unfolded his umbrella. He extended his elbow for her and they went down the stairs in the rain. They walked only a short distance to a little restaurant where they found a table for two. It was a shabby kind of place, one she herself would never have gone into, full of strange food smells. The brown-skinned waiter with shiny black hair knew Rowland and recommended the curry special for lunch.

As they sat there, Rowland Vanderlinden talked, gesticulating with his hands, flicking his long hair back. Those little pock marks gave his face character, Rachel thought. And he had such nice blue eyes, full of life and curiosity.

When the curry came, Rachel ate what she could of it, trying not to show she didn’t like it. But he seemed not to notice and talked about this and that, including why he hadn’t appeared for the sentencing of Simmonds. “I had to come back here for a meeting of the Board,” he said. “I was sorry I couldn’t make it. I’d hoped I might see you there.”

She was thrilled to hear that, but for tactical reasons she thought she’d better lie. “I didn’t go either,” she said.

“Then I’m glad I didn’t,” he said with a smile. “My interest in Simmonds was purely academic, you know. I have a theory that such crimes are often sublimations of ancient, ritualistic impulses.”

She just smiled, though she wasn’t sure what “sublimations” meant.

“I thought I might find some pretext for visiting Queensville again,” he said, “but not long after the trial, I had a chance to go back to Africa for six months. So I took it.”

“What did you do there?” she asked. She’d never met anyone who’d led such an exotic life.

“I was studying the customs of the tribes along the Ogowe River,” he said.

“That sounds fascinating,” she said.

He looked pleased that she was fascinated. “One of the oddest things about people living in the jungle,” he said, “is how differently they perceive the world. Because the forests are so thick, they have no real appreciation of distance, especially if they’re not near a river. A few dozen yards is about as far as many of them ever see in their entire lifetimes. They just can’t imagine greater distances than that.” He smiled. “I sometimes think there’s a psychological equivalent of that phenomenon in Canada. I mean, some people here are so narrow-minded.”

Rachel was flattered by the implication that she wasn’t.

THE WAITER HAD TAKEN AWAY
the curry plates and brought them a dark sludge for coffee.

“You must be very fond of travelling,” she said.

“I am,” he said. “I’m not one of those men who can sit around all their lives in the same place, doing the same thing day after day, and then, when they’re dying, they say: ‘Well that was my fate!’” He shook his head. “That’s not for me. I want my life to be an adventure, even though it may not always be fun.”

Rachel was sure she agreed with that.

He sipped his coffee and told her he was in the process of writing a scholarly article on his African trip. “You’ve no idea how hard that is,” he said. “I mean, to take incredibly interesting things and put them into language dull enough for an academic journal!”

She knew she was supposed to laugh at that and she did.

“What exactly are you writing about?” she said.

“Fetishism,” he said.

She confessed she didn’t know what that was.

“Most people don’t,” he said. “A fetish is some object—usually inanimate, but not aways—that a spirit lives in.” He smiled. “In other words, it’s the kind of thing your father would consider to be absolute nonsense.”

They both laughed.

“Please tell me about the article you’re writing,” she said.

“Only if we have another coffee,” he said. She had a feeling he was enjoying her company and the idea thrilled her.

When the coffee had been poured, he began to talk, and she listened carefully. She wanted to be intelligent for him.

– 10 –

“NEAR THE END OF MY LAST MONTH
in Africa,” said Rowland Vanderlinden, “I went to Ndara, the main village of the Boma tribe. You won’t know about them, but one of the Boma customs had been reported widely amongst anthropologists: if a young Boma woman was infertile, her husband was expected to start sleeping with her mother. Then, if the mother produced a child, it was given to the daughter to rear as though it were her own. As a result, family relations amongst the Boma could be immensely complex.

“But I was more interested in another aspect of Boma life: I’d heard the tribe’s fetishistic practices were most unusual, so I thought I’d see for myself.

“I’d never been to Ndara and didn’t realize the trip would be so difficult. I had to go by the Ogowe River, for the jungle was thick and there was no possibility of going overland. I travelled in a dug-out canoe with three coastal tribesmen. Two of them rowed. The third was an old man who’d been to Ndara before. His name was Efua.

“Not that going by river was all that safe either. The tribes along the Ogowe weren’t friendly and were liable to attack strangers. Also, it was the rainy season, so the river was swollen and dangerous with rapids and whirlpools.

“Anthropologists discover things in the oddest ways. We’d only been on the river a few hours when I learned one lesson I’ll never forget.

“I was sitting at the stern of the boat and by noon I was starting to get hungry. Efua was dozing in the bow and the paddlers didn’t seem to have any intention of stopping for lunch. So I reached into the food sack and took out a banana. I peeled it and was just about to take a bite when one of the paddlers swung his oar and knocked the banana out of my hand. The dug-out almost toppled over. Efua wakened up and was horrified at me.

“I’d no idea what I’d done wrong. Efua and the paddlers talked for a while, and when they’d finished, he looked at me and shook his head in disgust. He said I was so ignorant I was a menace. He’d just convinced the two paddlers not to maroon me ashore and let me take my chances with the jungle and the hostile tribes.

“I kept asking what I’d done. He said if it hadn’t been for the quick action of the paddler I’d have taken a bite out of that banana. Didn’t people with skins the colour of dung-snails (that was what they called white people) have any sense at all? Didn’t I know that eating any kind of food while in a boat on water was absolutely taboo? Even the youngest children knew how stupid that was.

“Of course, I asked him why there was such a taboo. He told me to shut up with my ‘why’s. The reason for taboos was not a subject for discussion. Taboos were taboos and that was that. Even to wonder about them was another taboo.

“Anyway, shortly after that we went ashore and ate. Then we went back on the river and paddled for several more miles up a tributary. In the late afternoon we reached Ndara.

“It really was big—a village of about five thousand people. We had to pay our respects right away to the Boma Chief. His compound was in the middle of the village near a huge fig tree. Efua warned me now to walk carefully as we passed it. It was, apparently, the major fetish of the Boma. Every leaf, every little twig that fell off was taken home and treasured by the tribe.

“I met the Chief and gave him a Swiss Army knife, which he was very pleased with. He said I could stay as long as I liked.

“Now, as things turned out, I was only able to stay a few days. But even in that brief time, I saw a curious example of just how important fetishes were to the Boma.

“What happened was this. On our second night, I went with Efua to watch a purification ceremony in the clearing at the back of the Chief’s compound. A big, muscular man was tied to a stake in the middle of the square and a Shaman was chanting and sprinkling some kind of powder on him. The ropes looked very flimsy but the captive made no attempt to break them.

“Just after we arrived, the Chief and all the elders of the tribe came out of the main compound. The Chief himself was carrying an ornate club with a big knob on the end of it. I didn’t like the look of that.

“Without a word, he went up to the man at the stake and smashed the club onto his head, breaking his skull open. Then each of the elders took turns with the club, until the man’s head was nothing but a bloody stump.

“After that, some of the younger tribesmen untied the body. They carried it out of the village and down to the river and threw it in. Within a few minutes, the crocodiles were at it, ripping it to pieces.

“Efua told me that what we had just witnessed was the killing of a man who had desecrated the fetish. Apparently, he’d been one of the most successful hunters among the Boma, but he’d had a run of bad luck in the past few months. In his compound, he kept a branch of the big fig tree in a leather bag tied to the beam of his hut, and he’d sacrificed to it over and over again—chickens, fruit, the very best betel nuts—with no result.

“Now it wasn’t that he expected the gods always to act on his behalf. He knew very well how arbitrary they could be. But he expected at least some consideration for his devotion to the fetish.

“Instead, things just got worse and worse. Not only was his hunting unsuccessful, but three of his children died of some mysterious kind of poisoning. Then, their mother, his favourite wife, was so distraught she drowned herself in the river.

“It seems he was able to put up with everything else, but not that.

“He went directly to his hut and cut down his fetish from the central beam where it had pride of place and brought it to the very square we’d just been in. A lot of the Boma were there, watching him. He took the fetish out of its leather bag and spat on it. Then he lit a fire and threw both the bag and the fetish on it. He waited till they were nothing but ashes.