Burridge Unbound (18 page)

I glance through the free copy of
The Islander
which has come with the food. On the front page, Suli Nylioko beams beside a newborn goat during a visit to her home village, and a fire in a brothel kills eleven, including three police officers. On page eight, beside the crossword, there is a brief article on
the Truth Commission. When I talked to Suli Nylioko she was uncertain who would head it, but according to this article a retired supreme-court justice, Sin Vello, has been named chair. The third member is a Mrs. Grakala, who is the widow of the former ambassador to Argentina and has been active with
UNICEF
.

“It says here the commission is having its first meeting this morning,” I say. “It starts at nine o’clock. What time is it now?”

“A quarter to,” Joanne says.

I look around the deserted Happy Mouth Lounge. Besides Nito and us, there are no other diners. No one has been sent to meet us. There’ve been no instructions.

I throw the paper down and bolt from the table. Joanne follows, still munching her toast. Nito races to our side.

“Where is the Truth Commission meeting?” I ask him.
“Commisi vertigas
. Uh,
kaba, kaba?”

He looks bewildered, so I point outside, scratch my head, say
Commisi vertigas
several more times until apparently he understands.

“Justico kampi!”
he says, pointing in the same direction I was pointing.

“What’s that?”

“Justico kampi!”
He pulls us to the stand for private taxis, and then we pile in and Nito directs the driver.

“I haven’t got my briefcase,” I say to Joanne. “I haven’t got a pen or paper. I don’t even know what the agenda is!”

Nito, happy, I think, to be of some use, goes on at some length with the driver, who nods importantly. The taxi speeds us out of the hotel’s walled compound and then into slow-motion, bump-and-grind traffic. Little Asian automobiles, farmers’ tractors,
tritos
armed with boomboxes blaring the local auto-rhythm junk, young men on thin motorcycles with
their wives or sisters or girlfriends sidesaddle on the back. Peddlers pushing carts of plastic watches, hairbands, combs, ribbons, swarms of squeegee boys darting from stalled car to stalled car. Other boys selling cigarettes and pop, newspapers, bottled water. Everybody on the street, the moving mall, except it isn’t moving, or it moves only irregularly, like a sudden lurching sidewalk. It’s exactly as I remember it – the traffic in Santa Irene is still hopeless.

The
Justico kampi
, the hall of justice, it turns out, is not all that far from the Merioka, but we’re half an hour in this soup. The building is a grey, squarish monolith with hulking pillars and wide steps, a large lawn in front. Like many of the other buildings around it, mould, moss, waterstains, and creeping vegetation have erased most of the original colour, most probably a reddish brown, and replaced it with a sickly grey-green. Already the air has thickened. What seemed cool and fresh is now heavy with heat and water and the day’s growing smog, and weighs upon us as we hurry up the stairs. What if I hadn’t seen the notice in the paper? Were they ever going to tell me when and where?

Through heavy glass doors and into the massive lobby. High ceilings, a marble floor, not gleaming but not as dirty as some other public buildings I remember from before. Where is the meeting room? Nito has no idea. But a middle-aged man with a crooked nose – probably broken badly at some point, then healed over like a twisted tree trunk – recognizes us.

“Aya, Beeul Boo-reej!” he says, and shakes my hand enthusiastically. He and Nito talk, and then we walk down a hallway and up a flight of stairs to the large, airy meeting room. There are two solid teak doors that take some pulling, and four or five small birds scatter through open windows when we walk in. Long tables with empty chairs arranged in an open rectangle;
two immense ceiling fans, turning slowly; dark panelling, a frayed and dirty reddish carpet; microphones and headsets in front of many of the seats. Nobody else is here.

The man with the crooked nose shows us to our seats, pats his hands downward to tell us to wait, wait. Then he and Nito leave us, and we are left with the lazy fans, the still, heavy air. There’s a chair set in the middle of the rectangle – it must be where the witnesses will testify. It looks so solemn.

“Do you think we’re early?” Joanne asks.

By a half-hour at least, it turns out. I pace, gaze out the windows at the large lawn, the constipated traffic. They’re open-style, island windows – no glass at all, just wide-spaced bars which keep nothing out, seem to have been erected so that spiders could hang nets across them at their convenience. There are nearly a dozen of them, some as large as my hand, red and black, yellow and black, or just black. Patrick and I used to watch beauties like these. They stay rock-still, then flash the instant prey appears, seize the bug before it has even begun to struggle, then rotate on a pair of legs and knit it up in a snug silken sandwich.

“Shhhh. Listen,” I say to Joanne at one point.

“What?”

“Can you hear it?” I ask. It’s faint at first, just a whisper nearly lost in the grind of the fans, the wind from outside, the distant traffic.
Tokay, tokay, tokay
.

“What is it?”

“Count,” I say.

Tokay, tokay, tokay
. Growing louder, not quite a croaking, rather proud, I think. Then it stops.

“It’s saying its name,” I say. “Tokay. It’s a kind of lizard, it probably lives in the ceiling somewhere. Quite large, and it can be savage if cornered. But the Santa Irenians consider it good
luck to have one. When you hear it you’re supposed to count, and the more times it says its name, the more luck you’ll have.”

“I got six,” Joanne says. “Is that good?”

“I don’t know.”

Eventually aides begin arriving in clumps of twos and threes, some bearing stacks of paper for distribution, all in Kuantij. One aide helpfully brings us a couple of pens. I try to introduce Joanne and myself, but the language problem becomes immediately apparent and mostly we end up waving hands at each other. One young man shakes my hand vigorously and says, “Pleasurably meet to speakably you!” Almost everybody motions for us to sit down again as soon as we rise. Mrs. Grakala, it turns out, is a lump of a woman who walks tentatively, her spine curved with age. But her limpid brown eyes seem to take in everything. Her hand is weak as paper when I grasp it in greeting, her skin tissue-thin. I try to offer a greeting in Kuantij, although as I’m speaking I remember that I have the form of address wrong, worry that I might offend her by using the wrong word, and so simply mumble. She smiles and bobs her head until I go away. She settles in the corner with her two aides and immediately begins flipping through the documents.

Some time later, in no apparent hurry, our chair, Justice Sin, arrives surrounded by aides. He moves like a limping piano, he’s so corpulent, leans so heavily on his silver cane, takes such small, deliberate, wounded steps. His entire passage from the door to his chair at the head of the table is a drama of dignity, near-peril, astonishment, the capacity of the human spirit to create obstacles and then overcome them at least for a time. He looks damned but not yet delivered, powerful enough to bring us all down with him … and knowing it, and knowing that we know it.

Slowly, gingerly, like a dirigible trying to dock in a windstorm, he leans on the table and manoeuvres his body in position above the empty seat. Several hands reach out to help and the seat and the body are carefully aligned, as if there’ll only be one attempt and failure will mean disaster. When all is ready he sinks inexorably, a boulder that once set in motion can’t be stopped. Success! I’m mildly surprised at the lack of accompanying applause. He fingers through an enormous briefcase. Papers emerge and are passed left and right. More copies accumulate in front of me. The justice starts speaking and Joanne and I fiddle with our earphones for the translation.

Nothing.

The switch on the table in front of me has four channels. I try each in turn and fiddle with the volume. No luck. One of the aides says to try
janal ista
, channel two, but it isn’t working.

I motion to him and point to the earphones. A number of people look over at me. Justice Sin continues with his opening remarks.

“It isn’t working!” I whisper. The aide leans over to listen to my earphones, then leans over Joanne to listen to hers. He motions back to some other senior aide, who comes by to listen as well. Justice Sin interrupts his speech and, apparently, asks what the fuss is about.

The senior aide points to the headphones and explains. Several aides start talking at once. One young man abruptly leaves the room and that settles everyone down. Justice Sin resumes his speech. The man who spoke English to me before says, “Pleese to you uh … waiting waiting fix.”

Waiting waiting. When Justice Sin speaks his wattles tremble and his eyes roam in an apparent drunken stagger, fixing on something for a moment, as if astounded by the wonder or stupidity of it, then moving on to something else. The sweat
from his hands seeps onto the pages of his text, and even from across the room he smells of bad gas. The words roll in deep-throated rumbles that would sound impressive on their own without the woggling lips, the tiny nose nearly lost in the layers of fat.

I’ve nothing to do but fixate on his appearance, and wonder how these people view me with my jutting bone face and haunted gaze, the trembling I can never seem to ease from my hands.

Joanne takes a sheet from one of the documents in Kuantij, turns it over, and writes:
Do you need me here?

YES!
I write back.

She nods, turns over another sheet of Kuantij, and begins writing a letter home. I scratch on the first paper,
We’ll bring the laptop for you next time
. There’s no phone connection, but she could at least write her e-mails to send back at the hotel. She smiles and writes back,
And maybe a good book or two!

I absolutely need her. Just having her here helps me to focus, stay calm. Though my leg isn’t jumping this morning, my insides seem stable. No sign of a twister, yet. I suppose it’s inevitable I’ll fall into one sometime, but in the daylight in this great hall I feel much stronger than in a long while.

I keep waiting for the young man to return and announce that the translation service is working. The door remains ajar but no one comes in. Justice Sin rumbles on and many of the aides take notes, although Mrs. Grakala seems lost in her handouts, the enormous bifocals balanced heavily on the end of her nose. I look at my handouts, but can recognize nothing except the occasional reference to my own name.

Dear Mom
, Joanne writes. We’re sitting so close to each other, it’s hard not to read inadvertently.
How are you? Better than me I hope. I’m trapped in a conference hall listening to what
might be the most interesting meeting I’ll never understand
. Her small, spidery writing.
Any word yet on the tests?

Sin talks and talks and then, apparently, there is a break. There is no formal discussion of the justice’s remarks – although the room explodes in conversation as soon as the break is announced. The justice remains in his seat, and when I address him in English he does the same smiling and bobbing routine Mrs. Grakala performed for me earlier. He tries fitting his earphones around his fat jowls and fiddling with the stations but it’s no good, no one’s looking after the translation.

“Lumbi drongupta talios suling fan,”
he says, one of the few idiomatic expressions I know. Literally: “The water buffalo knows now is a good time to eat,” meaning, I believe, that the rest of us are just going to have to wait our turn.

Waiting, waiting. “This sure is exciting,” Joanne says, smiling, then returns to her letter. I pace to stretch my legs, watch the spiders for a while. Slowly people drift away.

One of the aides catches my attention finally.
“Suling fan!”
he says, and I nod, thinking he’s saying we’ll have to wait longer for the translation service. But he points out the door and then I clue in. Lunchtime!

Joanne and I follow the aide to the banquet room, which is in a more modern part of the building, is glassed-in and cooler due to the noisy air conditioning. Now there are fifty of us, five round tables of ten with white linen tablecloths and a band playing traditional Santa Irenian music on flutes, odd stringed instruments, and rapid small drums. Scattered among the men in their lounge suits are some of the famously lovely island women who seem to crop up at every official function: tall, lithe, raven-haired beauties in tightly wrapped gowns. All have golden-brown skin that seems to glow of its own light. Up close many are large-eyed, overly made-up creatures stinking
of perfume, but one or two are impossibly vibrant and fresh, new orchids rising from a rainstorm. Their eyes pass over me as if I don’t exist, that’s how old and decrepit I appear, but they linger on Joanne. She’s in light, comfortable cotton pants and a sensible shirt. “My God, it’s a flower show,” she says. “What a disappointment I must be!”

“They envy you your hair,” I say.

“Give me a break. They’re just gorgeous.”

“And they think the same of you.”

The midday feast is traditional here, and I gather that since this is the opening meeting of the commission we must all eat ourselves into stupidity. Round after round of dishes arrives: spicy meats, burning hot fruit and vegetable plates, odd-textured soups, fish concoctions, deep-fried mysteries. We try engaging our table mates in conversation about the food but the only words of English that emerge are “Harro!” and “Velly happy see-you!”

“Didn’t you learn
any
Kuantij while you were here?” Joanne asks me.

“The Kartouf were not big on language lessons.”

“And Foreign Affairs?”

“Ha! I was lucky to get a handout on what to bring.”

Sizzling chicken strips with a fuzzy, piquant coating. Beans twisted in curlicues and glazed with brown sugar and something hot. A greyish unidentified meat, strings of which get caught in my dentures.
Supira
, the island firewater, for toasting, a sweet red wine for drinking with the soup, a heavy beer for simply washing things down. I taste and nibble but am careful about having too much. I launch into a long story for Joanne about some spicy
tarwon
sauce I had once that nearly killed me.