Sleep faster, we need the pillows.
Jewish proverb
Lies, half-truths, stories painted on air. Deceit is an art, an accident, a condition. And the basis for these deportations, these applications to revoke citizenship, a citizenship obtained by fraud. The deportations used for refugees, originally people in flight. Torn from their homes, families, their occupations — in some cases, their sanity. Beset by tyranny, poverty, conflict — broken bodies, broken minds.
Who can blame them for changing a past, a present? Leah thinks. Their lives have suddenly become so unstable that the facts they knew — fixed, settled facts — have already been shaken loose. And who can blame them for wanting to protect themselves, their children, to find a haven? Or merely to pry open the gates of possibility. Urgent lies, offhand lies, fuelled by fear or need, they neglect to mention the existence of a relative, a deed, a political party. Or they magnify hardships or misfortunes that are grim enough as they are. People who have taken an elastic approach to their histories, desperate to improve their futures.
Difficult cases. Is there anything more final than extinguishing someone’s citizenship? Depriving them of their right to be where they are, to exist where they are. Interrupting a highly specific life, filled with accumulated circumstances, incidents, experiences.
This case, though, this is a different kind of lie. About a different kind of life.
She is surrounded by paper sent over by Owen, affidavits, reports, dispatches, records, wading her way through them. This is what she has discovered so far: these innocuous-looking documents are unsafe, full of risks, hidden brutalities.
I, Samuel Rybak, of the City of Minsk in the Republic of Belarus make oath and say as follows:
Sworn before me this tenth day of April, 2009, in the City of Minsk. Ivan Stasevich, a Notary Public in and for the Republic of Belarus.
The rawness of this takes her by surprise. She has been trying to develop some detachment from her clients, their harrowing lives. Second-hand disaster looms so large in this work, she knows she must find ways to stay at a distance herself, to avoid absorbing every harsh detail into her own being. But this, this is wrenching, this has ambushed her. Pray, Jew, pray.
What did you think a war criminal was? says Louis.
A man linked to something more impersonal, more sweeping, perhaps. Not this dirty individual torture, this personal violence. Although, strictly speaking, these are not war crimes — not committed in the course of armed conflict. What are they? Obscenities, horrors.
The NKVD humiliated people to break them down, says Owen, who has been getting briefings from the War Crimes Section. Sometimes they forced prisoners to make animal noises. Confessions were crucial, they had quotas to meet. And later on, they were so desperate to meet the quotas they began turning each other in.
No, no, no, says Drozd.
He is invading her daylight hours now, not merely her dreams, rasping in her ear.
These things did not happen, he says. People distort them, they exaggerate, he says. This is what they do — they try to justify naming other people, justify giving information. And if — if — there were cases where pressure was applied, a small number, I was not involved. I was not that man, the clerk. I was barely a man — young. Fifteen. Or sixteen.
Fifteen. Or sixteen. When do people become moral beings, or at least beings with moral capacity?
Twelve for girls, says her aunt. Thirteen for boys. B’nai mitzvah. The rite of moral responsibility.
There is no denying this, though: the linking of Drozd to the affidavit is hearsay, and shaky hearsay at that. They will need something stronger to deport him.
Hearsay — a tale of a tale. You must not come to tell a story out of another man’s mouth. The rule at a time when seeing was believing, when the hearing was considered more trustworthy, when memory was believed more faithful. A witness must speak to what hath fallen under his senses.
But this rule is still here, sitting beside her like a stuffed frog, blinking at her, unmoving. And perhaps still better than accepting borrowed truths, still safer than second-hand realities.
She takes another affidavit out of the box.
···
Una bomba, says Isabel, her fine-spun hair a pale mass. Your war crimes case. Here. Or perhaps at the courthouse. The police say they suspect it is a hoax — she pronounces it hocks — but still, they take it seriously, they notify the parties, they search the office.
They are milling around on the sidewalk, together with other people from the building, all of them still clutching the things they had been holding when they left. From offices, studios, a gallery, people standing with a croissant, a drafting ruler, an old book in their hands. Some of them are looking at these things in a puzzled way. Why do I have these scissors?
We had bombs in Colombia, says Isabel reproachfully, then she looks over her shoulder as if they might have followed her here.
She tightens her grip on Leah’s arm.
Why do they think it’s a hoax?
They do not say exactly, although they say a hoax is not uncommon. But even so, they take steps.
A trill of fear. Who would do this? The man Drozd, an attempt to disrupt the proceedings? Or perhaps someone who supports him. Or someone who despises him.
Who are these people now, olive green hazard suits, deep-sea divers appearing suddenly on dry land? Climbing out of a truck, helmets bobbing, their faces in shadow behind their visors.
Stay back, they say calmly. Stay back.
They lumber over to the building in their suits, heavy collars up around their faces — people out to search the ocean depths of the office, looking for sea creatures with explosives. But they are brisk for all their calmness, all their bulk.
Stay back.
Nate is there now, his hands cupped around the back of his neck. Louis? she says to him.
Court, says Nate.
He looks sharply at Isabel, who is becoming more agitated. Now she is stroking Leah’s arm, over and over.
Let’s go for a walk, he says.
How long does it take to find a bomb?
The trees are leafing out above them, branches arching over the pavement. A fitful sun is out, sifting through all this young greenery, newly alive. Yellow seedlings are littering the sidewalk, last year’s dead leaves clogging the gutters. Now they are walking under an umbrella of crabapple blossoms, bark peeling and blistered on the branches, sun glinting though them. Looking up, far up into this light-filled vault, she feels something inside herself expanding, reaching out, spinning through the branches. A brief swell of elation fills her chest, her head.
Look up, she says to Isabel. Look up.
Isabel looks up for a second and then down again.
This city — Leah is often startled by the odd pockets of loveliness it produces out of nothing, out of dirt and cement. These moments when some tired street bursts out into foliage, when a dead-looking hedge produces cascades of white flowers for no reason — some invisible algorithm of weather and season. Why this day, and not that day, this week and not the next? Sometimes she stumbles across a river of pale blue irises where there was nothing a few days before, or a patch of garrulous tulips, an old garage dripping wisteria. They insist on themselves, these things — so simple, so heady — and then disappear as quickly as they come.
Nate has slowed down his strides so that he can talk to Isabel, talking about nothing in a careful, airy voice.
Outside, his bare head makes him look smoother, lighter, all of a piece. Egg-shaped, yes, but harder, a mineral egg, an egg made of ivory, perhaps. Something about this head, this big-boned body makes him seem unusually coherent, defined — as if he had finished becoming who he was at an early age, had completed the shape of his personhood early on.
So different, she thinks, we could belong to different species.
He is unhurried, grounded, she is restless — she twists her dark hair up and then drops it, she crosses and uncrosses her arms, she puts her hands in her pockets, stretches her legs. Sometimes she tries to hold herself still, but this only lasts for a minute. Pins and needles? She was born on them, lives on them, is propelled by them into motion. And one motion flows into the next and the next, a stream of disquiet.
They say that we should watch out for suspicious parcels as well, says Isabel abruptly, stopping and twisting her fingers together. But what does this mean, how will I know, what does this look like — a suspicious parcel?
Her face is distressed. Suddenly, the lives of other people might be in her hands. Or her hands might be blown off.
Nate reaches out to put his arm around her, and she brushes him away.
I thought this was a safe country, she says, her voice accusing, bewildered.
···
Safe? No such thing, says her aunt. Who’s safe? Not us, anyway. A tribe of people forever gambling on existence.
···
More affidavits, more brutal stories, more problems of proof, of evidence.
The office has been declared bomb-free for the moment, and she is making piles of paper, making labels for the piles, changing the piles, changing the labels. She is looking for something solid, something to build a case around. None of this is working, but the stories are slipping out, creeping over the edges of the boxes. The arrested, the tortured, the dead, their accounts recorded by wives, fathers, brothers, cousins, friends. All these stoical people, all these matter-of-fact descriptions. Full of small, shimmering braveries — If I must give in, I will not do it easily. If I must name people, I will name people who have already been arrested, already dead.
So personal, so intimate. For the victims, of course, but even for the perpetrators — perhaps shattering bones, inflicting pain, creates not only a physical intimacy but a moral one as well. Or rather an immoral one, but at least a proximity of sorts, a permanent linkage.
The emotion is largely drained from these documents, though, little here in the way of grief or rage. But they are all the more powerful for the missing parts, the unspoken words. This was agonizing. This was heart-rending. This was unendurable.
How do they survive it? Are they numb, afterwards, half-paralyzed? Do they strain themselves to the utmost to avoid talking about it? Or do they talk ceaselessly, unable to stop? Let me tell you about being beaten, about being tortured. Let me tell you about being worked and starved in a slow form of murder, about riding the edge of death for months, years. Let me tell you about losing everyone I ever loved. Everyone. Every single one.
What does it do to them? Scarred, wary, determined to make sense of their own survival. But how do they manage to live anything resembling a normal life with these nightmares, this anguish buried inside them? How can they stand the feeling of someone else’s skin against their own again, to kiss a crying child? Can they possibly have tears left for anyone else?
Tearless. A chronic condition, said Nate when they first began working together. The body begins attacking itself, its own saliva and tear glands. The mouth becomes dryer and dryer, the eyes become dryer and dryer, sometimes blurring.
I can’t even cry, he said.
But he said it in a bemused way, as if he wasn’t sure whether this was good or bad.
She felt a sudden impulse to touch his eyes, to run her fingers across his eyelids, his lashes.
Now, she thinks: These people. These people inhabiting the affidavits — are they living dry-eyed existences as well? Or perhaps it is the opposite, perhaps they spend hours weeping uncontrollably. Either way, they are turning into spiders in her brain, picking their way around her frontal lobes. Urging her, hectoring her.
Go away, she says to them.
No, they say in a graceful, spidery way.
I’m doing what I can, she says.
Do more, they say.
Law, sleeping in the background, turns over restlessly.
···
We’re lawyers, says Louis. Not alchemists. We can polish up the facts, frame them differently, show them in the best light. But straw into gold? Impossible.
Lead into gold, she says. She is in his office, sitting across from him.
What?
The alchemists were trying to turn lead into gold. Spinning straw into gold was the miller’s daughter in Rumpelstiltskin.
God give me patience, he says, pinching the bridge of his nose.
He means this. Despite his cynicism — or perhaps because of it — he has taken to dropping into a small synagogue from time to time. She wonders if this impulse is the result of that moment when he seemed to have misplaced himself, when he seemed adrift in a world suddenly emptied of substance, only the outlines left. Perhaps this has sent him searching for an anchor of some kind, for additional purchase.
She envies him his careless Jewishness, though — the idea of dipping into it from time to time. The thought that he has so much of it merely sitting there, that he can pick it up or drop it whenever he wants, even waste it. Her own seems much less reliable — sometimes she feels as if she has to hold on to it deliberately, or it might skitter away from her. But she also feels unexpected surges of it once in a while, surges that are almost palpable. A flood of something potent, like a wild sweetness in her veins. I am this. This is me.
Anything else? says Louis. You do have your own office.
Owen, she says. We have to speak to him, alert him to the problems. We have to tell him we need more evidence, better evidence.
No, he says, looking at her sharply. We do the case we’re given. Owen is as astute as they come. He is certainly aware of any problems, and the case is enough of a hot potato as it is. Some of the associations — Hungarians, Ukrainians, Russians, Germans — are opposed to these kinds of cases proceeding, and the Jewish groups want them to go ahead. We don’t want to present him with a dilemma where anything he does — even nothing — will incur political liability. He needs cover — if we ever want more work from him. And we do.
But we’re likely to lose.
Lose? say the spiders, shocked.
He hesitates.
You don’t know that, he says finally. Anything is possible. Very few judges will want to see someone walking away from these things. Especially when the end result is only a deportation. But we’re not raising it with Owen, at least not yet. So for now, you’re going to have to cobble together something that works. Look again. See what you can find. It doesn’t have to be a perfect case, a watertight case — just something respectable that gives us a shot. Now get out.
He rubs his face with his hands.
···
She needs Nate — where is he? He is a necessity, a requirement, she needs to talk about the case.
This is what they do, and when they do it, they are good at it. When they talk about law, they are nimble, acrobatic, casting up ideas then prodding, poking them for weak spots. He has a more instinctive feel for it than she does; in school, he took to law effortlessly, as if he were rediscovering a dialect he already knew. She had to acquire hers by hand, every piece hard-won.
She had been immersed in an art history degree, engrossed in the painters of Der Blaue Reiter, their deep, bright colours, their sensual lines swirling around her. One day she realized — belatedly — that this would not produce a livelihood, not the one she needed, not without more degrees and time than she could afford. She had torn herself away from her courses, miserable about the loss, resentful at her own lack of foresight. Looking around for something that would provide a living, she slid sideways into law.
At first she refused to consider whether she could take any pleasure in it, as if this might be a form of infidelity, faithlessness to her first love. And the law itself irked her.
So clumsy, she had said to Nate. So inept. Blundering around in human lives like that.
He raised an eyebrow.
They had found each other the first week of classes, had detected a possible kinship, standing in line for casebooks.
Not clumsy, he said. Something else. Muscular.
You have to concede this, then — the logic is bizarre.
I concede nothing, he said.
But she found the shift from art to law unnerving. She felt as if she had been exiled from a world of hues and pigments, and sent to a place of flat words, a place from which all the colour had been leached. Banished to some arid country she had no idea even existed.
After a while, though, she began to realize that if she listened closely enough, there was something like a dry song running below the surface of these words, the rolling Latin phrases. And she was tantalized by some parts of it — by the obsession with fairness, with rightness, by the flirtations with morality.
The doctrines lured her in further, each one a piece of reality that had been carved up and tied into a bundle. Ideas exhaling the air of other centuries — the British ones in particular, their cases spreading out to the colonies, to her colony. Even their names had a dusty ring: the Lords of Appeal in Ordinary, Viscount Maugham, Lord Morris of Borth-y-Gest. Eventually she began to come around, first to the point of declaring a ceasefire, and later a partial surrender. And slowly her paintings abandoned her, although pieces of them still bobbed up from time to time — a woman in a dark dress disappearing around a corner, a blue-black fox curled in sleep. Sometimes, in dreams, she found herself inside one of the pictures, part of it — climbing up a Mediterranean hillside, or moving through a formal public garden, people in top hats strolling around her.
I concede nothing.
All of this took longer than it should have, too long. School inched forward, turtle-paced, and then she would be out of money — forced to take a job for a spring term here, a fall term there.
···
A thousand dollars, said Rudy.
She looked up, worried. A new debt?
They sat down beside her, around the dining room table, and Gus began fanning out bills, Malcolm looking on unhappily. Six hundred of this was his, a long odds bet on a horse. Vain, selfish, the uncle who had been married and divorced, who had returned a year later. A man with a flair for duping people, but who did it so affably, so kindly, that people almost lined up to be duped. And the horses, the racetrack — one of his haunts. All those possibilities, all those people thin-skinned with eagerness.
Not a man who would give up money easily. But Rudy and Gus had wrestled it out of him, harassing him, nagging him, rattling him until he handed it over, coming up with the other four hundred on their own.
For the school fees, Rudy announced.
She was speechless. How had they done this? They must need the cash for other things.
Yes, said Malcolm.
Never you mind, said Rudy.
These men, she thought. Looking around at them — Gus sheepish but pleased, Rudy grinning, Malcolm’s face screwed up, torn between pride and resentment. These men, taught by circumstance to keep their eyes on the ground, the few skimpy prospects they had disappearing over the years — they believed in her illogically, boundlessly.
Something rare, this belief. A windfall. She felt a rush of fondness, she was almost haplessly grateful.
Then Rudy started to waver, to slip to one side in his seat, another faint rolling over him, and she and Gus leaned forward to grab his arms.
···
The basement, says Rudy sternly. Now.
After dinner. She had planned to work on the case, read more of the paperwork, but there is no arguing with him.
He is a discarder of things, he is constantly paring down. Left to himself, he would toss out most of the basement contents without a qualm, send bags of it sailing through the air to the curb. But she is a keeper, whenever he attempts to jettison things from the basement — a cracked butter dish, a rocking chair with a broken spoke — she reclaims them, collecting them from the sidewalk, the bin. This is not a game — the loss of these things is genuinely disturbing.
You do it, then, he says. Make some space.
Usually she agrees and then ignores him. Tonight, though, he is insistent, and she realizes the basement would be a welcome distraction from the affidavits, from fractured limbs and bodies.
The room is next to the furnace room, a weak light bulb, green-painted walls, a concrete floor. Quiet, dim, it seems almost underwater, a horde of objects floating in it. The flotsam and jetsam of various lives. Musty suitcases, a cracked butter dish, a hammer with a broken claw, a lamp that no longer works. What should we do with this rusty birdcage, missing a door? Put it next to the chess set, missing a rook.
You never know when you might need something, says her aunt.
Yes. You never know. How is it possible to know? Leah is convinced that the lamp can be repaired, that the butter dish can be glued, that the rook will turn up, wedged behind a cushion. That the broken hammer, the birdcage will somehow save the day, some day. And she is right, she is convinced she is right, except that she is beginning to suspect that the timeline for this is longer than she thought. Perhaps the moments when these things might turn out to be valuable are scattered over a decade or two, not this year or next year or the next. In the meantime, though, she is determined to hold on to them, to have them sit here silently in this green dimness, waiting for their hour to arrive.
They are restful, too, these things. She is standing beside the shelves where Gus keeps his tools — old coffee cans full of wrenches, clamps, boxes of finishing nails, bolts and nuts. An incurable fixer, whistling breathy non-tunes as he repairs a step, replaces a window. He has a small stock of skills, but his real virtue is patience, his willingness to keep going when — inevitably — the wood splits, the nail bends. And his tools, so unassuming, so quietly useful. Perhaps some of their restfulness will transfer to her if she stays down here for a while, keeps them company.
Rudy’s dog — a golden retriever with a white muzzle, flecks of saliva on her jaws — pads downstairs, sniffs around, and then comes over to rest her old head on Leah’s leg, looking mournful. She scratches the dog’s ears and watches her rheumy eyes close.
She can hear Malcolm upstairs, his voice comes down clearly. He is usually buoyant after the racetrack, but today he sounds sorry for himself, today he must have lost. Three-year-olds, colts and geldings, he says, disgusted.
Another good reason to stay down here.
He does have his own peculiar form of generosity, not about things — unless they are pried out of him — but about events or circumstances. As if he were distributing possibilities to other people like some kind of modern largesse, doling out prospects. Here, this set of chances is for you. Look, this possibility, this long shot is for you. Over there, these breaks, these prospects, these are for you and you.
A mismatched group, these uncles. One day, eight years old, she had looked around and realized that her family was unusual, off-kilter, lacking in certain features. Determined to shape them into something more acceptable, she did her best to impose a parallel order on them, to make them more family-like. There must be two uncles at parent interviews, no more, no less, since her aunt was too exhausted to go. Two uncles at school concerts, two uncles at dance recitals, a set of contrived parents. Why did they tolerate this, her insistence on this regime of twoness? School was a foreign country for Rudy, the rules murky at the best of times, and Gus was accustomed to following her instructions. Malcolm, though, for Malcolm, these were opportunities to practise his spurious geniality, his talent for deception.
Hello there, he would say to a teacher, already flirtatious if the teacher was a woman. If the teacher was a man, he would shake his hand in what he considered a forthright, gruff way. From there, the conversation flowed down a set of known alleyways.
Do you have to do that? she said once when she was older, cross as only a ten-year-old can be. There was something suspect, something crude in these methods that even she could see.
It works, doesn’t it? he said, and he was right.
Does a child want to know how easily people can be fooled? Not this child — life was slippery enough already. Parents who had vanished without warning, one after another, without her permission, without her consent. A sleight of hand, disappearing without even a puff of smoke. All too compelling, all too convincing as a lesson in the instability of events.
No more people would disappear, no more people would evaporate into air if she had anything to do with it. She herded these men together on the sidewalk when they walked to the pub for dinner, she counted them incessantly. She pulled them back from crossing against the lights, insisted they hold handrails on stairs.
Isn’t that sweet? said a passerby once, but it was deadly serious for her. She knew that she had to exert whatever meagre control she had over events, over circumstances. How much was that? Something unknown, unclear, but she was determined to do what she could, what was possible. She knew one thing with a hectic certainty, one thing in an almost tangible way: fate could not be trusted for a minute.
Now, she looks around for something she can throw out, something to pacify Rudy. The dented flour sifter? The broken guitar? Something catches her eye — over there, a box. Her aunt’s box, sent over after she died. Something she poured over at the time, something she hasn’t opened for years.
She reaches over, pulls it out.
Inside, on top, a small portfolio. Her mother’s photographs. She begins leafing through them, tiny shocks of recognition.
A sleepy baby, a crawler gumming a key chain. A skinny four-year-old drinking from a hose, a tricycle-rider, head down, intent with effort of peddling. What was her mother thinking about when she took this picture, caught this moment? What did she mean by this shot, what was she saying? But these pictures are not talking, they offer no hints to the photographer.
Then a picture of an older woman — a mesh of lines around her kind eyes, greying ginger-brown hair — looking out steadily. The colours are strong — a wine-coloured blouse, a yellow wall behind her — but her face is so alive that it dominates the picture, her expression a mixture, warm, melancholy, sardonic.
She feels her chest ache, she holds the picture close to her, trying not to bend it.
I miss you, she says.
I know, says her aunt sadly.
But for her, Rudy would be tempted to toss this picture, the first thing to go. The aunt, they called her with particular emphasis, this tart-tongued woman with so much to say. Enumerating their child-rearing failings, a catalogue. A sleeping bag is not a blanket. A swimsuit is not a gym suit. A bowl of cereal is not dinner. They would listen to her silently, without response, sometimes glancing at Leah reproachfully, as if she had betrayed them.
Too many shadows, though, living in these photographs, waiting below the surface. The small darkroom, the trays of chemicals for developing the pictures, a drying line. The sound of her mother humming under her breath as she dipped the negatives into one bath after another, the black tongs, the burnt match smell of the fixer. So absorbed, she would only come to with a start when the girl began howling or hopping up and down.
Then she would stand with the child in front of her, both of them looking at the pictures pinned up on a line. A slender, springy woman, large eyes, short dark hair, a lilt to the way she moved, the way she talked. Running her hands up over the girl’s forehead, sweeping the hair back from her face, over and over. A girl who looked like her, a small edition, gawkier but still alike. More Rubin than Jarvis, she would say. And then she would go back to humming.
Fiddle dee dee, fiddle dee dee, the fly has married the bumblebee.
A photograph of her father holding her, a serious toddler. This father, smiling uncertainly, this figment of a person. So few traces of him, this man, greedy for unknown things, for experiences beyond his reach — just out of the picture frame. This Andrew Jarvis.
What did you find? she says to him. Was it worth it?
What did I have to lose? he says.
She studies the picture again, familiar, but not familiar. Were there any signs of a future departure in his clothes, in his hair? Was there anything about him that suggested a man about to bolt? I’m sorry.
More photos of the child — does she seem content, this three-year-old in overalls, standing against the front of a sofa, one arm up along the cushions? Does this naked toddler, jumping over a sprinkler in the sun, look happy? They are strangers, though, even a glimpse of their thoughts or feelings hard to see — they simply are, existing in these moments on paper. Small beings fixed in an instant.
And her mother — if she had lived, what kind of photographer would she be now? Someone who took bold, startling shots? Someone who created subtle images, enigmas for the viewer to unravel? Searching for the eye of the beholder.
Underneath the portfolio are other documents — school reports, a lifeguard certificate, an old library card, a full-length birth certificate. Full name of father: Andrew Gregory Jarvis. Full name of mother: Miriam Rubin Jarvis. Female child born alive at 2:30 a.m. And here, the motor vehicle accident report, yellowed and brittle now. How many times had she been over this spare, cryptic document, looking for clues?
Date of Accident: Unknown. Discovered October 14, 1978. Coroner’s office estimates accident occurred a day earlier, based on state of driver’s body.
Cause of Accident: Vehicle left the road, impact with a large tree.
Location of Accident: 4th Line and Side Road 15.
Damage to Vehicle(s), If Any: Extensive — see circled areas on chart.
Injuries to Person(s), If Any: Female driver killed on impact or died shortly after, child diagnosed with fractured femur.
Witnesses: None.
Other Notes: Reason why vehicle left the road unconfirmed. Driver’s blood alcohol content over the limit, allowing for alcohol from decomposition. Child found dehydrated, strapped into back seat.
The basement around her trembles.
Loud, she thinks, the only thought she has time for.
A din of crashing, splitting, falling, disintegrating. The noise is everywhere, she is lost in it. The car begins settling in jerks, each one with its own sounds. In a few minutes, the settling stops, and there is only snapping and creaking. Eventually this subsides as well, and a soft, chilly darkness sinks in. She can smell gasoline, dead vegetation. Blood on the grass, bushes, the metal door, twisted sideways. Only a few shards of glass left in the window beside her. Her leg and side are hurting, an enormous, dull pain. The seat next to her is covered in sour vomit. After a while, a long while, the only sound is the soggy drumming of the rain.
Then the basement, the bare bulb is back, and she can feel the report in her hands.
···
Jews don’t drink, says her aunt.
Manifestly untrue, but a grain — half a grain — of fact.
Then they drink less. Something to do with the genes, less tolerance.
Gus has an inarticulate spasm when she asks him about it.
She liked the sauce, he admits reluctantly. But she wasn’t a drunk.
4th Line and Side Road 15?
The two of you were up at someone’s cottage, he says. You don’t remember?
No.
Was that why her father left? The sauce. Perhaps he was unable to handle it. Perhaps he was a drinker himself. Or did her mother begin drinking because her husband left? If she was a drinker.
I don’t know, says Gus, appalled by all this talking.
···
Andrew Gregory Jarvis. This is what she knows about him — he is unfindable. He is an absence, this is his category, his fundamental trait. Missing. Not even an enigma, too insubstantial for that. Not much more than a rumour.
Gone. Untraceable. As a child, she had accepted this unquestioningly, as she had accepted the existence of gravity, of air. Later, in a new century, a century of online searches, she had plugged his name in half-heartedly, quickly deterred by the number of results. And unable to shake the rooted belief that this was futile, that he could not be found.
What would she do with him if she did find him? she thinks now. If he were no longer missing. How would this shift the sticky configurations in her life, how would it change her understanding of things, her pacts with reality?
Perhaps it would be a good thing, though, something to shake up all those moving parts. A small streak of chaos. Perhaps this is the moment for at least a glimpse of him.
Over to her desk. In a minute, there it is, unblinking on the screen — a list of Andrew Jarvises, a small paternal collection.
And now?
···
What kind of bomb do you think it will be? Nate says conversationally. A pipe bomb? A suitcase bomb? Simple enough to make one, to look it up. Saltpetre and charcoal.
How handy for the bomb-inclined, she says, but her stomach is twisting. She can see this bomb, this explosion far too clearly. A deafening boom, the walls staggering, the ceiling starting to collapse. Screams of terror, of pain. Clouds of grey-black dust swelling around her, filling her nose, her throat. Then silence.
Perhaps she should begin dropping into a synagogue as well.
But she is a rickety agnostic, an incurable doubter — unsure even about that. The idea of a god — the sense of a god — is tempting, even elating. A clue that opens up the possibility of some existential pattern, even a logic of sorts. But as soon as she begins to feel a longing for this, a hunger for transcendence, as soon as she feels some internal balance start to shift even slightly, she is assailed by a sense of implausibility, by an analytical twitch.
Doubt wisely, says Donne.
I’m surprised about Louis, says Nate. If ever there was a confirmed cynic.
Perhaps he grew up with it. Perhaps old habits are dying hard.
Not the habits of her childhood, though, one that featured a complete absence of creed. This was not a matter of conviction, but a lack of interest so absolute as to be dead air. Her uncles had forgotten about religion, and simply kept on forgetting.
And her aunt — quarrelling with her own God, despite her efforts to fill the girl with a certain strain of Jewishness. Her faith in this God was an irritable one — I have my reasons, believe me. Instead, she attempted to infuse the girl with a specific way of being, to envelop her in its stories, its smells and tastes. She taught her songs about goats or old wars, they ate grated horseradish, parsley sloshed in salt water. She showed her how to make walnut bread in round loaves, they struggled to put together a burlap hut, her aunt cursing fluently. Seders with Marvin and Ida — the neighbours — around a plate with an egg marked with black smoke and a shank bone. Dipping their fingers in syrupy wine to mark the plagues with dark red drops. (All ten — happy now?)
Baruch etah Adonai, Eloheinu melech haolam. Even the blessings she learned seemed more like chants rather than prayers. Strangely beautiful in their own way, whole things in themselves, but she was only dimly aware that they were related to some kind of deity. They had sunk into her anyway, into her ribs, her sternum — ancient ribbons of song flowing through her.
But she is godless now, now when it might be useful, even practical, to have an omnipotent guardian. Now with a bomb threat grinning at her, only a foot or two between them.
···
Pick a pile, she says to Nate the next day, still surrounded by the pieces of the case. He is standing in the doorway to her office, and his body seems suddenly intensely present. She has to resist the urge to touch his shoulder, run her fingers down his spine, up the back of his neck.
Not my case, he says stiffly.
What? This is not how they do it, this is not how they work. Is that resentment in his voice? Or perhaps something more complicated. Had he wanted this case?
He is a generous rival, but still a rival. He juggles these things with casual skill, and when — inevitably — they come into conflict, he simply shrugs with wry amusement. Every so often, though, she sees a glimpse of his ambition, a spike of ruthlessness.
Where does it come from? Some primeval instinct? His father? But his father is a cheese maker, he makes hard cheeses, soft cheeses, blue cheeses wrapped in chestnut leaves, sheep’s milk cheeses rubbed with rosemary.
Imagine. A father. A father and a cheese maker.
Quaint, she says.
No, says Nate. A highly technical operation. The mixture of milks, the introduction of bacteria, the heating to precise temperatures. Then the curing, the aging.
Would someone immersed in this small, exact world instill such drive in his son?
But perhaps Nate had wanted the case for its own sake, lured by the history running through it, the idea of some overdue redress.
Go ahead, take it. For a moment, she is tempted to say this — the stories are so haunting, but the evidence is so full of holes. Not only shaky hearsay, but double hearsay, anonymous hearsay, vague statements, missing archival records.
The benefits of losing the motion. Too late now.
But even as the words are almost out of her mouth, she thinks: no. No, she won’t — she can’t — give this case away, disturbing as it is. No, this case has attached itself to her now, she is stuck with it. This case fits her in a way that few of her others do.
Sometimes she feels the various parts of herself are crowded into this job, packed in together. She avoids showing any trace of this to Louis, though. For him, she tries to make it clear — in the way she nods, the way she speaks, the way she holds herself — that she is remarkably suited to this position, that if she were plotted out against a diagram of its elements, she would be revealed as the answer for everything.
Unlikely, says Louis.
He will take more convincing now.
···
How long have you been with the Ministry? she says, hoping to distract him.
Owen is calling to find out how the case is going, for a measure of its chances. He is a client, of course she must speak to him. She is tempted for a moment to refer him to Louis, but he will be angry if she shifts this problem back to him, this exercise in tactful evasion. Perhaps even worse, it might suggest that she is unable to handle it, to engage in the footwork required. No, instead, she will be as skilful, as careful as she can be, exceptionally careful. This is only an update, nothing more, no questions on her part, no bids for more evidence, no dilemmas presented. Some small talk, then a quick discussion, circling around the danger spots.
With the government? he says. A long time, too long, but I’ve been in the Department of Justice four years. My last department was Fisheries.
And did you catch much there? she says, straight-faced.
Only a bout of bureaucratic flu.
She laughs.
So why did you decide to send this case out? she says. Instead of using your own lawyers.
We have excellent people, but we’re short-handed. Secondments, a chronic illness, two leaves of absence. And these things can be delicate.
Is that the flu coming on again?
He laughs this time, a discreet laugh.
Perhaps. But with the Director on leave, I’m keeping an eye on things for the moment, so tell me about this case.
We may not be able to link Drozd to the NKVD through records alone, she says. He wasn’t an officer, he was a clerk, hired locally.
Ah, he says.
Certainly the NKVD were involved in widespread torture and executions. It would be difficult to dispute that. The problem is that they did ordinary police work as well, so even if we could show that he was hired by them, that wouldn’t prove much.
Can we connect him to the incidents in the affidavits? he says.
A man expert at omissions himself, he can spot them instantly. And incidents — such a sanitized word.
Much less clear, she says. We only need to prove that he lied, but this is the essence of his lying — that he concealed these things. Or failed to disclose them.
What about linking him to more widespread killing? The War Crimes Section seems convinced that there is something more to find. They suspect something even worse — that he was involved in other crimes, perhaps executions, perhaps on a larger scale.
I haven’t seen anything yet, but I’ll keep looking, she says. What do you think about his age?
We have only his word for it — his documents were all re-created, not unusual after the war. But no one was coercing him, he was nobody’s victim. And sixteen is not so young. Especially in Belarus. Especially at that time.
Not so young, she thinks. How young is that? And is there a moral discount for age, some sliding measure?
So our chances overall? he says patiently
He is very patient, she realizes, smoothing out any irritation, any annoyance he feels. She sees him in her mind as they talk, his narrow face, the dark lines around his mouth, slight hollows under his cheekbones. The trace of humour that he extends to people, vanishing in a second if there is no hint of reciprocation, expanding slightly if there is. Everything about him is finely tuned to the next meeting, the next appointment; his muted suit, his tie loosened but not loose, his shoes polished but not new. If there is any self-importance to him — and she suspects there is — he hides it well, he hides everything well. Was this ability to obscure things acquired through his work, built up over the years? Or was he given the position because it was something he already possessed? Perhaps someone interviewing candidates looked at that calm, sealed exterior and said to himself: perfect.
Our chances? A complicated question, she says, so many factors involved.
What are the strengths, the weaknesses, then?
She talks as much as she can about anything other than the evidence, skipping, deflecting, sidestepping.
What about linking the specific incidents to him? he says again.
There is no putting him off.
Generally speaking, she says, almost under her breath, almost to herself — generally speaking, without the right records, we need better evidence.
Ah, he says.
He does know.
How bad is it? he says.
Difficult to say.
A pause.
We used archival evidence in the Nazi cases, he says, but the Germans were much better at documenting things, including their own crimes. The Russians are less accommodating about the NKVD records, which are far from complete, anyway. No help from Belarus — their records are still closed. And there’s some diplomatic sensitivity here as well.
She says nothing.
I suspect that the appetite may be low for pouring more money into a weak case. But we have an MP who’s preoccupied with the NKVD — he has a cluster of expatriate Russians in his riding. He’s been harassing the Minister, so I’ll take a quick reading of the temperature.
···
Why is the sun so hot? she said. So recently arrived, hoping to keep her aunt by the bed, to delay the moment of turning off the lights, the moment of darkness, departure.
Do I look like an encyclopedia? said her aunt.
The child was undeterred. All she had to do was find the right question. Where does the music on the radio come from? What makes cars go faster? How do birds stay up in the air?
How do you think? said her aunt.
Invisible strings?
Close enough.
The girl had been hoping for some instructions about flying, some tips. She had plans — she wanted to fly herself, to take off, weightless, to soar over the trees, to perch on electrical wires. She wanted to watch from above as drivers hopped out of delivery vans, horns honked below, bicycles swerved between cars.
Even now, even as an adult, the desire to fly sometimes nags at her, the urge to swoop and glide, to hang in the air dizzily, unhindered by machinery. She wonders whether there was a time when humans were able to fly, some long-forgotten detour or dead end in evolution. Did we lose this, she thinks, like flightless birds? Are there small, vestigial wings hidden in our bodies somewhere? Why would this yearning for flight be so strong, so widespread? Why is it so bittersweet?
···
This is the truth about glass, she says to Nate. It has the molecular properties of both a solid and liquid, something in between. An amorphous solid, they call it.
Why is that the truth? says Nate.
···
She has read most of the affidavits now and they all have weaknesses, serious problems of proof. For the moment, she is out of ideas. Perhaps if she leaves the case alone for a day or two, lets it settle, some silt will drift to the bottom, some wisdom will float to the top, something will emerge.
But the spiders are awake again, making elegant gestures with their legs.
No, no, they say. No, no, no. Don’t give up.
Don’t give up, says her aunt.
I’m not giving up, I’m letting it settle. A different thing, entirely different. But there is something I have to tell you, something you should know. A caution, a warning. Whatever it is that you want to happen, whatever it is you think will happen, this is the distorted universe of law. A garbled reflection of real life. The chances are that nobody finds what they want here.
But the spiders are not listening.
···
She rubs her sandy eyes. Up late the night before, she had allowed herself to sink into her Der Blaue Reiter painters again, to become her old self for a little while in their soothing arms. Her friends, these paintings — sunlit terraces, men rowing skiffs, people in the rain, holding umbrellas high. Now her thoughts seem to be sliding away from her, the warmth of the room making her sleepy. She puts her head down on her desk.
I did my best with Owen, she says to Nate. I did my best with him, but he’s too quick, too shrewd, there was too little room to manoeuvre. At a certain point, I began sounding evasive.
But Nate is not there, he has been replaced by the judge on the case, busy unnailing a crate of doctrines and principles. See that? he says, pulling out a doctrine. See that? A robust vintage, this doctrine. A perfectly aged law.
And then he is gone as well, and there is Drozd, staring at her with hatred in his eyes.
Why are you obsessed with this case? he says. What is wrong with you that you want to persecute an innocent man? To destroy a life, a life I have created from nothing, from less than nothing.
It’s not a question of persecution, she wants to say. It’s a question of justice. But her tongue has folded up.
What is this justice, what does it look like? Whose justice is it? How can it be justice, if I am innocent of these things?
How can we know that you’re innocent unless we hear the evidence? she says thickly. Nemo debet esse judex in propria sua causa. No man can be a judge in his own cause.
Because I tell you so.
But a guilty man would say the same.
Lawyers. I am sick of lawyers.
She says nothing.
You want to tear down a decent man, Drozd says. A man who survived the war as well as he could, who did what was necessary, and now you want to impose some twisted view of justice decades later. You have no idea what justice is, what it means in reality. You want to destroy a good man, on the basis of nothing. Nothing.
That’s your story, she says.
···
Under Norman law, says Nate, if a person wrongly called someone a “manslayer,” he was required to pay damages and to publicly confess that he was a liar, while he held his nose with his fingers.
No, she says in disbelief.
It’s true. But if you prefer this, under ancient English law, a slanderer would have his tongue cut out.
···
Get in here, says Louis, dangerously calm.
Before you say anything — she begins.
You’re fired, he says.