The Little Red Chairs (29 page)

They sat politely, bludgeoned from the sheer onslaught of rhetoric and evidence, as he cited document after document, raved, ranted, repeated himself and finally, declared that Serbs did not have any intention of taking that city, that there had been no siege and that it was a delusion and invention on the enemy’s part.

The place was stifling. Suddenly it occurred to her that a trace of him still lurked in her, minute and spectral, that effluvial stain that would be her stigmata forever. It was then that she resolved to ask for an appointment to see him, as things had to be settled between them.

The interpreters were having a hard time keeping up with him and sometimes words were jumbled and precise meaning was lost for those who listened through their headphones. The presiding judge asked him to go slower and he seethed at that, but after a second resumed his composure, saying he was adducing the facts as best he could and that it was in everyone’s interest to learn the truth.

On the next day, which was his last day of evidence, as evening was coming and dusk was creeping around the walls of the building and over the stacks of bicycles and misting the pond, he assumed a messianic calm, appealing to what was best and most reasonable in mankind. Suddenly and with great theatricality he broke into English, his voice booming, pervading every corner of that chamber, fortified with his own bravura – ‘If I am crazy then patriotism itself is crazy.’ Then, with a sweep of his arm, he told the four judges and those that might send him down of the larger certainty, insisting that he would leave that court a free man.

There was a hush. No one spoke. All was suspended as a judge informed them that the verdict would not be for eight or nine months. She looked around at the faces, but there was not a single gasp or cry, or tear; no swearing, no catcalls, a numbness, a negation, as if they had all been sucked into some vortex, some mass hallucination, or turned to stone, just a huddle of people endeavouring to get out and down that stairs, as they fled towards forgetfulness.

His barrister came towards her in the hall, all smiles. He was an enthusiastic man, marvelling at how well things had gone, his client’s élan, that sureness of knowledge, the non-fatalism and the certainty of his own innocence. Then, with even greater zeal, he was proud to tell her that her request for a visit had been granted and she quaked at having ever asked for it.

‘I think you will like him too much,’ he said.

The inference made her blush. She could almost smell it, the clay of that garden, mixed in with smells of flowers and an over-sweet flowering shrub, her soul intoxicated, as she was carried aloft to her unbidden destiny.

The Prison Visit

The prison was a few kilometres outside the centre, in a seaside suburb. The taxi driver chose the scenic route, so that Fidelma had a passing view of the North Sea, with one ship ploughing the grey bleak waters, big waves rising around it, a cold lonely sea that was a continuum of all loneliness. On the promenade, a few stoics were walking their dogs, there were lights in the shops in the town, several signs for museums and a bolder one in red that flashed
Casino Casino.

The prison was flanked by two tall towers, and though it was only four o’clock, darkness was descending and the brick facade was the colour of dried blood.

Security was far more strict than at the court and she was passed from one guard to the next, their faces under the fluorescent lighting pallid and identical, sour and sullen, eyeing her with suspicion. The detention rooms, where he and half a dozen others were being held, were at the end of a long corridor and as she followed the broad back of a guard, her decisiveness was faltering.

He greeted her warmly, arm outstretched: ‘Let me look at you … still beautiful … a little too thin perhaps.’ He seemed, with his excessive compliments, to be oblivious to the guard, who was also standing there as he continued with many other tributes. She had come in his hour of need.

‘How are you Vlad?’ He smiled at the recollection of the old
name and the old days. They were at a little metal table that was stacked with a batch of papers which he began to lay out.

‘I brought this,’ she said and she took out the black chiffon scarf with the smell of verbena, with which he had blindfolded her. He seemed to ignore it.

‘Don’t you remember …’ she said and she held it up for him to see and maybe even to smell. He acted as if he did not understand her, or as if perhaps she was some simpleton he had met long before.

‘You were in that court Fidelma,’ his voice booming now, ‘you saw … you heard … they paint me a monster, when all the time I was seeking to create a homogeneous peace. You know me … you knew me … in our personal association did you find me a monster?’

‘It’s the only good memory I have of us,’ she said, crushing the scarf in her hand.

‘I am a poet, I am an artist, I am a humanist for Christ’s sake, caged in this stinking universe for crimes I have not committed.’

‘I wanted to write to you, but I did not know how to put it,’ she said, leaning towards him and more anxious now.

‘Oh Kafka, come back and help me overcome those shitty ladies and gentlemen enrobed, on their high thrones, because truthfulness is dead and I am the one who must prove it.’

‘The morning you were taken off the bus, the news travelled like wildfire … TJ’s was packed. People drove from all over to watch on the big screen … there you were, the you they did not know … the you I did not know, but then witnesses told their stories and shoes were pelted at your face on the screen … Fifi fainted …’

Nothing of emotion or even surprise registered on his face, as he held up a sheaf of papers to show her.

‘Not a single piece of evidence ordering atrocities was ever signed by me.’

The pages were scrawled in different inks, with question marks and annotations all over.

‘I was watching in my house with my husband … he knew nothing of our … our love,’ she went on.

‘For example,’ and he reeled them off, page and paragraph, ‘D1329, D2335, D2986, D2168, D2170, D3575, D3302, D2172, D2336, D2512, D2513, D2605–606 …’

It was not only a matter of will now, but of alacrity, of who could outdo whom – ‘I was ten weeks pregnant … there was no one I could tell … not even you … its father.’

He looked at her, then shook his head slowly and sternly from side to side. How dare she compromise him in the presence of a menial.

‘I am not a nationalist,’ he said addressing the guard now, ‘but I think races should not mix … when I meet a real Frenchman or a real German or a real Irishman … they have something that flowers have … a distinct scent of their own.’

It was being said to deflect her, but she was more determined now, her anger mounting.

‘Three men knocked on our door … my husband answered it … they had business with me, or rather with you, whom they had come for …’

‘Yes,’ he went on, ‘I have received many prominent awards … Books in several languages, also a comedy and a novel –
The Wondrous Chronicles of the Night
…’

‘They brought me way up the mountain, to a hut,’ refusing to
be thwarted, ‘… the one they called Medico took out a crowbar …’

‘One does not talk about a rope Fidelma, in the house of a hanged man,’ he says.

‘You have to hear me out,’ she answers.

‘You mustn’t dramatise Fidelma.’

‘My world in bits … and the child …’

‘People who converse with God know that I am innocent.’ He is bellowing it in her ear.

‘You know everything you have done … in a way I wish you were mad, but you are not mad … you are one of Lucifer’s lying liars … a monster.’

There is the instantaneous eruption as he stands, papers flying in all directions, ‘
Uit
, uit
: Out, out,’ he orders the guard in Dutch and English.

She is gripped by the elbows from behind, the blades of both shoulders lifted in a clinch and then marched outside, to where the burly one is seated and together they proceed up the corridor, towards the doorman at the end. The two who held her talked to him in their own language and she wondered what they were saying – that she assaulted the prisoner, that she was a nutcase, that she should be placed under arrest.

‘I’ve done nothing wrong,’ she says but is ignored. She knows they could understand, but the intention was to intimidate her. She has to wait on their pleasure, their whim, their tyranny. With a sudden alarming grab, the doorman takes her handbag and empties the contents onto a table. The usual things – a wallet, a comb, a compact, loose coins and ground biscuits, because each day she had brought biscuits to the court for her lunch and most were uneaten. He sees the ticket of admission to Court Number 02. It interested him greatly, this small white card with lettering
in black and in red,
Closing Arguments.

The companion with the thick eyebrows also studies it carefully, as for some clue. Then the doorman takes an official sheet of paper and slowly, laboriously, writes down each item that was in the bag. She thinks, these brutes have absolute power over me now. When he finishes, he signs and stamps it, goes halfway down the corridor and disappears through a doorway, while his fellow guard stood over her. Never once did he meet her eye and was deaf to her repeated question as to what was going to happen to her. The only person she could phone, that is if she was allowed to phone, was the young girl at the Tribunal, who acted as interpreter, but she had not brought that number.

‘I am staying at Hotel Corona,’ she said, as if that would exonerate her. A sneering look came on his face and stayed there, while they waited alone.

Finally, she heard voices and two men, one already known to her and a stranger, came towards them. She ran to them, tears in her eyes, and foolishly said, ‘All I want is to go home.’

With a dogged indifference, they pretended not to have heard and went on talking in low voices, when suddenly the one who had emptied the contents of the handbag, as if exasperated, or realising it was his suppertime, gestured to the third one to put the stuff back in the bag and get done with it. She was made to sign the letter he had written and then slowly he took a key and still more slowly moved it into the lock. That squeal of metal would live forever in her memory.

Outside was deserted, the searchlight showing mist on the plot of grass over which she ran, wildly, not once daring to look back, passing a little row of dwellings with plants and china dogs in the window, up onto the road, in search of a taxi, except there was none.

Boarding the first bus that came along, there was a hiatus, as she could not remember the name of the street where the hotel was.

‘Den Haag Holland Spoor,’ the driver said, and she shook her head.

‘Salonboot Rondvaart Den Haag,’ he said and she was even more bewildered.

‘Holland Spoor … Rhijnspoor … Staatsspoor,’ he continued and used the moment’s baulk to pick at one of his teeth.

People in the bus were becoming impatient, muttering to one another.

‘To where do you wish to go?’ a woman near the front called.

‘The centre,’ she said.

‘Centraal,’ the woman said and the driver repeated it and now Centraal, like Sunday morning bells, rang jubilantly as they set off.

In the glass of the window, going through leafy suburbs, she saw her startled self and then his face, appearing, floating out there, the vengeful eyes, the lip snarled to one side,
Uit uit
and she huddled into her coat for protection.

The Conjugal Room

The conjugal room is functional, a bed, a zinc washbasin, a shower room divided off by a folding door and some fawn towels. It is larger than the previous cell and there is no guard on duty.

How well she looks,
très chic
, in her fur, not unlike Anna Karenina. She is wearing it in her assumed role as huntress, saw it in a boutique in a side street, near the hotel, when she stood to look, but because it was Sunday the shop was closed. However, a woman next door alerted the owner and before long, she was tucking the fur collar around Fidelma’s neck and steering her towards the swivel mirrors, which allowed for a front and back view. She had been upstairs making dumplings to put in the chicken broth for her husband, who was very ill, in fact dying. The fur collar was the last of the winter collection and money did not matter now, all that mattered was that her husband, her good husband, be tended to in the last six weeks of his life.

‘Quite the little traveller you are,’ Dr Vlad says, coming towards her, soft and prowling, the way he once was and when his body is flush with hers, she can feel the heat of his balls and that waddle under the casual navy trousers. He is about to kiss her when she staves him off with a flick of her wrist. May she comb his hair?

‘You may.’ He is happy at the courtesan approach and with the feigned dutifulness of a little boy, he sits in a chair facing the barred window.