The Trial of Fallen Angels (29 page)

I pointed the gun at Ott, trembling violently, my finger on the trigger. I didn’t know what to do. I just wanted him to leave. He seemed as stunned as me, and he just stood there, waiting, almost hoping, it seemed, for me to shoot him. But I couldn’t do it. He had risked his life to stop Tim from raping me, and he had stopped Tim from shooting me when I tried to drive away. He had spared Sarah’s life when he could have shot her through the window. Somehow, even though he had put us through all of this, I felt sorry for Ott Bowles and didn’t want to hurt him.

“Why?” I screamed at the top of my lungs. “Why? All this for what? For what?” I backed away toward Sarah with the gun still pointing at him.

Sarah had begun crying when Ott and Tim started fighting, but she became quiet after I fired the three shots at Tim. I turned from Ott and stumbled through the darkness to find her. She was still where Tim had placed her, curled up on her side. I bent down and picked her up. She was wet, as though she had been perspiring or had peed through her diaper. I just wanted to take her back home to her daddy and the life we had made, where we would all be safe again. Cradling her against me and holding the gun, I made my way back toward the door.

I kept my eyes on Ott the entire time, illuminated by the flashlight and the small amount of light from the nighttime sky. He watched me warily but passively, as though he had accepted the truce I had offered. But when I stepped through the threshold of the mushroom house door, he made a move toward us. I was ready for him and didn’t hesitate this time. I fired the gun.

The bullet struck Ott in the leg, and he collapsed to the floor next to Tim. I watched him through the door for a moment, deciding whether to shoot again. But then I suddenly realized that Sarah wasn’t squirming or crying even though I had just fired a gun next to her, with the same arm that was holding her.

I kneeled down to see her in the flashlight. Now I understood why she had felt so wet. Her clothes were soaked through with blood and her tiny chest was ripped open. There was blood all over her beautiful cheeks and the creamy white perfection of her stomach. Her brown eyes were wide, staring out into nothing.

One of the three shots I fired at Tim Shelly had hit my baby, my Sarah.

I had killed my own daughter.

39

T
he skies open as if all of the heavens surrounding the earth are filled with water and the seal holding it back is suddenly punctured. I have never seen it rain so hard.

Through all this rain, Elymas and I scale the rock cliff of a shrinking island mountain, climbing higher and higher above a shoreline that only minutes earlier had been arid grassland and Mediterranean forest. The branches of olive, cypress, and pomegranate trees sway like seaweed fronds in the surf, collecting floating grasses, berries, wilted flower petals, pieces of dung, logs, pottery, and the distended carcasses of animals—the detritus of the earth over which these trees once reached toward the sun. And one might ask, what sun? For despite the noontime hour, only a hint of ultraviolet gloom passes onto the despairing planet below.

Elymas had found me walking through the woods on my way to the Courtroom to present the soul of Otto Rabun Bowles. “We have one more visit to make, Brek Abigail Cuttler,” he said, “to meet others with an interest in the outcome of the case. Come with me, you will not be delayed long.”

I assumed he would take me to see Bo and maybe my father and mother, but instead he opened the portal of his unseeing eyes upon the terrible flood of Cudi Dagh.

Lightning flashes and thunder cracks across the sky. Elymas is above me on the cliff. The water rises in feet, not inches, the waves below consuming the foothills and everything in their path.

“We’re going to drown!” I call up to him on the cliff, rain streaming down my face.

“Do not worry, Brek Cuttler!” Elymas yells back down to me. “Cudi Dagh stands seven thousand feet. Noah found refuge here. Come along quickly.”

Less than one-third of that altitude remains as we press our cheeks against the face of the mountain for the final ascent. Elymas uses his gnarled fingers like a mattock, thrusting them into the crevices. He loses his grip only once, but it costs him his four-footed cane, which clicks against the boulders on the way back down to the roiling seas below. I keep my distance, afraid he will take me with him if he falls. I am as old and worn now as Elymas, moving slowly and cautiously, gasping for air and stopping often. I climb the mountain like a crippled goat, using the stump of my right arm for balance, barely able to see my next steps through the cataracts clouding my eyes. My clothes dissolve in the downpour into a paste of thread and dye that curdle into the wrinkles of my skin.

At the summit, we find a monastery constructed of mud thatch and thickset timbers ringed by an annular rock garden sprinkled with chunks of sandstone and quartz and veined blocks of marble. Behind the small building, a narrow escarpment offers what in better weather would have been magnificent views of the lesser mountains and plains of Ararat. At the far end, a monument is chiseled into the gray basalt ridge. It is a carving of an immense wooden barge run aground in rough seas, waiting for salvage beneath the pensive wings of a raven and a dove. On the deck of the barge gathers a herd of animals fortunate enough to have escaped the floodwaters—pairs of lesser mammals and reptiles of every species. At the bow stand the humble figures of a man and a woman.

Elymas nudges me inside the monastery, where we find a small chapel kept warm by a fire that burns without fuel inside a stone fireplace. A semicircle of crude wooden stools encircles the raised hearth, and between these and the flames stands a small rectangular table that serves the monks as both dining place and altar. At the center of this table sits an unusual bronze menorah, tarnished waxy black. A one-armed crucifix, like the one that hung from my uncle Anthony’s neck, is attached to the trunk and lowest branches of the menorah. The King of the Jews bends his left arm upward along the broad curve of the branch in a gesture of sublime exaltation.

Elymas ushers me through an alcove past one of the monks’ cells, furnished with a bed of wooden slats suspended by iron straps above the floor. We enter the kitchen, which contains a small preparation table, a cistern overflowing with rainwater, and three wooden bins filled with dried fruit and nuts, as if the monastery has been recently inhabited. When we return from the kitchen into the chapel, we find that all but one of the stools in the semicircle around the hearth are occupied by monks wearing brown hooded robes. They face away from us toward the altar with its strange menorah, and on their laps they cradle laptop computers into which they stare reverently with their backs bent as if in prayer. Halos of fluorescent light from the computer screens give them the appearance of saints posed in a medieval painting.

We walk around them to see their faces, and I am stunned to discover that the first monk is Karen Busfield, wearing her blue Air Force uniform beneath her brown robe. Around her neck hangs the white linen stole on which I had embroidered a gold alpha and omega and presented as a gift at her ordination. It is a simple, conservative vestment, lacking the colorful ecclesiastical designs she preferred, but it was the best I could do with one hand. She wore it the day she married Bo and me and again the day she baptized Sarah. But she tried to give it back the day Bill Gwynne and I advised her to accept the government’s offer to drop the treason and espionage charges in exchange for an honorable discharge and time served. She would be required only to plead guilty to criminal trespass on government property and promise to keep what happened inside the missile silo confidential. I approach her and touch her shoulder: “Karen, it’s me, Brek. What are you doing here?”

She looks up from her computer screen but doesn’t recognize me in my old age. Her cheeks are powdered with the brine of dried tears. Outside, the storm rages on. The timbers of the monastery stiffen like the scourged back of a flagellant paying his penance. Karen closes her eyes and begins mumbling a chant underneath her breath.

Next to Karen sits my mother-in-law, Katerine Schrieberg-Wolfson, the second monk of Cudi Dagh. She clutches two photographs against the side of her computer. The first is a picture of Sarah, her granddaughter, and the second is a black-and-white photograph of her father, Bo’s grandfather, standing in front of one of his theaters in Dresden. Katerine Schrieberg-Wolfson does not weep as she sits transfixed by her computer. She has witnessed too much sorrow in her life to weep anymore. She regrets only that she had never told Amina Rabun that it was her father, Jared Schrieberg, on that dark day in Kamenz, when God turned his face from Christian and Jew alike, who fired the shots from the woods that drew the soldiers’ attention.

“Poor Amina!” she cries. “But is it not a blessing that she didn’t live to witness her only heir come to this? Oh, but now my precious granddaughter and daughter-in-law are paying for our sins! When will it end?”

Katerine gives no indication of recognizing me either. Instead, she looks suspiciously at the monk seated to her left, Albrecht Bosch, who is typing madly on his keyboard with ink-stained fingers. Bosch weeps profusely, as a father weeps for a son, and he pleads in vain at the screen: “No! No! No!”

Albrecht Bosch thought he had understood Ott Bowles’s suffering, and that, by sharing his own sorrows with Ott, had shown him the way. He had been there for Ott as a friend, as the father he would never be in place of the father who never was. From his stool in the monastery, Bosch sends another e-mail to Ott, pleading with him to surrender. But the time for Albrecht Bosch’s final appeal has passed, leaving him alone again in a world that had never really welcomed him.

Sitting on the stools next to Bosch, Tad Bowles and Barratte Rabun follow the drama on their computers in disbelief, each concerned not for their son but for the difficulties that will be visited upon their own lives by his behavior. Tad’s preoccupation is his reputation: “My name will be forever associated with a murderer!” he bellows.

Barratte Rabun too is consumed by names, but hers is a different complaint—she mourns an opportunity lost to resurrect a name rather than the urgent need to bury one. That name, Rabun, has now been soiled beyond all recognition, and dirtied with it is her dream of the family that lived so long ago breathing once again within the bodies of its children and grandchildren. She beseeches the heavens: “How? How could I have lost them again? Twice in the same lifetime!”

The computer in Barratte’s lap, where once she cradled this precious dream filled with such hope, sends back a message that the dream is indeed lost forever. And that message confirms for Barratte Rabun what her cousin Amina had understood and explained long ago—that the mercy of God will never shed its light upon the Rabuns of Kamenz. Barratte closes her computer and throws it into the fire. She will not grant the unforgiving God of that perverse, meaningless relic on the altar table another moment of satisfaction.

The stool at the apex of the semicircle sits vacant. Next to it sits Harlan Hurley, wearing orange prison coveralls beneath his brown robe, smirking from ear to ear as if he is playing a computer game and winning with every move. Events have unfolded in ways even his grand dreams could not have predicted. The scandal of using school district funds to support Die Elf and the making of the documentary has shoved Hurley’s fascist drama onto the front page of every major newspaper and into the lead segment of every news broadcast and talk show. Deluded supporters have flooded the airwaves with words of support and the mail with money.

Next to Hurley in the chapel sit my poor parents, eyes transfixed upon their computers in anguish and disbelief. They do not even notice me standing beside them. How can one begin to describe the agony of parents witnessing the murder of their own daughter and their own granddaughter? In their grief-stricken faces atop Cudi Dagh, I see the unfathomable joy of my first moments of life—the jubilant astonishment and wonder that rises up from the vulnerability of birth to declare again for a cynical world the existence of unconditional love. I could not bear the gift of that love as I grew older. I convinced myself I was not worthy of receiving it, even as I recognized it emanating from me with the birth of my own daughter. Yet here it is again, pouring forth from the shattered faces of my parents, flailing itself against the computer screens in a futile attempt to shield me from harm, to protect the dying object of an infinite grace.

The digital clocks at the bottom corners of the computer screens on the laps of the monks of Cudi Dagh all display 4:02:34 a.m., 10/17/94. The screens flicker brightly, as if they are bursting into flame, then they show me holding Sarah, bloodied and lifeless, in the dim light of the mushroom house. I am screaming without sound, as if in a silent movie. The gun drops from my fingers. Ott Bowles, with a bullet hole in his leg, slides across the floor toward it.

The computer screens cannot show what Ott Bowles is thinking at that moment, but I know. His soul is mine now, and we are forever one. He is thinking about Amina, Barratte, and the Rabuns of Kamenz. He is thinking about the Schriebergs and how they have been ungrateful. He is thinking about the world and how it has been merciless. He is thinking about Harlan Hurley and Sam Mansour and how my husband has destroyed them. He is thinking about Tim Shelly and how I have killed him and my own child. He is thinking about how he rushed forward to help us out of the mushroom house but how I shot him down in cold blood. He is thinking about how unjust and unfair life has been.

Most of all, Otto Rabun Bowles is thinking about justice.

He knows now the documentary will never be aired, and that he will be forever misunderstood, blamed, and convicted for Tim’s and Sarah’s deaths. The Rabuns have always been misunderstood, blamed, convicted for things they did not do.

The computer screens on the laps of the monks finally show what I have been unable to accept from the moment of my arrival in Shemaya. Ott Bowles raises the gun and fires three silent shots into my chest. I slump over on top of Sarah. Moments later, police officers storm the mushroom house. They had been able to trace his e-mails after all.