The Dark Backward Read online

  Like the other photographs that hung in the few places the shelves did not cover, it had become a part of the background, something he seldom noticed while he hunched over his oversize mahogany desk, writing a brief or pouring over a case file as he got ready for a trial. Lately, however, he found that he was gazing at it more and more often: the captured memory of all his early expectations. He thought he could still see in his eyes, recorded forever on a photographer’s film, the youthful and fervent belief that no one he defended would ever be convicted of something they had not done. Had anyone ever been more innocent than that, to think that only the guilty were sent to death or prison after a trial by a jury of their peers? He had been lucky, he told himself, the luck of fools, that he had lost so few times in his career and that there had been only that one occasion when he had been certain that the jury had got it wrong. Somewhere, at the bottom of a desk drawer he always kept locked, he kept the file, now yellow with age, of the murder case he lost and the innocent man who had now been more than forty years in prison.

  “He was almost your age,” he said without meaning to.

  Adam looked back from the window where he was watching the traffic on the street below.

  “My age?”

  “Sorry, never mind. I was thinking about something else, a case I had a long time ago. Someone I tried to defend was convicted of a crime he did not commit. He was about your age - intelligent, too; extremely so, in fact – a gifted musician, in addition to everything else. I don’t remember half the people I’ve represented, but I’ve never forgotten him. But enough of that, tell me what you thought about today, - what you think about the things that go on in a courtroom.”

  Adam took a last look out the window and then came over to the chair in front of Darnell’s desk.

  “I wouldn’t have imagined there could be so much noise.”

  “Really? I thought things were fairly orderly.”

  “I didn’t mean in the courtroom; I mean out here, in the city, all these machines.” He smiled self-consciously as he thought about the words. “Cars and buses, and street cars – I mean trolley cars, yes? It’s no wonder everyone seems always in such a hurry. They’re trying to get away from it.” A look of puzzlement entered his eyes. “But then, when they do get away from the streets, they go inside and turn on noises of their own – those pictures that flicker on a screen, saying things that, as near as I can tell, make no sense.”

  “Television,” said Darnell. “I hadn’t quite thought of it like that, but I suppose you’re right. Most of it doesn’t make sense, just a lot of noise. But are things really that quiet where you come from?”

  Adam laughed. “Compared to this, what isn’t?”

  “I’d suggest you visit New York when this is over, but I don’t think you’d much like it. But really,” he went on, leaning back in his chair, “tell me what it’s like on this island where you live.”

  “Quieter than this.”

  Darnell picked up a pencil and tapped it on the desk. It made a hollow echo in what he had always thought the silence of the room, but which now, as he listened, seemed a restless hum, the sound of the city just outside.

  “We’ve known each other for several months now, and yet whenever I ask you to tell me something about the place you lived, the place where you were born, you never give a direct answer.”

  Darnell bounced the erasure end hard against the desk and caught the pencil in mid-air. The fact that he could still do it, move that quickly, pleased him immensely. Bent forward on one elbow, he gestured toward his law school class photograph.

  “I had to go to law school three years to learn how to be as evasive as that. You’re on trial for your life - don’t you think it’s time you started answering my questions? Don’t you think it’s time you told me the truth?”

  “I haven’t lied to you – or to anyone – Mr. Darnell. On my honor, I haven’t.”

  “Is there a reason you won’t tell me anything about the island, anything about the place you’re from?”

  “Yes,” said Adam with a candid glance. “It’s not allowed.”

  “Not allowed? Not allowed by whom?”

  The question seemed to take Adam by surprise, as if the mere statement that something was not to be done was all the answer necessary.

  “We’re not allowed,” he repeated. “We have no dealings with strangers, with those that might come from other places. It’s forbidden.”

  “If I don’t understand more about where you’re from, about the way you live, you may never get back there. You may never see that island again. You understand that, don’t you, that this could happen?”

  A strange look passed over Adam’s eyes, a look that suggested a deeper meaning in Darnell’s question than Darnell could have known.

  “I’m not going back – I can’t go back – whatever happens here.”

  He said this with an air of indifference that, as Darnell grasped immediately, was not because Adam did not care about going home, but because he knew he could not, and, knowing that, accepting that, he saw no point in dwelling on what he could not change. There was a kind of frightening simplicity about the way Adam seemed to look at the world, a strange resignation in the face of whatever might happen. Darnell had the feeling that if Adam had been told that he was going to die the next morning it would not disturb his sleep. And yet, at the same time, if he had been told that he was about to be attacked by a dozen or more armed men, he would have looked forward to the fight.

  “Why?” asked Darnell. “What you did – was it considered a crime there as well?”

  Adam’s eyes, usually so curious and alive, had a haunted look, a semblance of something that, though it was not guilt, was close to it.

  “Was it a crime?” Darnell repeated. “Would you have been punished for it if you’d been caught?”

  “Caught?” he asked with a surprised, almost scornful glance. “If I had been…?” He realized that he had gone too far, said something he had no right to say. “I’m sorry, Mr. Darnell. You couldn’t have known. Caught, you ask. That suggests that what happened was secret, that no one knew; but everyone knew, Mr. Darnell. That’s the reason I can’t go back. The punishment I received was life in exile.”

  None of it made sense. Darnell threw up his hands.

  “I don’t understand any of this. How could you have been sent into exile? Where could you have gone? And for what? You were found on the island, living with several hundred others. The crimes you say you committed happened only after that. They saw what you had done, what you had done with that child. That’s the reason you’re here. But you’re talking about something different, something that must have happened before that. What was it? What is it you think you did?”

  Darnell knew that Adam would not tell him. He would not talk about anything that had happened on the island where he had been born and raised, the island he never would not have left if he had not been forcibly removed, taken prisoner and sent to America to be tried for his crimes. But even this did not make sense.

  “If you were punished, as you put it; made to spend the rest of your life in exile, wouldn’t that mean that you no longer have a loyalty to the country, the place, that has rejected you, turned you out, told you that were not to be a part of them anymore?” Darnell twisted his head to the side, searching in Adam’s expression for something that might help him understand what made Adam think the way he did. “Then why won’t you tell me what I need to know if I’m going to have any chance to save you? The only defense we have is that these crimes you’re accused of weren’t crimes at all, that what you did wasn’t prohibited by the laws – the customs, if you will – of the place you lived.”

  Adam’s eyes were so filled with sympathy as to be almost insulting. He seemed actually to feel sorry for Darnell and his inability to understand. It was all Darnell could do not to lash out, the way he would have with a normal client, an American who could appreciate how much he had to lose if he did not answer fully every q
uestion his lawyer asked. Darnell got up and walked over to the window, watching the way Adam had earlier the movement on the street below. What would it be like, he wondered, to see all this with Adam’s eyes; see it, as it were, not like someone who simply had not stood at this window before, but like someone who had never seen a paved street or a car before, never known electricity, never entered a well-lit room, never known the speed and efficiency of modern life? Never known, a voice deep inside him added, the ease with which we rid ourselves of obligations, or the absence of belief in anything more important than ourselves.

  “Do all your trials take as much time as this one?”

  Darnell turned around.

  “But we’ve only just started. Why would you…? Of course, I keep forgetting. This is the only trial you’ve ever seen, and….And I don’t imagine you have trials were you’re from and –”

  “Why do they take all this trouble asking questions of the people who are going to serve on the jury? And why do you have a jury in the first place? Wouldn’t it be better to have one of your wisest citizens, like this woman, the judge, Evelyn Pierce, be both judge and jury? A trial is a simple thing, isn’t it? The one accused tells everyone what they did.”

  Darnell was never quite certain when Adam asked him a question whether he was more interested in the answer or in the way that Darnell would sometimes have to struggle to explain something that, because he had always taken it for granted, he had not really thought about.

  “For a great many people, telling the truth would be the same as pleading guilty. When you’re charged with a crime here, you aren’t required to testify. As you must have heard the judge tell the jury, the -”

  “‘The defendant has been charged with the crimes of incest, rape and murder. He has entered a plea of not guilty to each of these charges. That means that you are to consider him innocent of everything, unless and until the government has proven him guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.’”

  Darnell stared in astonishment as Adam went on, repeating word for word Evelyn Pierce’s warning instruction to the jury.

  “‘…then, and only then, after you have weighed all the evidence, are you to decide whether the government has proven its case beyond that famous reasonable doubt you have heard mentioned so often.’”

  Adam’s eyes seemed to take on another glow, filled with some light of their own. He sat straight, balanced on the edge of the chair as if he did not need the chair at all, but could have stayed in that position, or any position, for as long as he wished and not felt the least bit tired or cramped because of it.

  “I understand, at least I think I understand, the reason for this insistence that an accusation isn’t the same thing as proof; I understand why you have a trial. It isn’t so clear why you seem to have turned it into a game.”

  Darnell was still staring at him, trying to take in the prodigious act of memory he had just witnessed.

  “A game you say?” His narrow chest rumbled with laughter. He nodded twice emphatically. “Yes, I suppose you could call it that – two combatants, two sides, each of them trying to get a jury to see things their way.”

  He moved quickly to his desk and dropped into his comfortable well-used chair. Narrowing his eyes, he tapped his fingers together and then, quite abruptly, stopped.

  “That’s what I was trying to do – get the jury to see things my way – when I asked all those questions during jury selection. Do you remember – I can’t recall exactly what I said, but the first thing I said to that first juror -?”

  “‘I imagine we would both agree, Mrs. Arnold, that if a husband killed his wife, or a father killed his daughter, and then defended his action on the ground that the woman had been raped, he ought to be punished at least with life in prison if not the death penalty….’”

  Adam paused. Darnell thought it was because he was not quite certain what had been said next, but he saw the look of confidence in Adam’s eyes and knew that was not true. Then he remembered that this was the same place that he had paused himself, and paused for just that same split second.

  “‘…and that whatever was done to him it wouldn’t be punishment enough.’”

  Darnell showed no expression, did nothing to suggest that what Adam had done was in any way extraordinary.

  “Yes, I believe that’s what I said. I have to get them to think that there might be other standards, other laws, than our own. I have to make them believe that it wouldn’t be fair to subject you to rules you had no way of knowing.”

  Pursing his lips, he looked away. For a few brief moments he again tapped his fingers together. A thin smile like a shared secret stole across his aging, parchment colored lips. “Which is why I made that remark – I don’t quite remember all of it – about Aristotle. Perhaps you remember….”

  Eager to help, Adam bent forward.

  “The Supreme Court case: Roe v. Wade? You said: ‘In Roe v. Wade the Supreme Court cites as one of its authorities on the question of abortion the Greek philosopher Aristotle. What the Court doesn’t mention – what I suspect the Court did not know – is that in the same place Aristotle says that abortion is morally permissible he also approve of the killing of a new-born infant – infanticide – where the child is born diseased or deformed, or even as a necessary means by which to limit population.’”

  Darnell nodded, again as if there had been nothing unusual in what the young man had done. He pointed to a shelf behind where Adam was sitting.

  “Would you be so kind? Up there, on the top shelf – could you reach it - the first one on the left?”

  Adam got the volume, an old leather-bound edition of Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England. There was a thick layer of dust on the cover.

  “I don’t think I’ve looked at this since I moved in here,” Darnell remarked as he opened it carefully in the middle. “This is what lawyers used to read before there were law schools.” His eye moved back to the rough-cut page. “Here is something you might find interesting.”

  He began to read a long passage from Blackstone’s discussion of trial by jury. Near the end of the page, still speaking the words, he glanced at Adam, listening with an attention so complete you might have thought he had been hypnotized. He was sitting perfectly still, no movement of any kind. His lips were slightly parted, his eyes open and unblinking. He stared at Darnell, listening as much by what he saw, the steady movement of the reader’s mouth, as by the sounds of what he heard. Darnell turned the page and went on.

  “That was interesting, didn’t you think? – How the jury system started and what it was meant to do.”

  He closed the book and held it on his lap. His gaze moved without his conscious intention to that photograph of his law school class. How hard they had studied, how much work there had been, the constant effort each day to remember half the things they had been taught. He shut his eyes and listened in the silence to the dim echo of voices from his own, distant past. All of his former classmates, most of them veterans of the war, had been intelligent, motivated and hard-working; some of them had gone on to highly distinguished careers. But no one with whom he had gone to law school, no one he had ever met, could have done what Adam did.

  “Remind me, Adam. Help an old man remember what he just read. Repeat it, word for word, just the way I read it – if you would.”

  And Adam did. He repeated all of it, and not just the words; he repeated it the way Darnell had read it, with each change of intonation. It was like listening to that rare musician who has perfect pitch, except that instead of music, it was grammar. Darnell studied him intently.

  “You can do this, but you never learned to read or write?”

  “But if you write things down, make those marks – letters, you call them – then what you’ve learned you have to learn again.”

  “I don’t understand. I write things down so I won’t forget them.” He pointed toward the book-lined shelves. “No one could remember everything that is in them, and even if there were someone
who could, there has to be a record that everyone can consult, a way to keep track of everything that has happened.”

  “That’s what I mean: whatever you write down you have to learn again. You hear something, someone tells you something, you write it down – which you couldn’t do if you didn’t remember it; but then, because you have it down in writing, you forget what it was, and then, when you want to remember it, you can’t.”

  “But we have the writing -”

  “Which you read to learn again what you’ve forgotten. But, you must forgive me, I know nothing, though I’m starting to learn, about the way you live in this – what is the phrase I hear so often – ‘modern world’ of yours. There are so many things going on all at once, so many voices, so much noise - perhaps you have to make those marks, write things down, to decide what is worth keeping and what should be thrown away. Still, it seems to me that what I said before is true: that what you’ve learned doesn’t belong to you - it hasn’t been made your own possession - unless you can remember it. That’s one of the reasons, though not the only one,” he added with a glance cryptic and full of meaning, “that nothing worth remembering is ever written down.”

  Darnell seized on it.

  “You mean, where you’re from? So some things are written down, some people do know how to read and write?”

  Adam looked away.

  “Yes, some things; and yes, a few.”

  “But everything you were taught – whatever that might have been – all of it was told to you, things you heard that you then had to memorize?”

  “Yes, of course. How else should you do it? We were taught to run by running, taught to swim by swimming; we were taught to learn by listening.”

  “Listening; yes, I understand.” Darnell sank back in the chair and shoved his hands into his jacket pockets. He fixed his gaze on a point at the far side of the room, now buried in shadows in the late afternoon. “And that’s the way you were able to pick up English – by listening to what you heard?”