The Truth Commissioner Read Online Free

listens with as much indifference as her excitement will fail to register. When she has
finished he nods and smiles, asks her if she likes dancing, but in all the rush of noise she doesn’t hear his question and
turns her head away before he can repeat it. Then she pats him on the arm and once again he has to endure the skirmish of
light in the rosette of her ring. He watches her return to the backslapping crew of her colleagues whose friendship, now strengthened
by shared experience, constructs an exclusion zone round them and feeling his new isolation more keenly than ever he takes
himself to the stern of the boat and hunkers down on an upturned crate. The rising spray-ladened wind moistens his face and,
as the engine starts up, he watches the sea churn and choke itself on funnels of white foam. He wonders how the sharks feel
having had a close experience with the human representatives of the law, of truth and reconciliation. Do they now share their
excitement and describe it as ‘wicked’ or ‘cool’? Do they even possess the curse of memory at all? He tries to contain his
spreading anger by telling himself that with a little creativity it will shape itself into a good story, that he will be able
to mine a rich vein of laughter. Already he constructs a comic portrait of Captain Ahab, searches for a punchline that will
send the story spinning into folklore. Of course he will have to reinvent his own role, airbrush the inconvenient parts that
go against the flow, but it’s what artists do and above all he is an artist. The screeches and laughter of his team rise up
unabated: he cringes as he thinks how often he will have to endure a full-bodied reprise of it all on the homeward journey
but then as the boat veers slowly to shore, he comforts himself with the warming thought that he might be able to work the
return flight so that she sits beside him. Then the salted bitterness of the air is rendered a little sweeter by the conjured
image of her resting her head on his shoulder and as she slips into sleep he imagines the warmth of her breath on his cheek,
the way her mouth will be opened slightly and raised towards him like a child’s.
    And more than anything they are children, bright-eyed with idealism and the belief that the report they will present in a
month’s time will illuminate the way forward, that they will have played an important part in constructing the way out of
the morass, in building a new bridge to healing and forgiveness. So how would they feel if he were to tell them now that it’s
all been for the optics, that what will happen and how it will happen has already been agreed, mapped out, and the fixity
of the main boundaries established like every continent after every war? A few small disputed areas still exist that might
be left as neutral or placed under joint administration but by and large it’s a done deal. So perhaps it was not such a bad
thing that they have had their compensatory fun, their day in the sun, even the obligatory ritual of a visit to Robben Island
where they were given a tour guided by an ex-prisoner. Afterwards they had a group photograph taken in the entrance to the
prison, under the sign which reads: ‘We serve with pride.’
    A snow cloud of petrels flakes thickly around the boat, hovering as if frozen on the layered air before free-falling. He watches
and envies the effortless grace of their flight, their balletic eloquence, and then his eye catches something further off.
Too big to be anything else. He doesn’t want to admit it at first and then he starts to laugh. He looks around for someone
to share the joke with but there’s no one close enough to hear his voice, so when he speaks, the words are for himself:
    â€˜ “God save thee, ancient Mariner!
From the fiends that plague thee thus!
Why look’st thou so?” – With my cross-bow
I shot the Albatross.’
    It can’t be