Scott Turow - The Burden of Proof

"How long is it you two have known each other, you and your husband?"

Stern asked. He was a few feet away from her, kneeling awkwardly to look at the plants.

She gave him instructions on how to harvest the.fruit. The overripe berries, dark as blood, looked wonderful but would not hold. "And you may as well roll your pant legs up.

There's no pride out here and a lot of dust and mud. What did you ask me?"

He repeated the question.

"We've only been married a few years, ff that's what you meant, but I've known him forever. It was a doomed relationship right from the start. I was his T.A. in Freshman English. The people in the EngYsh Department were scandalized when I started going out with him. Well, not scandalized. That department wasn't scandalized by anything, but they thought it was pretty odd."

"He was a freshman?"

"An older freshman, in my defense. He'd been in the service. But he was irresistible. He's very dark, very big, very quiet. It was like someone put a mountain down in my classroom." Sonny in the great heat shook her head, apparently overcome by the memory. "Talk about romantic. How could I resist a man who came back from Vietnam with poems hidden in the pockets of his camouflage outfits? I wanted to believe that poetry could transform the world, but Charlie really did.

Have you ever known anyone like that?"

"My brother, I would say. He was a poet," said Stern, who had just finished rolling his trousers, exposing a row of pale flesh over his black nylon hose. He must have looked worse than a scarecrow. The straw hat she'd given him was too large and rcsted unevenly on his ears.

"Honestly?"

"Oh yes, a young one. He wrote romantic verse in a number of languages. ! believe he was quite gifted. My sister still has Jacobo's poems somewhere. I would like to read them again someday, but just now it would be a melancholy experience." He took on momentarily the stung look he could not avoid from time to time, a close expression of admittexi pain.

"He passed away?"

"Long ago. I seldom speak of him, actually. But he was an extraordinary figuestined for greatness. He was the most remarkable young man. Handsome, bright. He wrote poems. He declaimed in public.

He was a prize scholar. And he was also quite a rogue. That was an important aspect of his character. Always in the midst of one misadventure or another. Filching fruit from a stand. For a period when he was sixteen, he would sneak out at night to keep company with the mother of one of his friends."

Sonny. made a lascivious sound: Oo la la. "He sounds as if he was something."

"That he was," said Stern, and repeated the phrase. "He was the child the world adored. I felt this, of course, as a terrible weight, being the younger brother." In his parents' home, his brother as the first-born and a son had assumed a natural centrality, a regal primogeniture.

Handsome, outgoing, willful, Jacobo had in one fashion or another overpowered everyone. Their mother lived under his spell basking in each achievement, and their father was no more capable of confronting Jacobo than anyone else. Even as a child, Jacobo had more or less run the household, his moods and passions governing them all like the tolling grandfather clock in the front hall. At the age of fiftysix Stern Could still recall his jealousy. There was probably no fury in his life like the rush of emotion Jacobo had inspired. Stern, too, was dominated by him, awestruck but also wildly resentful. Jacobo was often cruel. He relished Alejandro's admiration, but he would not allow any equal in his domain. How many times did they enact the same scene, where Alejandro wept in humiliation and.rage, and Jacobo laughed a bit before yielding to comfort him? Che, pibe. "The entire life of my household-my mother's especially-was at an end after he died." ' He stood straight and rubbed his knees. In the heat and wind, he felt a dreamy vagueness. The field of fruit, the irrigated furrows and the plants rising from the hills of straw, stretched in all directions into the dusty haze.

There was not another soul around, not another voice, except for Sam's, and the birds', and the drone of planes approaching a country airfield ten or twenty miles away.

Argentina, he thought suddenly. Its cruel history, its fateful cycles of hope and repression, pained him like a crushing hold applied to a vital place; it was always that way. He seldom thought of any of this, and when he did, the memories filled him with an ardor, fresh as any lover's, for the United States.

There were cousins left down there who prospered generally, but had also suffered terribly; they wrote once a year, sending money, which Stern invested for them in bank accounts here.

"How old was he then?" Sonny asked of Jacobo. "'Seventeen years four months."

"How horrible. What happened?"

"One of those terrible tales of impulsive youth. He fell in with a Zionist crowd. Wealthy young Jewish people. My mother was thrilled at first by such impressive comradeship. When she' eventually realized how strong Jacobo's attachments were, it was too late to retrieve him.

This was in the midst of World War II. Argentina was supposedly neutral, but tilted toward the Axis, and these were politically dangerous views to hold. Jacobo decided that he would go to Palestine fight with Haganah. He could not be dissuaded. He knew, like everyone else, that he was dstined to be a hero. There were thirty of them. We went down to s them off and the boat truly looked as if it would sink before it left the harbor. My mother wept; she knew she would never see him again. And she did not. The Germans said the Allies had sunk the boat; the Allies blamed the Germans. Perhaps it was a storm. We never knew."

Here amid the acres, thinking of all of this, spewing of what was lost and so momentous, he saw his present life as vulnerable as a paper construction. In Sonny's company, there was, for whatever reason, less sadness. But it was like letting your finertips drift along the raised features of a relief-he could feel the textures and recognized again his deepest secret, that without Clara, with the children grown, he had been left with no fundamental alliance. He could sense the desperate struggle every day had been, doing what had been done before with a determined effort to give it no reflection. Far from the city and those routines, he was strongly under the influence of this heartyStates.

There were cousins left down there who prospered generally, but had also suffered terribly; they wrote once a year, sending money, which Stern invested for them in bank accounts here.

"How old was he then?" Sonny asked of Jacobo. "'Seventeen years four months."

"How horrible. What happened?"

"One of those terrible tales of impulsive youth. He fell in with a Zionist crowd. Wealthy young Jewish people. My mother was thrilled at first by such impressive comradeship. When she' eventually realized how strong Jacobo's attachments were, it was too late to retrieve him.

This was in the midst of World War II. Argentina was supposedly neutral, but tilted toward the Axis, and these were politically dangerous views to hold. Jacobo decided that he would go to Palestine fight with Haganah. He could not be dissuaded. He knew, like everyone else, that he was dstined to be a hero. There were thirty of them. We went down to s them off and the boat truly looked as if it would sink before it left the harbor. My mother wept; she knew she would never see him again. And she did not. The Germans said the Allies had sunk the boat; the Allies blamed the Germans. Perhaps it was a storm. We never knew."

Here amid the acres, thinking of all of this, spewing of what was lost and so momentous, he saw his present life as vulnerable as a paper construction. In Sonny's company, there was, for whatever reason, less sadness. But it was like letting your finertips drift along the raised features of a relief-he could feel the textures and recognized again his deepest secret, that without Clara, with the children grown, he had been left with no fundamental alliance. He could sense the desperate struggle every day had been, doing what had been done before with a determined effort to give it no reflection. Far from the city and those routines, he was strongly under the influence of this hearty outspoken young woman. The images were of things thriving, unfolding in the torrid early season heat, as if there was some fertile' spirit carried from her, like the scent of humus on the occasional spells of warm wind.