The Book of Other People by Zadie Smith Page A

Lélé tapped her palm for emphasis and said, ‘Mark my words. The summer won’t pass before there’s a catastrophe here.’
    Living only a kilometer or so from the river, I thought that the eventual smell of rotting frogs might be at least one potential catastrophe, but, in the days that followed, there was no smell at all. As soon as the burnished skins and tiny organs were exposed to the sun, the shredded frogs dried up, vanishing into the river bed.
    This was a lucky thing for Lélé, who at this stage of her pregnancy was still willowy and trim, in part because she didn’t have much of an appetite. The smell of most things sent her retching, except the moldy fragrance of ancient ink and dissolving paper, which she relished so much that I frankly suspected her of nibbling away at small fragments of the town’s judicial legacy.
     
    A week after Lélé made her prediction, the frogs were no longer even a problem. A few inches of rain had fallen somewhere up in the mountains, and the river overflowed, drowning the remaining frog population and depositing a tall layer of sandy loam far beyond the river’s banks, crushing, among other things, the field of vetiver that I, like my father and grandfather before me, had faithfully planted at the beginning of every year. Some years I had actually made a profit from my vetiver, which was not only good for the soil but also very much sought after by perfume-company suppliers. Those years, I’d used the money to plant a few more almond trees near the section of our property that nearly merged with the open road. Lélé loved the almond trees, and before she was pregnant, whenever she and her husband Gaspard came to visit, they’d both spend hours crushing the fibrous fruits with river stones to dig out the kernels.
     
    The morning Gaspard came to see Lélé, I had to run off to court. I was a judicial witness in the case of a former priest who was suing for medical expenses for his psychiatric care. The priest claimed that he’d been forced by the police chief to offer extreme unction to some prisoners whom the police chief had then ordered executed before they could appear before a magistrate. I had been called by the priest’s niece, with whom he was living after being expelled from his parish, to take a statement about her perception of the priest’s mental health, and all I planned to do in court was reiterate what was already obvious: that for one reason or another the priest was now insane. The magistrate, who had no patience for cases in which there were no possibilities for bribes, would probably dismiss the case outright. However, since there were two local radio journalists expected, he had no choice but to put on the charade and pretend to listen to all of us before making up his mind.
    I have no formal training in the law. All I know I learned by shadowing my father. His approach had always been the same. We are there only to witness, not participate, he’d say, to grant a piece of paper, an affidavit, a notarized statement, which might be helpful to someone in some later legal proceeding or action. If we are required to speak before a judge, we need state only what we’ve seen. We do not conjecture or make guesses. We speak only when asked.
    This is the approach I was taking with Lélé and Gaspard. As Gaspard’s four-wheeler pulled up in front of the house, I purposely accelerated mine in the other direction. I would probably have to be in court at their divorce proceeding. There would be enough time to take sides.
    Neither the priest nor his niece showed up, so the magistrate dismissed the case. During the ten years I’d been doing this, I’d found that more people don’t show up than do. Many simply wanted the benefit of the initial hearing, in the field or in my office, where I took most of my notes. The rest already knew the likely outcome of their cases or were too scared to present themselves.
     
    Gaspard’s car was still out front when I