THE MAZE
JANET McKNIGHT

New York Lawyer
December 1, 2008

There is an old Mohi tale, a combination of possible truth and hopeful rumor, told to schoolchildren of each generation in the Maze. The story goes that a woman named Jaz crossed over the River Maze in the middle of the night, miraculously unnoticed and unharmed. She risked her life to escape the fate that haunts all who lie on the wrong side of the oppression. Allegedly, she made a life for herself in the capital city of Korsco, living as a Maze citizen, her Mohi features not so striking as to make her unable to pass as a Maze woman. It is believed she had a family and added a dose of tolerance to the Maze upbringing of her children, just enough to counteract the influence socialization was sure to have. Every Mohi and even some Maze youth want to believe the story is true, that a Mohi woman named Jaz did exist and that she improved her life by crossing.

Through the perpetual dusty haze of the desert, a black and white ball came into view. It flew through the air with a sharp arc until it hit the back of the net. Kai was sweating and smiling as he ran up the field, arms open. Teammates rushed to him, jumping all over him and each other. On Kai’s goal, the Maze Men’s National Football Team won the Regional Championships. The Maze was one step closer to qualifying for the World Games just a few years away. We are heroes! they all thought. No member of the national team was born in or probably had ever even set foot east of the River Maze. Conversely, Mohis were not allowed on Maze national teams—for football, for sports or anything else. The Maze tribe had conquered the Mohis long ago and the conquered were confined to the East side of the river. There they remained quietly for years with the waterway serving as the pulsing vein of segregation.

In the Maze, Mohis were guaranteed little more than a right of occupancy in their lands. Many Mohis were abused by the Maze police force and still the world did not stop. But as the globe continued to rotate, so were members of the country churning the oppression into a rebellion.

Petra Lena and Kai Sabah remembered going for ice cream after school when they were younger versions of themselves. They had always been easy friends and equally talented football players for their respective teams. Kai was selected to the men’s national team when he was sixteen. Petra was invited to practice with the women’s team a year later. Petra found herself cautious when having to make a decision and this soft stepping made her less of a threat on the football field. Other players could see her next move at the very moment she discovered it herself. But for Kai, drastic action showed certainty and certainty meant you were brave. And Kai had always wanted more than anything to be brave. Together they watched Commissioner Lark of the National Governing Body of Sport live on television as he read aloud the words that many Maze athletes had feared since the desegregation momentum had started to roll.

The National Governing Body of Sport does not agree with the government’s discriminatory laws prohibiting the Mohi from joining Maze national teams. As a result, we, as the official governing organization of sports in this country, completely suspend all national sports teams from world and international competition. The suspension is indefinite. As athletes, we must take advantage of our place in society to challenge the injustice towards our neighbors. We must pressure the government to alter its laws to prevent certain war among countrymen. There will be no sports at all if we do not act with passion and decisiveness in this fragile hour.

The news was not as tragic as murder or servitude. But tragic like heartbreak from which one cannot heal. Tragic enough that action had to be taken because things were no longer the same. Petra and Kai, as citizens of the Maze, expected to sacrifice themselves in some way to uphold their country’s order. But they both felt a sudden twinge of soreness at the thought of what they would have to give up for this order to now exist.

After the NGBS invoked its ban, the country was engulfed in a shadow of mistrust. Athletes who were burned by the Commissioner’s decision were so bitter at their government for not repealing its segregation laws, so bitter at their sports leadership for taking a position against those laws, so bitter that their minds began to conceive of the most threatening thoughts possible—that their leaders no longer ruled them.

Thoughts were quickly strewn about the old schoolroom in which the teammates gathered. All who attended knew the consequences of merely attending. But they could not think of another way to decide what they each had to decide. Twenty athletes were present, both male and female. But this was not a team chosen to compete for anything. This was a team of citizens reluctantly coming together to decide their fate as athletes and as sons and daughters of the Maze. What would soon be known as the Players’ Defection was forming in this small room on the far side of town.

At issue were the laws of the Maze. Defection from the country was illegal. This everyone knew. The General Court for Traitorous Crimes also harbored a law punishing those who helped to plan for or assisted in the carrying out of a defection. Traitors would be found. Those athletes who decided to stay were likely to be arrested for the crime of accessory even if they did not make a sound in the room that night.

The elder statesman of the men’s team, Hamed, spoke: “I am staying. You all say we have a right to disagree with the laws so much that we can leave the country that restricts us by them. Where is this written? I have not seen it.”

Kai interrupted him with a fierce passion. “This country is broken. We must find a way around. If we stay, think of all the training for nothing, all the opportunities for success, gone. We do not play for The Maze, we play because we want to win.”

“And what are you playing for? What are you winning?” Hamed fired back.

Hamed composed himself and stated with absolute confidence to Kai and all his teammates in the room, “You will never have repatriation if you leave.”

“Tell me I can have back all that I will lose and I will stay.”

“Nobody can give you back those future competitions or the World Games, Kai. But if you leave, you will lose your pride as well. That will hurt more and for longer.”

These twenty athletes, some stubborn and some weak-hearten, all never having questioned whether to follow a rule of a coach were all now deciding if they should obey the laws of a government.

Petra and Kai were friends in a strange land though neither one knew when it had become strange. Sitting together on a bench in an empty park, Kai realized the end of the fantasy faster than Petra was willing to admit to the shifting landscape of their worlds.

“Why do sports and politics have to be connected at all?” Petra asked.

“It is leverage. They find what gives you joy and threaten to take it away.”

“And if you leave, what about the defection law?” Petra was using leverage of her own in a weak attempt to gauge the vulnerability of his decision.

“Well, once you decide that you have no respect for your country it makes it quite easy to ignore the laws.”

Two friends sat on a bench and wondered which one of them was brave. Petra felt something pulling her to stay. This choice would say something about her will to help people. She had left her family as a teenager to pursue an athletic dream and now that journey was taking her to a larger goal. But what if they are right? Nothing will change tomorrow. Nothing will be different even if she stays. She will have complied with her government’s laws against defection, helped the NGBS to boycott the insane laws of segregation and still nothing will be different.

“I do not know what they are going to do to me.” She spoke of the government, the accessory to defection laws and the unknown punishment that could await her for her knowledge of her teammates’ defection from the country.

“I guess it depends on how well my father can do his job,” he answered with guilt. “I have always been proud of his position as head prosecutor for that so-called traitor court but I never thought it would cause my friends trouble.”

“Maybe if you weren’t leaving there would be no need for courtrooms, no need for your father to come after me.”

“Petra, with all the fighting that is about to happen here there will be a need for courtrooms for a long time.”

He knew this was not good enough but the park, empty as it was, became emptier in the twilight of sundown and it was not safe to contemplate futures or friendships in the city park after dark. Kai walked Petra to the home she shared with her coach.

Ten athletes in all would eventually will themselves to defect. Others had decided to stay out of love. Some would stay out of fear.

“You are a brave soul,” Petra said to her friend.

“It is not I who am brave but those who stay,” he answered.

A lawyer, a prosecutor for the General Court for Traitorous Crimes, raised a son who loved both his country and his sport. But that son was also raised so respectful of love that he was capable of choosing which to love more.

“Kai, I have built a career on what I believed was right in this crazy world,” Mr. Sabah said. “But I cannot think of my only son as a traitor and so I will be proud of you.”

Kai was sitting in a chair a few feet away watching his father.

“It is funny,” his father continued, “the way that nature divides us but not as some might think. See, no matter what the laws are, there are people able to obey them, people able to fight them and those with the power to change them. Your great-grandmother was stepped toward change, although her actions are only now coming to fruition.”

“Who are you talking about?” Kai asked.

“Jaz.”

Kai was quiet and a bit confused.

“Some myths turn out to be true, Kai. The old tale of a Mohi woman who crossed the river—that is your family’s tale, your tale. And she would be proud of you for building your own path out of this maze.”

In a rare moment of sincerity towards his country Kai hoped his defection would cause change in the Maze, to build upon the steps Jaz had made. Just one undercurrent of energy, enough for one citizen to know that change had occurred, enough for his Mohi ancestor to know that her genetic courage had successful flowed through the ages.

Commissioner Lark sat in his office with his elbows on the desk and his fingers crossed.

The story was the lead of the local news that night, labeled “The Player’s Defection.” Ten athletes from the Maze Men’s and Women’s National Football Teams were absent from today’s mandatory annual certification meeting at the headquarters of the National Governing Body of Sport in Korsco. For several weeks, there have been rumors spreading through Korsco about national team athletes conspiring to defect from the Maze. The recent events may inject some truth to those rumors.

Lark had to turn it off. The news made his confidence waver and he felt remorse for thinking it would be all be so easy.

Sedition, lies, defection, accessory. All these cases were spun through the system as quickly as possible. The General Court for Traitorous Crimes was implemented forty years ago to specifically provide for the speedy process of these particular crimes. Lost in the rush were all notions of due process. One thing the Governor of the Maze did do was issue an executive order, approved by the Parliament, which gave immunity to government officials for the crime of accessory to defection. This included prosecutors in the General Court. This included Kai’s father, Burhan Sabah.

Petra soon received her Notice to Appear for public hearing in the General Court for investigation into the crime of accessory to defection. Petra and her coach both knew that if she told the judge that she was in that meeting room, she would be punished not commended for her honesty.

“You decide the truth,” he said. “If everyone else is going to make up their own truth then why should you be the only one condemning yourself?”

“So the truth is whatever hurts the least?” she responded.

“Courts do not know truth and lies, they only try to know justice. And if you say something is so or something is not so, the court will hear you for what you say not what you should have said. The court will appreciate you more if you give them a truth that makes the system consistent rather than a truth that makes the system right.”

Petra’s indecision led her to the back porch, which was big enough only for a small chair. She sat and peered out through the dusk over the cityscape and into the distance. As she squinted she could almost see the River Maze. And if she imagined even harder she could see the section of the river, about one hundred feet long, where the river turned into a trickle. Barely ten feet wide—still patrolled, of course—it was the narrowest part of the divide. She could imagine the temptation of jumping from one side to the other. She wondered if Mohis even wanted to jump to the west side after all. Kai and the other had jumped an ocean to get what they thought they wanted. As for that narrow part of the river, Petra hoped it would one day dry up or spill over into an ocean miles wide. Anything but a trickle.

Keep it sweet. This is pre-civil war. Or is it current? Prosecutor Sabah filled his head with calming thoughts but was nervous for the first time in awhile. He was meeting with Judge Iradie to discuss Petra’s case, a common custom in the General Court. He wanted to do his job but he did not want the matter to go to trial unnecessarily. And he certainly did not want to open himself up to any more scrutiny concerning his son’s defection or his immunity as a government official.

“Tell me something, counsel. Leniency for you, eh? Tell me something, tell me some—,” the judge’s voice trailed off. He had not wanted to go into that.

“Tell me something,” he started over. “Is it the justice you are after or do you just enjoy the fight, Burhan?”

The judge knew of fighting. He had grown up in bad straights and fought his way to an education and law apprenticeship. Forty years he had been on the bench of the General Court for Traitorous Crimes. He had seen abuse in his home, in his country and in his courtroom. He had a wife who did not truly love him. She only loved his story. People have a way of glorifying the hardships and triumphs of others that are close to them. In this way, his wife could feel the pain of his sorrows and the pride of his accomplishments because she had none of her own. “Oh, he had such a tragic childhood,” she would say. “Broke his daddy’s back with a shovel one night when he was beating the sister. Yes, it is so sad. I know.” Judge Iradie did not mind that she really did not know. He was content with his wife telling his story and making it her own. Maybe she needed the sympathy more than he did. He dealt every day with people who told their stories and pleaded for sympathies.

“Keep your questioning brief, counsel,” the judge made a plea of his own. “We already know the truth. We are in charge of the process of stabilizing the Maze following the uproar of the last few months. Let us keep to the facts, shall we? No fancy orations.”

“I hadn’t planned on it, sir.”

“This is a country out of time, I fear.” The judge’s lower lip quivered as he thought of all the people who had told the story of the Maze and made it their own. He had always believed the country could move past a civil war someday, that it could be whole. The judge had waited for that day and, in the meantime, punished those who left because they did not believe that day would ever come.

Little praise and even less legal clemency was shown to traitors in Judge Iradie’s courtroom over his forty years. Seldom did cases go to a full trial on the evidence. This was not because the prosecutors, such as Burhan, had put on such extraordinary presentations. As the very name of the court suggests, Judge Iradie was inculcated with the bias that defectors were traitors at heart. What need be proven by a standard of convincing measure was merely that the facts of the crime had occurred. The punishment was sometimes as cold as the strict liability itself, depending entirely on the judge’s depth of love for his country on any given day of judgment. But recently he decided that those people had simply grown tired of the sorrow. He suspected they did not want to stay in this story but make a new one. They were writing a new life rather than editing the one they could never correctly revise.

“Do you know of sorrow?” the judge asked.

“Only of the heart,” counsel answered.

“Is there any other kind?”

Burhan could see the judge’s energy was waning and he made a sincere and graceful exit. He went back to the small office in his house to prepare for the hearing. Judge Iradie returned home, lay down in bed next to his wife and dreamt of good reasons to write a new story.

Petra’s hearing commenced within a week. The morning hearings were made public to prove the consequences of being accused of a crime to which there was no presumption of innocence and no jury. Too many attorneys also tied up the smooth operation of Iradie’s court and so Petra would not enjoy the privilege of a public defender. It was almost nine o’clock as some observers straggled in and were seated. Judge Iradie, Petra and her best friend’s father were the center figures in the courthouse.

“Good morning, Ms. Lena,” Judge Iradie held control of his courtroom. “Good morning counsel. We are here this morning to determine Ms. Petra Lena’s involvement in the defection of ten Maze citizens three weeks ago. After questioning, I will decide if the facts of this case warrant an automatic acquittal or a trial to be held at a later date. I am also under power by Parliament to find the defendant guilty but determine the crime committed warrants only remedial punishment. If a trial is needed, Ms. Lena will be provided a public defender at that time. Do you all understand that you will provide the truth in my courtroom no matter how much it may pain you or hurt your interests?”

There was a nod from both parties. Judge Iradie loved this part. He always believed that if you were not building something or helping to fortify it, then you were not caring about anything. He always thought of himself as an engineer of sorts, building a bridge between truth and justice.

“Mr. Burhan, you may begin your questioning.”

“Thank you, Judge Iradie.” He turned to Petra. “Ms. Lena, what do you know about the Players’ Defection?”

“Mr. Sabah, you should answer these questions yourself.”

“I am not in that position now. Please, simply answer.”

“These are not my secrets to tell.”

“Secrets?” he repeated curiously. “If you know people have secrets and you are keeping those secrets in this court, that is lying, Petra.”

“I do not practice lying as a universal law,” Petra answered.

“So you only lie at certain times?”

“No, that’s not it. Just because I know lying is wrong does not mean I know which truth to tell.”

The room was quiet. What does the world expect of me, she wondered.

“Let us start from another point. Did you ever discuss with any of your teammates the possibility of defecting from the Maze?”

Burhan wished this would end soon. He could feel the irony bleeding from his skin. Burhan Sabah’s name literally meant, “proof in the morning,” but he felt he would not live up to it on this day.

Petra was about to answer in the negative, to deny all knowledge, to avoid the wrath of the court.

“Please answer the question, Ms. Lena,” the judge said sternly.

But before she could let the words of denial tumble out of her mouth, those hidden doubts swept in as they always do and collapsed her good senses.

“Yes, sir,” she answered, glancing around as if someone else had uttered it.

Burhan himself looked up in surprise.

“Well, would you care to tell us the circumstances of the discussions you had?”

Over the next hour, Petra proceeded with bitter honesty about the cold schoolroom, the defections and even how it hurt her heart to say goodbye. Her closest teammates were gone and that was the truth in her life.

“Thank you, Ms. Lena,” Judge Iradie said sincerely, almost proudly.

“We will break for recess until I have conferred with the better thoughts of my experience and decide what is befitting the next stage of these proceedings.” Judge Iradie excused his courtroom.

At around the noon hour, the hearing commenced with Judge Iradie giving his

formulated and fair response.

“Dear citizens, you must know that when everything is falling apart the law steadies us. Its residual influence gives us predictability. It guides us like the moon pulls the waves. That said, I turn to the case now presented to us. I have found by convincing measure that there is no need for a full trial due to the honesty of Ms. Lena’s testimony. Due to her knowledge of the facts, Ms. Lena may be called as a witness in future hearings or trials regarding the defection of her teammates. For the accessory to defection in this case, the court finds appropriate action in permanently banning Ms. Lena from the privilege of participating on the Maze Women’s National Football Team, even at such foreseeable time when the NGBS lifts the ban on competition. We cannot have citizens found to be in violation of laws of the Maze continue to represent the country in such an important and public forum as athletics.”

Petra’s gaze remained strong. But her heart had dropped heavy with tears.

“This hearing is considered closed. There are no opportunities for appeal.” Judge Iradie retired to his chamber, another story rewritten.

Burhan walked over to Petra and she was willing to shake his hand. He looked down as if to nod his condolences. With nothing left to say he walked away. Burhan shared duties with other prosecutors in the General Court to present the rest of the loyal athletes’ hearings over the next few weeks. In total, he presented six cases relating to the Players’ Defection but he only ever felt shame with respect to Petra’s.

Petra found her coach in the crowd in front of the courthouse.

“I thought they would see through me,” she said.

“I understand,” he answered softly. “You were trapped.”

Her coach was not going to allow her heart to drown. Not when she had been so good. He knew that the cause she could not see was a virtuous fight for equality and the girl she could not recognize was the woman she had become. Petra could sense her coach’s thoughts at that moment. The fact that she could still read his mind comforted her to know that she had not lost all of who she was.

“Just think of the bravery you have shown, my dear Petra. Your courage will inspire both tribes to be brave and loyal and to tell truths at any cost. This is where the new Maze needs to begin. Someday, a young Mohi girl in the east will hear your story and will be inspired to believe that she can write her own.”

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