The Commission
By Scott Pomfret
Nov 15, 2025
Nov 15, 2025
I’m supposed to forgive. My daughter says it will be good for me. She drags me to meet the do-good sponsors of the initiative. To tell my story so they can match me up with the perpetrator of a crime.
On the day appointed for our confrontation, which is one of hundreds of such days and pairings over a dozen months the Commission’s in session, I take the train to Dubrovnik. My daughter and I meet in front of the Palace of Justice, where the Truth & Reconciliation Commission has been convening. The Great Hall, the Palace’s largest room, has over two centuries been the site of many sermons, many calls to arms, many proclamations concerning national days of mourning.
The nine-member commission occupies small thrones on a raised dais at one end of the Great Hall. A few feet beneath them is a mahogany box containing a chair for me, the victim. On a platform three feet below me, the monster slouches into his mahogany box. He’s wearing a rumpled suit with the tie knot loose. His face is dirty travelling from whatever hole he crawled out from.
The wooden benches lined like pews before us creak with the weight and flutter of gossiping diplomats. I clutch a lucky silver Euro and flip it over and over, tallying heads and tails as if at any moment one of these flips might decide something important.
To my right, a stage is marked to show me and the monster where to stand for the post-commission photo op. If we’re lucky, the commissioners will join us. Turn now forty-five degrees for the foreign press. Now this way for the tabloids. Now shake hands.
The lead commissioner instructs the monster in murmurs that sound like benedictions. The monster swears an oath.
Looking over my left shoulder, he testifies, “I’m old. I was young then. It was thirty years ago.”
Simultaneous translation echoes around us in eight languages. Unlike the monster, my father never got a chance to get old. To suffer the aches and indignities of aging. To see my children shiver with excitement at their grandfather’s coming.
The monster describes my father on his knees on that fateful day. A sign around my father’s neck naming him as a traitorous pig and enemy of the revolution.
“He oinked,” the monster says.
“Oinked?” asks the lead commissioner, frowning.
“Oinked,” the monster confirms. “Someone in the crowd prodded him with a stick, and he oinked. I smacked his ass with a two by four. People laughed, so I hit him again.”
I jump up and beg to be excused.
“Highly irregular,” murmurs the lead commissioner, but she motions for me to step down.
The person assigned to walk me through the process takes my elbow and pretends that it’s she who needs the support. An indeterminate age, she wears a floral print dress and looks as if she might be headed to a derby after. She guides me into a corridor outside the Great Hall that’s lined with mirrors. She and I argue about the efficacy of the process.
“I guess I’m a small person,” I say.
“The future of our country depends on reconciliation.”
“I can’t pretend.”
“It’ll take time.”
“Before that day, I had no idea the world could operate like that. That people could.”
At a table outside the commission hall, thin coffee drizzles into a wax paper cup from a silver urn. We each take a cup.
“Why did you come here if you don’t want to be reconciled?” she asks.
“My daughter ….”
“Don’t disappoint,” she says.
“I think I’ve already disappointed.”
She laughs and complains about the lukewarm coffee and stale pastries. She tries to make me get comfortable in my skin, saying, “Tell me more about your region of the country. I’ve never been there. Tell me more about your father.”
Then someone interrupts us, and she switches effortlessly to English, which I don’t understand.
Returning to Croatian as I drift toward the men’s room, she warns, “Don’t go far.” It’s said she’s fluent enough she could do the eight simultaneous translations herself.
Listening to my piss stream striking the ceramic urinal, I feel peace, until I recognize the old man pissing beside me. It’s the monster, of course. His urine dribbles. He’s shorter than I am, which seems impossible. I flee the men’s room into the arms of the process woman, who reminds me that the Commission is my last chance to talk to the monster. To ask why.
She switches languages again midstream, as if she’s talking to someone else. I wish I had her facility with speech, but I don’t want to be like her.
I say, “I hear my father’s voice even now. He hasn’t forgiven me yet. How can it be my turn?”
Staring at me in genuine astonishment, she says, “What a child you are, to have to have what’s in your heart match your behavior. It’s as conventional as being polite, this commission. Nothing more. That’s all this is. Ceremony.”
“Maybe the monster and I ….”
“The monster?” she asks sharply.
“The declarant,” I explain, finding the neutral word the Commission prefers. “Maybe the declarant and I can agree to remain permanently estranged but not currently murderous. Is that enough?”
Her eyes flash so sharply, I feel like a marionette with its strings cut. My Euro coin slips between my fingers. Dropping to the marble floor, it rolls on its edge in a complete circle around me before falling flat on its side. The acoustics in the hall of mirrors are so perfect that the monster, who’s standing alone gazing at his reflection near the far wall, looks up at the tiny plink.
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Scott Pomfret is the author of Since My Last Confession: A Gay Catholic Memoir; Hot Sauce: A Novel; the Q Guide to Wine and Cocktails; and over sixty short stories published in magazines including Ecotone, Smokelong Quarterly, The Short Story (UK), Post Road, New Orleans Review, Fiction International, and Fourteen Hills. An MFA candidate in creative writing at Emerson College and a resident of Provincetown MA, Scott’s at work on a comic queer Know-Nothing alternative history novel set in antebellum New Orleans.
More at www.scottpomfret.com and @bostonseanachie on most social media. |
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