Death in Durban

by Jon Zackon

  In the event, Theo wrote back promptly, if rather officiously.

  He said there was a witness of sorts. A milkman had been on his early morning rounds when he heard the collision. He turned round and saw a car accelerating as it drove past him. But it was dark and he couldn’t describe the car or its colour. He got the impression, though, that the driver was a man.

  “That is not much to go on, but I am sure we will track this hit-and-run wrongdoer down. It is only a matter of time,” wrote Theo.

  I didn’t share his optimism. There was, of course, a hidden agenda to all this and Theo made that obvious at the end of the letter, which read...

  I am sorry for your tragic loss, my friend, and I can see that it may tempt you to seek some kind of personal retribution. But I want you to heed the following warning – you will not be allowed to get back in the country, so do not try. Even before this incident I had sent your personal details to every point of entry in the Republic. If you try to get in, you will simply be put on the first flight back. If you try to gain illegal entry, you will most assuredly be caught and in that event I will make sure you rot in prison for a very long time. So don’t try it, Daniel.

  I thought, don’t call me friend, Theo. You’re no friend of mine. As for the warning, who else could it really be about but Koos? Was Theo saying that he suspected him of killing Ruth? I couldn’t be certain.

  ***

  With little to think about that was good I buried myself in my work. I couldn’t bear to go out at night, not even to jazz concerts, and missed, among others, Errol Garner, the Basie Band and The Jazz Messengers. I thought about drinking myself into oblivion but it had never suited. Three drinks and I was tipsy, a feeling I really didn’t like. So I worked late, or stayed in my room and read.

  ***

  On a quiet Monday in August Blake took me to El Vino’s. He ordered a large plate of beef sandwiches and a bottle of Burgundy. I settled for a small glass of claret.

  “This is by way of being a celebration, Danny,” he said. “A group that specialises in business journals has bought us out.”

  He downed a third glass of Burgundy. It gave me a headache just watching him.

  “But the new owners want me to stay on as editor while I find a successor.”

  “So why is this good news, Blake?”

  “If I suit them and they suit me, and if my successor proves suitable, I will be appointed group editorial director.”

  “Great.”

  “There’s more. I’ve told them about you, Danny, and it is possible you will become Europa’s new editor. Don’t look so surprised. You’re doing a damn good job for us.”

  “But what about Charlie?”

  “He’s old, Danny. He wants to retire in the next two years.”

  “And Norman?”

  “Definitely not happy with responsibility.”

  “Well, I’m flattered.”

  “Er, you’ll have to prove yourself. There’ll be a six-month probationary period as acting editor. When the time comes, I hope you’ll accept that.”

  He grinned and said, “Don’t forget, I’ll be depending on you for my own promotion.”

  ***

  The nightmares started in November, about the same time as I became acting editor. I can’t remember the first one, not that I would want to. But they became more and more vivid and disturbing. Frightening, in fact. Like a particularly nasty horror comic.

  In these half-dreams I would be running and running, only to be stopped in my tracks by a huge face. It had enormous red-veined eyeballs and was leering down at me. Blood and spit flew from its lips. Then gigantic hands would grab me by the throat. From far away a voice would call, “Danny, Danny, help me, help me, help me …” and I’d wake up.

  The obvious imagery, dredged up from my own memory, I could cope with. But the distant, disembodied voice, the plea for help, was unbearably distressing. I wondered whether I’d perhaps heard something like it in a movie. But trying to pin it down didn’t help.

  The nightmares became more persistent, so I made an appointment to see a GP. I mentioned this to Charlie. He sat at his desk in an old and torn pullover and must have been among the last journalists on earth to wear a green eye-shield.

  “Don’t go near the bastard, Danny,” he said.

  “Sorry? Why not?”

  “All he’ll do is give you sleeping pills. It’s happened to me. GPs don’t want to listen to your troubles, believe me.”

  “Maybe pills will help.”

  “No, they won’t. All the new sleeping pills are bloody dangerous. Nobody knows their long-term effects. And in the short term they will leave you confused, with your feelings deadened. You can’t work properly and your sex life is hampered.”

  “Well, to be truthful Charlie, at this stage that wouldn’t bother me in the slightest.”

  “Don’t joke, Danny. It would, believe me. I’ve been through that whole charade and it’s no fun. Just don’t do it, son. As for the nightmares, they’ll fade. Like the old cliché says, time heals all.”

  He didn’t bother to say it, but we both knew that the one thing I had was time. It stretched out uncomfortably in front of me.

  As for the nightmares, I knew the sort of thing that would cure them instantly – a shot between Koos’s eyes, for example. I teased myself with a moral conundrum. What was worse – to do nothing, which would surely amount to cowardice and betrayal, or to kill Koos, which went against everything I’d always said I believed in? Well, we’re all hypocrites, I concluded.

  At the same time I wondered which path I would choose if I ever got that single chance during all the years to come.

  Chapter 29

  1996

  MY KNEE hurts from sitting in a cramped position. I’ve been driving into the sun for hours, so my head also hurts. Far away to the south, the clear skies are giving way to storm clouds. The lowest tier is black as night and already the horizon has vanished.

  As I turn off the N14 butterflies begin to unsettle my gut. I’ve only waited half a lifetime for this and now that I am so damned close …

  My map, a rough drawing, is misleading. It shows Van Zeeder’s Kopje to be just off the main road. But as I leave the tarmac behind and find myself on a rutted dirt road, the hill that gives the dorp its name still looks miles away. The state of the road forces me to slow down.

  I don’t want to think about what might lie ahead at Van Zeeder’s Plaas. I’m nervous enough already. Better to think about the past. Such as how, to my astonishment, a confluence of events great and small, a mixture of personal affairs and history on a grand scale, brought me back to South Africa this cold August.

  ***

  I’d been editor of Market Europa for about a year when the group’s personnel manager found me a new secretary. Karen Longhill was eighteen years old, blonde, smart and full of fun. A typical Home Counties girl. She was clever enough to have gone to university, but in those days fathers believed their daughters should go out to work, preferably as secretaries.

  Karen had another great attribute. She was sympathetic by nature.

  I fought for a long time to keep our relationship on a professional basis. I had too much going on in my head, most of it to do with Ruth, and Koos, and revenge. I only let my guard down once – but that was enough.

  The occasion was Karen’s birthday in June, 1964. She invited the office to The Rose and Crown public house, known to the Fleet Street types who frequented it as Auntie’s, for an after-work drink. The place was packed with journos from the Daily Sketch, the Observer and even one or two from the Daily Mail. A glass of wine in hand, I looked around the place and, bearing in mind that there were at least ten pubs within a hundred-yard radius, said, “Good choice Karen. Great atmosphere.”

  She looked at me carefully and with familiar openness said, “It’s nice to see you enjoying yourself, Danny. You always look so miserable in the office.”

  “Well,
there are a lot of responsibilities …”

  “I don’t believe it’s got anything to do with work. It’s something else, isn’t it?”

  I think I must have shrugged.

  “Before Charlie … Mr Minty … retired he told me about your tragedy. It was just too awful.”

  “Yes, it was.”

  “Can’t you tell me about it?”

  It was hardly the right time or the right place, but I promised that at a later date I would take her for a drink and perhaps a bite to eat and tell her my story.

  Five nights later, in a quiet corner of The Red Lion, a few blocks away from the noisy tipplers of the national press, I gave her an abridged version of what had happened to me in Durban and after. Disconcertingly, she hung on to every word.

  “Don’t go back,” she said when I’d finished. “Please, never go back.”

  We went for drinks several times in the next few weeks. Everything happened slowly. I’d never noticed before how attractive she was. I took her to the cinema, we went dancing and, eventually, she came to my flat. Making love seemed a natural progression.

  Early in 1965 we were married at Guildford Registry Office. Karen wore a funny little rose pillbox hat on top of a Vidal Sassoon bob cut. Matching rose gloves and shoes. Silver tights with a diamond pattern set off her grey and white Mary Quant collarless jacket and dress rather nicely. I’d given her a pink gemstone brooch, which looked like Faberge but wasn’t. She looked as if she belonged on a page of Vogue.

  We drove a mile or two to her family home for the reception. Her father and mother welcomed me, although I must have seemed like an exotic beast to them. Norman was best man and Blake was there, along with one or two people I’d met. Everyone else was a relative or a friend of the Longhills.

  During the reception I phoned my mother. She asked to speak to my bride and apparently said the right things, because I saw Karen wipe a tear away. My parents could not have been happy at me marrying a non-Jewish girl. But they would have guessed how lonely I’d been and, well, one black sheep had to be considered a fair result for any Jewish family in the Sixties.

  The next day Karen and I set off for a week’s honeymoon in Jersey.

  As we lay in bed in our hotel suite, with Karen’s head on my shoulder, I suddenly realised it had been months since I’d last had a nightmare.

  ***

  In the next four years we had two boys, Adam and Paul. We bought a house in Richmond and were mostly content with our suburban existence.

  As soon as the boys were old enough Karen came back to work. She wrote well and I coached her on how to construct a news story. Then I used my contacts to get her a job in PR with a firm in the City. Within a few years she was made a partner. We had more than enough income to live well.

  As for me, I had to admit I loved being editor and watching Europa flourish. The sales even held up during economic downturns, which delighted Blake and his fellow directors.

  Our sons grew up at a hell of a rate, were troubled and troublesome teenagers, much happier once they’d got to university and were free of parental control. Both have done well since. Adam has qualified as a dentist and Paul shunned his arts degree to join a City brokerage, where he seems to have discovered a talent for making money without breaking sweat. Both love the pop scene and claim to hate jazz.

  I have tried at various times to explain my past to them and what brought me to London, but neither has shown much interest. It seemed for a long while, even without their indifference, that my past was becoming irrelevant. Durban was a lifetime away. I was not the same person. Just look, I would say to myself, how different my life is now, how comfortable.

  How wrong could I get? All that bitterness, all that rancour, all that hate – it doesn’t just go away, does it? You can sublimate it, sure, but it’s molten, like magma. Sooner or later it will force its way to the surface and erupt.

  I don’t know what the trigger was. Perhaps it was what the labellers like to call a mid-life crisis. But well into my fifties I started to get depressed.

  The nightmares returned. “Help, Danny, help,” cried the distant voice. I would wake up weeping.

  At odd moments, while I read or watched television, I would remember my vow to make Koos pay. It made me feel ashamed. My moods worsened.

  And I was in for shock. I discovered a flaw in the nature of womankind. Yes, I am generalising, but I cannot believe that what I found in Karen was peculiar to her alone. Men should be warned.

  It seemed a most obvious thing to believe that when I became depressed Karen would comfort me, guide me out of the darkness. I took it for granted. It wasn’t so. As I became depressed, so she became depressed. The whole process was alienating. She became gruff and censorious. I retaliated. After years of a peaceful marriage we began to shout and fight. The boys were gone from home by then and there was no one to stop us. We were trapped in a destructive cycle neither of us knew how to break on our own.

  “For God’s sake, go and see a shrink,” she shouted.

  But I couldn’t. In a weird sort of a way I needed the nightmares, needed my personality to remain intact, to remind me where my conscience and duty lay. I began to think more and more about returning to South Africa and attending to unfinished business.

  South Africa ... wasn’t that the country where the white minority so ruthlessly oppressed the black majority? Where white police brutalised the black and coloured population as a matter of course?

  Well, no, not any more. Without a revolution, without any gun-crazy white cowboys riding in blood up to their stirrups, Nelson Mandela had risen from the status of a common criminal, hunted in the streets of Jo’burg before being incarcerated in Robben Island, to become the country’s first black president. It beggared belief.

  Chapter 30

  AS ANY sports loving South African will tell you, the spectator sees more of the game. I had a teacher who repeated the old saying endlessly. So as I sat at my desk in London, did I see the seismic changes coming that ultimately overwhelmed apartheid and white rule? Sorry, no. Like millions around the world I sat amazed in front of my TV as Mandela walked to freedom at Victor Verster Prison on February 11th, 1990.

  Within the next few years the transfer of power from the Nationalists to the ANC was complete, thanks to the vision of F. W. de Klerk and Mandela’s own boundless magnanimity.

  There were major consequences for me. I could re-enter South Africa at will. I also watched keenly as the new ANC government set up its Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 1994 to examine the multitude of crimes committed during the apartheid era.

  Would Koos van Blatter be called to account before the Commission’s judges?

  I wrote to Theo, putting the question to him. He didn’t reply.

  So I wrote again. He still didn’t reply.

  I thought many times of writing directly to the Commission. But there it was, that same old problem – I didn’t have a shred of real evidence against Koos.

  Surely, I thought, they would eventually get round to him.

  As 1995 came and went, my personal situation began to change. For years I’d turned down offers to be appointed group editorial director. I still loved the mechanics of being editor. But now, as I approached retirement, I accepted the senior post with the intention of bolstering my pension. I found myself being paid more for doing less. I had time on my hands.

  Promotion didn’t help my marriage, though. Karen had grown ever more distant. By now we lived in a detached house in Esher. But she began to spend as little time there as possible.

  For some time I’d felt pains across my chest and down my left arm. I failed a stress test, nearly falling off the treadmill. An angiogram revealed a blockage in one of the lesser coronary arteries. I was prescribed beta-blockers and given a nitrate spray.

  “Your are not in great danger,” said the cardiologist. “You’re lucky it’s that artery. If you had a heart attack now it would not be severe. But
don’t be fooled – heart disease can quickly get worse if you don’t look after yourself.”

  I hated the beta-blockers and the way they slowed my pulse. Some nights I would lie in bed thinking my heart was about to stop. It was an eerie feeling.

  For some years I’d been drinking and smoking more and more, eating badly and sitting up all night playing poker. Now I started swallowing omega-three capsules and making myself bran muffins.

  I thought constantly about going back to South Africa. But confronting Koos would be a dangerous venture. I was also trying to hang on to the remnants of my faltering marriage. It never crossed my mind to call an end to it.

  Then, barely three months ago, Karen left a letter on the sideboard saying she was moving out for good. It transpired that she and a City businessman by the name of Harvey Rees-Rendell had been conducting an affair behind my back for years. His wife had died after a long illness and they wanted to live together.

  Karen sued for divorce.

  Suddenly I was free of all obligations and hindrances. It wasn’t a freedom I’d sought or wished for or liked, but there it was.

  And still I hesitated to go to South Africa. There was my angina to contend with, as well as a host of old fears to conquer.

  Three weeks ago came the catalyst – a letter from Theo.

  It read,

  In answer to your question, contained in your earlier letters, the gentleman concerned looks sure to escape what should by rights be his fate.

  I have much to tell you, Daniel, but this is hardly the way to do it. Come and see me. There is nothing to stop you now. I promise you won’t regret it.

  The question he referred to, but carefully avoided spelling out, was about Koos and the Commission. But I knew what he was getting at and I didn’t blame him for being cryptic and security conscious. He belonged to the old order and so was almost certainly under scrutiny from the new African authorities.