Keepers of the House

by JH Fletcher

  The interviewer, known for his political slant, was dismissive of the notion that fault could lie with other than South Africa’s whites; world opinion had defined the conflict years before. ‘Both sides? That’s hardly the informed view, would you say?’

  Mark said, ‘It’s the truth.’

  The interviewer chuckled, indulgently. ‘That sounds dangerously like an expression of principle.’ As though principles were something deserving shame.

  The next day, driving into the city, Anna stopped at a book shop and bought Mark’s book. Over the next week — between meetings, in airport lounges, in the bath — she read it in great gulps.

  TWENTY-THREE

  Back in Africa after his final break-up with Anna, Mark Forrest filled the gap with nonsense.

  Always parties; always girls. In time his pain became so familiar that he almost ceased to be aware of it. When that happened, the party-going petered out, too. One girl remained. Krystyna de Koch, an Afrikaner and member of the security police, no less. At first it amused him to sit down, later lie down, with the enemy. Then he forgot all that nonsense and she became simply a woman, breasts and thighs and a fall of lustrous dark hair that in moments of passion she drew gently across her mouth, a scented tent in which he could hide his face and tell himself he was cured of Anna Riordan and all her works.

  They drove to the high emptiness of the Drakensberg, the saw-toothed mountains sublimely beautiful against a sky the colour of gentians. They walked for hours among the peaks, saw antelope: eland and duiker and wildebeest. Lonely and wild and beautiful like so much of Africa; with its sudden precipices and yawning descents dangerous, too, like so much of Africa. They camped under peaks that still, in October, contained the icy breath of snow. Firelight flickered on their faces and, later, their ardent bodies. They listened to the mysterious silences of the night. The air crackled with frost, the stars were an icy furnace, and Mark thought he would stay in Africa forever.

  He was sure Krystyna would marry him, if he asked. Africa was still news and likely to remain so; he would never be out of a job. He thought that the grandeur, ugliness and colour of Africa, the unceasing exclamation points of African existence, the calamities and triumphs and savagery so much more vivid than elsewhere, might be the refuge and salvation that he had been seeking all his life.

  Cruelty and hatred, he thought. Glory, too. If I did not hate it so much, I could not love it as I do.

  Half-drunk on sex and whisky, he took another swig from the bottle and smiled down at Krystyna lying beside him in the double-sized sleeping bag. His mind focused on a future that seemed not only desirable but right.

  In the dying firelight her eyes were a gleam of white against the russet and gold of her face. He opened his mouth to ask her to marry him. Before he could speak, she reached up and placed her fingers across his mouth.

  She said, ‘No …’

  He cocked an eyebrow, humouring her. ‘You don’t know what I was going to say.’

  ‘Perhaps.’ She sat up and looked past him at the mountains, no more than a ghostly rumour in the darkness. ‘You do not understand Africa.’

  It touched his professional pride. ‘I wouldn’t say that.’

  ‘Neither Africa nor the Afrikaner.’

  He smiled, hoping to lighten her mood. ‘Who could ever hope to understand them?’

  ‘We have very long memories.’

  Many Afrikaner rituals were tied up with the distant past, but Mark knew she was not talking of that.

  ‘The authorities think of you as the enemy because of what you write. To them you will always be the enemy.’

  ‘I’m a journalist. I report what I see.’

  ‘You damage us in the eyes of the world.’

  He would not accept blame. ‘Your government damages you.’ Yet Mark knew that his reports were of necessity slanted to suit Sydney’s requirements; total objectivity was impossible.

  She shook her head. ‘No one who is not African will ever understand us.’

  Her words struck an elegiac note. It troubled him; he did not want to lose this woman, too.

  ‘So teach me and I’ll learn.’

  ‘You should leave Africa,’ she said.

  ‘If I did, would you come with me?’

  A coal clicked in the dying fire.

  ‘No,’ Krystyna said.

  Anger. ‘Has your boss put you up to this?’

  Inside the sleeping bag, her hand caressed his thigh. ‘My boss doesn’t get into bed with me.’ She smiled, coaxing him, but Mark was in no mood to be coaxed.

  ‘I’d say he’s here right now.’

  It was deliberately hurtful, yet her smile did not flicker. With sudden desolation, he knew that he had indeed lost her.

  ‘We are a backwater here. No place for a journalist of your talent.’

  That was nonsense. ‘The action never stops.’

  ‘Things will quieten down again, you’ll see. People will forget us.’

  ‘You think the blacks will forget?’

  ‘We shall make our own peace with the blacks. Afrikaner, Zulu, Shangaan … We are all African. We do not need outsiders to show us the way. We have been living with each other for centuries.’

  Her hand continued to move on him. He turned to her, yielding to the increasing intimacy of her touch.

  ‘You think that, why are you here with me now?’

  ‘I am an Afrikaner,’ she said, ‘but a woman, also. It is the woman who is here with you.’

  At the last, he managed to salvage something with a joke. ‘Thank God for that,’ he said.

  Mark did not leave Africa. He did not even leave Krystyna, or not entirely. They still spent occasional nights together, but the urgency was gone. He remained unsure whether the break-up had been her idea or whether her boss had indeed warned her off. It did not matter; either way, it came to the same thing.

  He told himself that a foreign correspondent had no business with a wife. At least there was one consolation; in sharp contrast with his feelings after his break-up with Anna, he did not ache. In his heart he knew that Krystyna had been right. He would never be truly African, would not wish to be, perhaps. They would not have been right for each other, their differences far greater than the attraction that had drawn them together. He was grateful to her; thanks to the clarity of her perception, he had escaped unscathed from what would almost certainly have been another catastrophe.

  She had been right about something else, as well. The tide of protest was ebbing. Every day there was less to report. Even the police no longer hassled him. Perhaps, as she had said, it was time to move on.

  Certainly Australia thought so. Mark was one of the favourite sons of the Sydney mafia; when they approached him about a possible move to London, they asked him nicely. It meant nothing; if they had made up their minds they needed him there, they’d have packed him off, never mind what he thought about it. They hadn’t but, in truth, he had no reason to refuse. It would be a great career move; the most ardent republican could hardly call London a backwater.

  Yet he hesitated, intuition urging him to stay.

  To prove him right there came a sequence of killings: one black, several white, then more black, deaths by the dozen — and everything changed.

  A contact in the African township of Atteridgeville tipped Mark off that a child — a choirboy on his way to practice — had been killed by the police. He checked and found there was something in the story. He flew up from Cape Town to interview the police officer in charge. Who, at least to begin with, was a pleasant surprise.

  Mark had taken it for granted that the cops would give him a hard time — they always did — but Colonel Niewouldt, grey-haired and fatherly, seemed to be the exception. Not that he was about to accept blame for anything the police might have done.

  ‘The Enquiry uncovered no evidence against the constable,’ he told Mark. ‘The only witness was the madam of a brothel. We interrogated her, but she could not even identify the officer she claime
d was involved.’

  Mark was sceptical; he had been lied to so often. ‘The version I heard, she claimed he wasn’t in the line-up.’

  ‘It’s what she would say, isn’t it? Listen,’ the Colonel said, ‘Children, old people, are attacked every day in the townships. The tsotsis, ruffians, are everywhere. It saddens me to say it, but this kind of business is commonplace.’

  ‘The boy’s father blames the police. Mrs Kumalo, the brothel keeper, blames the police.’

  Niewouldt slapped an exasperated hand on the surface of his desk. ‘Then let them bring evidence. Do that and we shall prosecute. You think we enjoy it? A child dead and the police blamed? These people … If the sky fell on their heads they would blame the police.’ He breathed deeply for a moment, nostrils flared, lips indignant. ‘We took statements from everyone,’ he said. ‘If you want to see them you are welcome.’

  This was co-operation, indeed. Mark began to wonder if his contact might have been mistaken, after all.

  ‘I would like that. Thank you.’

  The Colonel lifted his telephone, spoke briefly. A uniformed officer brought a bulging file and led Mark to a vacant office with a desk and a chair. He placed the file upon the desk and pointed to a bell push in the wall.

  ‘The Colonel instructs that you should be locked in. For security reasons, you understand. When you have finished, please ring the bell and we shall come and let you out.’

  He left the room; Mark heard the key turn in the lock. The idea of being locked up by the police would have disconcerted him, had he let it. He sat at the desk, opened the file and began to read the statements of the witnesses in the case of Moses Majozi, the thirteen-year-old choirboy who had been beaten to death on his way to church.

  The first statement was from Bishop Amos Phalimanze, leader of the church to which Moses had belonged:

  I, Amos Phalimanze, by the Grace of Jesus the Nazarene, bishop of the three million members of the Zion Christian Church of Africa, say this.

  Our members are not of this world. All things other than work and prayer are forbidden. We do not visit beer halls. We do not attend football matches. We do not smoke tobacco or other drugs. We do not involve ourselves in politics or protest.

  Simon Majozi, his wife and children are members of our church. Simon is a good man, strong in the Lord, the foreman of a construction company in Pretoria. Friday night Simon and his family returned home from church. His youngest son, Moses, thirteen years old, had something to eat, then set out to return to the church for choir practice. The rest of the family went to bed.

  One hour later, his daughter awakened Simon. She told him that a messenger had come to say that his son had been badly beaten by the police. Simon and his wife got dressed at once and ran to the spot with the messenger. They found Moses lying unconscious in the roadway. Mrs Kumalo, one of the crowd, told them what had happened. She is not a member of our church, and they knew her by sight only. They put the boy into a car and took him to the hospital at Kalafong.

  Thoughtfully Mark put the paper down and turned to the next one, the statement of the Mrs Miriam Kumalo whom the bishop had mentioned in his testimony and who, according to Colonel Niewouldt, ran a brothel in the area where the incident had taken place.

  Name?

  Miriam Kumalo.

  You run a shebeen in Sibeni Street?

  Shebeen? I do not know that word.

  It is a very common word among people of your profession. As you are well aware, it means you sell liquor without a licence. You are a shebeen queen and brothel keeper. Do you wish me to explain what the word ‘brothel’ means?

  I have friends who take cool drinks in hot weather. Meet other friends. Some of the Colonel’s friends also come.

  Do not be insolent. What did you hear that night? While you were selling cool drinks to your friends?

  One woman say, come quick, there is big trouble. So I go and see this white cop in the alley with a boy.

  A black boy?

  Of course black! You think we have white boys here? The boy is lying on the ground. The cop has his gun out. He is kicking him.

  What did you do?

  I run up to him. I ask what he doing. He take no notice, but kick the boy again. His boot marks are all over the boy’s shirt. I say to him, I know that boy. He not one of the Comrades, those men who are always rioting. He go to church. All the time in church. I push the cop away. I tell him, how you do this thing? You like me to kick your kid brother like this?

  What did the policeman do?

  Church? he say. What he doing on the street, then? I say, he going to church. He choirboy. His eyes go round. Choirboy? Fokking hell! Then he run back to his car, drive off. I take his number. He see me. He reverse so fast I have to jump out the way. He say, what you doing? I say I report him to Pretoria. He point his gun at me. He say, you sure you don’t want the front number, too? Then he drive off.

  And the boy?

  He still lying there. I send a man for his father. When he come, he drive him to the hospital at Kalafong. That all I know.

  Once again Mark turned the page.

  My name is Pauline Tshabalala. I am a nurse at the Kalafong hospital. Friday night at the hospital like rush-hour in the city. How! So many people. Stab wounds, bullet wounds. So many. All night rush, rush. This boy brought in, left on a stretcher. After maybe one hour, I get to look at him. I see at once he very bad. He cannot speak. There is blood on his head and in his ears. And his body, when I look, all bruises. Blood all over. His parents are there. I tell them not to worry, we fix up their son real good. When we take him into X-ray, we see his skull is all broken and there is blood on the brain. Nothing we can do. Presently he die. I go to tell the parents. They sitting there holding each other’s hands. I tell them their boy is dead.

  Finally there was a statement from Colonel Niewouldt himself.

  I am a Colonel in the South African Police. As officer commanding the Atteridgeville Unit, I confirm to the Enquiry that the police carried out all procedures correctly and in accordance with standing orders.

  I visited the location of the incident personally and took statements from all witnesses.

  The witness Miriam Kumalo is a woman of poor character who runs a shebeen and brothel in Sibeni Street, Atteridgeville. During interrogation, Miriam Kumalo alleged that she had seen Konstabel Venter kicking the deceased, Moses Majozi.

  Konstabel Venter states that he was on patrol in Atteridgeville at the time of the assault on the said Majozi. He surprised two men attacking a third who was lying on the ground. He drove up to give assistance, whereupon the assailants fled. Konstabel Venter pursued the pair on foot, but was unfortunately unable to detain them. He returned to the scene of the incident, where he was assaulted by the complainant Miriam Kumalo.

  He denies categorically that he was kicking the deceased. He denies categorically that he was in any way responsible for the injuries suffered by the deceased. He left the scene only when it became apparent that his own life was in danger.

  At a subsequent identification parade, Miriam Kumalo was unable to identify Konstabel Venter.

  After full enquiry, I am of the opinion that no blame attaches to Konstabel Venter, who is in fact to be commended for his attempts to save the boy Moses Majozi, despite considerable danger to himself.

  I so advise.

  Mark closed the file and rang the bell. The same officer took the file and checked it carefully before escorting him back to Colonel Niewouldt’s office.

  ‘I understand the Enquiry followed your advice and exonerated the officer?’

  ‘Of course. There was no evidence against him at all.’

  ‘Except for Mrs Kumalo.’

  ‘Mrs Kumalo …’ The colonel dismissed the Kumalos of the world. ‘A woman of bad character who could not even identify the officer concerned. She was just trying to make trouble.’

  ‘Yet she saw him. According to your own testimony, she even assaulted him. Why couldn’t she identify him
after that?’

  Niewouldt’s eyes regarded him frostily. ‘Listen to me,’ he said. ‘We have our own way of doing things in this country. They may seem strange to you, a foreigner, but they work. We know how to keep our house in order, believe me.’ He smiled, jovially, the father figure who had delivered a rebuke but was willing to forgive. ‘Now, tell me. Have you seen everything you need?’

  It was pointless to talk to this man any more.

  ‘Thank you.’

  Niewouldt smiled and smiled. ‘You’re quite sure?’

  ‘Thank you.’ Through clenched teeth.

  Niewouldt, avuncular, walked Mark to the door. ‘You journalists are always complaining about the police. Our lack of co-operation. Well, our shoulders are broad enough to put up with it. But I hope, on this occasion at least, you have no complaints on that score?’

  They had been discussing nothing less than the crucifixion of the truth, yet his voice contained no hint of mockery.

  ‘You have been really co-operative,’ Mark said.

  Why say anything else, when all was lies? Back in Pretoria, Mark phoned his contact. ‘I want to meet Miriam Kumalo. And the father.’

  Miriam Kumalo said, ‘Of course I could not identify him. The bastard was not there.’

  Simon Majozi said, ‘I am black, he is white. I have no power. My son is dead. I can only say hallelujah, it is over. The vessel is shattered. The water has drained away.’

  Mark filed his report. Sydney loved it. Someone, predictably, came up with the headline:

  SLAUGHTER OF THE INNOCENTS

  A Moses Majozi Commemoration Fund was formed, proceeds to go to apartheid’s victims.

  A campaign was launched to send letters of protest to the South African embassy. Outside which a few banner-carrying demonstrators marched and yelled for the cameras.