Talion

by Beyers de Vos

  He was quite beautiful.

  The camera around Nolwazi’s neck is heavy.

  The pathologist, Dr Natron, who is tapping an impatient refrain on her clipboard with her gloved fingers, is sharp and tall. A single lock of badly dyed blonde hair is escaping from underneath her surgical cap. She has a pinched face – partially hidden by her mask – and her skin has a pallor that resembles the dead.

  The doctor clears her throat. ‘I’ve already completed the external examination, as you can see. His clothes’ – she indicates a row of evidence bags on a low table to her left – ‘are over there. We did find a small bag of marijuana on him, hidden in his underwear. We’ve also X-rayed the body. The bullet is lodged behind his right lung. Shall I start?’

  Nolwazi takes a few more photos of the body, focusing on the entrance wound in the chest, then nods. Dr Natron begins at the neck. She makes a V-shaped incision that she carries down all the way to his navel. A large, deep cut that opens him up: his organs have to come out, have to be weighed. When Dr Natron reveals them, they are fresh; red and real. Except for the heart. When the doctor takes out his heart, it has become purple, and it bursts like a berry under her scalpel.

  The floor of the mortuary examination room is wet. Blood mostly, and other liquids that Nolwazi can’t identify, which fall from the body as it opens up, as it is invaded. The most personal thing that could be done to someone: opened up and forced to reveal their innermost self. The room is cold and quiet as the pathologist works, the body now like a textbook diagram, the person who was there gone in the flash of steel.

  ‘Found it!’ Dr Natron whispers, with a little too much excitement. She holds a bullet in her bloody glove, between thumb and forefinger, and raises it to the light. Small. She drops it in a metal bowl. Nolwazi photographs the bullet, the camera flashing oddly against the light in the room.

  ‘Single gunshot wound to the chest. The entry wound is nine millimetres across,’ Dr Natron says as she works. ‘No exit wound, obviously. So, a 9-mill pistol. As you saw before we started, there is discolouration around the wound. The gun was fired from a distance of between thirty and sixty centimetres. The bullet did considerable damage to both the heart and the lungs.’

  ‘Thirty to sixty centimetres?’

  ‘That’s what I said.’

  Nolwazi frowns, makes a mental note to follow up.

  Dr Natron has given Nolwazi all the information she has for the moment, and the smell is starting to seep into her skin – the touch of the dead. She clears her throat and asks, ‘Is the family here?’

  ‘His sister is here, I believe. She is quite early. In the viewing room.’

  ‘Thank you, Doctor. Blood and DNA?’

  ‘To the lab.’

  ‘I’ll, eh, just leave you to it, then. I’ll come and fetch the evidence after the viewing.’

  Nolwazi’s last image of Dr Natron is of her holding a saw, standing over the body like a scientist, a gothic experimenter.

  The victim’s sister is sitting with her knees pressed against her chest, gaunt and unresponsive on the single bench in the tiny viewing room. The only decorations are the blue, grimy curtains that shut off the window through which families identify the bodies. Her large, pale eyes are dark, her hair unwashed. Nolwazi notices again how thin she is, how insubstantial.

  There is an older woman with her. Tall and broad with a great sweep of white hair spilling down her body. The older woman looks up when Nolwazi approaches, lifts an eyebrow.

  ‘Excuse me,’ Nolwazi begins, ‘Freya Rust?’

  The elder woman gets up and extends her hand. ‘Yes,’ she answers, ‘that’s her. My name is Philomena Ash. I’m family. Who are you?’

  ‘I’m Inspector Mngadi. I’ll be investigating your brother’s death,’ Nolwazi says, speaking around Philomena.

  The young woman doesn’t move, doesn’t say a thing. Her face is blank; her lips are white.

  ‘We met when you were interviewed on Friday, Ms Rust. And I know we’ve already taken your statement, but I was wondering if there is anything else you had thought of, anything else you would like to add? Any detail?’

  Freya Rust is silent.

  Philomena says quietly, ‘I don’t think she’s up to it.’

  Nolwazi nods.

  ‘Ms Rust, Ms Ash, I can officially confirm your brother died from a single gunshot wound to the chest. If there is anything else we can do, please let me know. There are trauma services I can refer you to.’

  Philomena fills the silence with a rough boom: ‘Thank you, Inspector.’

  Nolwazi has run out of things to say. She can see the abyss opening up around Freya Rust; in this little room, she can sense the gravity shift. She can sense it because she knows it: it’s a cold ripple, as snug as a noose. She wants to say, I know what it is like to lose everything. I know. But she doesn’t. What could her pain do for this young woman? What good is piling pain on top of pain and expecting it to help?

  So they sit and wait. Nolwazi, who should be getting a second statement from Freya Rust, who should be using this time to think of other questions, to work, is muted by the grief she senses coming off the young woman.

  Dr Natron appears outside the door, keeping back. She beckons to Nolwazi. ‘The body is ready to be viewed. I haven’t found anything else of note, but I’ll send you the full report by the end of the day. Just pull the curtain back whenever you are ready.’ Then she slips back into the depths of her lab.

  Nolwazi walks over to the curtain. ‘Ms Rust, I’m going to need you to identify the body officially, please. If you need a few moments, I understand. Just let me know when you are ready.’

  Philomena says, ‘I think it is best to just do it.’

  Nolwazi nods. She pulls the curtain aside.

  Freya stares at the body. She doesn’t react. Nolwazi does not see a single muscle shift. ‘Is that your brother, Ms Rust?’

  Freya Rust stands, looks Nolwazi straight in the eye, and says, ‘That’s him,’ before walking out stiffly. Philomena follows, a slightly apologetic expression flitting across her face.

  13

  Slick arrives home on the last train of the day, and it comes to a standstill with a rattling scrape across the tracks. The station is closing for the night.

  At the entrance to the station, on a narrow street, he sees a familiar face. The woman is watching for him, waiting. He smiles at her, because you cannot help but smile at her. Her grin is wide and friendly, but also hungry.

  He shakes her hand. ‘Sawubona, sisi,’ he says to her. Her greeting is smiled back at him. ‘Unjani?’ he asks, although he knows she won’t respond. She moves towards him, beckoning. But not for him, for what he has in his pocket. He slips a packet into her hand. ‘You’re the only person who gets anything from me for free, do you know that?’

  She lets go of him, making desperate sounds in her throat.

  He waves goodbye as she rushes towards the staircase that leads under the train tracks, where she lives. ‘Sala kahle!’ he yells. She doesn’t greet him back.

  He walks slowly down the narrow street. He is smiling; Mama Africa wouldn’t have liked his kindness one bit.

  Of course, he doesn’t see it as kindness at all.

  14

  Freya is sitting on her small balcony; Ash has left.

  She is wearing Ben’s favourite hoody, oversized and grey. It smells like wood, like skin, like smoke, like Ben. The ember of her cigarette blazes brightly as she drags, and with every pull it feels like the world is getting smaller. Dark storm clouds are stampeding over the city, writhing. Thunder. Almost-rain. The air is wet, purple. Freya looks up. A white balloon blows past. As she locks her sight on it, a fork of lightning scorches the sky. The light fizzles.

  The balloon bursts, and so do the clouds.

  Before

  1

  It was a very hot day. It was noon, when the sun is at its fiercest and there are no shadows.

  They were playing next to the pool, but not in it
. They weren’t allowed to swim before their mother finished her work and agreed to supervise them. Big walls of sunlight rippled through the blue water. The world smelt like chlorine. Ben was sitting on the hot bricks that surrounded the swimming pool. He liked the feeling of the heat on his bare legs: almost painful. He had been rummaging around the firepit his father had dug next to the swimming pool the previous night. There had been a bonfire under the stars, fairy lights in all the trees, and beautiful adults walking through their garden, ruffling his hair and saying words Ben hadn’t understood. It had been wonderful.

  Now the fire was dead. He had placed his hands carefully in the black ash, marvelled at how soft it was – the softest thing he had ever touched. He was making handprints on the bricks, pressing his whole hand down. Each print had to be complete, unbroken.

  He painted war marks on his face with the soot.

  His sister was sitting a little way off, on the lawn, a brick placed before her. She had collected various things from throughout the garden. Yellow daisies and pink bougainvillea leaves and great strands of fern. Even a few cactus stems she had pulled from the wasteland that was the back garden. She also had figs, plums, and a bucket full of ripe, ripe mulberries.

  Ben walked over to her.

  She was determinedly cutting up the mulberries one by one, with a knife she’d stolen from the kitchen; they disintegrated under the pressure. The brick was stained a deep red, and the knife was dripping with darkly purple juice.

  ‘It looks like blood,’ he said to her.

  She looked up at him, shading her eyes with one hand, staring at him for a long moment. A dragonfly whizzed through the air between them. ‘It’s more than just blood,’ she said finally. She looked back down at her work.

  ‘What are you doing?’ he asked.

  ‘Cooking. Killing.’ Her face was dirty, and there were big beads of sweat on her brow. Grass smears stained her white dress.

  ‘Do you want to swim?’

  ‘Not now. I need to finish.’

  So he sat down next to her, careful not to disturb her work. He watched the front door for a parent who would no doubt appear any second. His shirt stuck to his back, and he suddenly felt dirty from the ash all over his body. The grass underneath him was nothing like the smooth brick; it itched and stung.

  He waited for his sister to finish.

  In the hot silence, there was nothing to disturb them. Just the occasional whirr of an insect and the grating, grating, grating Freya’s knife made as she scraped it across the brick. Just the two of them, the girl with the purple knife and the boy with the blackened hands, trying to fend off the light.

  Trying not to burn.

  The Spirit of the City

  June

  1

  Church Square.

  This is the navel of the city, the guts.

  Old sandstone buildings – once the epitome of grandeur, now symbols of a lost and degraded inner city – border the square. And at the heart of the square, there stands an old statue. The statue is surrounded by litter-­strewn gardens and there are homeless people sleeping on the yellowed grass, not yet aware that the dawn of another homeless day is upon them. The roads at the edges of the square are quiet; it’s too early for traffic.

  Seen from above, the square isn’t square at all; rather, it has been built in the shape of a shield. A shield held on the arm of the city, buttressing attacks.

  The dawn light is just about to strike the tip of the statue’s hat.

  And as the sun illuminates his eyes, he comes to life.

  He looks up. He winks. Then, startled, he stares down at the great sandstone plinth he is standing on. He wants to get down. His copper bones are creaking.

  The soldiers that guard the foot of his plinth are coming to life too and, as he touches each of them with his slender cane, they jump to attention. They salute. The statue indicates to his soldiers that they should help him down. The soldiers – there are four of them – gently lift him off his perch, and bring him down to ground level, where he surveys the square through a brittle eye. After a moment’s thought – hand on his chin, eyebrow lifted – he seems to make a decision. He throws his arms open wide: come one, come all.

  He’s going to do a show.

  He jumps. His great bronze feet boom across the square, and the concrete slabs beneath him ripple all the way to the edges of his garden, and splash drops of black stuff onto the road.

  The people sleeping in the square stir. They stand up and stare at the two-foot monster come alive before their eyes, his metallic skin shining with excitement. He smiles. Come, come, he beckons. Come, come. The show is about to begin.

  The soldiers, groggier and less assured than their master, are setting down their guns and murmuring silently: what have they got themselves into? They look uncertain, and the newborn sunlight dapples their copper-wrought green coatings: they are like something from the sea, retrieved from some long-forgotten shipwreck. The statue turns and signals to them. He wears no green coating, bears no sign of ageing. But across his body, splashes of red paint glisten like blood; the work of a protest. He seems not to mind this little inconvenience. In fact, the longer he is awake the more jubilant he becomes.

  The homeless people are straggling through the square towards the wonderment before them, dragging dirty blankets and tiny children behind them. They form an audience, standing slightly apart from one another, as if they have forgotten how to be part of a crowd.

  Once the audience has settled, the statue takes a bow. Then he and his men begin to dance. They begin to drum a tattoo on the pavement with their heavy feet; they begin to clap their hands to an ancient beat.

  In unison they beckon a song from beneath the city, luring it into the streets.

  Their feet move faster and their hands clap louder and then, driven by the force of their own bodies, abandoning the formation, the four soldiers take one another by the hands and start to waltz, dancing a circle around the lonely figure of the statue. They are surprisingly graceful, these giant metal men, holding one another and weaving through the dawn air. They move more and more urgently, and the statue beats his feet faster and faster and faster until trails of dust are spinning into the air, whipped up by the frenzy of their movement.

  And then there is a loud bang like cannon fire.

  It is over.

  The soldiers let one another go and stand to attention, and the statue holds his mouth closed with both hands, as if ashamed. Tentatively, he looks at his vagabond audience. He takes his hat off, inching forward towards the men and women gathered here and holding out his hat to each, where it lingers for a cold minute before it moves on.

  There are no tips forthcoming; when he has asked each person twice, his shoulders sag.

  He pushes a dusty sigh from his metallic lungs.

  From his belt, he pulls a dagger. Blunt, aged. His audience grows wary, shuffling from foot to foot. He looks up at them from under the brim of his hat. He winks again.

  Then he dances a final time.

  He makes his way gently around the circle, his nimble feet touching the floor lightly, his nimble knife curving through the air in a flourished arc as it slices the throats of those assembled. The blood blooms on the necks of his victims, before bursting out onto the cold cement; their heads fall backwards, their eyes shut white.

  It is over before anyone can flee, before a single sound of horror can be made.

  All of them are fallen to their knees, clutching at their throats with faltering hands.

  The statue stands in a circle of blood; he is heartbroken.

  One by one the homeless topple, head first, towards him – a final bow. He turns as each body collapses, holding his hands to his chest, as if in thanks. As if to say, Your sacrifice means something to me.

  The soldiers take up their positions around him. The sun breaks, red and furious, over the tall office blocks.

  The statue looks around the square, at the enflamed city. He opens his mouth and th
rows his arms wide. Dirty tears fall from his dirty eyes, and his sculpted mouth is torn open; from the cool, dark recesses within, the city begins to scream.

  Thursday

  2

  His moustache is lit up by rays of sunlight spraying through the window. As he turns his head, she can see the individual strands of hair standing to attention above his lip, made blond-red by the light. His upper lip twitches slightly, as if it knows it’s being watched. His hand comes up automatically and strokes down the misbehaving hairs.

  It’s a nervous habit, and it has Nolwazi mesmerised.

  Frik catches her eye, and she looks down at her desk.

  The police station is old and grimy (all police stations are old and grimy). It is a big, sprawling compound, built from blond bricks and concrete slabs; the large banana trees in the courtyard out front do little to uplift the general dilapidation. It is a sleepy station with a small jurisdiction, and few people come in during the day, although there is always a small queue of them, usually here to report a lost driver’s licence or get fingerprints taken.

  A standard practice is to take a nap at your desk.

  Larger crimes are handled by the two bigger Pretoria stations: Sunnyside to the west, Garsfontein to the east. And the SAPS Detective Services deploys only two inspectors to the Brooklyn police station. The only reason she is one of them – shortly after being demoted and transferring here in the first place – is because Inspector Sergeant Paulson is on administrative leave, pending an internal investigation, and the colonel needed someone with experience to take over the Benjamin Rust case. ‘We need this solved cleanly,’ he told her, with uncharacteristic firmness. Murder was not such a frequent burden here. So she came back from her self-­imposed exile, back to a job she’d left behind in Mamelodi, a job she isn’t sure she wants any more; a job with few resources and little in the way of a team to help her work.