by Deon Meyer
‘In prison I tried to study for a degree. It wasn’t the first time. I must be the longest enrolled student in the history of Unisa. I have completed eleven subjects, but not all for the same qualification. I would start a course and a year or two later I’d want to do something else. When I was in jail I read and studied to try and understand what was going on in my life. It didn’t help. You are what you are. The answers aren’t in books. They’re in you.
‘But there were things in the books that made me think. Like the desire to be part of something. Even though you know you can’t really be. They say we lived in tribal bands in ancient times. Later in tribes. All the people were related to each other. Somewhere I read that if two people walked into each other in the forest in New Guinea, they would discuss their genealogies for hours to try and prove a relationship. Otherwise they would have to kill each other.
‘That’s the way we are. If we are family, if we belong to the same tribe, if we have something in common, we see each other. There is peace and order. But in the city we are nothing to each other. It’s everyone for himself.
‘When I was a kid, in Seapoint, there were tribes. Jews and Greeks and Italians. Everyone belonged to a tribe. Except me.
‘My father was an Afrikaner in Seapoint. Gerhardus Lodewikus Lemmer. Gert. Gert, the mechanic, at Ford in Main Road. That’s where he met my mother. She was English. Beverly Anne Simmons of the Spares Department.
‘She was a slim, petite woman.
‘Her father was Martin Fitzroy Simmons. My English grandpa. I never knew him. But I inherited his names.
‘When you told me your parents’ story. How your father did all those things. My father wasn’t like that. For thirteen years my mother kept telling him he should start his own business but he wouldn’t. “You’re a good mechanic. You can make a fortune.” He said he went to work and he went home and the worries were the Englishman’s, the man who owned the dealership. If you own your own business, the worries are yours. He didn’t want the worries. Then my mother said he was just poor white Afrikaner trash, she hadn’t married him to live in a two-bedroom flat in Seapoint for the rest of her life.
‘They must have loved each other. In the beginning anyway. I know he loved her. I could see it.
‘I’ve only once talked about them before, Emma. It’s hard for me. I don’t want to. There are times when I don’t even want to think about them. Each was as bad as the other. Each in his or her own way. My mother was a manipulator and a slut and my father was a coward and a violent man. What do you do when your parents are like that? What do you do when other people talk about their parents and you sit there with this hatred inside you? For what they did to each other. And to you. They were like two different chemical substances that were harmless on their own, but as a combination they were explosive.
‘English was the language of domestic fights, of arguments and baiting, screaming and swearing at each other. They always spoke English to each other. My mother refused to speak Afrikaans. “It’s such a common language,” she used to say, and then my father would speak only Afrikaans to me and she would fight with him about that too. On the other hand, they fought about everything. Money, work, his drinking and her unfaithfulness, about his lack of ambition and her desire for status. About the food she cooked and the household tasks that he didn’t do. About her spendthrift ways and his stinginess, about every conceivable thing.
‘I thought it was normal. It was all I knew. For five days of the week they would argue and bicker every night. Every night they would take potshots at each other until something hit home and that became the subject, the point of argument they focused on until they began to rant and swear.
‘I don’t know how old I was when I began going off on my own. Seven, maybe. When it was time for them to come home I would wander round the streets or go and sit by the sea. But when I got home and she asked, “Where were you?” and he said, “Leave my son alone” I would become the new focus of disagreement.
‘While I walked around Seapoint I would see other people. Tribes and groups sitting on pavements and in gardens and on balconies, all laughing and chatting. I would stand there like a child without a cent gazing through a sweet-shop window.
‘He hit me for the first time when I was nine years old. It was like a dam wall breaking.
‘He never trusted her, he always suspected something was going on. He hinted and accused her, but he never had any proof. She was too sly for that. But that night she was reckless. And he was drunk. He was standing at the window and he saw one of the Bardini brothers who had the ice-cream shop on Main dropping her off with his motorbike. He saw her kiss the man goodbye, how he held her bottom while they kissed. How she looked back at the Italian as she walked away and laughed. Then my father knew what she had done and when she came in he said, “And now you’re fucking the dagos?”
‘And she said, “At least they know how to fuck,” and he called her a whore and she threw an ashtray at him that smashed against the wall and he wanted to hit her. He went up to her and lifted his hand and she said, “Don’t you dare,” and he turned around and hit me on the side of my head and she screamed, “What the hell are you doing?” and he said, “Will you do it again?” and she said, “Damn you, what are you doing?” and he hit me again and shouted at her, “Not me. You. You are doing this.”’
I stopped talking, because I didn’t know how the fuck I had come to be talking of this.
‘I’m sorry, Emma.’
I shifted in the chair. I leaned forward. I wondered whether I could hold her hand.
‘I didn’t mean to go on like that …’
Her skin seemed to have become transparent. I could see the dark blue of her delicate veins.
‘But that’s who I am.’
With every beep of the machine her heart pumped blood through her arteries to her brain, where they still didn’t know how much damage there was.
‘I think I understand today. How it all fitted together. From that day on, my father hit me. A lot. And hard. The trouble with violence is that it begets more violence. In people, in communities, in countries. It’s like this evil you let loose, you can’t get the genie back in the bottle. But it doesn’t help to stand in the dock and tell the magistrate that it was your father who made you like that.’
I felt the hem of the hospital sheet. It was softer than I expected.
‘The thing that I could never understand, was why he didn’t hit Bardini. Why didn’t he go round to the ice-cream shop and drag the man out of there and beat him up? The answer is that my father was a coward. And that is one thing I swore I never would be.
‘My father’s strategy worked for a while. He told her if she didn’t want him to hit me she would have to stop whoring. She would behave herself for two or three months, but I don’t think she could live without the attention of other men.
Only as an adult did I try and piece together her story. I collected all the photos of her as a child and later ones with my father. I remembered what she used to say about her youth, when she was going at it with her husband. “Daddy loved me, Daddy adored me.” She talked about her father like that, the middle-class Englishman from lower Rosebank. He was a clerk in the provincial administration. She had been a pretty child. Petite, with blonde hair and large eyes. On every snapshot she was smiling cheekily at the camera, always conscious of herself. And smug.
‘They met at the garage. My father was twenty, with a dark fringe and brooding eyes. He had a girl in Parow, a serious relationship; there was talk of getting engaged. That, I think, was the start of the trouble. My mother wanted the attention of all the men and here was one she couldn’t have. She kept on until she got it.
‘By the time I was five, she wasn’t young and cute any more. I don’t know if it was the pregnancy or just the passing of time. Perhaps the souring of their marriage. At thirty she was tired. Worn out, and it showed on her face and her body and she knew it. She tried to regain the attentions of men with make-u
p, hair dye and tight clothes. They were the candle and she was the moth. It was irresistible, an unavoidable reaction, the way a leg jerks when you bang the knee.
‘We went through the cycles. She would be faithful and reasonable and calm would prevail. Then they would start fighting and she would go off looking for attention until some man wanted something more and she would give in and sleep with him somewhere. Even in our flat. Once I came home from school in the morning, I can’t remember why, maybe I was sick. I had a key and I went in and heard them. My mother and Phil Robinson, the rich Brit who owned the hotel on the seafront. A hundred hotel rooms, but they had to come to our flat.
‘When she saw me she screamed, “Jesus Christ, oh, Jesus Christ, Marty, go away, go away,” but I just stood there staring until she climbed off and came and shut the door. Later, when Robinson was gone, she begged me not to tell my father. “He’ll just hit you again.”
‘That’s my history, Emma.
‘Poor white Afrikaner trash. Just like my mother said.
‘My father was a drinker of wine. That’s what the smell of wine really brings to mind. The sour smell of his breath when he was drunk and beat me because my mother had gone.
‘When I was thirteen, she left. My father beat me then because she wasn’t there. And because he wanted to make me “tough, so you can handle life and all its shit”.
‘He succeeded.
‘I’ve thought about this a lot. What he did to me. The biggest thing is, it takes the fear away. Fear of getting hurt. And of hurting. That was the important one. Feeling pain is something that becomes ordinary afterwards. You get used to it. But causing hurt, it’s like a thing that has to get out.
‘There was a karate club in Seapoint, in the Anglican church hall. My father sent me there. My problem was with control. I could never understand why we had to hold back, why we weren’t allowed to hit the other guy.
‘I looked for trouble. At school, in the streets. And I got it. I liked dishing it out. For the first time I was the one causing pain. Drawing blood. Breaking. It is like being outside of yourself. Or inside something else, another world, another state of being. Time stands still. Everything disappears, you hear nothing and you see nothing except a red-grey mist. And this object in front of you that you want to destroy with everything you have in you.
‘When I was in Matric, I beat up my father for the first time. After that, things went better for a while.
‘I wanted to get out then. Get away from him and from Seapoint. My karate sensei was a policeman. He wanted me for the police karate team. I joined because you have to go to Pretoria. It was far enough. They spotted me there and recruited me to be a bodyguard. I was one for ten years. One year with the Minister of Transport. He retired. Eight years with the white Minister of Agriculture. The last year was with the black Minister of Education.
‘My first year … The Minister of Transport was an incredible man. He saw me. He saw everybody. Maybe he saw too much – felt too much. Maybe that was why he shot himself. But I often used to think: why couldn’t someone like him have been my father?’
25
I talked to Emma Le Roux for four hours before Dr Eleanor Taljaard came to tell me to go and eat.
I didn’t tell Emma everything. I didn’t tell her about Mona.
I wanted to. I had the words in my mouth.
It’s a funny thing, letting all these monsters loose in my head. It’s an avalanche, a dry river after rain, a trickle, a stream, a flood that sweeps everything with it.
But when I came to Mona there wasn’t enough momentum, the clouds suddenly dried up. Mona of Pretoria. Mona of Muckle-neuk. A full-bodied woman four centimetres taller than me.
I sat there, next to Emma, and thought about it. The Mona Chronicles. I met her in the summer of 1987, one year after I became a bodyguard. She worked in a salon in Sunnyside and I had to have a haircut. She said, ‘Why don’t you let it grow a little?’
‘It wouldn’t help,’ I said.
I sat down and she put the number-one comb on the clippers and drew it back and forth over my head, without saying a word. I watched her while she worked. She had thick brown hair and a pretty face with rosy cheeks. Her skin was smooth and healthy. And her body. She was wearing a loose-fitting dress, but she couldn’t hide the generous curves of her breasts and hips. Her ring finger was bare.
She walked away from me to fetch something. A colleague made a remark, I couldn’t hear what it was. Mona laughed. It was a wonderful sound, musical, clear, genuine, originating deep inside her, and she surrendered herself to it. I followed the direction of the sound and saw how the laugh slowly invaded her body until the beautiful melody owned her.
When she was finished and had dusted and washed me off, I asked her what her name was and she said, ‘Mona.’
‘Can I take you out for a pizza on Friday, Mona?’
‘Who are you?’
‘I’m Lemmer.’
She looked at me for two heartbeats and then she said, ‘You can.’
I picked her up at her flat in Berea Street and we ate in Esselen Street. Neither of us was much good at conversation, but it was a comfortable time, as if we knew each other. We were single-child city kids who had never grown up.
I remember she asked me, ‘Why are you so skinny when you eat so much?’
‘Exercise.’
‘What kind of exercise?’
‘Fifty pull-ups, sit-ups and push-ups in the morning, the same at night. And fifty kilometres a week.’
‘Why all that?’
‘For my work.’
She shook her head slowly. ‘Thank God I’m a hairdresser.’
I wanted to hear her laugh again. More than that: I wanted to conjure it up out of her, I wanted to be the reason the melody played, because it was the sound of happiness, of contentment, of everything that was good and right in the world.
I took her back to her flat that night and she invited me in and I stayed for nine years. I had to work to hear her laugh. I had to search within myself for a sense of humour, make room for someone who could be daft and light hearted, ready to joke or tease, because Mona’s laughter was not programmable. It was elusive and unpredictable, like the numbers in the state lottery. But when I hit the jackpot, the reward – to see her overwhelmed by joy – was great.
Mona changed me without knowing that she had. There is only so much room for baggage. If you bring in humour and light-heartedness, you must throw rancour and melancholy overboard. And then you travel easy. And light.
There were other lessons too. Mona accepted her own weaknesses with cheerful resignation. She was the one who tried to teach me that regret does not pay, we are what we are and there’s no sense in hiding that. It was only much later that I was able to master that lesson.
It was an easy relationship. She didn’t make demands, she just lived every day for itself. When I told her I would be away with the minister for three or four days she would genuinely say, ‘I’ll miss you.’
When I returned, her smile was real and she held out her arms and laughed happily when I carried her with some effort to her massive double bed. Then I would undress her and caress her wonderful body inch by inch, until desire flamed up in her, like a she-bear coming out of hibernation. Her body would hum and she would open herself up to me as if opening the doors to wonderland. When I went into her, her face showed intense pleasure without shame. I became addicted to that, as I was to her laughter.
With Mona nothing was conventional.
When I had to accompany the minister to Cape Town for six months the following February, she said, ‘I have to tell you something.’
‘What?’
‘You can do what you like down there.’
‘What do you mean?’
She looked out of the window and said, ‘Lemmer, I can’t…’
‘Can’t what?’
‘I can’t do without sex for six months.’ ‘I’ll come and visit you.’
She said it didn’t m
atter. If I met someone in the Cape, that was fine. She just didn’t want to know about it. When I came back after six months and still wanted to live with her, she would be here. If I didn’t want to, that was fine too. But she would not promise to be faithful. Not when I was so far away.
‘Why not?’
‘There is a type of man I can’t say “no” to.’
‘What type?’
‘Your type.’
‘What kind of man would that be?’
She wouldn’t say.
‘Come with me to Cape Town.’
‘This is my place. Right here.’
For nine years she was my summer wife. My house and haven in Pretoria. We never fought. We never talked about the six months that we didn’t see each other. Then I took the golden handshake and I knew I would have to go to Cape Town, to Seapoint. I would have to go and find myself.
Once more I said, ‘Come with me.’
Once again she said she could not.
Three years after I left her, she called me, the night before I was found guilty and all the papers were full of it. She said, ‘Now you know.’
‘Now I know what?’
‘What type of man I meant.’
I told Emma why I left government service.
‘In 1998 they said they had to increase the number of black bodyguards. We could choose a severance package, or a transfer. A transfer to where? They couldn’t say. So I took the package.
‘I bought myself a flat in a block between Fort and Marine Streets in Seapoint, just a kilometre from where I grew up.
‘I looked for my father. I couldn’t find him. Nobody knew where he had gone. The Ford dealership was still there with the same name. New owners. The whole of Seapoint was full of new people. The Italians had gone, and the Greeks. Of the Jews, only the women were still there, old ladies walking along the seafront alone or in groups waiting for their children to come and visit them. There were Nigerians and Somalis, Russians and Romanians, Bosnians, Chinese, Iraqis. New tribes that I could not be part of.
‘I started a karate dojo at Virgin Active in Greenpoint. In the mornings I taught self-defence to English and Afrikaans women; in the afternoon, JKA karate to kids – South Africans and all the other tribes of Seapoint. I did that for nearly two years. It was a job. At the gym the women called me “Lemmer” and the children called me “sensei”. I was neither happy nor unhappy.
