The White Lioness

by Henning Mankell

  He had spent the last few days and previous weekend trying to delve as far as possible into Jan Kleyn’s secret. He knew now that Jan Kleyn was always visiting this house in Bezuidenhout. It was something that had been going on for many years, ever since Jan Kleyn moved to Johannesburg after graduating from the university. With the assistance of Wervey and some of his own contacts, he had also managed to get around the bank confidentiality regulations, and knew Jan Kleyn transferred a large sum of money to Miranda Nkoyi every month.

  The secret had opened up before his very eyes. Jan Kleyn, one of the most respected members of BOSS, an Afrikaner who carried his high esteem with pride, lived in secret with a black woman. For her sake he was prepared to take the greatest of risks. If President de Klerk was considered a traitor, Jan Kleyn was another.

  But Scheepers had the impression he was only just scraping the surface of the secret, and decided to visit the woman. He would not explain who he was, and it was possible she might never tell Jan Kleyn he had been there, the next time her lover came to visit. If she did, he would soon have identified the visitor as Georg Scheepers. But he would not be sure why; he would be afraid that his secret had been exposed and that Scheepers would have a hold over Jan Kleyn in the future. Of course, there was a risk that Jan Kleyn would decide to kill him. But Scheepers believed that he had insured himself against that possibility as well. He would not leave the house until Miranda understood quite clearly that several other people were aware of Jan Kleyn’s secret life outside the closed world of the intelligence service.

  She looked at him, looked through him. She was very beautiful. Her beauty had survived; it survived everything, subjugation, compulsion, pain, as long as the spirit of resistance was there. Ugliness, stunted growth, degeneration, all those things followed in the wake of resignation.

  He forced himself to tell her how things stood. That the man who paid her visits, paid for her house, and was presumably her lover, was a man under grave suspicion of conspiracy against the state and the lives of individuals. As he spoke he got the impression she knew some of what he was telling her, but that some parts were new to her. At the same time he had a strange feeling that she was somehow relieved, as if she had been expecting, or even fearing, something different. He immediately started wondering what that could be. He suspected it had something to do with the secret, the elusive impression that there was yet another secret door waiting to be opened.

  “I need to know,” he said. “I really don’t have any questions. You shouldn’t think either that I’m asking you to give testify against your own husband. But what is as stake is very big. A threat to the whole country. So big I can’t even tell you who I am.”

  “But you are his enemy,” she said. “When the herd senses danger, some animals run off on their own. And they are doomed. Is that how it is?”

  “Maybe,” said Scheepers. “It may be.”

  He was sitting with his back to the window. Just when Miranda was talking about the animals and the herd, he detected the slightest of movements at the door directly behind her. It was like someone had started to turn the handle but then had a change of heart. It dawned on him he had not seen the young woman leave the house that morning. The young woman who must be Miranda’s daughter.

  It was one of the strange circumstances he had discovered while doing his research these last few days. Miranda Nkoyi was registered as the single housekeeper for a man named Sidney Houston, who spent most of his time on his cattle ranch miles away in the vast plains east of Harare. Scheepers had no difficulty in seeing through this business of the absentee rancher, especially when he found out that Jan Kleyn and Houston had studied together at university. But the other woman, Miranda’s daughter? She did not exist. And now here she was, standing behind a door, listening to their conversation.

  He was overwhelmed by the thought. Afterwards, he would see his prejudices had misled him, the invisible racial barriers that organized his life. He suddenly realized who the listening girl was. Jan Kleyn’s big and well-preserved secret had been exposed. It was like a fortress finally giving way under siege. It had been possible to conceal the truth for so long because it was quite simply unthinkable. Jan Kleyn, the star of the intelligence service, the ruthless Afrikaner fighting for his rights, had a daughter with a black woman. A daughter he presumably loved above all else. Perhaps he imagined that Nelson Mandela would have to die so that his daughter could continue to live and be refined by her proximity to the whites of this country. As far as Scheepers was concerned, this hypocrisy deserved nothing more than scorn. He felt that all his own resistance had now been broken down. At the same time he thought he could understand the enormity of the task President de Klerk and Nelson Mandela had taken upon themselves. How could they possibly create a feeling of kinship among peoples if everybody regarded everybody else as traitors?

  Miranda did not take her eyes off him. He could not imagine what she was thinking, but he could see she was upset.

  He let his gaze wander, first to her face and then to a photograph of the girl, standing on the mantelpiece.

  “Your daughter,” he said. “Jan Kleyn’s daughter.”

  “Matilda.”

  Scheepers recalled what he had read about Miranda’s past.

  “Like your mother.”

  “Like my mother.”

  “Do you love your husband?”

  “He’s not my husband. He’s her father.”

  “What about her?”

  “She hates him.”

  “At this very moment she’s standing behind her door, listening to our conversation.”

  “She’s sick. She has a fever.”

  “But she’s listening even so.”

  “Why shouldn’t she listen?”

  Scheepers nodded. He understood.

  “I need to know,” he said. “Think carefully. The slightest little thing might help us to find the men who are plotting to throw our country into chaos. Before it’s too late.”

  It seemed to Miranda the moment she had been awaiting for so long had finally arrived. Before now she had always imagined nobody else would be present when she confessed to how she went through Jan Kleyn’s pockets at night, and noted down the words he uttered in his sleep. There would just be the two of them, herself and her daughter. But now she realized things would be different. She wondered why, without even knowing his name, she trusted him so implicitly. Was it his own vulnerability? His lack of confidence in her presence? Was weakness the only thing she dared to trust?

  The joy of liberation, she thought. That’s what I feel right now. Like emerging from the sea and knowing I’m clean.

  “I thought for ages he was just an ordinary civil servant,” she began. “I knew nothing about his crimes. But then I heard.”

  “Who from?”

  “I might tell you. But not yet. You should only say things when the time is ripe.”

  He regretted having interrupted her.

  “But he doesn’t know I know,” she went on. “That has been the advantage I had. Maybe it was my salvation, maybe it’ll be my death. But every time he came to visit us, I got up during the night and emptied his pockets. I copied even the smallest scrap of paper. I listened to the random words he muttered in his sleep. And I passed them on.”

  “Who to?”

  “To the people who look after us.”

  “I look after you.”

  “I don’t even know your name.”

  “That doesn’t matter.”

  “I spoke with black men who lead lives just as secret as Jan Kleyn’s.”

  He had heard rumors. But nothing had ever been proved. He knew the intelligence service, both the civilian and military branches, were always running after their own shadows. There was a persistent rumor that the blacks had their own intelligence service. Maybe linked directly to the ANC, maybe an independent organization. They investigated what the investigators were doing. Their strategies and their identities. He realized this woman, Miranda, was c
onfirming the existence of these people.

  Jan Kleyn is a dead man, he thought. Without his knowing it, his pockets have been picked by the people he regards as the enemy.

  “These last few months,” he said. “I don’t care about the time before then. But what have you found recently?”

  “I’ve already passed it on, and forgotten,” she said. “Why should I strain myself to remember?”

  He could see she was telling the truth. He tried appealing to her one more time. He had to talk with one of the men whose job it was to interpret whatever she found in Jan Kleyn’s pockets. Or what she heard him muttering in his sleep.

  “Why should I trust you?” she asked.

  “You don’t have to,” he said. “There are no guarantees in this life. There are only risks.”

  She sat in silence, and seemed to be thinking.

  “Has he killed a lot of people?” she asked. She was speaking very loudly, and he gathered this was so that her daughter could hear.

  “Yes,” he said. “He’s killed a lot of people.”

  “Blacks?”

  “Blacks.”

  “Who were criminals?”

  “Some were. Some weren’t.”

  “Why did he kill them?”

  “They were people who preferred not to talk. People who had rebelled. Causers of instability.”

  “Like my daughter.”

  “I don’t know your daughter.”

  “But I do.”

  She stood up suddenly.

  “Come back tomorrow,” she said. “There might be somebody here who wants to meet you. Go now.”

  He left the house. When he got to his car parked on a side street, he was sweating. He drove off, thinking about his own weakness. And her strength. Was there a future in which they could come together and be reconciled?

  Matilda did not leave her room when he left. Miranda left her in peace. But that evening she sat on the edge of her bed for a long time.

  The fever came and went in waves.

  “Are you upset?” Miranda asked.

  “No,” replied Matilda. “I hate him even more now.”

  Afterwards Scheepers would remember his visit to Kliptown as a descent into a hell he had thus far managed to avoid in his life. By sticking to the white path mapped out for Afrikaners from the cradle to the grave, he had trodden the path of the one-eyed man. Now he was forced to take the other path, the black path, and what he saw he thought he would never forget. It moved him, it had to move him, because the lives of twenty million people were affected. People who were not allowed to live normal lives, who died early, after lives that were artificially restricted and never given the opportunity to develop.

  He returned to the house in Bezuidenhout at ten the next morning. Miranda answered the door, but it was Matilda who would take him to the man who had expressed a willingness to talk to him. He had the feeling of having been granted a great privilege. Matilda was just as beautiful as her mother. Her skin was lighter, but her eyes were the same. He had difficulty in making out any features of her father in her face. Perhaps she kept him at such a distance, she simply prevented herself from growing to look like him. She greeted him very shyly, merely nodding when he offered his hand. Once again he felt insecure, in the presence of the daughter as well, even though she was only a teenager. He started to feel uneasy about what he had let himself in for. Perhaps Jan Kleyn’s influence over this house was altogether different from what he had been led to believe? But it was too late to back out now. A rusty old car, its exhaust pipe trailing along the ground and the fenders broken off, was parked in front of the house. Without a word Matilda opened the door, and turned to him.

  “I thought he’d be coming here,” said Scheepers doubtfully.

  “We’re going to visit another world,” said Matilda.

  He got into the back seat and was hit by a smell he only later recognized as reminiscent of his childhood’s henhouse. The man behind the wheel had a baseball cap pulled down over his eyes. He turned and looked at him without saying a word. Then they drove away, and the driver and Matilda started a conversation in a language Scheepers did not understand but recognized as Xhosa. They took a southwesterly direction, and Scheepers thought the man was driving much too fast. They soon left central Johannesburg behind them and came onto the complicated network of highways with exits leading off in all directions. Soweto, thought Scheepers. Is that where they’re taking me?

  But they were not headed for Soweto. They passed Meadowland, where the choking smoke lay thick over the dusty countryside. Not far beyond the conglomeration of crumbling houses, dogs, children, hens, wrecked and burned-out cars, the driver slowed down and came to a halt. Matilda got out then came to sit beside him in the back seat. She had a black hood in her hand.

  “You’re not allowed to see from now on,” she said.

  He protested and pushed her hand away.

  “What is there to be afraid of?” she asked. “Make up your mind.”

  He took hold of the hood.

  “Why?” he asked.

  “There are a thousand eyes,” she said. “You are not to see anything. And nobody’s going to see you, either.”

  “That’s not an answer,” he said. “It’s a riddle.”

  “Not for me it isn’t,” she replied. “Make up your mind now!”

  He pulled the hood over his head. They set off again. The road was getting worse all the time. But the driver did not slow down. Scheepers rode with the bumps as best he could. Even so he banged his head on the car roof several times. He lost all count of time. The hood was irritating his face, and his skin started to itch.

  The car slowed down and came to a halt. Somewhere a dog was barking furiously. Music from a radio was coming and going in waves. Despite the hood he could smell the smoke from fires. Matilda helped him out of the car. Then she removed the hood. The sun shone straight into his unprotected eyes, blinding him. When his eyes got used to the light he could see they were in the middle of a mass of shacks cobbled together from corrugated iron, cardboard cartons, old sacks, sheets of plastic, venetian blinds. There were huts where a car wreck formed one of the rooms. There was a stink of garbage, and a skinny, mangy dog was sniffing at one of his legs. He observed the people who lived out their lives in this destitution. None of them seemed to notice he was there. There was no threat, no curiosity, merely indifference. He did not exist as far as they were concerned.

  “Welcome to Kliptown.” said Matilda. “Maybe it’s Kliptown, maybe it’s some other shantytown. You’d never find your way back here anyway. They all look the same. The destitution is just as bad in all of them, the smells are the same, the inhabitants are the same.”

  She led him into the cluster of shacks. It was like entering a labyrinth that soon swallowed him up, robbed him of his entire past. After a few paces he had totally lost all sense of direction. He thought how absurd it was that he had Jan Kleyn’s daughter by his side. But absurdity was their inheritance, something that was about to be disturbed for the first time, and then destroyed.

  “What can you see?” she asked.

  “The same as you,” he replied.

  “No!” she said sternly. “Are you shocked?”

  “Of course.”

  “I’m not. Shock is a staircase. There are many steps. We are not standing on the same one.”

  “Maybe you’re at the very top?”

  “Nearly.”

  “Is the view different?”

  “You can see further. Zebra grazing in herds, on alert. Antelopes leaping and leaving gravity behind. A cobra that has hidden itself away in an empty termite stack. Woman carrying water.”

  She stopped and turned to face him.

  “I see my own hatred in their eyes,” she said. “But your eyes can’t see that.”

  “What do you want me to say?” he wondered. “I think it’s sheer hell, living like this. The question is, is it my fault?”

  “It might be,” she said. “That depends.�
��

  They continued deeper into the labyrinth. He would never be able to find his way out alone. I need her, he thought. Like we have always needed the blacks. And she knows it.

  Matilda halted outside a shack that was slightly bigger than the others, even if it was made from the same materials. She squatted by the door, which was shoddily made from a sheet of hardboard.

  “Go on in,” she said. “I’ll wait here.”

  Scheepers went in. At first he had difficulty in distinguishing anything at all in the darkness. Then he made out a simple wooden table, a few wooden chairs, and a smoking kerosene lamp. A man detached himself from the shadows. He gazed at him with a hint of a smile. Scheepers thought he must be about the same age as himself. But the man facing him was more powerfully built, had a beard, and radiated the same kind of dignity as he had found in both Miranda and Matilda.

  “Georg Scheepers,” said the man, bursting into laughter. Then he pointed to one of the chairs.

  “What’s so funny?” asked Scheepers. He had trouble in concealing his growing unease.

  “Nothing,” said the man. “You can call me Steve.”

  “You know why I want to meet you,” said Scheepers.

  “You don’t want to meet me,” said the man who called himself Steve. “You want to meet somebody who can tell you things about Jan Kleyn you don’t know already. That person happens to be me. But it could just as easily have been somebody else.”

  “Can we get to the point?” said Scheepers, who was beginning to get impatient.

  “White men are always short of time,” said Steve. “I’ve never been able to understand why.”

  “Jan Kleyn,” said Scheepers.

  “A dangerous man,” said Steve. “Everybody’s enemy, not just ours. The ravens cry in the night. And we analyze and interpret and think we know something is going to happen, something that could cause chaos. And we wouldn’t want that. Neither the ANC nor de Klerk. That’s why you must first tell me what you know. Then perhaps we can combine to illuminate some of the darkest corners.”

  Scheepers did not tell him everything. But he did divulge the most important points, and even that was a risk. He did not know who he was talking with. Nevertheless, he had no choice. Steve listened, stroking his chin slowly the while.