The Serpentine Road

by Mendelson, Paul

They both seem to know at once what he has said.

  ‘I could have protected them . . .’

  ‘Perhaps. Or maybe we would be talking as widowers both. You have them all still. That can never equate to a mistake. Not in the long run.’

  ‘I thought about those black kids. Lots of times.’

  ‘How can you know it was one of them?’

  ‘Because she stared at me and I knew she recognized me.

  Because it makes sense when nothing else does.’

  ‘To kill six men?’

  De Vries looks ahead, looks out of the tall windows as far as the misty vista of suburbs and the Cape Flats, the townships and squatter camps. Amidst the concertinaed perspective, he knows that Khayelitsha lies ahead of them, the sandy track once called Pama Road, the corner house with the blue car.

  ‘To kill six men who came to her home when she was no more than a child and murdered her family. I understand that. That is not a mystery. You’d kill the men who took your family; I’d kill them too. That is what we are.’

  ‘That’s what I have become.’

  ‘That’s delusional, Johnnie. You don’t become this way. This is what we are, what we always were. What we will always be. It is dormant inside us . . .’ He pauses. ‘. . . Inside more people than we could ever contemplate. It only needs the catalyst.’

  ‘After twenty-one years, I don’t know. I don’t know how she even identified each of you, found each of you.’

  ‘I don’t know either, but I think I can empathize with something, and I think you can too. It took her twenty-one years, from the moment her family was murdered to the six deaths. Can you imagine what those twenty-one years must have been like? Do you think she ever thought of anything else? Whatever she was doing, whatever she was thinking, however she tried to live her life, it always came back to this, to one moment in time when everything changed.’

  ‘That . . . I understand that.’

  ‘Her or me?’ De Vries says. ‘That was the equation. You know, I almost began to believe I deserved it. And then I thought, I don’t. I don’t know why, but that’s all that kept me going. Just one decision, one judgement.’

  Marantz sits, mouth agape, counting out the years since he last held his daughter. He nods curtly, closes his mouth and swallows.

  De Vries raises his glass roughly, watches the red wine spill, spatter on the light stone floor; he smiles.

  ‘To the next twenty one . . .’

  EPILOGUE

  Nqobani waits. Waits for his sister, just as he has always done. He does not keep track of the time, less still the days of the week.

  Nqobani remembers. He has no recollection of time before that night. His history begins then. Nqobani remembers the four men: four white men in his family’s house, the noise they bring, the shouting and spitting, the deafening fire. He still feels the moment when it is as if his body is split in two. Wendile drags him through the tiny opening at the back of the shack; half of him is burning, wet with blood, half is cold, soaked with icy rain. He feels the rusty corrugated iron catch his loose sweater, scratch his side. He wriggles free, vomits, senses Wendile urging him on in a hushed bark. Though he is younger than her, he is bigger, yet she picks him up. When they are away from their house, she goes back, leaves him panting and shivering behind a scrubby bush. When she comes back, he can see the expression on her face, knows to say nothing, knows that whatever it is she has seen, she will not forget.

  ‘We go now,’ she hisses, pulling him after her down the narrow alley between the tin and wooden shacks. Nqobani remembers the tube-like alley filled with detritus, catching his arm on the wire, feeling the blood hot on his body, crying and whining, the rain thumping like a crowd’s footsteps on the roofs either side of him. He feels the sounds close in on him, the walls of the shacks arching over him. Even though they are both small, they have to squeeze and shuffle to pass dwellings whose walls bulge and subside into the tight corridor. He hears the drumbeat of the rain, the shouting of the white men and, deep in his head, echoes of the gunfire which cut apart his mother and father, his sister, his uncle and aunt. He sees their blood: on their faces, on the walls of the shack, spattered across his own clothes. He looks down at his legs, crossed and bent. His trousers are saturated with blood, yet he feels nothing. Now, in the village, he dreams of blood; he dreams of the dark tube in the cold rain and a looming wave of blood which both chases and awaits him.

  Nqobani waits. Wendile should be back soon. She is his legs. With her, he can move throughout the village. He can see the outside and be free of the dark, smoke-filled hut in which he lies for so long. The villagers stoke his fire and bring him pap. But they never touch him, never hold him. Whatever it is they say is within him, they dare not come close.

  Nqobani waits; days and nights pass.

  Nqobani prays every night, just as he has been taught. He prays for strength in his legs, for his body to be renewed. He prays for their family, for their memories, and their place next to the Lord in heaven. He does not know why they pray since God seems so far away; since that night, He has always seemed so distant. But she insists; it is their ritual.

  He wonders now where she is, away for weeks at a time, in the city. She says she is cleaning, but he sees a light in her eyes, a light absent since she was eleven years old. He wonders whether she has found a man; he wonders whether she will leave him now, abandon him in exchange for a life.

  Nqobani does not know how long has passed; he does not know how long since he has seen daylight outside his hut, save when he has slithered across the earth and lain on his back with his head out of the hut, looking up at the heavens. He did not realize it then, but now, as he sits waiting for the sun to move across the sky, for the temperature to fall once more so that the air thins and he can breathe fully once more, he feels it so strongly it is as if it swims within him, in his blood, in his heart. Last night, as he lay staring up at the stars, he knew. He was alone. Wendile was absent; Wendile was not under the stars.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Huge thanks to my editor, Krystyna Green, Martin Fletcher and all at Constable who continue to support their authors so admirably.

  My excellent SAPS advisor, Marianne Steyn, answers all my procedural questions, but none of the views expressed by the fictional SAPS characters within the story are necessarily a reflection of her own.

  All my friends in Cape Town get press-ganged into reminiscence and fact-checking, for which I am very grateful. As ever, the amazing Birch clan deserve special thanks, as do Abbie Chetwyn and Michael Nel for medical advice, and a host of others for all manner of intriguing contributions.

  To live with someone who puts up with the troughs and peaks of being a writer and can then read an early draft and make such well-judged, apposite comments is a tremendous advantage, and my love and thanks go to Gareth Hughes for doing just that.