by Deon Meyer
She held the dog against her chest. She didnt look at the minister. She looked at her fingers entangled in the toys ears.
When Sonia was in the bath, I went in and I lied to her. I said we had to do it, because I had to take a little bit of her blood to the doctor. When she asked, Why? I didnt know what to say. I asked her if she remembered the vaccination she had at play school so she wouldnt get those bad diseases. She said, Mamma, it was sore, and I said, But the sore went away quicklythis sore will also go away quickly, its the same thing, so you can be well. So she said, Okay, Mamma and she squeezed her eyes shut and held out her arm. I have never drawn blood from someone before, but if you are a whore, you have your AIDS test every month, so I know what they do. But if your child says, Ow, Mamma, ow, then you get the shakes and its hard and you get a fright if you cant get the blood . . .
* * *
What are we waiting for? What do you want? he asked. But the man just sat and looked at him, with his pistol hand resting on his lap, and said nothing. Just the eyes blinking now and again, or drifting off to the window.
He wondered whether the man was right in the head. Or on drugs, because of that terrible intensity, something eating him. The eyes were never completely still. Sometimes a knee would jerk as if it were a wound spring. The pistol had its own fine vibration, an almost unnoticeable movement.
Unstable. Therefore dangerous. Would he make it, if he could pull himself up by the armrest and launch himself over the little more than two meters between them? If he picked a moment when the eyes flicked to the window? If he could deflect the Z88?
He measured the distance. He looked into the brown eyes.
No.
But what were they sitting here and waiting for? In such tension?
He had partial answers later when the cell phone rang twice. Each time the white man started, a subtle tautening of the body. He lifted the phone from his lap and then just sat dead still, and let it ring. Until it stopped. Fifteen, twenty seconds later it beeped twice to show a message had been left. But Griessel did nothing about it. He didnt listen to his messages.
They were waiting for instructions; that much Thobela gathered. Which would be delivered via the cell phone. The intensity was stress. Anxiety. But why? What did it have to do with him?
Are you in trouble?
Griessel just stared at him.
Can I help you in some way?
The man glanced at the window, and back again.
Do you mind if I sleep a bit? asked Thobela. Because that was all he could do. And he needed it.
No reaction.
He made himself comfortable, stretched his long legs out, rested his head on the cushion of the couch and closed his eyes.
But the cell phone rang again and this time the white man pressed the answer button and said: Griessel and, Yes, I have him. He listened. He said: Yes.
And again: Yes. Listened. And then?
Thobela could hear a mans voice faintly over the phone, but couldnt make out any words, just the grain of a voice.
Griessel took the cell phone away from his ear and stood, keeping a safe distance.
Come, he said. Lets go.
Im very comfortable, thank you.
A shot thundered through the quiet of the room and the bullet ripped a hole beside him in the couch. Stuffing and dust exploded from it, falling back to the floor in slow motion. Thobela looked at the white man, who said nothing. Then he got up, keeping his hands away from his body.
Easy now, he said to Griessel.
To the car.
He went.
Wait.
He looked back. Griessel stood beside the assegai. He looked at it, looked at him, as if he had to make a decision. Then he bent and picked it up.
Thobela drew his own conclusions. The man didnt want to leave any evidence. And that was not good news.
* * *
He was supposed to pick her up at half-past four, but at a quarter past there was a knock on the door; when she opened up, there stood Carlos with a big smile and a bunch of flowers.
He came inside and said, So, conchita, this is where you live. This is your place. It is nice. Very nice.
She had to remain calm and friendly, but the tension was overwhelming. Because the toy dog was lying in sight and the syringe of blood was still in the fridge.
She wanted to hide it in the shopping bags along with the ingredients for the meal she was going to cook. Sonias dress was folded up in her handbag. Carlos wanted to see where she slept, where her daughters room was. He was impressed with the big television screen (Carlos will get you one like this, conchita. For you and Sonia). He wandered over to her fridge. Now dees ees a freedge, he said in awe, and as he reached for the handle and pulled, she said, Carlos, sharply, so that the sound of her voice gave her a fright and he looked around like a child who had been naughty.
Will you help me to get the groceries to the car, please? She could send him down to the car with a few of the plastic bags.
Sí.
Of course. What are you going to cook for us?
Its a surprise, so dont open the fridge.
But I want to see how big it is.
Another time. There wouldnt be one.
* * *
The white man sat in the left back seat of the car and let Thobela drive.
Go.
Where?
Just drive.
Thobela took the farm road out. He couldnt see in the rear-view mirror what was happening on the back seat. He turned his head, as if he had seen something outside the car. At the edge of his vision he saw Griessel with a roadmap on his lap.
He added up what he knew. He was reasonably certain Griessel was a policeman. The Z88, the attitude. The white man had known where the farm was and that Thobela would be on his way there. More important: no other policemen had shown up. The law considered the farm covered.
Griessel had waited for the right call to come over the cell phone.
Yes. I have him.
But that was not police procedure. Couldnt be.
Who else was after him? To whom else did he have value?
Go to George, said Griessel. Thobela looked around, saw the roadmap was folded now.
George?
You know where it is.
Its nearly six hundred kilometers.
You drove more than a thousand yesterday.
The policeman knew he had left the Cape yesterday. He had access to official information, but he wasnt official. It didnt make sense. He would have to try something. He could do something with the car on the gravel road because he was wearing a seat belt and Griessel was not. He could brake suddenly and grab the man when he was thrown forward. Try and get the pistol.
Not without risks.
Was the risk necessary? George? What was at George? If the policeman had been official they would have been on the way to Cathcart or Seymour or Alice or Port Elizabeth. Or Grahamstown. To the nearest place with reinforcements and cells and state prosecutors.
He was a high-profile suspect; he knew that. If you were SAPS and you caught the Artemis vigilante, then you called the guys with guns and helicopters, you didnt get off your cell phone until you had your detainee in ten sets of handcuffs.
Unless you were working for someone else. Unless you were supplementing your income . . .
He considered the alternatives and there was only one logical conclusion.
How long have you been working for Sangrenegra? He turned the mirror with his left hand. Bloodshot eyes stared back. He got no response.
Thats the problem with this country. Money means more than justice, he said.
Is that how you justify your murders? said the policeman from behind.
Murder? There was only one murder. I didnt know Sangrenegra
was innocent. It was you people who used him for an ambush.
Sangrenegra? How do you know he was innocent?
I saw it in his eyes.
And Bernadette Laurens? What did her eyes tell you?
Laurens?
The policeman said nothing.
But she confessed.
Thats what they all keep telling me.
But it wasnt her?
I dont think it was. I think she was protecting the childs mother. Like others would protect their children.
The unexpectedness of it left Thobela dumb.
Thats why we have a justice system. A process. That is why we cant take the law into our own hands, said Griessel.
Thobela wrestled with the possibility, with rationalizing and acceptance of guilt. But he couldnt tip the scales either way.
So why did she confess then? he asked himself, but aloud.
There was no response from the back seat.
43.
While they carried the shopping bags into Carloss kitchen, she could think of nothing but the syringe of blood.
The house was unnaturally quiet and empty without the bodyguards; the large spaces echoed footsteps and phrases. He embraced her in the kitchen after they had put the groceries down. He pressed her to him with surprising tenderness and said: This is right, conchita.
She made her body soft. She let her hips flow against his. Yes, she said.
We will be happy.
In answer she kissed him on the mouth, with great skill, until she could feel his erection developing. She put her hand on it and traced the shape. Carloss hands were behind her back. He pulled her dress up inch by inch until her bottom was exposed and slipped his fingers under the elastic of her panties. His breathing quickened.
She moved her lips over his cheek, down his neck, over the cross that hung in his chest hair. Her tongue left a damp trail. She freed herself and dropped to her knees, fingers busy with his zipper. With one hand she pulled his underpants down and with the other she pulled his penis out. Long, thin and hairy, it stood up like a lean soldier with an outsized shiny helmet.
Conchita. His voice was a whispering urgency, as she had never done this without a condom before.
She stroked with both hands, from the pubic hairs to the tip.
We will be happy, she said and softly put it in her mouth.
* * *
Thobela Mpayipheli and his white passenger, sitting in the back like a colonial property baron, drove past Mwangala and Dyamala, where fat cattle grazed in the sweet green grass. They turned right onto the R63. Fort Hare was quiet over the summer holidays. Five minutes later they were in busy Alice. Fruit vendors on the pavements, women with baskets on their heads and children on their backs who walked stately and unhurried across the road and down the street. Four men were gathered around a board game on a street corner. Thobela wondered if the policeman saw all this. If he could hear the Xhosa calls that were exchanged across the broad street. This was ownership. The people owned this place.
Thirty kilometers on was Fort Beaufort and he turned south. Four or five times he spotted the Kat River on the left where it meandered away between the hills. It had been one of his plans to bring Pakamile here: just the two of them with rucksacks, hiking boots and a two-man tent. To show his boy where he had grown up.
Thobela knew every bend of the Kat. He knew the deep pools at Nkqantosi where you could jump off the cliff and open your eyes deep under the greenish-brown water and see the sunbeams fighting against the darkness. The little sandy beach below Komkulu. Where he had discovered the warrior inside him thirty years before. Mtetwa, the young buffalo who was a bully, an injustice he had to correct. The first.
And far over that way, out of sight, his favorite place. Four kilometers from the place where it flowed into the Great Fish River, the Kat made a flamboyant curve, as if it wanted to dally one last time before losing its identitya meander that swept back so far that it almost made an island. It was about ten kilometers from the Mission Church manse where he lived, but he could run there in an hour down the secret game paths around the hills and through the valleys. All so he could sit between the reeds where the chattering weaverbirds in brilliant color lured females to their hanging nests. To listen to the wind. To watch the fat iguana warming itself in the sun on the black rocky point. In the late afternoon the bushbuck came out of the thickets like phantoms to dip their heads to the water. First the grace of the does in their red glowing coats. Later the rams would come two by two, dark brown in the dusk, sturdy, short, needle-sharp horns that rose and dipped, rose and dipped.
He had wondered if they were still there. Whether he and his son would see the descendants of the animals he had waited for with bated breath as a child. Did they still follow the same paths through the reeds and bulrushes?
Would he still know the paths? Should he stop here, take off his shoes and disappear between the thorn trees? Search out the same paths at a jogtrot; find that rhythm when you felt you could run forever, as long as there was a hill on the horizon for you to climb?
* * *
While Carlos was seated in front of the TV with a glass and a bottle of red wine, she took the syringe of blood out of her handbag and hid it deep in a cupboard where pots and pans were stacked, bright, new and unused.
She looked for a hiding place for the toy dog before she took it out from under packs of vegetables in the shopping bags.
Her hands shook because she would not hear Carlos coming before he was in the room.
* * *
They drove in silence for two hours. Beyond Grahamstown, in the dark of early evening, he said: Did you ever hear of Nxele? His tongue clicked sharply pronouncing the name.
He did not expect an answer. If he did get one he knew what it would be. White people didnt know this history.
Nxele. They say he was a big man. Two meters tall. And he could talk. Once he talked himself off a Xhosa execution pyre. And then he became chief, without having the blood of kings.
He didnt care if the white man was listening or not. He kept his eyes on the road. He wanted to shake off his lassitude, say what this landscape awakened in him. He wanted to relieve the tension somehow.
Exceptional in that time, nearly two hundred years ago. He lived in a time when the people fought against each otherand the English too. Then Nxele came and said they must stop kneeling to the white God. They must listen to the voice of Mdalidiphu, the God of the Xhosa, who said you must not kneel before Him in the dust. You must live. You must dance. You must lift your head and grab hold of life. You must sleep with your wife so we can increase, so we can fill the earth and drive the white man out. So we can take back our land.
You could say he was the father of the first Struggle. Then he gathered ten thousand warriors together. Did you see where we traveled today, Griessel? Did you see? Can you imagine what ten thousand warriors would look like coming over these hills? They smeared themselves red with ochre. Each had six or seven long throwing spears in his hand and a shield. They ran here like that. Nxele told them to be silent, no singing or shouting. They wanted to surprise the English here at Grahamstown. Ten thousand warriors in step, their footsteps the only sound. Through the valleys and over the rivers and hills like a long red snake. Imagine you are an Englishman in Grahamstown waking up one morning in April and looking up to the hills. One moment things look as they do every day, and the next moment this army materializes on the hilltops and you see the glint of seventy thousand spears, but there is no sound. Like death.
Nxele moved through them. He told them to break one of their long spears over their knees. He said Mdalidiphu would turn the British bullets to water. They must charge the cannons and guns together and throw the long spears when they got close enough. And they could throw, those men. At a range of sixty meters they could launch a spear through the air and find the heart of an Englishman. When the last long spe
ar had been thrown, they must hold the spear with the broken shaft. Nxele knew you couldnt use a long spear when you could see the whites of your enemys eyes. Then you needed a weapon to stab open a path in front of you.
They say it was a clear day. They said the English couldnt believe the way the Xhosa moved up there on the crest. Deathly quiet. But each knew exactly where his place in line was.
Down below, the Redcoats erected their barriers. Up there, the red men waited for the signal. And when the whites sat down at their tables laid for midday dinner, they came down.
From the time I first heard that story from my uncle I wanted to be with them, Griessel. They said that when the warriors charged, a terrible cry went up. They say that cry is in every soldier. When you are at war, when your blood is high in battle, then it comes out. It explodes from your throat and gives you the strength of an elephant and the speed of an antelope. They say every man is afraid until that moment, and then there is no more fear. Then you are pure fighter and nothing can stop you.
