Those Who Love Night

by Wessel Ebersohn

  “Why? Tell me why?”

  “This has to be over first.”

  “Tell me what’s changed in the last five minutes. Just tell me that.”

  “It’s just the case,” she lied. “And all the other things that are part of it—your position and mine.”

  Chunga took a step back. “Something has changed.”

  She turned quickly and tried to leave the bedroom, but had only taken a single step before he had her hand and had drawn her back toward him. “Jonas, please.” She was surprised and almost ashamed at the plaintive sound of her voice.

  “There’s no need to plead,” he said. “Nothing will happen to you against your will, not while you are with me. Do you understand that?”

  “Yes, I understand.”

  “Then listen to me. I am going to help you to clear up this matter. I will show you that the truth has many sides. And that I am no monster. After that, I want things to be different between us.”

  “After that, everything will be different,” Abigail said.

  * * *

  Unlike her first night in Harare, and despite the killing of Krisj Patel, Abigail felt safe in the armchair in her room. On the drive back to the hotel, Chunga had said nothing. Without his almost overpowering presence, she could think more clearly now.

  The other matter had started as only a vague uneasiness, but understanding had come suddenly. She had noticed a number of dinner parties in the restaurant finish their dinners, then leave. As far as she remembered, all had paid before they left. Jonas Chunga had not even signed anything. He had led her from the table in a manner that did not acknowledge the possibility of having to pay. Then there was Andrew, their private waiter throughout dinner. She was sure that no one else in the place had a private waiter.

  What did this mean? Was this how this director of the CIO was treated wherever he went? And if that were so, then why? Whatever the answer was, Abigail could not imagine herself being at ease with patronage on this level. Was anything ever refused to those close to the source of power?

  And yet this was a man who, up on the hillside overlooking the city, had told her what was truly in his heart. And she had given him every reason to believe that she was ready to receive him. But when she withdrew, there had been no force, not even any pressure. He had simply accepted her change of heart.

  I swear to you, he had told her, I am not part of killings and torture.

  Only time would show how truthful that declaration had been, and whether her change of heart had affected her chance of having her matter heard urgently. She understood why she had not been able to allow Jonas Chunga to make love to her, but nothing else was clear. She fell asleep in the chair, the night within her eyelids swirling furiously with images of Jonas Chunga.

  22

  The Makwati twins were in the double bed in the front room of the apartment on the building’s top floor. Tanya was stretched out on her back, breathing through her mouth. Next to her, Natasha was sitting up so that she would not fall asleep. There were no lights on in the room.

  From her position she could see, through a lace curtain, a few hundred meters of the road running down the hill past the prison’s main gate. There was no moon, and the wire fence that skirted the trees inside the prison ground was invisible under a dark sky.

  The apartment had been a good choice. Some of their members had walked the dark street after sunset to test its effectiveness, but had never been able to notice their presence. Even their selection of the old couple who occupied the apartment had been sound. They were quiet, sympathetic to the cause, willing to help and were always in bed early.

  Helena had given instructions on what to wear while they watched. They were not to get within a meter of the window, clothing had to be black and they were to wear no jewelry or adornments of any kind. Even the clips in their hair had to be removed. They could use rubber bands, but nothing else. The color of their skin, a deep mahogany, would do the rest.

  Changing shifts took place after dark and through the back door. Tanya had come first, Natasha following ten minutes later. When they were relieved, they would leave separately and go in different cars. “We can’t be too careful,” Helena had told them many times. “If we are careless in just one small point, it might lead to our undoing.”

  “But will they care about this?” Natasha had asked. “We are only watching. Is it a crime to watch?”

  “It depends on what you are watching,” Helena had said.

  The precautions had worked well. No one had paid any attention to individual people entering or leaving the building. Watching the street for movement from the direction of the prison, Natasha was confident that they were safe.

  The only weakness in their arrangements, and one that had arisen the evening before for the first time, concerned the presence in the apartment of three teenagers, grandchildren of the old couple. The children’s parents had died in the cholera, but they had been away from home when it struck and so had survived. Their arrival from the home of their grandparents had been unexpected and, so far, no other apartment had been available to those watching the prison gate.

  The young people too had learned to hate the authorities. Their grandparents had told them of the atrocities inflicted on communities and the needless suffering of so many people. A security failure had arisen through the sheer excitement of the thirteen-year-old boy. He had been unable to contain the knowledge that every night, in the front bedroom, the people’s spies were watching the prison. He did not understand the purpose of their watching, but he could imagine a few reasons.

  “They’re checking the front gate and the guards there,” he had told a friend, “so they can charge it or maybe plant dynamite and destroy it.”

  It was a wonderful story and, by noon the day after he had told his two closest friends, every pupil in the school had heard some variation of the story. The most popular version was the one in which they were marking out the spot where an earth-moving machine would batter against the gate and destroy it and those guarding it, to advance on the prison building itself and release the prisoners.

  It had been almost four hours since they had relieved Abel. In a few minutes, Natasha would be waking her sister to take over from her. All evening, there had been no movement on the road that passed the prison gate.

  Somewhere in the back of the apartment the old couple and their grandchildren were asleep. The old man’s snoring was a gentle rumbling, occasionally interspersed with a convulsive roar. “Please, child,” the old woman had begged Helena when she first approached them, “be very careful. We are old and can’t go to prison. And, if we go, who will look after the grandchildren?”

  Some time before, perhaps an hour, Natasha had seen the figure of a man, silhouetted against the headlights of a car. But after the car had passed, leaving the street in darkness, it had been empty. Even once her eyes had again become accustomed to the dark, she had seen nothing.

  Natasha did not know that the brief silhouette she had seen earlier belonged to Agent Mordecai Mpofu of the CIO, and that he was part of a team that had fenced off the area. She also did not know that while she was watching the empty street, a team of CIO agents was blocking access to and from the area.

  She became aware of them for the first time as the back door of the apartment was smashed in. It was only when the door to the room had been thrown open and three armed agents entered that she rose uncertainly from the bed. Tanya was just waking up.

  Natasha tried to stop the first blow from the barrel of the revolver. It landed on her left hand and she thought she heard a bone snap. Somewhere from the back of the apartment someone was crying. The next blow fell behind her left ear. She was down on her knees and nothing in the world was stable anymore. The walls themselves were rotating. She did not see the third blow coming.

  23

  It was only after Abigail had fallen asleep in the hotel armchair that the city’s power had gone down. On some occasions only individual suburbs lost powe
r, but on this night the entire city and a few hundred surrounding kilometers were all in darkness. Only the poorest in the shack villages with their candles, oil lamps, oil stoves and wood fires, and the wealthiest with their standby plants, were unaffected.

  Most of Borrowdale Brooke was not as badly affected by the outage as the rest of the city. Within minutes of the power cutting out, the lights were coming back on, one house at a time, as standby plants kicked in. Jonas Chunga’s was of the automatic variety, starting within a few seconds of the power failing. As was his way, he had few lights on. Whether or not the power came back was not important to him, but he was glad to hear the refrigerator and the air conditioner buzzing.

  He had already received a telephone report about the arrest of those foolish Makwati girls. Agent Mpofu had told him that it had all taken place quickly and effortlessly, without gunfire or excessive violence. The Makwatis were very small fish in a pond that Chunga felt he was drying up fast. A few months in Chikurubi would be a lesson they would not easily forget.

  He strode up and down in his den, a spacious, glassed-in room that overlooked a tree-filled garden. The tops of the trees were vague silhouettes against a moonless sky. He noticed neither the trees nor the sky nor even the whiskey, of which he had now consumed a quarter of the bottle. By two o’clock, Jonas Chunga had given up the idea of sleep. The image of Abigail in his mind was both too vivid and too persistent to allow even the possibility of losing consciousness.

  He needed something to distract him from this woman and everything she had awakened in him. He found it in a file that had been placed in his hands personally that afternoon by the minister himself. The instruction had been for him to handle this new matter himself the next day. A cabinet minister was interested. Why would he not be? Chunga thought. It was his wife’s income that was affected.

  Chunga knew the essence of what was in the file, but if he hoped to make sense of it the next day, he would have to at least skim through it. He was working by the light of a desk lamp.

  The first item in the file was the minister’s note, instructing him to have the matter dealt with as top priority. It was followed by a letter from the chocolate factory, informing the dairy estate, owned by the old man’s young wife, that they would not be requiring further supplies of milk. Chunga already knew why, but the matter was further clarified by a clipping from The New York Times. The clipping covered a threat by a human rights organization to boycott the company’s products worldwide if they continued buying milk from that estate.

  There was more in the file, but Chunga closed it and dropped it into his briefcase. He hesitated only a moment before throwing the briefcase across the room. He hated the humiliation of it. They created these situations, then they treated him like their messenger boy, or rather, part messenger boy and part enforcer. No, mostly enforcer.

  He knew that the authorities had allowed the farm to be seized from the white owner as part of their land-reform policy, or was it their poverty-relief policy? He had lost track. Then the minister’s whore had decided she wanted it.

  And now the chocolate maker, with operations in God knows how many countries, cannot afford to buy their milk from them. Somewhere down in the bottom of the file there was probably the new manager’s assessment of the effect the chocolate factory’s decision would have on the estate and, no doubt, it would be catastrophic.

  He was already scheduled to meet the senior black manager at the chocolate company the next morning. Chunga’s job would be to explain to him that the white managers would be able to disappear overseas to other branches of the company. They could leave the country as political refugees, while he would be staying. It may not be in his best interests to alienate those in positions of power who would like to be his friends. He should think carefully before choosing the side he wanted to be on.

  The matter required little thought. He thought instead about Abigail under that great tree. How long ago had it been? Four or five hours, perhaps. He remembered her breasts. He could still feel them under his hands. Christ, it was torture.

  Now, after all this time, there was this face. Of all the faces there could be and all the women there had been, he had been confronted by this one unforgettable face.

  He rose too quickly, throwing over the chair, and pressed the intercom button. It took longer than expected before he received an answer, and then it was not the voice he expected. “Send up the girl,” he said.

  From his window he could see her running from the cottage, her white nightdress just visible against the surrounding darkness. He went down to unlock the back door for her. Once she was inside he locked the door, then led the way up the stairs to the bedroom.

  “Wine?” he asked. She had stopped just inside the door, still unsure about what was allowed her.

  She nodded and he poured for her. He still had his whiskey. This room was the only place she had ever, in her eighteen years, drunk wine. Chunga’s household was also the only place where she had eaten regularly and had money to buy clothes. She had even been able to send money to her mother in the Nyanga hills on the border with Mozambique. Many people ate because she was able to please her boss. She had not lost her virginity here, but she had learned much about what pleased men. And he did seem pleased.

  He sat down on the edge of the bed and patted the place next to him. “Come,” he said. “There’s no need for you to stand there.”

  24

  Tony Makumbe lay on his back, looking up at the ceiling of the cell. Its uneven surface had turned black as the night had deepened. For the first time in hours he was aware of the eight men in the cell with him. The voice had been mumbling on all night, but had become softer, more muffled and altogether unintelligible. Eventually it had stopped.

  There was enough light in the cell, a pale gray shaft from the window, to see a man coming across the cell toward him. Tony tried to rise, but it took an effort that was now not possible.

  The man bent over him. Tony could see the big square head and a quick glint from the eyes. The face came closer, until it was so close that the features were merging into each other. Tony had heard about the terrible things that happened to young men in prison. This must be the time, he thought. This must be the time and this must be part of the punishment.

  But the voice surprised him by its gentleness. “Tony, are you feeling better now?” The speaker had kept his voice low to avoid waking the others.

  It was Big Jake. Tony recognized him from the day before. How could I have forgotten? he asked himself. Jake, seeing that he was trying to rise, slipped a broad hand under one of his shoulders and lifted him until he was resting on an elbow. “I’m well, Jake,” he whispered.

  “Can you stand?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Do you want to use the shithouse?” The lavatory was in a corner of the cell, not enclosed in any way.

  “Not now. Thank you.”

  “Tell me when you want to.”

  “Thank you, I will.” He looked up at Jake, who was kneeling next to him on one knee. “Why are you doing this for me?”

  “We know who you are.”

  “I see.”

  “We know who you are, and we are sorry that you are sick.”

  “I hope I haven’t disturbed anyone.”

  “Just the talking. The talking bothers some of the others.”

  “I’m sorry about the talking. Ask them to forgive me. At night I can’t always control the talking.”

  “Perhaps you are not eating enough. You have given away too much of the food that was meant for you. They bring it for you, but you give it away.”

  And yet the hunger was gone. He must have eaten some of it. He remembered his food being brought by the guard, and the murmurings of dissatisfaction from the other prisoners. How often had they brought him food? More often than the others and of much better quality, it seemed. The other prisoners had asked the guards why he was receiving better food than they were, but had received no answer. After th
at he had shared his extra rations with them.

  “If you do not eat enough you will die,” Big Jake said.

  “I’m not dying yet,” he said.

  “I have told the others we can’t take all of your extra food.”

  “It’s all right, Jake. I’m happy to share.”

  “You are not strong. Tomorrow you must take more food yourself.”

  After a while, Big Jake told him to try to sleep now and to avoid the talking, if that were possible. Then he went back to his own sleeping mat.

  Tony remembered the bombing. He had placed the parcel just where they had decided. A few bottles of wine had ensured that none of the security guards were awake. He had often wondered what had happened to them afterward. The blast had been heard all the way down to the gated estate of Borrowdale Brooke, where the old dictator himself lived. They had all imagined his sleep being disturbed by it. It had shattered the door of the building, but done little other damage. After that, the police had placed a two-man guard on the door.

  He was sure that the bombing was the reason that he had been picked up. And yet it had happened nearly a year before. Surely they must have known sooner?

  The members of the group had all expected martyrdom. They had spoken about it on many nights. But when no arrests had been made, the prospect of heroic martyrdom had receded. Some had claimed disappointment, but he had felt only relief. And yet, when they eventually did arrive at his door, he had again felt relief.

  Long after Big Jake had gone back to his mat, perhaps an hour or even more, Tony heard two men in the corridor outside the cell. A young, light voice was saying, “How long do we keep them, or is it permanent? And, if it is permanent, why don’t they do it and get finished?”

  A stronger, older voice answered. “The order came from high up, very high up. Nothing happens to any of them, especially this one. Nothing, you understand.”

  “Yes, sir, I understand.” The lighter voice had lost whatever self-assurance it had held a moment before. “I just thought, perhaps there’s no reason…”