There were uniforms all around him in the hallway.
Soldiers with the berets of the Parabats, and of Armour, and of Artillery, and of the Medics. Scrubbed clean conscripts who were serving out their army time in administration in the capital city. Haggard young men changing trains on their way home for leave from the operational areas of South West Africa and the fearsome close quarters of guerrilla war. The airforce technicians of the Mirage squadron at Hoedspruit.
The bearded and confident elite of the Recce Commando.
Jack eased his way through them. He was so very close to his destination. He went into the station magazine and sweet shop. He bought a map of Pretoria.
His finger nail searched for and found Potgieterstraat. He memorised the turns, the roads he would follow.. He folded the map, stowed it away in his hip pocket. He would not be seen on Potgieterstraat studying a map.
He went out of the station. Pretoria was higher on the veld than Johannesburg, cooler, and the first frosts were not long away. He ignored the taxis. He would walk. He could see more by walking. He went past the booths where Blacks could buy their railway tickets, then out of the station yard. He went past the Combi vans that ferried Blacks between the station and the townships of Mamelodi or Atteridgeville, by the small street market where fruit and milk was sold, and vegetables. He could sense the difference to Johannesburg. He felt a little at ease walking here, because there seemed no threat, no scowling eyes gazing at him. He walked past the big dairy, and there the pavement ended, as if Whites' territory was bounded by pavements. He crossed coarse open ground. Potgieterstraat was ahead of him.
So very close to the road he had taken when his mind was made.
Under the old railway bridge of darkened steel and cut stone.
Potgieterstraat stretched away up the hill.
Far in front of him, across the road, was a high slag yellow brick wall. He was within sight of Pretoria Central, of the Local gaol of the Pretoria Central complex.
Hell, and his gut was tight, and his legs were jellied.
He was the insect brought to a night light.
The wall was the colour of the mine mountains in Johannesburg. Pristine, dirty yellow and new. He walked up the hill. He was again on a pavement. Sometimes he looked to his left where there was nothing for him to see, sometimes he looked straight ahead at the tilt of Potgieterstraat. He pleaded with himself for naturalness. He was on foot, alone, and approaching one of the most security conscious square miles of the State. If he were to be challenged he had no story. Jack Curwen had sneered at Jacob Thiroko, he had told his mother that he was going to bring his father home, and he had planned bomb making with George Hawkins, and because of his hot headed nature and his arrogance Sandham was dead and Duggie Arkwright was dead. Lunacy and arrogance had carried him on the wing to Potgieterstraat. And thank God that Sandham and Duggie couldn't see him with jelly legs and his tight gut as he flickered his eyes forward to the high yellow brick walls of Local.
He looked right. He had seen on the map that he would pass what was labelled as D.H.Q. . . .
Couldn't believe i t . . . D.H.Q. He was walking past the Defence Headquarters of the Republic. The bastards had built Pretoria Central up the hill, same side of the road, spitting distance, rifle range distance, from the Defence Headquarters of South Africa. Throwback to the days of Empire, stone pillars holding the portico, weathered red brick, barred windows, creeper-draped railings topped with coils of barbed wire.
Eyes moving. From the nothingness of scrub and railway sidings to his left, on to Potgieterstraat and the walls that grew in height as he came closer, on back to the formal gardens of Defence Headquarters where the sentries patrolled with magazines fitted to their assault rifles. Duggie and Sandham were dead, and Jack hadn't even known that D.H.Q. was right alongside his target. All the sentries, and all the back-up that would be out of sight but there in support of Defence Headquarters.
The excitement seeped from him.
The building next to Defence Headquarters, sandwiched between D.H.Q. and Local, was that of the South African Airforce. More wire, more sentries.
Thiroko had said it was impossible.
Across the road from him was Local. He stopped, and bent down to flick his shoe lace undone. It took him several seconds to retie the lace. He looked down the side street that ran under the wall of Local, he stared down Soetdoringstraat while his fingers fumbled to make the knot. Immediately across Potgieterstraat, at the top of the angle of the Local walls, was a jutting fire position. There were dark slits, Jack couldn't know whether he was observed. The main gatehouse of Local was down Soetdoringstraat, covered by another fire position. At the end of the Local wall on Soetdoringstraat he saw the lowered barrier of a check point. The walls of Local were thirty feet high. Local was covered by enfilading gun positions, and Local was only the gaol for the short-term Black criminals. Further down Soetdoringstraat, past the checkpoint, was the gaol for White politicals, and away and hidden from the road were the old Pretoria Central and the women's gaol, and further away and further hidden was Pretoria Maximum Security. At that moment Jack Curwen would have believed Jacob Thiroko.
He stood. He tried to resume a casual walk, and the walk was dragged and slow.
He went on up Potgieterstraat.
Over the height of the Local wall he could see the top floor cell windows of five blocks. There were clothes hanging from some of the windows, underpants and socks and shirts, and once he saw the face of a Black who gazed out into the bright morning light. A terrible quiet about the place.
Difficult for him to realise that hundreds of men were held behind that wall, that they made no sound. At the end of the Local wall the brickwork gave way to a mesh wire fence that stood between the road and tropical gardens, and then the wildness of high trees climbing over a steep hillside. He knew from his map that the hill was Magasyn Kopje. He knew that Beverly Hills was set back on the slopes of Magazine Hill.
Behind the trees, out of sight, were the walls of Beverly Hills.
A daft fantasy in Jack's mind. If he yelled his father would hear him. He reckoned he must be within eight hundred yards of the cell blocks of Beverly Hills. And he had seen high walls and gun positions and sentries with assault rifles.
The fantasy slumped. He was eight hundred yards from his father, but he might as well have been in Churchill Close and five and a half thousand miles away. Despair, hurrying after the fantasy. He thought there was nothing more for him to see on Potgieterstraat. Despair, because he thought the bomb in John Vorster Square was for nothing.
Jack retraced his steps. He came briskly down the hill.
He snatched one glance down Soetdoringstraat. He saw the checkpoint barrier rising, and a car coming out, leaving the cocoon of wire and walls and fields of fire. He looked away.
On down the hill, back towards the ordinariness of Pretoria.
The car that had come through the checkpoint sped past him. He went back towards the railway bridge. He felt he had turned his back on his father because he had been intimidated by the walls of Local that he had seen, and the walls of Beverly Hills that the trees obscured.
He took the first train back to Johannesburg.
• • *
Jacob Thiroko had heard the news of the John Vorster Square bomb on the radio in the morning.
He was astounded. He had thought in terms of an un-guarded civil administration building, a noisy gesture simply.
John Vorster Square was something else . . . He had heard on the radio that the attacker had picked his moment to charge through an opened gate, hurl his bomb, and then escape under the nose of an armed sentry. An attack with the spontaneity of passion, nothing that was cold and pre-determined. Thiroko recognised the extent of the danger.
The most feared soldier was the man who was prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice.
Thiroko thought that he had gambled hugely on Carew's son, and the boy had repaid him by throwing a bomb into the most hated inst
itution on the whole of the East Transvaal.
The radio had said that long into the night there had been crowds on the streets of Soweto cheering the success of the attack, jeering at the police in their Casspirs who had come to disperse them with gas and bird shot.
The Indian owner of the safe house had long since gone about his business of selling motor car accessories when Thiroko came down stairs. In the kitchen he ate a slice of toast and drank strong coffee prepared for him by the Indian's wife. He ate increasingly littje. Easier not to eat.
His suitcase was packed, his room ready for another guest.
He said his goodbyes to the Indian's wife, and left her home, and walked slowly with his suitcase to the Finchley Central underground station.
For the first time since he had arrived in London he journeyed to the offices of the African National Congress.
A terraced house in a side street off the Pentonville Road.
A heavy green door beside windows covered with close mesh that was proof against fire bombs.
He endured the back slapping greeting of the London comrades - Blacks and Indians and Whites. He elbowed his way with little grace through the earnest congratulations of those who fought the regime from trenches that were separated from the battlefield by thirteen hours' flying. A small few he trusted. A great many he regarded with contempt. Thiroko was a military man. These were the pam-phleteers and the speakers at fringe meetings, and the dreamers who said that the total revolution was at hand and that power was at the corner to be grasped. Thiroko was at home in the training camps of northern Angola, or with the young people of the Solomon Mahlangu school in Tanzania, or with the fighters when they retired across the Botswana border to rest up in Black Africa. He thought they were all communists in the London office. They were the men and women with whom he hardly cared to pass the day. There was one man in the terraced house with whom he would have entrusted his life. A man who was old, a skinny tent pole with a pebble rolling accent of Hungary, a man they all called Magyar and who had spent fourteen years in the regime's gaols, and served his time to the last day without an hour of his sentence remitted before travelling to London and exile. A pale, pinch-faced man with a whispered voice who had never been heard to boast of his commitment to the Movement, a man who had made his sacrifice and expected no praise for himself. This one man he would trust.
Thiroko handed his plane ticket to Lusaka to a young White who he thought was at heart a Boer because he wore jogging shoes and a tracksuit and cut his hair as if he were a conscript in the S.A.D.F. He asked to be booked on the evening's flight home.
He took Magyar to a small room, and when they had sat down amongst the cardboard cartons of A.N.C. literature that were expensively printed but not distributed, he turned up the volume of a cassette radio. Thiroko took few chances.
He had no right to take chances, not with the safety of a young man who was prepared to run inside the John Vorster Square perimeter with a homemade bomb.
Magyar wouldn't ask him, so Thiroko gave the information.
The Hungarian had been in the Movement from the early days of the dive underground at the time of the banning of the African National Congress. He had stood in the same dock six years after it had held Nelson Mandela and Sisulu and Mbeki and Mhlaba and Motsoaledi and Kathrada and Denis Goldberg and Mlangeni. And now, in his 67th year, he was hardly listened to by the members of the London office. He pushed paper and he drafted press releases that would be rewritten. He was the one for Thiroko to talk with.
Thiroko told Magyar that the attack on John Vorster Square was the work of a single committed individual supplied by the agencies of Umkonto we Sizwe. He saw the quiet pleasure on the wrinkled face. Thiroko knew what the security police had inflicted on the old man.
Their voices were low against the barrage of the music.
"You were in the maximum security section of Pretoria Central?"
"What we called Beverly Hills, the hanging gaol. Yes."
"For how long were you there?"
"There was a group of us, White politicals, we were there for two years and eight months. From 1980 to 1983 we were there. It was after Jenkin and Lee and Moumbaris escaped from the White political section that all of the rest of us were taken up the hill while they rebuilt our former place."
"Such an escape is only possible once?"
"Of course. From the new gaol for politicals it would not be possible."
"From Beverly Hills?"
Magyar smiled sadly. His mind was taken far back.
"Nothing is possible from Beverly Hills. Before our time, a White condemn, Franz von Staden, escaped. He was at exercise and the wall of the exercise yard was not as high as it is now, and in those days it had no grille. He saw his chance, took it, and then he went to the station and a policeman who was not on duty saw him and remembered his face. They took him back and they hanged him. Now nothing is possible from Beverly Hills."
"From the outside?"
Magyar shrugged. "What is on the outside, Comrade Jacob? What do I know of the outside? I was brought to the gaol in a closed van with slit windows. I saw some trees, I saw some houses for the prison staff, I saw their self-service store, but I have no detail. It is the same inside. I lived in the gaol for 32 months, I was in C section 1. I can tell you about each inch of the floor of C section 1, not of C section 2, not of C section 3. I would have to imagine that C section 2 and C section 3 are the same as our section. I can tell you nothing of B section, nor of A section, where the Blacks are.
There are gardens inside the outer wall that come up to the sections. I saw those gardens when I went inside and when I left. You are there a long time and you know very little.
It was the same for all of us who were there . . . It is not a place that I care to remember."
Thiroko was hunched towards him.
"For me, I want you to try to remember."
For more than an hour the radio played light music, and a disc jockey doodled away his time in a London studio.
The old man covered a dozen sheets of foolscap paper with his drawings. At the moment of his arrest he had been an architect's draughtsman in Cape Town.
He drew a plan, as best he knew it, of the square mile to the west of Potgieterstraat, a square mile that encompassed Defence Headquarters to Pretoria Central to Magazine Hill.
He drew a plan of the whole of Beverly Hills, cursing the gaps in his knowledge.
He drew C section. He drew C section I. He drew an individual cell. He drew a cell in relation to the catwalk above the linking corridor. He drew the corridor of C section I and the catwalk. He drew the exercise yard of C section I, and after that he drew a top view plan to show the positioning of the metal grid over the yard and of the supporting beams. He drew the visit rooms. He drew the gallows shed as it had been described to him. Last he drew the airlock entry through the outer wall.
He said drily, "Under the Prisons Act, I could get ten years for drawing you such plans . . . should I be returning to South Africa."
Thiroko accepted no time for banter.
"Firearms?"
"There is an armoury in the administration block where they keep hand guns, machine guns, grenade launchers.
There are guns available at all times in the gatehouse and at the reception at the entrance to administration. There are guns on the watch tower that is set onto the highest wall on the hillside where the sentry can overlook the whole of the compound. The men on the catwalks have F.N.s or Lee Enfields, they are issued with six rounds for a duty. No one carries a gun if they are in contact with prisoners."
"What is the closest guard to the condemns?"
"I cannot tell you about B section and A section. Over C
section there is the armed guard on the catwalk. Through the windows he can look down into each cell. In addition there is one guard, not armed, who is locked for the night into the individual corridors of C section i, and 2 and 3.
Each of those men has a telephone line to the
Control in the gatehouse."
Magyar looked up to see the fighting concentration in Thiroko's eyes.
"Comrade, I do not think you can go to any of the others of us who were there and find more. One man's experience is the same as every man's. I have forgotten nothing that I knew. You cannot break out. You cannot break in."
Thiroko said, "Last night a man broke into John Vorster Square."
Again the sad smile, as if it was a disappointment to the old man that he played the bearer of bad news.
"John Vorster Square has public roads on all sides. Go east from Beverly Hills, you have half a mile before you get to Potgieterstraat, all a control area. Go south, and you are climbing Magazine Hill which is within the prison complex.
Go west, you have a rifle range for the military, and then you have the police training college, and then you have the police dog centre. Go north, you are into Defence Headquarters and the Air Force command bunker. There is not just a high railing. You cannot break in nor out of Beverly Hills . . . Is it because five comrades will hang?"
A defiance in Thiroko, an echo in his words from a park bench. "It is not right that we should do nothing."
"Sentiment from you, Comrade Jacob? There was one amongst the White politicals serving with me, serving longer than I. He used to say, 'Why don't they hurry up with their bloody revolution, get us out of here?' I tell you, every man in Beverly Hills, political or criminal, yearns by the candle of hope for freedom, that is what I know. Comrade, there are five of our men in there who are going to hang and they have no hope."
Thiroko put the drawings into his briefcase.
"If you hold the candle of hope for them then that is wonderful," the old man said.
A SONG IN THE MORNING Page 18
