A SONG IN THE MORNING

by Gerald Seymour

  Their farewells were curtly made. Thiroko switched off the radio. He went out of the room. He was given his ticket.

  It had been taken to the Zambian airlines office in Piccadilly, and endorsed for that night's flight.

  He was photographed when he left the green painted front door, as he had been when he had entered. The cameraman freelanced for the Special Branch and operated from the Metropolitan Police offices on the opposite side of the street.

  Thiroko would have expected to be photographed. He didn't care. He had curtailed his visit to London. He was going home with the pain in his stomach. And when he got there he was going to provide the support that an extraordinary young man had asked of him.

  • * *

  Jeez knew of the bomb.

  The sentries changing duty on the catwalk would have been disciplined, up before the governor, if it had been known that they had let slip such a nugget of information.

  Jeez had heard them talking.

  It seemed a small matter. What seemed a big matter was that Sergeant Oosthuizen had informed him that his solicitor was driving from Johannesburg the next day to see him.

  He thought the days were sliding fast, each day shorter.

  He thought his time was bloody racing.

  * * •

  George Hawkins was driving to inspect a chimney when he heard the one o'clock news.

  He was preoccupied with the chimney because he was certain it would be difficult. The chimney was 112 feet high, and to bring it down he required an additional 28 feet of clearance on the fall line. It was a built-up area of Hackney, and the oaf who had telephoned him hadn't known whether there was 140 feet clear. He was going to see for himself and he was going to charge them for his time whether or not he agreed to do the demolition.

  Johannesburg's central police station? Stone the bleeding crows.

  He knew it was his boy. The fire told him that the blue print for the bomb had been his own diagram of the La Mon Hotel device.

  Christ, and he hadn't told the kid much. Hadn't told him much because he hadn't thought the kid was getting far beyond having his arse shot off. He'd given the boy nothing but the barest and the briefest. The boy must have followed to the letter what he had been told, must have memorised every bloody word. And what he'd told him for the hotel job was sweet bugger all of what he'd need to know to blow a hollow charge job against a prison wall. Hadn't even told him of the safety procedures to go through in the loading of a hollow charge job with Polar Ammon.

  He thought that if Jack Curwen died that he, George Hawkins, would never forgive his bloody old miserable self for allowing the boy to stuff such nonsense in his head.

  * * *

  Hard for the student to concentrate on his afternoon lecture.

  The subject matter was The Role of the State in Support of the Single Parent Family. Hard for Jan van Niekerk to concentrate on anything. All the talk in the cafeteria, and over the whole campus was of the bomb in John Vorster Square.

  He had read that there was a theory that the bomber was White. Jan van Niekerk had carried a package to the Landdrost Hotel. A few Blacks got to stay at the Landdrost, token Blacks, but he thought that the Mr Curwen to whom the package had been carried on by the bellboy must be White, a White name. He was involved, certain of that. He was guilty under the terms of the Sabotage Act, 5 years to death. Always, since he had begun, they could have manufactured a case against him. There would be no need to manufacture anything when he had carried explosives, when those explosives had been used in something so super fucking fantastic as the bomb inside John Vorster Square.

  After the lecture, managing almost a bounce in his crippled stride, he made for his locker. There was no message for him.

  • * *

  Frikkie de Kok liked a drink, and he liked to talk. There were few men he could drink with because his working life was his secret, a matter that put him apart from other men. His assistant was his natural drinking partner, on Wednesdays in the late afternoon and early evening, if they did not have to be out of their beds while it was still dark on the following morning. Frikkie de Kok liked the Harlequin Club for his drinking and the chance to watch a rugby match from the old dark wood long bar. He had a small circle of acquaintances amongst the solicitors and barristers and government servants and accountants who patronised the bar on their way home from work.

  His place was a corner table against the wall and the window, where he could talk to the man who would succeed him on his retirement. Where, also, he could watch the match.

  He gave all he knew to his assistant.

  He thought that was the least he could do for this young man who was so keen to learn. He had decided when the time would be, very soon, that he would allow his assistant to take over the full role of judging the length of the rope to be used, of fitting the pinions and the hood, of handling the lever. He reckoned that an assistant had to be given a chance to learn for himself. Not for a multiple of course, but for a single execution, and as long as they had no reason to think that the man would not go quietly . . . probably be best if it were a Coloured, that's what he thought, because in Frikkie de Kok's experience, the Coloureds were usually no trouble . . .

  Frikkie de Kok checked his watch. The players should have been out of the dressing room by now.

  He carried on talking.

  "You see, there's a great irony about the method of execution, hanging. We now support the method of hanging over firing squad or gas chamber or electrocution because we say it is the most effective and the most humane. It didn't start like that. Look where it started, hanging. They wanted the most degrading way of death, and they wanted it to be slow and painful because that was good deterrent. What they were looking for was something that shocked and terrified the people who came to watch a public execution.

  The slower the better, because that way the spectators were most frightened. That's the irony. We have taken the most inefficient method and changed it into the most efficient. I like to think that in Pretoria we have the very most efficient and the very most humane system. You can go anywhere in the world, you won't find anything that is better organised than our situation. It's something that we in South Africa can feel genuinely proud of . . . I think they're stupid not coming out earlier, that's the way you get to pull a hamstring, when you're not properly loosened . . ."

  There was a ripple of applause from the touchline, and shouts from members in the bar. The players ran onto the pitch.

  "There was one thing that concerned me the first time I was an assistant, that was the heart of the man. The heart kept beating for a full twenty minutes after he'd dropped.

  I'd been told all the things that I told you when you first started. Fracture dislocation of the cervical vertebrae with crushing of the spinal cord. Immediate unconsciousness, no possibility of recovering consciousness because there is no chance of breathing. But that heart was still going. I put my ear against his chest, while he was hanging, and I could hear the heart. It took me several minutes to get accustomed to that heart keeping going . . . They want to watch the new boy at out half. Fine boy, off last year's high school side.

  He could go all the way. I'd like to think my boy could get to play for Harlequins."

  "He's on the school team, Mr de Kok."

  "But the school's filling his head with university, not with rugby. He's in his books, that's why he's not on the line watching."

  There was the question that the assistant had waited two years to ask, the question that fascinated him. For two years he had waited for the opportunity to appear. He thought it was the moment.

  "Does he know?"

  "Know what?"

  There was the roar as the Harlequins kicked off.

  "Know what his father does."

  He wished he hadn't asked. He saw Frikkie de Kok hesitate.

  "I've never told them, not Dawie, not Erasmus. You could say it's like telling them about the sexual functions.

  There's never a right time
, and anyway they'll learn it all at school. There's never been a right time to tell Dawie what I do, and if I tell him then do I tell Erasmus, and he's two years younger. I suppose I'll wait until they're adults. They might not understand, funny things are young boys' minds. He thinks I run the carpentry courses at Central."

  "If my Poppa had done such work, I'd have been proud of him."

  "Who knows what they might think . . . "

  The assistant was hunched forward. "Mr de Kok, what would happen to us if the political situation were to change?"

  "Change how?" Frikkie de Kok was entranced by the game, nose close to the glass.

  "If the present government were to fall."

  Frikkie de Kok chuckled. "No chance. And we'll survive, our job isn't political. Every government needs us . . .

  Let me tell you an anecdote from history. There was an executioner down in the Cape, and he hanged and he quartered and he severed limbs, and he was paid by each item, then the British came. We're nearly two hundred years back.

  The British said that he should just do hanging. The poor man saw his livelihood going, so what did he do? He went and hanged h i m s e l f . . . "

  They were both laughing.

  ". . .A little bit of change never hurts anyone. I won't be hanging myself, not even if they abolish maximum security.

  Too damned fast I'll be off to buy a farm. You won't see me for dust . . . That man, he's offside."

  "Me too, Mr de Kok, I would have said he was offside."

  Frikkie de Kok said from the side of his mouth, casual,

  "Next Thursday, tomorrow week, that's the Pritchard Five."

  "All together?"

  "They killed together, they were convicted together . . .

  Look at that."

  "That referee's a disgrace, Mr de Kok."

  • * *

  Jack, still dressed, slept on his bed. Exhausted. Harrowed by the high walls he had seen.

  He had turned his back on Magazine Hill, he had walked away from the green tree slopes where his father was held.

  12

  The minibus driver kept the stops short. Just enough time for the tourists to take their photographs, and for the guide to give her spiel to a German couple, four Americans, and Jack.

  The guide was an attractive girl, might have been thirty years old but she wore her hair young in the blonde Diana style. She had sensible shoes, and perhaps that was the giveaway that the girl who had the job of introducing tourists to Soweto was not a child. She talked well. She had to talk well because the material for her to talk about was pathetic in the uniform dreariness of the streets and the homes.

  They had come through the Orlando area of the township city. They were on high ground and looking down over the corrugated roofing and the straight roads and across the railway yards and away over further hills that were blistered with roofs.

  The guide said, "We don't really know what the population of Soweto is. It's very difficult to get these people to fill in a census form, and they have their relations come to stay with them. They aren't the sort of people who are good with forms. So, it could be anything between one and two million people, we really don't know . . . "

  The first reason for Jack to come to Soweto was that he must behave as a tourist. Yesterday he had gone to Pretoria.

  Today he was waiting for his contact. And he needed desperately to be out of the hotel, was fearful of every footfall in the corridor, dreaded having to go back, wondering whether his room would be staked out, the explosives discovered.

  The day porter had made the telephone call, placed the hooking. The Rand Development Board tour was back on schedule, he said, because Soweto had been quiet for a week.

  "You can see with your own eyes that this is a community into which a great deal of government money has been placed, millions of rand have been spent on making the living conditions of our Black people more acceptable. Most of Soweto now has electricity, most of it has running water.

  All of the main roads now have tarmac, and later you will see that we have started to build shops, the supermarket type of shops. The amount of money that we are spending is a very great drain on the country's resources, but we are spending it . . ."

  The second reason for Jack to have made the journey into Soweto was vaguer. He felt that he had joined a war, that he had become a part of the armed struggle of the people who lived in this and other vagabond townships. He wondered how many of the one or two millions who eked out an existence in Soweto acknowledged the legitimacy of the tactic of bombs and bullets to change the conditions of their existence, how many of them knew the name of Jacob Thiroko. Not one of them would have heard of Duggie Arkwright. He thought of his journey into Soweto in part as a tribute to Duggie. He had thought that he might learn something of the people in whose cause Duggie had laboured. Driving past the stunning repetition of the homes of one million, or two million, people gave him not an iota of an idea of what their notion of a political future might be.

  "Why are there high lights in the middle of open ground, illuminating nothing?"

  The German man waved airily in the direction of hugely tall arc light stands that were dispersed over an open area of rubbish and building debris and raw earth. The German woman looked at her husband sheepishly as if she thought it impolite to ask a question.

  The ready answer. "They are there to make it safer for the residents. Unfortunately, Soweto is a very lawless place.

  On average, every weekend, there are thirty murders in the township boundaries. The gangsters prey on the wage earners, rob them and kill them when they are coming back from the beer halls. We call the gangsters tsotsis, they are just hoodlums, sometimes they are ordinary criminals, sometimes they are agitators trying to intimidate the peace loving people . . . "

  "I was told," the German said, "that they put the electricity in so that the Africans would buy televisions and radios and all the electrical appliances that are sold in the White owned shops. I was told it was just to expand the market that they put the electricity in."

  "Whoever told you that was lying." The guide withered the German.

  She had a fixed smile when she was talking to the tourists.

  But in the front seat beside the driver her smile dropped.

  When the tourists were muttering amongst themselves or trying to photograph from the moving bus, then Jack saw the reality of her face. He saw the frowns on her neat forehead as she talked with the driver, discussed where it was safe to go. The driver would pause at each cross roads, and the White guide and the Black driver would stare and hesitate. Jack couldn't help but see the reasons for the hesitation. Slogans aerosol-ed on walls.

  KILL ALL WHITES. Be Kind to Animals, Adopt a Policeman. Death to Traitors and Informers and Collaborators. Children of the African Heroes Do Not be Afraid of Whites.

  Jack thought it was lunatic to be running a scenic drive round friendly Soweto. The Germans and the Americans didn't seem concerned. The Germans were preoccupied with their focal lengths. The Americans were so busy in a denunciation of their own media, and Edward Kennedy and all the liberal East Coasters who gave them the picture of South Africa in flames, that Jack wondered if they had even seen the armoured personnel carriers parked at the side of the petrol station, and the second group that were parked close to the big school complex. He wondered if the Black polite were local, what it was like for them to be on law enforcement in their own community. He kept his peace.

  Jack thought the rows of small brick homes, match boxes, and the pitted streets and the piled rubbish and the pitifully few shops were pathetic. He couldn't understand how the authorities could put a bus on, with a pretty girl as guide to boast about how much had been achieved, and drive tourists round so that they could see with their own eyes how bloody awful the place was.

  "The impression you get back home, back in the State of Washington, is that the whole place is aflame. Looks pretty peaceful to me."

  "What I reckon is that all these folks
want is work and to be left in peace."

  The bus jerked to the right. Jack saw the guide pointing to a group of young Blacks standing on waste ground a hundred yards ahead. The driver had turned down a holed track. They went fast past a fire-blackened house. He saw the driver's face when he turned to the guide for instructions.

  There was a sweat sheen on the driver's skin. Jack wondered how it would be to go back to the township each night when your job was driving White tourists round your backyard by day. They came back onto a main road. There was no commentary from the guide. He could sense the mood between the driver and the guide, that they had been around too long. There were school children streaming along the sides of the road.

  An American woman said that the kids looked cute in their white shirts and black trousers or skirts. The German woman was complaining that the minibus was going too fast for her to take photographs through the window. They went along two streets where the houses were larger. Black middle class homes. The guide started to talk about the owner of a taxi fleet, and the owner of a Black football team. Jack thought the houses belonged to White clones, because there were leaping German Shepherds in the front gardens. There was smoke rising ahead.

  The German man was tapping the guide's back, then pointing to a bungalow that was larger than the others, once the queen of the street. A smoke charred bungalow, with fire scorched beams littering a front lawn.

  "What happened there?"

  The guide turned to speak to the German, wasn't looking ahead, hadn't seen the smoke rising from tyres in the road.

  "That was the home of the Mayor of Soweto. That is the work of the agitators. His home was burned down. It was an attempt by the agitators to intimidate those who are trying to better the life of the Blacks in Soweto . . . "

  The driver was slowing, but he was Black. He couldn't tell the guide to shut her mouth and concentrate on what was going on in front of them and tell him what the hell to do. Over the guide's shoulder, Jack saw the schoolchildren, cute, running forward from the tyre barricade towards the bus.