Lily Nyati and the other widows believed the truth had not been told. They wanted to know why, how, with whom he had operated. They wanted to know what Theron had omitted.
They had given me an impossible task. And two men with police warrant cards and free run of a major international airport had made my mission even more daunting. But the widows had ambushed me, left me no choice. That much was obvious, no matter the restrictions inscribed in my passport.
I re-read the letter, parsed it a dozen times, examining its omissions as much as what it said. The widows had not sought the identity of their husbands’ murderer – or murderers – but the reason for the killings. Perhaps I was reading too much into it, but they seemed also to be inquiring about a person in a different role – not victim or perpetrator, but a Judas figure, “the person who betrayed them”. Clearly, at whatever inquiry had inspired the newspaper clipping enclosed with the letter, evidence had been produced that, on the fateful day of the killings, an informer, or informers, had tipped off the assassins.
Of course, they were right to clamour for justice, even if mistaken about my ability to enlist the policymakers in Washington in their crusade. Yet the balance of forces had shifted. No longer the emissary of a higher power, I would have to fight alone.
My cell phone rang out and the screen showed a number in Washington, although I did not recall giving my local whereabouts to anyone back home.
“Sleeping dogs, Tom.” It was my former ambassador returning my call. “Leave it alone. Please. For all our sakes.” Her choice of metaphor sounded oddly familiar. I wondered who she had been talking to since I called.
The sun was long past its zenith, the afternoon fading. A call from the hotel front desk, jangling in the quiet whisper of the air-conditioning, told me that people were waiting to take me across town to the opening reception of the conference.
As I clambered into the mini-bus, my minders handed me a photocopied addendum to the agenda:
“Opening address to be delivered by Cde Lily Nyati.”
Three
SHE HAD CHANGED IN THE obvious ways of grief. There was a harder look to her eyes. Over the years, Lily Nyati had become something of a well-known person – not quite a celebrity, for that would imply some cynical manipulation of her plight – but an emblem, an icon nonetheless: the widow of the fallen warrior, swathed in his mantle, bearing his cross, his sword.
She had created a charitable foundation to promote reconciliation. She had been at the forefront of the racial debate. She had tried, without success, to prevent her hometown, her shrine, from falling into anarchy. In a way she stood in the tradition of Winnie Mandela – a woman defined initially by an absent husband but growing on her own terms in the vacuum created by his departure.
Her sole mission was to remind those who might forget that her land could not yet move on until it confronted its recent history with greater disclosure and penance. She reminded her compatriots that the mystery of her own bereavement had not been resolved. When she saw me, the fusion of loss and rage burned in her eyes, far more than any indication of pleasure at our reunion.
After the pleasantries – “how well you look” and “you have not changed one bit” – she drew me to a quiet corner of the lawn, away from the pre-conference, cocktail-and-canapé reception that seemed designed to reward less enthusiastic attendees. I was faintly aware of lush scents and bright colours at the fringe of vision – bougainvillea, frangipani. An empty space had opened between us and the delegates clustered around buffet tables alongside the pool.
“We were desperate,” she was saying. “We did not know where to look. The letter was our last hope.”
“I am sorry it took so long to reach me.”
“But you can still help.”
“I can try.”
“You must try.”
I found myself saying: “I will try,” but I was not sure she heard me. She had taken my hand when we met and still held it, squeezing it tightly.
“People think I am a little … obsessed,” she was saying, speaking quickly as if there was not much time. I found myself looking over her shoulder, lest Nieuwoudt or Faku lurked behind the flame trees. “But it is because they do not want to face what I face.”
“I thought it had all been resolved. Well. At least the details are known. From the transcript you sent.”
“That, yes. But you see, you will know this. In your country these matters are taken to their conclusion. Watergate. Impeachment. Monica Lewinsky! But here, we go only so far” – she bracketed her fingers between her thumb and index finger – “and then look the other way. We say: let us stop now. The pain is too great.”
“But they know who carried out the killing.”
“Of course. But they are free, those ones. They killed the Pebco Three and the Cradock Four and the Motherwell Four and the Cooktown Four, and they are free. They have stood in the open and said what they did. But that is not all of it.”
“Lily, what else can there be?’
She pulled me closer. Her hand held mine tightly.
“They were betrayed.”
“By?”
“That is what you must find out, Tom. Please. I am sorry.”
She released my hand and stepped back.
“Sometimes the past will not let me go. And when I saw your name on the speakers’ list, I started hoping again. I am sorry.”
“I will try.”
“Is that diplomat language?” she said. She smiled, almost coquettish. “Because we have seen a lot of diplomats coming through here and making promises.”
“I am no longer a diplomat.”
“But you are an ambassador?”
“A title. No more. A retirement benefit. Like a gold watch.”
She laughed. “So you do not need to be diplomatic. You can discover things.”
“I would not know where to start.”
“You must start where Nyati was the night he died. You must start with the people who met him. The last people who saw him.”
“I will try my best.”
“No, you can do more. Nyati thought you were his friend. He thought you made America his friend. He thought when you came to see him, it was not just you but all the Americans coming to see him. The American people. You brought the American people to support The Struggle, to encourage him, to show us we were not alone. So you must help him now. Will you?”
“You know I will do everything I can.”
She smiled, as if a victory had been won, but then grew sombre.
“But you must be careful,” she said. “Perhaps we should not ask you. When you first came to us, we thought you were – what do you call it – a spook, a spy. CIA. Dirty tricks. But now the shoe is on the other foot. Our enemies are still out there, Tom. They will try to stop you. They will play the dirty tricks. Like before. Maybe worse.”
Across the lawn, a small, busy man detached himself from the cocktail crowd and bustled his way towards us, clad head to toe in purple. Despite advancing years, he was still the figure he had been when I first saw him in the 1980s preaching in his church in Soweto – chirpy, demanding, burning with a self-confidence that denied every attempt to crush him. Like the rest of us, he wore a laminated tag, proclaiming his name and profession: Desmond Tutu. Archbishop Emeritus.
A young woman – mid-to-late teens, early 20s, I could not guess more closely – took Lily Nyati’s hand. She was slender, bony even, with close-cropped hair and angular features that, combined with her spectacles, gave her the same frail and owlish look as I recalled from her father. She wore a short, dark skirt and a T-shirt, the uniform of youth. She stood slightly akimbo, as if cloaking her vulnerability to the shocks of a world that had convinced her to expect only the worst.
“My daughter, Solomon’s daughter,” Lily Nyati said. “Celiwe Nyati, daughter of The Struggle.”
I thought I recognised her from the airport demonstration and I noticed that her eyes showed the bloodshot tinge of contact with teargas.
But this did not seem the place to inquire.
Instead, I smiled, foolishly happy to meet a new generation of the family. When I last saw her, she had been a bundle in a blanket tied to her mother’s back.
“I knew your father,” I said.
“I am happy for you. I wish I had that privilege.”
“Lily, my dear, they are waiting for your speech,” Tutu broke in, blessedly covering my embarrassment.
“Archbishop, do you know Thomas Kinzer, the ambassador from America. Ex?”
“Ah, my good friends, the Americans. Perhaps not so diplomatic. But welcome. Welcome in our rainbow nation.”
He forced one of his distinctive, staccato laughs and led Lily Nyati and her daughter away across the lawn, an intense, enclosed trio in clashing colours.
Over her shoulder Lily called out to me: “Do not forget, Tom. Do not forget your promise. We trusted you then. We trust you now.”
Her daughter looked back at me as if to suggest quite the opposite.
“Promises? That sounds very mysterious. Have you known Lily long?”
“Some time. Thomas Kinzer.”
I extended my hand as I glanced at the intruder’s laminated identity tag: Zoë Joubert, Centre for Governance (NGO). (Mine said: Thomas Kinzer (Ambassador). I recognised her name as the author of one of the ground-breaking papers on the psychology of those who had carried out some of history’s worst and most intimate cruelties, from Josef Mengele in Nazi Germany to Eugene de Kock in her own country. For someone steeped in the darkness of human evil, she seemed determinedly bright.
“I read your paper, on perpetrators. Rather compelling.”
“Ah! A diplomat indeed.”
“Retired,” I said. “A retired diplomat.”
“But I didn’t know diplomats made promises. Well, not ones that they could keep, in any case!” Despite her smiling, I thought I detected an edge to her voice.
Zoë Joubert stood straight-spined as if she had been taught at an early age to draw herself up, in the manner of an equestrian or ballerina. Her appearance, I admit, confused me. I had always associated the NGO set with the sandals-and-sarong tradition of aid workers at far-flung “projects” involving village handpumps and seed beds.
But she defied the caricatures. She had that poise that comes from a certain type of education, the kind that teaches the social arts, the ability to communicate through deft questions and fluid conversation, to deflect the impudent from prying too closely before they are invited to do so. Her hair was professionally tended, waves of chestnut and dark honey drawn back from her high forehead, accentuating the aquiline cast of her features. Her tan suggested a liking for the outdoors more than stuffy libraries or closed, nocturnal communing with computerised databases. There was something of the beach about her: I found myself wondering whether her skin would taste of sea salt.
To this day, I cannot adequately explain her sudden, immediate impact. Even now, when so many other impressions and events have been laid over the palimpsest of what you might loosely call our relationship, I recall a swirl of emotion unsullied by the equally stark memories of what subsequently transpired.
Her eyes crinkled over half-moon spectacles, producing the slightly intimidating prospect of a well-respected academic about to test a student’s thoroughness in preparing a paper. At least, she had not fled. The thought left me absurdly pleased.
“You seem very young for a pensioner,” she said in what I took to be some kind of teasing inquiry.
“Well. It’s a long story. I could tell you over dinner,” I heard myself blurting out. “I’m sorry. That must have seemed rather forward.”
For a moment she seemed as nonplussed as I felt. Conference small talk was not, I guess, supposed to include such brash overtures.
“No, no. Please. Let’s have dinner. A good venue for a long story.”
Perhaps she figured that someone who owed a promise to Lily Nyati could not be all bad. And perhaps, too, she simply wanted to know more about what the promise entailed.
We turned back towards the crowd where a mistress of ceremonies tapped the microphone. The amplifiers emitted a loud whistle then subsided. Lily Nyati was waiting in line with the others – Alex Boraine and Antjie Krog, Nyameka Goniwe and Desmond Tutu.
From the hotel’s French windows, another group of people had issued forth across the lawn, a cluster of thick-set security men surrounding the all-too-familiar Father of the Nation. It was the first time I had seen him other than in television news footage. He looked slightly smaller and more shrunken than expected. During my first stay in his country, when he was serving time in Pollsmoor Prison after his long spell on Robben Island, his name had been a mantra, an incantation. The distillate of hope and defiance, uttered by the masses to taunt the white authorities like a matador waving a red cape at a fuming bull.
“Mandela,” I said, immediately regretting such a gauche statement of the obvious.
“Madiba,” she said fondly, using his blue-blooded clan name, as if to re-affirm the implicit assurance that, in Mandela’s new order, there would be no levy of pain – no guilt tax – for his former jailers.
“Have you known Mrs Nyati long?” I whispered as the audience fell silent.
“A long time. From before. We met in The Struggle.” She leaned towards me, laying a hand on my arm to signal that we should be silent in such august company.
“And her husband?”
“He was murdered just after I met him. I only wish I had more time to spend with him.”
Four
“MR PRESIDENT,” LILY BEGAN. “Comrades, Excellencies, friends. Thank you all for coming to the Mother City, Cape Town. Thank you for your interest in our new struggle. In the past, as you know, we fought for our freedom and our democracy. That was our first struggle. Against apartheid.’
She pronounced the word with a half-smile and what sounded to me like a mocking snarl, stressing the final syllable as if squeezing the vowels in her throat, strangling her one-time oppressors with their own language. The sound, the word itself, left some of her audience uneasy, as if it were a breach of decorum to mention the unpunished crime in the era of reconciliation.
Beyond the podium and the pool area, the hotel’s December rituals were unfolding regardless of our earnest, self-absorbed gathering – the pampering of foreign guests, the subtle suggestions that nothing, really, had changed to upset the natural order. Bearing aperitifs and bowls of nuts and potato chips on silver salvers, waiters in white tunics and purple sashes slid between tables of guests from “overseas”.
Some of the men wore what might have been a uniform, gold-buttoned navy blue blazers and pale slacks – habitués of the great hotel’s luxury, migrating like birds to the warm southern summer. The women favoured floral frocks in pastel shades, offset with pearls, the tribal dress of their annual invasion.
Nothing in their manner betrayed a sense that Lily’s words carried beyond the magic circle of delegates held nervously in her thrall, certainly not to those clinging to a different spell altogether, cast in a time before people like Lily Nyati gave speeches on the sacred lawns of the Mount Nelson Hotel, named for a different Nelson altogether than the one who stood before us on the low podium.
“Now we have a second struggle, not with the oppression of the old system, but with the legacy of the old system.”
Listening to her, I imagined her as a schoolteacher, like her husband, chalking the letters onto a board: Oppression, Legacy – underscore O, underscore L. “For decades, for all our lives for most of us, we lived under the tyranny of the system called apartheid” – the word again, the capital A, the tremor of resurgent memory. Underscored.
“We lived with the Pass Laws and the Group Areas Act, the so-called homelands.” Underscore P, L and G, A, A and H. “We lived with the torture chambers and the sjambok. We lived in a police state where our only crime was the colour of our skin. Every day we were wounded a little bit more. We were wounded by our failure to throw off o
ppression. Our own children called us cowards. We bled from the cruelties of the system and our own impotence to end it. Today, that system is no more.”
She paused to drink from a water glass. Among the crowd of delegates and participants – black, white, foreign, local, drawn from the current and former regimes – murmurs of assent fell into a darker silence of memory, foreboding.
On the hotel terrace, happy hour ticked away. Second rounds were called for. Whiskery cheeks flushed; pearls nestling in modest décolleté glowing with the beginnings of demure perspiration. Condensation frosting tall glasses.
“Waiter, over here waiter, if you please. Same again. Chop chop, old chap!”
Lily Nyati punched a clenched fist into the air.
“The system is no more so we say: Viva to that!” she proclaimed. One or two people curled their fingers in agreement. Others exchanged bemused looks: where was all this leading?
“But we cannot say we are healed. Can we? Yes, we have our freedom, but our hearts are still wounded. Our souls bleed. And why? Yes, we have had commissions and inquiries, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The TRC.” – the chalkboard again – “But look at our beautiful country today. Look at the perpetrators, the collaborators, those who lived so happily with apartheid in their suburbs while we were slaves in townships. Surely, we say, surely they must burn now with remorse and pain. But how many of them really know what they did? How many think: oh, well, we got away with it? We did not have to pay and we are still here in our big houses with our maids and gardeners, our cars and our jobs? And for us, the victims, what do we have? Do our husbands open the door to greet us and say they are home? No. Because they are dead. Do our children rise from the grave to embrace us? While the perpetrators walk free we are left with our pain. We are not healed.”
She cast her eyes over a skittish, close-knit band of diplomats from European countries and the United States.
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