Outside, the Cape light glittered. Inside, the bar languished in perpetual gloaming.
Shrivelled and sun-wrinkled, skinny as a retired jockey and mounted on a bar stool that seemed too tall for him, Ray Gilliomee had been a star reporter of the right-wing press, breaking any number of stories about divisions within black ranks, misbehaviour among the heroes of The Struggle.
It was he who had obtained the surveillance tapes of a particularly high-profile, mixed-race clergyman and anti-apartheid activist, reaching operatic climax with a white woman who was not his wife – infidelity across the colour bar, illegal in those days on several counts, not only chromatic.
It was Gilliomee who knew in advance that the state of emergency would be declared after Nyati’s death. He was the reporter who first glimpsed the police files on the murderous misdoings of the young men surrounding Winnie Mandela. Every story he wrote was big news. And every story worked to discredit the foes of apartheid.
He was also the author of a widely circulated series of glossy works offering the official version of the same struggle as had consumed Nyati and Joubert and the others – except that it had been from the opposite perspective. He had been granted unparalleled access to the army and the police who had stood on the front lines of Africa’s last racial war. He had drunk with them, caroused with them, shared hangovers with them and finally glorified them in books that were now mostly out of print, and certainly out of favour in this new nation that was quite happy to concoct its own history.
One of Gilliomee’s books interested me in particular – an account of the insurgency in Namibia in which Kobus Theron had fought as a young police officer attached to a shadowy unit called Koevoet before his deployment to the Cooktown region as the top cop in the security police detachment there. The name of the unit translated as crowbar. A blunt instrument, levering away an opponent’s protective layers of armour, smashing the soft innards to pulp.
The book was called The Valor of the Few, heavy with combat illustrations and printed on high-quality glossy paper that suggested covert sponsorship rather than commercial viability.
“Theron. De Kock. Tough guys,” he began after I bought a round of drinks and left a wad of notes on the chipped varnish of the bar. “Merciless. Followed their orders. And then some. Told me things that never went into the rag. Plenty of things. Should I have published and be damned? Maybe, but there was a code. They’d hint at things. Tell you where to be on what day if you wanted the scoop. But the other side of the bargain was that you didn’t write 90 per cent of what you heard. Sure there were the horror stories. We knew them. We kept them to ourselves. Who heard of the Vlakplaas farm while it was still operational? Who wrote the stories about gooks being dropped from helicopters? Without a parachute” – he paused and cackled. “Now, of course, everyone thinks they know what really happened. But not all of it. Not by a long shot.”
A white bartender polished the same tall beer glass for what seemed like the hundredth time. Something in his bearing reminded me of men like him in the old days with their sun-reddened faces and pencil moustaches whose job was to patrol segregated black townships in armoured trucks, armed with shotguns and sjambok whips.
“Then came the TRC. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission,” Gilliomee went on. “Hah! Some truth! And what reconciliation? We saw all these cops singing like canaries. It made interesting listening. Because we knew that they still weren’t telling the whole story, still hadn’t stopped telling lies. And we – the old hacks who knew better – we weren’t going to say anything either.”
“Theron, too? In the Nyati case?”
“You don’t want to know.” He took a swig of his brandy and Coke, rattling the ice cubes as if he was playing for time while he considered his words, or at least requesting a refill. For the first time in our conversation, he looked me straight in the eye, fixing me with a baleful, bloodshot gaze.
“I don’t know what your game is, Kinzer. But if you know what’s good for you, leave it. Forget you ever heard the name Theron. Take my word for it.” He tapped the side of his nose with his index finger.
The bartender was still polishing the same glass. I signalled for a top-up for Gilliomee and slid him a plain envelope containing the agreed sum for the purchase of his book – and then some.
He pocketed the cash – all in dollar bills as he had stipulated – with a rapid, fluid movement that seemed well practised.
“Has it changed that much?” I asked him. “Surely the new reporters are under the same pressures.”
“Maybe. But they are beginners. Amateurs some of them. Crusaders and all. They are trying to get it right. The whole truth and nothing but the truth!”
He laughed sardonically.
“Some of us like to keep our hands in. Freelance assignments. That kind of thing. Profiles of people we have met in bars. Advance obituaries.” He separated the word into component syllables. Oh-bit-choo-eh-ries. “You know what I am saying?”
“Character assassination, you mean.”
“At the very least, Mr Ambassador,” he said. “Like I said. They are still out there. Everywhere.”
It was time to move on.
Outside, the wind had scrubbed the afternoon sunlight bright and clean. Pondering my next step, I realised I had forgotten my copy of Gilliomee’s book and re-entered the bar.
The waiter was nowhere to be seen and the polished glass he had tended so assiduously stood on the mahogany counter, in lonely splendour, illuminated by a shaft of sunlight penetrating the gloom, catching motes of blue dust in still air that smelled of stale liquor and tobacco. Somewhere behind the racked bottles of spirits, I could hear the tones of an indistinct telephone conversation that sounded as if it was being conducted through a cupped hand.
As I took the copy of his book, Gilliomee tapped his nose again, nodding towards the source of the telephone conversation and raising his eyebrows for emphasis.
Leaving the bar, it was probably a trick of the searing light that made me think I recognised two men – one black, one white – cruising by in a late-model beige Toyota.
My final – and most difficult – call was to the consulate, which acted as a kind of embassy during the African summer when the ambassador and chosen staff members migrated south for the opening of the South African Parliament in the white, colonnaded building close to the ornamented expanse known as the Company Gardens. The tradition had survived the changes.
Even now, administrative personnel would be preparing for the session of debates and law-making that would open in a few weeks’ time. The outsiders would be preparing their switch from the highveld around Pretoria to the balmy, breezy beachfronts of the Cape, planning receptions and dinners to cement their ties with the country’s legislators and government ministers.
Since my time, the embassy’s diplomatic staff had changed many times over, rotating in and out every few years, but some personnel had remained, weathering the times of upheaval and transition.
One of them, Val Coetzee, had been a senior registry clerk – in effect the den mother of the local hire staff and an unofficial counsellor to generations of career diplomats seeking a path through the maze of official data contained in the mission’s files. She acted as PA to successive ambassadors, in effect the embassy’s institutional memory, the keeper of many of its secrets – not, perhaps, of those contained in the encrypted communications between the spies and their masters, to which she was denied official access as a non-American but, certainly of the kind of confidences divined from chance conversations, asides around the water cooler, sightings of documents that, technically, fell way beyond her security clearance.
Once, she had even allowed me a glimpse of the dossier relating to Jess Chase – an act of incipient intimacy, never to be consummated, after a breathless encounter at a staff Christmas party.
I was surprised at how little her voice over the telephone seemed to have changed. There was almost coquettishness to her acceptance of my invitation
for coffee at my hotel.
“Only coffee?”
When we met she smiled with a beam I remembered well. She wore an elegant, two-piece suit in a light gabardine material, cut close to her slender waist, her hair blonde and short, her skin tanned. She spoke with an accent that led back to her Afrikaans roots through overlays of her employers’ Americanisms. The more relaxed she became, the easier it was to hear the lilt of the platteland, the backwoods, where she had grown up, blind to the racial cataclysm building around her.
We chatted about our respective trajectories. She had heard, she said with some discretion, about my “voluntary early retirement”. Her tone of voice suggested commiseration.
I asked about her life since the time we had “served together” and was surprised to hear a rushed, blushing confession – it sounded unrehearsed – that her marriage had not gone well, that her husband had been the suspicious type and had not trusted her avowals of good behaviour on her absences from Pretoria in Cape Town.
“Of course, you knew he was in the security police,” she said.
Of course I did not. And neither had she told me. Even now, such conflicts of interest could ruin a career for someone in her position and she hurried on with her narrative. After the break-up her husband had taken up with the widow of a neighbour killed in one of the South African military campaigns in Angola. For her part, she had raised their children as a single mother. Now her beloved boys had gone their way, both of them working in Britain as waiters with their degrees in engineering and psychology gathering dust in their bottom drawers while their own country sorted itself out. Her job, she said, was what counted now. She could not do anything to jeopardise that. The current ambassador was a stickler for procedure, she said. No peeking at the files anymore. She smiled as she spoke, but the message was clear enough.
“And the archive?”
“Gone,” she said.
“Onto micro-fiche, diskettes?”
“Just plain gone,” she said. “I was sure you would have known this. After Mandela’s release, we weren’t the only ones. A lot of embassies did it. Men from Washington came in and boxed everything up. All the old files. The whole lot.”
“But you always had a good memory, Val.”
“That depends on what I’m supposed to remember and what I’m supposed to forget.”
“I’m interested in a bunch of young white people. It’s for a conference report. Historical stuff. They lived outside Jo’burg in a place called Old Deep. Zoë Joubert was one of them.”
“Wasn’t she the student leader? Married to a poet. Rod. Rod Harris. Rodney Harris. His poetry was banned, of course. There was a file. A cross-reference to someone else.”
“Solomon Nyati?”
“How did you know?”
“A guess. Kobus Theron? Ring any bells?”
She looked sharply at me. The humour drained away from her voice, replaced by a wariness I could not quite explain.
“My ex did mention that name. Terrible things. Terrible. And there was something in the files they took to Washington.” She glanced at her wristwatch.
“I have to go – tempus fugit,” she said. Her accent became more clipped, like a suburban housewife trying not to speak too sharply to a clumsy maid.
“Did the file say anything about Nyati’s death?”
“I really wish you would not ask me. You know there are orders sometimes that you don’t just go around disobeying. You of all people should know what happens.”
She took a business card from a crocodile-skin purse and wrote a cell phone number on it. She smiled in a way that was half warning, half invitation.
“Call me if you want to just chat. But no more questions, hey, Thomas? Promise me. Things have not changed here as much as you might think – or as much as Mr Mandela might think. You are treading on thin ice.”
When I returned to the hotel room, the phone was ringing and Zoë Joubert was talking to me.
“I have an answer of sorts for you. We’re having a party,” she said. “Why don’t you come along and meet my friends? And be a friend, Tom. Just a friend… Can you do that for me?”
Of course I could, I said, crumpling Val Coetzee’s phone number into a ball in the palm of my hand. My life seemed to be filling up with people who wanted to set very clear markers. Conference purposes only. Conversation without questions. Friendship without prospects.
As I lowered the phone to its cradle, it rang again. I thought it might be Zoë Joubert calling to change her mind.
“Now don’t you go …”
“Don’t go doing what?” Lily Nyati said.
Nine
THE MAIN HIGHWAY TO PLETTENBERG Bay, the N2, leads through towns with main streets wide enough to turn a span of oxen – across the Breede River to Riviersonderend, Heidelberg and Riversdale, then on, over the Groot Brak River, bypassing Mosselbaai and George until the final stretch on what they called the Garden Route, alongside the great lagoon at Knysna leading through a turbulent passage called The Heads, into the Indian Ocean.
My plan was to see a different, less manicured part of the country, along the dirt roads meandering through indistinct places in the Overberg, where the dust devils rose to herald the approach of distant vehicles and you wondered whether the single telegraph wire, strung on spindly roadside poles, carried any signal or intelligence at all.
Was there some vestigial notion of tradecraft in the instinct to avoid the obvious route? (During my time as ambassador, my security detail had always spent what seemed a disproportionate amount of time devising unpredictable itineraries.)
Or was the decision to take this more circuitous approach simply a way of preparing for my reunion with Zoë Joubert, allowing me to compute my options, steady my nerves?
The tiny settlements in this great, broad expanse boasted names that suggested a fantasy world, as if strange things had happened and would happen again without clear explanation. One hamlet was called Baardskeerdersbos – beard-cutter’s bush – another Wolvengat, the Wolf’s Lair, where an artistic colony had established itself, offering sculptures, reflexology and vegetarian Indian cuisine. Strange creations in iron and stone rose in fields fringing single-storey homesteads with old tin roofs. It was easy to ask: why here? Which wolves were prowling now?
I had flown over the region many years earlier and had been struck by its white beaches and curling surf and its long, uninhabited stretches where flowers blossomed in the local undergrowth, the fynbos.
The guide books told me that, at Cape Agulhas, a plaque had been unveiled by President PW Botha in August 1986, informing visitors that they now stood at the southernmost tip of the African continent. I wondered how Botha felt that day, looking south across the blank fury of the ocean while, at his back, his country burned with fires set by those who had taken Solomon Nyati’s mantle after his murder?
My journey would proceed on unpaved roads, touching Cape Agulhas with its lighthouse hooped in red and white, and odd places like the Malgas Ferry, where a small crew of boatmen pulled a pontoon across the Breede River on the unpaved by-ways between Napier and Swellendam.
I had planned to travel alone, but, Lily Nyati persuaded me otherwise.
“You can give Celiwe a lift,” she said over the phone, after we had completed the formalities.
“Happily. If she wants to.”
“She wants to, I know,” the mother said. “She wants to meet anyone who met her father. She was too young.”
“Is she going to Plettenberg Bay?”
“Ha!” Lily Nyati laughed at the very suggestion of her daughter at such a place. “Plett! Jo’burg-by-the-sea! Apartheid-without-the-guilty-conscience! You will see. Not too many formerly disadvantaged South Africans go to a place where the formerly advantaged still have their place in the sun.”
She laughed, but without malice.
“Drop Celiwe at the Intercape bus at the Shell station there and she will go on to PE and then Cooktown. You will save her time and money and you ca
n talk.”
“You have seen the newspaper?” she said, changing the subject abruptly. I admitted I had not. Too intent on my own private inquiry, I had ignored the public prints.
“You should be alert, Thomas,” she said in her stern, school-ma’am voice. “If you want to find out you must be on your toes. You should read the story about the statute of limitations.”
She pronounced the term with lugubrious irony. I caught the school-room inflection. S, underscore, L, underscore. “Perhaps they have got wind of you already. Now they are saying there will be a statute of limitations. Soon, in our Parliament. The people’s Parliament.”
She laughed again, this time with the same bitter tone as had suffused her speech to the conference gathering on the lawns of the Mount Nelson Hotel.
“So the Parliament of the people will pass a law – this week, next week, whenever – to say that the unsolved cases from the TRC will just disappear. And the people’s Parliament will let the people’s oppressors go free. You do not have much time. But time to take my daughter closer to home.”
Celiwe Nyati arrived at my hotel a little while after I had checked out, impatient to be started, already annoyed at falling behind schedule so early in the journey. She was wearing the same skirt and T-shirt, both freshly laundered, as when I first met her in the gardens of the Mount Nelson Hotel. She carried a small, inexpensive tote and a Pick n’Pay supermarket plastic bag containing what she called padkos – food for the road – which Lily had insisted she bring along.
A bell-hop offered to carry her bag, but she hissed something in their shared language and he stepped back as if scalded. A floor manager – a white man, as it happened – asked whether she had a reservation and found himself facing a look of such scorn that he apologised and called her ‘madam.’
“Madam is a term used by maids,” she said haughtily, this time in English. The man gasped. His underlings sniggered. “Are you a maid?”
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