Permanent Removal

by Cowell, Alan S.

  “But …”

  “No buts,” she said.

  Thirteen

  I AWOKE MUCH LATER THAN planned. The day had already advanced far beyond my usual hour. I threw open the drapes and recoiled from the acid intensity of the light. The sky was cloudless and below it, the view I had seen by moonlight seemed all the more breathtaking, as if the sun had etched every detail, every curling crest of surf, every sweeping line of dune and mountain.

  A stretch of white beach, now flecked with bright parasols, led to a gap of perhaps 100 yards where a treacherous tide rushed in and out of the Keurbooms Lagoon, forcing its way through a curving channel, washing over the shallows that skirted it.

  Through my field glasses – a gift when I first left for Africa from friends who apparently believed I would be on some kind of permanent safari – I scanned a more distant shoreline, where a man cast a line into the surf and stood back, holding aloft a long fishing pole. A child dug a hole in damp sand. Both wore shorts and wide-brimmed sun hats. A woman in a yellow swimsuit stretched out beside a blue tent – tanning and reading next to a red cooler box. Otherwise the entire beach, miles of it, was deserted.

  On the lagoon, pleasure boats – inflatables and compact cabin cruisers with outboard engines – churned the waters into pristine wakes, or bobbed at anchor, fishing poles sprouting like the antennae of oversized crustaceans. Closer to me, just below the hotel across gorse-covered rocks, a beach restaurant was starting up for the pre-lunch crowd, its tables filling under dark green canopies designed for shade. Waiters and waitresses in black pants and white shirts wove a slinky-hipped way through their clients bearing jugs of beer and pots of grilled shrimp.

  Looking at them through binoculars, still clad in a hotel bathrobe, I felt oddly embarrassed, as if I might be accused of voyeurism.

  A few hours earlier, as I left her villa, Zoë Joubert had invited me to join her and her friends for a picnic at a beach they called the Robberg. I would need beach clothes and sun lotions.

  The late hour left me little time for the morning’s errands.

  I walked up quickly from the hotel towards Main Street, past a curiously English-looking church – St Peter’s – in rough brown sandstone, set in a stand of blue gums. The gate to the churchyard was a virtual replica of those bucolic lych-gates you would expect to see in an old movie set in Dorset or Devon or some other place in England in the 1940s with Spitfires or Lancaster bombers roaring overhead. A signboard set out the timetable for the forthcoming Christmas services – midnight mass, family Eucharist.

  In the town I had seen fliers advertising carols on the beach, by candlelight no less. Such fervour amid the pagan decadence, the sun worship! I imagined the church in the off-season – boarded-up, its notice board empty save for a couple of forlorn drawing pins, its pews and altar dormant, dusty, awaiting the recall to life as the visitors of the African summer rolled in from the goldfields farther north, their Mercedes and BMW SUVs bulging with offertory.

  More likely, of course, the church would be open for its regulars all year round – quietly, modestly – its priests living in a mixture of fiscal joy and spiritual dread at the thought of the seasonal worshippers swelling the collection purses and transforming the line of communicants into God’s traffic jam.

  Now, as I walked on, past the Steers burger bar with its population of pre-teens, towards the CNA bookshop and Foschini’s fashion store, I thought of those believers – Tutu and Mkatshwe, Chikane, Naude, Boesak – who had taken their crosses to the barricades. I had once been present, purely by coincidence, when security officials in Johannesburg’s Jan Smuts Airport (as it was then called) sent Desmond Tutu back and forth through the metal detector as he sought to board a flight to Cape Town.

  He was the only person the police body-searched. He was the only black man in the line, the only Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, the only man to trigger the metal detector with a pectoral cross.

  Did they think it was a weapon, he said to no one in particular. (Of course, with his interpretation of the faith, the cross was indeed the greatest of weapons.) In his lecture accepting the Nobel, Tutu had proclaimed: “Let us work to be peacemakers, those given a wonderful share in Our Lord’s ministry of reconciliation. If we want peace, so we have been told, let us work for justice. Let us beat our swords into ploughshares.”

  The line for security clearance at Jan Smuts, offered the rejoinder.

  I made my purchases – a cooler box, outlandish surfing clothes, smoked trout, wine and beer – and returned to load my plunder into the rental car. A hotel concierge in an unseasonal dark coat stood over it, as if on guard.

  “Skollies,” he said. He pointed to the tires. All four of them were flat. One had been clumsily slashed and the others apparently deflated.

  “We are very sorry,” he said. “It has not happened before.”

  Was it just a coincidence after the episode on the dirt road at Elim, or, perhaps, a warning shot for straying beyond “conference purposes only”? Or, like the man said, just plain old vandalism, the kind you got everywhere? Even in places where the plots never thickened.

  The concierge offered to be in touch with the rental company to have the car replaced or fixed. I handed him the keys and started down a wooded path past signboards telling walkers to beware of thieves and other skulduggery.

  As I turned to look back at the hotel, I thought I saw in the distance a beige Toyota pulling away. But South Africa was full of beige Toyotas.

  The Robberg Beach stretched towards a hump-backed peninsula bearing the same name, a curve of sand and surf abutting rocky redoubts where seals flubbed and flopped and honked on cliffs above the sea, fighting for the high ground occupied by the great cantankerous alpha males while lesser creatures perforce contented themselves with lower shelves of sand-coloured rock, closer to the water where they sometimes provided sustenance for Great White sharks.

  Zoë Joubert had chosen a picnic location at the far end, easy enough to reach by car, but a slog on foot. I felt I might just as well have been setting out to cross the Sahara for all my chances of arriving on time.

  The promontory formed the southernmost horn of the great bay from which the resort took its name, stretching from the tip of the peninsula back, past the squat ziggurat of the Beacon Island Hotel towards some distant point beyond which lay another resort called Nature’s Valley.

  Even further, visible only in the imagination, lay the wild coastline leading on to Port Elizabeth and East London and Durban and, ultimately, as Africa’s cartography curved north, to Mozambique and Tanzania, Kenya, Somalia. Since delving into the transcripts of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, my mental GPS had marked another waypoint – Crystal Sands, where Nyati died – but I did not dwell on the thought.

  Rising sharply from Robberg Beach, thick ramparts of brush held the dune in place against the wind and the rain of the off-season. Narrow wooden staircases and paths with handrails provided discreet access to the rows of mansions occupying the front line between the land and the sea, between Africa and ocean.

  High above, with echoes of the Hamptons, were the villas of the local aristocrats, Chris de Vere among them, where the elite unwound as staff members made beds and cleaned rooms, laundered clothing, marinated prawns, unloaded comestibles, set out buckets of ice, filled fridges with bottles of white wine, sliced limes and lemons and collected errant newspapers and mislaid coffee cups and glasses smeared with lipstick from low poolside tables.

  Jess was ascending towards a substantial residence, painted in white with bright blue shutters. She had turned to look back at the relentless, cresting surf. She was wearing a short, white blouse over a dark, wet bikini – the strap had left a visible water mark across the back of her shirt.

  She carried a rubberised, black swimming cap in one hand, a beach towel in the other. Her black hair had sprung loose. Her tanned legs still glistened from the sea. The lower part of the bikini clung to taut buttocks that I remembered with a physical jo
lt. I waved and she made as if to return the gesture, then lowered her hand abruptly and turned away, resuming her ascent of the stairs, quick and busy. She did not look back to see what had become of me in my ludicrous disguise, my cover as a vacationer of no sinister intent, with cooler box and baggy shorts to prove it.

  My gaze followed the line of the stairs, up through the delicate, intricate vegetation of the fynbos. The path contoured around, below a battlement of hedge and lawn outside the big house. The blank monocle of a brass telescope peered directly at me, as unflinching as the barrel of a tank cannon. I could not make out who stood behind it in the shade of a white canvas awning. The whole episode was over in a matter of seconds, but it crystallised as a moment of foreboding, a harbinger, somehow, of hazard.

  I found the night’s revellers re-established in a colony of beach umbrellas, towels, kikoyis, cooler boxes, drinks cans, wine bottles, paper plates, children and the flat body-surfing equipment called boogie boards that allowed the more athletic to catch the waves and hurtle towards the shore. Some of the exchanges, I imagined, would be the codas to last night’s conversations, themselves merely the latest reworking and revision of themes broached decades earlier.

  Old Deep was an impenetrable, uncharted terrain of liaisons, cross-references, subliminal connections. Without a compass or guiding star, outsiders intruded at their peril. But I had blundered in now, for better or for worse.

  Zoë rose to meet me, looking quizzically at her watch. I apologised for my lateness, rubbing the stubble as if the gesture offered some kind of explanation.

  “I thought you weren’t coming,” she said. “We missed you.”

  “How could I not come?”

  “You walked? I’m sorry. I could have given you a lift.”

  “I’ll remember that next time,” I said. It seemed inappropriate to go into long explanations about the rental car. All that mattered was that she – or some undefined we – had missed me. Missed me!

  “Swim?” she said. “You look as if you need it. In a nice way, of course.”

  I lowered my paraphenalia onto the sand and spread my towel on the fringes of the group, making camp beyond the protective perimeter. Following her advice, I headed for the waves, but on the way to the churning, pounding water, the sand was so hot it burned my feet.

  I thought for a moment of turning back but was persuaded to continue when I heard the croak of Riaan van Rensburg’s voice singing an old Beach Boys classic. He had reached a line, urging me to find a new place and was guffawing. I thought some others in his group were laughing, too, presumably at my unfamiliar attire – long, loose-fitting shorts and a tight, protective top accentuating the paleness of my skin. Or, more likely, at some insider joke they had shared many times.

  I ploughed on, diving, finally, into the surf and relishing the brisk shock and scrub of salt water. Zoë Joubert followed me, hand in hand with the same girl I had last seen reading a magazine in the hotel room in Cape Town, who now interposed herself between me and her mother, entwining her arms around her and turning her back to me as the waves lifted them to their peaks and lowered them to their troughs.

  Zoë Joubert looked down at her daughter with loving eyes and then she looked at me with what I took to be a plea for understanding. I never saw the wave that caught me and pushed me down into the seabed so that I came up gasping for air, my hair full of sand.

  “You know,” Riaan van Rensburg said when I returned to my towel and cooler box, “it’s much quicker if you drive. Something wrong with the car?”

  Fourteen

  WE WERE SITTING CLOSE TO ONE another on beach towels. The ocean tang mixed with other odours – suntan cream on warm skin, wine, cigarettes, and marijuana. Someone – a straggler tardier even than I – brought the day’s morning newspaper which arrived around noon from Cape Town. I espied a headline:

  “Nyati Widow Rejects Probe Curbs.”

  Lily had gone public with her opposition to the statute of limitations.

  The article explained that the legislative proposal had the support of a high-ranking group of political leaders and wealthy business types who had prospered from a programme called Black Economic Empowerment designed to expand the white monopoly on corporate wealth. A new law would draw a line under the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s findings. “In the interests of racial harmony”, there would be no further inquiries, no right to re-open cases deemed closed, although pre-existing criminal cases would be heard.

  A vote was scheduled in Parliament within days. “Analysts” – those mysterious figures beloved of reporters seeking anonymous attribution for their own gut-feelings – forecast that the law would win easy approval. No one wanted to raise the phantoms. No one except Lily. And, by extension, Thomas J Kinzer, her unofficial, unannounced ghostbuster.

  The topic was one that would naturally interest the Old Deep set – one of them in particular: if the law was approved, it would no longer matter who had betrayed Solomon Nyati.

  Back at the hotel, before my sortie to the beach, I had planned to use the stash of stationery purchased in Cape Town to open files on each of my suspects using codenames to shield identities from prying eyes. It was, I suppose, a reflexive gesture and the names were none too subtle, or flattering: Fatboy (Van Rensburg) and Rugby-boy (the lawyer Ferd), Poet (Rod Harris, Zoë’s ex), Cobra (Kaplan, another lawyer) and Professor (an academic from Durban called Porter). Certainly Jess would have to be in there, and Zoë, too. (Codename “Venus?”) But what about me? Was I somehow a player, too? Codename TJ?

  Rugby-boy was a tall, powerful man with broad shoulders and a big chin that needed a shave – the sort of fearless, hail-fellow type you would choose as a companion for a long, unpredictable voyage into uncertain territory.

  Cobra, slender, saturnine – better met at the end than the beginning of a precarious journey – had been a young lawyer with an uncanny knack for the high-profile case that brought the television cameras along with the dry, legal hearings, turning the fierce spotlight of global publicity onto the sins of the regime.

  He had a look of unbearable arrogance and I wondered if his friends found this appealing or simply tolerated him as the unfortunate adjunct to his effervescent wife. Cobra – Maurice Kaplan to his clients and colleagues – had a habit of tilting his head backwards to scrutinise his interlocutor through hooded, half-closed eyes. (The inspiration for his codename was not hard to figure.) He spoke with a languorous drawl. And, like Rugby-boy – Ferdinand Walker, a.k.a. Ferd – he had no objection to responding to the honest inquiries of an earnest American: no one can resist re-telling the final version of their finest hour, particularly when gilded by selective memory.

  Throughout my professional life I had believed that curiosity is the greatest flatterer; that sincere questions disarm even the most guarded interlocutor. So what was it like, back then? How did you get by when the system was stacked against you? But how many of these versions were camouflage, false trails to cloak betrayal?

  Even Zoë Joubert leaned forward to catch the exchanges between us, though she must have heard the rationales and exculpations a thousand times. As she did, she smiled at me, seeming happy that I was so fascinated by their common history. My spy’s guts squirmed in shame.

  “You see, Tom, you had to make your mind up whether you would stand up and be counted,” Rugby-boy was saying.

  “Think of pre-war Germany if the Germans had collectively said no to Hitler, or the Romanians under CeauSescu. Think of your civil rights movement – if you say you have a dream then you have to take the risks to make it come true. You know, most people didn’t stand up – not in our society, not the whites. It was too easy not to, too easy to take the bait – the houses, the cars, the security. Apartheid was a welfare system. The whites, the Afrikaners especially, got the jobs on the railways, the mines, the post office, the whole state infrastructure – police, army. But that was only one side of the coin. Apartheid produced a national schizophrenia, true separation not j
ust physically but in the mind, the soul. The result was that life and death took on different meanings for both sides. I’m talking about black lives, black deaths. Steve Biko, Hector Pieterson, Matthew Goniwe, Solomon Nyati. There was a white politician, Jimmy Kruger, who said the death of Biko left him cold. Cold! That was not just callous, not just indifferent, it was blinkered, blind stupidity, as if you were on the Titanic and you said the iceberg left you cold. Which it did of course.”

  Cobra took up the refrain, speaking with a particular intensity, his eyes widening hypnotically.

  “You could make your choices, but you had to put them into effect and that was the hard part. Of course we all opposed apartheid, hated it. But how were we to oppose the system in a meaningful way? Where could we make a difference? There’s a sense now, especially for you foreigners, that The Struggle was all black–white, but it was never that simple. There had always been whites like Helen Suzman or Beyers Naude and Helen Joseph. But they were pretty high profile. What about people like us? Young. Students. Would-be professionals. When we tell people now that we fought in The Struggle, too, they look at us as if we are crazy. But we earned our place.”

  Cobra paused to run the tip of his tongue along the adhesive strip of a Rizla paper in which he had rolled a blend of tobacco and marijuana, placing a thin curl of rolled cardboard at one end and twisting the other into a fuse.

  “So, yes, we could defend people – pro bono of course. We could ensure that what little law obtained was used. We promised legal redress, even achieved it sometimes. But was it enough? Not all of us were lawyers. How could we associate ourselves with the real opposition, the comrades, the ANC? Throw bombs? Fire Kalashnikovs? Go for training in Moscow and East Berlin? Angola? Do you remember the necklace executions – death by incineration with a car-tire around your neck after a summary decision by a people’s court and sometimes not even that courtesy, just the mob demanding the same conclusion as the hanging judges of white justice? The modalities varied. The instinct was the same. How could we join a struggle in a less violent way?”