“I would do anything. I would lay down my life,” Theron said.
I did not think that the comrades outside would necessarily distinguish between his life and mine if his gambit failed.
“Would my husband kill you? If he had had this gun, would he have killed you when he could have?” Lily Nyati’s fingers roamed over the weapon. She clicked the safety catch on and off, a murderous metronome. Hypnotic. And left it off.
“I doubt he would think I was worth the effort.”
“And now what do you think of us? Do you think we are human now? Do you see what pain you have created? If I had killed your wife, would you forgive me? Would you receive me in your home?”
“No, I could not have. My heart is not big enough for that. You are better people than I am,” Theron said, his shoulders slumped.
“Go,” Lily Nyati said, as if suddenly tired. She clicked the safety back on.
“Celiwe, tell those people outside to go away. The show is over.” She laughed bitterly.
“I have asked them,” her daughter said. “But they refuse. They want vengeance.”
“Tell them. From me. From all of us. The widows. Tell them we want it to be over.”
Celiwe stepped outside again, grabbing the bullhorn she had used so skilfully in Cape Town. Dust rose from the war dance – young men firing up their passions as earlier generations had done in exactly this same place. Light flashed on a large blade. Columns of smoke rose from burning tires. Two tires seemed to be held in reserve, along with bottles of petrol. When I looked again, the distant Toyota had disappeared. Someone had grabbed Celiwe Nyati’s bullhorn and hurled it to the ground, crushed under the feet of the toyi-toyi dancers.
“We cannot leave,” I said. “Not everything has been said. He has told the truth, Lily. You must respond. You must say if his truth was enough.”
“The truth does not exist in a vacuum,” she said. “It does not heal all wounds. It opens them. Does his confession ease my pain, our pain? I see what you want. It is what you Americans call closure. All the loose ends tied up. He confesses. I forgive. He is free. I am free. But it is not like that. Life is not like that. Truth is not like that. Perhaps in your country where your lawyers make people pay for their sins in dollars and cents you can pay for the loose ends, too. But not here. There are too many loose ends, not enough dollars or even cents. We have loose ends from the slavers and from the Christians with their missionaries. We have loose ends from the traders and colonialists and the gold mines. And all that was even before apartheid, the mother of all loose ends! We have history and you arrive as if you can wipe the slate clean. Listen to them outside. Is there closure for them? The only closure they know is the toyi-toyi. An eye for an eye. It is their judgment that counts now. Not mine. Or ours.”
“You do not believe he was telling the truth?”
“If he was telling the truth, then he will be forgiven.”
“And me?” I said. “Have I done what you asked of me?”
“You have done more. You have done too much. You did the opposite of what I asked.”
I had come to the end of my arguments. Theron rose and Lily Nyati stared straight ahead as he walked towards her.
“Can I shake your hand, Mama Nyati?”
“Never,” she replied. “How can I forgive you?”
“Miss Nyati. Tell me what I must do.”
“You said you would lay down your life. Then prove it.”
Theron picked up his machine pistol and made a more to walk outside.
“Leave the gun,” Solomon Nyati’s daughter said.
A window smashed. Rocks rained onto the roof, a satanic hail.
“We must call the police,” I said.
“There will be no police today, not of the kind you imagine,” Theron said.
Lily Nyati picked up the telephone but the line was dead. She tried her cell phone and looked at it, baffled. “There is no signal.”
Twenty-Eight
THERON WAS DOWN. HE HAD LEFT the building with his hands held above his head in surrender. I do not to this day know why but I followed him. A Molotov cocktail landed at his feet, exploding in a bloom of oily orange smoke, but he walked on. You could smell the sweat, the burning fuel, the rage. The rocks came, hitting him in the chest and on the shoulders and in the groin. But he kept on walking.
In the crowd, the blades were drawn – long agricultural machetes, pangas freshly honed. A boulder the size of a soccer ball somehow flew at him. He faltered, stumbled, fell. He twisted around to look at me. I saw no fear, only the bewilderment of a prize-fighter who cannot grasp that all is lost. A hail of smaller rocks hammered at his ribcage. Somehow he rose again, first to his knees, then upright.
“Go back,” he mouthed to me. Blood sputtered from his lips and gums. The crowd closed behind us, locking us into their trap.
Theron’s tormentors grew bolder. They pushed, shoved, spat. With nowhere else to turn, he came to a halt. Someone produced a sharpened bicycle spoke, already dipped in blood, and punctured his arm. The fabric of the dove-grey suit, scuffed and dusty, darkened in a crimson ring around the entry wound. Theron closed his eyes briefly, then stared back at his executioners, the toyi-toyi dancers. A weighted club – a knobkerrie they called it – thudded down on his shoulder so hard that you heard the bone splinter and crack. He grunted, staggered. His knees buckled but he pulled himself upright, one arm aloft to shield his head, the other suddenly useless, hanging by his side.
He turned to me again and I saw the beginnings of panic. Perhaps he had imagined that his redemption would be quick, clean, one way or the other. But vengeance demanded a death as painful as any he had enforced on his victims. Above the crowd, passed from hand to hand, an unburned tire was moving towards him. A machete slashed at his lofted arm so that it, too, fell to his side and the tire coiled around his neck.
“Ah dear Christ,” I heard him say. “The necklace …”
Theron finally sank to the ground. His face was level now with a clear bottle held by one of his assailants. It was filled with petrol. Someone grabbed him by the hair and wrenched his bleeding head backward as the fuel was poured over him, as if in some macabre baptismal rite.
“Murderer!”
“Killer of Comrade Nyati!”
“Pig!”
The cries multiplied.
“One settler, one bullet.”
Then silence.
The leader of the group held aloft a cigarette lighter and made an attempt to strike it, ridiculously without result. You could smell petrol, sweat, urine, faeces. I knew where this was all leading but the great luxury of translating will into action had deserted me. I knew I had to escape but could not move. The crowd was too dense, my resolve too feeble.
I knew the petrol would soon blossom in a hideous flash and ignite the tire around his neck and his skin, burning it to the bone, like napalm, and the crowd would dance in jubilation and watch him turn to cinder. When I tried to push back, young men behind me pushed me forward, towards their fiery guillotine, the next in line.
It was not me, I wanted to say, I did not kill Nyati. Theron and I are not the same. Take him. Spare me. But sentence had already been passed.
Theron was praying.
“Onse Vader wat in die hemel is, laat U naam geheilig word.” Our Father, who is in heaven … The words came to me. I had not uttered them for a long time, but I did now. No one heard.
“Gee ons vandag ons daaglikse brood.” Give us this day our daily bread.
“Where is your God? Your God cannot save you. Boers have no gods.”
“En vergeef ons ons skulde, soos ons ook ons skuldenaars vergewe.”
“You have trespassed too much.” Laughter rippled through his executioners.
“Your prayers will not help you.”
“You will go to hell.”
“Lei ons nie in die versoeking nie.” Lead us not into temptation.
They took up the chant now.
“Go to hell. Go to
hell.”
“Maar verlos ons van die bose.” But deliver us from evil.
“Stop,” the girl said.
The crowd fell back.
Celiwe Nyati was carrying Theron’s treasured and trusted companion, his Skorpion machine pistol with which so many murders had been committed. She carried it at port with both hands before her.
She advanced towards him where he knelt. His shirt dripped blood from fresh wounds. A gash had opened the skin of his forehead. Dust and mud covered him, transferred from the boots and bare feet that had kicked him. Petrol formed runnels through the grime that coated his face.
She lowered the gun, taking its weight in her left hand, her finger extended along the trigger guard. No one spoke. No one danced. No one shouted slogans.
The young men hung back now, silenced.
Celiwe Nyati brought the gun barrel level with Theron’s head.
His voice was barely a whisper. “Do it now. Shoot. Please. For God’s sake.”
Then she extended her right hand.
“Take it,” she said. “Take my hand. For my father’s sake. Not for mine. Not for yours. Not for your God.”
Part Six
They had covered the bases. They had the electronic surveillance in place on the vehicle. All they needed was the signal, and that would come willy-nilly from the woman who thought she had escaped their attentions. Who thought she had been so damn clever.
Twenty-Nine
THE LETTER ARRIVED BY PERSONAL courier – FedEx or DHL – two months after my ignominious retreat. I was still licking my wounds, counting my blessings and secretly wondering if, against all the odds, I could salvage something from the whole debacle.
The episode outside the Nyati home had left me badly shaken. You can theorise all you like about the purifying fire of revolutionary violence, but when you encounter it, eyeball to eyeball, it leaves deep scars. I was moody, anti-social, reluctant to pick up the phone. I slept badly. The nightmares invariably transported me back to Cooktown as the object of the crowd’s rage in place of Theron.
Some of my Washington friends had gone so far as to suggest that I seek counselling for post-traumatic stress disorder. But how preposterous would that have been? My travails paled to insignificance compared to the havoc my visit had called down upon the others. In any event, I have never been easy baring my soul to strangers, certainly not on the basis of a cash transaction and a ticking clock.
The letter’s arrival made me jittery. My personal address was on very few circulation lists. Yet an anonymous man in uniform was at the door asking for my signature to hand over the package. I signed for it with some alarm. This time, there were no coloured birds or fishes.
I had not, in the end, decided to embark on a Cape-to-Cairo odyssey; or a visit to the Pemba Channel Fishing Club in Kenya to hunt for marlin; or a safari in Serengeti or the Masai Mara; or even a quick foray to the Victoria Falls and the tiger-fishing of the Zambezi. The options belonged to a previous existence when a certain stranger called Thomas J Kinzer had the luxury of time to be filled, before events and experiences burst in upon him, demanding that he somehow come to terms with them.
I fled Cooktown after the ambulance came for Theron. I dropped the rental car at the airport in George and took the first available flight north to seek a long-haul connection to Europe. Anywhere out of Africa – the final cop-out.
There was no effort to salvage any vestige of respect or friendship from that awful night on the deck of Zoë Joubert’s vacation retreat. Too much had been broken. So many lives had been turned upside down by the events I had so foolishly triggered, just as I had been one catalyst among many of even grislier events many years earlier when Nyati died.
So I ran.
I ran, stashing the beginnings of this volume in my carry-on.
I ran from Zoë Joubert and Faku and Nieuwoudt and Anna-Marie Theron and Vanessa van Rensburg – the whole lot of them. I ran from Jessica de Vere, née Chase. There was nothing we could say to one another that would revive what he had once had, or undo what I had precipitated.
Pandora’s Box. Genie’s bottle. Can of worms. Choose your cliché.
Even at the last moment, at OR Tambo Airport in Johannesburg, I thought they would stop me. I was a day over the limit on the visa and a lifetime away from its restriction to “Conference Purposes Only”. At the long gauntlet of exit booths, an immigration officer disappeared with my passport and I figured that maybe I would not escape without answering a whole raft of questions about incidents in Cooktown that had somehow made the local prints. But she returned quickly, rubber-stamping me out of the country with a speculative glance, comparing my clean-shaven photograph to the dishevelled fugitive standing in front of her. I looked around me, half-expecting to see Faku and Nieuwoudt in some dark corner, waiting to see me off the premises. Or worse. But there was no one.
On the flight I made no pretence of restraint. I was drunk and snoring before they brought dinner.
And now the letter.
It was handwritten in a graceful, almost calligraphic hand, suggesting a golden nib and expensive ink. The paper was hand-laid vellum, harking back to earlier times when serious amounts of thought preceded the commitment to words that could not simply be retracted at the tap of a cursor.
Either it had been drafted and re-drafted or written with great confidence and deliberation because there was no indication of corrections or deletions or revisions.
“Tom,
I’m not really sure how to start this and maybe I shouldn’t start at all. I’m still here in Plett. Everyone else packed up and went home pretty much when you did, so it’s a lonely old town. Mills was anyhow due a visit with Rod so there has been very little to distract me from my thoughts. I went for a long walk along the Robberg Beach today, past Chris and Jess’s place (I could see it was all shuttered and there are rumours that it’s on the market) and past our picnic spot, where, of course, there is no trace of all our fun and games: the ocean is a pretty good housecleaner. There have been massive storms, too, with huge rains that brought a spate of floodwater down the Keurbooms River, completely changing the landscape. After the flood-waters punched a way through, part of the old Lookout Beach was completely washed away and the bar near your old hotel overlooks a new mouth into the lagoon rather than that lovely, long beach. Some of the speedboats at the boat club were wrecked. There are whole new obstacles on the river where trees and logs have been carried along by the floods and dumped, like those dams that beavers apparently make. What do they call it – the pathetic fallacy? – when we project our feelings onto inanimate objects, although there was nothing inanimate about the storms. Still, they made me think of your visit among us.
I was always taught that you shouldn’t rush your feelings into words and, if you do, to leave them fallow for a while in a bottom drawer and look at them in the cold light of dawn. (Excuse the metaphors!) But I can’t do that this time. I tried to keep quiet, but I can’t. And I promised myself that once I had written there would be no censorship or edits or re-casting or excisions. That’s why it’s pen and ink. No revisions! The minute I finish this I will send it to you by courier so that there is no prospect of it getting lost. When – if – you finish reading you will understand why. I hope you will reply in kind without any one of your old diplomatic obfuscation. It will, incidentally, be the only copy so its destiny is in your hands.
Here goes.
When I last saw you, I was terribly angry. You had taken my world and deconstructed it without even trying to reassemble it. You had broken my trust and, I feared, my heart. You had betrayed me and everything I thought, or hoped, that you wanted for us. The relationships on which I had built my adult life – all my friends and, yes, lovers – were fixed in our little galaxy. We all knew our place, our orbits. We tolerated our myths and fibs and foibles. What had been was a past we all shared, a bond, held together by our common acceptance of one another’s flaws. It was, if you like, our treasure, our emotional pat
rimony. We didn’t need it thrown in our faces like kitchen dregs in some kind of cheap soap opera.
When I read the newspaper reports of the trouble you had caused for Lily Nyati, I was even more enraged. How could you bring the murderer to her home, the killer to her hearth? What on earth did you think you were doing? What trauma were you causing her poor daughter? I was not surprised to see articles saying you had provoked riots. You had inspired emotional violence here and then went on to Cooktown to stir up physical unrest. I confess that my feelings were self-serving. Of course I knew you as an individual – an individual who had tried to sweep me off my feet and had come pretty close to succeeding, who had reawakened so many feelings and hopes that I had submerged in the name of my work – although, as I think you guessed, the real motives lay in my protectiveness towards my beloved daughter. But, after the reports from Cooktown, I couldn’t help but cast you as the archetypal blundering American that the rest of the world sees in your nation, walking into situations you don’t understand, believing that whatever standards you would like to think obtain in your own country should apply universally. Well, I happen to believe that those great ideals of transparency and democracy of which you are so proud are very rarely followed in the USA itself. And your attempt to use my country as a test-bed for them was pretty brutish. Of course, in the spirit of honesty to which I have dedicated this letter – maybe confession is a better word – I should say that I was secretly relieved. Your inquiries had barely scratched the surface of what really happened, at least in my case.
Then I called Lily and, I have to admit, I got pretty confused. Her account of that awful day with you and Theron was completely different from the newspaper reports. I had not realised, in fact, how much she desperately wanted to hear her husband’s killer make his confession and his apology to her and the other widows. I had not understood the extent to which she seemed to think that you had redeemed yourself in her eyes not only with this apparently cathartic moment, but also in coaxing Celiwe into a frame of mind that her father would, I think, have welcomed. But most of all, none of the newspaper reports told the story that Lily told me. The press accounts all seemed to have been following the original “scoop” by that dreadful Gilliomee, an apartheid stooge if ever there was one. Maybe “script” would be a better word than “scoop,” because there was nothing fortuitous about it as far I can see. He had written it as if he had been there as an eyewitness with the police. But how could that have been?
Permanent Removal Page 25
