“They had made me memorise one single phone number in Soweto. I found a pay phone and called it. An answering machine. I spoke my location and hung up. The wound was not all that deep but it was aching. A second after I put down the phone my pager beeped. I was somewhat baffled. The little message screen said: ‘Now or never’. If anyone was monitoring the pager service, a coded message would look pretty suspicious. I had no idea what it could mean now that the mission had failed. I felt terribly vulnerable. If the police were looking for me, I had nowhere to hide. I stood out. Whites have homes to go to. They don’t loiter outside phone boxes. They have cars, trucks, 4x4s. My behaviour marked me as an outsider in a small country town. But then things began to move. A little boy came up to me – a black urchin maybe 9 or 10 years old, with dusty bare feet and the look of a glue-sniffer in his eyes.
‘You must come – now or never,’ he said, tugging at my jacket. I followed.”
The boy led her in a suburban street to where a scratched and dented mini-bus was waiting. She clambered into the back and was pushed to the floor. A blanket covered her. The vehicle moved off and a voice told her to be silent until the order came to step out quickly into a bare yard strung with wire. She recalled a line of laundry drying in a desultory wind, the scratch and peck of scrawny chickens, a maize patch. She took two steps from the mini-bus and into the kitchen of one of those matchbox houses that spread like rashes in the poor quarters outside Africa’s major cities – homes that, in comparison to mine in Washington, were tawdry cramped places. In the townships, where squatters lived in tin shacks, they were – relatively speaking – palaces. A black man in a white, doctorly coat raised a finger to his lips to indicate that she should be silent. He wrote on a notepad: “Please say nothing. You will be moved out tonight. But do not speak.” Then he paused and added: “Or scream. No anaesthetic.”
The man doused her wound in a mercurochrome antiseptic wash. He teased out bits of fabric and used an ear-bud to complete the cleansing. She bit her tongue and kept it bit as he took a sharp needle to stitch the whole mess closed. He finished with a pad doused in iodine and taped a dressing tight over it. Then he pulled off his white medical coat to reveal matching olive green pants and shirt displaying the logo of a local veterinary service. He handed her a pack of aspirin and left.
“A woman I had not noticed in the shadows of the kitchen took over now. She, too, gestured for me to remain silent. She took me into the main room of the small house and sat me at a table covered in oil-cloth with a faded pattern of pink and blue flowers. She brought me bread, butter, jam and tea. Her manner suggested she was used to waiting on tables for white people. I smiled but she turned away and I suddenly realised what risks she was running in taking in a fugitive from justice, for that is what she would be accused of if the authorities found me. Aiding and abetting terrorism. A very serious charge indeed. That day lasted forever. I was tired and I dozed a lot but my mind kept on computing the possibilities. Clearly the mission had been betrayed. But at what stage? And how much had been known at each step along the route that was supposed to have led from free Africa to the target in Secunda? Did the police know they were looking for a white woman, or not? Did they have a name? Did they know it was me? No one spoke to me. It was obvious that I was an embarrassment, a risk, a danger. If the police came for me, then my reluctant hosts would be taken in and might never return – a way of living that was familiar enough to black people at that time, but not to most whites, of course. My shoulder was throbbing. I worried about infection. I wanted antibiotics and medical attention. But I think I realised even then that I would never be able to ask a doctor at home to look at my wound; it would need too much explanation. I had crossed a line. I was on the run. The thought brought a frisson of excitement but it did not last for long. To be a terrorist in my country was to be hunted, condemned to a life of backward glances and perpetual fear of the 3 am raid and the door splintering open. Sorry. I will pause for now.”
The mini-bus returned for her after dark. It took her part of the way towards Johannesburg where her journalist contact awaited her in a less obvious vehicle, a late model Nissan. He was dressed as a gardener and asked her to drive while he sat in the back seat like an employee so as not to draw attention at the roadblocks. The mission, he told her, had been blown somewhere in Botswana right at the last minute. The local police had gotten wind of the whole plan and became determined it should be stopped. And stopped it was before it could go any further. Word had filtered back across the border. The South Africans had laid an ambush at the handover point but had not had time to put blocking forces in place to prevent her from fleeing. Their only chance of finding out who was supposed to pick up the freedom fighters was to capture the white pickup. If she had not thrown the 180-degree turn when she did, she would have driven straight into the trap. When her contact told her that, she pulled the Nissan over onto the roadside and vomited.
“Of course it was a dreadful secret. I could tell none of the Old Deep people what had happened. Did I trust them all? Not completely. Did I want to avoid putting them in an impossible situation? Certainly. If they knew what I had done, they would be complicit. If I was identified as the driver of the pickup, then anyone who shared that knowledge would go down with me. And not just at Old Deep. The trail led straight back to Solomon Nyati. If I was identified, then the whole non-violent campaign would be discredited. He would be unmasked as part of the armed struggle. White liberals would look gullible and exploited. I had to live with the secret. I could tell no one. And, of course, when I confirmed my pregnancy, there was one more identity to be protected – an unborn child. Daughter of The Struggle, fathered by a billionaire. Imagine how the Ray Gilliomees of this world would have had a field day with the little yarn. I was more surprised than you can imagine just a few weeks later when Solomon Nyati got in touch again, though the same intermediary, to say the time had come to forge a stronger bond between the townships and the white suburbs, or, at least, the kind of liberals who lived at Old Deep. I was worried. I tried to tell Solomon in any way I could that I was damaged goods, tainted; that they might be on to me. But the message came back: ‘Comrade Solomon knows what he is doing; trust him!’
Between us, we put on quite a charade.
I had to pretend that the initiative came from Jess Chase. Silly, really. I had a far better understanding of what was happening than she did, but still I had to pretend I had no direct line to Solomon. Cutouts, they called it, like the M-plan – cells isolated from one another, unaware of what the other was doing. The theory was that, even under the most extreme duress, you could not betray what you did not know. So I used Jess as my double bluff, to protect my own ties to The Struggle, to protect the Old Deep set, to maintain the fiction that I – their leader – was nothing more than a peaceful activist. Certainly not a closet terrorist wondering when she would be arrested. Think of the stories Jess would be able to write about that! Of course I had my doubts. I knew that people like Kobus Theron were cunning. They could well have identified me and decided simply to let me run to see where I led them. It was a double life. All I could do was to pretend. I spent a life acting out the part of the self-confident leader Zoë Joubert until that night on the deck. When Kobus Theron said they had located Solomon and the others through a surveillance device in the car, I was relieved that it was not I who had inadvertently tipped off the police to his whereabouts. Although I guess that may have been just one more lie. So there we are. You are the only one who knows all of it, at least as far as I can tell. Forgive me for placing that burden on you, but I believe you have more than earned the right to hear the story. The truth, the whole truth – if there is such a thing. In the spirit of this mea culpa, Tom, I wanted to add one thing. If there is any place left in your feelings for me (and there is no reason why should there be after the way I misled you) and if you would like to try to reset whatever it was we had, I just want you to know that I would never deceive you again.”
At some stage, I had transferred the whisky bottle from its place on an antique dresser to the small table next to my armchair. It was well down by the time I finished reading. The final paragraph of her letter brought back uncomfortable memories of Theron’s words as he and I left the deck of her holiday home.
“Maybe one day she will tell you the whole truth and nothing but the truth.”
Maybe Lily Nyati’s questions had finally been answered. To the extent that they ever could be.
Epilogue
NOT LONG AFTER ZOË JOUBERT’S letter arrived, another package of documents, transcripts, covert tapes and surveillance photographs found its way to me from a lawyer dealing with Kobus Theron’s estate. A covering note from Anna-Marie Theron explained that, after the doctors patched him together following the violence in Cooktown, her late husband had insisted on returning to work but he seemed to have lost his skills or his concentration. There had been a terrible accident. He had not survived. Death would have been instant. A red haze.
Her note enjoined me to read his files carefully. She concluded with the words: “So now you will know his burden. And perhaps now he has found peace.”
I have perused Theron’s trove, but I shall let my narrative stand where it does. There is no need to undertake a major revision on the basis of unsubstantiated evidence, plausible though much of it seems. In this chronicle, I have disclosed what I learned and know to be reliable and true.
The same adjectives cannot be used to describe Theron’s versions, although, looking back, I believe he did try to steer me away from my worst misconceptions. By now, we have all indulged our need for catharsis, and there are probably some secrets that need to stay that way, some imputations of guilt that would simply be impossible to bear.
But I did call Zoë Joubert.
I told her that I had been asked to teach a post-graduate course in Justice and Truth at one of our universities.
I told her that I would begin my lectures with a question relating to two white men driving into a South African township where they were not welcome. They were saved from an enraged crowd by an act of enormous courage on behalf of a victim. So whose justice had been served, if justice had been served at all?
I asked her if she would perhaps be interested in coming over to address my students. A professional assignment. Fees and expenses paid. No strings. But it would be so nice if we could meet again. Her letter notwithstanding. And, of course, I could offer accommodation if she would prefer that to some soulless hotel.
She arrived on a circuitous connection via Abu Dhabi, London and New York. She thought the navy blue Jaguar XKR a trifle ostentatious. She seemed amused by my affectation of denim jeans and leather pilot’s jacket. It did not really need to be said, but her offer of a reset had been gratefully accepted: our mutual deceptions cancelled each other out. We were quits.
She told me that Jessica and Chris de Vere had sold their home in Plettenberg Bay and relocated to a stuccoed terrace in London’s Belgravia with a vacation retreat in the Caribbean, far from Africa. Rod Harris was still the man Camilla embraced as her father, though Jessica de Vere had insisted on clandestine DNA testing of the girl and of her own husband. She kept the results in a private deposit box at her bank in Geneva, along with other land registry deeds, bearer bonds and equity certificates provided by Christian de Vere.
Riaan and Vanessa van Rensburg somehow bumbled along, the eternal unhappy couple.
Lily had launched a campaign calling for the repeal of the statute of limitations, but it had run into a wall of denial and refusal from the politicians. There would be no criminal proceedings against the killers who were denied amnesty, on either side.
Zoë Joubert brought with her a small file of newspaper clippings, some in Afrikaans, which she translated as we perused them. One – “Exclusive Eyewitness Report” – described in uncanny detail how a former American ambassador and suspected CIA operative, acting in direct contravention of visa restrictions, had provoked a riot that almost led to the necklace killing of a former South African police agent acting as his bodyguard. The officer was just days away from being freed from the burden of his past by a statute of limitations.
The headline proclaimed: “An American’s Shame in the New South Africa.” It was signed: “by Raymond Gilliomee”. Its description of the events that final day in Cooktown recalled a Toyota saloon that had disappeared from view before the mayhem stopped just short of murder.
We exchanged some of this information over dinner and some, the more intimate details, in the whispering hours before summer’s first light. I did not mention the Theron files in my wall safe. Perhaps, one day far into the future, I shall unseal them when they can no longer hurt her as much as they would right now.
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