“What will you do?”
“I don’t know. Maybe go overseas. Jeff said he’d help me out.”
“Really?”
“Anywhere is better than here, hey.”
“Cheers to that.” Alet clinked her beer bottle against Tilly’s. “Jeff and your mom knew each other, right?”
“Let’s go sit on the stoep. It’s cooler there.” Tilly grabbed two more beers.
Alet followed her to the back of the house. Tilly opened the glass door and all the windows of the enclosed stoep. She tucked her feet under her on the old couch. Alet took a seat at the other end.
“You didn’t answer me before.”
“Mmm?” Tilly stared out at the backyard, where the trees were becoming monochromatic in the twilight.
“Your mom and Jeff.”
“Oh. Um … she worked for him for a little while when he first bought Zebra.” Tilly changed her empty bottle for a fresh one. Alet had only taken a couple of sips of her first. “You know, the last time I spoke to her, we argued,” Tilly said. “I think Wednesday, maybe. It might have been Tuesday. You’d think I’d remember.”
“She was in the garden every morning. I should have noticed that she was missing. There was just so much kak going on.”
“It’s okay.” Tilly sounded removed. “I don’t blame you. She was difficult.”
Alet studied Tilly’s profile, trying to figure out how she was going to broach the subject. “Do you think, perhaps, I could take a look at her things?”
Tilly dipped her thumb into the mouth of her beer bottle, making a popping sound as she pulled it out.
Alet wasn’t sure if Tilly had heard her, or if she was just ignoring the request. She tried again. “I’ll be honest, we don’t understand any of this. Maybe there’s some clue in her past that can help.”
“Your colleague already ransacked this house. He came in here and … Do you know what it was like? Finding out what happened to her and then walking in here? Her whole life violated, thrown on the floor like it was garbage.”
Alet wondered why Mathebe had gone to such lengths, had been so uncharacteristically messy. She supposed he was trying to be thorough.
“You people.” Tilly’s voice was shrill, a subdued hysteria suddenly bursting to the surface. “You have prodded and invaded, worse than whoever did that to her.”
“Tilly—”
“She always kept to herself. Now the whole world has made it their business to lay her bare.”
Tilly hid her face in her hands, a low moan escaping from the pit of her stomach. Alet moved closer and put her arms around Tilly. Tilly shook her off.
“I’m sorry.” The words seemed meager. Alet sat quietly, waiting for Tilly’s guttural moans to quiet down.
Tilly slumped into a fetal position on the couch, her head leaning on the armrest, her knees pulled up to her chest, her arms disappearing under her body. “Do you know how it happened?” she said at last. “Did she … suffer?”
“She was strangled before the fire. I honestly don’t know if she suffered.”
Tilly pushed herself up. “I can’t do this. I have to go to work. Please lock the door behind you.” She walked into the house, leaving Alet alone on the stoep. Moments later, Alet heard the front door close.
“Do you have any idea what time it is? I have a family.”
Alet switched the cell to her other ear and glanced at her watch. “I’m sorry, Professor Koch, but something came up.”
“Let me take this in the study.”
There was a click on the line. Alet imagined Koch assuring his wife that a call at midnight was nothing serious. She looked at the items spread out on her bed. She had taken a box of Trudie’s personal things from the house, hoping Tilly wouldn’t miss them till morning. In the box she found an old biscuit tin with peeling green paint, filled to the brim with faded photographs. Alet had tried to arrange them in some sort of chronological order. As she trailed her eye from the beginning of the line to the end, a whole lifetime passed, pink-cheeked youth slowly disappearing, giving way to a gaunt adult face, the bloom of beauty progressively worn down by time. The early photographs were sepia, a blond little girl growing into adolescence. In the later ones Trudie always looked away from the camera, her hair color and style changing constantly. There was only one picture that had her facing the camera, taken in the seventies, judging by the bell-bottoms and long hair of the man in the picture with her. She must have been about the same age as Tilly was now. There was an expression of surprise on Trudie’s face, as if she’d been caught off-guard. The flash made her pale eyes look like they were shining, as if she was something ethereal, staring out at Alet through time.
“This couldn’t wait till morning?” Koch’s mood had soured considerably between his bedroom and his study.
“I have something here, Professor. I need you to tell me if it is possible.”
“Ja?”
Where to begin? “I’ve found personal photographs of the victim.” Alet picked up the most recent one. “She was in her forties or so when she died, right?”
“It’s hard to determine a precise age forensically after a person reaches adulthood, but I concur that it is possible.”
Alet thought of the last time she saw Trudie in the garden. Trudie always dressed dowdy, her clothes that of an old woman, her hair the same color as Tilly’s, tied in an old-fashioned knot, always covered by some sort of hat, her eyes hidden behind dark glasses. “What if she was older?”
“Well, there’s a range of about fifteen years.”
“No. I mean, what if she was a lot older?”
“I thought you identified the victim. Don’t you have a birth certificate?”
“Professor, you said she was a different species. Have you found out anything more about how she might have been different from us?”
“The genotype wasn’t compatible with that of modern humans, although the phenotype might have mimicked Homo sapiens closely. To determine the exact expression of the gene from the DNA is virtually impossible. I can only give you an approximation. I thought I explained that.”
“Listen, Professor, I almost flunked biology in high school, so just answer my question in plain English.”
Koch sighed. “I can’t. Not with any degree of certainty.”
“Okay. Let me put it this way. I have a photograph here of what looks to be a three-year-old girl before the First World War. This same girl is a teenager in the next photo, but it was taken in the late thirties. I have one of her in her early twenties, but her hair is in a beehive and she is wearing a miniskirt. In what looks to be her late twenties her bangs are teased so high she might have blown away if the wind caught her at the right angle. Now my fashion sense is dubious at best, but I don’t think anyone has gotten a perm on purpose since the early nineties. Shall I go on?”
“You’re sure it’s the same person? Not a family resemblance?”
“I’m not sure of anything anymore, but it looks like her. I need you to tell me if it’s possible.”
Koch was silent for a moment. Alet heard his breathing, the sound of pages being turned. “According to a recent study, older males have longer telomeres and this causes them to produce offspring who live longer. If there was a mutation of the sperm, the effect might be greater. I don’t know. This is speculation.”
Alet scribbled “telomere” in messy script on her notepad. “Can you confirm this from the victim’s DNA?”
“Doubtful. Another possibility is jumping genes. The signal to age might have been blocked. There are very rare cases of this happening, but it is usually accompanied by severe retardation.”
“Just tell me, is what I’m proposing possible?”
“Anything is possible. We haven’t even started glimpsing the possibilities of gene manipulation.”
“Okay. Thanks. Please let me know if you find anything else. Oh, and I’m sending you all the crime-scene evidence I could find on the older victims. Perhaps you can pull DNA,
see if they have the same … jumping thing going on?”
Alet hung up. If Trudie had aged more slowly than normal humans, it meant that she really was Lilly Maartens. Alet was wired. She needed to clear her head. She thought for a moment about the shooter from the previous night, put her holster on, and went for a run.
1980
Jacob
He woke up shivering on checkered linoleum. A generator droned outside the building. Above him a single fluorescent bulb flickered and buzzed. He tasted blood. Why was he naked? He struggled to remember. The ghost of electrodes on his penis, under his arms. The pain as the circuit was completed, electricity coursing through his body. He had bit his tongue. The man in shorts and vel shoes flipped the switch. There were three of them, maybe four, coming in and out, dust and burrs clinging to their socks. He had struggled to understand them.
“You don’t speak Afrikaans, my boy? You going to learn fast, hey.”
A buzz. Muscles contracting, threatening to snap, the sting rippling thick under his skin.
“For starters, why don’t we give you a nice Afrikaans name? What is with this English Jacob kak.” He sneered. “You look more like a Jakob to me. Plain old proper Boer name. YAH-kohp, ja?” Another buzz. His heart pounded, his veins on the edge of bursting.
The other man hunched down, looked him in the eye. “He looks like a moegoe to me, Goose. How’s about we up the juice. You’d like that, hey Jakob?”
“Nee, Baas.”
Buzz.
He had cut the wire fence, limpet mines in a sack flung over his shoulder. Letso crawled through first, then held the wire back for Jacob and the others. They planted the mines on gas tanks and watched from afar as the whole plant went up in flames, patting each other on the back for hurting the enemy where it mattered. Jacob had never seen fireworks, but in his mind that was what they looked like, a fireball lighting up the sky for freedom.
Letso was with him when the police found them. The other MK members had left for Mozambique already, but Letso wanted to see his girlfriend. At first the policemen seemed confused, as if they were expecting someone else at the Soweto house.
“What did you say your name was?” The clutch plate squinted, asked him to repeat. He called over to the other Dutchman. “His passbook says he’s Jacob Morgan.” Then, suddenly, they got excited, speaking goat among themselves. Jacob Morgan, known MK terrorist. They arrested him and Letso, took them with bags over their heads to this place. When was that? Days? Weeks? When the electrodes didn’t break him, they brought in a cattle prod.
“You going to help us, Jakob.” The man had caressed the shaft with fat fingers. His face was sunburned and he reeked of beer and braaivleis smoke. Two other men lifted Jacob out of his chair, holding him down prostrate over the table. “You see, my boy, I don’t really care if you live or die. But perhaps you can be useful.” One of them pulled his underwear down, he could not tell which. Hands gripped his flesh, holding his buttocks apart. He felt the steel prongs resting on his skin, as if the man was deciding what to do. Then it penetrated him. He felt flesh tear deep inside.
“Sis, man. It smells.”
“He’s full of kak,” one of them giggled.
It hit him, ripping through his spinal cord, crushing his brain, his body simultaneously shrinking and bursting into the room. His eyes couldn’t see, his ears couldn’t hear. All that existed was the pain’s thick grip on him, its limbs entwined with his, pulsating, wringing, stealing his breath, his light. When darkness came, he gratefully gave over to it. But then he didn’t die. He was still where they had left him, discarded flesh, used up, on the floor like dirty laundry.
A stranger sat on the chair, looking down on him. A rigidity prevailed in the way he dressed, the precise cut of his short hair and mustache, the calculating look. A man carrying death with him, Jacob thought.
“I know what you’ve done, Mr. Morgan,” the man said. “Your friend Letso told us all about it, see?”
Jacob lifted his head off the ground to look at the man, every tiny muscle protesting.
“But don’t worry. I understand what the ANC has done to you and your people.”
The man didn’t make sense. Jacob had trouble focusing on what he was saying.
“The people you think are liberating you, they are actually destroying you. You see, they are really the bad people here.” He smiled sympathetically. “They killed your mother, didn’t they?”
“No.”
“They had people there in Soweto. Gangsters. They started the violence, so kids would get killed, so their cause would seem justified. Isn’t that so?”
Not true, not true.
“They had snipers there that day. Shooting everyone who wanted to leave, making it look like the police. That’s what happened, isn’t it Jacob? Your mom was shot when you tried to run away. The police didn’t do that. It’s the ANC that likes lots of black bodies for the overseas cameras. They lied to you, see?” The man got down on his haunches next to Jacob. “They don’t care about you.”
The man put his arm around Jacob’s waist and helped him to a standing position. He walked Jacob over to the chair and lowered him into it. Sitting up was painful.
“I bet you think I’m full of it, don’t you? But Communists take the lives of innocent women and children. All I’m trying to do is stop them. Deep down you know that, don’t you Jacob?”
Jacob trained his eyes to the ground, afraid to speak.
“What happened in the MK training camps, huh? When you were there. How did they treat their own people?”
Jacob had slept in a tent full of teenagers like himself when he first arrived at Quatro in Angola. Young people arrived daily, eager to join the fight. During the day they were drilled hard, taught how to build bombs, how to shoot, but at night he lay awake, listening to the women cry while the guards raped them. Lephutsi had been fifteen when they’d shot him. He was stupid as a pumpkin, one of the commanders had said, and the name stuck. Someone had accused Lephutsi of being a spy. Jacob never believed it, but they had dragged the boy away, his eyes pleading with Jacob to say something, to save him. “Comrades, no! Is not true. I am with you. I fight for Umkhonto. Amandla. Amandla. Amandla.” Lephutsi’s desperate yells continued until a single shot rang out in the distance.
“You can work for us, Jacob,” the man smiled. “Be an askari. Otherwise the government will hang you for terrorism, you know. That job you pulled at SASOL? Bad news.” The man leaned against the table, staring Jacob down. “But maybe you think it’s noble to die for the cause.”
Jacob wasn’t sure what the cause was anymore. He swallowed the blood in his mouth. “What do you want from me?”
“We need someone in the ANC. You see what they’re up to and report back to me.”
Jacob lifted his head, afraid to ask.
“My name is Berg. Don’t talk to anyone else, hear? You help me, I’ll treat you well. You have my word.”
Jacob nodded.
A doctor was sent in. He had confusing thoughts, unraveling as soon as they shimmered in his mind. Perhaps his interrogators used this same doctor for all their prisoners. Perhaps he even knew what they did to Steve Biko. Jacob asked, but the doctor told him to be quiet.
Jacob was helped to a room with a bed and a Bible. The door was left unlocked, but he had no desire to escape. He was in bed with his enemy now. There was nowhere to run.
A month later, he and Letso crossed the border into Botswana, armed with a true story of torture and a flimsy story of escape. They were welcomed as heroes in the camp, adoration in the younger boys’ eyes, respect from the elders. Letso played the game well, lapping up the attention, but Jacob couldn’t look his people in the eye.
“It’s because of what they did to him.” Letso proclaimed when one of the commanders, Bongile, asked. “They do very bad things to comrade Jacob and me. But we never talked. He is a brave man, I promise you.”
Jacob could feel Bongile’s distrust, vivid as a hand running down the bac
k of his neck, eyes following his every move. Jacob knew that even when he was sleeping, Bongile kept watch in the dark. He thought about telling Bongile everything, taking his chances. But the Security Branch men had threatened him. The askaris called it “burning bridges.” Rumors would be spread in the community that they were traitors so they could never go back. Jacob didn’t think his dad would survive the shame of having a government spy as a son.
Within a week the order came that they were going back across the border, running a shipment of AK-47s to Johannesburg. Two other men, Rocky and Jonas, would go with them. Letso protested, but Bongile claimed he needed experienced men. They left at dawn. Letso sat in the front seat of the combi, Rocky drove. Jacob was in the back with Jonas, a surly older man. It was barely light out, heat squeezing the air dry.
“So you the guys who escaped from the Security Police?” Rocky rolled his window down, leaning his arm out the window, his hand resting lightly on the steering wheel. The drone of air rushing by swallowed his words.
“Yebo. That’s us.” Letso had a glint in his eyes. Jacob had seen it often since their return. He sank deeper in his seat, cringing at the thought of what would follow.
“Those ropes let you walk out of there?”
“Haw wena!” Letso looked mortally wounded. “We were prisoners. Valuable! No way they let us go.”
A smile played on Rocky’s lips. “Then how did you get away?”
Letso frowned, the cloak of drama and intrigue hanging over his suddenly erect shoulders. “We were cunning. Fast like the Thokoloshe.”
Jonas turned to Jacob, looking him up and down. Jacob broke eye contact first, focusing on the wind tugging at the edge of Rocky’s shirt collar in front of him.
“But what did you do?” Rocky’s tone shifted. “Exactly how did you escape?”
“I waited for night.” Letso seemed unaware of the menace Jacob felt from the other two men. “The whites were braai-ing. We could smell the food, hear them talk. They were drunk, very drunk, on spirits and beer. I knew it was our chance to chaile.”
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