The Mandela Plot

by Kenneth Bonert

  HaShem means The Name. The real name is too holy to ever say aloud.

  The next week when I don’t go to shul, Ma asks me why, and I tell her it’s because I don’t believe in The Name anymore.

  The Nightmare

  5

  I’m doing my Playing—my most secret thing—in the garden when I hear the big gate being opened and the car pulling in. We have two gates, both made of steel with spikes, both always locked, obviously. It gives me plenty of time to stop and go inside, but I stay cos I’m so curious. I hear the main gate crashing closed, then a car door slamming, voices and footsteps. Now the inner gate is being unlocked and they walk in—for these few seconds as she comes around on the garden path I have the new girl all to myself. I’m ready to look bored, standing there. I knew it was ganna be a girl, but when I see her it’s like all my blood turns into one solid thing and then someone invisible starts banging a hammer against it. Coming toward me is a full-grown woman, a serious beauty. She has that Middle Eastern look of black curly hair and olive skin with plump red lips. She’s got big round ones under her tight T-shirt and her hips are wide in those green knickerbockers and I see an ankle chain above open shoes with glittery straps and giant cork soles. She’s got a rucksack on her back and a suitcase in each hand.

  It’s December 1988 and, God almighty, I cannot believe my luck.

  After she’s unpacked in the Olden Room she joins us at the supper table, sitting in Marcus’s old chair, and tells us her name is Annabelle Justine Goldberg, but call me Annie, uh? Please. And let’s see, I’m an anthropology major at Columbia, which is in New York City, USA. And she’s real excited about the teaching position she has arranged here in Johannesburg, South Africa. Her accent is TV and movies. It’s Demi Moore, Michael Jackson, Sly Stallone, Dallas-Dynasty. America! It’s juicy coolness exploding in her mouth compared to how we swallow all our words like we’re ashamed of them.

  “Teaching where, at Wits?” asks Arlene.

  “University? No-oh,” Annie says. “Elementary school.”

  “What’s that, elementary?” Isaac asks. “Izit nursery school?”

  “I think she means primary school,” I say.

  “Oh yeah,” Annie says. “I mean primary, like early grades?”

  “And whereabout’s this school?” Arlene says as she double-stabs the potato salad with wooden spoons.

  “Julius Caesar,” says Annie. “It’s a township?”

  Arlene freezes in her murdering of the potatoes and just stares at Annie for like ten full seconds, I swear. It’s Arlene who brought this Annie here. Arlene’s been a member of the Johannesburg League of Lady Zionists for donkey’s years and when they asked around for a host family to take a Jewish foreign exchange scholar for a few weeks, she went ahead and volunteered us. She said with Marcus away and Gloria passed on and still unreplaced because of Isaac’s insane stubborn refusing to let us get another maid, the house was empty enough for a guest. The shock to me was how Isaac didn’t start up another round of the shouty screamings over it. He just sort of shrugged. Maybe he’s sick and tired of arguing—there was just so much of it after Marcus did his disappearing act, it took such a long time to reach this Quiet Age as I call it. During the Age of Arguing I started calling them Isaac and Arlene instead of Da and Ma. It was my way to try and remind them to act like grown-ups. As far as I’m concerned, now that I am nearly seventeen years old, we should all be adults in this household, and behave like ones. Arlene and Isaac and Martin. Obviously I don’t call Zaydi by his first name, Abel. Zaydi is, we think, at least like ninety-two. He mostly sits in the garden clicking his false teeth and praying and talking to himself. It wouldn’t feel right to call him anything but Zaydi, which is Jewish for Granpa. Anyway it bugged my folks for a while to be called by their names like adults but they got over it. And now it isn’t just three adults and one senior anymore. Now it’s four of us. It’s plus Annie Goldberg. Annie the not-girl, Annie the full-grown woman heading to a township. Arlene is in shock, Isaac is boiling full of I-knew-I-should-have-stopped-this-bladdy-stuffing-nonsense. And myself? Man, I am still busy thanking my lucky stars. I mean look at her. And my school year is over, it’s summer holidays for me now. We are talking weeks. And I am a virgin.

  6

  I jerk awake. Another bout of the Nightmare. I lie there groaning, feeling afraid. The clock says two oh five in red numbers. After a while I see some flickering in the gap in the curtains. I get up on my knees to take a looksee. My room is the crappest bedroom, not only cos it’s the size of a closet but cos all the others face the garden while mine faces the backyard which is a concrete square, basically, with Gloria’s old room in one corner, empty now obviously, and a steel windmill thingie for hanging the wash in the middle. Marcus used to train there. I used to watch him wrapping his hands in bandages, used to look up from my books of poetry and spy at him. Watch him skipping with the leather rope going so fast it was like a force field around him. See him smashing at that heavy bag, huffing like a steam locomotive. And then looking down again, reading, say,

  In Xanadu did Kubla Khan

  A stately pleasure-dome decree:

  I’ve always liked the words of poems and how they look on the clean white of the page. If you read them over and over you get this airy, lifty feeling right under your heart, no jokes. So lekker. But I remember it was almost three years ago now, when I was thirteen—right after that bad thing happened at the Emmarentia Dam with Ari and Pats—that I put my book down and went outside and stood waiting there for the round to end. I asked him, “You want me to time you?” And my brother just shook his dripping head and stuck his gum guard out. I said, “I wanted to ask you. About school. High school. What it’s like . . .” And Marcus just sniffed and wiped his nostrils with that huge forearm, his biceps with the veins swelling up like a party balloon in his cut T-shirt. Then he turned his back on me. So I never did tell him about the Dam. I went inside to a mirror and lifted my sleeve, my face disgusted.

  Now I’m kneeling on my bed looking out and seeing the opposite of my brother. I mean it’s body movement but it’s not violent—Annie Goldberg is dancing on the concrete under the bright moon. She is barefoot and has on jeans cut off into shorts and a blue shirt from some sport which I have no idea of that says Seahawks and it’s so bladdy clear that she doesn’t have a bra on underneath. She has headphones on and a Sony Walkman clipped to her waist. The smooth way she dances, it’s like watching oil being poured, I swear. Her arms are going like snakes around her hips, her hips doing that up-and-down fluttery thing that only women seem to be able to. A feeling of pure, absolute wanting rushes through me like a bush fire through dry grass. So strong like I’ve never had before and all-a-sudden she spins around and sees me.

  I make like Donald and duck back down so fast it feels like I’ve left my hair behind. I lie there panting like our dog Sandy used to do on a hot day, holding a pillow squashed to my face. Morning comes and I stay in my room till I hear her getting ready and then I sneak out to the fig tree by the garden wall on the Clovelly Road side. Isaac and Arlene have gone to work as usual, and Zaydi has already made his slow way with his canes to the chairs under the plum trees. When Annie steps out, I’m up in the branches and nicely hidden. I watch over the wall as an old snot-green Chev 4100 picks her up. This is a car full of black people and the way, all casual, she jumps in with them—I won’t say shocks me, cos I’m like all liberal and that, but let’s just say it would shock anyone in the neighbourhood. Where we live in Greenside it’s just full-on northern suburbs, just bungalows with high walls and gardens and pools, every family is white obviously cos this is a white area according to the law. There’s hardly anyone ever in the streets, just sometimes maids standing on corners waiting for the chinaman to drive up in his old Opel with the fah-fee results or the wide ladies selling fresh mielies from big burlap sacks balanced on their heads, shouting, “Green mielies! Green mielies!” Anyway I bet old Mrs. Geshofsky across the road would just about have
an absolute cadenza if she saw Annie hopping into this carful of blacks. And crazy Mr. Stein, who lives right next door, I don’t know what he’d do, maybe come charging out with a homemade flamethrower or something since he seriously is meshugenah in kop as Isaac says when he says Mr. Stein belongs locked up in Tara, the insane asylum. Before Annie can pull the Chev’s door shut, I catch a few plinky notes of the black music they’re playing, and I notice dried shriveled things hanging from the rearview mirror. It’s all smiles and laughing in the crowded back seat as they pull off.

  I climb down. There’s nothing but time in this long summer holiday, school being out for six weeks, a luxury of open hours and days stretching off till the new year. At the Olden Room, which is hers now, I reach for the door handle. Don’t do this, I keep saying. But I turn the handle anyway. It’s locked, thank God. But I know where the spares hang. Do not do this, Martin. It’s like a magnet is dragging me to them. I’m shaking and need the toilet. When I find that the spare key is not there I’m majorly thankful. Cannot believe what I almost did. I rush back to the garden to spend the rest of the day Playing.

  Playing is something I shouldn’t do anymore. Goes back to when I was a little kid, in love with the garden, the hosepipe my favourite toy, watering Ma’s flower beds, the strelitzias and the proteas, the prickly succulents. I was still in nappies when Gloria used to put me on Sandy’s back to play horsey, the fur all silky under my fat little legs and Gloria’s warm dark hands curved around my ribs, holding me steady and the nice smell of her and her Sotho accent in my ear. Later on I started walking around the garden daydreaming—more than daydreaming, more like living inside stories I make up, I swear. I didn’t even know I was talking to myself and making funny faces and noises while I was doing it until I got told. That’s about when I realised not everyone does this, and I started calling it Playing. It’s hero play, basically. Finding secret tunnels under the apricot trees and jumping onto underground bullet trains, taking out the baddies like Bruce Lee in Enter the Dragon, and rescuing the women prisoners, carrying them off like Conan the Barbarian. Getting older I’ve kept trying to grow myself out of this addiction of Playing but all I do is hide it away so no one knows I do it (except for one). It got so bad at one time I couldn’t do any homework and ended up plugging—failing that whole school year. After that I controlled it more but I still can’t stop. It calms me down, hey, seriously. Takes away my jitters and makes everything feel happy-safe again.

  Tonight Annie Goldberg starts speaking to me alone for the first time. It’s happening in the corridor by the kitchen door, she just steps out and bang she’s right on top of me, her voice soft like she doesn’t want anyone else to hear. It’s almost painful to look in her eyes. Annie has these lovely eyes, very big and the colour of caramel with bits of mint green in them. When she touches my shoulder, I feel like my blood is being set alight. “I’m still on New York time,” is what she is saying to me. “What’s your excuse, insomniac?”

  Because I was up at two in the morning, watching her dance in the backyard. I think of how I must have looked to her in the window, all peeping tom, and I feel my face blushing like hot peppers. “Um. I get this nightmare that wakes me up.”

  “Is it always the same?”

  The question is like a quick push that makes me lose balance cos I so totally don’t expect it. She has to say it again before I nod. She smells of lemons. Looking down, my eyes run into the dark circles of her nipples underneath the blouse she has on and I have to look up again pronto. “Then you need to pay attention.” She’s stating this like it’s a fact, an order. “Recurring dreams, they’re the ones tryna tell us something big. Especially what we don’t wanna hear. What’s yours about?” I shake my head. “What happens in this nightmare?” But I won’t answer.

  I sleep badly all night and next morning when she goes to take her bubble bath I head straight to the Olden Room door again and this time find it’s been left a little bit open. My heart goes muchu in me, banging around like the drummer from Iron Maiden, and I stand there for a minute, I even almost pull the door closed but then I think of her naked in the bath, her soft, perfect olive skin, and I can’t stop my legs from moving me forward. It’s cool and dark inside. The Olden Room is where we store all of Zaydi’s old clocks. When Zaydi came to South Africa in nineteen hundred and voetsak from his village called Dusat, back in Lithuania where most all of us South African Jews come from, he only had holes in his pockets and he didn’t speak any English and he still doesn’t, only mameloshen, and he opened up a little clock and watch repair shop there in Doornfontein and that’s where Isaac grew up, behind the shop, so super poor. Then when Isaac bought our house after he was in business with Hugo in the scrapyard, he built Zaydi a room on the side of the house with its own bathroom and Zaydi moved in there after Bohbi—my grandma that I never knew—had died. Zaydi brought with him all his clocks left over from Doornfontein. They put them all nicely in the big room at the back of the house, with fancy curtains and a huge Turkish carpet. We call it the Olden Room because the clocks are old, I spose. I’ve always liked it in here, it smells of wood and varnish and brass.

  And it’s quieter than ever now, cos all the ticking clocks have been stopped for Annie. Arlene put a mattress in the middle for her, and a wardrobe and a desk against one wall. My bare feet sink into the cool softness of the carpet. The sheets and blankets are all messy on the bed and clothes are lying all over the show. The desk is piled up with books and magazines and mugs and combs and stuff. As my eyes adjust I spot a pair of her panties lying under some jeans. It’s surprising how lacy they are, all femmy, this side of her gets hidden under the tough jeans and the boy T-shirts. I kneel down and pick them up, my heart knocking, one eye on the door. Again I can’t stop myself and I squash the panties against my face, covering over my mouth and nose as I suck in air that tastes of her crotch and her private sweat, God, what am I doing? I’m dizzy and moaning aloud. It’s too much, the excitement, the wrongness, and I drop the panties and run out to do something else. When I come back a minute later, I am much calmer and she’s still in the bathroom. I page through some of her books on the desk. Sociology, anthropology, boring-ology. I finger the chunky jewellery in the little box. My eyes start roaming back to the panties but a hair dryer switches on down in the bathroom and it’s time to get the hell out. Still, I have this bold feeling all day, and in the night when she comes back home I look her straight in her caramel eyes and say, “Do you like your room?”

  “I’m surprised I didn’t get your brother’s.”

  “He left it locked,” I say.

  “Yeah, I noticed. You think that’s normal? Put a padlock on your bedroom door?”

  “Not really.”

  “The army’s done that to him. Screwed with his mind. You’re going to have to face that fucking draft too, soon. Have you thought about it?”

  The f-word shocks me, the way she just uses it like it’s nothing. It’s never been said in our house before—the folks would kill me, no jokes. “Marcus didn’t have to go,” I explain to her. “He’d already got deferment after high school, he was in varsity, did his first year engineering, but then he dropped out. He didn’t tell anyone. He just went.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “He volunteered,” I say. “Basically.”

  She opens her mouth wide, then closes it and walks away. I stand there thinking, Well that didn’t go too well.

  7

  But Annie Goldberg never locks her door when it’s her bathtime in the mornings, so I start going in there without fail. The hair dryer is my warning alarm. I know I’m doing wrong but can’t help myself, it’s like an addiction, like Playing. I shake just thinking about it, going into her things. Can’t wait for the next morning to come fast enough—and then the next . . .

  This time I’m leaving the room when I notice the wall clock by the door is hanging cockeyed. Maybe I bumped it. Straightening it, something heavy moves inside, falls over with a clonk. Behind th
e clock’s little door in front are only the usual cogs. But when I pry the whole thing gently away from the wall something big drops out the back. A shoe. One of those disco kinds, with a huge fat sole made of cork, and glittery straps. I turn it around for quite a while, till I hear the whoosh of the dryer, and then I carefully put it back.

  Can’t stop thinking about that shoe and when morning comes again and she takes her bath I’m back in, searching carefully and—bladdy hell—I turn up the second shoe of the pair. Hidden at the top of the curtains, stuck there with stickytape behind the wooden thingie in front of the rod. Who would hide a pair of shoes on top of curtains and behind clocks? What for? Then I remember she was wearing them the first time I saw her.

  Thing is, I’m a hider myself. Means I now feel closer to Annie than ever. I want to show her loyalty, her secret is mine too now. We’re the same kind. Every time I go in, I feel so tender toward her I can’t even explain, as I search under the mattress and go through all her bags, fingering the linings, and digging in her cases and feeling the pillows and duvet covers and blankets and probing with toothpicks inside her tubes and jars. But there’s nothing else to find except those obese cork shoes which I keep going back to, examining them carefully before replacing them exactly as found.

  I start to really think, to work it out. If she was wearing them that first day it means she wore them at the airport. If she wore them at the airport, she must have put them on overseas. It’s two plus two and it’s obvious but it hasn’t clicked in me before cos I must be a dummy: she came through customs on these. They don’t feel heavy, don’t rattle when shaken. But they’re big enough—you could fit things inside. One sole peels away a bit from the instep, old glue stretching like pizza cheese. My curiosity grows, I seriously need to understand—so I get some carpenter’s glue and a Stanley knife from the shed. As soon as it’s Annie’s bath time I’m in like Flynn. The blade splits the gap like butter, but I only peel it enough so I can angle it to the light. There’s a hole dug out of the cork. Something in there is wrapped in bubble wrap. Looks black through the bubbles, white at the middle. I realise I’ve been staring for minutes, I’ve lost track. I have to either squeeze out some glue and stick the instep back or is there time to cut some more? The Stanley knife is shivering in my hand. I start cutting and peeling, exposing about half the bubble-wrapped thing. It’s round, looks like a disc, like a little record? No, or maybe a roll of insulation tape. My fingertips can’t get under it. For some reason I look to my right and Annie Goldberg is standing there in the doorway.