Full Spectrum 3 - [Anthology]

by Ed By Lou Aronica et. el.

  “In any case,” Ephraim said, “I wasn’t the only one who—”

  “Watch that talk,” said Wessels, angry and puzzled. He slapped Thubana across his lips: a crisp, open-handed blow.

  Myburgh turned around. Jeppe, Wessels, Wessels’s partner, and the man named Ephraim were all near enough to touch—as, of course, was Thubana. But Myburgh suddenly understood that he was a ghost to the Afrikaners: a nonentity, a person-shaped void. Those he’d expected to rescue him—fellow whites—could neither see nor hear him, while the blacks—Kabini, Mpandhlani, Ephraim, and so on—had no more interest in him than he had in them. The exception to this judgment, at least until he’d tried to betray Skosana, was Mordecai Thubana, who had given him his coat.

  Why should I be ashamed? I’m being a good citizen, aren’t I? Standing up for stability and order?

  Myburgh went to Jeppe and shouted into his pinched, bloodless face: “I’ve had an accident! My name’s Gerrit Myburgh. If you want proof, ring up my brother Kiewit—Kiewit Myburgh—on the farm called Huilbloom! He’ll vouch for me!”

  Jeppe blinked. He recoiled imperceptibly. That was all. It was as if he’d suffered a mild pang of heartburn or caught a faint whiff of sewage from a settlement upwind. Then he turned about and piercingly commanded all the hangdog laborers from KwaNdebele to reboard their bus. He dispatched Wessels’s partner to assist in overseeing the boarding, then approached Mpandhlani with his hands jammed Humphrey Bogart-style in the pockets of his trenchcoat. All Myburgh could do was skip aside. Then, as 496’s riders straggled bemusedly back to the bus at the urging of Jeppe’s henchmen, Jeppe eyed Mpandhlani with a rote and clinical ill will.

  Over his shoulder, he said, “Don’t let the bus go until we’ve questioned this gentleman.”

  Myburgh heard Kabini, the driver, cry, “Please, nkosi, you’ve got your man! Let me finish my route!” This plea was followed by a thump, an outraged yell, and the sounds of argument as the police goosed Kabini up the steps to his driver’s cage. Myburgh could see only kaleidoscope pieces of their scuffle through the bobbing heads and shoulders of the people stumping back to Grim Boy’s Toe.

  Thubana was not among their number. He stood out in the field with Mpandhlani, Major Jeppe, and the pumpkin-headed cop whom Jeppe called Wessels. Myburgh stood with them, of course, but he seemed not to count, having even less impact on the events now unraveling than would a beside-the-point memory or an unheard song. Should he go back to 496 with the others, strike out on foot for Pretoria, or stand here like an undressed department-store mannequin, humiliated and useless?

  Jeppe took note of Thubana. “Go back to the bus, kaffir,” he said, abandoning all pretense at courtesy.

  “If Winston’s a terrorist, I’m a terrorist, Major.”

  “Then you are,” Myburgh said. “You told me Mpandhlani was held for almost three years for terrorist activity.”

  Simultaneously, Jeppe said, “Very well. I believe you. Stay here with your bloody accomplice.”

  Thubana replied to Myburgh: “I told you I supposed he’d been a guerrilla. Nothing more.”

  “Guerrilla, terrorist—it’s all the same to us,” Jeppe said, squinting perplexedly at Thubana. He turned to Wessels. “Aren’t we lucky this fellow’s so talkative, though.”

  “Yes, sir.” Wessels had three or four chins. Even in the mud, he seemed to be bouncing lightly on his toes, minutely jiggling his chins in anticipation of the fun he was soon going to be having at the two Africans’ expense.

  “But no more out of you until we’ve talked to Mister Baldhead,” Jeppe told Thubana. “Understand?”

  Thubana merely stared at the major.

  Myburgh lifted his arms in exasperated disbelief, dropped them to his sides again. He was invisible to the very authority to whom he should be is lumpishly self-evident as a marshmallow in a mug of cocoa. And his words were as inaudible to Jeppe and Wessels as the high-pitched piping of certain kinds of dog whistles. Suddenly, he found himself—as he had been on the road right after that elephant demolished his Caddy—on the verge of tears.

  Four men in an open field on a damp morning. From nowhere, it seemed, the fancy came to Myburgh that if only they had a folding table and chairs, they could sit down and play a few hands of bridge or canasta or hearts. Cards were plasticized, after all—they didn’t usually go soggy on you. He and the others could take partners and enjoy themselves. So what if it wasn’t quite cockcrow and he was missing a shoe… ?

  Jeppe ended this absurd reverie by stepping up to Mpandhlani, his eyes level with Mpandhlani’s lips, and saying, “Take off that stupid cap, kaffir. When in the presence of a state official, you show respect.”

  “We’re outdoors,” Myburgh blurted. “What the devil difference does it make, Major Jeppe?”

  Mpandhlani’s spirit seemed to have left his body. It had flown away to a thatched Ndebele house with freehand-painted fences and exterior murals, frescoes of wild geometric designs in mint green, lemon yellow, concrete blue. Or that was what Mpandhlani’s fallen lower lip and fish-eyed gaze suggested to Myburgh, who thought the man looked catatonic, as if the mere arrival of the security police had irreversibly traumatized him. He was taking refuge in memory, in a fitful, private idyll of childhood.

  “Take off your cap!”

  “Leave him alone,” Thubana told Jeppe.

  “Shut up!” Wessels said, and, wincing, he struck Thubana with his rhinoceros-hide whip.

  Up, involuntarily, went Myburgh’s arms as he flinched away from the unexpected blow. When he looked again, a raw, triangular gash on Thubana’s cheek had begun busily leaking scarlet.

  Mpandhlani’s spirit flew back from his boyhood home (probably only a few kilometers from the Myburgh family farm) and reanimated his upright corpse: He took off his cap.

  Jeppe seized it from him, examined it with distaste (for, yes, it stank of both rubber and man sweat), then hurled it into the twilight with a contemptuous flip. The volleyball-half whistled through the air and landed wetly, a sound like two hippopotamuses kissing. Jeppe, noticing Mpandhlani’s naked, saddle-stitched pate, gave a squeaky guffaw. Perhaps his laugh embarrassed him, for he cut it off immediately.

  “My,” he said. “What an ostrich egg. I’ll bet old Christiaan Wessels here would be glad to scramble it for you.”

  Now Mpandhlani’s eyes were at least semialert. He looked at Jeppe, at Wessels, at Thubana, at Myburgh. It seemed to Myburgh that he started to speak. But, in fact, what came out of his mouth was a staticky tirade:

  “… our express purpose to kill more and more South African security forces, especially the Boers, because unless whites are made to feel unsafe, and until they too are killed, they will yet feel safe to go on killing the Africans. And, in fact, although some whites are among the security forces killed by the Azanian People’s Liberation Army, time has almost come when—”

  “Shut up, you bloody kaffir!” Jeppe cried.

  “—for every African killed by the racist security forces, a white person must be killed. One racist, one bullet! Phambili Nomzabalazo Wabantu!”

  At that moment, Mpandhlani stopped broadcasting propaganda and began transmitting a medley of pompous marches. Jeppe and Wessels appeared nonplussed, uncomprehending. But Jeppe seized Mpandhlani by the arms, pulled him to him, and then brutally shoved him toward the roadway. Mpandhlani bent double, clutching his head as if to dam the symphonic battle hymns spilling out.

  Headlamps and flashlights reflected off the windshield of Grim Boy’s Toe like strobes in a Joburg nightclub. Confusion reigned. Myburgh literally had no idea where, or to whom, to turn.

  “Take this walking radio station to the van, Wessels. Get the filthy bugger out of my hearing.”

  “Me, too,” Thubana said.

  Jeppe nodded. “Of course. You, too.” He swept his hand after Wessels and Mpandhlani, a command and a dismissal.

  “What about me?” Myburgh asked Thubana. “What am I supposed to do?”

  “Go find Winston
’s cap.”

  “His cap?”

  “I beg your pardon,” said Jeppe, glaring at Thubana.

  “Sure. Otherwise, the broadcasts he’s picking up will drive us crazy before we reach security police headquarters.”

  Myburgh hobbled deeper into the field, trying to find the spot where their comrade’s volleyball cap had made its obscene-sounding, sucking touchdown.

  “Hurry!” Thubana yelled after him. “Or we may go off and leave you, Mr. Myburgh!”

  “Shut up!” Jeppe said. He twisted Thubana’s arm, chivying the much taller man after Wessels. He appeared to believe that Thubana was playing mind games with him, maybe even communicating by means of code words and gestures with a squad of guerrillas farther out in the bundu. In fact, Jeppe was royally spooked. Myburgh would have sympathized with him more if his own predicament had not been so outré and ego-crippling. No one could feel as isolated as he did.

  By what seemed pure luck, he found Mpandhlani’s volleyball cap, pried it out of the mud, then stumbled back to the roadway to the bakkie—the nylon—into which Wessels and two more security agents were herding Mpandhlani and Thubana.

  Kabini, sporting a badly swollen eye, waved at Myburgh from his driver’s cage on the Putco bus. Although Myburgh thought seriously about boarding 496 again, he decided that, being invisible to the Afrikaners, he’d do better sticking with Thubana, who, however mad, had at least some small insight into the clunkily ratcheting gears of this nightmare.

  So Myburgh leapt into the BOSS van just as Wessels was pushing its doors to. The hem of Thubana’s coat got caught in the closing doors. Myburgh yanked the hem free and toppled backward. Wessels, cursing, slammed the doors a second time, harder, so hard that the metal walls and loadbed of the bakkie’s holding cell vibrated like fettered gongs.

  Mpandhlani and Thubana sat on narrow benches on either side of this four-wheeled cell.

  “Are you all right, Mr. Myburgh?” Thubana said.

  “No,” Myburgh said. “Of course I’m not.”

  For added to the trauma of his selective invisibility was the fact that he had lost a stocking: His muddy left foot ached with the pitiless July cold.

  * * * *

  Wessels, whom Thubana ridiculed in Afrikaans as Pampoenkop— Pumpkinhead—had taken Mpandhlani’s coat, leaving his upper body clothed only in a threadbare T-shirt. Meanwhile, Mpandhlani’s steel plate was broadcasting, even inside the nylon, an ANC report on forced removals to impoverished Bantustans. Their little cell buzzed with the transmission, a crazily garbled mix of news, exhortation, and music.

  “Give him his cap,” Thubana said, his naked hand on the sjambok cut on his cheek.

  “Gladly.” Myburgh flipped Mpandhlani the volleyball-half and, lying in the center of the floor, watched him settle it on his head like a housewife twisting half an orange onto the fluted reamer of a citrus juicer. At first, it seemed to hurt Mpandhlani to cover his skull, but then the cap muted the transmission, turning it into sounds like voices heard faintly through a heating vent. The bald man’s eyes brightened, his lips relaxed. But he still looked cold, hugging himself and hunching forward like someone straining against electrocution.

  “May I give him your coat, too?” Myburgh said. “I’m fine now. Well, not fine, exactly. Numb.”

  “Sure,” Thubana said. “Go ahead.”

  Myburgh rolled out of Thubana’s expensive coat and handed it up to Mpandhlani, who nodded his curt thanks and shrugged himself into it. As he put it on, Myburgh saw that neither he nor Thubana had belts now. Wessels had undoubtedly taken them too, on the grounds that the kaffirs could use them as makeshift weapons, their buckles serving as nasty flails. Well, that seemed smart. A policeman had to watch himself. Wessels would surely have taken their shoes too, if they hadn’t been wearing ratty takkies.

  “What’s going to happen to us?” Myburgh said.

  “To Winston and me?”

  “Of course.”

  “Interrogation. Detention. Torture. One of us may fall out a window. One of us may strangle himself.”

  “Strangle? Strangle yourself?”

  “It’s hard to say, Mr. Myburgh. I don’t know what Winston’s supposed to have done. Or what kind of stuff Jeppe and Pumpkinhead will be looking for.”

  “Someone exploded a bomb near the Armscor factory,” Mpandhlani said. “I’m getting a report on it now.” He listened to the voices tunneling his gray matter like so many ethereal brain worms. “The blast—a car bomb—did heavy damage to the plant itself.”

  Myburgh blinked. Armscor was the weapons-manufacturing arm of the South African Defense Force and a profit-making enterprise of the first water. Its plants were among the most heavily fortified in the country. If it had suffered a crippling bomb blast, no place and nobody—no white place and no white person, rather—could rest secure again. So far as that went, though, Myburgh could not recall any time that he had really rested secure. Living in South Africa had always seemed to him like walking through a plush hotel suite past hundreds of whirring electric fans with frayed cords and no safety baskets…

  “You didn’t have anything to do with that, did you, Winston?” Thubana said.

  Mpandhlani—no, better to call him Skosana: Winston Skosana, a man with both a baptismal name and a Ndebele surname, not merely a patronizing Bantu joke name—Skosana tilted his volleyball-capped head against the van’s wall and laughed in the basso profundo registers of earthquake.

  “Don’t I wish. Oh, don’t I wish, Mordecai.”

  Thubana grinned sheepishly. “That’s what I thought. But… hey, man, you know.”

  “I know. But I’m just an oke at a Simba Quix chips-and-rusks factory, loading trucks and carrying out trash. Oliver Tambo never tells me nothing.”

  He laughed again. His laughter overwhelmed the hisses and pops still seeping through his earholes, nostrils, and eyes from Lusaka and other points north—several points north, Myburgh figured, for occasionally Skosana picked up ANC broadcasts, and sometimes PAC patter, and, more rarely, the revolutionary threats of the Azanian People’s Liberation Army. Indeed, Skosana’s skull was a broadcast clearinghouse for a variety of antiapartheid, anti-imperialist voices. Myburgh couldn’t look at the man—lean, weathered, battle-scarred—without twinges of both awe and fear. On Grim Boy’s Toe, he had seemed comic. Here in the nylon’s holding cell, though, he suddenly and unaccountably radiated a good-humored self-confidence and strength. Myburgh did not think it was all owing to Thubana’s trenchcoat.

  Painfully, Myburgh got up and limped to one of the mesh-covered windows on the nylon’s rear doors. He was surprised to see Putco bus number 496 chugging down the highway behind them, its headlamps jittering in the pale light, losing distinctiveness, like fish eyes vanishing into clear water, as the sky reddened through a gauze of blowing clouds and spread out vividly over the Transvaal.

  Pretty. Very pretty.

  With no closer settlements or factories blighting this part of the Putco route, the land was lovely, an exhilarating desolation. Soon the nylon would enter the outskirts of Pretoria, cruise past the jacaranda trees on its wide boulevards, and he… well, he would be home.

  Bracing himself against any sudden lurches, Myburgh said, “What in God’s name happened to me out there?”

  “You became shadow matter to them,” Thubana said.

  “I was shadow matter in my dreams. When Kabini hit that other Putco bus. When I had a heart attack in my Cadillac and got on 496 as my dead self’s ghost. Damn it, this is real!”

  “You look real to me,” Skosana said.

  “Thank you.” Nearly slipping, Myburgh turned back around.

  Thubana’s hand was blood-streaked from the ragged sjambok wound that Wessels had inflicted. Myburgh found the handkerchief he had used to staunch his own bleeding and passed it to Thubana, who took it with no qualms and held it against his cheek.

  “I don’t get it,” Myburgh resumed. “Why didn’t I mean anything to those men? What’s going on?”<
br />
  “Winston,” Thubana said, gesturing with his free hand, “is my book in one of those pockets?”

  Skosana patted the side pockets of the borrowed coat, raised a telltale thump, and pulled out the copy of Superstrings. He hefted it as if it were a hand grenade.

  “Turn to page eighty,” Thubana said.

  His eyebrows lifted, Skosana began riffling. When he found the specified page, he bent the book back in his lap.

  “Up at the top,” Thubana said. “John Schwarz is talking about ‘E sub-eight’ symmetries. Do you see it?”

  “E sub-eight? Christ, Mordecai, did you memorize this whole crazy book?” He waved it. Again, like a hand grenade.