At the third or fourth landing (during his reverie, Myburgh had lost track), the slightly overweight Schoeman, breathing raggedly, asked Dedekind, the ranking agent, if they could rest a while. His request was granted, and Thubana and Skosana positioned themselves at a rail fronting a narrow window looking down on a graveled roof; there, a peeling billboard glistened.
Skosana nudged Myburgh. Read the billboard, his nudge and his lifted eyebrows commanded.
Myburgh studied the sign. It was one he recognized from other venues —street bills, newspaper ads, magazine inserts. It showed a bottle of laundry bleach, with a slogan next to it that struck him this morning with a new, almost brutal, forcefulness: JIK, it said. (A brand-name.) And under that: WITH CONTROLLED STRENGTH, FOR THE WORLD’S WHITEST WASH.
“Oh, Lord, I’m feeling sick,” Skosana said, in a self-mocking lilt: “Here in the land of Jik.”
Thubana said nothing. The sight of the billboard, along with his friend’s doggerel, seemed to dispirit him. And Thubana’s funk clouded Myburgh’s efforts to regard the situation in an optimistic light. They were all in the land of Jik.
Must I keep on climbing these stairs? Myburgh wondered. Like Schoeman, he was winded. Trotting back down, after a short rest, seemed a more attractive option. At least, if he could get out again. Did the street-level door automatically lock? Did you have to have a key to go through it again?
Dedekind grabbed Skosana’s arm. “That’s it,” he said. “Let’s get moving.”
Myburgh, unsure of whether he was a man or a ghost, hurried along after the others. He feared that if they reached an upper floor before he could squeeze through too, he would be trapped in this claustrophobic stairwell for days…
* * * *
On the fifth or sixth floor (again, Myburgh was unsure), Goosen and Steenkamp strong-armed Thubana in one direction, while Dedekind and Schoeman pulled Skosana the other. Skosana set himself against their tugging and told Myburgh, “Go with Mordecai, man.”
“I said I would, didn’t I?”
“Shut up, kaffir,” Goosen said over Myburgh’s unheard reply. “We know what we’re doing.”
Steenkamp revolved his eyes to indicate that Skosana was off in the head and that Goosen should ignore him. Myburgh followed the two security agents with Mordecai Thubana. Dedekind and Schoeman took Skosana the other way, off into the well-lit but nightmarish warren of the upper floor.
What happened from that moment on, Myburgh received as if in a dream—a protracted hallucination that perfectly complemented his selective invisibility. Much of this experience did not seem real at all, while much of it was so hurtfully vivid that he almost ran from it. All of it caromed past at fast-forward speeds impossible to slow, or at crazy angles defying his efforts to find in them a coherent pattern.
In an interrogation room off a pair of nichelike halls giving onto the floor’s main corridor, Goosen, Steenkamp, and four more members of the security police—men Myburgh had not seen before—immediately began stripping Thubana.
They tore off his heavy, pilled sweater, revealing a light-gray T-shirt on which a complicated series of mathematical equations in red, blue, and yellow danced like thousands of printed footsteps on an impossible foxtrot diagram. A caption under all these symbols read, this explains everything.
As two men held Thubana’s arms and two others stood by in case he resisted, Steenkamp grabbed the T-shirt at the neck and started to rip it away.
“Pas op!” Goosen shouted. Then: “You nincompoop, take it off carefully. Carefully.”
“It stinks,” Steenkamp said. “And it’s”—he nodded at the math-symbol choreography—”nonsense.”
“You don’t know that, nor do I. Take it off carefully. Lay it over there.”
Steenkamp obeyed, pushing Thubana’s head forward, unrolling the T-shirt up his back, and spreading the T-shirt out on a metal desk in the corner. The six agents then hurried to strip Thubana of his rubber-soled takkies, pants, and baggy, tan undershorts.
“Stop that!” he cried, swatting at them. “Stop!”
Goosen cuffed him viciously. Soon, embarrassed and shivering, Thubana stood naked before them, his ribs touchingly prominent and his knobby-kneed legs like those of a muddy stork. Myburgh could tell at once that he hated this exposure, hated and resented it, even though he’d known from the start that this was the way things would go, for no African entering state custody as a crime suspect or as a political detainee could hope to come out unscathed, either physically or emotionally.
Even Myburgh knew that, but this morning, unable to intervene, he felt like a voyeur, a window peeper. It pained him that Thubana had to undergo not only the impersonal brutality of the policemen’s attentions, but the added humiliation of having a third party (the agents were one obsessive entity) see his helplessness. But each time Myburgh turned aside or drifted to a different corner of the room, a ghost forsaking its haunts, he felt that he had given in to a cowardly squeamishness.
At last he turned to Thubana and said, “What can I do?”
Thubana’s eyes fastened on him. “Don’t look at me. But don’t leave. That’s all.”
“We’re not leaving,” Goosen said, “but we’ll look at you all we damned well please.” (Lord, the pretty fellow was young!)
Myburgh started to speak, but stopped. He looked aside. Then he crossed to the desk upon which Steenkamp had spread Thubana’s this explains everything T-shirt, collapsed into a metal folding chair, and averted his face from Thubana’s interrogators.
Occasionally, of course, Myburgh had to look, for the sadistic imagination of the agents was a fertile one. In fact, to think of Goosen, Steenkamp, and their accomplices as state interrogators was to whitewash their activities. Call them, rather, torturers. They didn’t just ask questions. They did all they could to shame, hurt, and dehumanize their ward without quite knocking him unconscious—unconsciousness would have interfered with their efforts to crowbar the “truth” out of him.
“Praat, praat, praat!” (Talk, talk, talk!), the six men yelled at Thubana.
“Op die stene” (On the bricks.), Goosen said.
They made him balance on a pair of bricks placed at contrasting slants on the floor, one brick about a meter behind the other, so that Thubana resembled a circus performer walking a tightrope. In addition, they slipped a yellowish latex hood over his head so that when he let out a breath, the hood ballooned obscenely, and, when he inhaled, he sucked the suffocating rubber back into his mouth and nostrils.
The way he swung his elbows, his wrists tied behind him, showed his terror, as did his muffled pleas to take off the hood. He made this plea whenever any opportunity to reply to the agents’ stylized harassment arose—for, darting in and out, they were like hyenas worrying an injured springbok.
“Who prepared the car bomb at Armscor?”
“Who drove?”
“How did they get that bakkie past perimeter security?”
“Mpandhlani—your ‘friend’—says you were a contact for the ANC guerrillas who planned the attack.”
“Would you like to sire your own little pikkenien one day?”
“A statement, Mordecai. A statement!”
“List your contacts.”
“Everything you did these past six months.”
“The hiding places of your fellow terrorists.”
“What do you know about ANC plans to decommission the Pretoria Dam?
“When did you first hear of them?”
“This hood is nothing. Nothing. Wait until you’ve got a noose around your neck, kaffir.”
Seeing that brick-balancing and dogged verbal harassment were not doing the job, Goosen commanded a change in tactics. Steenkamp approached the desk and yanked the chair that Myburgh was sitting on out from under him. Myburgh only narrowly kept from splintering his tail-bone. Steenkamp took the chair to Thubana (still trussed in that urine-hued cowl, a baby in a placental membrane), slammed it down, unbound Thubana’s hands, and thrust the folding
chair into them even as he was trying to rub the soreness from his wrists.
“Over your head,” Goosen said.
“What?” To counteract the possibility of smothering, Thubana kept puffing against the latex.
“I said, lift the chair over your head. Lift it and hold it. If you let it down, you’ll pay.”
Major Henning Jeppe and Lieutenant Christiaan Wessels entered the little room. They grinned when they saw what was going on; two of the four men who had been assisting Goosen and Steenkamp clicked their heels, nodded deferentially, and left. Myburgh, rubbing his hip, backed into the corner behind the desk. He watched from this cubbyhole as if standing aloof from the agents’ sins would absolve him of any complicity.
Thubana, when Steenkamp prodded him with a billy club, raised the open folding chair over his head. He held it by two legs, his elbows bent.
“All the way up, kaffir! All the way!”
Thubana strained, straightened his arms, and pushed the chair up as high as it would go. Its rounded back bumped the ceiling, and Thubana almost toppled from the bricks to which his feet awkwardly clung. As a warning, Steenkamp thrust his billy into the cleft of Thubana’s buttocks and jiggled it.
“Hold the chair sideways! Arms up! Up!”
Thubana stuck his chin out, as if to allow more air under the latex cowl, struggled for a fresh grip on the chair, and lifted it as high as it would go in this new position, missing the ceiling and so maintaining his balance. He looked like a monument to the patron saint of contortionists.
“Good,” Steenkamp said. “Good.”
Jeppe caught sight of the T-shirt spread atop the desk and came over to look at it. Wessels, his enormous head bobbing first to this side and then to that, sought to keep an eye on Thubana as he swaggered over too. At Jeppe’s bidding, he picked up the shirt, smoothed it out in front of him, then minced about clownishly, as if modeling it at a fashion show.
“Phew!” he said, sniffing the T-shirt.
“Be still,” Jeppe said in Afrikaans. Then he read the English words under the run-amok equations: “ “This explains everything.”“ He squinted. “Yes, I’d wager it does.”
Then, to Thubana: “What is this, kaffir? What kind of treason did you come in here wearing?”
“What is what, sir?” Thubana was hooded and blind. Naked and off balance and straining to keep a chair aloft. Myburgh could not believe that Jeppe actually expected him to deduce the specifics of his moronic question.
“Your T-shirt, kaffir. These equations.”
“That’s a GUT, sir.” His words were hard to make out, the hood muting and skewing them.
“A ‘gut’?”
“Yes, sir. Or a TOE. A T-shirt TOE.”
“Is it a ‘gut’ or a ‘toe,” kaffir? Don’t trifle with me today; I’m coming down with something.”
“A Grand Unified Theory, sir. A Theory of Everything. Except that it… it isn’t.”
Steenkamp jabbed Thubana with his billy again, and Thubana had to lift one foot from its brick to keep from falling and to prevent his interrogators from assaulting him. Indeed, he would never have found the brick again if the policemen hadn’t caught him and guided his wayward foot home.
Then, as if to show that this “kindness” had been provisional, Goosen used the end of his billy to lift and then lower Thubana’s testicles. Again and again. Gently but menacingly.
“A ‘gut,” a ‘toe,” or neither, kaffir?” Jeppe said. “Explain to me these scribbles”—flapping the T-shirt—”you claim explain everything!”
“A T-shirt TOE,” Thubana said. “A joke, my baas—just a joke.”
Myburgh was disappointed. Until just now, Thubana had avoided using any kind of kowtowing epithet.
“A joke? How is it a joke?”
“There’s no finished Theory of Everything yet, sir. So that’s a… well, it’s a just-pretend TOE.”
“What does it pretend to mean?”
“Nothing, sir. Nothing real, at least.”
Goosen lowered his billy, then rapped it upward into Thubana’s groin so fast that Myburgh was not sure he had actually done it. The chair in Thubana’s hands slipped and clattered down, striking both Goosen and another man; and Thubana, flailing one arm, toppled from the bricks, landed on his ribs, and rolled over like a man who hears gunfire on a busy street and tries to escape it. But Thubana could not escape.
“Jy wil baklei, jy wil baklei?” (You want to fight, you want to fight?) Goosen cried, wiping blood from his lip and dropping the billy. He hurried to a nearby file cabinet, removed a piece of green hosepipe whose tube glistened as if cored with glass dust or diamonds, and stalked back to Thubana. He began to pummel Thubana vigorously about the head and shoulders.
Thubana rolled from side to side under these blows and also the inescapable boots of Steenkamp and the two men whose names Myburgh still had not learned, for they stepped in and out to kick Thubana, like dancers in an intricate musical-comedy number.
“Stop it!” Myburgh shouted.
He rushed from his corner and grabbed Goosen’s hosepipe on its back-swing. But, after a brief hitch that made Goosen look back as if Wessels or even Jeppe were playing a trick on him, the hosepipe slipped from Myburgh’s grasp and crashed down on Thubana’s ear with a solid whumpf!
All Myburgh’s subsequent efforts to deflect the hosepipe were failures, leaving burns in his palm but only imperceptibly delaying the adrenaline-charged policeman.
“Damn it, Goosen,” Jeppe said, not even raising his voice. “Do you know what you’re about?”
Goosen and the three other men backed off. Jeppe walked over to Thubana’s huddled body, nudged him in the small of the back with his boot toe, and, letting the tail of the gray T-shirt dangle down mockingly on his shoulder, asked if he were now ready to explain—seriously explain —the formulae imprinted on it. Then, because he clearly wanted an audible reply, he yanked the hood off Thubana and flung it at Steenkamp.
“It’s nothing, my baas,” Thubana wheezed. “It only looks like it means something.”
“Where did you get it?”
“I had it made. I designed it.”
“Designed these equations?”
“Yes, sir.” Thubana lowered his arms, sculled backward on his skinny, bruised rump, and propped himself against a wall.
“Who else has seen them?”
“Only a shopkeeper in Marabastad. I gave him the equations on a paper bag, sir. He silk-screened the shirt.”
“What do they say?”
Thubana studied Jeppe with visible wariness, as if dealing with an idiot or a psychopath—an entire roomful of such creatures—and Myburgh suddenly feared that it was so.
“Gravity, electromagnetism, the strong force, the weak force.”
“Pardon me?”
“A man in America—at Fermilab in Chicago—says the final TOE will fit on a T-shirt. It will be that simple.”
“Fermilab?” Jeppe said.
“They have a particle accelerator there,” Thubana said.
“Nuclear stuff,” Wessels said. “Particle accelerators have to do with…you know, nuclear stuff.”
Jeppe stiffened. He flapped the shirt out, grasped it by its sleeves, pulled it taut before him, surveyed its just-pretend TOE. “Decode this, kaffir.”
“A big fish,” Steenkamp said. “We’ve caught a big fish.”
“A joke but not a joke,” Thubana said. “One day I hope we have a Grand Unified Theory, a Theory of Everything, but today it’s—” He stopped. “Today, my baas, it’s only a dream.”
“Explain!” Jeppe said.
When Thubana could not, they laid their bricks about two hand spans apart, prodded Thubana to remount them, forced him to hoist the chair aloft again, and walked around him like children around a maypole, asking questions and beating him with billies, hosepipes, their open hands. Although Steenkamp repeatedly slapped him across the buttocks with the hood, Myburgh noted that Thubana was doing a little better now: He could see
the men tormenting him, he could breathe without fear of choking on rubber…
* * * *
Later, after beating Thubana again during an orgy of rushes and retreats, they pushed him into a shower just off the interrogation room and made him stand under a prickly spray of cold water. The pipes clanked noisily, and the shower head ratcheted like a Gatling gun. Typical. Tomorrow’s building, yesterday’s plumbing.
Myburgh accompanied Thubana to the shower room’s threshold, but two security agents, there to make sure Thubana didn’t duck out of the spray, kept him from coming nearer. So, like Thubana, he could do nothing but wait for the ordeal to end.
Full Spectrum 3 - [Anthology] Page 58
