“That’s a pity,” said Lindiwe and she turned to look out at the valley which spread itself beneath the house like a tapestry. In the distance clouds were stacking themselves into vast towers which would soon reach the sun. Lindiwe’s face still had a simple beauty, but the cheeks were a little too drawn, her big eyes a little hollow.
“Endumeni,” she said. “That mountain peak there. The place of thunderstorms. You will see, we’ll get another one soon.”
“We’ve come to ask a few questions,” I said. “The journalist you mentioned, the one who visited Mona, died in what might be suspicious circumstances.”
“Died?” said Lindiwe. “Because of what Mona told him?”
“More likely because of the conclusions he drew from what she told him.”
“Which were?”
“We’re not entirely sure,” I admitted. “He didn’t get the chance to express them.”
“We made the assumption,” said Khanyi, “that he was making incriminating allegations about the circumstances of your death.”
“Reports of my demise have been exaggerated,” said Lindiwe. She smiled regretfully.
“An erroneous assumption,” admitted Khanyi.
“Incriminating who?” asked Lindiwe.
“Thulani Mbuyo,” said Khanyi, then added, “The man who is to become president of the country,” as if that might remind Lindiwe who he was.
“Oh, that man,” said Lindiwe, and she smiled again. “No, my death was all my doing, I can assure you.”
“But your need to disappear,” I said. “It was driven by a fear of what Mbuyo might do to you?”
Lindiwe’s eyes flickered back to me. “Might do to me?” she said.
“After the fire in Khayelitsha,” I said. “If Mbuyo knew the part you played in that operation, he might have been driven to take revenge?”
“Oh goodness,” said Lindiwe. “There was no operation. Surely you know that?”
“The files are a little confused when it comes to the details of the operation that led up to the fire,” I said.
“There was no operation,” said Lindiwe. “No operation at all. And Mbuyo knew very well the part I played. He is not seeking revenge for anything.”
Lindiwe turned to look out at the valley. “When I saw your car approaching,” she said, “I felt a sense of relief. You have no idea what a burden guilt can be. I hoped that the time had come for me to pay for my crimes.”
“Your crimes?” I said.
“Oh yes.” Lindiwe turned back to me, her eyes filled with tears. “You see, the murderer you are looking for,” she said, “is me.”
I couldn’t find anything to say. Khanyi too was silent.
“But now you say a journalist has been killed?” asked Lindiwe.
“He died,” said Khanyi. “We’re not sure how or why.”
“I can tell you why,” said Lindiwe. “But first I want you to know that I killed those men in that hut. I don’t deny it. I didn’t do it alone, but I did do it. The Khayelitsha massacre. It was a massacre, but it was not political. It was murder. My father and his government department would have everything political. But sometimes killing is simply killing. And I killed those men.”
Lindiwe paused, and we waited. She turned abruptly and looked out over the valley again.
“Mona told us what Mbuyo and the others did to you,” said Khanyi eventually.
The clouds chose this moment to obscure the sun, and it felt as if someone had switched off the heat. Lindiwe shivered. “I took my revenge,” she said. “I killed them all. It is as simple as that.”
“But Mbuyo survived the fire,” said Khanyi. “Isn’t that why you staged your disappearance?”
Lindiwe kept looking out at the valley as if she was waiting for something to happen. She shook her head.
“No, it isn’t,” she said. “I was not running from the men who raped me. They are all dead, every one of them. Killed in the fire.”
“But the man who survived,” I said, struggling to fit the pieces of the puzzle back into place. “Who is he?”
“I have not been running from Thulani Mbuyo,” said Lindiwe. I’ve been running to protect him. And to protect myself. We’ve both been running from the truth.”
“Who is he?” I asked again.
Lindiwe stood up abruptly and moved over to the edge of the veranda where she stood like she was at the prow of a ship.
“Wandile,” she said.
We sat for a moment in shocked silence. I said: “The person we know as Thulani Mbuyo is his brother Wandile?”
Lindiwe nodded.
“They would have killed him,” she said. “Worse. They would have necklaced him, then hung him from a streetlamp for all to see. They would have come after me, the Fehrsons, my friends, his family. They would have killed us all.”
“Are you saying,” said Khanyi, “that the man who is becoming president of the country is not Thulani Mbuyo? It is Wandile Mbuyo?”
“It was my idea,” said Lindiwe. “I realised he would not survive. I knew we had been deceived.”
“Deceived?” I said. “Who deceived you?”
“They called him a man on the ground, or some such nonsense. He was the man Wandile met with when he had something to tell them.”
“And he deceived you?”
“Oh yes,” said Lindiwe, and she looked back out at the valley. “He called himself Frans. A student at the university, a member of the youth league, always standing up and shaking his fists at the rallies. Chanting the slogans, waving the flags. But he was a fraud, a government plant.”
The door to the veranda opened and two young children emerged, balancing a tray with three glasses and a plate of sandwiches. Behind them four other children followed, their eyes wide with curiosity, and they gathered in a circle to watch us. Khanyi sipped at her lemonade and flinched at the bitter taste.
“Delicious,” she said, “did you make this?”
The children nodded in unison.
“So clever,” she said. I sipped at mine. It was pure lemon juice as far as I could tell.
Lindiwe’s eyes twinkled. “We don’t add sugar. So bad for us, isn’t it?”
The children murmured their agreement.
“Has something happened to him, mama?” asked one of the five-year-olds as she gave me an accusatory stare.
Lindiwe laughed. “Of course not, angel.”
“You’ve been crying,” said the little girl in defence of her argument.
“Well, nothing is wrong.”
“Mama has a man,” confided the little girl to Khanyi. “A man she loves.”
“That’s a wonderful thing,” said Khanyi.
“But he hasn’t visited for a long time,” said the girl with a touch of anger.
“Back inside children,” said Lindiwe. “I want to see your homework all done when I come in.”
They reluctantly moved back in, the talkative girl giving me a particularly intense look as if to commit my face to memory. Just in case I did turn out to have been the bearer of bad news.
“From the mouths of babes,” said Lindiwe. “Wandile has not visited us for many months, for obvious reasons. They love him, he is such a kind man. He is no saint though. He wasn’t one and isn’t one. He killed his own brother. We both did.”
“What the brother did to you was unforgivable,” said Khanyi.
“Was it? He left me alive, which is more than we did for him. And does it make it any better that Wandile did it out of love for me? If anything, it makes it worse. I live with that every day.” Lindiwe finished her lemon juice and winced at the bitter taste of it.
“You know what I think?” She smiled at us. “I think Wandie knew it would be unbearable and had no intention of living to bear that guilt. He wasn’t caught in that fire by mistake, which was what I thought at first. He never talks about it, but I think he closed the door of that shack, bolted it behind him and prepared to die with them. It was the final twist of our fate that he was the one
that survived. Survived to know that he had killed his own brother out of revenge for what he had done to a woman he loved and would see only occasionally for the rest of his life.”
“Could you tell us more about the man called Frans?” I asked.
“I had told Wandile I didn’t trust him, but I only realised what he had done when I met with that man Du Toit. After the fire.”
“What had Frans done?”
“Frans was one of those good listeners. He heard everything Wandile told him about what had happened to me. The two of them would meet for a drink and Wandile would pass on information about what his brother was up to. Wandile probably drank too much, said too much to Frans. Frans was like the serpent in the grass. He started whispering about what his people would like to have happen to Wandile’s brother and his gang.”
“So you thought the fire was a state-sanctioned operation?” said Khanyi.
“Yes, we did. But I make no excuses. I did what I did out of hatred. The whispering of that snake was no excuse. He knew what to say, that was his talent. And we wanted to hear it.”
“But why?” said Khanyi. “Why did he pretend it was a state-sanctioned operation when it wasn’t?”
Lindiwe looked at Khanyi, and her wide eyes were full of kindness.
“He was a weakling,” she said. “He did it because he wanted to kill. I could see that in him, could see it in his eyes, and I should have realised. I too wanted to kill. We were all young and dangerous. His whispers offered us the chance, that was all.”
“And Wandile?” said Khanyi.
“Wandile did it out of love. For me. But what does that matter? There is no justification for killing. Whether it is for hatred, revenge, love or by permission of the state. It is killing.”
Lindiwe’s eyes settled on me, and for a moment I had the sensation that her remark was directed at me, as if she knew of the blood on my own hands.
“When you discovered Frans had deceived you,” I said, “you had the idea that Mbuyo should adopt his brother’s identity?”
“I met with Du Toit, and he told me there had been no operation. We’d been lied to. Frans had been trying to find me, and I realised why when I met with Du Toit. Frans wanted to kill me. The hospital had mistakenly identified Wandile as Thulani, and I knew that if he revealed the truth Frans would kill him too.”
“You persuaded Du Toit to get you in to see Mbuyo on Robben Island?”
Lindiwe nodded. “By then Frans was hunting me. I was on the run. Wandile had disappeared behind the blank screen of the apartheid machine and I knew that he would tell them who he was. That information would get back to Frans. By then I had realised how dangerous Frans was.”
“But you told Du Toit it was Mbuyo you were running from?”
“I told everyone it was Mbuyo I was running from. Nobody knows who he is. If I had told Du Toit the man without a face they had sitting on Robben Island was Wandile it would have got straight back to Frans. Du Toit said that Frans had disappeared, but I couldn’t trust a word he said. I couldn’t trust any of them.”
“And Wandile accepted your idea?”
“Not at first,” Lindiwe gave a sad smile. “We had half an hour. That was all, with a policeman at the door. Wandile knew that Frans was a maniac. That Frans would get to him. But I think he wanted it. Welcomed it even. He wanted to pay for his crimes, and if that came through the hand of Frans that was okay with him.”
“He didn’t come clean though. The world knows him as Thulani, not Wandile.”
“That is another of my crimes,” said Lindiwe. “Perhaps the greatest of them. When he refused, I asked him to do it for me. Unlike Wandile, I did not want to stand up and pay for what I had done. I wanted to run, and I wanted Wandile to live. I imagined we had a life ahead of us.”
In the distance, the clouds produced an experimental roll of thunder. From the veranda we could see the full extent of the valley, see the perilous road descending from the Endumeni ridge, the bridge which from this distance appeared to leap over the deep Tugela ravine, and beyond to where the African grasslands merged into the haze beneath the building thunderstorm.
“And if Mbuyo confesses now, it would destroy him,” said Khanyi.
Lindiwe nodded. “It would. And kill him. And kill me. I used to have fantasies of telling the truth myself and reclaiming the life I lost. Not a day has passed that I haven’t wondered, could I tell the truth now? But it would expose him as a traitor and a killer. Because make no mistake – that is what he is. A traitor to his people. He might have found his faith over the years, but he betrayed them thirty years ago. He killed his own brother and betrayed his people in the process. And I helped him do it. Thulani Mbuyo was one of the big hopes for the South African people. His death set back the fight for freedom in this country many years. With each passing year I wonder: is it a little more forgivable? What if we tell the truth now? Wandie has done some good things, would he be forgiven now? But I don’t think that kind of betrayal fades over time. Or does it?”
“He had his reasons for what he did,” said Khanyi as if that mitigating fact might contribute to the fading of the betrayal.
“He did, but what do they count for now?”
From inside the house came the sudden howl of a young child in pain. Lindiwe was on her feet before I’d even identified the sound. “Let me see what the little devils are up to,” she said and disappeared into the house. A few moments later the howling was silenced, to be replaced by strident denials from another child.
“Who was Frans?” asked Khanyi.
“He is not identified in the file,” I said. “Du Toit raised warning flags about him. He believed what Lindiwe told him and put it into his report: that their man in the field had fooled Lindiwe and Wandile into thinking they were carrying out an approved action. But Du Toit was laughed at. Mocked for falling for the desperate pleas of a pretty young woman. They refused to identify the man in the field. Everyone claimed not to know who he was.”
“That’s not unreasonable, they would have had cut-outs,” said Khanyi. “It was how they worked. Limiting knowledge of the chain. It protected their people in the field.”
“And exposed them to megalomaniacs with homicidal tendencies,” I said.
From the house came the sounds of a truce, some laughter and excited chatter. I watched the tower of clouds in the distance. The sky here seemed huge, as if our position on the hill above Masotsheni provided us with more sky than normal. The base of the cloud was heavy and dark, resting just above the level of the foothills at the far end of the valley. At the top the cloud became puffy and white like a squashed chef’s hat. But the anvil shape of a thunderstorm was forming, and occasionally the entire formation lit up with a flash.
Lindiwe came back out to the veranda. “Their dramas are always so big,” she said. “It’s comforting sometimes to focus on the little problems in life. Helps to put everything into perspective.”
We spent another hour on the veranda as the storm built up and moved ever closer. The children treated us to a second dose of lemon juice and they glared at me in case I made Lindiwe cry again, which I didn’t.
“Why do you think the journalist died?” I asked Lindiwe as she walked with us back to our car.
“There were three of us,” said Lindiwe. “Each of us played our part in killing those men. I am ready to pay for my crimes. I believe Wandile is ready too. But one of the three is not ready. Mona told the journalist the first part of my story only. She has been a faithful friend all these years and kept my secret. But that was enough for him to stir the pot. And one of us didn’t want that pot stirred.”
“You mean Frans?” said Khanyi.
“Wandile tells me they see each other, isn’t that amusing? Frans has done well in business. He’s involved in politics too, as so many big businessmen are. It has been Wandile’s fate that they have been brought back together. Frans looks at Wandile’s broken face and doesn’t recognise him. Wandile keeps his mouth closed because he
knows Frans is still looking for me. I beg him to tell Frans where I am. Let him come for me, I am ready.”
“But Wandile refuses?” I said. “Refuses to tell Frans where you are?”
Lindiwe looked up at the sky as the first heavy drops of rain fell. “Wandile refuses,” she said. “But now, with everything that is happening, it will not be long before Frans finds me, and realises who Wandile really is.”
“Who is Frans?” I asked.
Lindiwe looked back down at us. “I don’t know,” she said. “Wandie speaks of him as Frans, when we speak of him at all, which is hardly ever.” She smiled. “When your car approached, I thought perhaps my time had come. That Frans had sent you to bring an end to it all.”
“He must be stopped,” said Khanyi.
Lindiwe shook her head. “You haven’t been listening. I want Frans to come. Don’t you see? It is time.”
“Is there somewhere you could go?” I said. “Just for a few weeks?”
Lindiwe laughed. “With twelve children? Not likely.”
“Consider taking some precautions at least. For the sake of your children.”
“The children will be fine. Wandile pays for all of this. He’s made sure it will continue after we are gone. It’s our legacy. One small bit of good we can do, after all.”
The storm loomed overhead as Khanyi and I climbed back into the car. I reversed back into the gully that served as a road and watched Lindiwe dash back to the shelter of the veranda. Khanyi shook her phone as if that might help it recover reception.
We struggled down the slippery road in silence, the driving consuming my attention.
“I’ve been a fool,” I said after a few minutes. “‘We have nothing to fear from the truth’ – that is what he said. Those words exactly. ‘We have nothing to fear. But carrying it can become a burden.’”
“You will have to draw me a diagram,” said Khanyi. “What are you saying?”
I turned the windscreen wipers up as the storm suddenly engulfed us. The winding track would soon turn to mud, and I was keen to reach the tarmac before we were washed away.
“They are both tired of carrying the burden of their truth. You heard Lindiwe say it. What a relief it would be if Frans came to end it all. For thirty years they have carried their burden, but they have had enough.”
Treasonous Page 23
