Closed Circle, page 22
Now he had visited death more closely and personally and he was afraid. It was not only his closeness to death that ended the investigation though. It was also everything he had learnt and his belief that it was the national state of mind that made such crimes possible. To Yudel it was not so much a wave of crime as a condition of the nation and he knew there was nothing he could do about it. This too, the acknowledgement of his own ineffectiveness, was an area of introspection that was new to him.
There was a third aspect to his withdrawal from the case. To his great surprise he had been visited one evening by Blythe Stevens and Ralph Du Plessis. The conversation had followed lines that had not been intended to encourage Yudel's continued involvement. Perhaps the whole thing was unwise, they had said. We wouldn't want to be responsible for anything happening to you. Frankly, your investigation has blurred some of the issues. And twenty-five thousand is a lot of money. Do you know how many people can be fed on that? In any event you've been getting your salary all the time. And this is covered by a medical aid, isn't it? Do you know how much my wife and I live on?
Freek spent a few mornings with Yudel. He told him that the official CID position was that the bolt had probably been a stray from an archery range that adjoined the mine property. He had spoken to the secretary of the archery club that used the range and discovered that none of their members used crossbows and that the bolt was definitely from a crossbow. Also, if it had been a stray from the range it would have had to travel some three hundred metres and climb twenty-five to have struck him. But the area did not fall within Freek's jurisdiction and there was nothing he could do officially. The local CID were questioning club members and getting nowhere. Freek had obtained membership lists of all the local archery clubs as well as an incomplete register of Afrikaner Revival Movement members, but neither had revealed anything of value.
They had talked about Lieutenant Visser of the Durban CID and on one astonishing morning Freek had been accompanied by the lieutenant, on holiday and wearing short trousers and a bright check sports shirt. Visser had seemed truly disturbed by what had happened to Yudel, but he had directed most of his comments to Freek. “Yissis, colonel, you know how it goes with this sort of thing. No one ever knows where such a thing might lead and none of us wants to take the chance of finding out. What if you find out that security want to take over the case and you are in their way? You know what I mean? You know, there's a point, if the investigation starts going in a certain direction, everybody stops asking questions. Hell, Mister Gordon, I'm glad you're getting better."
“Tell Mister Gordon what you did after you visited him in the hotel," Freek suggested.
“It was Varrevich sent me. I went to report back to him. He wanted to get rid of you without a fuss. I'm sure he would never be involved in something like this though. He's a friendly oke. He's often bought me a beer."
“Who is this Varrevich?" Freek asked.
“Major Milan Varrevich. He escaped from Hungary as a youngster in the early sixties and came here. It just shows that there are worse places in the world than South Africa. Those overseas people who are always complaining about us can just shut up."
Dahlia phoned the hospital daily until he regained consciousness. The next week she saw him between official visiting hours. She had been attending a seminar on the “Role of Muslim women in the liberation struggle."
“I've found Dladla," she told him. He was glad to see her, but not interested in Dladla's whereabouts.
The next morning he woke from a deep, leaden sleep to find Dahlia seated on one side, Rosa on the other and Freek hovering uncertainly round the foot of the bed. Involuntarily he tried to rise, but the tensing of his stomach muscles was accompanied by a sudden and deeply penetrating pain that cause him to fall back on the pillows. “May I introduce you?" he groaned.
“That's all right," Freek said. "I've already..."
“Hello, Mister Gordon," Dahlia said. “I've been telling Mrs Gordon how grateful we all are for your willingness to take up this matter and for your courage. I was saying how proud she must be of you."
Rosa was looking at Dahlia out of her dark, unfathomable and almost unblinking eyes and saying little. She had recognized Dahlia as the woman in the photograph. On her next visit she told Yudel that she had read a magazine article on the dreaded disease, AIDS, and how it was not just homosexuals that got it now. It was cutting down loose-living heterosexuals in large numbers. It served them right and it just showed how careful you had to be and only unswerving, single-minded monogamy could ensure one's survival.
On Dahlia's last day in Johannesburg Freek was there too and he left with her. When he came again a few days later he looked to Yudel's eyes more than usually satisfied with himself. “What the hell did you slip away to on Thursday?" Yudel snarled at him. “I know you, Jordaan. You're a real bastard with women." Freek sat thoughtfully down next to the bed and looked impassively at him.
“Perhaps you need to bring this thing into some kind of clearer perspective," he said.
“You take advantage of women, Freek. Don't deny it. She's not..." He looked for a word that would describe Dahlia, but did not find one that suited him. “...strong."
Freek allowed himself the smallest smile. “There are other ways you could describe her. For the record, I walked her to her car and said goodbye there. I apologize for my many failings." He was grinning broadly by this time. “But they were not exercised on Dahlia."
Yudel turned to the window to avoid looking at Freek. “I'm being a damn fool, right?"
“Right," Freek agreed. “Listen, Yudel, I know what sort of effect she's had on you. It's happened to me from time to time, but believe me it passes. Girls like Dahlia are fine for an interlude, but more than that is impossible...even without the race thing."
“Do you think you could find it in your heart to spare me the fatherly advice?"
“We all have our areas of expertise." Freek ignored his request. “This is mine..."
“One of yours," Yudel suggested.
“All right, one of mine." Freek was being very modest. “You aren't married to her and you'll find that once the initial itching has been satisfied it's Rosa you really want. To love a woman and to love fucking her is not the same thing."
“I'm sorry for my outburst," Yudel said carefully. “Please may we discuss something else."
It was not only Yudel's state of mind that changed while he was in hospital. The country changed too. In a black township an hour's drive from Yudel's home the population protested about the way they were being treated by the local authority by refusing to pay rent. Overnight law and order disappeared from township streets throughout the country.
Police vehicles were stoned, barricades thrown across thoroughfares, government buildings burned, cars hijacked and their owners assaulted. The number of burglaries in white suburbs increased by the day and were conducted with growing audacity, burglars sometimes returning with reinforcements to a house from which they had been driven a few hours earlier. A generation of black children were seized by a frenzy that made it impossible to continue schooling until they had been released from their position of subservience, proclaiming to the world, or at least the milling township streets that there could be no education before liberation.
For an instant, a bright flickering moment of history, the revolution was upon us and it was met first with rubber bullets and teargas, then with live rounds. There were massacres in Winterveld, Langa and Mamelodi and individual killings over the length and breadth of the country. For those who saw the way ahead as leading through revolution's fire it was necessary to keep the anger alive. Even death was nothing more than a necessary offering on the altar of a glowing egalitarian future. The funeral of every victim of police bullets was turned into a political jamboree and the police obliged by creating new victims. So the chain that led from automatic rifle to cemetery led back to the automatic rifle again.
Eventually the fury, bottled up in the townships by the police, turned inwards. Collaborators were found everywhere and the word, necklace, took on a new meaning as victims had motor car tyres forced over their shoulders to pinion their arms before the mob poured petrol over them and set them alight. Africa purged itself, removing the weak, the suspected collaborator, the overly introspective, the forgiving, ridding herself of all who were not possessed by the single-minded obsession to destroy everything that seemed to hinder the revolution. Three and four-year-olds learned to make and throw petrol bombs. On farms along the borders land mines dismembered white farmer and black labourer alike, while in the towns explosions in fast food outlets, parked cars, rubbish bins and supermarkets punctuated the life of the nation, bringing brief diversion and casual death.
In the white suburbs fire-arm dealers ran out of stock, as did the manufacturers of security gates, mercury arc lamps and closed circuit television systems. Burglar alarm companies worked sixteen hours a day to stay ahead of the demand. Gun clubs could not cope with the number of applications for membership, an industry for the training of guard dogs came into being and private security companies were registered daily.
White society as a whole, and Afrikanerdom in particular, took on a schizophrenic aspect as it sought both to reform the nation and to defend itself. The cabinet ministers who ardently promoted reformist measures to their constituencies were the same ones who made speeches excusing the massacres.
In the townships no one was unaffected. Old Daisy Matshogo, the charwoman who came in twice a week to help Rosa, for the first time in fifteen years asked Rosa for an advance on her pay. Her week's groceries had been torn from her hands, the containers broken open and the food scattered over the pavement. The youths who were responsible screamed at her that a consumer boycott was taking place and if they found her supporting white shops again she would get the necklace.
Daisy's son, Jonathan, who had just finished law school, came one day to fetch his mother from work and fell into conversation with Yudel. He was one of the new and growing tide of black graduates. Just as it was impossible for his mother to address Yudel as anything but Mister Gordon, so he only felt comfortable calling him Yudel.
“Where are you doing your articles?" Yudel asked him.
“No articles, man," Jonathan said. Then in explanation: “I'm a barman now. My brothers will kill me if I become part of the legal system."
“And your studies?"
“Times will change," Jonathan said. “I'll still have my degree when liberation comes."
A few months later a three-year-old grand-daughter of one of Daisy's sisters was killed by a police rubber bullet, the heavy, unyielding projectile having struck her over the heart with such force that it broke a rib and stopped the hearts functioning. Yudel and Rosa, lone white faces in a sorrowing and embittered gathering, found themselves standing next to the grave of a child they had never known. They listened to speeches, in languages they did not understand, that first denounced racism, then all government supporters and finally all that was white. “We have to do it," Rosa had said after Daisy told them. “They must see, all of them, that some of us care about what happens."
The violence swept through 1985 like a bush fire, the flame of each day igniting the one that followed until it seemed to be running of its own inner volition, without purpose and serving no aim. And among the general and random deaths there were other, more specific assassinations. The bodies of four activists, who had been travelling by car from Port Elizabeth to a town a few hundred kilometres inland, were found stabbed and burnt in scrub along the roadside. Three others from the same town had gone missing a few months before and were never again seen by their friends or families. Chief Ampie Mayisa was hunted for weeks and hacked to death by vigilantes when he was found. A youth leader was shot from the distance of a few feet, his lifeless body left in the dust of the township street. Another was beaten to death.
Yudel's list that had from the beginning been too long and included too many cases would have grown into something beyond the most sordid imaginings, except that now no one was counting. Yudel himself turned away from the newspaper reports on these incidents. He saw no point in knowing the details. After two months in hospital and another at home he returned to work. For a long time, he only felt comfortable lying down. He walked slowly, resting often, and found himself perspiring heavily after only minor exertions. At work he paid little attention to the averted eyes of Poena van der Merwe and his friends or the determined friendliness of some of the other staff members. And the tension was gone. Perhaps he had paid his dues for the aberrant behaviour of the past or perhaps guilt saw itself reflected too clearly in his obvious physical weakness. Whatever the reason, the awkwardness that had surrounded him for the few days before the attempt on his life no longer existed. He spent his working hours either in his office with the door closed or at the prisons doing the work for which the department paid him.
On one occasion he saw Wheelwright in Brigadier De Beer's office. The door had been standing open and the security policeman was leaning back in one of the chairs intended for visitors, trying, without conviction as far as Yudel was concerned, to look jovial and relaxed. He saw Yudel, but turned back to De Beer immediately, the smile never leaving his lips. It was a practised deception and, like the joviality, it lacked conviction. De Beer did not mention the visit and Yudel never discovered whether he had been the subject under discussion.
The family of the boy who had delivered the newspapers in his street had moved to another town and, as part of his convalescence, he walked to the Sunnyside shopping centre on most afternoons after work to buy the paper. The walk back up the hill was slower and he stopped to rest three or four times, leaning against a jacaranda, before he got home.
In his study or sitting up in bed, while Rosa busied herself with her perpetual and as far as he could see pointless activities, he would glance through the newspaper, taking in only the broadest outline of the day's events. The sounds of her doing things with crockery in the kitchen or the intermittent buzzing of her sewing machine reached him as from a great distance. Occasionally she might say something to which he would have to respond, first pausing to pick up the traces of what she had said where they were still floating along the outer edges of his attention.
It was on a Friday evening six months after he had been discharged and had undertaken his evening walk, for the first time without stopping to rest at all, that Yudel sat in his study, the unread newspaper folded on the desk before him, and thought about the events of the past ten months. He remembered the exhilaration of his trip to Durban. He thought briefly about Dahlia. Since he had left the hospital he had spoken to her three times on the telephone, but the conversations had become laboured, with neither having much to say to the other and it is impossible to make love over a telephone connection. There had been nothing to mark the last call, no acknowledgement from either that this was the end of it, only a growing restlessness in Dahlia and a lack of attention on Yudel's part. Arrogance, he thought. Rosa had always said that he was arrogant. But it had been a long time since she had last used that word to describe him. He was aware that he had skirted the nearer fringes of a deep and destructive depression, but he had recognized it and employed the only cure which for him was certain. He had immersed himself so deeply in his work that there was room for little else.
Even Yudel's relationship with Rosa's endless relatives had changed. Since he had been wounded they had treated him with a degree of consideration he would not have thought possible. To Irena, Rosa's sister, he had always been a hero. Now he was a martyred hero, a role from which he derived no pleasure.
The thoughts of the immediate past rolled away, leaving him with only the present, the empty, despairing present. His eyes travelled idly over the unusually tidy surface of his desk, seeking something with which to occupy his mind and finding it in the folded newspaper. He made to take it, but before his hand had reached it his eyes picked out a single line of text at the bottom of a column, the rest of which was hidden. The line read, “Mrs Ngcube had been a senior executive member of..." Yudel's hand stopped just short of the newspaper. It was the tense in which the report had been written as well as the subject's name that held his attention. “Mrs Ngcube had been..." With an effort of will he unfolded the newspaper and spread it on the desk in front of him. The headline stretched two thirds of the way across the front page. “Ngcube's widow slain." Yudel's eyes fled over the words as if pursued. “Well known civil rights attorney, Mrs Elizabeth Ngcube (43), was gunned down and bludgeoned to death in front of her children in the driveway of her Umlazi home last night. Four years ago, in November 1981, her husband Mr Fellows Ngcube was assassinated..."
In the kitchen Rosa was trying to sing a popular song. She had probably been singing for some time, but now her rather tuneless, off-key rendering had become irritating to Yudel. Then everything was absorbed, Rosa's song, his recollections, even the strange apathy that had become part of him, the indescribable pathos of it all. Where will it end? he asked himself. Where in God's name will it end ?
He started to his feet to go to Rosa, but stopped abruptly. It won't do for her to see me this way, he thought, suddenly realizing that for the first time in all his adult life he was crying.
Part 3: THE CIRCLE, BROKEN
Pretoria and Johannesburg, April 1986
Twenty-Two
