Eloff Street on a Saturday Morning
“WHAT DOES SHE DO ALL day up there?” says Fay on the phone when I get back to Johannesburg.
“Smokes,” I say. “Looks out of the window. She seems happy enough.”
“She thinks the world owes her a living. And Jason?”
“I liked him.”
“He charmed you.”
“Doreen thinks his girlfriend is a Satanist.”
“I feel sorry for her,” says Fay.
“I feel sorry for her,” says Doreen airily, when I ring her to say I got home safely and have spoken to Fay. “And Steven?”
“I liked him.”
“You were taken in by his bullshit,” says Doreen.
“I’ll come back next time for longer.”
“Yes. Well.” She is suddenly distant. “I must be going now. Give my regards to your father.”
• • •
MY DAD HAS FOUND a buyer for the house, and I am going back to help with the last of the packing. After he picks me up from the airport, we drive through the suburbs of west London, and all the things I might tell him seem absurd to the point of embarrassing. I had a good flight, and by the way, did Mum ever mention to you she shot her dad?
These stories don’t travel. Over the phone, I had told my dad some of what I had seen and heard, and he had said lots of sensible things that reassured me immensely. Being able to talk to him like this only emphasized the extraordinary nature of my mother’s self-sufficiency: no parental safe harbor, and all the experiences I found painful just hearing about were hers firsthand.
Still, there are limits to what can be said when you are accustomed to not saying things; when saying things has always been construed as a weakness.
“How is it going?” says my dad as we drive from the airport. London seems small and gray and wonderfully familiar.
“Cor, they’re a pretty wacky bunch,” I say, and I laugh.
I am glad to be home, although it is not quite home anymore. Something has happened to the house. While my mother was alive, it had looked like a complicated but more or less explicable system—not the crazy-person hoarding of newspapers. There was an architecture to it all, invisible to the naked eye, which with noblesse oblige my dad had been permitted to slot into for thirty years. Now everything looked bizarre—fragments of a civilization once infused with importance whose meaning had, somewhere along the line, become obscure.
My dad and I move through each room, trash bags in hand. By the door in the kitchen, an entire closet filled from floor to ceiling with plastic bags. In the drawer beneath the sink, hundreds of rubber bands she picked up in the street where the postman had dropped them. In the cabinets, endless margarine tubs, washed and neatly stacked for—what? A container crisis that never came?
My mother would have been brilliant in the Second World War or in Mao’s Great Leap Forward. She could’ve fulfilled scrap quotas for entire villages. Long before it was fashionable, she took up recycling and had a waste disposal system in place that would, typically, find her fishing through the garbage to pull out a pear core, wrongly deposited by my father or me, and which she would hold aloft between thumb and forefinger to cry, “Are you trying to starve my birds?” (Vegetable matter went under the feeder, to supplement the seed ration.)
“Don’t interfere with my system!” she said, if you had the temerity to suggest throwing something away. The Smarties lids or ice-cream tubs; the iron-on patches and old bottles of sun cream. Shoe horns, hair clips, unidentified gray liquid. Scarlet food coloring. Handy-pack wafers. A lifetime’s supply of used envelopes. In a drinks cabinet in the living room we found a disturbing mandarin suspended in syrup like a fetus. Pipe cleaners; packets of sugar from Iberia, the national airline of Spain. Beads in a tin. Fucidin H cream “for external use only,” insect repellent, Algipan balm. Dental sticks, shower caps, cork mats, belts belts belts. An army sewing kit. A tiny bib, liberated from a pair of child’s dungarees; cat collars, double-sided sticky pads, loose pajama cords. Empty boxes of mint thins, still breathing the ghostly air of peppermint. Sacks of birdseed; something called bloodworms for the fish.
“Why are you writing it down?” says my dad, and I can’t say. It looks like a life’s work. He has been struggling alone with it for weeks and is at the slash-and-burn stage, but I am still dithering over every last item. My front pockets are stuffed with name tags she used to sew into my PE kit, even though she hated sewing. In my back pocket is a horrible porcelain magnet in the shape of a cat that my mother bought at a Christmas fair and stuck to the inside metal frame of the window in the kitchen. These things will end up in a storage unit in London, and for years I will pay through the nose to keep them there, in misguided observance of my mother’s core principle: that there is nothing in life that can’t be made use of.
In the kitchen, I reach up to a drawer above the stove and heave out a glass jar of desiccated coconut. My dad smiles. It would be taken out twice yearly when my mother made curry, hefted onto the table with a groan and her favorite catchphrase: “You could kill someone with that.” (People notwithstanding, she approved of things that exceeded their proper proportions.)
“How old is that stuff?” I would say.
“Old enough to be your mother.”
“I’m not eating it.”
“Nonsense.” From the back of the cupboard, papadums, which she transferred to the plate with a magician’s sleight of hand.
“Let me see the packet.”
“Sit down.”
“I’m not eating till I see the packet.”
“For goodness’ sake.”
“Excuse me”—this was the era when all my sentences began with “excuse me”—“best-before dates do exist for a reason, you know.”
“There’s nothing wrong with it,” said my mother. When she said “There’s nothing wrong with it” before you’d even started eating, you knew you were in trouble. I made a dash for the cupboard.
“You’re going to get such a slap in a minute.”
Next to a box of ice-cream wafers with an outdated typeface, the papadum packet. “For God’s sake. Best before April 1976.” Something like that—I remember they predated our move to the house. She smiled in triumph.
“You wouldn’t last five minutes in Africa.”
I hold it aloft, my dad opens the trash bag.
• • •
MOST OF THE EMOTION generated by seeing the house go is used up by the sheer hard labor of dismantling it, hauling sacks of refuse into the car and out again at the municipal dump. We drive back and forth three times a day. For some reason, the more trivial the item, the harder it is to part with. The margarine tubs look particularly pitiful at the bottom of the dumpster. Discarding them feels like an assault on her dignity. After the last of it, the removal vans come to take what’s left into storage, and with an overloaded car we drive into London. My dad is staying with a friend until the paperwork on his new house is finalized. After almost thirty years away, he is moving back to west London, where he and my mother started out together.
I see some of my friends in those weeks I am back. To those who ask, I talk about the trip in general terms. I talk about the weather and the price of the sushi. There are certain people I instinctively avoid, those who after my mother’s death wanted nothing more than to stroke my arm and console me; who urged me to call them whenever, even in the middle of the night. (I am not against this offer per se, only when it’s used by those whose need to be confided in outweighs all other considerations.)
“I feel like I’m not hearing something?” says an intuitive friend at lunch, after I have fobbed him off with trivia about my trip. I hesitate. I don’t want to embarrass him. The story makes too great a demand on the listener. I can’t stand it, the look of embarrassment and panic on a person’s face as they cast around for an appropriate response. Suddenly, I understand my mother’s glibness, her insane giggle when she said, “I thought I might have to shoot my father.” What is the right tone for that kind of statement?
With a lurch, I realize how afraid she must have been, that these things in her past would put her beyond reach of common understanding; that they would make her alien, even to me. I give a brief outline, and although he responds with measured incredulity, is sympathetic without being prurient or arm-stroking, afterward I’m convinced it was cover for his real response: gut revulsion—toward my family and me for what happened in the first place, and toward me exclusively for the vulgarity of passing it on.
Something happens around then that, although I’m not willing to see it, drives home just how gripped I still am by my mother’s orthodoxies. I interview for my newspaper an eminent movie star who, during the course of the interview, unexpectedly tells me that later in life she discovered that her mother, who had killed herself decades earlier, had been sexually abused as a child. “They say you inherit the guilt,” said the actor, “but what you really inherit is the silence.” I am so horrified that instead of following it up, I panic and change the subject. Although this aspect of her background hasn’t been reported on before, I do not include the line in the piece.
On a rainy March evening, my dad drives me once again to the airport. After the odd, transitory weeks in London, I find I am excited to be going back, to have something known to go back to. Now I have an outline of the story, I want to color it in.
“Be careful,” says my dad.
“I will.”
“If you want me to come out there, you’ll let me know.”
“I will.”
“Mum wouldn’t want this to take over your life.”
“It isn’t. Honestly.”
“Bye, baby.”
“Bye.”
• • •
IT IS DIFFERENT THIS TIME. I land in bright sunshine. Instead of going to a hotel, a car takes me to a house in a street of other houses, with a sidewalk you can walk down to a strip of bars and restaurants. Until I find somewhere more permanent to live, I am staying in a guesthouse, known to me through the informal network of journalists that in my previously dingy state I hadn’t felt fit to exploit. (Journalists will, generally speaking, help one another out, if it doesn’t compromise their own interests too much and if the help can be administered over drinks in the bar.)
The first night back, there is a drinks party in the garden of the guesthouse. In the balmy twilight air, I sit and drink white wine and feel my shoulders relax. The company is familiar, reassuring, and fairly representative of the neighborhood: two Australian medics on their electives; two British journalists who live in Johannesburg and drop in every night for a drink; and an American called Alan, who holds out his hand to introduce himself.
“I work in disaster relief,” he says. One of the journalists catches my eye and swiftly drops it. “That’s my day job. But really I’m an unfunctioning artist. Notice how I say unfunctioning, not dysfunctional.” He raises his eyebrows, and I must look blank because he gives a small laugh and says, “Don’t make the mistake of taking me seriously. I have a certain humor not everybody gets.”
Alan is staying in the guesthouse, too. The night before, he says, he went to the bathroom in the middle of the night and, yanking what he thought was the cord for the light switch, summoned armed response to the door. It is the second time he has done this in a week. I ask what he is in Johannesburg for, and he says he is here on his own time, to investigate the “frontiers of postracist society.”
The Australians stare.
“Yes,” says Alan. “When I lived in San Francisco, I got up in PR disguise sometimes, to see what it was like. You know, to be targeted by racists.”
“Why would racists target you for being in public relations?” asks one of the journalists politely.
Alan closes his eyes. “PR as in Puerto Rican,” he says. “Another oppressed people.”
In the days that follow, I do all the things I didn’t do last time, things that will ground me, I think, as I travel deeper into my mother’s history. I buy a local cell phone. I figure out where to buy groceries. I walk around the neighborhood, the sun on my back like a hand, pushing. Away to the right, the city stretches off beneath a canopy of trees, gathering like a well-tailored skirt at the skyline. Better than Manhattan’s, I think.
Up the hill, past the bead shop, past the newspaper shop selling weird vegetables in a box by the door, under the covered walkway, where hawkers sell beaded wire animals and other knickknacks laid out on bright fabric. In the street, men in neon vests mill about, keeping an eye on the cars. They are paid by local businesses to deter thieves, but after a couple of days of waving madly at them each time I pass, I suspect their deeper purpose is to relieve Western visitors of an urgent need to be nice to a black South African. One of them, Joseph, spends most of the day asleep under a newspaper on a derelict porch, knocked out by the sheer force of foreign goodwill.
A man standing in front of the secondhand-book shop sees me coming and retreats, slightly, into the shade of the doorway. I had gone there on my first morning, and after buying an ancient, liver-spotted copy of Rilke—“Lord, it is time / The summer was so great”—held out my hand across the counter.
“Hello!” I said. The man was white, with thick milk-bottle glasses and a lime-green shirt. He took the full force of all the pent-up condescension left over from my exchange with the car guards. Reluctantly, he shook my hand and introduced himself as Mervyn. Mervyn, I decided, was quirky and fun.
Past the sushi restaurant, the gallery with the piece of driftwood arranged artfully in the window, the brunch place that serves two types of tapenade. At the end of the street is a shopping mall, laid out in a horseshoe around a car park. There is a telecom provider, a supermarket, a travel agent, and a place on the corner where chickens turn, bumper to bumper, on a slowly revolving spit. The whole complex could be in a regional English town were it not for the foliage—army-surplus brown—and the heat, rising from the parked cars in broad, muscular waves. Walking through it is like pushing your face into a substance that, for a split second, continues to hold its impression.
• • •
IT IS A TRUISM of South Africa that you are more likely to be killed in a car than by a murderer (although if you are murdered, it is most likely to be by someone you know. Johannesburg is dangerous, but it’s not immune to the law of averages). I hire a car and start tentatively to explore the quiet roads around the neighborhood. Studying the map, there are street names that strike me at the level of myth come to life. After forty years in England, my mother’s references were still Johannesburg-based, so that in a crowded street, while you might say, “It’s like Grand Central Station” or “It’s like Piccadilly Circus,” my mother would say, “It’s like Eloff Street on a Saturday morning.” There it was, in the grid of downtown Johannesburg: Eloff, between Joubert and Von Brandis, as famous in our house as Madison Avenue.
From the court papers, I have a list of my mother’s old addresses, where she and the family lived during her teens and early twenties. Most of them are within a couple of hours’ drive from the city, at the outer edges of metropolitan Johannesburg and in the rural communities beyond. I have an idea that, when I’ve acclimatized to the roads, I will drive to these places. This seems important, although I have no idea what I’ll do when I get there. But I have to do something. What else is there to do?
One of the first major drives I undertake is to Fay’s house, five miles southeast down a six-lane freeway, taxi minivans weaving in and out with terrifying speed and imprecision. Past the South African Broadcasting Company, a black tower not entirely stripped of its sinister apartheid-era associations. Past the mine dumps that stand along the southern edge of the freeway, flecks of gold in them catching the sun. I hear they are being remined; it turns out too much of value was thrown away the first time. Past the turnoff for Orlando East and Baragwanath Hospital, the biggest in the southern hemisphere. There is a sense of the air opening up and the sky expanding and getting lighter, fading to the shimmering white of real heat and the crushing weight of boundless space. Past Soweto on the right and east for two miles along Columbine. At the side of the road the grass is knee-high and waving. The buildings thin out, the pools disappear, the edges of things waver as the heat roars in. Another country begins.
My aunt is standing at the gate, waiting for me, a slim figure in the shade of a tree. “Hello, my darling,” she says. Hello. Hello.
• • •
ALTHOUGH IT IS ONLY two miles away, Fay has never been to Soweto—“I can’t believe it, it seems ridiculous”—and I am keen to see it. One morning, we are met at her house by an elderly black man called Opa, or rather, a man trading under the name of Opa, the Dutch word for “grandpa” and the most unthreatening name possible for a black man’s professional dealings with white people. Opa will be our tour guide for the day. We get in his car for the fifteen-minute journey.
Soweto is the subject of endless chirpy editorials in the local press about the rise of the black middle class, epitomized by a new shopping center and redbrick homes with cars parked out front. This is not what tourists come to see. We drive through the fancier area quickly, Opa pausing to point out Winnie Mandela’s house, which has a guard out front and satellite equipment on the roof, before speeding up again to reach the top of the hill. From here, the majority of the township can be viewed: an expanse of shanties in every direction as far as the eye can see. On the map it appears as a blank space.
“When the—how can I put this?—white people came to South Africa,” says Opa, “they encountered the—how can I put this?—black people.” As delicately as he can, he condenses the last hundred years of South African history as if it involved no human agency whatsoever but was merely a series of ahistorical forces bearing down on the country like weather. We pull in at some gift shops opposite Baragwanath Hospital, where the minivans terminate, throwing up dust and conking out at wild angles to one another. I buy some beads. My aunt seems pleased. Opa explains that lots of people mistakenly think the word “Baragwanath” comes from the Zulu, but in fact it’s English. Many of the early immigrants who came to work in the mines were from Cornwall, he says; Baragwanath was one of them. For lunch, Opa takes us to a dark, busy restaurant in Soweto called Wandies Place. We have green beans and chicken, and while Opa lingers over the buffet, my aunt and I sit opposite each other and talk about our day.
“This has been just so good,” she says. “So interesting. Opa is wonderful.”
“Yes,” I say. I am happy to be here with her.
Over the next few weeks, we go on many more excursions. We see England play South Africa at cricket. I collect her in the car and bring her back to my neighborhood for dinner at a Thai restaurant. We go to see a show, a Lion King derivative called African Footprint. My aunt is a bookkeeper at a large company, and I go into work with her. She introduces me to her colleagues, and we spend a pleasant morning hanging out in her office. One evening, after spending the day together, she asks me to give Maria, her maid, a lift to the bus station in town. I have chatted quite a bit to Maria at my aunt’s house. She has told me about her teenage son. When Maria laughs, she holds up a hand to cover her mouth. By the time we get into the city, it is dusk. The bus station is in a very dark street, crowds of people moving about in the shadows, and I am nervous. “Will you be OK?” I ask as Maria gets out. She looks at me severely, tightening the belt on her jacket. “Of course,” she says, and I see it in her face: “Oh, you people have no idea.”
At lunch one weekend in a shopping mall in Meyersdaal, I pull out some papers and slide them across the table. We are eating Klip River fish and drinking white wine. In the background, motor racing whines on the TV. Like Steven, Fay hadn’t known anything about her father’s murder conviction. I tell her about it now. My aunt doesn’t react immediately.
“I’m glad,” she says finally.
I’m puzzled. “I don’t understand.” I say.
“I’m glad he went to prison somewhere along the line.”
I turn over the top sheet of the paperwork. She glances down. “Yes,” she says. “That’s his signature.” She reads on, through the judge’s remarks to the sentencing. “Hard labor,” she says. “Good.”
• • •
THE TOWNS OF MY MOTHER’S youth sound harsh to the ear and are no less severe in reality. One day, I drive two hours south on the highway and pull off onto a small, dusty regional road. I am looking for the faintest hairline on the map, a track that runs through open country and which, according to an address I have from the court papers, leads to the house where my mother walked out into the fields one morning in a pair of pink silk pajamas. After missing it several times, I turn onto an unsurfaced road that runs through grassland as high as the roof of the car. In a ghost story, after the engine died down I would see a flash of pink silk in the tall yellow grass and a second later hear laughter. But there are only the red roofs of a few mean scattered houses, with faded yellow walls and grilles on the windows. There are small purple and white flowers in the grass. I return to the main road and pull into the settlement’s only sign of life, a liquor store, where men hang around the door in oil-stained dungarees. On the horizon is a line of trees, leaves streaming, sunlight gauzy behind them. It could be northern France, I think, and then one of the men shambles over to start a conversation, and I get in the car and leave.
Vereeniging is full of funeral parlors and pawnshops. Outside the art deco station stands an old steam engine, of a kind, I suppose, my grandfather once drove. I stand on the bridge, looking down the tracks toward Johannesburg, the heat rising from the concrete like floodwater. Witpoortjie, in the district of Roodepoort, where the family lived at the time my grandfather was arrested, is gaudy and chaotic, people spilling into the street from the sidewalk. Meyerton, Zwartkoppies—all flat, sullen, rebuked. I don’t always get out of the car. In a quiet street in a town fifteen miles west of Johannesburg I find the magistrates’ court where the first hearing took place, a squat municipal building behind razor wire. I have always thought that by fixing things exactly one widens their possibility; or in this case, lessens their power to torment. But driving to those places and just standing and looking seems woefully inadequate. I reach for some other ritual—laying flowers, saying prayers?—and find nothing. At the end of all those hot, tiring afternoons, I wonder what the point has been. Perhaps it this: that as long as there are places to visit and things to find out, my mother and I still exist in the present; are engaged, still, in conversation. And then I think of the places I can’t go.
“Paula never talked about those years,” Fay had said over lunch at Meyersdaal, meaning the years after my grandmother’s death and before Jimmy remarried, when my mother lived alone with him. “I should have . . .” Her expression was beseeching. I smiled. It always comes back to this, I think, one way or another. I should have asked about the past. The cowardice was mine. It reminds me of that bit in Superman when the dad keels over in the dust in the barn and dies, and the superchild looks up at the sky in the direction of his Kryptonian mother and howls, “With all my powers I couldn’t save him.” With all my powers of education, all my competence and good taste; with my life-saving certificate and my grade-five piano; with my equity and insurance; with all that perspective, through which almost anything can be rationalized away or excused; with the invincibility that comes, simply, from having been loved, I couldn’t ask a simple question, because I was frightened the answer would destroy me. My aunt said, “When I think of those years and what she—” Ha. Well. We both had to smile then, since we knew from long experience that such imaginings are impossible. The airbag inflates. There is no seeing around it.
• • •
MOST OF THE PEOPLE I meet in those early days are either journalists or aid workers, people who come to South Africa determined to do their own laundry and within a week submit to the logic that having domestic staff helps the local economy.
Dora does my laundry.
The journalists look down on the aid workers for their worthiness. The aid workers look down on the journalists for their loucheness. The domestic staff look down on all of us, I imagine, as we cringe and dither in the face of their duties, and in one of eleven official languages think, “Pricks.”
A new friend, a South African journalist, is going to Canada for a few months and offers to let me house-sit in her absence; a vacant property is vulnerable to invasion. It’s a beautiful two-story house, with a deck overlooking a lush garden running down to a pool. Architectural Digest is always bugging her to feature it, she says, and she always declines on the assumption it just serves as an advertisement to burglars. I won’t be wholly alone there. For a while, the upstairs bedroom is rented out to a photographer for Agence France-Presse, who is away most of the time covering atrocities in Zimbabwe. And while the high, wide garden wall is being rebuilt, a man called Albert will stay in the pool house at night.
Over the next few weeks, a pattern establishes itself. In the mornings, I sit in the pool house rearranging chapter headings for the book I’m supposed to be writing. There is a chair, a desk, and a large purple exercise ball. When I’m not rearranging chapter headings or staring out at the pool, I’m wondering whether to use the exercise ball.
Mid-morning, I run up the path to make tea. The path is rough underfoot. Ferns brush my legs with what feels like a retractable groping action. Lizards scatter on the low garden wall. My mother used to say that if you dropped a stone on a lizard’s tail, it would fall off and grow another. We once spent an entire week on vacation in Majorca chasing them to try to put this to the test, but they were always too fast for us.
In the kitchen the floor is tiled and cool. The tea is clear and red with a picture of a tree on the packet, bent-limbed like a broken umbrella, like a symbol of the broken heart of Africa, like . . . Dora comes in just then.
“Did you work this morning?” she says. She flicks the mop at my feet. That woman sees straight through me.
For lunch, I go to a place called Ant’s, which used to be a weapons and ammo store and is now a coffee shop serving cappuccino and the two types of tapenade. Ant himself is a bearded Afrikaner, very dyslexic, who is hoping to collaborate with someone on his memoirs and who once threatened to extinguish a rival snack outlet for what he said was their plagiarism of his meat platter. I find a municipal tennis club and twice a week have coaching with Therese, “South Africa’s number three,” who makes me run back and forth in ninety-degree heat as retribution for the Boer War.
When I walk back to the house, I pass Siya, one of a group of itinerant men who seem to live in a park at the end of my street. Siya is young and agile, with dreadlocks and a big multicolored beanie. He is the most friendly and sometimes falls into step with me. We walk in dappled sunlight down the middle of the street, partly from pleasure, partly from habit; you are advised not to walk too close to the edge of the park where Siya and his friends disappear to at night.
He tells me he has come from the Transkei to make his fortune. He says this with an ironic smile that acknowledges the fact he is living in a park. He owns a guitar and has started songwriting. He asks me to let him know if I hear of any jobs or empty garages going.
“I could be your night watchman,” he says. I tell him about Albert. Siya nods thoughtfully.
I offer him part of the Chelsea bun I am eating, and Siya takes it and looks around as if wanting to return the gesture. He points to a house with a sign on its gate that reads, “Beware: this property is protected by live snakes.”
“See that house?” he says.
“Yes.”
“There are no snakes in that house.”
We are at my front door. “See ya, Siya,” I say, and he wheels around grinning and heads back to the park.
In the evening there are drinks in the garden of the guesthouse, or else I drive to the cinema in one of the malls. Compared with London, the city is easy to get around, nowhere more than forty-five minutes from anywhere else and the roads wide and straight. The malls are American in style and full of affluent teenagers. Nobody who doesn’t have to drives through the old city center at night.
I go to see Joan and Danny again. “Man, you’ve hardly eaten,” she says. “Pickled onion, Em? Avocado, Em? Shame, the man said they’d be ripe today, they’re not ripe. Piece of Christmas cake, Em? Old Pa, what do you want?”
One night, I am invited to a party at the house of an English baroness. The baroness isn’t in residence but has lent her house to an English friend for the summer. A journalist friend drives me there, to a neighborhood forty minutes away, in the north of the city. “Howzit, baba,” says my pal to the guard in the guard hut—showing off, I think—and the man waves us through.
When they colonize the moon, the developments will look like this, a series of units within the silent acres, devoid of life as if the air were unbreathable. The party is just getting under way as we arrive. In the back garden by the pool there is a barbecue presided over by South African men holding beer cans; a little way off, English men regard them with a mixture of superiority and envy. There is no denying it: South Africans have a natural authority with a pair of meat tongs.
A man asks me why I am in South Africa. “Escaping the English winter,” I say. He points to a man in a black V-neck sweater standing alone in the corner and mouths, “CIA.”
I don’t know it then, that everyone on this circuit suspects everyone else of being a spy; that people who are not spies pretend to be spies; that one is to be alert at all times for suspicious behavior, to store away and thrill oneself with in duller times to come.
Later on that evening, with pitch-perfect postcolonial condescension, the spy explains to me that while in global terms South Africa is not terribly influential, it has “strategic importance within the region.” I nod vigorously.
There are a lot of aid workers here, mainly Scandinavian and British women in firm sports bras who dash around town alleviating suffering as you or I might wipe down a table.
I am introduced to an Australian journalist called Michelle, who hands me a business card featuring an underwater photo of a shark and the words “Michelle Bovine, journalist, General News, Foreign Affairs, Marine Science.” She is a minor celebrity at the party by virtue of having moved into a house where the Vaulting Wanker had last been sighted. This, it is explained to me, is a neighborhood streaker whose routine it is to run across people’s gardens, masturbate in the general direction of their house, and then vault over the fence into the night. One of his early victims had been the daughter of a prominent antiapartheid campaigner murdered by the security police. When news of the Vaulting Wanker reached the papers, the man who murdered her father read about it and, wanting to atone, got a message to her from his prison cell that he would have his people look into it and, if she wished, make sure the Vaulting Wanker was quietly eliminated. She declined his kind offer. I sometimes think this story contains everything you need to know about South Africa.
Michelle, who had not seen the Wanker herself but had at least gazed upon the ground where he had wanked, offers to give me a lift home. A large, drunk man grabs us as we leave and reminds us to run through all the traffic lights. “Will they be all right?” he says to no one in particular and crumples into the wall.
In the car, Michelle tells me she has come to South Africa to make her name as a war reporter.
“Which war?” I say.
She frowns. “Well, in any case, what I really want is to get into television.”
• • •
I AM GOING ABOUT this perversely, I know. I am here for a maximum of six months, and yet insist on this charade of spending the first five hours of every day at my desk in the pool house. Fay thinks I am crazy. She asks if I want to go on safari with her, but I can’t face the four a.m. start. I can’t face anything much beyond the pool house each morning. I tell my aunt I have work to do. I tell myself the same thing. I call the Department of Justice and have them fax me a list of prosecutors called Britz, past and present. Half are dead; the rest, when I call, turn out not to be relevant. From the court papers I have the name of the arresting officer: a Sergeant Nel. You may as well look for a Smith in the South African phone book, but I ring a dozen or so Nels, to no avail.
I have, I realize, become blasé about risk. It seems to me statistically improbable that anything will happen to me in this country, where everything bad that can happen in a family has pretty much happened. At night, I lie in my ground-floor room and look up at the narrow window beneath the ceiling, wondering, if push came to shove, whether I could fit through it. It is unclear what Albert’s duties are in relation to me. It’s also impossible to tell how old he is. He could be anything between forty and seventy-five. Albert arrives at dusk with a portable stove and refuses my offer of tea. While I sit on the terrace in the evening, I see the light from his stove dancing in the corner of my eye. In the morning he is gone.
At least once a week either Albert or I trigger the network of alarms I set and which crisscross the garden invisibly. Sometimes they trigger themselves when I am out during the day, and I get home to find a pink slip under the door—like the one you get from the postman when you’ve missed him, only what you’ve missed in this case is a fat man in a uniform limply waving a gun at the undergrowth and looking for signs of an intruder. I get the feeling I am one false alarm away from him saving us all the trouble and shooting me himself.
One morning, when I go into the kitchen, Dora tells me that a friend of mine’s car, parked under my bedroom window overnight, has been broken into. She stands poker straight between the work surfaces, drinking her tea with her back to the door. I lean against the counter.
I ask what Albert said, and Dora waves a hand, either to signal the irrelevance of this or the irrelevance of Albert.
“What time did he leave this morning?”
“Seven.” Dora comes in on the first bus and leaves in mid-afternoon. I tell her about Siya’s offer of night security. Siya is young and strong, I mean, he’s usually stoned, but I might feel happier—
“Who?” says Dora.
I mime the shape of a large hat on my head. “Siya with the braids from the end of the street.” Dora has to cough suddenly and, excusing herself, leaps through the back door to throw her tea dregs into the flower bed. Who, she says, reentering the kitchen, do I imagine broke into the car?
“Absolutely not,” I say. “Siya wouldn’t do that. He’s my friend, he knows I live here.”
Dora looks at me. “He’s bad, those boys are bad.” They robbed the bakery earlier that month, she says.
When I walk out for lunch that day, Siya is in his usual post at the end of the street. He holds up a hand in greeting. When I frown at him, he winks. I huff on to the shops.
As a liberal foreigner, you are discouraged from going on about crime in South Africa; it’s seen to be rather poor form when there is so much else of cultural interest to talk about. I am on my cell phone one night, walking the block from my house to the guesthouse for drinks, talking to my friend Merope in London. She is complaining that the real estate agents have overvalued her flat; now it’ll stick around on the market forever. As I round the corner, I walk straight into two large men who with a swiftness approaching grace grab my wrist, twist it up my back, and, in what feels like a weird country-dance move, wrench it upward until my hand instinctively releases. “OK, OK, take it,” I say, in what I think later was an oddly petulant tone. Barely breaking their stride, they continue up the street while staring at the phone and trying to work out how to hang up the call. Merope’s voice issues mosquito-like out of the earpiece.
I walk into the guesthouse, shaking. “I got mugged,” I say to the room full of people, and despite my fright, try to pull off a complicated maneuver of getting maximum sympathy for the mugging and maximum kudos for appearing not to care about it. The English in the room start flapping gratifyingly. The South Africans, once it has been established no gun was involved, assume a total lack of interest. I turn to the host. “I need to make a call,” I say. “The person I was speaking to will think I’ve been murdered.”
I am shaking so much it takes a few tries before I can remember the dial code.
“When are you going to learn how to use your fucking phone?” says Merope.
“I was mugged.”
“Oh. Shit. I thought you hung up by mistake like you always do. Are you all right?”
“Yes. They just took my phone.”
“Sorry. I thought you were being an idiot.”
“It’s OK. They couldn’t work out how to switch it off. I think you killed them with that really boring story about your flat.”
I don’t want to worry my dad about it, but the next morning I feel I haven’t had enough sympathy for the mugging and, against my better judgment, ring Fay.
“I was mugged,” I say pitifully.
“Oh,” she says. There is a short silence. “Are you OK?”
Her tone is neutral, not unsympathetic exactly, but not encouraging either, and I imagine she is thinking, “Really? You’re coming to me, of all people, with this trivial nonsense?”
I laugh. “It was quite funny, actually,” I say, and we are back on safe ground.
• • •
IN ALL THOSE AFTERNOON drives I’ve been taking there is somewhere I haven’t felt inclined to visit. It is one outrage too many, a place where something happened that I decline to take on as mine. And then my friend Adam, a British journalist, has an interview come up four hours or so south of Johannesburg and halfway to Durban. He suggests a road trip; we will stay overnight at his contact’s house and drive on to the coast for a day or two. When I look at the map, I gulp; his contact lives five miles or so from where, six years before my mother was born, my grandfather committed the murder.
There is no exact address for Adam’s contact, whom I will call Z; just instructions to drive south for three hours on the highway, look out for a biltong shack at the side of the road, turn left, and drive for another twenty minutes up an unpaved track. When we get to the crest of the hill, says Z, we’re to call him. The path to his house is impassable; he will come and collect us in his Land Rover.
He is, from what Adam says, the type of man I naïvely thought didn’t exist anymore: a former British Army officer involved in what might delicately be called risk assessment, a job that requires him to spend long periods of time in countries that don’t issue tourist visas. Unlike the people posing as spies on the Johannesburg barbecue circuit, these men are older, wider, redder in the face, and not inclined to wear cashmere. Adam is writing a book about the mercenaries of southern Africa and has been spending a lot of time in the company of these men, by far the most entertaining of whom is Z.
We follow his instructions to the letter—left at the shack, along the unpaved road—but take a wrong turn somewhere and end up at a dead end, a grassy clearing outside an abandoned-looking barn. “Is there someone we can ask?” I say. We look around at the desolate scene and burst into laughter. Z doesn’t answer his phone.
For a while, the excitement of plans gone awry keeps us going. There is no real urgency. We have potato snacks. We get out of the car and, like children after a long journey, unfurl and lean into the thick humid air. Then it is dusk. Adam backs the car up the track and we retrace our steps until we find the crest of the hill. A jagged path leads sharply down, around a bend where, just visible, is the roof of a building with a number of large satellite dishes on it.
We imagine Z has been called out. That he is attending to an emergency at a neighboring property. That he can’t get reception on his cell phone, although we are sure he must have a satellite phone. We imagine They have found him, whoever They are, and he is lying in a pool of his own blood with a knife through his chest. Adam opens the door and gets out.
“I’ll stay with the car,” I say. “It’s not because you’re the man. It’s because you’re the one who knows him. It would be rude for me to turn up at the door.”
“Right.”
There is a moment’s pause and then, in a burst of determined energy, Adam heaves himself up and starts off down the hill.
I decide to give him twenty minutes before heading back to the main road to call the police. The sound of a vehicle climbing the track makes my heart soar, then plunge. What if it isn’t them? What if it’s them? Roaring over the crest of the hill is a Land Rover with a red-faced man at the wheel. “Sorry about that!” he booms. “I got separated from my phone!” From the passenger seat, Adam gives me a wan smile.
• • •
TWENTY MINUTES LATER, we are installed in Z’s country-style kitchen. The inside of the house is like a Swiss chalet, with warm, exposed beams and thoughtful furnishings in a variety of pastel colors. “Pink gin?” says Z. He pours generous measures, while reminiscing about his days on the intelligence circuit in Cape Town. “Of course,” he says, “Mr. Bong was very obviously Chinese intelligence. And I said to our new ambassador, ‘You’re very lucky, the head of French intelligence is over there, I should go and introduce myself if I were you.’”
His specialist subject is African coups, many of which have been centered, at the recruitment stage, in South Africa’s second city. “You know who was behind it all, don’t you? The Nigerian-Lebanese axis. Bloody Lebos. And of course everybody knew about it before it happened. Even the bloody Canadians knew. Six knew and decided not to tell the Foreign Office, in their wisdom.” Z looks off into the distance, as if at a parallel and infinitely better universe where people listened to their spies. More pink gin. “I mean, for goodness’ sake, you don’t debrief at that level in-country!”
“No, no,” I murmur. After a few more pink gins and the welcoming arm of the sofa I doze off. I wake up as Z is saying, “Tim’s brother disappeared in Tongo. One rather assumes he was done in.”
• • •
THE COUNTRY IS PARCHED and rocky around here, sparsely populated and tricky to cultivate. It’s an area known for its large number of Scottish immigrants; the farms on three sides of the property where the murder took place were called Braemar, Clydesdale, and Abergeldy. Johan Hendrik Potgeiter, an Afrikaner in their midst, had called his farm Kromellenboog—Afrikaans for Crooked Elbow, which described the shape of the stream that ran through it.
On Christmas Eve 1925, three men set out from Ladysmith, heading in the direction of the remote rural community. They traveled by motorbike, and if they had been trying to accrue witnesses as part of an elaborate hoax on the system, they couldn’t have been seen by more people. A Madwendwe Kubeka saw them ride past his school in the direction of the farm. A Mr. Venter saw them standing beside the bike at the side of the road. They even stopped to ask a woman where they could find water. Her name was Ntombikazulu Mazibuku. She turned up among the state’s forty-four witnesses.
The farmstead was at the end of a long track, concealed from the road. It had been reconnoitered in advance by the men, and Potgeiter, an elderly man, identified as an easy victim. During the course of the robbery, he was assaulted and died. The three men were seen by several people leaving the farm, heading in the direction of Brakwaal Station, where they abandoned the bike and boarded the train. Mr. du Plooy, the station foreman, remembered them clearly.
A few days later, they were arrested in Ladysmith, where they were found to be in possession of twenty-five one-pound notes, a pistol, some electric cord, and a set of silver hairbrushes. They had stolen a total of three hundred pounds from the old man and were charged with culpable homicide and robbery; they pleaded guilty to the latter.
At sentencing, Judge Tatham, while acknowledging that the victim’s death was not their sole purpose, had no desire to be lenient. It was, he said, “an act of almost incredible meanness.” He referred to a similar case recently prosecuted in the Transvaal, for which two men had been sentenced to death. “Psychologists,” he said, in a modish reference for the time, “tell us that there is no power so strong as the power of suggestion.”
In his rather long-winded summation he wished to make a broader point. “In a population such as this,” he said,
consisting as it does largely of coloured people, white men who engage in transactions of this character must receive no more mercy than natives. They ought to know better. They ought to know the effect of their example. It is essential that the suggestion to commit a dreadful, cowardly and mean crime such as this should be accompanied by the suggestion that if it is committed, it will meet with the most severe punishment. It is impossible for me, having regard to the brutality of your conduct, having regard to its deliberation, and having regard to the importance of making an example of you to prevent others from committing a crime of this sort, to sentence you to a less term of imprisonment than that of 10 years with hard labor.
He had considered ordering them to be flogged as well, but decided against it, and so, on behalf of George V, by the Grace of God of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and of the British Dominions beyond the Seas, King, Defender of the Faith and Emperor of India, sentenced them to what was considered at the time a life sentence. There are, he said, “two classes of crime for which one is disinclined to show mercy. The first is offences against little children, who are unable to protect themselves, and the second is that of robbing old people, who are equally helpless.”
• • •
THE NEXT DAY IS SUNDAY. Z, delighted to have guests, has invited a family from a neighboring property for lunch. The children, red-haired and freckled, flee outside and bound on the rocks like Irish setters. “Will they be all right?” I say. The youngest is about four. Their mother waves a hand; they are as familiar with this environment as the rocks themselves, she says. She has the air of a woman used to dominating a landscape.
“Now then,” says Z, pushing studs of garlic into a raw leg of lamb and turning to me. He wipes his hands on his apron. “What’s all this about a murder?”
I go upstairs to retrieve the papers. The map accompanying the trial notes looks like a child’s treasure hunt, with “Murder” written at the top in a round, slightly babyish hand, underlined and with a symbol to show where the body was found. I give a brief presentation of the facts.
“Who was the judge?” says the woman.
“Someone called Tatham.”
“Yes,” she says. “He was my great-uncle.”
From the kitchen a loud snort.
“Where did it happen?”
“A farm called Kromellenboog.”
“It’s over there somewhere. Named for the shape of the creek; it’s Afrikaans for ‘crooked elbow,’ you know. And who did he kill?”
“An old farmer called Potgeiter.”
She pauses for a moment and gives me a shrewd look. “His grandson still lives in the district.”
Z looks up with renewed interest. “Well, there’s one for the local paper. Truth and reconciliation and all that. My grandfather killed your grandfather. Worth a photo at least! Come on, let’s call him!”
My good humor evaporates.
“No,” I say.
Z has the diplomacy to drop it. When we leave, hours later, amid promises to meet up for drinks when Z’s next in the city, Adam asks if I want to make a detour to the spot on the map. I hesitate.
“Come on,” he says. “We’re right here. We might as well.”
It is harder to find than anticipated. The map is approximate and all the dirt tracks look the same. We pull off the highway and climb yet another unpaved road, cross a stream, and, on a slight rise set back from the path, pull up in front of a mean-looking farmhouse, surrounded by scrub. There is no signage, save for one discouraging trespassers. “Is this it? I think this is it.” We sit in the car and stare. Adam waits patiently, out of respect for whatever private moment I might be having. I’m not having anything. I feel ghoulish and silly. Whatever internal process these expeditions are serving, this place falls outside of it. I can just hear my mother’s impatient response: “Stop looking for nonsense.”
“Come on,” I say. “There’s nothing here. Let’s go.”