Mamelodi Cemetery

27

By the time the escorts had returned after seeing the relatives out the death notification forms had been completed by the admin office. One coloured and six black men had been hanged, so the deaths had to be registered at two different Home Affairs offices in the city.

The escorts engaged in a game of paper, rock, scissors; the losers would be the two who had to register the deaths and the winners would join them later for the burial detail. The game ended quickly and the losers collected their documents. They checked them cursorily. The cause of death in each case was stated as Judicial Execution.

The two escorts departed together in a prison car. They were well known at the Home Affairs departments and were given preferential treatment. At the first office they went to the front of the queue and were admitted to a back office with a window and a red carpet where a supervisor occupied the desk.

‘How many do you have today?’

‘Six,’ said the escorts in unison.

Within half an hour the department’s records had been amended to record the deaths of the six men and the escorts left with their certificates for the second office they had to visit. There they had only one death to register: Willem Maarman’s. Back at Maximum they handed in the certificates to admin and set off with the other escorts on the next leg of their mission.

At the chapel they collected the coffins and manoeuvred them through the passages to the garage behind the gallows building. Two minibuses were waiting there. They quickly sorted the coffins according to the race of the occupants and loaded them in the minibuses. Just as there were two Home Affairs offices for the registration of the deaths, so there were two cemeteries for the bodies. One would go to Eersterus Cemetery and the other six to Mamelodi.

The prison had only one minibus with panelled windows for the purpose and they had had to rent another from an undertaker, whose assistant was to drive the coffins to Mamelodi. With six coffins loaded in the minibus there was no space for a second escort and, after playing paper, rock, scissors again, only one escort accompanied the bodies to Mamelodi. He was heading for a nightmare of a different kind.

On the way to the cemetery a car approaching from the right failed to stop at the red light. Its brakes must have failed, for it didn’t stop even when the undertaker’s minibus drove through the green light, right into its way. A perfectly executed ballet followed. The errant car lurched to the right as the minibus veered left just enough for the two vehicles to touch sides for half a second, and for the two drivers to recognise mutual fear in the short time they had eye contact before the car went on its way and the minibus spun out of control into the parking lot of a shopping centre.

Coffins crashed about the minibus, spilling their contents. By the time the minibus came to a halt, its interior was a mess of planks and mutilated naked bodies. The undertaker’s driver took one look and ran away, leaving his door open, the minibus idling and the prison warder on his own in the disarray.

At Eersterus the two escorts paid a passer-by to fill in the grave for them. They made themselves at home under a tree and smoked one cigarette after another. The body underground would still have been warm when they left. They were back at Maximum in time for lunch.

It was a different story at the other cemetery. Long after midday the lone man at Mamelodi was still struggling with his rickety load of coffins. When he had arrived the graveyard was deserted. It was midsummer and hot; swirls of wind chased red dust devils across the flat expanse of untended soil.

He dragged the first coffin by its front end and slid it out the back of the minibus. When the rear end of the coffin fell to the ground, the lid, hastily nailed back after the near accident, popped open again and fell off. The escort refastened the lid with a few blows of his shoe and picked up the front end of the coffin a second time. By the time he had dragged the coffin to the open grave a few yards away he was sweating profusely. He stopped next to the fresh mound of soil and pondered the best way to get the coffin into the grave.

Still bent over the front end of the coffin he half turned to look into the shade below. This was a job usually done by two men, now he had to find a way of doing it on his own. He decided to slide the coffin across so that its front end protruded over the edge of the grave. First he pushed the coffin over and then jumped into the grave. He grunted with the effort as he pulled the coffin over further and further until its back end was right on the grave’s edge. Then he gave it a final tug and stepped back, but there was insufficient space behind him and he was trapped when the coffin crashed six feet down into the hole and fell against his shins.

A cloud of dust rose from the grave and when it had settled he saw that the cheap coffin had disintegrated; its occupant lay on his side, an arm flung wide. Oblivious of the blood seeping from the abrasions on his legs he scrambled out of the grave, crawling like a spider with his hands and feet in the earth. Streams of sweat traced white lines in the dust on his face.

He struggled with each coffin in turn, dragging them from the minibus and across to the allocated graves. Five more times he disappeared into the shady hollow of a grave, getting dirtier with each drop until he was as red as the soil, with sand under his fingernails and clinging to his scalp. He did not bother to put any of the coffins and bodies together again, leaving them as they had landed, in a mess of planks and limbs.

Filling in the graves on his own took yet more time and greater physical effort, and he became progressively more dehydrated. His throat was parched as he toiled, shovelling soil into the graves.

It was late afternoon before he arrived back at Maximum. He returned dog-tired, incoherent with dehydration and with a pounding headache, only to be mocked by his fellow escorts and castigated by the Warrant Officer for having taken so long to complete the job.