De Villiers Residence, Pretoria

38

Smit’s case was of no use to me in attempting to understand why Leon Labuschagne had killed seven men at the reservoir. I put the file away and went to look for my sister. Annelise was in the kitchen preparing dinner. The innocence of the scene reminded me of the cases where the men whose death warrants I had seen had crept into a house to kill the woman inside. I offered to open a bottle of wine. After the dishes had been cleared from the table, Annelise left to supervise her children’s homework. Pierre and I retreated to his lapa. He carried a bottle of very old French cognac.

We sat down and I accepted a cognac from him. I sniffed at the rim of the bulbous glass. ‘What’s the difference between brandy and cognac?’ I asked.

He smiled. ‘If you have to ask you won’t understand.’

We sat staring into the night. Although the sky was clear you could not see the stars; the city lights created a haze. I pondered a conundrum that has intrigued me from the time I first moved to the city: why do I feel unsafe in the city at night when I never feel unsafe in the dark nights in the bush?

‘Listen, Pierre,’ I said, ‘I really need to talk some more about killing.’

‘What exactly is it that you want to know?’

‘I want to know if it is possible to kill someone in cold blood because you are angry with him or hate him.’

He sighed and shook his head and asked, ‘Is this a rhetorical question?’

‘No,’ I said, ‘it isn’t. Let me rephrase the question. What I want to know is this: could you kill seven people in cold blood because you are angry with them, or because you hate them for their race?’

‘Yes, you can,’ he said, nodding. ‘But what I can’t understand is how such a man could think that he is a Christian.’

The conversation was going in the wrong direction for me, although he had partly answered my question. ‘Christians have killed a lot of people in the name of the faith,’ I reminded him. ‘But that is not what I have trouble understanding. What I am trying to grasp is how a man feels while he is killing. What does he think? How does he feel? How does the killer’s body react to the thing he is doing – killing?’

‘God knows,’ Pierre said very softly, ‘I know about that.’

‘Are you willing to tell me?’ I suggested gently. ‘I cannot get through to Labuschagne and I am trying desperately to understand what was going on in his mind.’

‘Not now,’ was all he said.

Knowing well that he wouldn’t be moved, I was on the point of giving up. But then he said, ‘Maybe later, after I have put the children to bed.’

I realised that he meant after I have had a few more cognacs and I assisted him in getting greased up quickly. By the time he started opening up my head was spinning.

‘I think we have a physical aversion to killing, which has nothing to do with religion or morality,’ he said. ‘It’s incredibly difficult to kill someone. I found it difficult even when they were shooting at me and it was him or me.’

‘How do you mean, it was physically difficult?’ I asked.

‘I mean that you go to custard. You shake, you stiffen up, there is a roar of blood or whatever in your ears, and all your training goes out the window. Worst of all, time stands still. And in that void all your senses become hyper sharp and all your sensations are magnified tenfold. So you feel dangers greater than they really are, threats more serious, while at the same time your capacity to think is compromised and your reactions are slowed down.’

‘So what happens then?’

‘You make mistakes, and plenty of them. Big ones, too.’

He sipped at the cognac. I had given up trying to match him drink for drink. I had to go to court the next day with a clear head.

‘And you relive those mistakes every day after that; you experience the whole event exactly as it happened, with all the physical sensations you experienced at the time. You go back there but you can’t turn the clock back. When you wake up the consequences are still there for you to deal with.’

I brought the discussion back to the point. ‘But how do you force yourself to do it, even in those cases where you have to kill, I mean when your whole being resists, as you’ve explained?’

He stood up abruptly and went into the house without looking back. I thought he had gone to sleep, when I heard a toilet flush. He returned to the dark of the lapa.

‘I know exactly how they felt,’ he said as he sat down.

‘Well,’ I said, ‘he doesn’t talk about it and on this topic I have so far had to beat every word out of him.’

‘I am not talking about Labuschagne,’ Pierre said gruffly. ‘I am talking about the thirty-two men they hanged.’

This threw me somewhat off balance. I played with the glass in my hand, swirling the cognac higher and higher towards the rim. How could he know what those men felt? He was so unlike them. He answered without hearing the question.

‘I read all those cases, remember,’ he said. ‘I know what every one of them went through. You become someone else in the pack. Your own identity and values are absent somehow, they get submerged in a morass of other personalities and value systems. For a time each killing is easier than the previous one, and then they start getting more difficult than the prior ones. Eventually you have this thing inside you that you can’t talk about and you can’t bear thinking about. And you end up where it is easier to be awake than to be asleep. You pick up a momentum.’

We sat staring at our glasses for a while. I thought of Wierda’s words. They hunt in packs.

‘Yes, it is a momentum. You start slowly and pick up speed until you feel comfortable. Then you pick up more speed until you reach the extreme limits of your self-control, the point just before you know you are going to lose it.’

He did not say what it was. I assumed he was referring to his self-control or his sanity, perhaps both.

I asked him about Mrs Webber’s killers. There were three of them and they could so easily have overpowered her and taken what they wanted. Why did they have to stab her, and beat her, and strangle her with a wire tied around her neck? Why?

‘They were in a panic. You can only kill if you go into a state of panic. You can’t do it otherwise,’ Pierre said. It was not a complete explanation.

We drank some more and talked about what had happened to him in Angola deep into the night. I got the impression that I was the first one to hear it from him and that not even my sister knew.

‘Let me tell you something else,’ he said, changing the topic. He was slurring his words. ‘When someone you know well dies, the awfulness of the death is offset by the weight of the memories you have of that person’s life, and of your shared experiences. But when you kill a stranger all you have are the act of killing and the process of dying. Together, the killing and the dying constitute your sole memory of that person, and your shared encounter. It is a memory of their agony and your hand in it.

‘The only thing worse than killing a stranger would have to be to kill someone you know well, with whom you have shared memories and shared experiences. Because then the memory of the act of killing and the process of dying would make nonsense of all those prior memories and shared experiences; it would mock them and piss on them.’

Pierre was not given to swearing, and when I looked up sharply I saw he was oblivious of my presence.

‘We killed strangers, and that was difficult enough,’ he said as we staggered from the lapa, long after midnight. ‘I just can’t see how you can kill someone you know.’

The way he said it gave me an idea. ‘When you shot at those people, did you think of them as people, you know, like you and me? Or how did you see them?’ The question wasn’t very coherent. We were at the gate and I was ready to drive back to the hotel.

‘No, no,’ said Pierre. ‘You don’t shoot at people. You shoot at uniforms. All you see is the uniform.’

‘What about the ones who don’t wear a uniform?’

‘If they don’t wear your uniform, whatever they’re wearing, that is the enemy’s uniform,’ he said.

The war in Angola was not very clearly defined in my mind. We saw very little on television. I had no picture of the enemy’s uniform. What we were allowed to know was that there were Russians and Cubans assisting the local forces.

‘So you shoot at uniforms. Does that help you not to think of them as people?’ I asked.

‘We have our uniforms and they have theirs. I told you, soldiers don’t shoot at people; you shoot at uniforms. You don’t think of them as people while the fighting is going on.’

There was a qualification in Pierre’s response, unintended perhaps, but it was enough of an opening to allow another question.

‘Do you think of them as people after the fighting has stopped?’

It was a question too many. Pierre turned on his heel and walked back to the house, his reaction an answer more eloquent than words.

I drove back to the hotel carefully. I should not have been driving, but the streets were deserted. I thought of the events in the gallows chamber and at the reservoir. Maybe there was something in Pierre’s reaction to my last question. Men in uniform see the enemy as a human being only when he is dead. And their job, of course, is to kill them.

But I was more interested in the warders and prisoners in Maximum, where warder and prisoner alike were dressed in prison green.