WHEN THE THREE MEN FILED INTO THE ROOM they could have been anywhere: a dining room, a waiting room, a courtroom rank with sweat. This was business. Two sat; between them one stood at the microphone and waited.
His hips gave him away, his black hat, the sharp heel of his boot that tapped out the time. The audience knew from the first twang, the ribbed sigh of the metal, that he was the frontman – but more than that: they knew from his possession of the bare human voice that superseded any tool or instrument, the hard-pressed innard and gizzard.
Graham Weir began his ballad, and ballads are stories, are desperate letters, are messages from the grave. It took us in the audience back to the veld, to the open spaces, to the place where you could still choose the ending.
I sat in the third row, at the end, and listened for stories. I wanted to know how things happened. I didn’t want to analyse them, or find a newsworthy angle, or add a paragraph about retribution and reconciliation. I didn’t want to take notes or check that the sound guy was recording. I wanted to sit somewhere alone, in the dark, and have my dreams interpreted without having to say a word except ‘Yes’.
But beside me was a woman who smelled peculiar. She exuded a sharp, acidic stink like cat’s piss; there were burned edges to her aura. It reminded me of being at the hairdresser’s with my mother, who used to get a poodle perm and think herself lucky to have it: there was the same sense of things being forced into new shapes. She took up more than her fair share of the seat, this woman; her meat moved, it touched me at arm and thigh.
And she was laughing wetly to herself, all the way through the performance, her choking coughs half-muffled by the songs. Sometimes there was no music, and the sounds she made were audible. One musician occasionally held an accordion on his black knee but didn’t play at all. He moved its lungs so that it only sighed, the warm air of the ages moving through the whole man to the tips of his fingers. Its bone buttons flashed in the spotlight like funeral jewels. She spoiled it.
She huffed and puffed as Weir sang the old ballads and fingered the familiar keys, the bars and rope, the hopelessness, the silver reckoning moment. He picked on even the known chords of ‘Amazing Grace’ and cracked those, his throat shrinking down to its tendons. Sometimes he held his head skywards, and the notes went over our skulls. They went over hers.
In the ballads no one comes for you – not your father or your mother, or your own true love – except to watch you hang, and that was in the morning. The woman next to me heard the notes and knew that there was something in the room that she could not name; she was a false medium, a table-rapper at a supper séance, and so she laughed.
I tried to ignore her, to focus on the gift of this single night to myself in the midst of the De Jager hearings, a night I couldn’t afford but knew that I needed, one night of space between me and the thing that had happened in Darktown. I concentrated instead on the backdrop, the sepia photographs of the old diggers next to their coffins, the searching men with their rifles and their spades. It was a joke, or it wasn’t. There they were, preserved for us to ponder.
Sometimes when Weir held still he flattened himself into the paper so that he stood with the dead men at the vanished saloon, stood beside his own coffin, stood by the pale woman who was holding her ghost baby loosely to her bodice, as if it was already gone and she held only its shadow.
Or else it was that the men in the photographs ventured out onto the stage. There they bloomed, rosy and whole, a regretful garden grown up through the boards of The Little Theatre, dazzled, a little awkward, their tongues thick in their mouths, the spades and rifles replaced by cemetery bouquets crumbling dusty in their hands.
Whichever way it was, the dead men had been called up, and so they leaned there, the evidence ranged before the bland audience, the snickering housewife, her husband, me. Weir stood beside them, alive and sizzling, struck over and over by the lightning of trauma and memory. When he showed his teeth the women in the audience tittered. We wanted him, or what he had, and knew that we wanted him, or what he had, and it made us excited and afraid. The men were quiet.
In the end the melody just came to an abrupt halt, because there was no way to end it but cleanly. Weir stood still and the men in black paused, cautious as animals now that they were done with the music, or the music was done with them. Weir took off his black hat. Beneath it the hair had bristled bravely, but now under the stage lights his scalp showed pinkly through. With a sweep of his hand he divested himself of the West, and made himself as ordinary as the audience – though what had fallen from his mouth was not. The musicians looked up at the audience, dazzled, awkward, thrown back from the rosy gardens, the wet regret, the past.
Then they took their instruments and they retreated behind the backdrop. We were left to ourselves, blinking and murmuring, bending to collect appendages.
The stinking woman beside me stood up with a sigh. She gathered her evening outfit to herself, the soles of her shoes hard on the floorboards of the makeshift auditorium.
‘Ag, skies,’ she murmured, and I drew my knees up to allow her and her husband passage to the exit. Her smell dragged behind her: it followed me to my car. I showered again when I got home.
The next morning I was sorry I had gone out. I should have slept longer in preparation for covering the De Jager trial. My eyes were sandbagged; my nose streamed at every scent. We were crammed together in the gallery, sweating and contained. There was the usual fidgeting, the shuffling of papers, the scarred faces of the relatives like Scrabble letters. Court is the combination of tension and boredom. So many words generated; so many versions recorded, pored over, proven false. When I was first given the court beat I thought it would make a difference to have the sorry transactions laid out in plain view, that sides would be easy to choose. Now I know that everyone thinks they tell the truth. At the beginning of a trial we are spectators, but by the end of it we are witnesses: we listen and are merged with the events. By this afternoon, everything would be different.
The gallery wasn’t noisy, the way it gets when gangsters go on trial. It was expectant: people wanted to know why. They already knew what, although the repetition of fact makes it no easier to live with. They were an audience; they wanted a story. And it had to be a story with a happy ending.
The TV station wanted a couple of soundbites for the evening segment: me, windswept in front of the magistrate’s court, summing up the session, ending with the usual rhetorical questions that defy conclusion.
I wanted something else. We sat away from the rest of the gallery, near the doors, so I could grab the killer’s parents before they were overwhelmed by the other microphones and senseless, shouted questions as soon as they set foot in the corridor. I wanted first go at them. I wanted to know how they felt.
In the defendant’s seat young De Jager leaned forward, elbows on the knees of his new suit pants. He had shaved his head during his month of psychiatric assessment. Beneath that scalp, said Doctor Oosthuizen in her testimony, lay the two expected hemispheres of a normal brain.
De Jager had a skew smile that showed off his chipped teeth. He began to testify. I was grateful the SABC had applied for access to the transcripts. I meant to keep notes, but after I heard him speak, my right hand tingled and then went numb. I tried to flap the blood into it as the cameraman watched me curiously, raising a sandy eyebrow. I shook my head at him.
‘Sometimes,’ De Jager said, ‘I don’t know if I remember what I’ve done or whether I’ve heard it from other people, or maybe read it in the newspaper.’ He grinned politely, reflexively, at the families of the four people he shot before he ran out of bullets. The mutters rose; the magistrate had to call the gallery to order before one of the hard women in doeks leaped over the benches and choked him.
So far he has escaped. When I first saw De Jager he was scurrying like a cockroach along the dirt road of Darktown, sensing the air, hunched into a shapeless jacket against the winter morning. He had to be bundled into a police van for his own protection. The farm workers surrounded the vehicle: the three policemen they’d sent to arrest him were swamped. The residents laid their hands on the bonnet, the bumpers, the reinforced windows, and their fury shook the van until the boy inside it rattled around like a pinball in the faded machine at the only café they had there. His head through the smeared windows looked too small for what it contained. I thought they would break his neck. I wanted them to break his neck. When I got home my notebook and cellphone were gone.
The seasons shifted. The new De Jager of the courtroom was hairless: institutions agreed with him. When I saw him sitting there this afternoon he was sleek, heavy as a seal, weighted with something more than his home schooling, the murder ballads of his own family. I’ve been reading the analyses, the profiles, the reports – who hasn’t? – looking for some revelation in the paperwork that can be contained by the six o’clock news, that will send me from the echoing middle floors of the SABC building to somewhere higher up, translated. I could be an anchorwoman. It pays a lot more, and they don’t have to make the news: they just convey it. Someone else can do the research on the ground, travel in economy to scraped townships, ask the weeping mothers what went wrong, see the little girls twisting themselves around their uncles’ scabby legs, knowing that none of them has any real hope of avoiding their destinies. It’s hearing the ballad often enough that makes you remember the lyrics.
And De Jager knew the tune. He also wanted what those children and their parents wanted, what we all want. He wrote to Doctor Oosthuizen that he wished he was special, remarkable, memorable – in other words, that he wished he was rich in the currency of the twenty-first century, which values recognition over love.
His wish had been granted. Whatever else happened to him in the long murder ballad of his life, De Jager would always be the white boy who killed those black people at Darktown, killed four strangers and made sure that the three-month-old was dead, and then went back to the farmhouse to find more bullets: the boy who brought them not music but silence. He had stood out at last – by allying himself with the million-man army of the shaven-headed: the collaborators and the loners and the insane.
And he had also, in his ignorance, allied himself with the same people he hated: with the ranks of the grieving. He didn’t know that in African culture a shaven head is a sign of mourning.
That knowledge would relieve him of his last weapon: his smirk – at the cameras, at the relatives of the dead. It was not the grimace of the nervous teenager he had been, but the smile of the man he was now, the one who still thought he stood a chance against the system. His broken teeth made my own teeth ache in my mouth: they were the saddest thing about him, a reminder that he had no idea what he had done.
But he would come to know the significance of his act. De Jager would have an endless and solitary stretch to ponder the banality of responsibility, long after his hair had grown back while he waited in his cell for revelation; long after the hair of his victims fell away from their scalps where they lay, all four of them, done and dusted, under the earth.
His appearance on the court stage was brief. He spoke and was led backstage again, to minimise contact with the rage of the public that sometimes cheats the judge’s decision. On his way De Jager lifted his hand to his mother and she grabbed it for a second as he passed her. The gallery hissed, but there were also small plainsong murmurs of ‘Shame’. Shame.
I grabbed the cameraman and pulled him to his feet. We moved quickly into the corridor and caught them. It wasn’t difficult. I put out my hand and laid it on the fleshy bicep of his mother. My arm tingled as the blood rushed back into it. The lawyer tried to bar my way but the couple stopped, and she didn’t shake me off. Her inertia halted the progress of the people massing in the doorway behind, and I found myself pressed against her.
‘Mrs de Jager, is there anything you want to say to the families of the victims?’
Her husband stood mute at her side, his eyelids flickering like a sleeper’s. The other journalists swarmed around us. They were starting to shout over my voice. I had to be quick, but she distracted me. Something about her was familiar beyond the routine pixilation of newspaper photographs.
‘The victims? What do you mean?’ The question came slowly, as if she hadn’t spoken in days. Her hair hadn’t been washed for court: it rested on her forehead in greasy ammoniac strands.
‘The victims. The people who died.’
The other journalists were rushing forward.
‘Mrs de Jager!’
‘Mrs de Jager!’
‘Do you have any comment?’
The press of people locked us together. The hot stink of her scalp made my nose prickle and run: that scent of animals marking territory.
We could not understand each other. She cocked her ripe head to the side, her eyes squeezed upwards in puzzlement. I wiped my nose and rephrased the question.
‘The four people your son killed. That he shot with his rifle.’
‘But my son didn’t kill anybody.’ She gave a little laugh of relief, a few discordant notes. This was more familiar: she knew the chorus from here. Mrs de Jager laughed again, forcing the air into my face so that I had to breathe in what she had breathed out. ‘I don’t know where you got this. No one was killed.’
And her lawyer hustled them away from me. She laughed all the way down the passage, all the way to the car outside. Her smell stayed.