They shook hands, then Lindi and Khethiwe marched towards the van. Once inside, they hugged each other, relieved that they had what they had come for.
‘I suppose we shouldn’t really be counting our chickens before they’ve hatched,’ Lindi said.
‘What?’
‘Oh, it just means we still don’t know what’s in this laptop.’
Ma Khethiwe told the driver to head for Rosebank. She rummaged through her bag and pulled out a sealed envelope. ‘It’s a letter for Kagiso from Mrs Motlantshe,’ she said. ‘The father gave it to me. He said that Kagiso must read it before he does anything.’
‘But that’s not going to be possible. The plan is for Two-Boy and me to talk to Kagiso over the phone, not to meet him.’
‘Then you must read it,’ Khethiwe said. She handed the envelope to Lindi who opened it with exaggerated care, as if it were some ancient manuscript and its contents might unlock a great mystery.
Dear Mr Rapabane,
I am trusting you with Lesedi’s belongings because I know that my beloved son also trusted you. He paid a heavy price for trying to stop this filthy business with the land. I am the one who should have stopped it. I knew what my husband was doing but every time I was thinking he is going to stop. But he lost his way. All the time he wanted more. My husband is a bad man, but he is not the one who has killed our child. My husband thinks he is a big man but those fellows he is doing deals with, they are more powerful. For them, killing a child is nothing. I pray to Almighty God that you find this thing that Lesedi was hiding. You have to finish what he started. I am tired. My marriage to Josiah is finished. But I have two more children and I want for them to grow up in a South Africa that we fought for. Nkosi sikelel’ iAfrika.
Priscilla Motlantshe
Lindi wiped away her tears and handed the letter to Khethiwe.
Kagiso tried sitting down. He tried standing up. He paced up and down the room. He checked both of his phones. The one Ma Khethiwe had bought for him and the one Two-Boy would use. They were both charged. Both had a signal. He was beside himself with anxiety. For a man who liked to be in control, this was like torture. He looked at his watch. It was nearly two. Even allowing for traffic, Lindi must be with Two-Boy by now. The fact that he hadn’t heard anything must be a good sign. Surely she would have called him if Priscilla had not been there or she hadn’t brought anything of Lesedi’s with her.
Kagiso flinched, his body tensed even before he was aware of what had caused it. He heard a key in the lock of the door to the apartment. He backed away towards the window overlooking the street.
On the other side Sharmi opened the door with exaggerated caution, one centimetre at a time, till she could see into the room. She saw a figure silhouetted against the daylight and failed to stifle her shock.
Kagiso rushed at her, putting his hand across her mouth.
‘I’m sorry,’ she breathed, when he removed it. ‘I didn’t expect anybody to be here.’
She remained where she was, the door still open.
Kagiso moved around her and looked down the corridor. He shut the door. ‘What the hell are you doing here?’ he said sharply.
‘I could ask you the same question,’ she snapped back, then paused. ‘Wait, wait, Kagiso. Let’s not shout at each other.’
‘Okay, fine, but what are you doing here?’
‘I needed somewhere to be alone.’
‘But this is the last place you should use. It’s a meeting point and that’s all.’
‘I’m done with meeting points, Kagiso. It’s over for me.’
‘What are you talking about?’
Sharmi Meer realised this was one part of her plan she had not rehearsed. She’d thought about what she was going to say to the police, but not this. ‘I’m handing myself in today.’
Silence.
‘Say something.’
‘You can’t just call it a day. It doesn’t work like that. There’s the rest of us.’
‘It was me.’
‘What do you mean, it was you?’
‘The Lesedi business. It was me.’
‘But …’
‘Hold on, let me finish.’ She was relieved, grateful, a sinner given the chance to expiate her misdemeanours.
‘You remember when you first told us that you’d had an approach from Lesedi Motlantshe. You said you were ready to give him the benefit of the doubt. I disagreed. Afterwards I put my own people onto it. I drove to Mpumalanga the day before his visit and gave the go-ahead. What they did, it wasn’t what I wanted, wasn’t what I planned. My instructions were to mess him up, enough to send a message that the Motlantshes were not wanted in the area. Something must have gone wrong. We’ve started a bandwagon rolling and all sorts have hitched a ride on it. My man’s gone to ground so I can’t tell you what happened. So you see, all this,’ Sharmi pointed in the direction of the Ponte building, ‘it was my doing.’
Kagiso walked back into the room and sat down. He didn’t speak for an age.
‘Why, Sharmi? Why? Why didn’t you talk to me?’
‘Because we never talk to each other, we just talk at each other.’
‘But I brought it up at the last meeting. You could have said something.’
‘Oh, sure! You at your sanctimonious best. Hardly the kind of atmosphere in which I could have said anything about this.’
‘But this was about an operation. You should have talked.’
‘It was my operation,’ she said emphatically.
‘But it went wrong, it was a disaster, and we were caught in the middle of it. You had no right to—’
‘Look, I’m tired. I’m not here for a row. I’ve had enough of those. You and I have always disagreed about how to go about this whole business, but that’s not it, is it? The rows, the arguments, they were not just about operations, not just about tactics, Kagiso, they were about us. You know that, don’t you? And that’s why Lesedi’s death is so tragic. Actually, I think people like him are asking for it, but that’s not why he ended up being killed. He died because you and I never learned how to just talk to each other, to explain ourselves to each other, to tell each other what was going on in our heads.’
Kagiso let the words sink in. She’d drawn him in, made him as culpable as she was. He wanted to throw the accusation back. He stared at Sharmi, as if to make sure this wasn’t just another front she’d opened. She looked spent. He knew her well enough to see there was no fight left in her. She wasn’t pointing a finger at him or trying to blame him. Not now, not this time. There was no judgement. She was trying to describe what had happened but he didn’t recognise the picture.
‘But – but you can’t hate me that much … not enough to go and do a thing like that?’
‘I don’t hate you. I don’t think I ever have.’
‘Then why this?’
‘You tell me, Kagiso. Let’s not play games. By morning I’ll be all over the news. By this time tomorrow you’ll either have to be out of the country or you’ll be pulled in, too. So tell me. Why have we been trying to destroy each other?’
‘I don’t know what you want me to say.’
‘Just tell me the truth.’
‘About what?’
‘About us. I know what I did, what I carried on doing. I’m not proud of it, any of it. I’ve worked it out now. I wanted us to talk about it a long time ago. But we never got the chance – you walked away.’
Sharmi and Kagiso had met some years earlier. She’d just finished working on a feature film that had been shot on location in South Africa, hired as one of the English director’s local assistants. There was a cast party and Kagiso had turned up, invited by a woman he’d known at Stellenbosch, whose father had invested in the film. Apart from the uniformed staff serving an endless supply of food and drink, the two of them were the only people of colour. Sharmi had seen the woman on the set occasionally, all white linen and lovely. For Sharmi each day on the shoot had been like a trial: she’d felt the need to prove herself
, to say something, to do something that might catch the director’s eye. The other woman, fragrant and ethereal, would turn up whenever it suited her and make straight for the director’s chair, flopping into it like she owned it. Her conversations with the director would always start with a reference to some encounter they’d had off location. Daddy this, Daddy that.
The contrast between the two women could not have been greater and – over the course of that evening – Sharmi had lost no time in reminding Kagiso of the fact. That was when the sparring had started, that very night. It had begun as joshing, energetic disagreements charged with a sort of sexual frisson. Neither understood at the time that something else was at play – though they would find out in time, but too late to do either of them any good.
The party, and the events that had followed it, had shaped their relationship. They didn’t talk about it any more but it sat there like a mutant gene that disfigured their lives.
The woman was just another of those people Sharmi had wanted to get even with, and Kagiso had offered her the means to do it. Sharmi never forgot the exquisite pleasure of watching the reaction on the face of Kagiso’s Stellenbosch blonde when she heard that he would be leaving the cast party in her VW Beetle and not Daddy’s BMW. In the car back to her digs in Muizenberg, Sharmi had, with some relish, described the look. ‘First time the spoiled brat had anything taken away from her,’ she’d said. ‘Probably thought she’d had you bedded, her first black man.’
It had led to another argument, their second or third of the evening.
‘Why, why must you turn everything into a political battle?’ he’d asked.
‘Because in this country everything is political, Kagiso, even who you fuck,’ she’d replied. They’d ended up in her room later, Kagiso tearing at her clothes and lunging at her from behind with a ferocity that had left her dissatisfied and only just on this side of humiliation. But she hadn’t tried to stop him. Earlier that evening, at the party, in the car, she’d goaded him, needled him, and he had reacted like a wounded animal. They were even.
That evening, each of them had revealed something to the other. In being exposed in that way, they had reached a point in minutes that might take months, even years, for others. It was a bond of sorts.
She’d woken the following morning to find that Kagiso had gone, leaving what she thought was a ludicrously formal note to say he’d be grateful for the lift back to Jo’burg if the offer was still open. (They’d talked about it at the party.) She’d called him straight away.
‘What do you mean, “if the offer is still open”?’ she’d said. ‘You weren’t that bad!’
‘I’m sorry,’ he’d said.
‘Christ, I’m joking, Kagiso. We were both a bit over the top.’
‘It won’t happen again.’
And it didn’t. Not on that journey. Never. She might as well have had a complete stranger in the car. They talked about everything except what had happened. The first part of the journey was through the sparse and arid beauty of the Karoo. She’d imagined the two of them, in the bubble of the car, their intimacy a cocoon protecting them from the vast and unforgiving desert around them. At first she’d let it go, hoping he’d open up. Then, when they’d broken the journey in Nieu Bethesda, Sharmi had confronted him.
‘You can’t do this, Kagiso. You can’t walk into my life and then just walk away as if nothing happened.’
‘I didn’t walk into your life. We just ended up in the same bed. Anyway, I think it was you who walked into my life.’
Sharmi had slapped him across the face. ‘Oh, so that’s it. I suppose you think I make a habit of picking up poor, unsuspecting boys and dragging them into my bed. What do you think I am? Is that why you fucked me like you wanted to hurt me? Or is that how you get your kicks? Your bit of white fluff wouldn’t have put up with that, would she? She’d have been straight off to tell Daddy.’
They hadn’t used the room at the B&B and had driven through the night, all the way to Johannesburg, with barely a word uttered. That was it. They hadn’t planned to see each other again.
A couple of years later, when Sharmi and Two-Boy had already begun the first steps towards direct action, he’d said she should meet a friend of his who was, as Two-Boy had put it, ‘ripe for the picking’. It turned out to be Kagiso, a rising star in the Ministry of Rural Development and Land Reform. There was shock on both sides as Two-Boy did the introductions at a bar in Greenside. They’d managed to greet each other like old mates who’d simply lost touch.
They became like prize-fighters, circling each other, trying to punish each other, and discovering, when the blow was struck, that there is nothing more tactile or intimate than harming someone.
They were as close to each other as you could get – but neither seemed able or willing to admit it. So they went on trying to hate each other. For Sharmi every act of sabotage, every fire they started, every farm that was wrecked, was part of a proxy war she was still fighting against Kagiso. She pushed each secret project to its limits, waiting for the moment when Kagiso, as he always did, tried to row them back. That was when she would strike, saying he just didn’t have the stomach for the fight.
In fact, she’d had little reason to doubt his commitment, except for a prejudice born of what little she knew about his background. None of them in the cell really knew much about the others. They were co-conspirators, not friends. That was partly a question of temperament but also design: it seemed simpler that way.
Sharmi didn’t understand him – he didn’t fit into any box, or not one that she recognised. Take the whole Stellenbosch University thing. What kind of black youth would have chosen to go to an old Afrikaans university? In her mind Sharmi saw a place of arcane initiation ceremonies and pretty blonde girls on the hunt for someone with a nice slice of the Western Cape in their inheritance. And then there was his white ‘family’, which was just bizarre to her. Kagiso rarely, if ever, talked about his childhood but Sharmi had picked up enough from conversations with François to piece together a picture of a black mother and her son locked in a humiliating embrace of dependency with a white family who basked in a self-righteous glow of generosity.
‘It wasn’t like that,’ François had said, when Sharmi had asked him about Kagiso’s past. The four of them, Sharmi, François, Kagiso and Two-Boy, had yet to coalesce into the group of underground activists they were now.
‘How do you know?’
‘Because he’s had plenty of opportunity to forget, to bury them, since they left and he hasn’t. He’s genuinely fond of them.’
‘Well, if he’s so fond of them, as you put it, why don’t we hear more about them?’
‘One good reason is that he knows people like you are waiting to pass judgement.’
‘Oh, come on, man! I pass judgement on your parents, with all their charitable foundations and shit, but you still talk about them.’
François’s father had made a fortune in a catering business that supplied the South African security forces with ready-to-eat meals. He’d retired to Cape Town where the family owned a sumptuous villa overlooking Camps Bay. He and his much-altered wife divided their time between their home there, a penthouse in Sandton and a game ranch in the Tuli Block bordering Botswana. Jointly, they had established several charities to which they devoted enormous amounts of time, not to mention money.
‘That’s because in this twisted country where we live it’s easier for me to say I love my parents, despite their dubious past, than for Kagiso to say he respects and loves a white family who tried to do some good. You see, Sharmi, you don’t really hold it against me that I was the beneficiary of a wealthy upbringing, however ill-gotten it was. You allow me to leave my baggage at the door, but you don’t allow Kagiso to do the same.’
‘Christ! Spare me the fucking sermon.’
‘No, this is important,’ he’d said, leaning closer to her. ‘You don’t expect me to hate my parents, but you want Kagiso to disown his.’
‘His
what? What are they, François?’ Sharmi had interrupted. ‘That’s the whole point. They’re just another white family who got the fuck out when the going got tough.’
‘No, it isn’t the point. Whether Kagiso wants to think of them as part of his family or not doesn’t matter. It’s up to him. The fact is, he should be allowed to be grateful to them for giving him the same opportunity as me – except he had to be a lot smarter and tougher to get through than I did. Why can’t you just leave it at that?’
‘Because it affects the way he thinks. He sounds and behaves like a white liberal.’ She had spat out the last word like it was a curse. During the struggle for freedom, especially in the eighties when the state had given up any pretence of looking for legal cover, those whites who clung to the hope that there was still some middle ground from which to effect change were vilified from both sides. The white establishment saw them as duplicitous, enjoying the fruits of apartheid while pretending to despise it, and many in the black liberation movements, increasingly drawn to violent opposition, saw them as irrelevant.
‘Ah! So now we have it. A black man can’t be a liberal.’
‘I didn’t say that. I just can’t see how any self-respecting black man would want to be a liberal.’
‘Would you prefer Kagiso was like those so-called freedom-fighters, who toyi-toyi with their imaginary guns and make inflammatory speeches, while they stuff money into the pockets of their Italian suits?’
‘Don’t be ridiculous. I just wish he’d show some passion – some proper blood-and-guts passion,’ Sharmi had said.
Kagiso slumped back in the sofa. He shut his eyes and kept them shut as he spoke. It was as if he were talking to himself. ‘Every meeting, every argument, you remind me that the person I’ve become is not the person I want to be.’
He opened his eyes. Sharmi began to move towards him. ‘No, don’t,’ he said. ‘You see, I’m not really sure if any of this, this whole thing that we’ve been doing, I’m not sure if it is really me. It’s what I thought I should do, not what I wanted to do. Every time we did something, blew something up or whatever, a part of me thought it was wrong. You see, I know I’ve been happiest when I’ve brought people together – not this, not what we’ve been doing, dividing people, making them hate each other. That never made me happy. And yet I carried on. But you, everything you do, you’re so clear, so sure, so committed. I should have pulled out a long time ago. That’s what you would have done. I didn’t have the guts to act on my conscience. I wanted to be more like you, have your certainty, but I just didn’t have it. So I guess it was easier to tell myself that I didn’t like what you stood for, the way you went about things.’
The Burning Land Page 25