by Deon Meyer
“Will you help me to get the groceries to the car, please?” She could send him down to the car with a few of the plastic bags.
“Sí. Of course. What are you going to cook for us?”
“It’s a surprise, so don’t open the fridge.”
“But I want to see how big it is.”
“Another time.” There wouldn’t be one.
The white man sat in the left back seat of the car and let Thobela drive.
“Go.”
“Where?”
“Just drive.”
Thobela took the farm road out. He couldn’t see in the rear-view mirror what was happening on the back seat. He turned his head, as if he had seen something outside the car. At the edge of his vision he saw Griessel with a roadmap on his lap.
He added up what he knew. He was reasonably certain Griessel was a policeman. The Z88, the attitude. The white man had known where the farm was and that Thobela would be on his way there. More important: no other policemen had shown up. The law considered the farm covered.
Griessel had waited for the right call to come over the cell phone. Yes. I have him. But that was not police procedure. Couldn’t be.
Who else was after him? To whom else did he have value?
“Go to George,” said Griessel. Thobela looked around, saw the roadmap was folded now.
“George?”
“You know where it is.”
“It’s nearly six hundred kilometers.”
“You drove more than a thousand yesterday.”
The policeman knew he had left the Cape yesterday. He had access to official information, but he wasn’t official. It didn’t make sense. He would have to try something. He could do something with the car on the gravel road because he was wearing a seat belt and Griessel was not. He could brake suddenly and grab the man when he was thrown forward. Try and get the pistol.
Not without risks.
Was the risk necessary? George? What was at George? If the policeman had been official they would have been on the way to Cathcart or Seymour or Alice or Port Elizabeth. Or Grahamstown. To the nearest place with reinforcements and cells and state prosecutors.
He was a high-profile suspect; he knew that. If you were SAPS and you caught the Artemis vigilante, then you called the guys with guns and helicopters, you didn’t get off your cell phone until you had your detainee in ten sets of handcuffs.
Unless you were working for someone else. Unless you were supplementing your income . . .
He considered the alternatives and there was only one logical conclusion.
“How long have you been working for Sangrenegra?” He turned the mirror with his left hand. Bloodshot eyes stared back. He got no response.
“That’s the problem with this country. Money means more than justice,” he said.
“Is that how you justify your murders?” said the policeman from behind.
“Murder? There was only one murder. I didn’t know Sangrenegra was innocent. It was you people who used him for an ambush.”
“Sangrenegra? How do you know he was innocent?”
“I saw it in his eyes.”
“And Bernadette Laurens? What did her eyes tell you?”
“Laurens?”
The policeman said nothing.
“But she confessed.”
“That’s what they all keep telling me.”
“But it wasn’t her?”
“I don’t think it was. I think she was protecting the child’s mother. Like others would protect their children.”
The unexpectedness of it left Thobela dumb.
“That’s why we have a justice system. A process. That is why we can’t take the law into our own hands,” said Griessel.
Thobela wrestled with the possibility, with rationalizing and acceptance of guilt. But he couldn’t tip the scales either way.
“So why did she confess then?” he asked himself, but aloud.
There was no response from the back seat.
43.
While they carried the shopping bags into Carlos’s kitchen, she could think of nothing but the syringe of blood.
The house was unnaturally quiet and empty without the bodyguards; the large spaces echoed footsteps and phrases. He embraced her in the kitchen after they had put the groceries down. He pressed her to him with surprising tenderness and said: “This is right, conchita.”
She made her body soft. She let her hips flow against his. “Yes,” she said.
“We will be happy.”
In answer she kissed him on the mouth, with great skill, until she could feel his erection developing. She put her hand on it and traced the shape. Carlos’s hands were behind her back. He pulled her dress up inch by inch until her bottom was exposed and slipped his fingers under the elastic of her panties. His breathing quickened.
She moved her lips over his cheek, down his neck, over the cross that hung in his chest hair. Her tongue left a damp trail. She freed herself and dropped to her knees, fingers busy with his zipper. With one hand she pulled his underpants down and with the other she pulled his penis out. Long, thin and hairy, it stood up like a lean soldier with an outsized shiny helmet.
“Conchita.” His voice was a whispering urgency, as she had never done this without a condom before.
She stroked with both hands, from the pubic hairs to the tip.
“We will be happy,” she said and softly put it in her mouth.
Thobela Mpayipheli and his white passenger, sitting in the back like a colonial property baron, drove past Mwangala and Dyamala, where fat cattle grazed in the sweet green grass. They turned right onto the R63. Fort Hare was quiet over the summer holidays. Five minutes later they were in busy Alice. Fruit vendors on the pavements, women with baskets on their heads and children on their backs who walked stately and unhurried across the road and down the street. Four men were gathered around a board game on a street corner. Thobela wondered if the policeman saw all this. If he could hear the Xhosa calls that were exchanged across the broad street. This was ownership. The people owned this place.
Thirty kilometers on was Fort Beaufort and he turned south. Four or five times he spotted the Kat River on the left where it meandered away between the hills. It had been one of his plans to bring Pakamile here: just the two of them with rucksacks, hiking boots and a two-man tent. To show his boy where he had grown up.
Thobela knew every bend of the Kat. He knew the deep pools at Nkqantosi where you could jump off the cliff and open your eyes deep under the greenish-brown water and see the sunbeams fighting against the darkness. The little sandy beach below Komkulu. Where he had discovered the warrior inside him thirty years before. Mtetwa, the young buffalo who was a bully, an injustice he had to correct. The first.
And far over that way, out of sight, his favorite place. Four kilometers from the place where it flowed into the Great Fish River, the Kat made a flamboyant curve, as if it wanted to dally one last time before losing its identity — a meander that swept back so far that it almost made an island. It was about ten kilometers from the Mission Church manse where he lived, but he could run there in an hour down the secret game paths around the hills and through the valleys. All so he could sit between the reeds where the chattering weaverbirds in brilliant color lured females to their hanging nests. To listen to the wind. To watch the fat iguana warming itself in the sun on the black rocky point. In the late afternoon the bushbuck came out of the thickets like phantoms to dip their heads to the water. First the grace of the does in their red glowing coats. Later the rams would come two by two, dark brown in the dusk, sturdy, short, needle-sharp horns that rose and dipped, rose and dipped.
He had wondered if they were still there. Whether he and his son would see the descendants of the animals he had waited for with bated breath as a child. Did they still follow the same paths through the reeds and bulrushes?
Would he still know the paths? Should he stop here, take off his shoes and disappear between the thorn trees? Search out the same pat
hs at a jogtrot; find that rhythm when you felt you could run forever, as long as there was a hill on the horizon for you to climb?
While Carlos was seated in front of the TV with a glass and a bottle of red wine, she took the syringe of blood out of her handbag and hid it deep in a cupboard where pots and pans were stacked, bright, new and unused.
She looked for a hiding place for the toy dog before she took it out from under packs of vegetables in the shopping bags.
Her hands shook because she would not hear Carlos coming before he was in the room.
They drove in silence for two hours. Beyond Grahamstown, in the dark of early evening, he said: “Did you ever hear of Nxele?” His tongue clicked sharply pronouncing the name.
He did not expect an answer. If he did get one he knew what it would be. White people didn’t know this history.
“Nxele. They say he was a big man. Two meters tall. And he could talk. Once he talked himself off a Xhosa execution pyre. And then he became chief, without having the blood of kings.”
He didn’t care if the white man was listening or not. He kept his eyes on the road. He wanted to shake off his lassitude, say what this landscape awakened in him. He wanted to relieve the tension somehow.
“Exceptional in that time, nearly two hundred years ago. He lived in a time when the people fought against each other — and the English too. Then Nxele came and said they must stop kneeling to the white God. They must listen to the voice of Mdalidiphu, the God of the Xhosa, who said you must not kneel before Him in the dust. You must live. You must dance. You must lift your head and grab hold of life. You must sleep with your wife so we can increase, so we can fill the earth and drive the white man out. So we can take back our land.
“You could say he was the father of the first Struggle. Then he gathered ten thousand warriors together. Did you see where we traveled today, Griessel? Did you see? Can you imagine what ten thousand warriors would look like coming over these hills? They smeared themselves red with ochre. Each had six or seven long throwing spears in his hand and a shield. They ran here like that. Nxele told them to be silent, no singing or shouting. They wanted to surprise the English here at Grahamstown. Ten thousand warriors in step, their footsteps the only sound. Through the valleys and over the rivers and hills like a long red snake. Imagine you are an Englishman in Grahamstown waking up one morning in April and looking up to the hills. One moment things look as they do every day, and the next moment this army materializes on the hilltops and you see the glint of seventy thousand spears, but there is no sound. Like death.
“Nxele moved through them. He told them to break one of their long spears over their knees. He said Mdalidiphu would turn the British bullets to water. They must charge the cannons and guns together and throw the long spears when they got close enough. And they could throw, those men. At a range of sixty meters they could launch a spear through the air and find the heart of an Englishman. When the last long spear had been thrown, they must hold the spear with the broken shaft. Nxele knew you couldn’t use a long spear when you could see the whites of your enemy’s eyes. Then you needed a weapon to stab open a path in front of you.
“They say it was a clear day. They said the English couldn’t believe the way the Xhosa moved up there on the crest. Deathly quiet. But each knew exactly where his place in line was.
“Down below, the Redcoats erected their barriers. Up there, the red men waited for the signal. And when the whites sat down at their tables laid for midday dinner, they came down.
“From the time I first heard that story from my uncle I wanted to be with them, Griessel. They said that when the warriors charged, a terrible cry went up. They say that cry is in every soldier. When you are at war, when your blood is high in battle, then it comes out. It explodes from your throat and gives you the strength of an elephant and the speed of an antelope. They say every man is afraid until that moment, and then there is no more fear. Then you are pure fighter and nothing can stop you.
“All my life I wanted to be a part of them. I wanted to be there at the front. I wanted to throw my spears and keep the short assegai for last. I wanted to smell the gunpowder and the blood. They said the stream in town ran red with blood that day. I wanted to look an Englishman in the eyes and he must lift his bayonet and we must oppose each other as soldiers, each fighting for his cause. I wanted to make war with honor. If his blade was faster than mine, if his strength was greater, then so be it. Then I would die like a man. Like a warrior.”
He was quiet for a long time. A distance past the turnoff to Bushmans River Mouth he said: “There is no honor anymore. It makes no difference what Struggle you choose.”
Again silence descended on the car, but it felt to Thobela as if the character of the silence had changed.
“What happened, that day?” Griessel’s voice came from the back.
Thobela smiled in the darkness. For many reasons.
“It was a tremendous battle. The English had cannon and guns. Shrapnel shells. A thousand Xhosa fell. Some of them they found days later, miles away, with bunches of grass pushed into their gaping wounds to stem the bleeding. But it was a close thing. There was time in the battle when the balance began to swing in favor of the Xhosa. The ranks of Nxele were too fast and too many, the English could not reload quickly enough. Time stood still. The battle was on a knife edge. Then the Redcoats got their miracle. His name was Boesak, can you believe it? He was a Khoi big-game hunter turned soldier. He was out on patrol with a hundred and thirty men and they came back, on that day. At just the right time for the English, when the British captain was ready to sound the retreat. Boesak and a hundred and thirty of the best marksmen in the country. And they aimed for the biggest warriors, the Xhosa who fought up front, who ran between the men and urged them on. The heart of the assault. They were shot down one by one, like bulls from the herd. And then it was all over.”
She tried to grind the pills in a flour sifter, but they were too hard.
She took the breadboard and a teaspoon and crushed the pills — some pieces shot over the floor and she began to panic. She used more pills, pressed. The teaspoon banged on the breadboard.
Would Carlos hear?
She wiped the yellow powder off the breadboard into a small dish she had set on one side. Was it fine enough?
She set the table. She couldn’t find candles or candlesticks so she just put the place mats and cutlery on the table. She called Carlos to come to the table and then she brought out the food: fillet of beef stuffed with smoked oysters, baked potatoes and petit pois.
Carlos couldn’t compliment her enough, although she knew the food wasn’t that special. He was still buttering her up. “You see, conchita, no crew. Just me and you. No problem.”
She said he must save room for dessert, pears in wine and cinnamon. And she was going to make him real Irish coffee and it was very important to her that he drink it because she had made it the way she had been taught, long ago when she worked for a caterer in Bloemfontein.
He said he would drink every drop and then they were going to make love, right here on the table.
Somewhere on the N2, fifty kilometers before Port Elizabeth, Griessel made him stop.
“Do you need a piss?”
“Yes.”
“Now’s the time.”
When they had finished, standing four meters apart, the white man holding his organ in one hand and the pistol in the other, they went on their way.
At the outskirts of the city they stopped for petrol without getting out of the car.
When they passed the turnoff to Hankey and the road began to descend down to the Gamtoos Valley, Griessel spoke again: “When I was young I played bass guitar. In a band.”
Thobela didn’t know if he should respond.
“I thought that was what I wanted to do.
“Yesterday night I listened to music my son gave me. When it was finished I lay in the dark and I remembered something. I remembered the day I realized I would never be
more than an average bass guitarist.
“I had finished school, it was December holidays and there was a battle of the bands at Green Point. We went to listen, the guys from my band and me. There was this bassist, short with snow-white hair in one or other of the rock bands that played other people’s songs. Jissis, he was a magician. Standing stock-still, not moving his body in the slightest. He didn’t even look at the neck, just stood there with closed eyes and his fingers flew and the sounds came out like a river. Then I realized where my place was. I saw someone who had been born for bass guitar. Fuck, I could tell we felt the same. The music did the same inside; it opened you up. But feeling and doing are not the same thing. That is the tragedy. You want to be like that, so fucking casually brilliant, but you don’t have it in you.
“So I knew I would never be a real bass guitarist, but I wanted to be like that in something. That good. So . . . skillful. In something. I began to wonder how you found it. How did you start to search for the thing you were made for? What if there wasn’t one? What if you were just an average fucker in everything? Born average and living your average life and then you fucking die and no one knows the difference.
“While I was searching I joined the police, because what I didn’t know is that you know without knowing. Something deep in your head directs you to what you can do. But it took me a while. Because I didn’t think being a policeman was something you could feel, like music.
“Also, it doesn’t happen just like that. You have to pay your dues, you have to learn, make your own mistakes. But one day you sit with a case file that makes no sense to any other fucker, and you read the statements and the notes and the reports and it all comes together. And you feel this thing inside. You hear the music of it, you pick up its rhythm deep inside you and you know this is what you were made for.”
Thobela heard the white man sigh. He wanted to tell him he understood.
“And then nothing can stop you,” said Griessel. “Nobody. Except yourself.