by Fred Khumalo
The sun had just set, leaving the sky a pure cobalt blue. Occasionally, birds would fly by, in impressive formations. He continued playing. Without even realising it, he started playing ‘The Song of the Sun’. The song that he’d heard in the villages around Bloemfontein, that young Basotho men picked up from their fathers and let grow on them, so they could pass it on to their own sons in turn. Slowly, softly, just the notes of the concertina with no singing. A warm spring breeze wafted towards him, bringing with it the smells of the Seine. He closed his eyes and continued playing. Soon enough, he was seeing the mountains of home in his mind’s eye. The smell of roasted maize assailed his nostrils. A shimmering blanket of sunflower plantations danced on the horizon. He played on. He could hear the voice accompaniment to his playing, the voice of a village singer walking home after a long day out there in the fields. The voice rose and fell, rose and fell. Eyes closed, he played on. His fingers picked up speed. The instrument obeyed. The music came out in quick sharp bursts now; the voice of the village singer kept up as well. He opened his eyes slowly. The voice crescendoed. He realised he wasn’t imagining it. It was coming from behind him. No, it couldn’t be. He continued playing, hoping the voice-dream would go away. But no, it only rose with a new intensity. When he turned to his left, he saw a man, head thrown back, eyes closed, singing his heart out.
When Jean-Jacques stopped playing, the man was jerked back to attention. He looked around like one who’d just woken up from a dream.
‘Who are you?’ Jean-Jacques asked in French, glowering at the man.
‘Wow, my brother,’ the man said in English, ‘I did not know music from Africa could travel so far.’ He paused, then said in broken French, ‘Excuse me, sir, I couldn’t help but join you. You play so well …’
‘Thank you, my brother, but who are you?’
‘Sorry, my brother, I am Jerry Moloto, an artist from South Africa.’
‘Welcome to France. I hope I’ll learn something from you one of these days, Mr Artist-from-South Africa.’
‘Ah, this brother is mocking me!’
They looked at each other. Then Jerry, staring straight into Jean-Jacques’ eyes, spoke in his mother tongue. ‘I could have sworn this piece of shit was from home. Looks like a Boesman from home, I swear to God.’
Jean-Jacques looked at him impassively, unblinkingly. At length, he said, ‘What language was that supposed to be?’
‘My mother tongue, sir. Sepedi, from South Africa. I was just reminding myself of something.’ He paused. ‘You sound like a Frenchman, sir, but—’
‘I am a Frenchman, by way of Algeria.’ He smiled.
‘Yes, sir, I know that. What I mean to ask, if I am not intruding, sir, is where did you learn that music from? That is a song from my home, from South Africa.’
‘Music has no home. It is of the world, it belongs to the world.’
‘Well said, sir. But there’s always a source?’
‘A source, he says. A source. Well, I learned this from one of the African sailors. I’d been having dinner at one of the bistros along this river and was walking back to my apartment when I encountered this man playing this song. I fell in love with the music immediately. I paid him some money, asked him to play it again and again.’ He paused. ‘A lovely song, isn’t it?’
‘Sir, you must hear the story behind the song. They—’
‘I must be on my way, my brother,’ Jean-Jacques said, but he did not move.
Jerry shrugged, and said in his home language, ‘He even has the short temper of a mixed-race. Ah, to travel is to see.’ He started walking away.
Jerry hadn’t got far when he heard hurried footsteps behind him. Striding purposefully towards him, the concertina player seemed agitated. Now that he was on his feet, he looked quite imposing.
‘You said you were an artist?’ the brown giant asked.
‘May I speak in English now? My French is really, really horrible. May I?’
Jean-Jacques shrugged.
‘I paint, I carve wood, I do some writing, I play some piano. But mostly, I paint,’ explained Jerry.
‘Are you with a band?’ Jean-Jacques asked, still speaking in French.
‘No. But an acquaintance has invited me to some club called Jacob’s steps or something like that.’
‘L’Échelle de Jacob?’
‘Yes, that’s the one. Have you been there?’
Jean-Jacques opened his mouth, but decided to curb his enthusiasm. ‘Tell me, how long have you been here now?’
‘Three weeks, four. Why?’
‘Listen.’ Jean-Jacques looked at the man long and hard. Then he looked away, before saying, ‘Maybe our paths we’ll cross again. Maybe at l’Échelle de Jacob, who knows?’
Indeed, two weeks later the two men bumped into each other at the club. Jean-Jacques was polite, but remained distant. They regularly enjoyed drinks together, discussing music and art. But it took another month before he felt he could trust Jerry Moloto enough to tell him who he really was.
Jerry was overjoyed. ‘I knew it!’ he said. His initial suspicions had been confirmed.
Now that all cards were on the table, their friendship blossomed. Jean-Jacques took it upon himself to acquaint his countryman with the hot places in the city. Jerry, in turn, was delighted to fall under Jean-Jacques’ tutelage. They both became regulars at l’Échelle de Jacob. After a while, Jean-Jacques took an additional job as a part-time bartender at the club, just so he could be close to the music. The owner was thrilled to discover that Jean-Jacques could also cook – which he did on special occasions, surprising guests with the Indian dishes he’d learned from Portsmouth and with African cuisine from home. And whenever he was free, he would jam anonymously with the band. He played piano, mostly. But as time progressed, he took to the alto saxophone. Not entirely proficient on the horn, but his sound was tolerable, listenable.
He still kept his job at the Tour d’Argent. And there he stayed, until a certain day in 1958, when two men walked into the restaurant, and one of them said something to the other in Afrikaans.
‘So you see, Thierry,’ said Jerry, as he arrived at the end of his story, ‘me and Jean-Jacques know each other pretty well. He showed me the ropes when I was still new around here. I often wonder how my life would have turned out if I hadn’t met him here. Not only did that brother open doors for me, he also gave me the confidence to stand on my own feet as an artist, to think beyond the next meal. And his story … his story showed me that life could be a field of limitless possibilities.’
CHAPTER 43
Jean-Jacques did not regret his actions in the restaurant. Haig had deserved to die. He had kicked numerous desperate men back into the water during the Mendi’s sinking, and he had killed Pitso’s friend Tlali. Moreover, he was the reason for the mutiny that had almost killed Pitso. Truth be told, however, he had been shocked at the men’s sudden appearance at the restaurant, and had acted on pure instinct. He had had the fleeting, half-formed thought that they were members of the military police looking for him after all those years. They would take him home where he would be tried for deserting. He had heard that there was a new regime in power back home; a government that upheld a system called apartheid; a government that was even more vicious in its dealings with black people. With the men now dead, he thought he would feel safe. No one would ever know his true secret: that he was a South African who had deserted.
While Pitso felt justified in killing Haig, he felt remorse for the other man’s death: his only sin had been to be with the wrong man, at the wrong place, at the wrong time. He was prepared to stand before a court and tell his story. He knew he had done wrong, and was willing to be punished according to French law.
But he should have listened to Marie-Thérèse – listened when she’d warned him all those years ago to avoid confrontation of any kind. Her dreams, which he had dismissed, had been followed by a mutiny during which he’d almost been killed and had lost an eye.
In later years
these dreams had come and gone, always followed by some mishap – a car accident, a burglary at the house in Amiens, a sudden illness. Now he could see that he should have taken her dreams seriously all along. They were rooted in something; they had a logic of their own. For over a year, she had been begging him to stop working at the restaurant because she kept seeing, in her nightmares, a bloodbath taking place there, at the centre of which was her own husband. But being the stubborn man that he was, he had ignored her warnings. He would take his retirement as planned, in December.
Then, one morning, he’d woken up to find Marie-Thérèse gone. She’d left a brief, cryptic note, which he carried with him everywhere, even in his cell.
Dearest,
I cannot take the torment any more. I think the best thing for me, for both of us, is for me to leave. Long before we got married I told you that I was a bringer of bad luck. My dreams are a curse. Somehow, they bring pain, even death, to the people that I love. You barely survived that mutiny, years ago. You might not survive what I am seeing now. You know I have been having these endless nightmares over the past year. Believe me, my darling: there will be violence. Lots of blood. At least two people will die. If you are not willing to listen to me and walk away, I will.
I do not know how long my absence from you is going to last. I will wait until I get a message from wherever these things come from. And, please, darling, do not try to find me. It will simply complicate things for everyone. I do not know where I shall go, nor do I intend telling members of my family, even our beloved Motsomi. I will return when the time is right.
Until the day he killed the two men, Jean-Jacques had been tormented by regret and sleepless nights, trying to imagine where his wife could have gone. Was she hiding at the house in Amiens? Had she left France altogether? Had she secretly fled to Boston, where their son Motsomi, now a lawyer, was based? No matter where he searched, Jean-Jacques could find no trace of her, nor did she send word. Where could she have disappeared to, and when would she be back? The questions had tortured him, making him moody and unpredictable, with a temper he could barely control.
Ever since his arrest, he had refused to be interviewed by investigators about his motive for the murders. But how long could he go on like this? How sustainable was the game that he was playing? With the passing of each day, worry weighed heavily on his mind. He knew the French could hang him for double murder.
He also worried about whether his story would be heard. Would the case be adequately covered? He doubted it. Without the story reaching as wide an audience as possible, the murders would not have been worth it. Although he hadn’t had time to think before he killed the men, a public court case would give him the forum he needed to tell his story, with maximum effect.
It heartened him to learn that no one had come forward to claim the bodies of the men he had murdered. In fact, the authorities had discovered that the men, who had been identified as Stephen Humphrey Monash and William John Scobie of Australia, were not who they claimed to be. Their passports were fake. A huge stash of diamonds was found in their luggage at the hotel – hence, perhaps, the fake passports, and the gun in the man’s boot.
Inevitably, this revelation would delay the investigation. And the most obvious course of action for Jean-Jacques would be to cooperate with the authorities and apply for bail. But would they grant him bail in the first place, since his papers stated that he was an Algerian, a flight risk according to the authorities? He doubted it. Perhaps, he thought, making this as public a case as possible might influence the court’s decision. He did not know. He lived only on hope. Hope that the story he would tell in court would offer enough extenuating circumstances.
Then, one day, he received two unexpected visitors.
‘Who are they?’ he asked the guard who was escorting him to the front room where prisoners awaiting trial met their visitors. ‘What do they look like?’ Could it be the military police? How had they tracked him down? Why now, after so many years? As far as he knew, no picture of him had appeared in any papers. Even if it had, his appearance had changed completely over the years. ‘What do they look like?’ he repeated.
‘One is a Frenchman, the other sounds … like an Englishman.’
‘Black? White?’
‘The Frenchman is white, the other is black. The black one says he’s your doctor, the Frenchman says he’s your lawyer or something.’
If these were members of the military police, they would simply take him away. He was going to face them, he decided, but he would only leave the premises in a body bag, or a coffin.
As he entered the visitors’ room, Jean-Jacques’ body was humming like an engine, his mind on alert, his muscles tingling with anticipation.
‘Yooowwweeee, brother, look at you!’ A familiar voice shouted. Jean-Jacques turned and was startled to see his friend Jerry Moloto. Tears of relief and joy welled in Jean-Jacques’ eyes.
He half-whispered in Sesotho, ‘Child of my mother! What are you doing here?’
‘Relax, brother, relax. I think you’ll need me, you’ll need my friend here. Your story needs to be told to the world, before it’s too late. Telling your story might just save your life.’
The three of them followed the guard, who ushered them onto three uncomfortable seats, then withdrew to a discreet distance.
‘You were the last person on my mind, my brother,’ said Jean-Jacques. ‘Given your immigration status, I thought you wouldn’t want anything to do with officialdom.’
Jerry switched to English, keeping his voice very low. ‘My brother, this here is Monsieur Thierry Bousquet. He is a journalist and an author.’
They shook hands. Jerry continued, ‘We don’t have much time with you, so let’s cut straight to the chase. Thierry and I have been doing a draft of your life story. We’ve covered a lot of ground as it is—’
‘What the hell are you doing? You can’t publish my life story—’
‘Wait, let me explain. We do realise that we need your permission to go ahead and publish. Which is why we are here. But the reason we thought of documenting your story in the first place is to help build a defence for you. Admittedly, we are not lawyers so we’ll need some guidance.’
Jean-Jacques sighed and sat back. ‘All right, go on.’
‘Now, I know that your brother-in-law Sebastien runs one of the biggest law firms around. But I also know that you’ve never told him your full life story. Having worked with Thierry on this story since your arrest, I believe we could be of use to Sebastien. We could fill in whatever gaps there are in your history – assuming you’re engaging him as your lawyer, that is.’
‘I haven’t spoken to him.’
‘What do you mean, you haven’t spoken to him?’
‘He hasn’t been here.’
‘What? So, who has been here?’
‘No one.’
‘Shit. Why not?’
Jean-Jacques shrugged. He had no idea why his brother-in-law, one of the most respected lawyers in town, hadn’t visited him since his arrest. Had Marie-Thérèse instructed him to stay away? Was he now an embarrassment to the family?
‘My brother,’ Jerry continued, cautiously, ‘I hope you won’t be angry with me, but I want to know why you killed those people. Who are they?’
‘Take a guess. I’ve told you my story so many times you should be able to put two and two together.’
‘Are they members of the military police?’
‘You might say so.’
‘How did you know they were military police? Did they say, You’re under arrest?’
‘No. Had they not started speaking Afrikaans, I wouldn’t have recognised them. When one of them started saying insulting things about me in Afrikaans, I couldn’t hide my curiosity. I had to look at them. And guess what? There is Officer Haig staring at me right in the face. He tried to reach for the knife, but I beat him to it. There was no time to think. It was all instinct.’
‘What about the other bloke, who was he?’
‘I don’t know who he was. I only killed him because he tried to pull a gun on me,’ explained Pitso, shifting in his chair uncomfortably.
‘A gun? I wasn’t aware of that.’
‘Yes, he had a gun hidden in his boot.’
‘Damn, brother. But you’re still in shit. Deep shit. Now, tell me, how has the South African government reacted to this?’
‘These pieces of cow dung were travelling incognito. False Australian passports.’
‘The story gets better every day …’ Thierry spoke for the first time.
Jean-Jacques said, ‘To chart the way forward, gentlemen, I suggest you contact Sebastien on my behalf. Tell him you have my blessing to work with him, and ask him, please, to get in touch with me. I am all alone. My wife is somewhere out there in the world …’ He paused and thought for a moment. ‘Why are you two taking so much interest in this, anyway?’
‘Come on, man, I am your brother. I should look after your interests. This story must come out once and for all.’
‘Jerry, I know you. What else is of interest here? Is there money to be made?’
Jerry looked at the floor. ‘Naturally, my man, a brother has to eat. Thierry is going to run a series in his newspaper. And the series is going to culminate in a book – your life story. We split the proceeds. Man, it’s not as if I am taking bread from your mouth now. I am helping you. People must begin to appreciate who you truly are, not a demented Moor of no consequence.’
Jean-Jacques laughed out loud. ‘I knew it. Have you taken care of my documents and drawings?’
‘Naturally.’
‘Look, Thierry, once you chaps have spoken to my brother-in-law, please come back to me and let’s discuss this further. I appreciate everything you’ve done so far.’ He got up.
‘Wait!’ said Jerry. ‘Our visiting time isn’t over yet.’
But Jean-Jacques hurried towards his cell, the guards following him.
Three weeks later, the name of Jean-Jacques Henri was back on the front pages of the newspapers. His murder trial was about to begin. It was going to be a high-profile hearing. The Palais de Justice was packed to the rafters – with journalists, patrons of the Tour d’Argent and curious townsfolk.