Blessed Are the Dead

by Malla Nunn

  Emmanuel and Shabalala passed a large hut with dried buffalo horns at the entrance and proceeded to a wide yard with an umdoni tree at its center. Nomusa crouched on a woven grass mat, her head bowed in supplication. A young girl huddled against Nomusa, her skinny arms circling the woman’s waist. Items of clothing and a small cardboard box with the lid ripped off were flung across the wide yard.

  As the detectives approached, a giant Zulu man snapped a tree branch across his knee and raised the limb high enough to cast a shadow over Nomusa and the shivering girl.

  “Drop that,” Emmanuel said in Zulu, and crossed the dirt circle in four paces, raising dust. The man turned, surprised. He was easily six-foot-three and had been handsome once but carried a ring of fat on his belly and under his chin. The onset of middle age had thinned his hair and evidence of too much good living could be seen in his bloated face and red-rimmed eyes.

  “I am the great chief . . .” the man said, blood still running hot. “No one, not even a white man, tells me what to do in my own kraal.”

  “We’re the police, which means we can,” Emmanuel said. He disliked the chief on sight. “Now drop the stick.”

  Shabalala took up position at Nomusa’s right shoulder, ready to deflect an attack. The chief threw the limb against the perimeter wall, rattling the thorn branches and startling a thrush into flight. Nomusa and the child remained hunched over in the face of Matebula’s wrath.

  “Have you found out who killed my child?” the chief demanded. “There is a debt owing for her life and it will be paid.”

  “Who do you think is to blame for your daughter’s death?” Emmanuel stepped around Matebula’s bulk and caught a whiff of sour maize beer and dagga smoke. He checked on Nomusa and the girl, who looked about eleven years old and wore the short beaded skirt of an unmarried female.

  “The mother is to blame for Amahle.” Matebula pointed at Nomusa. “She let my child roam across the valley and sent her to work in the house of the white farmer instead of keeping her in the kraal.”

  “I was thinking of a person who might actually have killed Amahle. A boyfriend or maybe an old enemy.” Emmanuel reached out to lift Nomusa to her feet before he caught the quick movement of Shabalala’s hand. A short, sharp wave that said, Do not touch the woman, Sergeant.

  He dropped his arm.

  “My daughter was good,” Nomusa whispered. She kept her face turned away to hide a swollen eye and a cut on her left cheek. “Amahle had no boyfriends. No enemies.”

  “Lies.” Chief Matebula grabbed the cardboard box and upended it. A toothbrush, a lipstick, some candy-pink nail polish and two lead pencils scattered across the mat. “Explain these things! Where did they come from when all your daughter’s pay was meant to come to me, her father?”

  “Shut up and sit down.” Emmanuel had had enough of Matebula’s big mouth. “There. Up against the fence.”

  “A chief does not sit on the floor.” Matebula shouted an order in Zulu to someone hidden inside the largest hut and stood with his hands folded across his bare chest.

  Emmanuel permitted him the small victory. There were more immediate concerns than the maintenance of Matebula’s ego. He crouched at the edge of the mat and tried to make eye contact with Nomusa. She shut him out, looking up and beyond the fence line to the mountains wrapped in clouds. Traditional Zulu women, especially those married to an arrogant chief, did not speak to outsiders without their husband’s permission.

  “Sergeant.” Shabalala nodded toward the narrow passage connecting the circular yard with the rest of the kraal. Another signal.

  “Go,” Emmanuel said. “Take Nomusa and the child to their hut and come back when they’re settled.”

  “Just so.” The Zulu detective picked up the vanity items scattered on the mat and repacked them in the cardboard box. Emmanuel wondered if these little luxuries had been given to or bought by Amahle or if she had stolen them from her employers at Little Flint Farm. Beyond her startling physical beauty, he knew nothing about her life or her personality. What unknown event might have placed her in harm’s way?

  “Let go, Mama.” The girl broke free of Nomusa’s hold and scooped up the four cotton dresses and a blue hand-knitted sweater from the grass mat where they’d been thrown. She clutched them tightly, a fierce little creature with wide brown eyes flecked with gold, black cornrowed hair and a smooth oval face that would one day match her murdered sister’s beauty. A double-stranded necklace of blue and silver beads and a row of glass bracelets indicated her superior social status in a valley devoid of manufactured items.

  “Come.” Shabalala shepherded Nomusa and her daughter toward the passage. They crossed paths with a lushly proportioned female who came out of the great hut carrying a carved wooden stool and a rolled cowhide. The newcomer’s ocher-stained hair was brushed high into a stiff crown and adorned with shells and porcupine quills.

  “My fifth wife,” Matebula said as the woman sidled barefoot across the dirt circle, her hips swaying widely enough to knock a child to the ground. Amahle’s little sister clutched the dresses tighter and narrowed her eyes like a cat ready to unleash its claws. Nomusa cast the woman a cold glance. Matebula’s wives were rivals, not friends.

  “Great chief . . .” The fifth wife unrolled the black and white cowhide in the shade of the umdoni tree and placed the stool at the very center. A dried leaf fluttered onto the hide and she flicked it away.

  “Tell me, policeman from the city . . .” The chief settled onto the stool, feet apart, chest thrust out like a pigeon. “How will you compensate for the loss of my daughter?”

  “The police and the courts will exact a payment for the crime,” Emmanuel said. “Whoever killed her will be found and punished.”

  Matebula grunted. “These courts are far away in Pietermaritzburg and Durban. They cannot know the depth of my loss.”

  The chief’s words did not contain a shred of genuine emotion. He was talking about money. A beautiful daughter of marriageable age had been killed before lobola, a bride-price, could be paid.

  The fifth wife cooed in agreement from where she’d sunk down on her knees at the chief’s feet. She simmered for her husband. She was still young enough to enjoy her favored status and did not yet understand that another nubile girl would, in time, replace her. Matebula clamped a hand on his knee and massaged the flesh under his palm.

  “How much was Amahle worth?” Emmanuel asked, curious to gauge the depth of Matebula’s callousness.

  “Chief Mashanini from Umkomazi offered twenty cows. Not ordinary ones. A fat herd with long horns and speckled skins.”

  “Did you accept his offer?”

  “Of course, yes. Amahle was getting old and the price for her was fair.” The chief pursed his lips. “Now I will get nothing.” His wife made a sympathetic sound and shook her head.

  The mixture of self-pity and greed fascinated Emmanuel. Matebula’s world ended at his fingertips.

  “Amahle was happy to marry and move to Umkomazi?” he asked. Not far from this kraal missionaries taught girls to read and write and do sums, preparing their souls for heaven and their minds for life in the twentieth century. Marriage was no longer the only option for a Zulu girl.

  “Happy?” Matebula grappled with the word, trying to find its relevance. “She was satisfied to do her duty to me.”

  Maybe, Emmanuel thought. Marrying to escape was common in every racial group: indeed, he’d often suspected his own ex-wife Angela had chosen him as the quickest way to break free of her overbearing father and her defeated mother. Life as a detective’s wife was not the peaceful refuge Angela was looking for. They divorced when it became clear to them both that their marriage was a way station, not a sanctuary. Amahle might have decided that life under the chief’s rule was worth ditching.

  Shabalala returned, silently stepping up to Emmanuel’s left.

  “Your daughter had no admirers? No one she fought with?” Emmanuel asked.

  The chief heaved a sigh, bored by
the question. “Amahle spent much time with the white people on their farm but here at the kraal she was modest and silent,” he said.

  The fifth wife leaned back, her shoulder almost touching Matebula’s thigh, and whispered softly in Zulu.

  “There was one such man.” The chief followed his wife’s prompt. “Philani Dlamini. He is a garden boy at the farm where my daughter worked. He told many people that he was betrothed to Amahle.”

  “Was he?” Emmanuel wrote the name on a blank page. The first and only suspect in the investigation so far.

  “Never.” The word was dismissive. “This man has a herd of five cows and he is not a chief.”

  “Where does Philani live?” Emmanuel asked.

  Another urgent whisper came from the fifth wife, who kept her eyes cast down to the cowhide, the model of a good Zulu wife.

  “Near the farm of the Afrikaner.” The chief pointed over the thorn fence to a mountain flecked with orange aloe blooms. Shabalala marked the direction and the travel distance at a glance. “But Dlamini is not there. His mother has not seen him for two days.”

  “How do you know that?” Emmanuel asked.

  A small bump of the shoulder against the chief’s thigh acted as a warning from the fifth wife to take care. Matebula shrugged and kept quiet.

  “Where is Mandla?” Emmanuel asked. “We’d like to speak with him and his impi.”

  Matebula sat up higher on the stool. “My son does not have an impi. Everything in this kraal belongs to me.”

  “Excuse us, great chief.” Shabalala stepped forward with his shoulders dipped to decrease his size and presence. “We wish only to warn your son and your men that searching for Amahle’s killer is a job for the police and the police only.”

  “Why should my impi withdraw when the police stay in the town and never set foot on this land?” Matebula asked.

  “Because,” Emmanuel said, “if the impi continue to threaten witnesses, the chief of police will send more policemen to this valley, enough to trample the cornfields and outnumber the rocks.”

  “The truth is spoken,” Shabalala said to emphasize the point. Black-against-black violence rarely caught the eye of the authorities but if the trouble spilled over to white-owned farms, Matebula could expect his world, and his authority, to come under threat.

  “I will talk to my men when they return,” Matebula said grudgingly.

  After you’ve rolled your fifth wife, had a nap and smoked another marijuana cigarette, thought Emmanuel. It was time to move on with the information they had obtained. He pocketed his notebook, happy for the one name in it.

  “Stay well, great chief,” Shabalala said, taking up the burden of good manners when Emmanuel turned to leave. A flock of tiny red birds flew overhead and settled in the branches of the umdoni tree above the chief. The crimson flash caught Emmanuel’s eye and he glanced back over his shoulder.

  The fifth wife remained nestled close to the chief’s thigh, but her gaze was no longer on the dried cowhide but on the two detectives leaving the yard. She looked away but not fast enough to hide the calculating expression on her striking face. Not so naïve, then, and probably brighter than her husband by fifty watts. Yet Matebula would go to his grave believing that she was soft and yielding and born to please.

  As they walked through the kraal Emmanuel asked Shabalala, “What do you think of the great chief?”

  “Unworthy of the title.”

  “Can he rein Mandla in?”

  “No chance.”

  “Thought not.” Emmanuel paused outside a hut and noticed Nomusa and her daughter seated in its front yard. They were hunched over a bowl of brown lentils, picking stones and other impurities from the dried food with their fingers.

  Nomusa lifted her head like an impala testing the air for the scent of a predator and saw Emmanuel and Shabalala standing at the boundary of her home.

  “Go,” she said to them and shuffled her child back into the hut. “Please, go from this place.”

  Emmanuel moved to a small break in the stick fence. He wasn’t happy leaving Nomusa here, battered and grieving. A palm touched his shoulder.

  “Sergeant,” Shabalala said. “You must not walk past the fence. Things will go worse for the chief’s wife if you do. This is not her family kraal. It belongs to her husband and his clan.”

  Shabalala was right. Long after Amahle’s murder was written up in a case file and handed to a judge in robes and a wig, Nomusa would still be here, living in the shadow of the great chief.

  Emmanuel turned and walked away. He remembered his own mother, injured and hiding in the dark. He cut off the memory. He hadn’t been able to save her, either.

  Five minutes out from the Matebula kraal, with Shabalala scouting the way across a rocky field covered in mountain aloes, Emmanuel sensed they were being followed. A small shape darted from boulder to boulder and slipped behind clumps of sagebrush in an attempt to stay undetected.

  “It is the little sister,” Shabalala said without turning around. “She has been with us since we left the chief’s kraal.”

  “Let’s sit down and rest for a minute,” Emmanuel said. “Give her a chance to catch up and talk.”

  Even with Shabalala as the only witness, Nomusa had added nothing to what she’d said in the yard of Matebula’s hut. Amahle was a good girl. She was loved. She had no boyfriends and no enemies. The cardboard box with the lipstick had come as a surprise to her mother.

  Shabalala stopped at a grass area between two large boulders. They sat down and waited. A breeze lifted the scent of wet rocks from the valley floor. Emmanuel took off his hat and set it down, letting the air cool him.

  Stones skittered down the rock behind the detectives and a girl’s voice said, “Do not go to the Dlamini kraal. Philani is not there.”

  Emmanuel turned slowly and saw Amahle’s little sister crouched in the rocky field like a sprite.

  “What is your name?” he asked.

  She shook her head, refusing the information: smart move for a child.

  “How do you know the gardener is not home?” he asked.

  “His mother came to the chief yesterday morning and said her son did not come home from work at Little Flint Farm on Friday night. He is missing.”

  Shabalala picked up a stone from the grass and examined it closely. “Could it be that Philani’s mother is not telling the truth to protect her son?”

  “My brother and the impi went to the mother’s kraal.” The girl twisted her glass bracelets one way and then the other around her wrist: a nervous habit. “They did not find Philani even after breaking the hut apart and scattering the goats and chickens.”

  “Amahle knew Philani Dlamini?” Emmanuel nudged the conversation back to the dead girl. That Mandla was a major problem for the investigation he already knew.

  “They worked for Baas Reed at Little Flint Farm. Philani tended the garden and Amahle tended the white women in the big house.”

  Shabalala smiled encouragement. “Philani and Amahle were friends.”

  The little sister stopped twisting the bracelets and said, “Philani followed her up the mountains and down again and she did not chase him away.”

  Walking together over mountains was love in a child’s mind. Emmanuel thought she might be right. He took his notebook and pen from his jacket and scribbled the word flowers next to Philani’s name. Ordinary Zulus did not bring flowers to the dead but a Zulu man employed by white farmers as a gardener might have adopted the European habit.

  “Tell me about this chief from Umkomazi,” Shabalala said. Emmanuel had filled him in on the bride-price and the chief’s bitter disappointment. “He is rich and handsome, I’m sure.”

  “He is fat and slow and smells of cow dung,” she said flatly. “The great chief agreed to the marriage because he is greedy and not fit to work in the gold mines in Jo’burg. Amahle had no love for him.”

  “Huh . . .” Shabalala was impressed by the blunt assessment. At around eleven years old she co
uld already tell the chaff from the wheat and silver from tin. His own wife, too, told things as she saw them. “Perhaps there was another for whom Amahle had love but that she kept hidden from the chief and from your mother?”

  The girl looked away and began to spin the bracelets around her slim wrist, faster and faster. Emmanuel took his cue from Shabalala and focused on the stones peppering the field. They might each have been sitting alone in the grass and listening to the chirp of crickets.

  “There was one other,” the girl said. “A man with a strange name.”

  “Mmm . . .” Shabalala breathed out, keeping the conversation going without asking a direct question.

  “Mr. Insurance Policy,” the little sister said in English.

  Black Africans adopted names from a rich array of sources. Emmanuel knew a juvenile delinquent called Justice, a housemaid named Radio and a shoeshine boy with the evocative moniker Midnight Express Train. Every name was linked to a real story, an actual event that had shaped their lives. Where had an Insurance Policy sprung from in an isolated valley connected by a network of dirt paths? This bastion of shimmering cliffs and meandering rivers was surely one of the few places on earth that traveling insurance salesmen had not penetrated.

  “Did you ever meet this Mr. Insurance Policy?” he asked.

  “No.” The girl shook her head. “Amahle mentioned him one time. Never again.”

  “Was it in the winter or now in the springtime that she spoke of him?” Emmanuel asked. In the country, the seasons told the time. At the turn of each season, the men working in the gold mines of Jo’burg returned home to plow the fields or hand out modern marvels like aluminium cooking pots, lengths of brightly printed cotton and cash.

  “It was on the day the Afrikaner farmer burned the edges of the field by the river. I remember that my sister came home after dark and our mother was angry with her.”

  Farmers lit firebreaks in winter. The memory of stinging smoke and black ash embedded in his skin and hair for weeks was still vivid in Emmanuel’s mind. Tilling the fields and harvesting crops for six years alongside his adopted father had destroyed any romantic notion he might ever have had of living off the land.