“Comrades, we are here, I hope, to think of two kinds of solutions. One is practical. I know that many among you from our overseas friends become nervous when we say: look at the Swiss. They paid for what they did in the Holocaust. In billions from banks. They did not want to. They were forced to. By their victims and the sons and daughters of their victims. So who will pay for apartheid? Will the big companies who made their profits pay those profits back? Ford, Toyota, Barclays, Standard Bank, BMW, Pick n’Pay? Anglo American? De Beers? What about the governments who supported them with their policies? What about the people, the Americans, who used constructive engagement to protect the regime? What about those, the British and their Mrs Thatcher, who called Comrade President Nelson Mandela a terrorist? Will they pay?”
She paused again and lowered her written notes, laughing quietly, looking about her on the podium. There was a strand of bitterness when she resumed.
“No. Even my own government will not ask its friends for that. Instead it will buy some more weapons from them. Amandla!”
The sour irony of the battle cry drew a ripple of approval from the more militant souls.
“But I am not here to talk about money, or even corruption. I am here to talk about how we as individuals come to terms with our wounds, how we bathe them and make them heal, as we would our children when they have hurt themselves at play. And when we do that, what is really making the healing? Love. Love heals. When we pray, we beg the Lord: only say the word and I shall be healed. And that is the crux of matters here and now in our beautiful country. Where is the love? We do not love those who hurt us. They do not love those they hurt. But without love, our land will go forward like a sick man pretending he is well, like patients with HIV saying they merely have a common cold, until they fall suddenly and die. Look at us, the widows of Cooktown – Zinto, Ngalo, Mboniswa, Nyati. We know the names of the men who killed our husbands. We have seen them at the so-called Truth and Reconciliation Commission. We have heard them tell us in the most terrible detail how they did it. So brazen! Standing there and saying: yes we did this and this like so. We shot this one and burned that one and stabbed that one. We removed them! Removed! Eliminated. And yet they are free! Free as you and I who fought and suffered for our cause, free to walk on our beaches and mountains.”
A handful of reporters scribbled notes. The strobe beat of the photographers’ flashlights ticked up a little.
The Western diplomats were glancing at their watches, praying for the witching hour when the embassy drivers arrived to whisk them away to the next fusion of warm wine and bland small talk. I recognised their plumage of summer suits and hounds’ tooth twin-sets, as much as their instinct to avoid embarrassment at all costs.
Elsewhere within the audience, from the less constrained activists from the NGOs, a low rumble of endorsement and recognition built like approaching artillery fire.
Lily Nyati gestured for silence, scanning the crowd. Her eyes found mine. A single tear trickled down her cheek. She was looking straight at me. So was Zoë Joubert.
“Now we face a great challenge. And it is this, for all of us. From Cradock and Port Elizabeth and Cooktown and Motherwell. We must see the perpetrators brought to justice. We must see them show true and deep remorse. We must hear them say: your husband was a human being. It was wrong what I did and I am deeply sorry to the core of my being. And for our part, the victims, the survivors, we are told by all the experts that we must see them as humans, not monsters. And the experts in the universities and the think tanks say we cannot do that until they show remorse. We must reach the point where we can forgive because until we truly forgive we cannot be free of the hatred that burns within us. These killings of our loved ones, these burnings, these disappearances, they live with us. They poison us. They tie us to the perpetrators and we cannot be free. But how can we know these theories are true if the perpetrators do not come to us? If they do not confess to us? If they do not put the theories into practice?”
“Comrades. Excellencies. Above all, we must know why. We will not know how to live our lives without these dark shadows until we know the reasons, the causes, the orders, the treachery. It is not enough to say: I did this and this and he was dead. We must have the whole picture and we must know for once and for all that the guilty ones have paid.”
She turned now to confront the phalanx of political bigwigs sitting behind her.
“It is now the time to ask the biggest question that we have all avoided: should we, the victims, forgive at all? Is there a place in our rainbow nation for any of those in their boardrooms and offices and Casspirs and torture chambers who oppressed us? How can we forgive the spies and traitors who still walk among us? Comrade President, how can you ask us to forgive them when they walk on our graves?”
She sat down abruptly, suddenly small, hidden below a maroon beret, swathed in a brown chequered blanket.
The waiters tending the buffet tables had stopped their work to listen, silent, immobile, ignoring commands to top up jugs of Pimm’s No. 1 Cup, or to refresh gin and tonics. The diplomats had ceased shuffling as if entranced – deer in the headlights. The reporters looked on expectantly, aware that something shocking had happened even if it did not fit the usual categories of news. Slowly Mandela began the applause and Tutu helped the exhausted Lily Nyati rise in acknowledgement of her accolade.
At her side, her daughter raised her mother’s fist. She lifted her own in the salute that people of Celiwe’s age would hardly remember in its original context.
“Amandla,” the daughter cried, her voice strong where her mother’s had been failing, her eyes bright and fierce where her mother’s had clouded with tears and exhaustion. “Amandla!”
“Awethu,” some in the audience roared back. Power! It shall be ours!
The slogan, so familiar during my first stay in their country, revived the memories: dust and stamping feet, choking teargas, plumes of fire, rattles of gunshots, hurled rocks, Molotov cocktails.
Lily Nyati gazed at her daughter with apprehension, fear perhaps. She had called for apartheid’s final reckoning and her own child had taken up the challenge.
“Amandla,” her daughter cried.
“Awethu,” the crowd roared back.
Then, the voices slid into the harmonies of Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika – God Bless Africa – the national anthem once the marching song of the revolution.
Beside me, Zoë Joubert joined the singing. A sweet, firm voice that I would normally have associated with a convent upbringing or a church service; a white woman in elegant clothes singing in fluent African languages in the cadences that bound her to the struggle.
Across the lawns, on the hotel terrace, the foreign guests who came for the African summer to escape their own winter paused in their cocktail hour, as if somewhat puzzled by the native customs, or wondering if this was some form of cultural manifestation – like tribal dancing and the playing of marimba music – to be expected in these odd, new times.
The official delegation swept away, carrying Lily Nyati and her daughter with it. She looked back at me as if to say: now do you understand? I was left alone with Zoë Joubert, nervous in a way I could not recall since my first romantic expeditions in high school. She moved away slightly, as if Lily’s words had put our earlier banter into a different light.
“Some speech,” I said.
“Some woman. She behaved as if she knew you very well.”
“Back then. A little.”
“And Solomon?”
“Oh yes. Solomon, too. Solomon was something else.”
“You got around.” She said. “Funny we didn’t meet.”
“Different circles, I guess.”
In my previous life, I had learned to arrange my facial features into a mask – polite, non-committal, more interested in developing my interlocutor’s narrative than in offering any clue to my own. A trick of the trade in a world where even the most modest snippet of information had a value to be counted, stored, extracte
d without reciprocal disclosure.
Talking now to Zoë Joubert, I felt the same expression settling into place as I tried to bring some order to the unfamiliar feelings inspired by meeting her.
I wanted her to trust me. When I looked at her, heard her voice with its merest hint of a lilting, local accent, overlaid with some mid-Atlantic tones that I could not place, I wanted to radiate reassurance. I wanted to stem the dark undertow that propelled her questions as she sought to place my walk-on part in the drama of her country. I wanted many things that I had lived without for a long time.
I wanted to smile and I wanted her to smile back at me. I wanted to push aside the shadow of the mission set for me by Lily Nyati. As any beat cop knows, the greatest suspicion in homicide cases falls on the last person to have seen the deceased alive. And, in the Nyati case, that person was standing right in front of me, raising troublesome questions: who was the “we” she spoke about, was that the same as “meeting group” in the excerpt of testimony the widows had enclosed with their letter?
Yet. Yet, if I had met Nyati, Zoë Joubert seemed to have been thinking, what was the reason for that encounter? What was my secret, hidden agenda?
I found myself smiling in anticipation of our dinner date. Or was date too strong a word? The temperature seemed to have climbed towards evening. As Zoë Joubert crossed the lawns of the Mount Nelson Hotel, chatting and shaking hands with fellow conferees, I noticed that she had removed her jacket – a tailored affair in beige linen over a sleeveless, silk top in a shade of dark burgundy. There seemed to be some kind of marking on her upper left arm, an unusual blemish in what I was already telling myself was a vision of perfection.
Five
WE ATE GENEROUSLY, HUNGRILY AT one of the smart bistros on the Waterfront with pink tablecloths and matching napkins and an array of silverware. I was slightly surprised that she accepted my pre-emptive offer to pay the bill; something about her sense of independence had steeled me for a battle over sharing the tab, but she seemed happy enough with my old-fashioned fiscal chivalry, as if it were only right and proper that a stranger should pay tribute in this time-honoured fashion without taking her acceptance as an invitation to courtship. She had changed her outfit since the afternoon and now wore a light, cotton blouse with sleeves that covered her arms.
She drew a lot of attention from other men; moonstruck husbands peering past their wives, young bucks with the brazen eyes of frequent triumph. I steered the conversation away from Lily Nyati and onto relatively neutral ground – the status of her rainbow nation, the politics of the conference and – heretical though it seemed – the post-Mandela era. I ran through my diplomatic CV in a self-deprecating way with no hint of bitterness, glossing over its final chapter: the decision to quit had been mine; enough was enough. How long could one continue to be an ambassador – however extraordinary or plenipotentiary – in an era when jet planes and e-mail had made plumed hats and crafted dispatches something of an irrelevance?
Get a life, they said.
So I had.
“And you?”
“Nothing nearly so exciting. Groves of academe. Civil society. The two seem natural allies. Wine?”
“Thanks. And before that?”
“Oh, well. Little rich girl, I guess.”
“Nothing wrong with being rich. Not in America, at least.”
“Well there certainly was in South Africa. At least in the old days.”
“And now?”
“And now, well, there’s a handful of people called formerly disadvantaged who are getting advantaged pretty quickly. And plenty of people who were advantaged then and seem to be getting even more advantaged now! Then there are the ones who will never even know what advantage means and they are the majority.”
I let her guide me in the ordering. She checked with the table staff on the freshness of the Knysna oysters and said two orders of three would suffice, given their generous proportions. Perhaps a salad for the table? She suggested the fish – sole off the bone would be good with a bottle of dry white wine. She pointed to it on the menu and I had difficulty with the pronunciation: Buitenverwachting Buiten Blanc. She laughed at my linguistic clumsiness, but not in an offensive sort of way. She corrected me and explained that it was the name of the estate that produced it, quite close by.
“It means ‘beyond expectation,’” she explained. “In the old days, you couldn’t get to university without a good grade in Afrikaans. Now we have 11 official languages!”
The oysters, big and luscious, arrived with a garnish of condiments and brown bread, heavy with the taste of ocean.
“I can manage English and French. And a smattering of roadblock Arabic,” I offered.
“Roadblock?”
“You know the kind of thing. Don’t shoot. Which way to the airport please?”
“You never learned any of our languages while you were here?”
I caught a hint of reproach and shook my head ruefully.
“Not even roadblock, I guess,” I said.
“Well it’s never too late,” she said. I must have looked alarmed because she smiled and said: “Don’t worry. I’m not starting you on a course of isiXhosa or isiZulu. You won’t be staying that long, in any event.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m a quick learner. It depends on the teacher.”
She turned to ask a passing waiter to remove the oyster shells. I don’t really recall who was the more embarrassed at my gauche gallantry, her or me.
Even if I had been the most skilled of Don Juans, the most artful of suitors, I doubt that our first-date conversation would venture much beyond sparring and formality to delineate areas that could be considered common ground, set the markers of shared belief, compatibility. The rules were unfamiliar; I felt uneasy joining a joust in which my motives might be misread: I was not even clear about them myself.
I escorted her back to the hotel in a shared cab. (The journey was brief but the risk of violent crime argued against walking the nocturnal streets.)
The elevator stopped at my floor and, bidding her goodnight, I stepped out. The doors closed behind me. I found myself suddenly annoyed at my lack of courage, my inability to divine her assumptions about me. I tried to tell myself that these were early days: I had known her for only a matter of hours – this was certainly not the time to attempt the leap from a casual encounter to liaison, amour.
You might sense an affinity, a spark. But if you do not have the self-confidence to assume that your overtures will be reciprocated, you hold back, prevaricate. Not, I hasten to add, that I had ever commanded the cynical arts of a Lothario. Indeed, I had displayed a consistent talent for allowing my heart to dictate to my head. (Some would express the metaphor in earthier terms.)
I returned to my room, befuddled with advancing jetlag, my body clock out of sync in more ways than one.
When I accepted the conference invitation, I thought I understood – and could handle – the perils of this kind of travel across the years, back to a place of so many landmarks. But I had not expected such potent spells to be cast so soon after stepping from my time capsule, to find myself in a version of the present whose markers I no longer recognised, caught up in a minuet driven by forces I could not begin to define. The term “conference purposes only” suddenly seemed to offer remarkable scope to pursue far more than dry debates and ardent polemics.
To my surprise, after some initial hesitation on both sides – call it shyness, if you will, or inexperience – Zoë Joubert seemed to share the enthusiasm.
If, at a coffee break between panel discussions, I approached her, she would break off conversation with other delegates and greet me with an ardent intensity. I am not given to tactile behaviour, but found my hands reaching out and had to restrain myself from that kind of glancing touch on the sleeve or shoulder that implies so much. When I felt her eyes on me, I would turn and a smile would light my face. For the first time in years, there was no way of computing the likely course of events.
>
What remained of my professional cynicism, my tradecraft, sounded warning bells that I should not mix emotional entanglement with the Nyati inquiry. But it was increasingly, overwhelmingly evident that I would go where my heart led – if only to rediscover the delirious sound of its beating.
“You are like love birds, you two,” Lily Nyati said once when she joined us midway through the earnest discussions that had brought us all together. “Whenever I see one of you, I see the other.”
Zoë Joubert laughed and reddened. I think I choked on my coffee. Lily Nyati smiled, but there was no humour in her eyes. She was saying to me: do not confuse your missions. Find out the truth about Solomon’s last evening, but do not hurt this woman in the process.
There was another sub-plot that I hoped she would keep between the two of us: when I first met her and her husband – shortly before his death – I had been travelling with Jessica Chase, a foreign correspondent who had written the seminal newspaper profile of Solomon Nyati. The article brought his name before an international audience for the first time and had inspired me to seek her out soon after I arrived to begin my tour as a junior press attaché.
Now, his widow was warning me not to mix work with pleasure again, not at her expense.
“So, Zoë, are you finally divorced from that poet?” Lily asked in another of her interventions.
“Quite some time, now, Lily.” Zoë laughed to hide a blush.
“And, Tom. You. You married in the end after you left here?”
“Married and divorced, Lily.”
“A society lady?”
“Some people said so.”
“Like Zoë here, then.”
“Lily, really!”
“OK. Then, a mine owner’s daughter. A rand lady!”
After the final conference session, I planned a run around the contour of Table Mountain and Zoë Joubert offered to guide me on the unfamiliar trails. I accepted happily.
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