Permanent Removal

by Cowell, Alan S.

  As we began our journey, she settled into the car, lighting a cigarette without consulting me. Sensing my disapproval, she opened the car window a fraction to allow the fumes to escape.

  What would you expect from a daughter of the revolution if not defiance?

  She was studying African Development and Politics at the University of Cape Town and spent much of her time, she told me, in student politics, demanding better conditions, higher grants and improved accommodations – the legacy of her father’s martyrdom. How pleased he might be to know that his battle had been won, allowing his heirs to hone the terms of victory.

  “But the main target of our struggle,” she proclaimed, “is corruption. The corrupters who have betrayed my father’s struggle.”

  We drove along the rocky, breezy inlets of the coast to the resort town of Hermanus, past the village of Stanford and then on to Gansbaai before turning inland. I tried to ease the strained atmosphere by chatting about her mother’s courage, but the overture met with a tart response. Her mother, she said, was simply the public face, the public conscience of the new dispensation.

  “She is being used. She thinks we can still change our nation, our leaders. She knows in her heart that power has merely been handed from one small group of men to another. The skin colour is different. That is all. Not the gender. Not the structures of control.”

  I said that seemed a harsh judgment. “Look at the new houses, the democratic choices. Elections. Freedom.”

  “Do you really think the people have power?” she said. “Do you think power is not still in the hands of a few rich men?”

  “But they are African men, black men.”

  “They are men, not women. Whatever their colour. In my country it is the women who are abused and the men who give them AIDS.”

  She switched the conversation to my previous experience in her country. Her questions were sharp, angry: what had the Americans known about the apartheid regime, how much had they kept back, how much had they collaborated in the system and its perpetuation?

  “We were maybe misguided, not malicious. We wanted change,” I said, ignoring the uncomfortable evidence implied by Val Coetzee’s account of the bundling of the apartheid files.

  “And did real change come? Or just change that kept the big companies in charge of our minerals, our wealth? Was it short change for the masses? Who owns the gold, the diamonds? The people? I don’t think so. When I was at school I used to wonder why the biggest company in the country – in all of Africa – was called Anglo American. But now I know. It is obvious.”

  She turned to me.

  “How did you meet him, my father?”

  It was a question I had been hoping she would ask, one for which I did not need to prepare a legend.

  The encounter was one I had never forgotten or sought to erase, a moment that, for a young diplomat, explained far more than any embassy cable. It had been in the modest family home in the arid reaches of the Eastern Cape with its long horizons and ochre soil under an azure bowl of sky. We sat across from one another at a coffee table adorned with a pot of plastic flowers. I was expecting a kind of African Che Guevara. But Solomon Nyati seemed an unlikely warrior – bespectacled, trim, with the merest wisp of a neat beard, clad in grey flannel slacks and a white shirt, as if he were not too long out of high school himself, a 10th grade Lenin.

  I recalled asking him if there had been a single event that had inspired him to seek change, convinced him he could make a difference. He looked at me and removed his spectacles, rubbing his eyelids and squeezing the bridge of his nose.

  “It’s a long story.”

  “We have plenty of time.”

  “You, perhaps. In The Struggle, time can be very short.”

  “Did he tell you the bicycle story?” his daughter said, interrupting my reverie as I piloted the rental car onto the loose and treacherous surface of the gravel roads that latticed the Overberg.

  “He told everyone that story, my ma says. It was his party piece!”

  “Would you prefer not to hear it?”

  “No. Go on, go on. Tell me the bicycle story.”

  As an adolescent, in his hand-me-down school uniform, on a rickety, black, sit-up-and-beg Hercules bicycle, Solomon Nyati had been pedalling home along on a dusty track, bouncing on the worn, un-sprung leather saddle as the wheels bumped on the corrugations left by the local grading machine that came to repair the damage of the rainy season.

  He was in his mid-teens, intellectually precocious, an achiever, but still obliged to wear short grey trousers and a matching uniform blazer with cow-hide patches where the elbows had worn through.

  On this day, particularly proud of himself, he had passed an important examination that, under a different racial dispensation, would have qualified him among the top percentile of university entrants. The bicycle was old and heavy, with no fancy gearing to speed him home, so he pushed on the pedals all the harder to reach his destination.

  He was in a hurry to break the news of his triumph to his parents. Robert Nyati, a school teacher with little more than rudimentary qualifications, followed his son’s achievements closely, hoping that Solomon would one day secure the place at Fort Hare University that poverty had denied to previous generations of the family. The sweat collected in mercurial beads on the lower rim of his spectacles. He kept his eyes on the road for he had always been a cautious boy, never one to risk the crazy games with spears and dares that the others played with the snakes and crocodiles.

  “Did he tell you that? About snakes and crocodiles? Or did you invent it?”

  “He told me that. He told me all of it.”

  “And you remember it all?”

  “I was a good listener. And it made a strong impression on me.”

  “Go on.”

  He had tied his books in their satchel onto the rear carrying-rack of the bicycle – Shakespeare and Higher Mathematics. The books were written in languages other than his native isiXhosa. That did not trouble him.

  The richness of centuries-old English thrilled his soul and, in any event, the themes of love and loss, battle and tragedy, were universal, as familiar as the sagas of Maqoma and Shaka and Dingaan. (“The villains, in those days, were the British, before you Americans even came on to the scene,” he said with a light smile, “So Shakespeare was a case of: know your enemy.”) By the same logic, he saw no harm in extending his mind to embrace Afrikaans – even if it were the language his people came to associate with barked, inchoate commands, the prelude to gunfire.

  I broke off to ask her a question.

  “You said he always told this story. To whom?”

  “To people like you. People like you who needed to understand what it was like to be black.”

  “But it is different now. To be black, I mean.”

  “Do you think so?” she said. “Do you think there are not people who still do not want to understand? Who think they got away with the crown jewels and must not pay? Do you think they care about the bicycle story?”

  At the roadside, somewhere near Baardskeerdersbos, a pickup truck towing a long, blue, inflatable boat with a scratched fibre-glass keel and powerful, twin outboard engines was parked at the roadside, canted at an angle where a tire had burst on its trailer. Two men stood next to it, one of them speaking on a cell phone.

  “Should I offer to help?”

  “Are you crazy?” Celiwe Nyati said. “Skollies. Tsotsis. The new South Africa. Smugglers of perlemoen.”

  “Perlemoen?”

  “Abalone. They dive for it illegally and trade it for tik.”

  “Tik?”

  “Tik. Drugs. Methamphetamines. The perlemoen goes to Asia. The tik comes here. Do you know nothing about this rainbow nation of ours? Ha!” She lit another cigarette.

  The road wound onwards, towards the small settlement called Elim where Moravian missionaries had built a settlement in the 19th century. It boasted the only monument in South Africa erected to commemorate the abolition
of slavery. Under the tires, I could feel the corrugations where the graders had scraped away the surface bumps and drifts of dirt. I wondered if the road on which Nyati had set his story was real or more a movie set, a notional trail that foreigners would understand from visits to safari parks.

  We drove on, more peaceably now, the powerful odour of fynbos blending with the smell of Celiwe Nyati’s tobacco. Far behind, a plume of dust betrayed the position of a vehicle closing in, a warning that I would be overtaken and engulfed in its contrail.

  I thought fleetingly of Zoë Joubert driving in this same direction just a few days earlier along a different road with her teenage daughter. Had she, too, been interrogated about some historical moment? Was this what parenthood was all about? Would she, too, be thinking back to her first encounter with Nyati? She had been present, by her own admission, at his last, known public gathering before the murderous drive back to Cooktown, to the homestead he would never reach, to which his daughter was now heading.

  But, in her narrative, as I recalled it, Zoë Joubert had not mentioned when, or how, she first met him. Was she the one who led the other white liberals to him? And, if so, what had been the antecedents of their relationship? I was reminded suddenly of the scar on her arm.

  “Tell me everything,” Celiwe Nyati said, as if resentful of my silence, interpreting it as mental redaction or censorship.

  “Tell me everything he told you about that place.”

  The dusty plume behind us seemed much closer.

  He reached a fold in the green hills where a sharp, downhill corner would bring into view his parents’ settlement just back from the banks of the Grootvisrivier – the Great Fish River – nestling between the ripening stands of corn.

  From the bend above the river, safety was only minutes away, past the general dealer’s store with its paraffin lamps and hoes and dried fish, past the small chapel visited by the touring priest on his bicycle, past the sometimes noisy primary school near the makeshift sandy soccer pitch. Soon he would see the small stone house with its raggedy thatched roof and, parked outside, the old jalopy his father used to attend mysterious meetings in Queenstown and Port Elizabeth.

  Sometimes, the country bus would bring home cousins and brothers from far-flung mines and cities and there would be the slaughter of an offering for the prodigals, a goat usually, and millet beer would be passed in a round gourd polished with frequent use, hand to hand, mouth to mouth. Sometimes the visitors would be more secretive, arriving after dark and leaving at first light, their presence unacknowledged, unrecorded.

  Most times, the settlement would seem to slumber in the midday heat at the end of the first shift of the school day.

  As he approached, heralding his arrival with the rusty bell fixed on the handlebars of his bicycle, his mother would appear with a huge white apron around her girth and a half-smile on her lips, as if fighting back a hidden sadness from the many untold worries that she carried to and from the chapel and the hymn singing that seemed her only real solace.

  This time there was something wrong.

  “You know. My ma can tell that story down to the last detail,” Celiwe Nyati said. “But if I ask her if it’s true, she just laughs. Every hero has his stories, she says. But I have been there. To the old house where my grandparents lived and there is a road like that.”

  We were approaching Elim, driving between wild expanses of spidery plants and tiny blossoms in mauve and yellow. The vehicle following in my dusty wake was a white pickup truck with an amber light on the roof, flashing as it approached us. I was driving at around 80 kilometres per hour – a recommended safe limit for roads such as these, lined by shallow ditches and culverts that could be treacherous if they caught a tire. The pickup seemed to be travelling much faster.

  He rounded his favourite bend, his legs stretched out from the pedals, his thumb itching to ring his bicycle bell. But then he saw his mother, Matilda, standing outside the family home with her white apron held to her mouth and stained with vivid red specks. Neighbours had emerged from doorways, hesitant, staring at his parents’ house. Further afield, his sister, Priscilla, had dropped a big, blue, plastic water container she had been carrying from the borehole and was running full-tilt towards their mother.

  Two police vans, the kind whose rear compartment had been converted into a cage for prisoners, headed towards him. Behind them, moving more slowly, a big yellow truck rumbled away from the village, armed men peering from the high rim of its armour-plated steel flanks.

  The pickup in my rear-view mirror had closed in now, its headlights flashing, hovering off the rear fender of my rental car like a stunt pilot flying wing. I nudged in towards the roadside culvert but held my speed at around 80 kilometres per hour, reluctant to abandon my story or my position on the dirt road.

  The police van in the lead rounded a bend with red dust rising from its wheels. As it passed Solomon Nyati, its driver twitched the steering wheel, spinning him off the road into a drainage ditch. He cartwheeled through the air. As he fell, he caught a glimpse of his father, bloodied around the mouth, nose and forehead, gazing in surprise from the iron grille of the second van – his face seeming to register a blend of rage and entreaty, as if he were calling for vengeance but did not know quite how to say so. Solomon Nyati landed in the ditch, his bicycle crashing on top of him, its pedals and cogs and broken, sharp spokes finding tender parts of his flesh to stab into.

  At first he thought that the men following the police van carrying his father would stop to help him clamber out of the ditch. But, as he looked up – they looked down on him from the great height of the truck’s armoured rim – all they did was laugh. Black pools of sweat stained their blue uniform shirts, and the sunlight caught the silver-blue sheen of gun barrels.

  The white pickup had begun to overtake, rattling alongside, spewing dirt and gravel, its flashing light blinking rapidly. In the driver’s seat, I caught sight of a man with a beard, a battered, narrow-brimmed sun hat jammed down on his head – a familiar enough sight in these parts. He pulled past. I thought for a second that he had miscalculated because he seemed to swerve across in front of us.

  “Slow down!” Celiwe Nyati said. She yanked on the handbrake between us and the rental car began to slew until I released it, obeying some distant memory of dirt-road lore: never touch the brakes.

  “Couldn’t you see what he was doing?” she exclaimed.

  Her father had paused in his narrative so that I could absorb the image of a young black boy on the cusp of manhood lying in a ditch. But that was not the crime, he said, or rather not the only crime. His mild, myopic eyes had lost their soft edges. The men who laughed at him were not all white, he said. Some of them were black, black stooges, cooperating in their own oppression, laughing at one of their own.

  Only later did the men from the settlement come to him and lead him to the river bank, in a safe place where the cattle drank and the crocodiles did not come, and they told him that his father would not be returning from the big concrete building in a far city where many brave men entered in hoods and manacles and none emerged.

  The white pickup had pulled ahead; my windscreen filled with its dust. I had slowed down considerably now, without using the brakes, stick-shifting through the gears and declutching cautiously to prevent the rental car from sliding towards the hazards of the roadside.

  But still it seemed that the cloud of rusty dirt ahead of me had not begun to dissipate.

  “Look out,” Nyati’s daughter cried.

  The white pickup blocked the road just short of the neat rows of cottages lining the high roadside banks in Elim. Its orange light flashed balefully through the settling clouds of dust.

  The driver had clambered out and was standing to one side of the road waving a ragged red flag. He was wearing khaki shorts and a short-sleeved shirt in similar colours – once the uniform of southern Africa’s white warriors. This time, there was no time for fancy manoeuvring. I slammed on the brakes and the car skidded br
oadside, forcing me to steer into the slide to prevent a full spin.

  Celiwe Nyati was running clear almost before the car stopped. I followed her, striding angrily to the man who had blocked the dirt road.

  “What in the hell do you think you are doing?”

  “Subsidence, meneer,” the man said. “The roads these days, you know. Poor maintenance.”

  He gestured to a section ahead where a deep hole with jagged, crumbling edges ran across the carriageway as if the planet’s crust had chosen to split at precisely this place and this time.

  “You must be careful,” the man said. “There could have been a terrible accident. Terrible.”

  Ten

  WE WERE ON THE LAST LEG OF our journey together, driving between stands of exotic blue gums and indigenous forest. On a long high stretch back from the coast, a squall blew in from nowhere. Usually the summer weather marches along the ocean-front resorts and settlements from Cape Town, but this time the wind had come from the south-east. It darkened the sky without warning. Bullets of rain burst across the windscreen in a deluge that the wipers could not clear.

  I slowed and switched on the headlights, their beams spangling the downpour as it bounced off the tar. A tattoo of hailstones pummelled the roof. The traffic slowed to a crawl, trucks groaning in low gear as the highway snaked down towards the Knysna lagoon. A slick veneer of icy particles spread across the green roadside foliage.

  And then, equally unheralded, the sun burst through and the clouds hurried on towards distant mountains and the highway began to steam in the heat. She was still rattled.

  “Don’t you see it was a warning?”

  “From whom? That guy saved us from driving into a mighty big hole in the road.”

  “And who dug the hole there? So naïve. You really are such an American. A naïve American.”