As he left, Anna-Marie Theron took a photograph from the mantlepiece, returning to sit next to me at the kitchen table. I had a feeling that I had stumbled into a well-rehearsed scenario in which my own part had already been scripted. Ambushed would be another way of describing it. As Jessica de Vere must have known I would be.
“Kobie has told me who you are. I knew you would be coming here. I’ve always been waiting. He didn’t want to tell me, but I made him. After that woman called – Chase, De Vere, whatever – he was upset by it all. He doesn’t like to go back to the past, but he cannot get away from it. I have been thinking about it all. Over and over. In my head. You see this?”
She hands me the framed photograph. She and Kobus Theron are pictured by a swimming pool behind a high fence, cloaked in bougainvillea, topped with razor wire. Two boys have identical red hair and slender frames. Anna-Marie wears a modest, full-length swimsuit in turquoise. Kobus Theron is in skimpy Speedos. His torso is strikingly pale. The area behind the pool is littered with bicycles, cricket bats, a rugby ball. You can see a black, deep-bellied grill with its lid off, a hint of smoke rising into the harsh sunlight. On a lounger, a two-way radio shares space with a Jack Russell terrier and a machine pistol, a Skorpion.
“That was in the operational area, in South-West – Namibia they call it now. Our garden. These are our boys. Deon and Willem. Of course, they have grown up now. One is at Stellenbosch doing Law. The other is a doctor with Doctors without Frontiers. He’s in Rwanda at the moment. Rwanda! Talk about getting from the fire into the pan! Kobie was with the security forces and we lived in this house in Ovamboland and he’d be away for days, weeks on end and we’d be mortared quite regularly. You see here, in the corner of the picture, those doors? That was our bomb shelter. We spent quite a lot of time in it, me and the boys. And I’d take them to school in a convoy and do the homework behind a security fence. I had a gun – a rifle – next to the bed and bars on the doors and a radio to call up help from the local Kommando. And then Kobie would come home and we would be a family again and he would never talk about what he saw and did. The boys would try to make him tell stories … but he never would. He would be a dad, and make the braai and play rugby and cricket. Then he would go again and we would wait and wonder if he was coming back and that was how it was. And that was why I nagged and nagged him: get a transfer, Kobie, one of us is going to get killed – you or us – let’s move to SA, Kobie.
I have my duty, he said. But you can do your duty without a uniform, I told him, without chasing terrorists, without leaving us here to be mortared in our compound. So one day, he came home early. The boys were at school. I was doing my clinic – I used to be a nurse so I would treat the locals, the blacks, for their little coughs and sneezes – and he walked in and said: how do you like PE by the sea? And that was it. That was how Captain Kobus Theron became a security policeman.”
“You knew I was coming?”
“I knew you were coming, Kobie told me, and – forgive me – I know how you Americans think about us. I used to think you were our friends. But you think we are worse than your old plantation owners. You have forgotten what you did with your slaves because it was so long ago and you like to think we are like you with our blacks. But we are not. We grew up with these people, you see. We know them. We didn’t buy and sell them. We didn’t bring them from Africa in ships where they died and got diseased. They were here already! They came to our land from way up in the north, from the Congo. Of their own accord. We didn’t make them. We may not have taken them to our hearts, but we could talk to each other. We taught them our language, our Bible. We didn’t hate them. We do not. We went to church. We prayed to the same God, okay in different buildings. But we prayed the same for forgiveness for our trespasses.” She took a long drag on her cigarette and peered up at the ceiling as if she were reminding herself of the lines she had been rehearsing before my arrival.
“We are all Africans in the end, whether we like it or not,” she said. “My parents – my ancestors – left Europe more than 300 years ago, so what’s Europe to me? I have never been there. I cannot even get a visa to visit the land they came from. So tell me: what is Europe? A holiday brochure the same as Thailand or Australia. Anyhow, that is not what I meant to say. When I heard you were coming, I decided it could not be a complete coincidence. There had to be a reason. I believe in fate, destiny. I believe it was a chance to get someone to help us because there are not many left who will help the people who once protected them from the swart gevaar, the rooi gevaar.”
The words meant black menace, red peril. She smiled to see that I understood the terms
“So I thought: Just as it was fate to go to PE and Kobie being a security policeman, it was fate what brought you here today so I could say one thing, can you help him?”
“Help him? Mrs Theron, you know what he did. You might think we are bad because of slavery. But we have a different idea of right and wrong now.”
“Right, wrong. When did you outsiders care about right or wrong when you came into Africa to play out your own dramas? What was it for you? A stage? A background for your films? And when you told men like Kobie that it was good to fight the communists and you would support them, what was that? Hmmm? Was it your game, like the British and the French and the Germans – the African scramble, you and the communists? But we live here. We live with the results. Collateral damage you call it. I’m not talking about good and evil. I’m talking about suffering. I’m talking about finding peace. I’m not talking about all this limitation and amnesty. Neither is he. He does not care for all this legal mumbo-jumbo. They told him years ago when they sent him on his missions that what he did was legal. Indemnity. Freedom from prosecution for acts committed in the pursuance of the Emergency Powers” – she drew imaginary quotation marks in the air, leaving a tendril of cigarette smoke – “but the law seems to change in our country depending on who sits in the Union Building in Pretoria. He won’t have told you about his nightmares, his dreams. He does not tell anyone. But I know. He does not sleep a full night. He is haunted. Since he was at the Truth Commission and saw the women, the widows. They come back to him, their faces. He sees them and then it all changes in his dreams to the killings. It is all mixed up. The men, the women, the suffering … and the killings and the war. For me too it was hard to come to terms with all that he did. I didn’t know all the details until it came out in public. I knew he had a tough job but I did not know – I swear to God – that they made him kill people in cold blood. Can you imagine how we felt when we heard that? Everyone looked at the widows, Mrs Nyati and them. But no one thought: what about this other woman who has just been turned into an emotional widow, who has just found out her husband is being called an assassin who touched her body and soul with blood on his hands and death in his heart? Who will heal her? Who will she forgive to make it all better, knowing where her man had been when he came through the door at six in the morning and showered hot and cold for hours on end?”
She paused and lit another cigarette.
“And have you thought about our sons? What about them trying to make their way in the new Rainbow South Africa?” She offered the title with just a hint of scorn. “They go for a job and the black man asks them: so what did your father do in the old days? Have you thought of that? What are they supposed to say? He killed your comrades, your brothers, but he has hung up his pistol now – is that what they are supposed to say? When can they say: he was a policeman and that is all, it is over now, forgiven?”
“He used to pretend he was on radio duty or guarding. How could he say: I am going to kill people for my government? He didn’t want me or the boys to know what he did. How he earned his salary. How he put the wors and pap on the table. But it was a war. We knew that in Ovamboland and it was the same war in PE. There were two sides. Two sides to the story. Do the others have nightmares? I don’t know. How can I know? All I know is that he played by the rules. He always played by the rules. The government
’s rules. Even at the TRC. He could have run away. He was in Bosnia, Cambodia doing his mines. He didn’t have to come back. But he did. He came back because he believed in reconciliation, he believed in justice at the end of the day when the war was over and everyone was as free as everyone else.”
She began to busy herself with the evening meal, setting a warped aluminium pot on the stove, mixing a kind of cornmeal from a bag marked Iwisa No. 1 with water.
“So he was just obeying orders.”
“You don’t have to sneer. He was loyal to what he believed in, even when everything changed and you cannot say that of the politicians, or diplomats, can you, Mr Ambassador? To listen now you would think no one knew about apartheid and it was always someone else’s fault.”
“Are you frightened of him, Mrs Theron? Did he tell you to say all this?”
“Do you know what it is like to live with someone else’s – what is the word – demons? Yes, demons. Men like him have demons but that does not mean they are bad after everything they have seen and done.”
“But what on earth do you think I could do? And why should I do anything? Nyati was my friend. I liked and respected him. I thought he was the future.”
“You know, Kobie once said to me, later on, when it was near the end: if I was a black in this society, I would be a terrorist, too. Like Nyati and them. He understood. Yes, he obeyed orders, but he had started to understand that the people who gave the orders were wrong – liars, cheats who did not have to live with what they ordered the way Kobie does. Do you see the cabinet ministers, the generals confessing like Kobie? The old state president, PW Botha, who ordered all this, lives like a nice old oupa by the sea. Do you see him or his henchmen at the Truth Committee? No ways. And the ANC, what about them? They are in government for all the massacres and tortures they did in their camps in Angola. They are just the new version of the old ones, slicing up the pie. They have peace. But not my Kobie.”
“But I still don’t see where you want me to come into this.”
The pot of corn porridge began to bubble on the stove and she stirred it as it thickened. Then she returned to the table, but did not sit, leaning against the back of a chair, flexing her surprisingly muscular arms so that she was peering down at me.
“You know them, the women, the widows. He said you knew them. He said you visited them while Nyati was still alive. You were at the funeral. You know where they live. You must take him to them, face to face, so that he can apologise and you can explain and they can forgive him. I am a woman, too. I lost my husband to all those nightmares and the murder charges so I know what a woman would say to someone who came to say they were sorry. Because if they see him they’ll know he is truly sorry, that he suffers for what he did. That he was misled, like they all were, the soldiers, the troopies, the police, fighting for something they thought was forever when the Bothas and De Klerks were selling them out to you Americans and the British and the blacks. Without that war he would not have done this. He is a kind man. A loving father.”
“Like Nyati would have been?”
“That is not fair. Kobie is a good man. A good husband. He didn’t drink or fight or chase other women. He brought his kids up to be good members of the church and society. He fought in a war like a good soldier and now he wants to say he’s sorry. I know Kobie. He has said to me: Anna-Marie, if I could take back all the hurt, if I could bring back all the bodies, I would do that in a moment, but I cannot change the past. I can only say I’m sorry.”
“And to you? Does he ever say sorry to you? Does he apologise for hiding the truth from you all those years? Or maybe he did not hide it. Maybe you did not need to be told what was happening. Maybe you understood without needing the words.”
“That is disgusting. And it is not me we are talking about. We are talking about those women. And anyhow it was a war. There were others plenty worse than him.”
“So why does he not just go and say sorry to them? He does not need me for that.”
“Because whatever else has happened this is still South Africa and he does not know how to.”
Theron had returned from the yard. He was holding a can of fire-lighting liquid and the flames from his barbecue cast a flickering light around the doorway like some kind of halo. His wife gathered up the Jack Russell, hugging it to her body, and looked at me with pale, dry eyes.
“If these kaffirs can have their victory,” she said, “Why can my husband not have his peace too?”
Part Four
When the remaining bodies had been doused in petrol, Theron radioed the incineration order. Four slender columns of smoke curled above the dunes, all a little way off from each other, joined by a fifth rising from Nyati’s car. Later, Theron would regret leaving behind the phony licence plate on the burned vehicle – damaging evidence. But everyone makes mistakes; there were other tasks at hand. Dawn was rising on a new day – a battle over, but not the war.
Twenty-Three
BY THE TIME I ABANDONED THERON and his wife to their evening meal, Africa’s quick dusk had fallen. I could not shake off a stubborn feeling that, simply by touching the hand that pulled the trigger, I had entered into some kind of dreadful complicity with Nyati’s killer. He had committed the crime, of course, but I was part of the motive.
Without my self-serving visit to Cooktown with Jess Chase all those years back, Nyati might still be alive.
What could I offer his widow now – or the Old Deep set – other than my own head on a platter, my mea culpa? I had embarked on this mission as judge and jury. Now I was the accused. And the only witness I could call was weighing his options over a plate of grilled sausage and mielie pap.
The car’s headlights picked out fantastic shapes of creepers and misshapen branches that might have illustrated a compendium of tales by the Brothers Grimm.
During my diplomatic days in South Africa people had made much of the idea that the revolution confronted everyone with unavoidable, life-defining choices, no matter where you stood in the racial spectrum. It was a time when, quite literally, you nailed your banner to the mast and left it there.
The only question was: were you with the new order or not, ready to advance with the battalions of change or not? Zoë Joubert and Riaan van Rensburg and Rod Harris had made their choices long ago, gambling that they had guaranteed their place in a future as bright as the past was dark. But, this night, with Riaan van Rensburg as an unlikely inquisitor, they would be drawn back, forced to reexamine the flaws, the legends constructed on shallow foundations of deceit.
When we are young, in our innermost thoughts, in the moments of revelatory self-scrutiny never exposed to others, most of us know our own secrets. But, as time erodes our private honesty, we visit that bright core of truth ever less frequently. We come to prefer our fiction. Our untruths set into permanency, hardened by the glaze of invention. Our obfuscations solidify and become accepted truth. That was as true for the Old Deep set as for anyone else, myself included, as Theron had reminded me.
I pulled over and stopped the car, ignoring the road signs that warned of rock falls in the cluttered ravine heading back to the main N2 highway. I reached for the package of booze and cigarettes I had brought for Theron and tore it open. I swigged at the whisky. I lit a Chesterfield filter. I coughed and spluttered and felt no better.
Theron was playing mind games. He was lying.
The assassins had not operated with the outside world in mind. They had pursued their own agenda. Think of Mxenge, Goniwe, the whole procession of ghostly heroes lining the path to Mandela’s freedom – they had not died because of rash promises by junior diplomats. They had died because they had been in the authorities’ face. They had risen to oppose apartheid’s great ramshackle juggernaut and must therefore be crushed by it.
Their deaths were foretold in bleak interrogation rooms and cheery police canteens with polished linoleum floors; in spattered, stinking cells and bland committee rooms painted bureaucratic beige.
How c
ould that have anything to do with me?
Yet Theron had known things that were not in the transcripts. He had described the layout of Nyati’s living room, the plastic flower pot where they hid the bug, the easy promises I had offered to a suspected revolutionary in defiance of the God of policy. And I could not deny that I had made them. I could recall my words as clearly as when I spoke them: you have my promise, Mr Nyati, that I will work for a change in American attitudes; I will work for the legalisation of your organisations and the freedom of Nelson Mandela. How could I have foreseen what these words would lead to? And how on earth could I ever have assumed that anything I said in Nyati’s living room would simply remain there?
Theron had known where we hid the rental car on the day of my first visit. He knew how we had been ferried around Cooktown under grubby sacking on the muddy floor of a Kombi. Throughout our conversation he had been telling me how much he knew, not just about me but about the embassy, about Jess, about the relationship I had with her and the motel room where it began.
I switched on the car radio. A disc jockey was mid-way through a retrospective selection of ’80s music – Dire Straits, 10 cc, the kind of stuff that Jess had played on cassette tapes when we travelled together: “I’m not in love”, “Money for nothing”, “Brothers in arms”.
Theron had been saying: we were brothers in arms, you and I. We are tainted. We share guilt.
But he was wrong, wrong, wrong.
I would visit Lily Nyati and tell her he was wrong. I would take him with me and force him to confess his lies. I almost swung the car round there and then to return and grab Theron by the scruff of his neck and shove him into my car in manacles – better still onto the flatbed of his pickup – and drive him cruelly cross-country like they drove Biko, and take him to Cooktown all the way along the coast in the Eastern Cape and deliver him to the widows and say: here he is, here is your man, your culprit, prime evil, the source of your grief, your path to redemption – no Judas, no tricks, no mysteries, just one straight killer, one single state assassin; do with him as you will.
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