Permanent Removal

by Cowell, Alan S.

  He was speaking to me as if we were allies, bonded by pigmentation and shared threat. And I was listening to him as if he were right to do so.

  “What makes you think we are on the same side?”

  “No need to lose it, Ambassador. I’m only giving you my advice as a professional.”

  “Professional killer?”

  “Whatever you like to say. But I know these people …”

  “I grew up with them bare-assed in the Macabuzi River. Isn’t that what you were going to say?”

  “Something of that kind.” He sounded as if I had given offense.

  “Well I didn’t grow up with them calling them piccannins and kaffirs. I met them as people. Not slaves. Not blecks. And that’s how I will treat them.”

  “You want to go alone?” He let the idea sink in. I said nothing. “No, I thought not. I am not surprised you do not want to go alone. Because you people always seemed like having my continent as your playground. But you leave us to do the fighting.”

  I fumbled a cigarette out of my pack of locally made Chesterfields. In the studies that emerged after the TRC, of which much had been made at the conference in Cape Town, there was a theory that, in the cautious duet of victim and perpetrator, it was often as not the victim who made the first move towards reconciliation. But in return they demanded the truth about their loved one’s last moments on earth – total confession; total remorse.

  “You must tell your story, Theron. They must hear it from you. You must be their witness. You must tell the truth.”

  “And watch your back, Ambassador. You want me to watch your back, don’t you, Ambassador? Like a professional.”

  We pulled over for petrol. Theron stocked up on biltong and pies –padkos. We drank chilled Coke from plastic bottles. We smoked incessantly with the windows rolled down. I was following Nyati’s route to his death in the presence of his murderer. Some tribute! Some wake! A station called Radio Algoa was playing country music and slightly outdated rock. I had driven these road before with Jess Chase, years before, tingling with hope that, on this or that clandestine voyage, unhooked from my diplomatic credentials, we would become lovers and I would be initiated into a new world. Her world. However briefly, the dream had come true.

  I was invincible, shielded from all harm by the intensity of love and righteousness. I would see Nyati and grasp the lesson we often forgot in America in our haste for material betterment – freedom is the prize above all, and life without it is no life at all. I would outwit the authorities – the Therons and the Fakus and Nieuwoudts. To hell with policy and protocol. To hell with the risk of exposure for behaviour “in a manner incompatible” with my diplomatic status, as the cold war parlance used to put it. These same back roads had been my passage to enlightenment.

  But how often had Theron driven here, too, with his underlings and superiors – Snyman and De Kock, Taylor, Nieuwoudt, Faku? What had they discussed among themselves – tradecraft, rugby scores, children’s grades, chances of promotion, the perfidy of colleagues, coding systems, favoured weapons, victory, defeat? In their unmarked cars with the phony plates, had they discussed who they would next visit at 3 am? Did they talk about the enemy as worthy adversaries or as “dom kaffirs”? Had they cackled over the tapes from their phone intercepts, their bugging devices? Had they laughed at people like me who thought they had outflanked the system, outwitted them? Or had they been silent, macho, checking their radios and the magazines of their weapons, knowing what had to be done without needing to go into the detail of precisely who would break down a door here and who would stand guard there, who would roust a sleeping man from his bed and pistol-whip a protesting wife before the cuffs bit home on the captive’s wrists?

  “You know this road?”

  “Like the hand on my back.” Theron laughed and looked across at me. “Did you never do that? Did you never mock the Afrikaners, the police, for the way we messed up your language? Did you never say it was duck’s water off my back? That you made me out of a monkey. So, I know this road like the hand on my back.”

  “So did Nyati.”

  “Oh, yes. Nyati knew it very well. He travelled it often and if you tailed him he would slip away and meet his recruits and tell them how to get to Lesotho and Botswana on the way to training to pick up their landmines and Kalashnikovs. That is why we needed the radio bug your CIA gave. He was too slippery and he knew all the roads like a hand on his back.”

  “But in the end it was you who put a hand on his back.”

  “A bullet,” Theron corrected me. “I put a bullet through his skull. I do not joke about that.”

  We approached a rise in the road where the combination of a steep gradient and a sharp curve to the left forced travellers to slow down. Off to the right, a narrow cul-de-sac on a dirt road offered cover for anyone lying in wait. As we passed the place, Theron looked back over his shoulder, a final, retrospective evaluation of its suitability. Neither of us spoke. The circle was closing.

  The Cooktown turn-off came sooner than I wished or expected. Theron fastened his shirt collar and adjusted his tie. He reached onto the back seat and pulled on the jacket of his suit. He took his tote bag and placed it neatly across his lap. He switched off the car radio and cleared his throat. He packed the detritus of the padkos in plastic bags and knotted them carefully. He lit a cigarette, then stubbed it out.

  In his heyday as a counterinsurgency commander, he would not have displayed such nervousness at a moment like this. Any doubts or hesitation would be hidden by the orders to charge weapons, lock and load; any sense of vulnerability would fade in the knowledge that, out on the flank, Casspirs full of armed men were in position, a radio-call away from deployment.

  But not now. There was no back-up here, no daka-daka.

  A signpost from the black-top pointed to a dirt road leading across a scrubby field, past an abandoned slaughterhouse with a peeling, faded signboard in Afrikaans. Slagpale. The place seemed bigger, tawdrier, the burned police houses rebuilt, the cemetery swollen with AIDS victims outnumbering by far those who fell in The Struggle.

  The rear-view mirror showed an empty road. No children rolling barrel-hoops; no vendors selling wire sculptures of windmills and motorcycles. Only hawk-eyed young men in small groups on strategic corners. Theron scanned the township, checking for familiar landmarks, escape routes, lines of attack.

  He had been here often enough in the dead of night, cruising between the tiny homes, armed and dangerous. He had been here to arrest young men in raids before dawn – young men, who, if they survived the ministrations of the security police, had probably fathered this newer generation. White control, really, had been no more than a painful chimera, a bloodstained interlude.

  “Better pay respects,” Theron said, directing me to the burial ground on the outskirts of the township that looked out across a river-bed to the bald, dry hills of the Eastern Cape

  From his bag, he drew a tired bunch of flowers in cellophane bearing the name of a supermarket chain.

  The martyrs’ graves – no more than piles of dirt on the day of the funeral – had been covered with a newer adornment, in grey granite, like a small Greek temple, a budget Parthenon. An inscription read: “Their blood shall bear the fruit of freedom.”

  A notice credited the South African Heritage Resources Agency with the construction of the monument.

  Above small white urns there was another motto. “Long live the fighting spirit of our leaders.”

  Theron looked at it, then looked at me. He removed the wrapping from the flowers and laid them at the grave.

  “Ancestors,” he said, without explanation.

  We climbed back into the car.

  “Shit, man, this is wrong. We should get the hell out of here,” he said.

  I checked the rear-view mirror again. The knots of young men had coalesced into human barricades blocking the exits. In the distance, a slender column of black smoke rose from a burning tire.

  “Too late,” I sai
d.

  She was waiting outside the house that I remembered from my first visit. She was wearing a dark beret and a white apron over a woollen jacket and long skirt. The building was slightly bigger than most in the township, befitting the home of the school principal, perched on a rise so that it seemed to dominate the broken, dusty streets like a command post.

  She gestured for me to drive into the garage – the same garage as Nyati himself had made available on my first visit with Jess. (She had been driving at that time, and seemed familiar with this subterfuge to keep the car hidden, not from young black men but from men from like Theron.)

  Theron insisted that we reverse into the garage, poised for escape. Lily bolted the doors closed. The engine fell silent. A chicken pecked around the car, squawked when I opened the door. Speckles of dust floated in a shaft of lemon light spilling through a crack in the roof. The garage walls were lined with an array of rusting hoes and rakes and scraps of metal on hooks and frames.

  The remains of an entire bicycle, its wheels and frame bent out of shape, hung from a length of cord in the ceiling – maybe the same one Nyati had been riding in his narrative so long ago. In an art gallery in New York or Berlin, it would have qualified as an installation.

  Lily Nyati led the way through an inner door, past the kitchen where I remembered her making huge vats of soup for the funeral (the room was still and cold now, its odours antiseptic, neutral, as if she no longer lived here permanently, a temporary sojourner at her husband’s modest mausoleum).

  We embraced awkwardly and I introduced her to Kobus Theron. She started back, holding the white apron to her mouth to cover her shock. When she spoke, it was to reproach me with such bitterness that I thought all my calculations had been stupendously flawed.

  “I know who this is, but I never thought he would have the nerve to come to this house. I never thought you would have the nerve to bring him here.”

  “There is a reason, Lily. I promise,” I said.

  “I hope. Or I will never forgive you.”

  In the living room the three other widows sat in a sad row on a single sofa, huddling together for comfort at the sight of Kobus Theron and his tote bag. They whispered to one another and to Lily Nyati in their own isiXhosa language. To my surprise I heard Theron speaking it, too.

  Lily Nyati translated his words. “He says he is sorry if we are surprised. He says he is nervous, too. He says he is grateful if we will listen to him.”

  “And will you listen, Lily?”

  “It is not what I expected.”

  From the kitchen, Celiwe Nyati entered the room. She shook my hand with stiff formality. When Theron went to greet her, she turned away. This time she wore black jeans with matching sneakers and a T-shirt in green, yellow and black – the colours of The Struggle. At the front, across her chest, her father’s portrait and, at the back, a slogan with the promise: “One Settler, One Bullet.”

  Through the lace curtains and security netting on the window, I noticed that the young men had formed into a phalanx, either guarding the house or keeping us prisoner in it. With the car hidden in the garage, there was no sign of our presence for any subsequent investigator to note as evidence that we had even been there.

  Celiwe Nyati crossed quickly to a small window with four polished panes and gestured to her comrades, but I could not interpret the signal. Theron shook his head from side to side.

  On a coffee table – the same one as had been there in Nyati’s day when its mock floral arrangement hid a security police listening device – his widow had laid out a teapot, cups, saucers, milk, sugar and cookies under veils of thin gauze weighted with bright beads to keep away flies. Theron’s gaze fixed on the plastic flowers in the centre of the coffee table; he did not raise the question of whether the bug had ever been found, silenced or removed.

  It was tempting to imagine its forlorn signal beeping faintly in the silence of some forgotten control room long abandoned by the listeners, drums of recording tape hanging from storage racks. Lily Nyati poured tea with the requisite additions of cream and sugar. In theory I had come to report to her and so should begin the meeting. The heavy stillness of the sitting room became unbearable.

  “We have been here before,” I gestured inclusively to myself and the widows. Nothing much had changed in the room since I first saw it – the same brown suite of sofas and armchairs, the same glass-fronted display case with its framed photographs, school diplomas, and, from more recent times, a letter signed by Mandela himself praising the fallen warrior.

  “I recall Celiwe being here, too, as a very young child,” I went on. “Captain Theron has also been here.”

  Celiwe Nyati gasped. “This is not a family visit. You are not my uncle. This is not Christmas. You have brought a killer into our home. Our home! You have brought my father’s killer into his own house! Again!”

  Lily Nyati sighed and peered upwards at some imagined point on the plaster-board ceiling.

  The silence closed again and I continued with the speech I had been contemplating on the drive. My words seemed stilted, inappropriate.

  “I do not want to give offense, but some things do need to be said. We all know where we came from; we all know the roles we played. Captain Theron has confessed some of what he knew at the TRC.”

  Lily Nyati looked at me sharply when I used the word: some.

  “And I was here as a junior diplomat, a representative of my country, my government, when I made a promise I have not kept. None of that is disputed. None of that is new. What is new is what has happened since you all sent me a letter reminding me of my promise and asking me to investigate more recent events. I have now done both and, in the course of that, have met up with Captain Theron.”

  “Ex-captain, former captain. I am no longer a police officer.”

  “A police officer? A murderer!” Celiwe Nyati’s voice had risen, carrying to the young men outside. Tears brimmed in her eyes. Theron ran a finger around his unfamiliar tight collar, as if seeking to loosen a noose.

  “Mrs Nyati. Ladies. You asked me to find out who betrayed your husbands. I have discovered that no single person did that. Of the young white liberals he met the night he died, several have confessed to being informers of one kind or another, wittingly or unwittingly. But there was no single traitor of the kind Mr Theron described at the Truth Commission. When he said that, he was lying.”

  The widows on the sofa shook their heads, and clicked their tongues, but were not really surprised. Theron was a serial assassin, the killer of husbands, the author of pain and loss. Who would expect honesty? Only Celiwe displayed anger.

  “He should be dead, dead like my father, like the Cooktown Four and all the others. He deserves no sympathy. No forgiveness. Do you know what he did before he came here? He went to the grave, the monument, and put down flowers and in his heart he was probably pissing on it.”

  I turned to Lily Nyati.

  “Do you want me to continue? Shall we leave?”

  Her daughter answered for her.

  “You are not permitted to leave. Do you hear? You have no permit!”

  She laughed at her own joke: permits to enter segregated townships had been an instrument of control in the apartheid era. And now, it seemed, they were again. I had a sudden recall of the days before I met Jess, of following the rules and reporting to the police in some settlement or other to fulfil the bureaucratic protocols of control. The officer who copied out my details in painstaking script kept a framed photograph on his desk. I thought it might be of his wife, his family, but it turned out to be of his pet bulldog. In a corner of his office, a sjambok was propped against the wall.

  “Continue,” Lily was saying.

  “The reality is this. Theron planned to kill your husbands for a variety of reasons. One of the reasons was that Solomon Nyati was too important to The Struggle. Another, so he tells me, is that he was becoming too well-known outside the country because of people like me and Miss Chase.”

  The wi
dows seemed older than I had anticipated, their faces filigreed with wrinkles. Each sleepless night, each restless moment, each cry of pain had been etched forever so that, if you studied the fine lines, you would see the agony had been unending, a curse that would not be lifted.

  Zinto. Ngalo. Mboniswa. Nyati’s comrades, murdered by Theron and his men. Four widows, sitting where they had tarried so often with only memories for comfort..

  “So there was no single traitor?” Lily Nyati asked me.

  “As far as I know, there was not.”

  “But there was a reason?”

  “There was a reason.”

  “And you are part of that reason?”

  “It seems.”

  “Seems? Yes or no?” Celiwe Nyati demanded to know.

  “Yes.”

  “Then it is you, too, Ambassador or whatever you are, who should be seeking forgiveness,” the daughter said in more restrained tones. “Not just this monster you have brought with you.”

  Her arms were stiff against her sides, her hands curled into fists.

  “I have committed two errors. Firstly, I made a promise to your mother and the other widows that I could not keep and in my heart of heart knew I would not be able to keep. And, secondly, I came back here believing that the truth would make up for my failure. I believed that the truth would help you heal.”

  “It is more than truth, can you not see that?” Lily Nyati took up the cross-examination, gesturing to her three friends.

  “What do they need?” Lily Nyati was saying. “Truth? Redemption? Money? Do they need only the reason why they have raised their children alone, slept alone, lived cold and empty lives tending martyr’s graves? And you thought you would walk in and resolve this.”