Tandia

by Bryce Courtenay

  But Geldenhuis had one more surprise for him. He pulled back, suddenly smiling, and Peekay could feel the tension leave the policeman. Peekay realized that the lightning ferocity and the incredible calm, all within moments, was what made the policeman such a remarkable and feared interrogator, this schizoid ability to be hot and cold, two people at once.

  Geldenhuis quietly resumed his seat and, pushing his cap aside, he opened the manila folder. 'Do you have a good picture of the deceased?' he asked calmly.

  'Not personally, but I'm sure we could find one easily enough,' Peekay replied.

  'In that case I will release his body to you. We have a photographer coming from Pretoria to take the pictures of all the dead, that's why the relatives are having to wait outside. He's late, he was supposed to be here by eight o'clock.'

  'You mean we're going to have to wait?'

  'No I just said, get me a good picture. Even if we took a picture of this person,' he tapped the manila file, 'it wouldn't be any good, he's only got half of his head with him.' Geldenhuis said this sotto voce, not attempting to score a point; he was a police officer doing his job. He rose from the chair. 'C'mon, you'll have to officially identify him. I'll take his fingerprints at the same time.'

  Predictably, the first thing that hit Peekay as they entered the mortuary was the smell. He had no idea that human bodies could develop such a stench in so short a period. The smell of putrefaction filled the room. He clutched at his stomach with one hand and covered his nose and mouth with the other as he turned to rush out again, but Geldenhuis grabbed him by the shoulder halting him.

  'Dead kaffirs stink, hey? Just stand still for a moment and breath normally.' Peekay turned back again to face the room and, reaching for his handkerchief, he placed it over his nose. Geldenhuis showed no reaction to the stench.

  The room was in semi-darkness, like being under a heavy canopy of trees. It wasn't large and if you looked carefully you could pick out most of the detail, though it contained no windows. Light entered from two skylights in the roof, both of which had been painted white in an attempt to insulate the heat coming in; two large extractor fans whirred on either side of the skylights.

  The room seemed completely filled with the dead, laid out side by side on the polished cement floor, each corpse touching the other with a narrow corridor running down the centre and another, even narrower, along the wall leading to where they stood at the doorway. The corpses which were identified were covered with a green sheet from which two naked feet extended into the centre isle. On each left big toe was tied a manila label bearing the dead person's name. Those of the dead who had no identification, those who'd done as instructed and left their passes at home, were also covered, though this time their feet were covered and their faces exposed awaiting identification by their relatives. It was all very neat and tidy; Klopper obviously ran a tight ship.

  The far wall appeared to be made of glass insulator bricks in the centre of which was set a white enamel door about twice the size of a normal oven door. Set in line with the door and extending about eight feet out into the room was a ramp of the sort you sometimes see in loading depots where cases are pushed along metal coasters set between rails. The oven-like structure was obviously the incinerator for the unclaimed dead, and the ramp was for the smooth delivery of a body through the enamel door into its interior.

  Near the oven door, completely covered by several of the green morgue sheets, was what appeared to be a mound about five feet high.

  'Can we do this quickly, please?' Peekay gasped.

  'Ja, but we have a problem,' Geldenhuis pointed to the green mound. 'Klopper didn't have room for everyone, you know, to lay them out all neat. These are crisis conditions, this place is only built for a few stiffs. So, well, man, some they still in that pile. If Zulu Mambo, the Bantu you looking for isn't here,' his hand swept along the row of bodies, 'then you going to have to find him in that pile over there. Mostly over there is the bits and the bad sights. A machine gun, it can cut right through a person, also some of the guys, they used dum-dum bullets.'

  Peekay removed the handkerchief; his expression was incredulous. 'You bastard, Geldenhuis!'

  Geldenhuis shrugged. 'I'm sorry, we can't let anyone in to help you. No black people are allowed in until we taken all the photographs. Maybe you'll be lucky, maybe he's here, all neat in a row,' he paused, rubbing the point of the chin where Peekay had hit him, 'but I don't think so.'

  Peekay was trapped and he trembled as he walked down the centre aisle looking into the faces of the dead. There was a constant hum of flies in the room which he hadn't noticed as he'd entered and now he saw them clustered about the eyes and crawling around and into the open mouths of the dead who, apart from being covered with a sheet, had received no special attention. The blood from their internal haemorrhaging had caked around their mouths and necks. Peekay brushed a bloated fly from his face.

  'We spray them with Doom, but the buggers come back, I don't know where they come from.' Doom was a popular brand of insecticide; under the circumstances it seemed an appropriate name.

  Peekay came to the end of the long lines of the dead, knowing Juicey Fruit Mambo would not be among them but nevertheless forcing himself to look at each face. Here was the legacy of hate, the ultimate punishment for mothers and fathers and children who'd dared to hope they might be free in the country of their birth. Finally he reached the cloth-covered mound of the dead. The green sheeting was heavily stained with large brown patches of dried blood and in one place the brighter red of a fresh seepage. Peekay stood trembling, lacking the courage to pull back the sheets. Finally he did so and what he saw would be part of a recurring nightmare from which he'd wake screaming for the remainder of his life.

  Peekay would dream he was standing on the pavement looking into the window of Mr Rubens' Doll Factory in Hammersmith, looking down at the bits of broken doll, torsos and legs and arms and cracked and broken bisque heads lying higgledy-piggledy on top of each other in the window. Then, as he watched, the scene in the window would transform into this Sharpeville pile of the dead above which, seated on a single swing, was Geldenhuis. He wore a doll's wig and a pretty pink doll's dress embroidered across the bodice with blue forget-me-nots and tiny white roses, his feet in white calf-length cotton socks and shod with black patent-leather kiddies' shoes, his toes turned inward in the manner of a small child. Geldenhuis would look at him, his eyes wide and incredulous. He'd say, 'We spray them with Doom, but the buggers come back, I don't know where they all come from!' Then he'd smile and a bright trickle of blood would run from the corner of his mouth.

  On the top of the pile lay a huge woman, her legs wide open; her crotch and stomach had been blown away and viscera had been pushed back into the gaping wound. The elastic bottoms of her pink crêpe-de-chine bloomers with tattered fragments of bloody cloth attached still dug into her thighs, though her dress and the rest of the bloomers had been tom away. Except for the bizarre garters, her enormous body lay naked from the waist down. Propping it up were heads and arms, legs and torsos - though piled up the way they were, at all angles, they didn't look like bodies, more like components, a junk heap of rejected human parts.

  Peekay knew he was going to be sick and he grabbed at the oven door set into the wall, only just managing to swing it open and lean over the delivery ramp before vomiting into its interior. He remained like this for some time, continuing to heave; when at last he withdrew his head he was totally distraught, his body bent forward almost double, shaking violently.

  Geldenhuis watched Peekay as he threw up into the interior of the cremation oven, then he slowly withdrew his Smith & Wesson .38 calibre service revolver from its holster. Pushing to the left, he opened the chamber, removing the bullet in the chamber nearest to the barrel. He reached into his trouser pocket, his hands closing around the warm, familiar shape of the single gold square-nosed bullet. He slid it silently into the vacant hole
in the revolving chamber of the revolver and carefully pushed the chamber back. When he cocked the gun the gold dum-dum bullet would line up with the barrel to blow half of Peekay's head away. The coldness had come back, the terrible cold that seemed to seep down into his marrow. This place; the plan was working perfectly, it was even better than his fantasy of finding a boxing ring. He hadn't planned to kill him, just to humiliate him. But now as he saw the way things were turning out, he knew it was a certain sign from God that he was right. He was alone with Peekay; the black whore lay there ready for him on top of the sides of beef, just like the vision he'd been given. The cold grew more intense. Things were becoming mixed up in his head, blurred. He was in the cold room behind his father's butcher's shop. It must be a Tuesday, the carcasses were stacked up against the end wall. It was only right, his father must be punished, what he was doing was terribly wrong, he was committing a mortal sin, he was doing it with a black woman and so he must die. It was the only way to save South Africa, to do his duty as an Afrikaner and as a white man! But he was too cold, his finger was frozen on the trigger, slowly he lowered the gun and tried to still his shivering body.

  Peekay stood stooped over, panting, his hands resting on his knees. 'I'm a coward, I can't do it!' he gasped, without looking up. Then he began to sob softly, a great sorrow welling up in him, a terrible sadness for his whiteness, for his pale eyes and hair like straw which marked him as a vicious killer, a member of the strange ones. Slowly his fear began to leave him; the great hollow places it left behind were filled instead with grief. His grieving was for the mother, the great, warm mother of Africa with a washing basket on her. head filled with freshly laundered clothes smelling of sunlight, the flash of her white teeth as she laughed and gobbled up the gossip of the day, the slow perambulation of her massive thighs. He mourned for the woman who cradled her soft brown children in her massive arms, her skin like velvet and her song sweet as goats' milk mixed with honey. He pulled her as gently as he could from the top of the pile and laid her on the ground. Then his grief turned back as he lifted a child, no more than eight years old, his small, innocent face serene in death, as though he'd fallen asleep and was being carried in the arms of a loving father to his bed. Peekay laid him down as well, not even seeing the gaping hole in his chest. His grief moved the people one by one and laid them gently down. At last, at the very bottom, lay Juicey Fruit Mambo, his two gold incisor teeth intact in his huge broken head. Peekay bent down and lifted his shoulders off the ground and then he sat and cradled Edward King George Juicey Fruit Mambo in his arms and wept and wept.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  Juicey Fruit Mambo was buried according to tribal rights and rituals, with the slaughter of two oxen killed so that their bellowing would awaken his shadows to come for him. The meat from the two great beasts was hung inside his childhood khaya, huge strips of meat hanging mostly from the centre pole, drenching the small round hut in blood.

  Very early on the day of the ceremony two Swazi warriors arrived in a battered pick-up and requested permission to enter the lands of the Zulu and then specifically to visit Juicey Fruit Mambo's isigodi, his district or neighbourhood. The two strangers handed the umNgoma presiding over the burial ceremony a long sheath made of the fresh hide of an ox which still carried the beast's hair, mostly black with a splash of white near the top of its six-foot length. The two men were anxious to depart; they were deep into alien territory and when pressed to take a calabash of kaffir beer they did so, gulping the traditional thick, sour-tasting beer quickly before making elaborate excuses to depart. The sheath was from the great Somojo, the old man who had presided at Juicey Fruit Mambo's death at Sharpeville, and within it was the magic stick which contained his spirit. The spirit stick meant that Juicey Fruit Mambo could now be properly returned to his shadows to live with his ancestors in the land of the Zulu.

  The funeral was a big affair, attended by a great many people from his isigodi, and some from other places. It lasted a day and a night of dancing, feasting and excessive drinking, all at the expense of Mama Tequila, who, too sad and distraught to attend herself, instructed Tandia to see that it was a funeral to be remembered for ever.

  'Tandy, darling, I want everything first class, you understand, nothing slipshod, just the best, you hear? All of a sudden I wish we could be a cat licks like Ruth, then we could pay the Pope to make him the patron saint of motor cars!'

  Gideon came and this was thought a great honour even though he did not belong to the same isigodi as Juicey Fruit Mambo.

  A great many orations took place, for the Zulu people like to remember and to build things up so that all who are present- should be given the correct impression. When it came to Gideon's turn to speak he was careful with his form; country people like things to be done correctly and he thanked his rival chief for his welcome and paid homage to Juicey Fruit Mambo's clan.

  'Zulu Mambo was a warrior of great distinction who had the heart of a lion,' he went on to say. 'All his life he spat in the face of the amaBhunu, the Boers, and he suffered greatly at their hands. But he was a proud man from a fiercely proud clan.'

  'Haya, haya!' the crowd sighed, pleased with the compliment.

  'They tried to break his spirit, but they couldn't do this. In the end he defied the police guns and the great motors of steel that wear guns that spit bullets like a hailstorm. He stood and he cried out, "White man, I want my freedom back, I have come to take it back!'"

  The crowd moaned and the women started to ululate; this was their tribesman and the champion of the world was talking about his bravery. 'And they heard him, the amaBhunu heard his cry, but their hearts were stone like always and stone hearts cannot hear the truth. They killed him.'

  A great howl went up and a moaning even from the men.

  The Boer's heart of stone was well known to all.

  'But it was too late.' Gideon said, bringing them to silence.

  'When the teeth of the bullets tore into his great chest, it was too late, the call for freedom was out and its echoes were in the hills and the valleys and it rose above the crashing sounds of the spitting guns. The people have heard Zulu Mambo's call and they will answer, they will answer with Umkonto we Sizwe, the Spear of the Nation. The time to answer with the spear has come. It is the beginning and because Zulu Mambo has made this beginning for all, it is the beginning of the end of. the tyranny of the white man. The name of the place where our brother made the great call for freedom will ring around the world as a mighty blow rings on metal. The drums of freedom are sounding, we cannot turn back now, we cannot be stopped!'

  For a hundred years the people of Zululand will talk about the funeral of the great warrior Zulu Mambo. How it took fifty men to dig his grave, the same fifty men with ropes singing a chant to a dead warrior as they lowered him into his grave seated behind the wheel of a great pink automobile, dressed in a grey suit, white shirt, pink tie and chauffeur's cap which cunningly covered the wound of his noble death. Covering his eyes were the dark glasses for looking into the setting sun; on his hands were white gloves of the finest leather which held firmly to the steering wheel. They would tell the story of how the great warrior Zulu Mambo drove himself to the place of his ancestors with his shadows, who had come on foot to fetch him, resting comfortably in the back seat of the huge automobile, laughing and chatting away happily. Right to the very end that one was a Zulu who showed a lot of class.

  And now when the dust devils come and play willy-nilly across the dry land the herd boys laugh and point as they watch from the hilltops, 'There goes Edward King George Juicey Fruit Mambo, that is the dust of his parting, his roaring away in his great pink Packard!' And sometimes they can follow his dust cloud for miles. Haya! they think, one day I'll be just like him!

  When Tandia, Gideon and Peekay were ready to depart, the witchdoctor, who had presided at the burial ceremony, handed Tandia a tiny leather bag worked so thin that the cream-coloured uncured leather was
almost opaque. The bag, no bigger than her thumb, was made from the hide of one of the sacred oxen slaughtered for Zulu Mambo's burial rituals. 'Take what's inside and wear it around your neck; if you do this, then he who is now with his shadows will protect you always.'

  In the car driving back from Zululand Tandia took the tiny leather sack from her bag and tapped the contents gently into the palm of her hand. First one and then the second of the gold caps which had covered Juicey Fruit Mambo's incisor teeth fell out. She looked down at the two tiny pieces of gold and wept quietly for the last time for the only person who had always loved her selflessly.

  In the days and weeks immediately after Sharpeville the country was in an uproar with strikes and protest marches occurring everywhere. This time the world sat up and took notice and the Johannesburg stock exchange hit an all-time low. Whites in their thousands mobbed travel agents and the United States, Australian, Canadian and New Zealand embassies were flooded with requests for immigration papers.

  A week after Sharpeville, with the country almost brought to a standstill, Magistrate Coetzee called Tandia from a telephone box near the Magistrates Courts. From where he stood he could see the dilapidated building with its four windows on the first floor where Red had its offices. He could as easily have walked across but he couldn't take the chance of being seen. Besides, there wasn't much time; he had to take a chance that the Red telephone wasn't tapped.

  When Tandia came to the phone Magistrate Coetzee spoke urgently. 'Listen, man, Tandy, the government has declared a state of emergency! This morning I signed warrants for the arrest of ninety-seven so-called activists here in Johannesburg,' he paused, 'you know I don't take sides in these things, but Gideon Mandoma's name was among them. Geldenhuis came personally to pick up the warrant for him, jy moet gou maak, there is not much time.' Then he added, 'I don't know how to advise you, but like I suggested might happen, in a week's time they are going to ban the ANC and PAC, they will become outlawed organizations.