Deceive and Defend

by Marilyn Cohen de Villiers

  After reading one of the more detailed accounts of the Guptas’ successful efforts at ‘state capture’, Aviva had joked to Arno that the Gupta brothers were sharks, and Zuma’s earlier corrupt benefactor, Shabir Shaik, who—according to a high court judge—had had a ‘generally corrupt relationship’ with Zuma and who everyone had thought was a shark, was a guppy in comparison.

  ‘Nah, Shaik’s not a guppy. More like a snake,’ Arno had said. ‘He managed to slither out of jail on medical parole because he was supposedly dying from high blood pressure. Half the prison population in South Africa probably has high blood pressure too, but no parole for them. And, surprise, surprise – here he is, seven years later, still very much alive.’ Arno had pointed to a photograph of Shaik brandishing a golf club on one of Durban’s exclusive golf courses.

  ‘So now he’s a golfing guppy,’ she’d replied, and they’d both roared with laughter.

  Neither of them was laughing now.

  ‘I can’t believe it,’ Arno said, frowning at the iPad. ‘They’re saying there’s incontrovertible evidence against Yair. That has to be wrong. There’s no way he’d have done it. Oh, it’s written by Tracy Jacobs. You can’t trust anything she says. She just likes to stir up trouble.’

  ‘She’s not the only one saying this. I checked. All the stories say the same thing. They’ve charged Yair with premeditated murder; they say there’s solid evidence against him; and they all say that he pleaded guilty!’

  ‘Do all the other news reports also say Yair murdered your mother?’

  ‘No. Only Tracy.’

  ‘You see? She’s simply stirring. It’s total bullshit to link your mother’s death to Tiffany’s. Of course, all the other media are now going to jump on this serial-killer angle.’

  Aviva’s cellphone tinged and she snatched it up. She read the message from Vanessa, the travel agent, and resisted the urge to hurl the iPhone across the room.

  ‘Damn! I can’t go. I forgot about those ridiculous new travel requirements for minor children travelling to South Africa,’ she said. ‘Mattie has to have a copy of his unabridged birth certificate, and you need to give me an affidavit that you’re giving me permission to take him into South Africa. That’s going to take ages – oh not the affidavit, I’m sure we can do that quickly, but the birth certificate. Where do we get that?’

  She glared at her husband who was not even trying to hide his relief.

  ‘Oh Avi, I’m sorry you can’t go. But think about it. What good would it do if you run off to South Africa because of a story that’s pure sensationalism, without a shred of real evidence. And with all the media attention on Yair, you suddenly turning up will only make things worse.’

  ‘Stop, Arno. There is evidence,’ Aviva said quietly.

  ‘There is?’ Arno looked stunned.

  ‘Tracy covered my mother’s inquest, remember? You were there. She obviously put two and two together – just like Yair did. That’s why Yair tried to change his plea. Only she got it wrong. Yair didn’t do it.’

  Arno sat down on the edge of the bed and shook his head.

  ‘I don’t understand, Avi. Obviously I don’t think Yair would ever do anything like that. But... Why did he change his plea? Surely that means that he did it?’

  ‘He didn’t. And that’s why I have to go. To stop him.’

  ‘Avi, even if he didn’t do it, what can you do? You weren’t there when Tiffany died. You know nothing about their relationship. Who knows? You always said Tiffany was a bitch. Maybe they had a fight, perhaps they’d been drinking, or something.’

  ‘Yair doesn’t drink or drug any more, you know that. And Tiffany was pregnant, so she wouldn’t either.’

  ‘You haven’t seen Yair for years. You don’t know. He may have started again,’ Arno said.

  ‘I doubt it. His business is doing so well – and it wouldn’t be if he was using again. Anyway, he’s never been violent or aggressive, not even when he was using. But that’s beside the point. I know he didn’t kill Tiffany.’

  ‘Then why did he plead guilty?’

  Aviva hesitated. This was a secret she had carried with her for four years. She’d never told anyone. She’d barely been able to bring herself to tell Yair – and now she wished she hadn’t. How could she tell her husband yet another horrific Silverman secret? She and Arno had always been so open with each other. They had agreed that even if they had to lie to the rest of the world in order to be together, they would always, always be honest with each other. They had sealed their pledge with a kiss – and she’d mentally crossed her fingers knowing that there was no way Arno would ever find out.

  ‘Avi? What do you know? What aren’t you telling me?’

  Arno got up and took her hands. Aviva was torn. She wanted to tell him. She needed to share this dreadful burden. But it wasn’t really her secret to tell.

  ‘Avi? Talk to me!’

  ‘I can’t. I swore I’d never...’

  ‘Avi, we swore we’d never keep secrets from each other. When I told you that I’d let my parents know we were safe and together and that we’d had a baby, I knew how furious you’d be. And I was right. But I couldn’t not tell you.’

  ‘This isn’t the same thing at all,’ she muttered.

  He squeezed her hands. ‘Please Avi, trust me. It has to do with why Yair pleaded guilty, right?’

  She nodded.

  ‘And you know why he did that?’

  She nodded again and bit her lip.

  ‘So tell me. Why?

  She shook her head, tears welling. ‘It has nothing to do with you.’

  ‘Avi! It has everything to do with me. It’s making you run back to South Africa! You have to tell me. What is going on? Why did Yair admit to killing Tiffany?’

  ‘To protect her. There, I said it. He did it to protect her.’

  ‘Who? Tiffany? How would pleading guilty protect Tiffany?’

  ‘Not Tiffany,’ she whispered. ‘Zivah. Yair is protecting Zivah.’

  Chapter 16

  Zivah

  It’s not fair! Yair has no right to make me stay at The Lodge again. He knows I hate it here. He knows it. That’s why he didn’t even tell me himself that he was sending me back. That horrible Darryl or Darren or David or something said so. And I was still so frightened but he didn’t care. He just told Thembi to pack my clothes and made me come here. He didn’t care that when all those horrible policemen came to the house and woke me up, it was so scary. I thought they were robbers or something. They made such a noise, banging on the front door and then running up the stairs and charging into my room and I screamed and screamed for Yair but he didn’t come. He just left me.

  Darryl said the police took Yair away and that’s why I have to stay at The Lodge. But I don’t believe Darryl. He’s horrible and mean. Yair is also being horrible to me again. He still doesn’t think I’m a grown-up. He still thinks I’m a child. I hate it when he tucks me up in my bed and kisses me on my forehead and then leaves me alone while he goes out. I bet he goes to parties and has fun with other girls. At least that horrible Tracy doesn’t come around any more. And Tiffany is dead so she is never coming back. At least Yair doesn’t have girls coming to visit any more either. I thought it would just be Yair and me, but now Yair has sent me away. I bet it’s because he wants girls to come and stay again. I bet that’s why Darryl made me come back here. It just isn’t fair. Yair is supposed to love me. But he’s gone away and left me.

  Darryl said the police arrested Yair because they think he killed Tiffany. That’s such rubbish. Darryl is a liar. He’s a horrible, mean liar. Yair didn’t kill Tiffany. Darryl said the police may come and ask me questions about Tiffany. I don’t want to talk about her. I won’t talk about her. Darryl said they’re going to ask me if I saw Yair and Tiffany fighting. I’m not going to tell the stupid police anything. If they ask me questions, I just won’t answer. They can’t make me say anything. I don’t like Tiffany, but I won’t tell them that. She’s dead and you mustn�
��t say ugly things about dead people.

  I wonder where Yair is now? I asked Darryl when Yair would come and fetch me and Darryl said he didn’t know. He just said Yair is in jail. He’s lying! Why would the police put Yair in jail? He didn’t do anything. He shouted at Tiffany but that was because Tiffany was horrible and mean to me. Yair didn’t do anything wrong. Tiffany was horrible and Yair was right to shout at her. I don’t care if she is dead. She was a horrible, mean person.

  Carol Aronowitz is also horrible and mean. Matron says I have to go to her office this morning. I don’t want to. I hate her but Matron says I have to. I hate Matron. I hate being at The Lodge. I hate being told what to do all the time. I hate Yair for going away and making me come back here. I want to go home. I want Yair to go home. I want everything to be the way it was before. Everything is horrible. It’s not fair.

  Chapter 17

  Carol

  Carol crawled out of bed and headed for the shower, head thumping, stomach churning, mouth like the bottom of a budgie cage. She hadn’t felt this bad since that awful day she’d realised George was gone. Well, since the awful day she’d allowed herself to realise that ‘George’ had never been; that he’d had been nothing but a wishful figment of her menopausal imagination. It hadn’t been a lightbulb moment, of course. When she’d finally permitted herself to reflect on the whole sad affair—no pun intended—she’d had to acknowledge that she had known all along what George was, or rather what he wasn’t. She wasn’t stupid. She was just a fool.

  She replayed it in her mind as she did every day. How she had kidded herself that love was an option for someone like her. How she had ignored all the glaringly obvious signals that George was not the suave, rich, well-travelled petroleum engineer he purported to be – his appalling grammar and spelling; the obvious factual errors in his letters which often contradicted each other and seldom answered her direct questions. She had stopped herself from wondering whether George actually read her letters – or remembered what he had told her in previous correspondence. But then she’d melt in the warm glow engendered by his flowery compliments and declarations of undying love, and ruthlessly bury her paranoid suspicions.

  She winced when she remembered how she’d stilled the jangling warning bells in her head when George had attributed his fair complexion to the fact that although his mother was a ‘native’ South African, whose family owned a big farm in Worcester, his father had been a ‘native’ Australian. No one had used the term ‘native’ in a South African context since at least the height of the apartheid 1970’s; and what was a ‘native’ Australian, other than a dark-skinned Aborigine?

  Looking back, she still couldn’t believe that she’d halted her Google search to find out more about oil exploration in Fiji because of a misplaced sense of loyalty to the man she hoped to marry. That was after George had reluctantly shared his concerns that his new venture there—a ‘sure thing’—was in jeopardy. She squirmed when she remembered how upset she’d been when he’d written that he’d been unable to visit her in Johannesburg as they’d arranged, because one of his investors had let him down and he’d had to rush to Fiji to sort out the mess. She’d felt so miserable and her unexpected impulse to check up on George’s claims—probably as a result of his indirect request for money—had only made her feel worse. She’d explained to George that as a social worker, she didn’t have a lot of money. She’d told him that she needed her meagre savings for her old age – and waited miserably for him to dump her.

  But he hadn’t. He’d played her like a violin. She’d died a thousand deaths until his reply email arrived the following week. Usually, he’d respond to her letters almost immediately. She’d cried with relief when he’d declared that he fully understood her concerns, and that he loved her dearly. Her misery had returned when he later told her that he couldn’t dare to hope that she’d wait for him while he tried to raise the money he needed for his exploration project because it could take years. A few heart wrenching letters later, in which he assured her of his undying love and repeated how much he adored her and couldn’t wait to hold her in his arms (for the first time), he wrote that he’d come up with a solution. She wanted to crawl into a hole and die when she recalled how her foolish heart had soared. They could be business partners and lovers, he’d written. She just had to become a shareholder in his company. He’d persuaded his board of directors to reduce her buy-in investment to the bare minimum – just ten thousand American dollars. He’d even sent her a formal memorandum of understanding to sign and told her to resign from her job and fly to Fiji so they could be married in a romantic ceremony on the beach with the waves lapping at their toes. And they’d live happily ever after.

  Carol snorted. She had to stop thinking about George. She plunged into the shower and gasped. She’d forgotten to switch on the geyser again. That, or the old geyser had finally packed up. She groaned: she didn’t have money to replace it. Thanks to George—and her own stupidity—she didn’t have money for anything. All she had was her job. Any chance she’d had of ever retiring had flown out the window along with her Endowment Fund proceeds and Post Office savings. She’d be working for the Chev until she dropped dead from exhaustion and frustration at having to deal with ungrateful, undeserving, screwed-up clients every day.

  And now, like a hefty dose of salt in her still raw emotional wounds, Zivah Silverman was back.

  ***

  Carol ignored the knock at her office door. If she stayed quiet, perhaps whoever it was would just go away. Even though her scheduled one-hour meeting with Zivah had ended prematurely—after only twenty-three minutes to be precise—it had exhausted her. And profoundly troubled her.

  ‘I want to go home,’ Zivah had said, standing in the doorway, refusing to enter the office and glaring at her with unbridled loathing in her pale blue eyes.

  ‘Please come in and sit down,’ Carol had repeated for the third time, trying hard to sound warm and welcoming.

  Zivah edged into the office and stood in the middle of the little square of carpet with her hands clasped together, her face expressionless, her eyes downcast.

  ‘Please sit. Don’t you want to sit?’

  ‘I want to go home.’

  Carol sighed. And here we go again, she thought.

  ‘Zivah, you have to stay here. Your brother wants you to stay here because he isn’t able to take care of you at home.’

  ‘Well, Yair must tell them he wants to go home. You boss everyone around – why don’t you tell them that Yair needs to go home?’

  ‘It’s not up to me. If it was, I promise you I’d have him back home with you in a jiffy,’ she said with heartfelt sincerity.

  Zivah said nothing.

  Carol tried another tack. ‘Do you understand what has happened to Yair?’

  Still Zivah said nothing.

  ‘Yair has been arrested. Do you know what that means?’

  ‘Of course. I’m not stupid,’ Zivah hissed.

  ‘You’re right. You’re not stupid,’ Carol said.

  She meant it too. She’d always maintained that Zivah was far smarter than everyone gave her credit for, albeit that her IQ placed her squarely on the ‘lower functioning’ spectrum of mental ability. However, Carol firmly believed that Zivah acted and spoke like a spoiled child not only because of her intellectual disability, but because she had never been properly disciplined. She’d always been allowed to get away with totally unacceptable behaviour because she engendered a profound sense of guilt in every member of her family. They all regarded her as special and delicate and treated her with kid gloves. It was therefore not surprising that this treatment, coupled with her father’s dreadful abuse and her mother’s neglect, had exacerbated her disability, making her emotionally unstable, and prone to tantrums and tears. But there were times when her actions and words were calculated and manipulative, times when she seemed to slip out of her little-girl-lost persona. That Zivah was totally unpredictable, even—Carol admitted reluctantly to herself—fr
ightening.

  ‘I want to go home,’ Zivah said, her voice rising.

  ‘Yair wants you to say at The Lodge because there is no one at home to take care of you.’

  ‘I can take care of myself. I’m a grown-up. I’m twenty-two.’

  ‘But it’s not safe for a young woman like you to stay in a big house all alone.’

  ‘I’m not alone,’ Zivah whined. ’There’s Thembi and Stembiso.’

  ‘It’s not their responsibility to look after you day and night. Yair needs to be there too. And at the moment, he can’t be.’

  ‘You can’t make me stay here. I won’t.’

  Carol sighed. ‘Zivah you have to. Yair said you must.’

  ‘Well only for a few days. Just until Yair comes home.’

  ‘It may be more than a few days until Yair is released, Zivah. You need to understand that he might go to jail for a long time.’

  Zivah frowned and gripped the back of the chair. Carol held her breath, waiting for the tantrum to explode. It exploded.

  ‘Yair will not go to jail for a long time. He didn’t do anything. He didn’t! It was an accident. An accident. She shouldn’t have died. She was so stupid. It wasn’t Yair’s fault. You are so horrible. You are a liar – a big, fat, ugly liar. I hate you. I hate you.’

  Carol flinched as Zivah threw the orange plastic chair to the floor and ran out of the office, slamming the door behind her.

  ***

  The door had stayed closed while Carol ploughed through all her Zivah Silverman process notes. She tried to convince herself that she was imagining it – but she couldn’t. It was the words Zivah had used just before she’d slammed out of the office—‘She shouldn’t have died’—that had shaken her to the core. Carol had heard them before. But where? When? In what context? She read through every page of her process notes, but there was nothing.