Suddenly, Mafuta was quiet – and Tracy’s legs began to shake. Mafuta’s rages were legendary, but his calm persona was far more deadly.
‘You’re off the story. It’s clearly beyond your limited capabilities,’ he said in a tone of such reasonable certainty that Tracy almost found herself nodding as the tears welled in her eyes.
‘But... but what about Yair’s bail application?’
‘Dudu will cover it.’
Tracy forced her legs to continue supporting her. The newsroom was deathly quiet. Even Dudzile had stopped laughing.
‘Okay,’ she whispered. ‘Then I’ll take over the #Feesmustfall story again.’
‘No you won’t. Can’t trust you with that either,’ he said, and now Duduzile made no effort to hide her mirth.
Tracy hesitated. She could feel the eyes of the newsroom boring into her back. Should she flounce out of the newsroom in a huff? Should she slink back to her desk and pretend to be really busy? Should she just keep standing in front of the news editor’s desk – and hope the floor would open and swallow her.
She walked with as much dignity as she could muster back to her desk, sank into her chair and re-read her article on the Silverman sisters.
Mafuta was a bastard. It was a bloody good article, even if she said so herself. It was strange that Aviva hadn’t put in an appearance at any time since Tiffany’s death. Especially now that Yair had been charged with murder. But it had been years since she’d disappeared. There’d been a huge scare that she and Arno van Zyl had been murdered in a hijacking, but that had turned out to be a false alarm.
She’d asked Yair if he ever heard from his twin sister, but he’d told her that he hadn’t, not even on their shared birthday.
‘We were never close,’ he’d said. ‘She went back to Israel. She made a home for herself there after she ran away before – to get away from our father. She was never really comfortable here again. I think there were just too many bad memories for her. I had hoped she’d settle down here with Arno, but they apparently had a huge fight and broke up. At least, that’s what Arno’s parents told the cops when his car was found in Alex.’
Tracy wished she had contacts in Israel who could help her to find Aviva Silverman, but there was no-one. She opened Facebook and continued her search for every person she could find who had been at high school with them. None listed Aviva Silverman as a friend. Still, she would keep trying.
‘TT – here’s something for you to work on,’ Mafuta yelled.
Tracy looked up, surprised – and her heart sank. Mafuta had a huge, malicious grin on his fat face.
‘Even you should be able to handle this. There’s been an attack on a farm. In Dihlabeng. The farmer was killed apparently. Take a pool car and get the story.’
‘Why?’ Tracy blurted. ‘We never cover farm murders.’
‘Well, you’re going to cover this one. Speak to the workers. It must have been a revenge killing. Find out what the farmer did.’
‘But if it’s just another white farmer getting killed for being a racist monster, it won’t be much of a story.’
‘Then it won’t matter if you mess it up.’
‘Must I take a photographer with me?’ she asked.
‘It’s not worth sending two of you. Use your own camera if there’s anything worth photographing. And don’t come back until you have something we can publish.’
Tracy grabbed her backpack and stalked out of the office, with Mafuta and Duduzile’s laughter echoing in her ears.
Chapter 19
Tracy
She should have taken Buttercup, Tracy thought as she battled to change gears. The pool car jerked and spluttered, but didn’t stall this time. Tracy smiled grimly. She’d wait until she returned to Johannesburg, and file her story from the Daily Express newsroom. She wanted to see the look on Mafuta’s face when he read it. First, however, she had to get the story and she still had a long way to go.
But at least she was on the right track—literally—thanks to the helpful woman who answered the phone at Afriforum’s Pretoria offices when she’d called in desperation to find out exactly where the attack had taken place. She’d already tried the police, but after being given a fruitless run around, she decided to phone the right-wing, quasi-political organisation that continually issued media releases about what it called ‘White Farmer Genocide’. Mafuta usually read them out gleefully – and then deleted them.
‘You can speak English if you prefer,’ the woman who answered her call said, after listening patiently to Tracy’s tortuous Afrikaans.
Heaving a sigh of relief, Tracy switched to English.
‘Which attack do you want to know about?’ the woman asked.
‘The one that took place today – or yesterday,’ Tracy said.
‘We’ve had three reports of farm attacks this week. Two in the Free State, one in Limpopo.’
‘I’m not sure. The farmer was killed.’ Tracy flushed, thankful the woman couldn’t see her embarrassment. She wished she’d asked Mafuta for more details, but she hadn’t been able to bring herself to walk back into the newsroom, or even to phone him.
‘That’s not unusual. So far this year, there’s been over 300 farm attacks, and about 60 farmers have been murdered. That’s already more attacks than there were in the whole of last year, and 2016 isn’t finished yet.’
‘So many? Are you sure?’
‘Oh yes, absolutely. We get reports in from around the country all the time. The police don’t seem to keep accurate statistics – or if they do, they certainly don’t report them. So we keep track as best we can.’
Tracy was stunned. ‘I had no idea.’
‘Oh yes, it’s bad. There have been more than 1,500 murders since we started keeping records in 1997, and thousands and thousands of farm attacks. Unfortunately, newspapers hardly ever report on the attacks and you’ll never see anything about it on the news. Well, you’re a journalist, you know that. I’m really pleased that you’re following up on this one,’ the woman said.
Tracy bit her tongue. She couldn’t tell the woman that her news editor was simply sending her on a wild goose chase for a story that would not be published, just to punish her and get her out of the office and away from the story she really wanted to do.
‘We don’t yet have all the details of the latest attacks so I can’t confirm if anyone was killed. Do you have any idea where it was? Which province, perhaps?’ Tracy squirmed at the woman’s enthusiastic determination to assist.
‘Well, my news editor mentioned it was somewhere with a D?’
‘Hold on, I’ll check... Well, there are no farms with a D in these reports. Wait. I’ll check the districts.’
Tracy waited, her heart thumping.
‘Are you still there? Does the name Dihlabeng sound familiar?’
‘Yes! I’m sure that’s it. Umm – do you know where Dihlabeng is?’
The woman laughed. ‘Ja, I just looked it up. It’s in the Thabo Mofutsanyane District – in the Eastern Free State.’
‘Where?’
‘Ja, all these name changes are very confusing. It’s sort of in the Bethlehem area. Do you know where that is?’
‘Yes, I know Bethlehem. Thank you. You’ve been really helpful. Goodbye.’
‘Don’t you want the name of the farm too?’
‘Yes, of course,’ Tracy said, feeling really stupid.
‘It’s Steynspruit.’
Tracy gasped.
‘Do you know it?’ the woman asked.
‘Yes. Yes I do! Thank you so very, very much. You’ve just made my job a whole lot easier.’
She had ended the call and burst out laughing. Fuck Mafuta. Fuck Duduzile. She was on her way to a front-page story.
***
Tracy ground the clutch into the floor and slammed the car into third gear to take the slight incline in the road taking her onwards through the flat, featureless landscape. Even two hours of mile-upon-mile of waving mealie fields (or were they wheat f
ields?) dotted by the occasional tree and enormous grain silo couldn’t dampen her high spirits.
‘Bethlehem – 20km’. The car laboured past the road sign and she once again found herself reciting the last two lines of her favourite poem:
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born.
She giggled. She was hardly William Butler Yeats’s ‘rough beast’ but the story she was chasing... couldn’t that have been what Yeats had in mind when he wrote The Second Coming? Well, perhaps not exactly. Phillip Brown, her gorgeous English literature lecturer with his tight faded jeans and tighter vests under his black academic gown (which even a besotted Tracy had had to acknowledge was horribly pretentious) had said Yeats had been in despair about the future of Europe after the horrors of the First World War. Phillip believed Yeats was warning about a coming apocalypse, and possibly had a premonition about the rise of Hitler and the Second World War. Tracy had never been wholly convinced of that, but all the farm murders – weren’t they a symptom, a symbol even, of what almost everyone she knew was saying (with the exception of Mafuta): that South Africa was falling apart because of President Jacob Zuma and his looting band of henchmen?
She wracked her brain, trying to recall the entire poem.
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.
Yes, she thought, anarchy had been loosed upon South Africa. Everywhere you turned there was crime, violence and an unfeeling disregard for others. Look how many farmers were being killed in their homes; look at the violence of the stupid #Feesmustfall protests, to say nothing of the violence on the university campuses with students being beaten in the lecture halls and lecturers threatened and assaulted in their offices. Even the recklessness and lawlessness of the minibus taxis—and increasingly, ordinary motorists too—which led to wholesale slaughter on the roads... all symptoms of anarchy, of things falling apart.
And there was no end in sight. Everyone said everything would just get worse. South Africa was clinging by its proverbial fingernails to an international investment rating of just above junk – and everyone (other than Mafuta) believed there would be no avoiding junk status in 2017, not if Zuma remained president. But Zuma had just survived yet another futile motion of no confidence brought by opposition parties in Parliament. Tracy and Maxine had sat together, watching the live broadcast on television, as the President had chuckled and giggled his way through the debate, knowing he had the unwavering, ferocious support of the ANC, the party of Nelson Mandela. Parliament was a joke. It was exactly as Yeats had said:
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Bethlehem – 10km. She had reached the outskirts of the town, so Tracy slowed the car to under 60km/hr. She didn’t want to risk being pulled over by some crooked cop hiding in the bushes waiting for a likely victim to shake down for a bribe before Christmas. One good thing about the pool car she was driving was that it was in such bad shape, the cops would probably realise that she didn’t have much money and hopefully leave her alone.
Tracy trundled through Bethlehem, keeping a sharp eye out for the turnoff to Driespruitfontein. She almost missed it, because the road sign had been defaced, but she remembered the route from the last time she had driven to Steynspruit in search of a story. If Mafuta had realised whose farm it was that he had sent her to, he would never have given her the story. She giggled, and hoped the start of the second stanza of the Yeats poem would be prophetic:
Surely some revelation is at hand
***
The main farmhouse looked oddly deserted as Tracy drove up the long, dusty driveway. She parked under an enormous tree and made her way up the faded stone stairs leading to the front stoep. The house looked sad. Neglected and sad. Large chunks of the old broekie lace latticework that edged the roof over the stoep had broken off; the stone stoep itself was in desperate need of polish; and the paint on the front door was cracked and peeling.
There was also no indication that this was a crime scene: no police vehicles, no police tape. Perhaps the assault had not been at the main house. Perhaps the nice woman at the Afriforum offices had made a mistake and the attack hadn’t been at Steynspruit at all. That would kill her story. She would be forced to return to Johannesburg with her tail between her legs and turn in a nothing story about yet another anonymous farmer being attacked and murdered on yet another anonymous farm.
The attack had to have been at Steynspruit. Her career depended on it.
Chapter 20
Tracy
She rapped loudly on the stained glass panel in the front door and waited. She rapped again, harder. Discouraged, she decided to walk to the building that, if she recalled correctly, was the Steynspruit Kibbutz Office. The last time she had visited Steynspruit she had found it totally fascinating that the farm, which had been in Annamari van Zyl’s family for generations, had been turned into a kibbutz, giving the farmworkers a voice in its operations and a share in its profits. She had written a glowing story about it, praising Thys and Annamari van Zyl’s courage in taking such a revolutionary step despite the displeasure of their racist farming neighbours. Even Mafuta had been grudgingly congratulatory about it. Tracy had been thrilled when the editor himself wrote a short commentary quoting her story and stating that the kibbutz concept deserved to be considered as a realistic alternative to the current failing claims system of land restitution which, he had noted, was taking too long and often resulted in the farms falling into disrepair because the new owners did not have the money, or the expertise, to keep them going.
But the calls for expropriation of land without compensation were growing louder and although there was no proven direct link between so called ‘land hunger’ and farm attacks—despite what Afriforum alleged—farms and farmers were being attacked every day. Before starting out on this story, Tracy had agreed with Mafuta and the Minister of Police that these attacks were no different to any other crime in the country. Car hijackings; house robberies in which home owners were assaulted and sometimes tortured; cash-in-transit heists; rapes, not only of women but of babies and children; assaults and murders—they were all so commonplace, it was exactly as Mafuta always said—crime just wasn’t newsworthy any more unless it involved someone famous, or if the perpetrator was white and the victim black.
This attack fell squarely into the famous person category, so there was every chance the editor would run the story.
But now, facing the pretty woman who introduced herself as Busi, the farm manager, Tracy finally had to acknowledge the one fact she had been avoiding. The fact that if anyone had been killed in the attack, it probably meant either Thys van Zyl or Annamari van Zyl, or both, were dead. Tracy had liked Thys van Zyl when he’d taken her on a tour of Steynspruit and described the workings of the kibbutz. Annamari not so much: she’d been abrupt and suspicious. But Thys had been polite and friendly, with a sharp wit that Tracy had found surprising, a far cry from the stereotypical dour, racist, ignorant Boer.
‘It’s unbelievable,’ Busi, said, wiping her eyes on a tissue and sniffing. ‘We think the attackers broke into the house after nine on Monday night. There was struggle – the furniture was all over the place. They stabbed BabaThys, many many times. There was blood everywhere. He must have fought really hard. He was a strong man but there were too many of them. They tied him up and... and they used his electric drill! It was too horrible.’
‘What did they use the drill for? Were they trying to open the safe?’ Tracy asked.
‘The safe was open. The key was in the lock. But there was nothing much in the safe, I don’t think. The money for the farm is kept here, in the office.’
‘So what were they drilling?’
‘BabaThys,’ Busi whispered.
‘What! I don’t t
hink I heard you correctly. Did you say they drilled Thys?’
Busi nodded and sobbed.
Tracy stared at her. She couldn’t believe what she’d just been told.
‘I’m sorry Busi – can you tell me again what happened to Thys. You said they stabbed him, and they used the electric drill on him? Are you sure?’
‘Yes. They drilled his feet and his knees. Then they stabbed him and he died. I pray he died then. I pray he didn’t have to watch although the police think they probably made him watch first, before they drilled him and poured the boiling water on her face. And burned them with cigarettes. Ja, he probably had to watch.’
‘He had to watch Mrs van Zyl being raped?’ Tracy asked.
‘Yebo. They stabbed her too, but not so much as BabaThys.’
Tracy was horrified. ‘Why did they torture them like that? Why rape her?’
‘It’s what they do,’ Busi said. ‘The old gogo next door, over on Viljoenspruit was raped when that farm was attacked – last year, I think. Maybe the year before.’
‘You can’t mean Esti Viljoen? But she was old, really old! She must have been in her eighties!’
Busi shrugged. ‘They don’t care. They also raped some of the farmworkers there too. We were lucky. They couldn’t get to our houses. They tried, you know. But they couldn’t get through our security fence.’
‘Did you see them?’
Busi didn’t respond.
Tracy tried again. ‘Do you know who they were?’
‘If I did know, do you really think I would tell you? I wouldn’t tell anyone. That would just be asking them to come back again – with bolt cutters.’
‘Did Mrs van Zyl – did they kill her too?’
‘The ambulance took her to the hospital.’
‘Which hospital? In Bethlehem? Bloemfontein?’
Busi shrugged.
‘What did they want, the attackers? Did they steal anything? You said the safe was empty.’
The farm manager shrugged again.
‘Why do you think they attacked Steynspruit?’
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