When Morning Comes

by Arushi Raina

  They never made it that far.

  The students from Zanele’s school marched out onto Mputhi Road and collected others from Theseli and Naledi. They walked from the township onto the bridge. Then at the bridge, police started shooting. And the students scattered.

  First the papers made a big deal about a police dog that was killed by the crowd. “Savage,” the report said.

  But the main story came a few days after that. The headline Policeman Brutally Murdered was paired with a picture of a charred military van, with the blurred image of a burned body.

  I left the television on, watching the repeated minute-long clips of police holding off the crowd, throwing tear-gas canisters into the masses of students.

  I should have known what Zanele was planning, even if she’d made it a condition that I never ask. That condition had seemed easy to accept, then.

  A week, and Zanele still hadn’t been found. My mother gave Lillian three days off to look for her. Maybe because she believed in a mother’s right to bury her daughter—even if the mother was the help.

  But there was no sign of her. I drove into Soweto every morning around ten. I went, even when it became less likely she was alive.

  There were no estimates in the papers for how many had died. No names either, except Hector and Hastings.

  But there would be arrest records. So, a week after Zanele had gone missing, I came back from my circling, useless driving and rang Oliver to ask for his father’s office number. He kept asking me why I hadn’t answered his calls. When I finally got the number, I hung up and dialled Oliver’s father.

  “Colonel Joubert. Morning.”

  “Ah,” he said, a note of amusement in his voice. “Who is this?”

  “You know it’s me,” I said. “And I’ve called to tell you that I’m ready to—what do you people call it? Give a statement.”

  “Confess,” Colonel Joubert spat out.

  “Whatever makes you happy,” I said.

  “Jack, my boy, I appreciate it,” Joubert said. “I appreciate it, really. And I would be happy to take your statement personally. But right at this moment I am busy.”

  “With the Soweto riot arrests? I understand. But I think you’ll see that my statement is very relevant.” I put down the phone before he could reply.

  I put on a checked cardigan bought in England and a pair of black trousers. I stopped at the small crucifix on the mantelpiece. I hoped, tried to pray, that Zanele was in the arrest records. But I’d never been very religious.

  “You just can’t wait to leave, can you?” My mother stopped me at the door. She ran her fingers over the cardigan, smoothing it over, a false cheery note in her voice.

  “Yes,” I said, and went outside. By the weeping willow, a few ibis pecked at the yellow grass. There was a burned, bitter smell in air, probably from the neighbours’ cooking.

  I took a quick turn to the left, to the maid quarters. I walked into Lillian’s room without knocking. She looked up slowly from her meal of rice and chicken gizzards.

  “Do you know where Zanele is?”

  Lillian’s face didn’t change.

  “You must realize what you are doing—what you’re going to make me do if you don’t answer. I’m going to the police to see if she’s been arrested. Get us both into trouble.” I stepped closer. “I need to know she’s alive. Do you understand?”

  “You must learn some manners,” Lillian said. Her voice was deeper, more gravelly than I’d remembered. She spoke so little now that I was surprised by the sound of her voice. For a moment I recognized Zanele’s face, then it was gone.

  “Maybe you’re right,” I said. “But I need to know if she is alive.”

  Lillian put the tray of food aside and got up from her bed. “Wait and listen to what someone is saying before you talk.”

  I waited. Lillian began to pack away her lunch in foil.

  “I’m going to the police,” I said.

  “This is not your business. She is my daughter.”

  I turned and left.

  Seventeen

  Meena

  Thabo got better, and this surprised me, because I left him for hours alone in the warehouse with nothing, a glass of water and sometimes bread or roti from our kitchen. When he first regained consciousness, he seemed to recognize me. After looking unpleasantly surprised at seeing me, he came to accept the bandages, my feeding him and not answering his questions about Zanele.

  Jack had given me the keys and only occasionally agreed to drive me, which meant I had to ask Dr A. to take me after clinic.

  Jack would call from public telephones. The police were already onto him, he said, but he didn’t explain why. He would call and ask about Zanele. When I said I had nothing, he would hang up. I remembered how he’d been at the shop, friendly in the careless, intimate way that charming people are.

  The more he called to ask about her, the more Zanele ceased to become a question. I wanted to say a lot of things to Jack then. What had he really expected from starting a relationship with Zanele? Sometimes I wanted to tell him to shut up, stop calling.

  I kept going over the last time I’d seen her. Zanele, excited, rolling a tube of lipstick on the counter. The shade of lipstick was a loud, unlikely red.

  I knew this was the part of me that hadn’t recovered from what had happened—the tsotsi’s body heavy and still on the grass. Reading about the police shootings in The Sowetan. So I said as little as possible.

  Jonas came in one afternoon, one of those days when I’d talked to both Thabo and Jack, listened to them both replay the events of that afternoon in microscopic detail. Listened to Thabo’s persistent, repeated questions about Zanele.

  Jonas’ baas had lent him his television for the weekend. Could I believe it? His own television.

  “Yes, he’s letting you get a few soapies in before you die of TB.” My voice was flat and cold.

  Jonas stopped in mid flow about the shows and music on the television.

  “He knows you’re dying, Jonas. And he’s not doing a thing to help you, just feeding you more cigarettes so you die sooner.” And then suddenly, too late, I realized what I’d done. “Sorry. Jonas. I’m sorry.”

  He sat there, blinking slowly in the dim light of the shop. I made him tea, and we continued the conversation like I hadn’t just told him he was going to die.

  At the clinic, Dr A. and I stitched and mended and sent people away when supplies ran out. Afterward, I looked after Thabo as if doing that would bring Zanele back. I knew it made no sense, but that’s all I had.

  At the shop, I became careless, missed shifts and money. Whatever Papa said mattered less than the blood and the mending in the township. Many times I lost track of what he was saying, what he was trying to say. I wanted to tell him that I was going to leave the shop, leave school. It didn’t make sense anymore; when the police just shot children and left them to die in the street.

  Thabo never spoke to me. His eyes just fixed on my face whenever I changed the dressing. Occasionally he leaned up on his elbows and, with a finger, poked the skin sewn together on his thigh.

  Of course I didn’t tell him that I’d sent those boys to raid his shebeen.

  One day when I came in, he was limping up and down the warehouse in his torn shirt.

  “Zanele?” he asked.

  “We don’t know,” I said.

  I knew then that I would feel worse without having the tsotsi to look after.

  “We?” he asked.

  “The white guy, Jack,” I said. “You’re in his warehouse right now.”

  He clicked his tongue against his teeth. He was taking this better than I expected, maybe because he had suspected it for some time, walking around the cases of beer.

  “This was your idea?” he asked, gesturing to the beer.

  “No, his.”

 
; Thabo walked up to me, looking me up and down. For a moment I thought he might thank me for saving his life.

  “Dr A. has his car parked down the road,” I said.

  “Now you tell me.” He brushed past me to the back door of the warehouse, past the metal mesh gate. I locked the warehouse door behind us, and followed.

  Thabo

  First, I needed a new shirt, and I went to the shop with Meena so that she could get one for me from the men’s shelf. They were not the best, but at least they were new.

  “Why can’t you go home and get one?” she asked in the car. Dr A. looked at us in the rear-view mirror and said nothing.

  “You’re scared of showing up in the township, aren’t you?” Meena said. “They want you dead.” She seemed to remember something suddenly, and fell silent.

  In the end I had to wait at the back of the shop for Meena to get one of her father’s old shirts, an ugly, loose, grey-checked one that even her father didn’t want.

  “You’re not even trying,” Meena said, and came forward to pull the collar out. I moved back, and Meena took her hands away.

  That was stupid—she’d stitched me up. She was looking after tsotsis like they were her problem.

  Everything was changed. A mlungu was giving me shelter, an Indian girl was straightening my collar like she was my mother, my Black Berets wanted me dead, and Zanele was gone.

  “We haven’t heard anything for a week now,” Meena said, when I asked about Zanele. “I’m telling you the truth.”

  Jack

  When I knocked on the door of his office on the third floor of the station, Joubert took his time to respond. I heard him clear his throat a few times. Then he told me to come in. I sat down before he had a chance to tell me to. The chair sloped a little forward, as if I was supposed to feel like I was crouching, kneeling in front of him.

  Joubert’s office looked out on the Carlton Hotel and the Standard Bank Building. There were no framed pictures of Oliver here. A paperweight from Anglo American and one from Sasol sat on either side of his desk.

  “How’ve you been, my boy?” Joubert asked, scratching his beard. It made an unpleasant sound.

  Judging by the stack of reports piled next to him, it looked like Joubert was pressed for time. Vorster and his cabinet were breathing down his neck about the riots—and here he was, wasting time with me.

  “You should have looked into my statistical model idea,” I said.

  “Your idea?” Joubert continued scratching his beard, but slower now. The conversation had taken a turn he hadn’t planned for.

  “The statistical model that predicts civilian unrest. The one I told you about at dinner.”

  Joubert smiled at me indulgently. “Yes, very clever,” he said, his eyes turning to the clock.

  There were still hundreds of students on the loose, more riots breaking out across the country.

  “Her name is Zanele,” I said. “Zanele Mthembu.”

  Joubert blinked at me.

  “It’s spelled Z-a-n-e-l-e.”

  Still nothing.

  “In case you want to look it up in that file of yours. I’m assuming you have a file on people like her. One of their leaders.”

  Meena

  I got a call at around two in the afternoon.

  “It’s done,” Jack said.

  “What?” I said. The line buzzed, then became clear.

  “I told the police. So now they know her name. Now I know for a fact they haven’t got her in jail.”

  “You went to the police. Are you crazy?”

  “He checked.”

  “He?”

  “Joubert. He’s a colonel in the police.”

  “Why would he do that?”

  “He wanted to get to me. He said there’s no sign of her, she’s probably dead.”

  “You know a colonel?”

  “You’re focusing on the wrong thing here.” Jack’s voice took on an edge.

  It was a symptom of his nerves. He had probably never lost anyone before.

  “But there’s also a chance she’s on the run, there are plenty of them, the tsotsi even—”

  “She must be dead,” Jack said, and hung up, the click loud.

  Thabo didn’t think she was dead, and got fierce if you even suggested it. But Jack didn’t have the tsotsi to talk to. And what did Thabo know anyway?

  Still, there were many bodies waiting to be claimed and buried.

  Jack didn’t call for a while after that.

  I cried once for Zanele. Her life seemed to be, from the first moment I’d met her, a series of events leading to her death. And I missed her.

  Often my grandmother came to my room and scolded me. To Papa I said nothing. Papa didn’t know any of this, and could hardly be expected to understand what this felt like, how I read the faces outside the shop window.

  There was the clinic. But there were only so many supplies. We did our best there. But we couldn’t change what had happened.

  Thabo

  Still the shebeen wasn’t fixed. Pieces of the roof and broken glass were all over the street.

  I understood why Lerato had stabbed me. Sizwe wanted me dead for the missing money. He didn’t take kak, even when the rest of Soweto was burning.

  Getting stabbed by your own gang was the worst thing that could happen to a tsotsi.

  It was good that Sizwe believed I was dead. He wouldn’t be looking for me, definitely not in Zanele’s baba’s old mining uniform. I only went out around dawn, when the Berets would be sleeping.

  It was hard to hide in a place where everyone knew you.

  The uniform was too big for me, but I didn’t say anything, because Mankwe wasn’t in the mood for jokes. She just kept walking up and down in the space between Zanele’s mattress and the bathtub piled on all those bricks they’d collected. There were only three steps from one side to the other.

  Zanele had been gone for more than two weeks now. Mankwe had looked in all the usual places. The bush boys, Masi, Vusi were gone. Mankwe had asked where the rest were hiding—but there were so many police everywhere, so many people in jail; anyone you asked suspected you were an informer.

  The police had been looking for Masi every day. I’d heard that he was hiding here by pretending to be a girl. But then all those bored kids with no school, they would say anything to pass the time.

  Then Mankwe started thinking Zanele was dead.

  There were a few pieces of coal left in the bag. I took them outside the shack and lit them.

  “I’m getting water,” I told Mankwe, and left the shack for the well. I thought a bath and eating some hot paap would make her feel better.

  As I turned back from the well and carried the water up the hill, I saw them. I dropped the bucket and ran, but I was too late. Inside were five policemen, stepping all over Zanele’s mattress.

  They never brought so many abo gata to arrest just one person. One of them had a clipboard and a pen. He was waving a photograph in Mankwe’s face. Another two held Mankwe, who had handcuffs around her wrists. She was looking straight ahead. The others just stood around.

  I stopped at the door. “This is a mistake,” I said. “She did nothing.” They pushed past me. And then I said what Zanele would have wanted me to say. “She is not Zanele. You have the wrong person.”

  One of them hit me with the back of his gun. I fell. One of them stepped on my hand.

  “She killed one of the ours, you fokking kaffir. She’s going to get moered for this.” I heard a car door open and close. Then he took his boot off my hand, and left.

  Mankwe believed that Zanele was alive. There was no other reason for her to let them take her away.

  Eighteen

  Jack

  I drove around for the next few days, spending the nights drinking beer with Ricky and watching television
with the sound off.

  Ricky didn’t ask many questions, maybe because I chose not to answer them.

  It seemed Joubert still hadn’t told Oliver or anyone else about Zanele and me, which was mildly surprising. Whenever Oliver came by to visit Ricky, I left.

  But one time, Oliver caught me at home. “Pa says I can’t be friends with you anymore. Says you’re disturbed. ”

  I kept staring at the television. “You should listen to him.”

  “Tell me what happened.”

  “No.”

  “Why?”

  “Because in some ways you are no different than your Pa,” I said.

  “Screw you, Jack,” Oliver said, his ears red. Then he left.

  Lillian stopped working at our house a few days later. My mother had been complaining about her slow shuffling, the dirty counters. She didn’t mention her dead daughter, of course.

  Zanele’s death hung between me and everyone else, my mother, Ricky, my parents. Only Lillian knew—the way she would lower her eyes when I came into the room, so I couldn’t see the anger and the grief.

  My mother made phone calls. A new maid came in who talked more than Lillian.

  Meena called. “Her sister was arrested. Happy?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The police came and arrested her.”

  “I don’t—”

  Then Meena hung up. I’d been cut off from my only link to Zanele.

  The police couldn’t find Zanele, so they arrested her sister. I wasn’t surprised.

  I started smoking my father’s cigarettes, taking them out of his desk drawer. We’d sit together on the porch. The embers crumbled gold and then black as we flicked our stubs in the ashtray.

  “Oxford,” my father said. “Your mother reckons it will make you feel better when you’re away from here.”

  “Yes,” I said. “I’m sorry, I’ve no idea why I’m acting this way.”