She has her robe on and a towel around her wet hair and she’s like a statue, her eyes huge and mouth open. Something hits my foot. I look down, I’ve dropped everything. Sweat pops out hot all over my body. Annie makes a sound in her throat and something snaps in me and I rush at her and slide past and run into the garden, into the bushes where I squat down and hug myself, shivering, my heart kicking like an ostrich. Zaydi is under the plum trees, as usual. I stare at the front door for so long my knees go numb. Still hugging myself I straighten up and sit down next to him.
Zaydi has his Russian tea, his canes, his holy book of tehilim. He is ancient and pale, the father of my father. He starts to speak in his thin voice. His lips tremble around the Yiddish words like he’s taking hot soup. “In haym mir flekt nemen a brayt, a grosser brayt, azaviy . . . azo, un mit a bissel pooter . . .” It’s the beginning of the story about the singing baker, Friedelman, back in Dusat. Zaydi has a million of these Dusat stories and I know them all cos he’s been telling them since I was little. Zaydi—he’s the only one I ever let watch me Playing. It’s because I feel like he’s not really there, he’s living in his own fantasy world of that village on the lake. All his stories of white forests and frozen lakes with horses riding on them, they’re just fairy tales to me. I mean they’ve never seemed real, not here—how could they?—under the hot African sun. But right now I want to interrupt him, make him look at me, and tell him I’ve done something so wrong, can he help me? Except he can’t, no one can.
Across the lawn Annie is stepping out of the house fully dressed. She stands there on the patio staring at me and I get up like I weigh as much as an elephant and lumber slowly across the lawn. I speak to her shadow. “Listen. I’m so so sorry hey. It’s disgusting. I should never have. I’m so sorry, Annie.”
I look up and she’s chewing on her lip, pale in the face with a blue vein twitching by her eye. She swallows and her voice is shaky and hoarse. “How long’ve you been snooping in my stuff?”
“I just. I’m sorry, Annie. I don’t know what happened to me. I—”
“I asked you a question.”
“I don’t know, like a week.”
“Aw Jesus, Jesus, Christ!” She isn’t cross, she’s frightened. And that scares me majorly—an electric shot in the chest. She’s asking, “Have you told anyone else? About the—what you’ve seen.”
“No.”
“Did you tell anyone, Martin?”
“No, I didn’t.”
“Hey. Look at me. Did you fucking tell anyone?”
“No no no.”
“How do I know I can believe you? You’re a snoop, Martin. Did someone tell you to search my things? How did you know to look there? Jesus Christ, did somebody—”
“I swear to God, Annie, it’s not like that!” My mouth’s stretching itself down and wetness is burning in my eyes. “I would never tell anyone. I also. I mean I also have a hiding place and I hide things away—my secret things—and I can even show you it, in the garden, I’ve never shown anyone, or even told—I would never tell anyone, Annie, I swear.”
She stares at me. “Why’d you do it, dude? How’d you like it if you found me in your hiding place?” When she says it like that I see how serious this is. It didn’t feel that way when I was doing it—but now I see myself from the outside, a picture of me scratching in there like a bladdy monkey and I feel sick from it. Coughing into my hand even though I don’t need to, wiping at my eyes that are starting to drip, I tell her, “Honestly, it’s because. I think you’re. Like I really like. I like you, Annie.” But she’s not listening. She has her hands to her head and she’s walking away. “Holy mother fucker,” she says. “What in hell am I supposed to do now? This is bad, bad.”
“Annie, please don’t tell anyone. My folks.”
She looks at me sort of squinty, like she’s not understanding. “That’s what you’re worried about?”
I rub my neck. “Well, ja.”
“Lookit, Martin,” she says. “You have to get this. It’s not about your mom and dad being mad at you, okay. This is about you swearing to me right here, on your life, that you will never, never tell a single goddamn soul, alive or dead, about what you’ve seen in there.”
“Absolutely. I swear I won’t ever.” I think about it a second and then say, “Why would I want to tell anyone? I’m the one who was snooping, Annie.”
Annie is shaking her head, walking away. She stops and turns back. “Okay, I’m gonna need you to go over exactly what you’ve done. Everything, from step one.”
“Okay,” I say.
“Okay. Inside.” I follow after her through the front door, into the cool dark of the house I grew up in.
8
In the Olden Room Annie swipes the desk clean and I watch her put the shoes down on it, the one with its instep flappy, next to the Stanley knife and the glue. She asks me how many times I’ve been into the shoes and I tell her today was the first. She doesn’t believe me, prodding the glue and saying I’ve been putting them back together every time, devious me. I tell her the truth again, how I found them and then couldn’t stop trying to work out why she would do it. That makes her face get clumpy and she sort of moans and walks up and down again, bending her fingers. “Exactly,” she says. “If I’d left them out in the open this would never have happened. But it’s an amateur mistake. Stupid rookie. Idiot.” She’s not talking to me, it’s for herself, tapping her head with her hand like she needs punishment. “An amateur,” she says. “A kid finds it.” She turns on me. “Have you done anything to them? When you take em out, do you, have you . . .” I tell her again I’ve only peeked in one single time, today, and I still have no idea what it is I saw, or why she’d put the thing there in the shoe and hide it. “Don’t play dumb,” she says. “You are not dumb.”
Feels good to hear that, makes me want to show her she’s right. “Well I did remember you came from the airport with them on. So I reckoned maybe it’s something that you didn’t want customs to bust you with?”
“Give the kid a gold star,” she says. “So you took em out and—”
“No, Annie, I didn’t! All I’ve seen, it looks like a little black disc thing in there.”
“Bullshit.”
“Annie, I swear.”
“It doesn’t matter,” she says. “I goddamn have to trust you now. I have to assume you’ve seen it. And what do I do about that, Martin? About you.” She’s walking up and down again, shaking her head. She asks me why, why, did I have to go and do this? And I say sorry like another million times. She stops and looks at me. “Okay, Gold Star. Let’s say you’re telling the truth. So if it’s customs I’m hiding it from, what do you think it is?”
“I don’t know,” I say.
“Don’t give me that.”
“Like drugs?”
“They have dogs that sniff that shit. No, not drugs. What else?”
“Diamonds?”
“Ha! Funny. If diamonds are getting smuggled they’re going the other way, believe me.”
“I don’t know—like a bomb?”
“Dangerous, yeah,” she says, “but these aren’t literal weapons. But you know this already.”
“No, Annie, I really don’t. But if it’s not drugs and it’s not a bomb—”
She lifts her eyebrows. “What?”
“Has to be political.”
“Bingo for the bright boy,” she says. Then she looks around. “God. Hold up. You know what? I need a drink.” I follow her into the kitchen where she takes out a cold Lion Lager then puts it back. She goes to Isaac’s liquor cabinet in the lounge, but it’s locked. I’m about to tell her where the key is hidden when she gives the cabinet a few thumps on top until the latch drops inside and the varnished doors pop open. I’m impressed. “How’d you know how to do that?” She doesn’t answer. It’s mostly Scotch in there but she finds a bottle of tequila at the back that was someone’s gift long ago. In the kitchen she pours out two glasses of guava juice from the bottle delivered
fresh by Nels Dairy that morning and then she mixes tequila into both, passes me one. “Let’s go sit.” So back to her room where we sit down by the desk and she’s thinking hard because her forehead keeps wrinkling as she looks down. “Listen up, Martin. I may need your help for something.”
“Ukay.”
“But I want to ask you a question first off. I need you to get your mind right.”
“Oright.”
“Martin, you know the name of Nelson Mandela, am I correct?”
I pause. “Obviously. Ja. Of course.”
“Tell me what you know.”
“What d’you mean?”
“Just tell me what you think of him, Nelson Mandela.”
Time for a long drink. The juice is sweet, the alcohol makes my belly warm. “Go ahead,” she says. Then she says, “Mandela, Mandela. Man-deh-lah,” like it’s a magic spell, a whatchamacallit, an incantation. It scares me. The shoes are something political. Mandela. She keeps on chanting the word, asking me the same question. What does it mean to me? It makes me look down, at the cutting knife on the desk, and I almost point to it and say Mandela is that thing, that comes in the night and slits your throat. Thinking of Julius Caesar township where Annie goes to teach and how on the six o’clock news just the month before she arrived we all sat in the lounge and watched a woman being burned to death there, the reporter saying she was trying to get to work when she was attacked by African National Congress thugs who wanted everyone to be on strike. They necklaced her—put a tire full of petrol around her neck and set it on fire. They danced around whistling as she fell over. She got halfway up again and a young guy kicked her in the head and her smoking jaw fell off. The reporter saying that was why our army was in the townships, to protect law-abiding residents like her from the ANC. All that is Mandela. And there was this white family of six that got found hanging from the rafters in their house only a few blocks away from us, nothing stolen, only slogans on the wall. Kill the whites. That’s Mandela. When there’re like ten thousand angry black people in the street pumping their knees up and down, going, “Hai! Hai! Hai!” that’s Mandela. When I think Mandela, I think AK-47 assault rifle and RPG rocket launcher. I think of the Bomb Board at school saying remain calm. I think what happened to Solomon school bus number five on 29 September 1982. I think terrorist. But Mandela has some kind of power that protects him even in prison. Because President Botha has tanks and jet squadrons and nuclear bombs and secret police so why couldn’t Botha just kill him? What’s he afraid of? But he can’t. The name Mandela is too powerful. Even his ferocious wife on the outside, Winnie, with followers who necklace people alive, she is protected from the police somehow by that magic name Mandela. It’s a serious word, an illegal word, a word you whisper. Maybe Annie doesn’t know this, that Mandela is banned. That nobody has ever seen a photo of him. Mandela is invisible but it feels like he’s everywhere. Mandela’s a hundred myths, a thousand rumours: they said already dead, not really in prison, replaced by an agent, never really existed at all. Mandela is this joke Mervin Slapoletsky told at school one time which ended when President Mandela comes, to mean the same as when pigs can fly. And Mandela was what was coming to get me when I was little, if I didn’t behave, according to Gloria, making Mandela seem like the Tokoloshe, the monster that used to live under Gloria’s bed and was the reason she put the bed up on bricks to keep it high off the ground.
My glass is almost empty. I’ve been mumbling. I look across at Annie and I’m not sure how much I said aloud to her or what she understood of it. She puts her glass down and moves in her chair and flicks her hair and tells me, “It’s what I thought. That’s why I wanted to get to basics first. Before we—” She looks at the shoes and back to me. She holds up her palms. “Just listen to what I have to say, okay? Open mind.”
“Okay.”
“First off, it’s Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela,” she says. “The name Rolihlahla means the One Who Shakes Branches, the troublemaker. He’s a real person, Martin. Flesh-and-blood human being. Not a myth and not a legend. Certainly not any kind of a monster. A person, a man, a male African who is seventy years old and has been imprisoned continuously for the past twenty-six years of his life. Born in Thembuland in the Eastern Cape, with royal blood in his veins. In 1940 he gets kicked out of Fort Hare, the only black university, tiny, with like a hundred and fifty students, started by white missionaries. He was kicked out for being part of a protest, and he ran off to Johannesburg. A Jewish lawyer here, Sidelsky, gave him work and got him into legal training. He became a lawyer, one of the only black ones in this country, and joined the African National Congress, which wasn’t banned back then yet, right, bet you didn’t know that—ANC was a moderate organisation asking for the gradual increase of black rights going back to the start of the century. Because as everyone knows, black people have never been able to vote in South Africa, even though they are the huge majority. Only whites like you can vote. Only whites can be the government. And blacks in South Africa have never been able to live where they want, they gotta stay in shitty reservations you call homelands or in the townships, the ghettoes outside the white cities. They have to carry passes to be in white areas. They’re not allowed to have a decent education or get a good job. But in the fifties the ANC still had the idea of peaceful change. They burn their passbooks, they try passive resistance, strikes and stay-aways. They demonstrate peacefully but the government shoots them down like dogs in the street and brings in tougher laws, bans them. The government wasn’t interested in talking reason, only domination, white supremacy, apartheid. That blacks should be serfs in their own land. So the ANC switched to a policy of armed resistance, and Nelson Mandela, he was the first leader of their fighting wing, called uMkhonto we Sizwe—Spear of the Nation. He never targeted civilians, get that straight. Military and infrastructure only. He is arrested in ’sixty-two due to a CIA tip-off to South African authorities—shout-out to the good old USA, thanks, guys—and then there was a trial with nine others for planning to overthrow the system. By the way, all the white conspirators charged in that case along with Mandela were Jews. And so was the weasel prosecutor working for the government, a certain Mr. Yutar, trying to get the death penalty for him. Man, South African Jews—you guys are only like a hundred thousand and change out of thirty million population but I tell ya, anything big that happens in this place and there you guys are. You pop right up. Gold, diamonds, apartheid, whatever. There’s that inevitable Chosen One right in the middle of the action. They used to call Johannesburg Jewburg, you know it? Ha. But at that trial, called the Rivonia Trial, Mandela was expected to get death for sure. He shows up to court dressed in his traditional Xhosa robes, what a magnificent statement, and he gives a speech that you’ve never even heard of, which is a crime. It’s theft of your own history as a South African. That speech. I mean dignity. Gravity. Speaking as a Xhosa king in his native land to that white judge, colonised to coloniser but eye to eye, right? What a moment. Telling it exactly as it is, for the record. Turning the trial around to be a trial of the system instead of them. He speaks for like three hours. People were cryin’ in the bleachers. He ends by saying he is prepared to die for his ideal of a nonracial democracy. You can hear the people gasping. Putting it to the judge, almost daring him. Talk about true courage. Now, Martin, people have heard this speech all over the world, been inspired by it. But they haven’t taught you any of this in that so-called school, this is the underground history of your country, Martin, the truth. Because, listen, Martin, Nelson Mandela is no monster, he is a moderate. He’s not a myth, he’s not some crazed killer, he is a cultured democrat. He is like Martin Luther King mixed with George Washington. They have to paint him as a bogeyman to keep you-all scared so you’ll vote for em. But that power Mandela has, right, it is real simple, Martin, it’s not a mystery, it’s something called legitimacy. It’s the reason there was a seventieth birthday party held for the man in Wembley Stadium, London, England, where seventy-five thousand people showed up a
nd nine hundred million more watched it live on TV. It’s the reason every college kid back home knows the name Mandela, the reason the single ‘Free Nelson Mandela’ has sold gazillion copies worldwide. This is what you don’t see on your news. Everything’s banned. You’re in a vacuum down here. You don’t realise what he is on the outside of this country. See, this whole nation of yours, Martin? It is behind walls. You all are the ones who are in a prison and he’s the one who is part of the outside. D’ya follow me? Mandela is not only not a monster, he is the only true leader of your country. And everyone in the world knows it, man. Everyone knows it in their bones for a fact!”
She nods at me for a while. I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do so I put my empty glass down. I feel a bit light in the head but what she’s saying is making my heart push blood through me in heavy pulses. I’d like to leave this room and go into the garden. “Go ahead,” Annie says.
The Mandela Plot Page 4