“Beg a pardon?”
“Go ahead. Finish what you started.” She waves at the shoes. I stand. She’s at my side. I pick up the shoe I’ve already cut a little and slip the blade in under the instep and start to cut around. Mandela. I really do not want to be involved in this. This American is some huge liberal who goes to the township in a Chev full of blacks. She doesn’t know anything about what it is here in this country. I feel guilty, full of badness, even for just sitting here and listening to her go on about Mandela. Like terrorism is not a thing you should talk about like that. Just avoid, avoid! keeps flashing in me like an alarm. Meantime I put down the knife and peel the instep right off. There are two big holes, front and back. Both plugged by the same black things in bubble wrapping. The other shoe’s the same. Four black things total. I wiggle one out of its little socket in the cork. Unwrap the bubble plastic.
“You know what it is now?”
I nod.
9
At the dining room table, the Stanley knife slits the label along the spine of a videotape—one from Marcus’s old boxing library (Mitchell v Morake 4)—as I run the blade around the cassette seam. I check it’s rewound all the way before stickytaping the flap down and using the screwdriver to take out the five screws in the back and lift off the face. It’s a TDK E180, meaning 180 minutes of VHS tape. When I lift the reels out, I’m careful not to bring any of the little roller thingies with them. Annie hands me one of the four reels from inside the disco shoes. They’re oddly narrow compared to normal reels cos they had to fit in her shoes, but still each one has forty-five minutes of tape on it. I unpeel some of the tape and lay it on the leader and cut through both with the razor to get the same angle so when I put them together they fit perfectly. All that’s left is to put a little bit of stickytape to keep them spliced, and then both reels go back into the cassette. I look up and say, “I think I know what’s on here.”
“You think wrong,” she says.
“Is it Mandela?”
She smiles.
“Interviews, speeches, biography, all that.”
“There’d be no point to that. We’re long past that.”
“What’s it, then?”
She says, “Now can we make the copy?”
“Let me do them all first.”
She passes me the next tape, watches me fit it with another one of her shoe reels. It’s not hard for me. As I told her before, our ancient Telefunken video machine eats tapes for breakfast, but Isaac still says it’s “a hunned per cent fine”—that’s why I’ve been fixing tapes and cleaning heads and that for years. I think of asking Annie why she couldn’t just deliver the reels to whoever they’re supposed to go to, why put them in cassettes at all? But then I already know the answer—she’s going to hang on to these originals.
“Thanks for doing this,” she says. “I mean for real. I’ve been going crazy trying to figure out how I’m gonna get this part done. You can’t be too careful. The ANC’s rotten with snitches.”
I flinch. In my head the words communist and terrorist have both popped up in bright letters the colour of blood. But Annie hasn’t seemed to notice my reaction, telling me the ANC’s behind this tape mission, like it’s no big deal. “It’s going from comrade to comrade,” she says. “I’m just the gal in the middle, passing it along. I’m also a techie moron. Told em that when they came to my hotel in London to give it to me.”
“London?”
“Yeah, that’s where it happened. That’s pretty much the hub for the Movement.”
“Movement,” I say.
“Yeah, the Movement. As in anti-apartheid movement. I had a flight in the morning and I had to figure out a way to squirrel these videos away somewhere invisible real quick. What do you think of my shoes idea?”
“Good,” I say. “Customs is looking at you and meanwhile you’re walking right on it.” I’m trying to keep my voice all casual, remembering the arrivals hall at Jan Smuts Airport when we came back from holiday to Israel that time, the customs men with their caps and moustaches and hard looks. “How come you even know ANC people?”
“Cuz I do. Told the ones who gave it to me, look, all I know is how to push play, that’s it. They said improvise on the ground when I get there, find someone. But that’s not as easy as it sounds.”
“What would have happened if you’d been caught with this?”
“Still could happen, honey. I keep telling you but you’re not listening. Why do you think I was so freaked out when I found you in my stuff? I thought you might report me. Or tell your folks and they’d do it.”
“No ways,” I say. “Never.” But I’m not as sure as I sound.
She picks up the nearest tape. “This stuff is red-hot, Martin. Treat with extreme caution. Don’t forget that. Do not think I’m kidding. If you get nailed with this, it’ll be arrest, interrogation, prison time. The whole nine yards. I am not kidding you.”
Well, she’s an American and they exaggerate. I just nod like, ja, I get it, no problem, and use the video camera to make a copy for her, all four onto one 180-minute tape. Annie won’t let me watch the TV during the process, so I can’t see what’s on the tape. Afterwards she asks me about my hiding place and I tell her she’s the first other human being to ever know I have it. I call it the Sandy Hole because when Sandy was old and ready to die, she crawled into the papyrus reeds in the far corner. I followed her later, crawling inside. In the middle it was open, hollow, and Sandy was lying on her side with ants swarming on her black lips. I took a twig and touched her on her open brown eye and when she didn’t blink I knew what dead meant. I dragged her out and went back to dig my secret hole in the mud. I put in a bin liner and put a big empty tin of Quality Street sweets down in there and covered it with a board with mud on top.
“And what’s in the tin?” Annie asks.
“Secret things,” I say.
She rubs her chin. “Nobody knows about it, uh? Nobody could find it?”
“Not in a million years,” I say.
“These tapes—would you keep em in there for me for now? You proved to me my room is a joke. If the SB were to show up here and toss the place, I’d be screwed.” She means the Special Branch, the security police. I try not to smile. It seems a bit much, hey, as if they’d ever bother with our little bungalow in Greenside. But I tell her sure, I’ll stick the four original tapes in the Sandy Hole for her. “Swear on your life, Martin,” she says, “that you won’t watch em.”
“Okay, I swear on my life.”
She looks at me. “Good.”
I say, “You’re going to take the one tape with you, aren’t you? Into the township today.” She nods. I say, “That’s where your contact is, to give it to.” She doesn’t say anything but her silence tells me I must be right. “What’s it like in there?”
“It’s tough but it’s amazing. The girls are amazing. The people.”
“Do you have to go through like roadblocks?”
“Oh yeah, there’s police and army on the road into Jules. Any white person needs a permit, and I used to have to show them mine. But they’re used to seeing us now, they wave us through. Course today could be the one they decide to search.”
I think about this, looking at the video machine. “You should make it so if you do get stopped you can press a button and erase the tape.”
She perks up. “Could that be done?”
“Why not? I’d just have to think about how.”
“If you do,” Annie says, “you should come with.”
I fake a laugh to cover my shock. “Should I?”
“Yeah, you really should. Get off this movie set you live in here in the suburbs, Martin, this fake California. Quit pretending you’re not in Africa. You’re living inside a movie, my man.”
“Oh ja? What’s it called, the movie?”
“Whiteland,” she says, not grinning with me. “You should, though—come with. I’ll show you some things and change that screwed-up programming you have in there.” She
pokes at my temple.
“Screwed up, hey?” I say.
She says, “You think it’s normal to get the same nightmare over and over?”
I wish I’d never told her about that. Ever since, she’s been wanting to know what it’s about. “That’s just me,” I say. “It’s got nothing to do with where we live.”
“No? Why don’t you tell me about it and I’ll see if that’s true or not.”
“Why don’t you tell me what’s on the video?”
She looks at me for a while, without blinking. “I’d have to show you some things first.”
“In the township.”
“That’s right. You need to understand, gain the right mind frame.”
I shake my head slowly. “Annie, you’ve been here like two and a half weeks, hey.”
“That’s right. And you’ve never been in a township in your life, true?”
“It’s illegal,” I say, feeling small.
“Exactly,” she says.
There’s something pushy about the way she’s talking to me, I’m getting a teacher vibe off her that I don’t like. It makes me want to push back but I don’t have words to match hers, don’t have the grown-up knowing that she’s so chock-full of. So I say what I’ve heard so many others say. “It’s not so bad when you compare them to the rest of Africa.”
“Oh boy,” she says, her eyes making circles. “You really need to come with.”
I get hot in the face, but I go on quoting, all stubborn. “There’re millions of em trying to cross the border and get in. If it’s so bad why would they?”
She smiles very slightly. “Maybe you can ask them yourself, Martin. If you have the balls.”
10
In the blackness I’m being slammed around and I’m suffocating but I tell myself it’s just in my head, there’s plenty of air, but I don’t really believe myself cos everything tastes of hot dust and I feel dizzy. The Chev’s suspension is utterly stuffed, the struts need replacing, it was bouncing hard before but then we must have hit a dirt road because ever since it’s been insane. I hear stones ticking on metal and I cough on the dust and try not to hit my head on the lid by pressing hard with my legs. I feel the Chev climbing and then we are level and we stop and wheel around and reverse, the engine whining. The engine dies and there’s silence. Doors slam and steps crunch close by. I can hear voices, but too muffled to understand. The trunk is what Americans like Annie call this. I am locked in the trunk of a car full of strangers, black people. We say boot. A boot or a trunk—it’s just as locked and just as dumb to be in one either way.
But it’s funny, what I regret most is telling her the Nightmare. I’ve never told anyone before. I feel like she owns it now, almost like she owns some part of me. It’s not true, but I feel it. Like I’m in her clutches.
I hear the key scratching around the lock before it slides in. Then three loud bangs.
11
Always the whine of the brakes on the trucks and their heavy diesel panting. Always the soft rain. Always waking up in my own bed and believing it to be real, every single time. Then out of the dark the big megaphones boom German and the spotlights stab like lances through the rain. The noise of jackboots hitting the wet streets as the steel-headed soldiers in their dark greatcoats come off the back of the truck and rush to our walls.
“Achtung! Achtung! Aller Juden raus! Schnell! Juden rrrrraus!”
I’m up and in the passage and running. Jews out. Move it. Out. Wolf dogs are roaring. I see steel heads and greatcoats swarming over the walls and jackboots crossing the garden, trampling our flowers, Ma’s prized proteas and strelitzias and geraniums. They’ve got Marcus in a spotlight on his knees already, hands behind his head. Arlene shrieks from the main bedroom but it’s too late to help them. I can escape through the backyard and over the fence into crazy Mr. Stein’s property.
I spring across the kitchen to the back door but I freeze there. Don’t forget Zaydi! Glass is smashing everywhere. I swear and turn around and start running down towards his side of the house. All along the wet wind is blowing in the flapping curtains from shattered windows and the Germans with their blood-red armbands are at the burglar bars, slamming them with sledgehammers.
“Aller Juden raus! Schnell!”
I reach Zaydi’s room, he is pawing at the glass containing his floating teeth, his wrinkled empty mouth chewing. I grab him and pick him up, he is so light his bones feel as hollow as the aluminium tubes of our folding garden chairs. I swing him onto my back. Just then his big windows explode. The Germans are hammering the burglar bars. I can see their big faces in the spotlights under their square helmets, screaming at me, spitting and roaring, and then an enormous black wolf dog of the northern forests launches itself, foam streaming from its fangs, and smashes so hard into the steel that the concrete gives way and the whole frame of bars rips loose and collapses into the room.
I turn with Zaydi on my back and I’m running as fast as I can, that wolf dog and the blood armbands close behind, and I know they don’t want to shoot because they want me alive, us alive, they want to do medical experiments on all of us, to keep us in pain for as long as they possibly can.
Meanwhile Zaydi is getting heavier and heavier. As if his years are turning into kilos. It becomes so hard to carry him, he weighs almost as much as a whole century, I can barely hold on. But if I drop him they will have him. I kick open the door and start across the backyard to the fence. I can scramble over it by myself, easily. All I have to do is drop Zaydi. And if I drop him it will distract them. Drop Zaydi and get away—fly up over the wall and keep going and be free. That’s all I have to do. Drop him, drop Zaydi . . .
“And then?” Annie Goldberg asked me.
“Then I wake up,” I said.
“Do you drop him or not?”
“I don’t know, I never reach a decision. But it’s the worst part.”
“Being forced to make that choice?”
“No,” I said. “Being forced to hate my own grandfather.”
Exit Garden
12
The acid that Isaac keeps in the shed at home is for topping up car batteries and it’s such staunch stuff it has to be kept in this special bladder. I have it with me, the tube running into Annie’s bag with the videotape. If I didn’t get the three knocks my job was to pump acid and burn the tape, wipe out whatever’s on it. I don’t know if that would actually work, but Annie believed me and that’s all that mattered at the time. After I hear the knocks the boot lid creaks up and there’s Annie. I pull out the tube and hand her the bag and then climb out of the Chev and I’m standing in a township for the first time in my life.
I see bare earth and a small yellow-brick schoolhouse. We are on a hilltop and I walk to the edge. There’s hazy blue coal smoke and burning rubbish below, all these little houses hemmed in by koppies covered in yellow grass and stones. I see some bright yellow police Casspirs, long armoured trucks parked on the central dirt road, and then a brown army tank on a dirt soccer field. There are a bunch of combis, minibus taxis parked around a swarming marketplace. On the far side it’s a solid field of corrugated iron and cardboard, the roofs of homemade huts with stones on top to keep them down—as if the land there has some bad skin disease.
Annie takes me into the little schoolhouse. It’s bare concrete and brick walls, but new and clean. The principal is a short woman with big hair and veins in her neck, a wide smile and a painful handshake. Lindiwe Mokefi is her name. They run classes through the summer here, following their own curriculum. Annie already explained that this school is the first private English school built in a township, paid for by a Swiss charity, taught mostly by foreign volunteers, and free to the students. The only reason the government has allowed this place is cos it’s so desperate to make our country look good to foreigners these days. This Leiterhoff School gives a decent education—unlike the other black schools (“slave trainers,” Annie calls those)—but only to a small group of lucky girls.
She
takes me to her classroom. The girls stand up together and sing Good morning, Guest, good morning, Teacher. They giggle when Annie sits me down at one of the long desks, the chair too low for my long legs. She gives me a textbook to read aloud from, a story of Heidi and Kurt, who live in a village on a mountain full of snow. When I try some yodeling I become a true hero. There’s one girl, Ilona, who won’t let go of my arm. At break time they all go out back and each gets a peanut butter sandwich and a tin mug of milk from powder. I stand there watching them swarm over a sandpit like ants, other girls are skipping rope like they are trying to stamp the earth to death, kicking up red dust clouds and singing Umzi watsha, umzi watsha. I ask Annie why they don’t wear school uniforms and she says it’s because it might make them targets when they go home, either to the Comrades, the radical youth who want all schools boycotted till education improves, or to cops who seem to think that all students are terrorists and arrest them off the street into trucks they call kwela-kwelas—climb up, climb ups—cos that’s what they have to do.
Annie goes inside. I close my eyes in the sunshine and after a minute I feel a little hand gripping my fingers. Ilona. She has a flattened cardboard box with lines drawn on it, and some bottlecaps. We play Ludo, the bottlecaps reminding me of slinkers. Annie comes back out. “You made yourself a real good buddy there I see.” I notice she has her bag on her back. An older girl walks up. Annie says, “This is Nosipho, her sister.”
“How do you do?” says Nosipho.
“I’m well, thanks, and how are you?”
“I am doing excellent,” she says.
Annie takes me aside and says it’ll be okay for us to leave the school for a while, she’s arranged it with Mrs. Mokefi. It might be fine with the principal but straightaway my stomach starts zinging with steel butterflies. I ask where we’re going.
The Mandela Plot Page 5