The Mandela Plot

by Kenneth Bonert

  20

  Captain Oberholzer gets off the multilevel motorway of the M1 and drives down Goch Road, underneath the stacked highways with the big concrete pylons on both sides. I realise, God, we are heading for John Vorster Square. It bakes a brick of fear in my bowels, I swear. John Vorster Square is at Number One Commissioner Street and it’s an L-shaped set of buildings, and it’s got these blue panels all over. People make sad jokes about this place, the Blue Hotel they call it, and all the prisoners that just happen to fall out of windows from the top floors or slip in the showers and “accidentally” snap their necks or manage to hang themselves. When we get there, Oberholzer drives through security at the back and down into underground parking. “See those spots,” he says. “That’s for SB personnel only.” He shakes his head and whistles. “These security okes. They just like James Bonds hey, real-life James flippen Bonds. Unbelievable. You should check some of the motors these okes get to pinch from the stolen car pool. Like Porsches, man. Audis. Make the Flying Squad okes look like a bunch a wankers, even. Man, when I was up there on the ninth floor that time, I was like, the suits, the gold chains, the way they rock and roll—man, this is it, hey. This is what I want.”

  He lets me out and we walk across to an elevator underneath cameras. When the doors open, I see two black men with bags over their heads and their hands raised, their wrists cuffed to a rail on the ceiling. Two large white men in suits who smell of Brut and cigarettes nod at the captain and ignore me. We all ride up, dead silent. Except I can hear wet snuffling noises from under the hoods. When I look down I see red droplets hitting the tops of their shoes, pat pat pat. The carpet has lots of old stains already. On the third floor Oberholzer and I step out. Oberholzer’s all excited, whispering fast. “They going up to ninth, you see it? That’s Branch only. Normally they take their own special lift that doesn’t stop on any other floor. You check the lekker jackets? Style, man, style. Bladdy nice. Those prisoners are politicals. Those Branch okes, man, they get to hook the big fish. And you know the tenth floor is so top-secret there’s no lift that goes there, only stairs from ninth . . .” He keeps whispering as we walk. “Tell you summin. Some okes round here, they don’t like the security police, but me, I’m not negative, hey, I’m a positive person, you have to set goals in life. You ever read Napoleon Hill’s book on success? You should, hey. Keep a positive mind. If you jealous and you look down on someone else’s success yourself, then how you ever ganna be successful?” The corridor is wide, with a beige concrete floor, and the walls have two colours, the bottom dark blue and the top more greenish. I see a stairway curving up and the whole side of it is behind thick bars of another shade of blue. All the blues and the curving and the echoing noises of shouts and steel, plus the arches over some doorways plus a certain bad smell like must or dank—it makes me think of an aquarium. I imagine prisoners floating like bottled fish in their cells of blue. And I feel like I’m drifting underwater myself. Drowning.

  I hear a typewriter clicking behind a door. “My office,” Oberholzer is saying. “I got it the hard way, promotion from up the ranks. Developing my skills. My technical. My ideas. Good things happen if you work persistently, and Julius Caesar is the zone my unit is in charge of. I basically built this all from scratch, hey, a whole new concept in community relations and communications. You have to set positive goals in life, and you have to believe in yourself.” A secretary greets us, we go to the right, and Oberholzer opens another door for me. It’s bright through frosted glass. Parquet floor. Filing cabinets, a desk, a fan running. Oberholzer tells me to sit and goes to the files. “Ja,” he says, “this community unit, we are still riot squad, still Internal Stability Unit, but the idea is burger sake—hearts and minds—but not just inside the community, but also the hearts and minds of the rest of the world, hey? Propaganda is what wins wars also. Photography, public relations. Especially video. And we may have been winning on the ground but in propaganda we are behind. The other side is devil good at it. That is how I put it to the general when I proposed my concept, setting this up, using my technical skills. I just went for it, hey. Others might have had the idea, but I took action, I spoke up, I had the guts—and here I am now, look at me, a full captain in corner office with the whole township under my command and control. See, you have to spring when you see opportunity . . . Ah-huh, here we are.” He brings a file and gives me a blank card, tells me to write all my details in block letters. Name, addresses, birth date, and the same for all my family members. I want to say am I being arrested? I should get a lawyer, or talk to my parents, I should ask for that, at least. But I say nothing and start to write. Oberholzer calls the secretary for coffee, black. I write, MARTIN HELGER. 6 MARCH 1972. NUMBER 2 SHAKA ROAD GREENSIDE, 2193, JOHANNESBURG, SOUTH AFRICA . . . Oberholzer puts on his square reading glasses and writes in the file. The coffee comes. Not a tin mug this time. When I’m finished the card, I hand it across and he gives me a legal pad, telling me, “Now write down everything that happened that led up to you being inside Jules today. Everything. The story of how you came to be there at that school. Write nice and clearly, no cursive, take your time.” He goes out with the card. I stare at the pad. The secretary comes and asks if I want some Romany Creams. I really smaak those crunchy chocolate biscuits and I’m hungry as hell but I shake my head. She goes and after a while I start writing. It all started when Annie Goldberg came to live with us in Greenside, just two or three weeks ago. I will have to check the exact date with my mother. My mother, Arlene Helger, was the one who organised Annie to stay with us as an exchange scholar from USA. She

  I look up, hearing these fast heavy steps outside, thump thump thump, and then the door bangs open and Oberholzer rushes in. His face pale.

  21

  We are back on the highway, zipping along above the city. I’m confused but not stupid enough to ask any questions—it might make him change his mind again. In the office he told me suddenly I could forget about having to write anything down and instead he’d give me a lift back, straightaway. We went down to the garage and when I stood at the back of the Cortina, Oberholzer said don’t be silly and opened the passenger door for me. Like he’s my chauffeur now. I look out the window. A billboard is selling cigarettes—the next best thing to a lexington is another lexington. Another one is for Iwisa mielie meal, proud sponsor of the Kaiser Chiefs, kings of the soccer field. And there are rooftops and tall glass buildings and then the yellow hills of the mine dumps half covered in grass, hills made of all the sand they’ve pulled up through donkey’s years of digging gold up from under our feet cos Joburg is one huge goldmine, more of it found here than anywhere.

  We start changing lanes for the exit already, the sign says smit street so I look at Oberholzer and tell him as politely as I can that this isn’t the best way to get to Greenside. He says, “Who said anything about Greenside?”

  “I thought you taking me home.”

  “I’ll drop you at your father.”

  I go blank and he says, “Your father is Isaac Helger.”

  “Yes, Captain.”

  “Lion Metals, according to what I looked up.”

  “Yes, Captain.”

  “Of course he is,” says Oberholzer. “Of course it had to be.” It’s not just these odd words but the way he says them that makes my heart start to vibrate like banjo strings and I’m trying to think what to say but I have zilch. Meantime we drive into Braamfontein, passing the big train depot, and reach the bottom of De La Rey and make a right and head all the way up to the end. This is Vrededorp. The brick building at number 50A De La Rey is a full block wide and three stories high. The steel doors are peeling green paint with wire in the window glass on the ground floor, the burglar bars are shaped like diamonds. A sign says total armed response. I can just see the side of the wall at the back as we come up, with the vicious hedge of broken glass along the top. This place is my childhood, hey, in the Yard with my da. I know the smells, the workers, the feel of it, everything. My da Isaac, he ne
ver went to school, he built this place from nothing with his two tough hands, basically. Him and his partner Hugo.

  Oberholzer parks by the Salvation Army which is next to a tavern which is next to Mevrou van der Westhuizen’s fish and chips shop, with its oily smells and potato peels on the sticky floor. Farther down are rowhouses with red metal roofs and white men with smudgy tattoos on their arms are sitting on the front steps and passing bottles. In the 5th Street park, skinny white kids who look as wild and tough as seagulls are swooping around and shouting, crashing shopping trolleys and throwing bricks around. Vrededorp is mostly Afrikaans. The ones who have jobs usually work for the railways or the cops or the post office. They call the Yard “die Jood se motor plek”—the Jew’s car place.

  I unlock the door. Oberholzer says, “Hold your horses.” He touches something and all the locks suck down. “Your father, Isaac Helger, he must be getting on then. How old is Isaac Helger now?” I say seventy. He says, “Past the time for retirement, hey.”

  I shake my head. “No, not him.”

  “Everyone retires,” Oberholzer says. “Then you’ll be the one to take over, hey?”

  “My brother, probably,” I say. “When he gets out the army.”

  Oberholzer sniffs and lifts his eyebrows. “The army, hey. Ja. What’s his name again, your brother?”

  “Marcus.”

  “Marcus Helger,” says Oberholzer, like he’s tasting something. “Marcus. Helger. What’s he doing there in the army, you know?”

  “He’s on the Border,” I tell him. The Border—even just saying it I see the pictures in my head from TV and magazines. The bush war up north there where we are beating the hell out of the Cubans and the Angolan communists who want to take our territory of South West Africa away from us, for starters.

  “Really now. And what unit is he with?”

  “Not sure. I know he was in the parabats.”

  Oberholzer whistles. “Oh, a real grensvegter, hey?” Takes me a second to remember that grensvegter means a Rambo in Afrikaans, a super-soldier.

  “Ja, I spose,” I say. The parabats are the paratroopers, maroon berets and victory from the skies.

  Oberholzer is staring off, at the front of the shop. Trucks being loaded for wholesale. One is an old dusty pantechnicon picking up parts to take out to Windhoek in South West, all the way across the Kalahari Desert, to judge by its plates. I recognise Winston and Oscar and Radibe—three of Isaac’s senior guys—using straps to carry car doors and engine blocks up the ramp. Suddenly the door locks pop up. A hell of a relief, but I try not to show it, saying, “Well. Thank you very much for the lift, Captain.”

  “Tell me. Is your father, Isaac Helger, is he in there right now?”

  “Ja.”

  “You sure?”

  “He’s always here at this time.”

  “Where, in his office?”

  “No,” I say. “He’ll be in the back, in the proper Yard.”

  “And how comes you say that?”

  I give a little shrug. “That’s my da.”

  “Huh. That’s your da. Isn’t that nice.”

  There’s a silence. “Well,” I say. “Thank you again for the lift.”

  “Don’t thank me yet,” he says.

  It’s the way he says it, more than the words, that makes my mouth dry out. Softly I say, “Can’t I go now?”

  “Ja,” he says. “Let us go.”

  “Captain?”

  “I said let’s go.”

  I clear my throat very carefully. “Please can you not? Can’t you just drop me off, Captain? If I’m like not being arrested? I mean my father—like, please, he doesn’t have to know, hey?”

  Oberholzer smiles. “But I wouldn’t wanna be rude,” he says. “I come all this way.”

  22

  I take us to the side, away from the high counters where the front staff like Mrs. Naidoo have their inky carbon-paper order books and their chittering adding machines and their cigarettes leaking smoke from dirty plastic ashtrays to the squeaky old ceiling fans while the lines of customers wait patiently—the thick-legged Afrikaans men in green or blue safari suits with short pants and socks pulled up to the knees (always a comb tucked into the top of the sock), the wiry black motorbike couriers with their arms threaded through their helmets, the mechanics in greasy overalls sipping col’drinks through their moustaches.

  We go up on the old steel stairs and into the warehouse with racks full of exhausts and doors and radiators, gearboxes—every car part you can think of all filed like some kind of a library, with coloured paint written on the parts with the model and the year and the make, a big L or R for left and right. The wide freight lift at the back takes us down. Outside the sun rakes the open Yard. The earth is red and rock hard and the wrecks are piled on it in their long rows, smashed glass glittering and wrinkled steel bleeding oil and brake fluid. I used to play hide-and-go-seek with Marcus in here. There’s a crusher and a crane in the back corner by the far gate, near the parked tow trucks. I’m leading Oberholzer off to the right and we run into three of the younger guys on staff, Dube and Zimbu and Orbert. The old guys still treat me like I’m a little mascot, the boss’s boyki. But these younger guys are different, they usually just ignore me. Now they look at the captain in his uniform and their eyes get big. They tell us Isaac is down at the Old Cars. I’m not surprised. I go on with the captain. The Old Cars is by the Pyramid, the big stack of used tires. Lined up are the vintage cars that Da likes to work on when he gets a chance, restoring them and selling them off, usually working with Silas Mabuza. Silas has been with Da since forever. We get to the Old Cars and my father’s short legs are sticking out from under a ’31 Dodge. Other cars are under covers. There’s one in the corner on stands that is Isaac’s special prize, a 1936 Cadillac limousine. Funny, he always insists every old car has to be finished and done inside eighteen months max, but not that Cadillac, that thing’s been there like a million years, almost as if he doesn’t want to finish it. I look around and see Silas’s tools are there, which doesn’t surprise me. Him and Isaac are always together, the pair of them, he must have just stepped away. I call out and Isaac rolls out from under the Dodge and stands up, wiping grease with a cloth from his thick hands. The sun falls on his grey-salted ginger hair, flakes of rusty paint in the curls. The skin of his wrinkled face has that puffed, rubbery look from all the years of labour in the Yard, his eyes are slits that look like they’ve been cut into the rubber by a blunt knife, his nose is a blob that seems half melted. “What you doing here, Martin?” he says. He’s not looking at me.

  “I drove him here,” Oberholzer says.

  “And who you, then?”

  “I detained your son today. He was inside Julius Caesar township.”

  “What the hell?” Isaac says.

  I say, “Da, I went with Ann—”

  “He was there illegally,” says Oberholzer. “Your little angel.”

  “Now wait one second,” Isaac says. “What you talking here? Coming here in my Yard with my boy. Martin, what is going on?”

  Oberholzer smiles. “He is a very lucky little chap, you know. I could have—”

  “I’m asking my boy!” His temper cracks like lightning. One thing, you don’t mess with my old man, I don’t care who you are. “Martin,” he says, “you come stand here by me.” I hesitate. “Martin—get over here.” I walk across and turn and face Oberholzer. Oberholzer is still smiling but it doesn’t look like a real smile. His lips are moving like nailed worms on his pale face. He takes off his cap and wipes his hair back and puts the cap back on. “Listen,” he says. “I don’t know if you realise you talking to a captain in the South African Police—”

  “Listen to me,” Isaac says. “I dunno who the hell you are, but you wanna go for me, go for me, don’t you go for my boy! He is a boy. He is a bladdy minor! Now what is your story? What do you want from me? Speak up, man!” Isaac takes steps forward and Oberholzer sways back. Caught by surprise. When he started with hi
s talk of chap and little angel, it was like he was going to play with Isaac, poke at him. That’s a mistake, hey. Big time. I could have told him that before. Isaac is all red now, his head down like a ram getting ready to charge. He’s half the height but he looks twice as strong. “Ja, you a policeman,” he says, “I see that, so what? Lots of policemen come here to buy. I sold Johann Malan some brake pads last week. You know who he is don’t you? Brigadier Malan. Ja. Been coming here for years. And I reckon he outranks a captain by a little bit. He is a good friend of mine, matter of fact. So, I wanna tell you something, you come into a man’s shop you should talk nicely or expect to get your arse chucked out on the street. I don’t care what uniform you have on.” He jabs with his finger. “Or what gun you come in here strapped on.” Then he turns to me. “What happened, Martin?”