The Mandela Plot

by Kenneth Bonert

  Her hand rises from a pocket. A photo in the starlight, a black man behind a desk. He’s smiling and has papers in one hand. “Nelson Mandela,” she says. “This is him in his law office right here in sunny Joburg, before they made it illegal for an African to rent an office downtown. Keep it as a gift. Take it out and look at it when you’re alone. That’s not the face of an evil man, Martin. Don’t believe what the Natis want you to. Don’t believe your pops either. Don’t let yourself get lied to.”

  Something is cracking inside me. The photo slips away like a petal. I can smell lemons and perfume as she drifts into me, unfolding herself, and I think again of a blossom opening up. She has so many arms all winding around me like a dozen snakes and touching hands and fingers and now the tongue which is wet and hot as blood on my neck and flicking to my lips. I lose myself and when I come back so much impossible is happening at once—she’s up over me and coming down with a soft hissing sound and I feel rubbery coolness in all the heat, the flesh and skin and the weight of her so alive sinking down and down, all those arms looping me everywhere.

  And I’m gone again, washed away in that tide of perfume. Somewhere in all of it her fingernails have hold of a ripe pomegranate from the tree behind and she rips out the shiny guts of it and stuffs it into my open mouth, stretching my jaw. I hear moaning and realise it’s mine. The sweet pomegranate juice runs over my chin and down my throat where her long tongue is flick-flicking again, her teeth nipping. This taste of pomegranate juice. I’m never going to be able to separate it from the taste of a woman.

  School of Walls

  25

  I’m waiting at the corner of Shaka and Clovelly for Solomon school bus number eight to come and get me. The bus is a plain grey colour. It won’t say Solomon Jewish Boys on it, or anything at all, and its sides are armour-plated, the windows bulletproof—obviously. Plus they change the routes all the time, so sometimes it’s late. Not this morning. I hear the Leyland diesel revving and then it comes over the rise ten minutes early for the first school day of the new year, 1989. I’m the last stop before Regent Heights and even the Zulu driver sniffs at me like what is he doing having to stop here. The other students can see over the wall into my garden and they don’t laugh or sneer or anything like they used to, but they don’t have to now, they can do it all with their eyes. The thing is, this morning it doesn’t bug me—not at all. For real. I know they’re checking at my infamous blazer, I know what they’re thinking, but for the first time in my life I do not actually give two shits. I am no longer a virgin. I take a seat by myself and stare out the window. The sunlight makes the blazer glitter, polyester does that. Two years ago Arlene bought it from the OK Bazaars and sewed the Solomon coat of arms onto the pocket, it’s got boxy shoulders that stick out a mile. Arlene said why waste the money. She didn’t understand that everyone else wears slim cotton bespoke, from Samuelson’s in town. These are kids who get out of Bentleys with the driver holding the door. Who compare Swiss watches and vacations in Paris, private flights to Bophuthatswana on the weekend for gaming at Sun City or down to Plett for the beach. They come from palaces in Sandton or Houghton. Or private apartments of their own if they’re not from Joburg. They carry that certain smirk that knowing you’re going to inherit an actual diamond mine will give you.

  I’m looking down through the glass as we swing onto Barry Hertzog Avenue. I see black people waiting in a cluster at a Putco bus stop. White municipal buses are double-deckers and mostly empty, Putcos are singles and always jam-packed. The people hold plastic bags, look tired. We pass the Solly Kramers bottle shop. R5.99 red wine special. At Bimbo’s they’re advertising a New Shwarma Deluxe with Chips. A newspaper board tells me, pretoria spy ring busted. I think about how the prefects at Solomon have their own blazers, white braids added to the purple. They choose a dozen prefects from the matric students each year. I already know I’ll never be a prefect. It makes me smile to remember what I expected of Solomon before I got there, a school built last century by a goldmine tycoon who wanted an Eton for Jewish boys under the African sun. It was supposed to produce gentlemen of the highest caliber but I’ve never yet heard anyone use a word like chap. I remember my first year coming in I had this idea I’d work hard and shock everyone with my academic brilliance. They give tests for everything, that’s the Solomon style, like placement tests to fit you in your class for the year—every Standard has classes ranked A to D, clever to dumb—and there are even tests inside each class to get your desk, the dumbest have to sit at the front. Basically everything at Solomon is prep for matric finals, the state exams at the end of matric, the last year. You have to get that university placement, otherwise it’s off to the army, the government already has us all on its draft list. Plus there’s that famous Solomon average that has to be kept up. When you get down to it, finals is your whole life and they let you know that at Solomon from minute one. I tried hard but I have a wandering mind. I couldn’t stop myself from reading poetry and Playing in the garden instead of doing homework, so I barely made the C class in that first year, Standard Six, and again last year, Standard Seven. I don’t expect things to be different now for Standard Eight. If I’m being completely honest I have to admit how Ari and Pats weren’t too far off the mark that day at the Emmarentia Dam which I’ll never forget. At least Crackcrack has pretended not to see me. My brother was never too far away, an engineering student at Wits. But by now everyone probably knows that Marcus is off in the army, and that’s a different story isn’t it.

  Gears grate and shake me out of my memories. I should be more worried but I’m still floating and maybe this is what nonvirgins feel like all the time, floating along, not caring, maybe this is why adults don’t kill themselves in greater numbers. The bus is swinging onto De Villiers Road. I catch a flash of Brandwag Park way below and I remember how Marcus and I used to walk Sandy in there when we were little, and this one time when we were caught in a storm. There’s a stream down there and it flash-flooded into a raging river in front of us. Then the whole bank collapsed and this big section of tin drainage pipe was left sticking out. After a while it snapped right off. I held on to Sandy while Marcus dived in and swam after it. He got hold of it and dragged it to the side and then he used it for a slide. It was nuts—he could have been drowned so easily. But that was Marcus then, just wild, trying anything, always laughing, I’ll never forget it. It’s like he had his own light shining inside him all the time.

  On De Villiers Road we reach the start of the school wall. It’s made of these giant concrete slabs and it goes on and on like a great long cliff. On some of the slabs you can see the stamp of a Hebrew letter from when the Israeli engineers first put it in. And every thirty metres or so I see a camera in its green bulletproof box, with rings of razor wire all along between. There’s only one entrance to Solomon. It’s this huge gate of solid steel that could handle an atom bomb, I swear. There’s an arch over the top that’s the only part of the old gate left since 1982, it’s black ironwork and it says wisdom of solomon high school for jewish boys, with the coat of arms under and two Judean lions standing up on their back legs with our motto on scrolls, in Latin and Hebrew and English: Justice Is Togetherness, Togetherness Strength.

  The bus stops on the driveway in front of the steel gate. We all have to get off here and go in on foot with our bags, that’s security protocol, and no exceptions. I say we, but actually it’s like me, and then the rest—because as we get off I’m the only one who isn’t part of a group, or at least a pair. I’m alone like I’ve always been here. I remember in my very first week at this school, back in ’eighty-seven, I even went to Initiation. Every high school has male Initiation, where they bring in the new meat for some group suffering. Like you don’t have to do it, you can duck it if you want, but I showed up on a Sunday morning cos I thought I’d get some respect at least, maybe one potential friend. I found mayhem on the rugby field. There was shaving cream, rubber whips, and cricket bats. Matric men were stalking around in Ray-Bans
giving punishments to Standard Six boys. They made boys kiss heavy cinder blocks like a girlfriend and carry “her” around the field. They had to do push-ups and sit-ups while the bats were slapping their legs. They were getting their ball hairs ripped off with tape, getting walked and stomped on. I went out there and they took one look at me and someone shouted that’s Helger! and that was all they had to say. That’s Helger. The word spread like I was carrying radiation or the plague. Marcus had only just left the year before, they had come up under him. So the main man ran up with a folding chair and a nice cold can of Pine Nut. I was confused, I made a serious mistake and accepted both, sat there for a while watching all the other new boys getting the living shit knocked out of them while I sipped my nice col’drink and slowly realised this was not a trick. I left straightaway but the damage was done. From that day, I swear, I was the most hated in my Standard, upgraded from ignored. Soon I started to catch these rumours floating around myself like a bad smell. That I was a mofi, a raging homo, and I had the AIDS. That I was not really a Helger, athletic like my brother, actually I was retarded and adopted out of pity. They said lice and that I spread it deliberately. They said not really Jewish. They said what is he doing here? And by the end of my second year I still did not have one single friend. It was not exactly the Name I had planned to build for myself at Solomon High.

  To the left of the steel gate is this concrete pillbox thing where the uniformed guards sit with their monitors and assault rifles. There’s a tall turnstile next to it with bars sticking out. You go through one at a time and it clicks off your number while a camera records your face. When it’s my turn, I hold up my satchel for the guard in the little window to see. Every bag has to have a bomb tag, it’s a plastic ring around the strap. This one is lavender, it came in the post in the holidays. They’ll go on giving us new tags all the time, changing the colours. If anyone ever spots a bag without a tag or with the wrong-coloured one, they have to pull the alarm and cause an emergency bomb drill like the one we practice once a month. We all have to go up in a calm and orderly fashion to the rugby fields where our headmaster, Arnold C. Volper, will be stalking around in front with his squealy megaphone that he wears with a sling like a handbag. He’s a scary man, Volper. He even has a thatch of thick yellow hair like a scarecrow made of straw. I don’t believe there is a human heart inside there, honestly. He likes to read out individual test scores from the podium every week at Assembly. The eyes of the country are on us, he’ll say. We must never lose our position as the brightest school in the land. We are an example. Then he’ll usually give the names of the biggest dummies. You are a disgrace to us. Martin Helger. Once again. He likes to cruise around all quiet between the aisles in the school shul during prayers, looking to nab a victim by surprise. They said to us new boys when we arrived that Volper was going to get us, every single one, sooner or later. But when my turn came I could not believe it. I mean the prefect said talking in prayers, go to the office, but meantime I’m the only one who didn’t have anyone to talk to even if I wanted.

  They make you wait in the white passage outside the office. Talk about shitting yourself dry. My whole body was vibrating, my knees like Spanish castanets, as my breakfast kept trying to come back up, the yeasty taste of ProNutro cereal. Volper was sitting behind a polished teak desk as big as a supper table, I swear, with a huge window behind him and I remember that view of the square outside with the statue of Theodore Herzl in front of that line of pine trees, the statue being polished by three of the Zulu groundskeepers wearing their navy overalls. Volper had taken off his tweed jacket and it hung on the back of his tall leather chair. He was talking but I couldn’t understand the words at first, I was too much in shock that this was happening. I remember how he removed his watch and undid the cufflinks, the slow careful way he did that. He rolled up each sleeve with exactly three turns. Like he was getting himself ready for messy work—like a butcher or a surgeon. And I remember how calm his voice was. Everything was so civilised. There was a nice bookshelf, there was an oil painting of a sunflower. There were silver-framed photographs of his wife and his daughters on the far side of the desk. But at the same time I knew what was coming, and it felt so impossible but it was happening to me. I felt oily and sick inside, I could feel the pulses in my neck pressing against my collar and tie.

  Volper looked up and said, “You were whispering in prayers.”

  “No, sir, I was not.”

  “Name again?”

  I told him, my voice was so soft even I could hardly hear it.

  “Helger, Helger, Helger. Oh dear. This one could be that monster’s little brother. From Greenside?” Volper is fat and short but he has this way of looking down on you. It’s really remarkable. I mean he can do it even when he’s sitting. His trick is to point his flaring nostrils. Makes em look like shotgun barrels, I swear, and he likes nothing better than to stick that shotgun right between your eyes. With all that yellow hair and that blasting nose he’s a scary-looking creature all right. I told him yes sir and he sort of studied me before he went on. “Another future rugby star, doubtless.” I could feel his sarcasm big time, like this wave of acid coming at me. “Your brother,” he said, “used to reckon he was quite the big man when he was here, didn’t he? A family like yours, it’s a privilege to be here. With the right kind of people. Your parents had to make efforts to the board, I don’t know what. I don’t know how they managed it. You shouldn’t forget that.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Your brother had quite the high opinion of his fine self, strutting around. But I will tell you a secret, little-brother Helger—he was not such a big man when he was alone in this office with me. Facing the music. All that bravado goes out of them when it comes time in here to face the music. When he is alone and no mates to act the big stuff in front of. No more strutting in here . . .” He kept on talking like that and suddenly I clicked that there was something off with this guy. How can I put it? It felt like he wasn’t talking to me anymore, it was like he was talking to himself. His eyes got all heavy and half closed and his voice changed, slowing, picking up a kind of a singsong. I swear if he’d pulled out a pocket watch and told me to look at it and feel sleepy I wouldn’t have been surprised. But the only thing he swung was his tall chair, he spun around and started pulling a cord and I watched the blinds go across, slowly blocking off the statue of old Theodore and the polishing Zulus. I felt jealous of them out there in the fresh air, right then I would have swapped places—or with anyone, really. Volper switched on a desk lamp. He was still talking in that weird way, about bad boys and what they are really like when they face the punishment here, not acting tough anymore, and he undid one button on his shirt and then he stuffed his tie into the gap. I remember that, the way he stuffed the tie all carefully in there, can’t have it getting in the way. He took out this huge red ledger and he wrote down my punishment. I think that was about the time that I went into autopilot. Like I was nothing, a blank. It’s probably how they felt when they saw the gas chambers, only times about a billion. I had to move to the corner so I moved there. I had to bend over so I bent over. I had to wait bent over, so I waited bent over. You’re shaking and you’re trying not to show it. Volper stood behind me for so long that I moved my feet a bit and he told me to be like a statue. Okay. Next thing I feel his hand lifting up the tail of my blazer. He did it kind of slowly and he wasn’t very accurate, I mean the back of his hand, his fingers, kept brushing into me. He made a funny swallowing noise too. Next thing he was at the side by the cabinet, I saw his feet there, and the cabinet door opening. I heard wood getting knocked around, a snooker sound, and then I saw one end of the thing touching the carpet. When I saw that, my heart just about exploded. Volper walked around me, dragging the end of it over the carpet. It was made of yellow wood, bamboo probably, and he stopped beside me and then he let me have a good look at the whole of it, that bladdy cane. It was like as long as a fishing rod and where he held it, it was thick but it thinned down
to almost a point. Next thing he was behind me again and I had to wait and wait. All I kept telling myself is that I must show nothing. Don’t let him see that he can hurt you. That’s what everyone says you have to do when you get jacks or cuts which is what everyone calls getting caned. I tried to tense even more but it was hard because the tensing made the shaking worse. I twitched big time when I heard a woot! But it was only his practice swing back there, that cane cutting the air like a sword as he warmed up.

  When it was over, I went to the toilets and I had a look in the mirrors over my shoulder, to what had been done to me. The blood had soaked into my underpants. I had to peel them away and man that stung so much I bit my lip. Underneath, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. It looked like a tiger had raked my arse with its claws. For real, hey. No jokes. There’s nothing funny about that Volper. He’s pretty much a monster.

  26

  I come out of the turnstile and move through a zigzag of white concrete. They built it zigzag so no one can shoot through from the street—those Israeli engineers thought of everything. After the zigzags the school opens up in front of me, it’s got one road that leads up to the bus depot behind the swimming pool. The classroom buildings are made of steel and glass, they’re shiny and clean-looking in the sun. To my left are what we call the Bomb Boards, basically these big cork boards with posters. At the top of the boards it says remember malcolm steinway “the spirit lives on” and then the words under are stop! pasop! beware! stay alert stay alive! and underneath that always remain calm. Then there’re photos of different terrorist weapons we are meant to keep an eye out for, starting with round landmines like giant tea saucers. Next are limpet mines that look to me like car engine parts, the pale SPM and the reddish-brown mini, both of which can be stuck by their four magnets to anything metal, and then the safety rings and dust covers that come with them (“which may be found discarded nearby”) and the primers that look like razor blades and come in a matchbook with Russian writing. There’s detonation cord and demolition charges, TNT blocks and chunks of yellow plastic explosives that look like homemade soap. There’s a Kalashnikov and an RPG-7 with a rocket. A Tokarev pistol is held by a black man’s hand. Meantime they’ve finished looking under the bus with mirrors and searching on board because the big steel gate has opened up behind me—it trundles itself across on its own track, it’s that heavy. The bus zooms through and goes up toward the depot and the gate rumbles back across.