The Mandela Plot

by Kenneth Bonert

  There’s a path to the left just after the Bomb Boards and I take it. It curves around Assembly Hall to the school shul, the Solomon Synagogue to be official about it. It’s a cool building if you like science fiction, it looks kind of like a spaceship, all white and ready to blast off. I put my satchel in the passageway like everyone else. I used to worry they would piss on my bag or put dirt and rocks inside or steal my books but all of that stopped pretty much by the end of my first year. They’ve gradually forgotten about me and I’m more or less just being ignored again. But this morning I’m thinking about how I was when I started here, wanting so majorly to make a name for myself that meant something. I tried but all I got was shat on. I stand there remembering, reliving what it was like that first winter when I rocked up for rugby practice.

  Our coach is sportsmaster Brian Gocherovitz, who everyone calls the Gooch. The Gooch grew up as the only Jewish kid in some inbred little Free State dorp where the local Afrikaner farm boys made his life a misery by tying him to sheep and dropping him down wells and such, until he took up rugby. Eventually he played for the Blue Bulls the year they took the Currie Cup. He retired with no cartilage left in his knees and Solomon hired him to make us at least not such an embarrassment at the bottom of the league. They said he could achieve nothing for years until Marcus Helger came to Solomon. Marcus set the example, he led the best teams we’ve ever had. But when I trotted out onto the field on my thin pale legs for that first practice, the Gooch looked at me with much sadness. “Helger, Helger,” he said. “Helger. No. Just no.” He blew his whistle and everyone jogged off for laps but the Gooch held me back. I had on my brother’s old-old boots that didn’t fit right. The Gooch put a fatherly hand on my shoulder and walked me back to my bags. He said, “It’s nice of you to put in a show, Martin, really, but you go home now, oright, my mate? And I don’t ever wanna see you in a Solomon rugby jersey ever again.”

  “But, sir, why? I want to play.”

  “You know why. You not a normal boy. That name is Helger.”

  “But that’s not my fault, sir.”

  “Helger. Means the level we all aim for. What I talk on before a match. Bigger than you and me, my mate. This is legacy. Must protect. No matter what.” When I got moist in the eyes he patted my head.

  I shake myself and go into the shul. I’ve given up trying. But now I start pondering how I’ve had a woman, a real woman, an American. I mean I had to put my hand on her mouth to stop her from waking everyone up. Nobody would believe it but I know it happened. I am something. More than something. If you think about it, I’m bladdy head and shoulders above. I carry heavy secrets now. I’ve been in a township. Man, I’ve come this close to actual terrorists and talked my way out of nearly getting necklaced. And all-a-sudden I’m feeling some of the old, original determination firing up in me, like one of Isaac’s fixed-up Old Car engines coughing-coughing and then catching to rev hard.

  Sunlight is spearing through the huge rounded windows up there inside the synagogue roof. There’s a small gallery for females but it is almost completely empty, obviously, just a few lady teachers. Down below we all roll up our left sleeves and wind on the creaking leather straps of our tefillin, the three hundred boys of Solomon High. But there’s only one question buzzing around and that is who will be doing hagbah, the lifting of the Torah? Whoever the matric guy is who gets to do hagbah will also be called the Strongest Lad in the School. Who’s it ganna be for this new year, 1989? Obviously in his day Marcus was the hagbah guy, I mean that’s a given. He was the youngest one ever, he was Strongest Lad even before he reached matric, a record that’s never been broken. The service gets started. Prefects stand guard, Volper hunts silently. We sit and stand and praise the Almighty. Eventually the Torah gets brought out of the Holy Ark and carried to the bimah, our centre stage. Nilly Rossbaum sings this week’s Torah portion as we sit and listen. When he’s finished we stand up for hagbah. There’s a buzz that gets so antsy Volper has to snap his lips, just once, and it goes stone quiet.

  At the back of the matric block, a long, wiry guy shuffles down the pew and onto the carpet. Holy polony, it’s Johnny Lohrmann—otherwise known as Crackcrack. Since that bad day at the Emmarentia Dam years ago he has filled out, his hair’s gotten darker but it’s the same eyes sitting deepsunk under that bony brow. As he comes along I look away, feeling those eyes slide over me. It’s sort of crazy how we ignore each other, like we’ve both signed an invisible contract to pretend it never happened. Signed with shame. He reaches the bimah, there are seven stairs up to the gap in the low glass wall and then he crosses to the reading table where the Torah is spread open. He stands in front of it for a few seconds before he grips the wooden handles. Our school’s Torah is much bigger than average, milled from heavy ironwood. At this point in the year the scroll on the left is much bigger than the right. Crackcrack shows his teeth and grunts and steps back, hiking the holy scrolls straight up in the air in one move. I have to admit it’s a pretty good lift. No cheating by pressing down on the edge of the table first, just pure wrist strength. He holds it there over his head and then he spreads his arms wide to show more of the holy parchment. He makes his slow spin. You can feel the school watching carefully for any trembling. If a Torah ever fell we would all have to fast for forty days straight or be looking down the barrel of a mighty curse from above. Now everyone including me is pointing their little finger at the lifted Torah, singing the blessing. I think about how every Torah is always exactly the same as the ones that were written before, back and back for two thousand years, all those centuries of scribes like human photocopiers. The story of how God made the world and how the Jews came out of Egypt. There it is. I mean it’s something. It’s the reason we are here right now. The reason we are.

  After prayers we go into Assembly Hall for our placement tests. When I get my multiple-choice paper I stare at it for a while. I know for a fact Warren Stofflemeister always gets in the A class despite being a moron deluxe, just cos his old man is on the board. My theory is they’ve already placed us. The tests are a sham. So I’m not going to play their game this year and don’t even read the questions, circling random answers. I’m confident I’ll still go to 8C—might even have earned myself a promotion. I’ve been lucky enough to get laid last night so why not? I wait for them to call my name but it doesn’t come. Not even for 8D. Then Volper, drooling contempt, says this year in Standard Eight there is a special overflow class, Standard 8E. And it’s right where they’ve stuck me. Looks like my nonvirgin cockiness just backfired big time. The school gives us a nice send-off of whoops, cackles, and whistles. Apparently our E stands for either Extreme Losers or Extra Dof. Waiting outside for us is our homeroom teacher—none other than the Gooch himself. They probably reckon a rugby coach is what’s needed to boot some sense into a bunch of rejects like us. I look around and see guys I’ve mostly never seen before. It’s a small group and almost every oke is a new transfer in from a different school, the reason for the overflow. Meanwhile the Gooch doesn’t like the way we aren’t paying him enough attention. “I swear to you all,” he says, “you do not wanna start the year on the wrong footing with me. You will suffer if you do. Act like wild animals and I will gut you and eat you. I am the only tiger here. Is that clear?” We say yes sir. A boy called Stanley Lippenshmecker doesn’t do it loud enough so the Gooch blows his whistle into Stanley’s left ear. We march off, Stanley clutching the side of his head, and the Gooch leads us to this hill on the far side, far away from all the other classes. People call this hill the Pimple for the obvious reason it’s one hell of an ugly lump of yellow rock. Our classroom is a prefab, what used to be a storage trailer, and it stinks of mould and old tennis balls and it’s right at the edge of the Pimple, overlooking the rubbish dump. The Gooch threatens more bodily harm then leaves when the bell rings.

  What’s nice is that my new classmates don’t yet know I’m the school untouchable. There’s a big boy from Durban called Reginald Solovechik (Solovechik Partne
rs, International Commodities Limited). This Reg has a head on his wide shoulders that’s the size of an atlas globe, I swear. This other kid, Barry “Mouth” Horvitz (Horvitz Industrial Solutions, Pty. Ltd.), gives him his nickname in about five seconds flat. From now on Reg is Spunny—short for spanspek, a kind of sweet melon and a reference to that huge dome of his. Another new oke is Irwin Mos‑kevitz (Moskevitz Computing: MCB on the stock exchange). This guy is paler than Casper the friendly ghost, I swear. He’s got hair like that French king Louis XIV going in a split-part off his pointed head and you don’t even want to know about the nose. Irwin spots a pile of dog turds and hops across and squats over it and acts like he’s crapping, his thin legs shaking and his face turning red as he puts on the voice of what sounds like an old Japanese woman going hysterical. “Eeeeeeh,” he says. “I shitee shitee so good.” Mouth sees this and straightaway gives him his nickname—Turdster. Others of these new okes are lighting up shmerfs around the corner. This is a class that’s mostly never even heard of Marcus Helger, and suddenly I’m lank glad that I threw that test.

  27

  It’s Wednesday arvy and I’m shaking with bad nerves. I don’t want to go to the book exchange but it’s time, already twenty past three. To psych myself up I think of what Annie said about me turning into a Nazi and about those people in Jules getting the police dog set on them. I remember the pomegranate tree, the promise made there in the night. Still in uniform, I unlock the gate and leave my garden behind and start walking down Shaka Road. Mulberries stain the pavement under the tree sticking over the Beechams’ wall. At the Smythes’s, some pink-nosed albino-looking bull terriers bang their snouts into the gate, barking hard at me. By the corner a group of maids is sitting in the shade of a municipal jacaranda tree, reminding me of Gloria—she used to strap me on her back when I was little and take me down to the shops along this route. When I was older I held her rough hand, stood there while she spoke in her language to the other maids, the giri-giri noises of Sotho, the click and pop of Xhosa. For the first time I wonder where the rest of her family was all those years when she lived in the room in the back. Some place like Jules?

  I reach Greenway Road, feeling thick and clumsy with fear. Viljoen’s Book Exchange is in an open mall off a parking lot, between the building society and that doggy-grooming parlour where they once burned Sandy with a hair dryer (and Marcus went back and planted the owner with one crisp left hook). As soon as I walk in, the good smell of books hits me right in the schnozz and I relax a bit. Give me books over people any bladdy day of the week. But here I’m in a bookshop looking for a person, and there he is, coming out from the back, Dolfie Viljoen. I have to cough to find my voice as I put A Light for the Abyss down on the counter. “I wanna swap this,” I say. “Can you recommend something good?” He doesn’t seem to click what this is about, maybe I should wink or something. Then he nods, says, “I think you’ll like this.” He goes into the back. Dolf’s one of those Afrikaners who speaks like perfect English, even his accent is almost like mine. Today he’s wearing a Pink Floyd T-shirt (Dark Side of the Moon) and his black hair is combed back, a good-looking oke with a shy way about him. He reminds me I’ve got a bias in how I look at chutaysim—I mean Afrikaners. They’re not all huge and inbred, not all vicious and racialist. Of course Dolf’s da, Oom Viljoen, he kind of is those things, with his blotchy face and huge white moustache—he won’t serve black customers.

  Dolf comes back with some science fiction book for me but also an envelope. Annie didn’t say anything about envelopes. I can hardly look at him as I take both and turn around. I feel as if I should have ignored the envelope, that by taking it I’ve fallen into some trap. Like any second now a bunch of hard-core Special Branch dutchmen are going to be jumping on my back and dragging me away. But nothing happens except that I jog all the way home and arrive sweaty. In the garden Zaydi is clicking his false teeth and mumbling a prayer. My fingers are shaking as I open the book and riffle through all the pages but there’s no note from Annie. The envelope contains a folded cheap-looking Afrikaans newspaper, an inky little tabloid called Vryheid!—Freedom. I can understand most of the main headline: More something Truths About Our Crimes. The story underneath says, roughly, that while our something-something units on the Border are supposed to be something heroic, the truth is that they are engaged in committing somethingly horrendous somethings against unarmed something civilians. There are blobby black-and-white photos showing armoured trucks that are like the Casspirs in Jules. These ones are driving over the legs of men tied down. Then come more photos that are so horrible they can’t be real. There’s a lump of meat on a thorn tree and the caption says geskilde baba—skinned baby. Mostly the article seems to be about police units. I have to say that relieves me a lot. Marcus is not in a police unit, like the one called Koevoet—Crowbar. He’s in the proper army and they don’t ride around skinning babies. No ways.

  I remember what it was like when he disappeared, just dropped out of varsity and enlisted without telling a soul, left behind a note and that’s all. He still hasn’t phoned once, or come home on leave. He sent a few letters, saying he was okay. First from Ladysmith, then Bloemfontein, then South West Africa. I remember how the day after he’d gone, Isaac drove his car to the Yard—a 1970 Valiant Barracuda Formula S fastback. Isaac gave him that car as a present when he got into university but we all knew it was also a bribe for not going to the army, which they’d been fighting about for a while. I remember driving in that car with Marcus and the smell of Deep Heat muscle rub and of sweat and leather from his gym bag and the big cracked boxing gloves and the bandages on the back seat. I remember one time we got tailgated by two okes in a truck and Marcus got out and this other guy got out with a wheel spanner. Marcus ducked a swing of the spanner and knocked the man down with a straight right. The other one in the truck got out and pointed a gun. Marcus just looked at him and shrugged and got back in and we drove off. That happened on Jeppe Street in the middle of town, I think it was about eight o’clock, people all around, but that’s Joburg for you. The day after Marcus did his vanishing act, Isaac gave that car to Silas Mabuza who gave it to his son, Victor.

  I take the tabloid to the Sandy Hole where I lift out the Quality Street tin full of secrets. First under the lid is Nelson Mandela’s face, or what it used to look like. Next are the videotapes, then my notebooks full of sketches and poems. At the bottom there’s a Durex effy (lubricated), a commando knife, and one of those little Barclay’s plastic bank bags. In the bag is a card and a shriveled thing with a dot of gold in it. Before Annie and the bomb tapes this was my biggest secret by far. I got it one early morning when I woke from the Nightmare and heard something in the backyard. This was when Marcus was still living with us. I went out and saw him at the sink. He was washing himself like Isaac does when he gets back from the Yard. Marcus was an engineering student (we believed) but he’d also gotten himself a night job, as manager at a steakhouse in Randburg where he wore a tuxedo.

  When I was sort of creeping up on him at the sink that morning, I saw the jacket and his shirt hanging from a pipe, and he was standing there barechested, scrubbing. A lump of something sticky-looking was hanging in his hair at the back. I must have got too close cos suddenly he whipped around and grabbed me by the throat and put me to the wall. After he recognised me he told me to go back to bed and not to sneak up on people. That lump had fallen and when he went back to washing, I picked it up. The bubbles in the sink were all dark from whatever he’d been cleaning off. The lump was squishy in my hand. I asked him what had happened but he ignored me. A card was sticking out of the pocket of his tuxedo jacket and as I left I took that too. I remember at the time I asked my parents what was the name of the steakhouse where Marcus is working and they didn’t know. And what time do steakhouses close. I was thinking there’s no need to wear a tuxedo at a steakhouse and come home at dawn. It took me a while to recognise that the gold dot was an earring, a stud, and the gooey chunk around it was a piece of a
n ear. I rub at it now through the plastic, it’s rock hard. Soon after I got this, Marcus was gone. Secrets—where there’s one there are always more, I swear. I take out the card and read over what’s on it for like the millionth time. Maybe it’s time I find out what it means.

  28

  We, the okes of 8E, get summoned on the intercom. It’s still only the first month but I’ve been expecting this. A bunch of new boys who haven’t tasted the cane yet—old Volper couldn’t let that go on for very long. In his office he gives us a group lecture about civility and then we have to step out and come back in one by one. Waiting for your turn outside you can hear through the door every whipping cut and then the smack when it hits the trousers—sounds like a combo of Gary Player practicing his tee-offs plus the maid beating a carpet in there. But we all grin and wink at each other, pretending it’s nothing, even though I know we’re all just about wetting our pants. Afterwards we meet up in the downstairs bog to compare arses and thighs, to check who got the most blood drawn, the deepest wounds. We take compass needles and pick out the purple thread on the backs of our ties, making a black stripe with four fledges in it to mark the occasion—four jacks apiece received today. I already have six separate black stripes from being caned six times before, which is about par for the course for a Standard Eight. The new okes are all black-stripe virgins till today obviously, but there are a couple others in our class who aren’t new. One is Boris Levin (LVK Distiller Holdings, Pty. Ltd.), who happens to take top prize for wound of the night cos the blood trickles have reached all the way to his socks and the cuts on his upper thighs look deep enough to slot a two-cent coin in. The okes are hosing themselves, having a good fat laugh at old Boris, and he looks at me and says, “At least I’m not a charity case like Helger.” Everyone goes quiet and I feel shit. Not that I haven’t been expecting this. Boris is a miserable douche and he’s been itching to let the cat out of the bag. That he’s got puffy eyes and it’s clear by his already-thin hair that he’s going to be very bald very early in life isn’t much of a consolation at this moment. I feel my face heating up and there’s a lump in my throat that won’t let me talk, not that I’ve got anything to say. Big Spunny comes closer, his huge round head cocked to one side as he squints at me all confused. Boris takes lots of pleasure in explaining it all to him, to everyone, that I am the school poor case, that I don’t belong here, that my brother was okay cos he was the greatest rugby player once upon a time, but me, I’m just a waste of space, everyone in school knows this. Spunny grins at Boris. Then he smacks the top of his head. “How’s that space up there, hey Boris? Starting to look unoccupied. You bald-arse.” That makes everyone kick back into major laughing mode, only it’s Boris who is blushing not me. Spunny turns to me and throws me in a headlock. “Okes, Helger might be a charity case, but he’s our one. Charity’s a top lad.” And that’s when I hear a most beautiful sound, it’s Mouth baptizing me right there. “Charity!” he shouts. “Charity! Cheers for Charity, okes!” I’m being spun around, I can hardly breathe, but I swear I’ve never felt so happy as those cheers echo on the hard white tiles.