The Mandela Plot

by Kenneth Bonert

  “How d’you mean?”

  “The business. It’s not ganna be your brother, it’s ganna be you.” I laugh. Hugo says, “Don’t be modest. Shine yourself up, nobody else will. You can do it and run that business very well, one day. I got no doubt.” He scrunches around in his chair to check for Isaac but the lawn is empty. “This is between you, me, and that garden wall. Your father would be miffed. He can’t be whatchacallit objected about you.”

  “Objective?”

  “There is something I want you in on it. Will be good for you.”

  “What is it?”

  “This has to do with sorting out a problem. If you the one and not Marcus, which I believe is the case, then you need to learn how it’s done. No school can teach from a book. And also being truthful to you, the way I understand this is a problem you involved us with.”

  “Me?”

  “A problem you sort of made, Martin. As I understand to be honest.”

  I stare at him, waiting for a sign he’s pulling my leg.

  “The policeman,” he says. “That you brought to the Yard.” That word policeman like a kick in my guts.

  “Don’t look so pale,” he says. “It’ll be oright. Now I’m going back on the road next few weeks. But when I get back, next time I’m here Sunday we’ll leave straight after lunch. I’ll come alone. You and me. You will make up the excuse. I will wait round the corner for you.”

  “Come on, Hugo.”

  “I’m not joking here, Martin. You don’t tell your father, no one.”

  I scratch my nose. “Go where?”

  “Yes or no. But I advise yes. I think you sort of have to.”

  “What’s this all about, Hugo?”

  “I told you. That policeman of yours. Captain Oberholzer. You think on it. But when I get back, you’ll be ready and you’ll see. We go together and fix your problem and get it done.”

  Isaac is coming. Hugo touches his pinkie to his temple and winks. When he leaves, after a conference with Isaac inside, he is carrying a shoebox under his arm. It occurs to me I’ve watched him taking shoeboxes away with him on Sunday afternoons for all of my life, but I have no idea what’s in them.

  Wednesday can’t come fast enough. I’m pretty sure there will be a message back from Annie but my heart still jumps in my chest when I open the book and find a little folded paper square. Her fingers left this for me. I sniff it vainly for her perfume before transferring the Hebrew letters to the decoding grid. Then letter by letter, as if in a reverse striptease, Annie’s words gradually appear for me.

  UR STAR MEET ME SAT FLEA MARKET TEAPOT STALL 11AM

  A star. See what happens with a bit of trying. I know the place she means, as she knows I would, it’s the market they have on the parking lot in front of the Market Theatre in Newtown. Annie. I’m going to see her, for real. I’m levitating, all my blood changed to helium. Annie.

  But with Thursday comes news of a bombing in Fordsburg—not far from the flea market. Two dead. Blasts happen all the time, yet the place and timing of this one feels like some of kind of a message meant for me, a reminder of what’s on the Fireseed tapes which chews at my mind. When it’s Friday after school and I hop on the municipal bus to Vrededorp, I realise where else the bus goes. So when my stop comes I don’t get off, I stay on till Fordsburg. Round here is more or less Afrikaans also, but more commercial than residential and with many Indian faces too. There’re rug shops, tailors, curry restaurants. The Oriental Plaza—the Indian shopping mall—is near here. I don’t know if they are allowed to live here as well cos I think it’s a whites-only area but I’m not sure. I come up on a corner where cop cars are parked. Used to be a Wimpy hamburger bar here but the jolly colours are all scorched black, I see, with broken glass and melted tables in the street behind police tape. There’re a few people loitering, looking. The fireblast went up to sear the brickwork of the second floor. Then my eye catches a menu blowing on the street, one of those plastic-coated ones, half burnt up and blistery but I can still read bits of it. Cheeseburger with French Fried Chips R2.50 . . . Special Grill R3.75 . . . Shanty Salad for Slimmers . . . Hey Kids! Join the Wimpy Wiz Club . . . “Another one,” a woman near me is saying. A man’s voice says, “They must really hate cheeseburgers, hey.” It’s a joke about how Wimpy bars keep getting targeted. A man in front turns around and says, “You should shut up and have some respect.” The first one says, “Come make me,” and next thing the okes are swinging at each other with typical South African friendliness. The women put out their arms and shout, “Hey hey heyyyy! Stop! Stop it!” A cop gets out of one of the parked cars and strolls up to do just that. The sight of that uniform does something to my stomach that it never used to. I move the opposite way. Suddenly a hand hooks my arm. There’s a square, hairy face too close to me. I can smell sweet alcohol on the breath and the eyes are strange, not focused on me, like he’s looking at the tip of his own nose. “Stavros Christou is my name,” this guy says, all murmury. “I come from Larnaca, Cyprus, the year 1960. For a better life, if you’ll excuse me. I have a cafi on Plein Street these thirty years. Do you know how many times I was robbed by them? I say nine, you won’t be surprised. But it’s more, a dozen. Have a look here . . .” He pulls down his collar. I’m moving away but he walks with me, holding on but not hard, almost gentle. Talking to me all softly as if we’ve known each other forever. “You see it? Twenty-five stitches. Two centimetres away from the jugular, they said. I didn’t even see the screwdriver. Like always, I said to them, take, take everything. I have no problem. I open the register. But they are against human life in their nature. You know it was two girls it was killed with this bomb. They put it in the rubbish bin and walked out. It was two little girls from school here for a hamburger. Girls in school uniform just like you are wearing. Sir, that bomb throwed them into this street here as if it was pieces of old rubbish they was. Thirteen-year-olds. My cousin, she does know the family of the one. Good people, sir, I can guarantee you. The best people. The girls was in pieces. But the one was still breathing when the ambulance came. I tell you honestly, sir, this is a blessing she died or she would have been a cabbage in a wheelchair. Did she deserve that for a hamburger? Oh what kind of place is this? Another one person was burned on his whole entire body, lying in hospital. Now I’m asking you a question, sir. You have an honest face. Would a genuine human being put a bomb in a hamburger place? To kill schoolgirls? Would a human being do such a thing? I’m asking you in all honesty, sir, because I want to know . . .”

  “Let go of me,” I tell him, he’s breathing so close and I get the feeling he could be blind or something. He’s making my skin itch. “Will you bladdy well let go of me? Will you, please?”

  But he doesn’t, he keeps on clinging, talking gently. “Don’t you see that the government is too soft? You have a sensible face. If they are not human beings don’t you agree we need to put them all up against a wall or it will never stop? Isn’t that obvious . . .”

  Some kind of a dwaal, a deep daze, hangs on to me just like that stranger, all the way to Saturday morning. I can’t seem to shake it. I have to force myself out of bed. It’s crazy, I know I should be excited, about to see Annie again—but I also feel all wrong in myself. I catch a different bus to the Market Theatre. This place is Liberal Central in Joburg. They have all the anti-apartheid plays like Sarafina! here, this is where the white Jewish kid Johnny Clegg started playing Zulu music with an ex-gardener, Sipho Mchunu, before they hit it big with their band Juluka. There’s also a jazz club across from the theatre—first place I ever saw blacks and whites together in a social situation where the blacks weren’t serving the drinks. I dunno, hey, the laws of apartheid they just seem to disappear around here, abracadabra. I’m under the M1 overpass and I see the tables and the people, the flea market. But inside me that Cypriot guy’s voice keeps droning, and I’m seeing Kefiya and Ski Mask also, and Comrade Shaolin. In the flea market the heat sizzles on the hot asphalt around the stalls and I catch that rotten
y veg whiff that I believe is zol being smoked and the more familiar pong of tobacco and the sweet whiff of beer and a dozen different songs from different speakers and the sound of a live saxophone somewhere, a guitar somewhere else, street musicians playing for coins. The crowding faces are coal-black and pig-pink and everything in between, tall, short, fat, thin, beefy. The stall I want is at the far end, towards the glass skyscrapers. But when I reach it there’s no Annie so I check my watch and find I’m early. I wander up to the theatre. In the doorway there’re piles of free newspapers. I recognise a stack of Vryheid! Next to it is one called Liberation. I pick it up and read about a Mass Democratic Movement rally in town. A photo shows oceans of marching people. But I can’t remember seeing it on TV or in the Star. I turn the page and an article with the words the jews mugs my eyes. the jews, it says, are South African’s biggest slum lords. the jews are the “chief exploiters of the masses.” Soweto and all the other townships, it is stated, are in fact owned by the jews. Jewish banks, I read, are the reason that apartheid exists. It all went back to the Boer War and the Rothschilds and who really controlled the British Empire . . . I go sort of blank. It’s like when I was a kid walking home from shul and they’d shout at us from the back of a car. Bladdy Jewsss! I put the paper down and walk away and stop and look back at the pile of them. I think of all the people who are going to pick it up and read it, repeat it, pass it on. I’m walking again but I don’t remember starting out. Floating. I find myself at the stall again. Lots of teapots but still no Annie. I’m kind of relieved. Then someone taps me and says, “I think she wants you.” Looking around I spy an old blue Volkswagen. Dark curly hair behind the wheel with dark sunglasses, plus a hand that keeps waving, waving.

  31

  She’s wearing a vest so I can see her brown shoulders, and a pair of giant hoop earrings. I don’t ask where she’s taking me in the little Volksie and don’t say anything about the quality of her driving—she jerks between lanes like she’s trying to dislocate our necks and treats that brake pedal like she’s allergic to it. We howl all the way down Jan Smuts Avenue and up into Saxonwold and turn onto Chester Road and come back and circle the Zoo Lake. “If you lost,” I say, “just admit. I can direct you. Just tell me where we going.” She smirks at me. “Oh shut the hell up, Martin.” I give her an oversized shrug. “What do I know?” I say, “I only grew up here.” She flaps her hand. “Everyone’s a damn expert,” she says. “Sit back, take your chill pill.” So I keep quiet and we go around again and then she finally parks in the lot behind the lake, driving all the way to the pine shade at the far end, with no one in sight. She says, “I was making sure we’re not bein’ followed, you really wanna know.” She clips off her seat belt and scrunches around to face me square. “Martin, Martin Helger. In the flesh. Ha!” She takes off her sunglasses and it’s eyes to eyes in there and wham it hits me and I think so this is it. This is what all the songs and the movies are about. I’m boiling like a kettle with it.

  I put my hand on her brown smooth arm and my voice comes out choked. “I missed you.”

  “Look at him,” she says. “You been working out, Martin?” I think of my morning push-ups and I nod. “You got thicker around here,” she says, touching my neck, my shoulder. “Looks like you’ve been out in the sun too, some colour. Nice. And . . . you’ve changed, I mean for real.”

  “Have I.”

  “You’ve grown. You look good.”

  I nod, thinking of my new friends at school. “I know, hey,” I say. “Turning seventeen on Monday.” March sixth it is—I haven’t seen her since the pomegranate bench, two months ago.

  “Really? Happy birthday.”

  I grin at her and next thing I’ve snapped off my seat belt and I’m going for it with both arms and both lips. She puts a hand on my chest to stop me. “Hoo wee,” she says. “Have ta watch myself round you, don’t I.” I just grin like a mute idiot while she presses my hands back to my lap. She says, “So. Talk to me about how we do this. What facilities you got? When can we get the videos in there?”

  It takes me a second to change gears. “Didn’t you miss me too?”

  She tosses her chin. “Videos, Martin,” she says. “Videos.”

  So I tell her in detail, showing off a bit, how I got my way up into the video lab at school and what I saw there and what I think can be done with that equipment. I explain security at Solomon. The concrete walls and the armed guards, the cameras and alarms and procedures.

  She nods. “Okay,” she says. “So how’re you gonna do this?”

  I just stare. “Me?”

  “What did you think? You point the way and we’ll do the rest?”

  I sput-sputter for a bit. “I didn’t. I didn’t really think about it. I’m just telling you it’s there.”

  “Martin, listen to me. You’re the only one, okay. We keep coming up against walls. We have a mission but we’re bottlenecked with this copying, and falling behind. I never thought it would be this hard. You’re the one who’s got the master tapes. You need to get in there and make this happen like yesterday, right. You got in there already once, didn’t ya?”

  “That was for like a second. Mr. Gordon is always there.”

  “After classes?”

  I’m shaking my head. “He’s there till late. And there’s always some after-school club up there in the media annex, it’s busy till like five. Also we’ve got this system of in-out checking that the guards do at the gate, numbers have to match at end of day. They made it like that in case of kidnapping. So it’s not like I could just hide away somewhere in the school and come out later. But even if I did, then how would I get out?”

  Her big caramel eyes have squeezed down to two lines. “So what are you saying to me?”

  “I’m just telling you how it is.”

  “You’re kidding, right? You bring me all the way here for that? To tell me this is not possible. What’s the fucking point, Martin? Jee-zus!”

  I feel my back getting stiff, my face hot. “Well you the one who set this meeting.”

  “Because I thought you had good news and we could do this thing! That this was to plan it properly, in person. Duh.” Her anger, her contempt—it’s worse than any caning, I swear.

  I fold my arms. “Well I spose you thought wrong then didn’t you.”

  There’s this silence in which her mouth hangs open. Then she says, “Don’t you dare, Martin. Don’t you dare attitude me, okay?”

  I say, “Is that an order you giving me?”

  “I’ll give you some free advice, kiddo. Nobody in this world likes arrogance.”

  “I’m not—”

  “It doesn’t matter. Our emotions don’t matter. We’re soldiers and we are here to do a job. We need those videos copied, Martin . . . What, what is it now?”

  “Nothing.”

  “What is it?”

  “Nothing,” I say. “You should go to the Wimpy in Fordsburg sometime, that’s all.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Nothing. Order yourself a cheeseburger, well burnt.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing. You don’t even know.” Then I say, “They blow up kids, Annie. Girls. For all I know that could’ve been from one of your Fireseed tapes.”

  She’s quiet for a bit. Then she says, “Look, Martin. What are you tryna say, that you’re going soft on me? Have you forgotten about what Jules is already? What this is all about? We’re bringing down a machine here, man. This is a war. And they are the ones with the army, don’t forget that.”

  “What do those schoolgirls have to do with any machine?”

  “Civilians aren’t the targets.”

  “Could have fooled me.”

  She closes her eyes, takes a big breath. Opens them and says, “Martin, if burger joints keep blowing up, people will stay home and businesses will go under. That’s just a fact. Right or wrong. It spreads fear, adds pressure. Heat and tension. A revolution is like making popcorn. It has to hit a certain te
mperature before people start popping in masses.”

  “People aren’t frigging popcorn, Annie!”

  “It’s an analogy, okay. If whites get comfortable living with apartheid why would they change it, Martin? They’ve had it too easy for too long. It’s time they got a taste of their own damn medicine.”

  “Those bombs blow up blacks too,” I say.

  She shrugs. “The mission is to make this country ungovernable. There is no way around blood getting spilled—but that’s not a choice we made. The regime did.”

  “I don’t know,” I say.

  “Martin. Hey. Look at me. You remember what you agreed to with me in the garden, when I offered you a way out? I would have taken the tapes off your hands then, but you made a commitment to me and now it sounds to me like Martin Helger’s commitments are just a buncha crap.”

  That stings. “I’m here aren’t I.”

  “The world is full of fakes, Martin. Don’t be a fake. Have integrity. Think of Mandela. Be an adult, be a man. Do your job. Do what you promised me, Martin. Go and get my fucking videos copied.”

  Yesod

  32

  The Malcolm Steinway Memorial is in the corner of the marble lobby, it’s standing panels with photos. I’m not here to look at the first part but I can’t help myself. Back in ’eighty-two our buses were unarmoured and had the name of our school on them, a bad combo. In the photos from 29 September, bus number five looks like a giant can opener just went at it, backed up by about twenty hyperactive blowtorches. The driver, Ezra Thenjwayo, fifty-six, father of four, was blinded and lost his left arm. Malcolm Jerome Steinway, fourteen, reading a maths text, a boffin on his way to making prefect, was blasted into a nearby palm tree. Bystanders fainted when they saw what was left of him, dripping. A Soviet limpet mine is what did it.

  Those days our school had no security guards and only a chain-link fence around it which didn’t go all the way. The bomb changed everything for us, woke us up to the fact that we are a target. The board started an emergency fund and flew in a team of combat engineers from Israel to build us some top-notch security. The wall. Moving down the panels I can see the wall erecting itself in photos, the huge slabs of concrete lowered by cranes, the pickaxe teams digging, the wires and circuits and cameras and razor coils being laid down. There’s a framed Gold City Zionist full-page feature, and some old blueprints, signed by the engineers. Some markings there have the words original fortifications. In the feature it mentions “uncompleted sixties-era fortifications that were never used,” which the school authorities had “no intention of finishing.” They wanted to make it clear that the “older security structures” were “categorically not part of the new security plan” which is described as “brand-new” and “state of the art.”