The Mandela Plot

by Kenneth Bonert

  Annie is shivering, hugging herself. We’re wet and filthy. I go back down and collect the bag and put out the candles and climb up again. When I climb out and shut the bench lid it locks in place. I get down on the bimah carpet and search with the light from the bottom. It takes a while but I find a knothole where you can stick your finger in and there’s a tiny lever inside to open with. I pull off the sweaty goggles and we carry the bags down and cross the shul and go out through its back door. “Welcome to my school,” I tell Annie, leading us to the front office in the admin block where Volper’s secretary Mrs. Brune has her desk behind glass with a hole in it. Nasty Mrs. Brune who gives you that smirk when you’re on your way to getting jacks and feel like you want to die. Across from Volper’s office door—which I can’t look at even here at night without feeling a pinch in my guts—are the staff toilets. I towel off in the gents. Annie finds a hair dryer in the ladies and we use it to dry our clothes while we stand round in towels. I get a sudden impulse to kiss her and surprise myself by going for it. What’s more surprising is that she kisses back. I lose track of time and float in it and it starts to get heavy. I think it’s because we both came so close to dying, it makes your body want to breed or something. But Annie stops things and we get dressed. All-a-sudden I start giggling like a madman and she says what. I shake my head, nothing. She says what, tell me. I don’t want her to think I’m laughing at her or anything so I tell her the truth, that I’m laughing at myself, the great Romeo. I had this whole plan of seduction ready. As soon as the tapes were taping I was going to whip out the champagne and orange juice and mix us up some lekker mimosas which I’ve read are supposed to be killer aphrodisiacs. I show her the champagne and then we’re both giggling so hard we can’t breathe. This kind of mad laughing is also from almost dying, I reckon. Then she says, “You should have been checking the weather forecast instead”—which guillotines all humour cos she’s right. I was acting like I’m the expert on the pipe but I nearly drowned us both.

  I lead us up to the media annex. Annie looks inside the library. She touches the Commodore 64s in the computer room. “A little more than we have in Jules township, uh?” she says. “Just a tad.” I show her the video lab with the storeroom and its twelve machines. I show her how they hook up to the editing suite so we can record a dozen copies at a time. With three hours of recording time I can only manage one session per night. Annie nods, asks if we can high-speed dub. I shake my head—that’s not possible for video. She’s looking at the editing suite, she tells me she’s become convinced that the Fireseed tapes can be edited down to two hours, easy, without losing any of their effectiveness. A two-hour tape would make two tapings per session possible—doubling production. It’s a good idea but while she’s talking, getting excited by it, something else dawns on me and I say the f-word a few times, interrupting her. I’ve forgotten all about the master. That tape is deep in my satchel and it’s not shrink-wrapped like all the new blanks. When I dig it out we find it’s full of grit. I clean it the best I can but when we play it, Ski Mask and Kefiya are inside a bad snowstorm. So Annie adds some f-words of her own. Now there’s nothing we can do tonight. We might as well leave, but I don’t say that—instead I crack the bubbly. We pass it back and forth. After a while Annie gets up with the bottle and wanders back into the storeroom. There’re sixteen-mil cameras and reels there also. She asks can we copy video onto film? “I don’t know,” I say. “I never thought about it.” Annie asks me if I’ve ever heard of a spaza bioscope. I shrug. “A bioscope’s just a movie house.” She says a spaza is a little shop in someone’s house in a township. In townships they have these cinemas in houses and churches. “They charge like a buck a head,” she says, “and sometimes they get a few hundred folks for a screening. In the country they’ll hang up a sheet off a baobab tree for a screen. Get the whole village out. If we could put our tape onto film, that would reach whatever part of the audience can’t get to a VCR.” I tell her I’ll think about if it’s doable. Meantime we’ve killed the bottle, standing there, and I’m feeling like maybe we could get back to the kissing. Annie seems to read my mind cos she smiles with one side of her plump mouth and walks out and wanders down into the library. I follow behind her like a needy pet. She shows me a book by someone called Larski, a famous anthropologist. Tells me he’s the one who got her into politics. He “opened her eyes” to how the U.S. was responsible for South Africa because of its support for the apartheid regime going back years. She says it’s her tax money, meaning she’s also responsible. I ask her if he’s the reason why she came here. “I have to admit that scumbag was the start of it,” she says. “Even though he’s just a mega-hypocrite who lives like a banker on the Upper East Side from all the royalties he makes off his writing. He’s like the rest of em, he doesn’t do a damn thing.” She starts talking about how important Africa is to the U.S. That her country was built by African slaves. That all the movies and music and fashion and slang all come from black people who came from Africa. “Africa is our mother, the slave trade our umbilical cord,” she says. “It really is our flesh and blood. That’s why what’s going on here in South Africa is so damn important to me. And should be to all Americans.” She talks about Congress and votes and Reagan but I don’t really follow what she’s on about. I pay more attention when she switches to the South Africans “in exile” that she met overseas, blacks and whites, good friends (and I think maybe more by the way she talks about some of them) that got her caring about my country. She studied everything she could get her hands on about South Africa and she says although she’s only been here months she has been heading here for years.

  “Is it what you expected?”

  “No,” she says. “It’s more. So much more.”

  The champagne is touching my head now and I start edging up to her so she turns around and does a flying dance step away from me. “Well,” she says. “We’ve got plenty of time. Aren’t you gonna show me the place?” So I take her on a long tour, hiking up to the pool by the bus depot, crossing the huge empty rugby fields under the wild moon. Down to my class on the Pimple, then across to Assembly Hall where we get together once a week to shout our war cries and raise our two flags and sing the two anthems while Mrs. Stanz puts long fingers to the piano, first “Hu’Tikvah” in Hebrew and then “Die Stem” in Afrikaans, first “The Hope” and then “The Voice,” first the blue-and-white flag of Israel and then the four-colour of the Republic. We end up back at the front lobby and Annie wants to see the principal’s office. “He’s called a headmaster here,” I say, and lead the way to Volper’s office but when I get in front of the door I start shaking. Annie looks at me and then gives me a hug. We go in. The first thing on the right is the corner where you have to bend over. With my heart jumping in my chest I open the cupboard door. Annie says holy fuck. She’s standing close behind me and can see the rack of Volper’s canes all lined up like snooker cues. I tell her what it’s like to be caned. She takes one out and hefts it. “Goddamn bastards,” she says. “This is sick.” We go over to the giant teak desk where she picks up the framed photos of the wife and daughters. She goes behind and I follow, I’ve never seen it from this side, the leather throne side with the big window at your back, the sun in the eyes of whoever stands on the carpet. Your victim. I try the chair out and feel all wrong, jumping up like it’s dirtied me. There’s a low sideboard to the right, on top is the big intercom machine with a microphone on a stand. There’re rows of switches, one for each class. Volper can send his voice from here to catch hold of any boy he likes and have him brought in for some pain. Like he’s a god or something. Or he can talk to the whole school. That echoing voice. Volper—just the name is enough to squeeze more sick feeling out of my guts and I want to leave. But Annie is trying the drawers, finding them locked. She picks a paper clip from a jar and straightens it. She’s asking me about caning at other schools. I tell her our school is supposed to be liberal—that we have it lank easy compared to government schools. “A whole c
ountry built on whipping,” she says. “Top to . . . bottom.” She’s working the clip wire inside a drawer lock. She’s got skills I never knew about, then I remember how she opened our liquor cabinet that time. She pops open this drawer too and we find the punishment ledger. There’s a fortune in pain banked up in that thing, decades of canings noted down in Volper’s messy scrawl, so many it makes my head spin. Then Annie finds a ring of keys. She zooms in on one key with a funny shape, a cylinder with sides, octagonal-like. “These are for safes,” she tells me. “The little kind.”

  “How do you know?”

  “How do you think?”

  “You been trained,” I say.

  “Help me check around,” she says. We look behind paintings but find nothing until Annie rolls up the carpet and stamps on the parquet squares. There’s one section where the squares are loose. She digs them up, says, “What’d I tell you?” Sure enough there’s a small safe sunk into the concrete. She fits the cylinder key and unlocks it and passes me up a pile of envelopes. I empty them on the desk. Photostats of birth certificates and insurance documents. Some bright Krugerrands in plastic sleeves and a copy of Volper’s employment contract with the board. Quite a few sheets of music, handwritten, that I reckon is Volper’s own composition, cos I remember he used to teach music. There’s a beautiful Piaget watch. And that’s about it. But when we go to return this stuff, Annie feels the bottom of the empty safe—it’s a piece of carpet on wood. She lifts it and underneath there’s a little wooden box carved with rhinos and mopani trees. Inside the box is a gold chain on a velvet base. I would have shut it then but Annie says wait and gives the box a shake, then she lifts the velvet base out.

  Time passes in silence. I’m the one who speaks first.

  “Jesus fucking Christ.”

  “You’re taking this,” she says.

  “Maybe,” I say.

  “You can use it, man.”

  “Yes,” I say. “But do I really want to?”

  Xanadu

  38

  There are lank ways we can catch a lift: with Mouth’s cousin, with Spunny’s uncle, with someone’s ma. But it gets later and later and the cousin is taking the Porsche which has no room and Spunny’s uncle is not in the mood and someone’s ma will have a cadenza if she knows where we’re going. No worries, okes, says Spunny. There’s taxis, there’s other okes who have their own drivers. But the drivers all have the night off and who’s ganna call for the taxi and we can’t get through on the phone and what do you expect it’s a Saturday bladdy night. Then Mouth says that belling for a taxi is a chicken move anyway. He’s had enough of all this dof backchat, he hates it when the okes can’t make a simple flippen arrangement. We are worse than a pack of females. But if we are men, true men, he says, we hitch into town like men. That’s the proven way to do it, and always has been. Spunny says oright. And me? Who am I to argue.

  That’s how come the three of us are walking at the side of Empire Road with our thumbs out and no one stopping except for black taxis which Mouth refuses to let us get into. Those combis are deathtraps, he says. And aside from the accidents didn’t we know about the three teenagers who got abducted when they got into one the other day, man it was on Police File and all. Mouth is talking even faster than he always does, so fast I think he might actually pull a tongue muscle, telling us how the doors got locked on the teenagers who got driven to a field near some bladdy township in the East Rand where a witch doctor was waiting with strong ropes and sharp knives. The cops said they were all alive while their organs were being removed, they could tell by the way the blood sprayed, the hearts still beating. “The sangomas need the body parts fresh to make good muti,” Mouth explains. “They chop your cock off and stick it in a jar to pickle. That’ll give someone many wives.”

  “Lovely,” says Spunny. “One day there’s a mix-up and oke reckons it’s a pickled cucumber in there. Slaps it on his hot dog by mistake.”

  “Bonus protein,” says Mouth.

  We go on ignoring the Toyota HiAces full of black people that keep slowing down for us and time passes and a white driver stops in his XR3. Ja, he’ll take us into the Brow—Hillbrow, where all the action is. He’s a young Afrikaner oke, tells us he’s just finished his national service, two compulsory years in the army. He’s playing loud Afrikaans gospel music and talking about some suicidal moments he had back there but he pulled through with a little bit of vasbyt—determination—you know? And the help of Jesus Christ his lord and saviour. Up front next to him, Mouth asks him what the army’s like and he tells us how horrible it was to be a “lelike kak-smaaking troepie”—an ugly shit-tasting infantryman—who was “altyd afgekaked en opgefokked”—always getting worked and beaten. But it was praying to his lord and saviour that helped him a lot and do we pray to Jesus? So Mouth goes and tells him, no man, we are Jewish, and that makes Spunny kick the back of Mouth’s seat. Meanwhile our driver’s getting excited about having actual Jews in his Ford and before we can get out on Smit Street we have to accept some of his church pamphlets.

  Town looks all different at night, with all the electric lights and the dark shadows. There’re crowds of a kind you wouldn’t see in the day, some with shiny clothes, some in rags. We walk all the way down to Thunderdome where we are supposed to rendezvous with the rest of the okes. It’s a long white building with this giant neon lightning bolt on top and spotlights swinging coloured beams at the stars. In front is a long line waiting to get in and at the front of the line by the doors are four large men that I can’t stop staring at. “They wearing tuxedos,” I say aloud.

  “Checkit Charity,” says Spunny. “The kid’s in shock. Has never seen a tux in his life before.”

  “Those are the bouncers, Charity,” Mouth says in slow-motion moron talk. “Bounce-uhs.”

  “Don’t stare at them like that, Charity.” I feel Spunny’s hand on my shoulder. “First thing to learn about the clubs is the bouncers. The bouncers, they own this whole night round here. They all work together.”

  “Not just the clubs,” says Mouth. “Bouncers rule, ay. Forget the Poras and the Lebs”—Portuguese and Lebanese gangs—“and anyone else. The bouncers are the main manne here. Forget about cops, you never smell a cop down here Saturday nights and anyway cops won’t touch bouncers neither. Everyone craps bricks for bouncers.” I ask them if it’s only bouncers that wear tuxes and Spunny snorts and tells me, “Listen, Charity, if you see a staunch-looking oke in a tux he is not heading for the opera. Just get out of his bladdy way.” They look at me like how stupid can you get—they can’t read my mind and see it’s filled with my brother in a tux, the jacket hanging on the pipe at dawn.

  Even with all our transportation grief we’ve still ended up being the earliest ones here, so I say why don’t we walk up to Xanadu. Spunny says only wrinkled old grots go to Xanadu, all the lekker chicks will be here. Mouth agrees. But I say I want to go check what it’s like and I’m ganna head up. “You can’t go on your own,” says Spunny. “You a babe in woods.” I say, “Watch me,” and off I go. They catch up to me, calling me a schmock and retarded, saying I’m “taking lank liberties,” but we all walk together up Claim Street. There are parts here that get a bit iffy and I notice Mouth and Spunny speeding up and going quiet. We pass alleyways where tons of people are sleeping on newspapers—it’s true what Annie said about the races mixing in town, black people are oozing in here, apartheid breaking down like a clogged oil filter. Farther up I see a drunk man beating a woman while a drunk woman beats on him with what looks like a teakettle. There’s a little mini park and people lying there and I see what looks like a grown man molesting a barefoot boy in shorts, the man cupping the crotch and the boy crying. But I keep walking as fast as the others—all those sights being flashes from a different world, the black world, and we can’t involve ourselves, can’t cross that line, otherwise bad things will happen. Anyway it’s so much part of us to pretend that they don’t exist that it’s like on automatic. I wouldn’t even have thought a
bout them prolly, if not for Annie.

  We pass Pretoria Street, where there are pool halls and the Hillbrow Record Centre and the Milky Lane for milkshakes. A few blocks farther up, my mates make a turn and there it is, a neon sign over a door—xanadu. Two bouncers are standing under the sign in their tuxedos. A job that makes you come home at dawn with a bloody chunk of someone’s ear stuck in your hair. Meantime Spunny and Mouth are groaning and moaning cos there is also a line-up here. “Everywhere you go,” says Mouth, “there’s always some bladdy schvantz standing in front of you.”

  “Let’s wait,” I say.

  “Ach, you mad,” says Spunny. “Wait for what? By the time we get to the door it’ll be time to duck back to Thunderdome.” He suggests we go graze somewhere, get some chow at Fontana, maybe a roast chicken. Mouth says nawt, let’s head back to Pretoria Street and jol a game of pool to kill some time. Then Mouth tunes me that anyway Xanadu is a kuk spot. You go down into a basement, it’s small and dirty but it used to be this famous jazz club, there’s still some photos on the walls. I can hear the thump of the dance music coming up and it sounds like house beats, the fat bass notes making me think of a giant toad burping in a cave. They start playing a dance mix of “Need You Tonight” by INXS and suddenly I step into the road. Spunny and Mouth both shout my name, ask where I’m going. I hold up my hand, tell them I’ll just be a sec, and cross to the other side and walk along to the front, passing the line-up on my right. There are women with dark purple round their eyes and glitter on their cheeks and hair all lacquered flat and spread out like mini thorn trees. There’re men with brown leather jackets with the sleeves pulled up to the elbows and some with tennis headbands and everyone is white. Some of them call out things to me. “Hey, junior, over here is the line, china.” “Where you scheme you heading, lightie?” “Check at this little wanker go.” “You go, boy, sort them out one-time.” They laugh. At the front there are some traffic cones and behind are the two men in tuxedos, one with hair cut short on the sides and left long at the back. He’s the one who looks at me when I say, “I wanna ask you okes something.” Now the first person in line says from behind, “Hey, what’s this now, who’s this little skelm scheme he is? We next man. We waiting here.” The bouncer with the long hair pokes his cheek out with his tongue and says to me, “Get the fuck away.”