“Let go or I report.”
The Gooch goes red and trembles so much his whistles jingle. “You. You disgust me. Have you got a letter for your absence?”
“No.”
“Go to Volper’s office.”
“Okay, sure,” I say, trying to move off.
But he redoubles his grip and shakes me. “What the hell is going on with Volper and you?”
“None of your business. Sir.”
“You gotten too bladdy big for your boots, Martin.”
“Maybe,” I say. “But I suggest you let me go. Otherwise it’s you who’ll get reported to Volper and not me. It’ll be your job. Trust me on that.” The Gooch stares and then walks off, putting his fist through the prefab wall.
In class I take my corner seat. Spunny looks away. Schnitz studies the ceiling. Turdster picks his nails. “Pack of wankers,” I say. No one answers. I raise my voice. “Pack of useless wankers.”
54
Now that I’m caught up on sleep and back at school, I start to think about the Fireseed tapes again. Annie needs me. Time to get back to work. I slide into the whole pipe routine as easy as kuk through a duck. Wake to my alarm after midnight. Collect my togs from the Sandy Hole and lower the bike to the street. Glide through Greenside, my Greenside, zone of the high walls, on streets dark and silent. Then the park at night and the riverbed and putting on my pads and overalls, the key to unlocking the grate tied to a string around my wrist so I won’t have to go hunting for it once I’m up there. In the media annex while the video machines hum, I set up a 16-mil camera facing the TV screen and try to record directly onto film. It doesn’t work at first but with some reading in the library and then some fiddling with the set-up eventually it comes right—the film speed has to be synchronised to match the flicker rate of the video image, it’s not a good copy but it’s usable, and there’s no soundtrack to worry about. I’m shocked at how much film is needed, though, nearly four full reels. I don’t think it’s practical to do this on a large scale. I drop the reels off in the shed, along with the new tapes, and bike home.
Wednesday afternoon I’m heading down to Viljoen’s, expecting a coded note from Annie—about the film reels but also probably a lot of cross words for me being absent. There’s a yellow weaver bird building a nest in the tree next to the post office on Greenway Road. I stop for a sec to watch it work—it looks like a beaut of a nest to me, shaped like a butternut squash out of braided grass, but my opinion’s not the one that counts. The female weaver bird will come and inspect, and if she doesn’t like it it’ll be ripped into a million little pieces and the male will have to start building all over again. A helluva life, hey. I walk on along past the doggy-grooming parlour in the open mall at the end of the parking lot and turn into Viljoen’s. Straightaway I see that Dolf isn’t there, it’s the old man at the counter. I surprise myself by how calm I keep, I’m getting used to handling nerves, as I ask him if there’s a book left for me to pick up. I start to say my name but he cuts me off. “I knows who you are, boy.” He’s got blotches on his cheeks and yellow hairs in his white moustache, a pouch of cherry pipe tobacco showing in his shirt pocket. “You don’t come here anymore, hear me?”
“Beg a pardon?”
“You knows what I said,” he says. “You want my son, go across to the Mike’s Kitchen. He’s there for you.”
“Beg a pardon, meneer?”
“Stop pretending you can’t hear. Go to Mike’s Kitchen for Dolf. That’s the message. And don’t you come back here. Ever.”
Grinning like a village idiot, shrugging as if to say You are crazy, old man, I turn around and exit but the calm has been squeezed out of me and my heart’s tap-dancing away like whatsisname Baryshnikov and Gregory Hines in that movie White Nights as I stand there on the pavement. Mike’s Kitchen is a chain restaurant, there’s one across the road, on the upper level. I dinkum do not know what to do. Go home? Pretend like nothing’s happened? What did he mean, Dolf is in there? Why would he be in there? Eventually I cross the street, telling myself I’ll just peek through the window. The building has a rampway instead of stairs and at the top I find the restaurant door open. There’s a booth to the right of the door and sitting there in it and looking right at me is Captain Bokkie Oberholzer. Opposite him are two other cops, bottles of Lion Lager on the table. I don’t see Dolf anywhere. Oberholzer’s waving me in like we’re old mates and I’m expected. Well, I am, I think, going numb. The two cops, huge men both, put on their caps and haul themselves out and I sit on the warm vinyl where they’d been sweating.
“How’s tricks?” Oberholzer says. “How things in the land of Helger?”
“Not so great,” I say.
He’s drinking Fanta, not beer. I remember him saying how his father, Magnus, died drunk in that rusty farmhouse in the klipveld, and I’ll bet that’s why he doesn’t drink. Him and Comrade Shaolin both—they’re more similar than they probably realise. He asks me how my daddy is doing. “He is fine, Captain,” I say.
“Must be hard for him, after what happened to your brother now.”
“You know about that?”
He smiles. “When you waltzed in here, you were looking for a different fellow, were you not?”
I’m silent.
“Lemme help your memory,” Oberholzer says. “He’s about this tall. Dark hair. Cocky little bastard. I know the whole family, the Viljoens from Linden, ja. Every single one of those Viljoens is henpecked by his woman. But your sad pal young Dolfie Viljoen he will never even get within a hundred kays of a woman. He’s the kind of fellow whose wife will be his own right hand, you know what I mean. Collecting comics as a grown man. Terrified of the rugby field. Going into weirdo black politics with commies. Cos you know why? When you pal around with cripples you don’t feel like you are limping anymore, that’s why.” Oberholzer leans over the table. “Black politics is for losers. I am looking at you, Martin Helger, and I am asking the question of myself, does he want to be a loser, another fokken waste of space like Dolf fokken Viljoen? Or is this one like his brother?” He lifts up a fist and shakes it. “Hard. Hard as diamond. Unbreakable. A winner.”
“My brother,” I hear myself say. “My brother, he’s been—”
“I know what’s happened to him. I am just saying a comparison.” Oberholzer uses a serviette to clear his nose, wiggling it around, taking his time. “I’ll tell you the difference between, let’s say, a man like your brother and a dom piel”—a stupid prick—“like Dolf Viljoen. Just for hypothetics now. Now you apply some pressure to a Dolf Viljoen and he squishes on you just like the soft piece of shit he is. But your big brother, uh-uh. You cannot squeeze a war hero like that. It’s another type I know well. It’s like a mystery in there. You have to find the flaw. Every diamond has one. One tap—boof—it’ll all crack right open. But you have to find it. If you try use brutal force he will not break. Put him in a machine, that machine it will break first.”
“I’m not sure what you’re saying, Captain.”
“Kuk. You know. You been helping little Dolfie Viljoen there with the distribution of subversive literatures. Nobody in the SB even cares about a speck like Dolf Viljoen. He is a sad little legend in his own mind, that’s all. But even still, I see your name on a report, I perk up, hey. I wanna know how it is you get involved. So me and crybaby we had a fatherly chat. Like I say, soft as kuk. Squish squish. He’s told me everything.”
Everything. Does that mean Annie? I say, “Honestly, I don’t know anything about what you’re saying, Captain. I get paperbacks from Viljoen, that’s all. I’m a big reader. Oom Viljoen”—the old man—“was in there today, he told me to come over here. Said Dolf is here.”
Oberholzer smiles with his lips all pressed. “Makes me very angry,” he says. “Very, very angry. I thought we were friends, Martin. I even brought this for you.” He reaches down and brings up a fat file with elastics around it and puts it on the table and drums his long fingers on top. “You know, I could let you take t
his with you. I’m sure it will be a big comfort to your family.”
“Is that . . . is it my brother’s?”
“So bright,” he says. “I admire your brains.” He swallows col’drink, his Adam’s apple pumping, wipes his mouth on his sleeve, and burps. “Tell me now, when you grew up with Marcus, did the two of you share a room?”
“No.”
“Where was his, next door?”
“Across the passage. My room’s at the back, he had the garden one.”
“The big brother. What was his room like? Describe it for me.”
“I don’t know. Full of boxing stuff, smelling of sweat.”
“Any books?”
“He used to read comics a lot, he liked the funny ones, Beano and that. Then it was the boxing magazines when he went to Solomon. He changed a lot.”
“Tell me, what did he care about the most? I don’t mean sport, like boxing. I mean more general.”
“Care about?”
“I’m talking in life in general. I mean the one thing that means—that meant—the most to him in the whole world.”
“I don’t know.”
“Think harder, Martin. Use those brains. It’s in your interest to think your hardest, believe me.”
I am thinking plenty hard but not about my brother, I’m trying to guess how much Oberholzer knows about Operation Fireseed, about the hundreds of tapes, about me using the school—and Annie, of course, always back to Annie. It all depends what Dolf told him, what Dolf knows. But if they knew everything wouldn’t I be in John Vorster Square right now, having that Hebrew code shoved in my face? Or else . . . I just don’t know. And I can’t understand why he’s asking about Marcus. And why the file? I cough and say, “Well, my brother—it’s hard for me to think about him now, you know, Captain. We’re all in a lot of shock. My parents especially. It hurts.”
“Oh, I’m sure it does,” Oberholzer says. “I’m very sure of that. Especially your dad, hey.” He leans forward. “He must be really in the hurt, hey?”
I look away, saying nothing.
“Martin, you need to talk to me. If you do, you can have this file, you can take it with you. If you don’t, we’ll have to have another kind of talk. And that means a trip to my office. You understand?”
I look at him again, and nod.
“I want you to do your best to explain him to me. Your brother. It’s important now.”
I ask as politely as I can, “And why is that, Captain?”
“You ask me why? Don’t you know already, Martin? Can’t you see? Because I care about you Helgers.” He smiles properly now, showing all his yellow teeth. “You people, you are all such a dear project of mine.”
55
Instead of going home I walk to the Emmarentia Library and find a quiet table off by myself to open up the file. From the outside it looks hell of a thick, like maybe a hundred pages. But as I turn the pages I find most of the type has been blacked out. Even holding pages to the light you can’t see through these fat lines at all. Whatever there is to read is in Afrikaans, a high, technical level of the language that’s hard for me to understand. So I fetch myself a dictionary and a pencil and start translating as best I can. It takes a while but slowly a picture of Marcus’s military career emerges. At the beginning they sent him to 5 South African Infantry Battalion in Ladysmith, to do his basics. After that he volunteered for the paratroopers, passing the selections course and joining 1 Parachute Brigade at the Tempe base near Bloemfontein. Then came six months of paratroop training and a dozen jumps before he received his wings. After that he volunteered again, passing through another round of selections to join 44 Pathfinder Platoon, based at Murray Hill, south of Pretoria, for more specialised training. The file has a performance sheet from a commander in the Pathfinders. I read the word vertroulik—confidential—at the top, and underneath there are ten points of evaluation. Number one is verantwoordelikheid—responsibility—and two is leierskap—leadership—down to number ten, aanbeveling—recommendation—which says that the candidate should “substantiewe bevorder word”—be made substantive in his rank, which I think means he got a promotion—and begin his duties effective 01 05 1988. The evaluation remarks next to the ten points are full of words like outstanding and impeccable and first-rate. Marcus is described as highly intelligent and cool-headed, extremely disciplined and self-motivated. But at point number eight, lojaliteit—loyalty—it’s noted that despite his excellence as a soldier there is a small political question due to certain statements about the mission of the South African Defence Force and also the candidate’s Jewish background. Nonetheless he has proved himself to be thoroughly trustworthy in his actions and an exemplary leader of men. There’s a note later on about a transfer to the Ondangwa base in South West Africa, but after that it’s almost all black ink.
I check the time and then I start looking up all the books I can about the paratroopers and the army and that, making notes as I read. When I’m finished I consider hiding the file in the Sandy Hole with the rest of my secrets—but Marcus isn’t just my brother, he’s another son. When I get back home it’s late and they’re already at the table, worrying about me—they wouldn’t have before this happened to Marcus, but everything’s different now. I tell them the truth, that I was at the library, looking up military things. And then I bring out the file, telling them a military courier came and dropped it off and I signed for it. They’re too excited to question my story. All Isaac says when he sees all the black ink is, “Bladdy bastids.”
But at least for the first time they have some official version of his history. They knew paratrooper, they knew on the Border. They also had some idea that Marcus was in the special forces because of his two-line letters that used to come every now and then. Isaac says he thought maybe Marcus had ended up “in the Recces” because he’s always been “so bladdy good at everything he does.” In fact it would not surprise him one bit if it turned out he’d been captured like that famous Recce, Captain Du Toit, taken in Angola in ’eighty-five and held in solitary confinement for almost three years before his release as part of a prisoner swap deal. Du Toit had been on TV when he came out, all bony and thin-looking as he shook President Botha’s hand. “Can you imagine what a hellhole that was for him,” Isaac says.
“Oy Gott,” Arlene says. “I don’t want to think about it.”
“He’s not in the Recces,” I say, explaining that Recces, the famous Reconnaissance Commandos, are permanent force men, in the army for life, not national servicemen doing their two years like Marcus is. “Oh thank God,” says Arlene, because at least it means that he hasn’t signed up to be a lifer—as if that makes any difference now.
Meanwhile Isaac is reading again. “So what’s this Pathfinder?” he asks, and I explain to them what I’ve looked up about Pathfinders. That they’re similar to Recces because they train to operate in small teams but there’re only a very few Pathfinders compared to Recces, and that mostly what Recces did was hide out behind enemy lines and make observations where the Pathfinders are more trained to do raids and attacks, they get dropped in ahead of an attack to “find the path” and put down marks for the others to land on. Isaac says, “So you’re telling me these guys are the first ones into the shit.” And I say, “Basically, ja, I think so.” And that’s when Arlene starts to cry like I’ve never seen before and I feel terrible for bringing this stupid file home. I get the horrible idea that Oberholzer is laughing all the way back to John Vorster Square. He got me to deliver this document straight to the heart of my family, like a poison arrow.
56
Arlene has started going back to work, at least. I think it’s good, more than good—I think it’s what they both need, to keep themselves busy. But Isaac doesn’t put on his overalls in the morning, instead he’s still in bed when I leave for school. After last bell I take the bus to the Yard and sit with Arlene in her office with its big steel vault in one wall where all the cash takings are stored, while she does the books or whatev
er. We talk a lot. More than I think we ever have before. And we talk to each other in a way that is so grown-up it almost scares me. Especially after I confess to her what happened between Isaac and the staff, so she can understand that I think it’s the main reason he can’t come back to work, cos he’s embarrassed to face them. Ma’s worried about him and so am I and it’s also a lot easier to talk about him than Marcus. She really can’t even say my brother’s name without crying. So I sit there with my chin on my hand as Ma’s typewriter clackclacks or her pen scribbles and I listen to her hum and see the sunlight across her long neck. She stirs two lumps of sugar into her tea with milk, not the Russian way like Zaydi and Isaac who take it with lemon and seedy jam. She always wanted us to go to England where it’s safe, me and Marcus. To become gentlemen. Attend Cambridge. She tells me she always wished we’d taken that hopsy popsy over to Britain. Arlene has her own private language like that. A hopsy popsy is a flight and the dipsy doodles are the restless itchy feelings she gets in her legs at night and the wriggly boom booms are insects that crawl and my nickname is Toppers. She likes to say “There’s nothing like the English, Toppers,” and I know she means their style, their classy way of doing things. Arlene never became the dancer on the stage she always wanted to be but now in these long talks I feel sad when she says, “I never had the West End, but I had you and Marcus,” and puts her cool palm to the side of my face. “My Toppers,” she says. “My Marty-Mart. I had you and you are worth more than any stage ever could be. You and your brother are more valuable than a million Londons.”
We go home together and find Isaac sitting there with his bottle and his paper, in vest and underpants.
“Da, don’t you think it’s time to go back to work?”
“Why, are things falling apart there without me?”
“No,” says Arlene. “Everything’s fine. Between Hugo and Mr. Magid and myself, it’s all running nicely.”
The Mandela Plot Page 28