The Mandela Plot

by Kenneth Bonert

  “Then what am I needed for?”

  It’s not until the last weekend of the month that there’s a change. That’s when Sunday stocktaking is due. In her office Arlene tells me that she’s talked it over with Isaac and it looks as if he’ll come with her to do what they’ve always done, the two of them alone in the Yard on a Sunday morning, going in very early together, stopping for some fresh chocolate rugelach at the baker in Doornfontein, then going on to do the stocktaking carefully by hand, all the items in the warehouse totaled up by the time they’re finished, and then back in time for the Sunday braai, buying the meat on the way. It’s the same ritual they’ve had since as long as I can remember. I think it’s even as old as their marriage. And because it doesn’t involve the staff, it will be easy for Isaac to do, Ma says she hopes it’ll break the ice and get him to start coming to work regularly the next week. So I’m not surprised when I hear their voices very early on the Sunday and then the car doors being slammed. The sky is just turning blue as I slip out and climb the dewy fig tree to look over the wall in time to see Isaac’s rusted bakkie going up Clovelly Road. I see the back of Ma’s head beside my father’s. I wave once. Of course there’s no reply. They haven’t seen me.

  57

  A hand is pressing on my chest. I open my eyes. Zaydi is standing over me. I don’t think he’s ever been in my room before. It gives me a fright, this old man with his trembly mouth, his wrinkled skin so white he looks like all his blood dried up years ago. I ask him what’s wrong and he says in his whispery Yiddish that there are soldiers climbing over the wall. I close my eyes cos I know I’m dreaming—a new version of the Nightmare is finally here, but my God, this one feels so real. I ignore Zaydi’s hand prodding at me. But then I hear banging on the front door and it’s loud and it doesn’t stop. And I hear voices. Afrikaans, not German. They’re calling for us to open up. They’re saying police.

  58

  Maybe Annie Goldberg was all wrong about the Nightmare, maybe it wasn’t all about me. The garden wasn’t me and the Nazis coming in weren’t me and Zaydi wasn’t my soul—maybe the truth is the Nightmare was a vision, like a prophecy. Only it was slightly off, my brain confusing all the characters-to-come. These guys aren’t Nazis, they’re just cops in uniform, and they’re not here to hurt me—at least not physically. They’re here to talk softly to me, to not meet my eyes. To treat me like I’ve been hit with a disease so bad all a person can do is feel sorry. I get in the back of their police car and we drive to Vrededorp. It’s Sunday, 25 June 1989. My eyes close themselves. If I were flying in the air over Johannesburg I would be able to see the Ponte Tower sticking up off the ridge like a gigantic chimney made of steel and glass, and down there next to it is the ribbon of Harrow Road and underneath the motorway there are big boulders sticking out of the ground, by the turn-off to Gordon Terrace and the way down to Bertrams. And over there is Doornfontein, Beit Street, where Isaac Helger grew up, and there next to it is the giant mushroom of Ellis Park Stadium, but me I’m flying west, to Vrededorp, and when I get over it I start falling hard. I see the big rooftop where De La Rey Street meets the 5th Street park, it’s rushing up at me faster and fas—

  “Martin, Martin,” says the voice softly, and I open my eyes. The two cops are looking back at me from the front seat. I seem to make them frightened, it’s in their faces. We’re here, they say. They’re asking me if I’m okay. Okay? I nod once and open the door and walk across the street to the green front doors of Lion Metals Pty. Ltd. It’s a lovely Sunday, the sun directly over my head. The flashing lights on the cars in the bright air look so jolly, blue and red, and the neighbourhood people crowded on the other side of the tape are looking at me with blank faces. I go around and then there’s a man in front of me, wearing a suit, who says his name is Detective Sergeant van Rensburg. He’s the one who is saying, “You can come through if you want, but.”

  “Yes,” I say. “It’s my right.”

  We start walking. I know the way past the counters, to the left, down the passage with the scratched linoleum tiles and the framed Tretchikoff print of a woman with a flower in her hair on the greasy wall. I hear myself saying, “Are you also from the Brixton Murder and Robbery Squad?”

  “That’s right.”

  At the doorway he reaches across. His breath smells of coffee. “Are you really sure?” I nod and we go in. The Austen Petersen vault door, constructed in 1928, weighing, I know, approximately five hundred kilos, is now fully open. It’s quiet in this room which is my ma’s office, except for the sounds of the people moving around and the shutter click from the man with the camera inside the vault. “You can see in from here, but careful and don’t step in or touch,” says van Rensburg. “Forensics.” I go up and look into the vault from the edge. They’ve set lights up and everything is very clear. I am dreaming. I am dreaming. I am dreaming. I see two corpses, both are naked. The flesh looks like wax and there are these black dots everywhere which I understand is dried blood as I smell the bad butcher smell, like metal on the air. The male corpse is all twisted, it seems like it could be making a letter from an alphabet I can almost read. Hebrew. Because this is a dream and everything is a code in a dream, a symbol, that’s all. The other corpse is a she. She has my mother’s hair. The faces of both are like dark balloons, the eyeballs sticking out. The mouths wide open and the bellies swollen. I think: my mother, Arlene, is two fingers taller than my father, Isaac. We make jokes about this. I look at the fingers and the fingertips are black.

  I don’t remember backing up or turning away—how could I be in the other office now? I can hear Mr. Magid’s voice from down the passage. I’m holding a can of col’drink, Fanta grape. But I don’t remember anyone giving me anything. This is what happens in dreams. Right? Another detective is talking. My ma likes ginger biscuits with her tea. She gets the dipsy doodles in her legs at night. She takes milk and two sugars. I fell out of the sky and crashed through the roof. The soldiers climbed over the wall and banged on the door, they had news. This detective’s voice is explaining how an anonymous call brought police, someone saying they’d seen black males fleeing the premises. Investigating officers found signs of struggle and the manager, Mr. Magid, was located to open the safe. The detective says the word suffocation. Someone must have made them strip and go into the vault. Probably at gunpoint. It would have happened right away when they got here, the voice says, maybe they were waiting for them, maybe they walked in on a robbery.

  I hear myself say, “Suffocated. That must have taken how long?”

  “That vault seals airtight, but it’s big enough to last two people I’d say an hour, maybe more. But they threw in a smoker.”

  “A what?”

  “A kind of grenade. The burning prolly et up the oxygen, on top of the smoke inhalation. We talking a couple of minutes, maximum. Like putting gas in there.”

  And he shows it to me, the incendiary device, sealed in a plastic evidence bag, a charred tube of steel now. This choked my parents. I’m not dreaming. I make videos that teach bombs like this. Her cool palm on the side of my face, her ginger biscuits. It’s a dipsy doodle, Marty-Mart. If you scratch at steel hard enough you can grind the tips of your fingers down to blood. I’m sitting down by the window now. I don’t remember moving here. I hear another detective talking to the first by the doorway, murmuring a question in Afrikaans—where is he? The other shakes his head, saying, “Daardie onnosel kameelperd. Hy’t hierdie een gebring.” That dumb giraffe, he brought this one. I think this one means me, and I start to listen hard, pretending not to. In Afrikaans they’re saying:

  —This is the son.

  —This is the son?

  —This is the son. It was him that sent the car for him. Did you show him—

  —He wanted to.

  —Jesus.

  —Well, like he said. He has a right.

  They bring in a tape recorder. I answer questions. A fat blue fly sticks on the wall. I wonder if it has been in Ma’s office, in the vault. The q
uestions keep coming, monotonous. Who had access to the building on a Sunday morning, what were my parents doing there alone. Who knew the combination of the safe, what were the names of the staff members, what were the items missing . . . At some point I’m talking about Hugo, Hugo Bleznik.

  “You know where to reach him?”

  I give Hugo’s phone number from memory. He lives in Hyde Park, I say. But suddenly I’m not so sure that’s true.

  59

  Some questions for the rabbi. Dear Rabbi, I know that you’re supposed to sit shiva for seven days after the funeral but what if it’s a double? I mean does that mean fourteen days? Because you’re supposed to get all the mourning out of your system during shiva, right? Well if it’s double the mourning that you have to do then shouldn’t you take double the number of days? Isn’t that logical, dear rabbi? With questions like that, I should be in yeshiva, right? I mean who knew I had such a talmudic mind . . . The funerals were on Thursday. Normally they would have been buried within a day or two, that’s the Jewish way, but the forensic pathologist had to perform autopsies. Also, I was waiting for Auntie Rively.

  Oh God. Auntie Rively.

  My (late) father’s older and only sister, forty years of living in Israel hasn’t done much to her South African accent and she still has the same nervous giggle that I remember from when I was a kid, the same orange-yellow wig and long print dresses worn with white Dunlop tennis shoes. She came by herself, leaving Uncle Yankel and her seven sons back in Jerusalem. The first thing she did on arrival was throw a crying tantrum about the autopsies. Autopsies were a grayser aveyre, a huge big sin, and how could I, how could I have let it happen? How could I have stood by and let them cut up the bodies of my own parents and her own brother? Do you know how they desecrate the holy human form when they do an autopsy? What was wrong with me? And poor Zaydi alive to have it done to his own child. She took over all the arrangements for the funeral, for everything. I didn’t care. Still don’t. Someone has taken out my eyes and ears and mouth and replaced them all with big lumps of cotton wool. My arms and legs are being run via remote control. I am stuck in a huge mistake. Any second now someone’s ganna rewind this video.

  We had the funerals in Westpark Cemetery, near the rose gardens of Roosevelt Park at the top of the Emmarentia Dam, not far from where Gitelle Helger, my Bohbi—Zaydi’s wife—is buried. Lots of people came. I had to stand there with Auntie Rively and shake the hands as the line moved up. Now we are sitting shiva—seven days total was the rabbi’s answer—at my house in Greenside, which means prayers every night and people coming to say them with us. Auntie Rively’s organised the catering, she hired a maid also. I hardly know anyone. Some of them are friends of Ma, some are connected to the business. But there’s also a large religious bunch that Auntie Rively has brought in—and they’re all strangers. They’re chassidim, black-hatters, a sort we never had much to do with. I start to realise that Auntie Rively has become one of them, they have branches everywhere and she’s got in touch with the Joburg lot and they’ve sent people. Even through the plugs of cotton wool this bugs me. I mean I don’t know this strange rabbi she’s brought in to run the services. Our rabbi, my parents’ rabbi, is Rabbi Tershenburg from the Emmarentia Shul. He comes around but he’s been pushed aside, these others have taken over, always a crowd of black hats and wigs in the lounge around the table full of smoked salmon and chopped herring and bagels and cream cheese. They want to talk to me about their rebbe and all the messianic miracles he does, want me to come and visit their synagogue or enroll in some course. I know my parents wouldn’t want these strangers here. But I’m stuffed with cotton wool and Auntie Rively is running the show with her giggling and her arranging.

  Now shiva is over and Auntie Rively says she’s found a “properly kosher” care home for Zaydi in Glenhazel. The remote controller of my limbs sends me to bed and I lie there mostly not sleeping like I’ve been doing all week. This morning I find Auntie Rively showing a man around the place, he’s making notes. I ask who this is and she tells me it’s the estate agent. I slap barefoot into the kitchen to fetch a bowl of Strawberry Pops and milk. I notice the estate man’s wearing a black hat and showing tzitzit from under his jacket—another religious one. After he leaves I lie down on the couch with a book for a while and when I hear the gates I’m up in time to see Mr. Harry Steed on the garden path, my father’s lawyer, carrying two obese leather briefcases. Auntie Rively sits with him at the dining room table. When I walk over they both stop talking and my auntie asks if she can help me. Then she giggles. I shake my head and start shuffling away. But then I see my father’s empty chair, the ottoman in front of it, and I can picture him clear as day chopping away with both heels and shouting bladdy schmocks! And it’s like I can hear him saying into my ear, Who the hell do these people think they are? So I force myself to go back and sit down at the table. They’re both quiet again, Harry looking at Auntie Rively and Auntie Rively giggling and asking me if I’m all right. I tell them I want to hear everything they’re talking about. “It’s just legal stuff,” says Auntie Riv. “Boring for you. I’ll let you know the gist.”

  “I want to hear.”

  Steed sort of rolls his eyes at her and lifts his shoulder. He’s got sideburns that are like a hundred years out of fashion and full of gross grey hairs and there’s some kind of skin condition on his nose. The maid brings tea and Steed unbuckles the jumbo briefcases and pulls out a load of papers. He has a low voice and he talks like a car that never gets out of first gear. It would put me to sleep, I swear, if I wasn’t concentrating so hard. He reads out like a metric ton of legal words, and then I ask questions and it takes a while for me to understand what’s what. How my parents’ joint will leaves everything to me and Marcus—the house, their bank accounts, the business. But there’s one major problem. Marcus isn’t dead, he’s just missing, so that means I can’t get the whole lot (at least that’s what I think he’s saying). Then there’s the other problem that at seventeen I am still technically a minor. Which brings us to other family members. Since Arlene was an only child there’s no one with a claim there, but Isaac’s end—well, here we have Auntie Riv. Moving onto the “corporate side,” things start to get very complex very quickly. It’s not just Lion Metals, there’s a whole stack of holding companies, some of them bought years ago just for their accumulated losses for tax reasons, others set up by Hugo Bleznik for God knows what reason (Steed says). This brings us to the matter of the accountant, who was Hugo Bleznik’s man and who has “recently schmitezed.” I didn’t actually know for sure that Steed was Jewish until he used that word, Yiddish slang for run away fast, disappear. Steed says he’s done his best to try to “unknot all of Hugo’s mess” using the books that Auntie Rively has given him.

  “Wait a second,” I say to her. “You mean you went to the Yard and just took them?”

  “Of course,” she says. “Someone had to lock things up and let the staff go.”

  “Wait a second,” I say. “Wait a second.”

  Mr. Steed says the Yard is closed, had to be, there is no money in current accounts. “A lot has disappeared,” he says. “Just like Hugo.”

  After Steed has gone I ignore Auntie Rively and lock myself in my room with my head going round like a carousel. This is not right, I’m being taken over—and why the hell was an estate agent here making notes? I know I’ve got to do something but I don’t know where to start. Eventually I get dressed and head out, ignoring Auntie Rively’s questions, and walk to Barry Hertzog Avenue. Since I’ve got like hardly any money, I take a black taxi to the shopping mall in Hyde Park and then hike the rest of the way, past the long walls and the big Rottweilers at the spiked gates, until I reach Hugo Bleznik’s place. The intercom brings out a maid who remembers me and lets me in. The Tudor house is full of other maids working away as if nothing is wrong, and to them nothing is. Same for the gardeners out on the rolling lawn. One maid tells me Hugo left on Sunday, bags had been quickly packed and put into the
boot of the Bentley for him.

  Alone, I slip across into the garage, sliding the door shut behind me. The red Jag is parked in its usual spot and behind it at the back I put on the work lamp and dig into the jar for the Allen key. The plank slides out, but there’s no tin in the hollow, and disappointment drops on me like a cold, wet sheet. But then I stick my hand inside and my heart starts thumping when I feel paper. I pull out a thick envelope. Inside are two wads of cash and some folded pages—a letter, badly typewritten.

  Mart!!

  If you have this in hand you are well on your way as I knew it would be as you are the top 1 + never forget it. Boyki 1st how sorry I am on your loss. But how is not the time for mornning! Now is the time to act quick. Like I did the second I got the news.

  Inside herew/ this is quite a few cabbage leafes for you to get by on. Also contact Webber Travel in Observatory. Maxie Webbers a good man. I have put in credit in cofidence yr 1 way ticket to New York. Your green card is here. You have yr passport. I think there is a dircet flight every day now. For now! I myself have taken another route as I will expaine below. You can leave on a weekend even Sudnay night via indirect. boyki I suggest now is the time to act do not think on the dead think on yr life there will be time later for teras which is hard now but the dead cant come back to life. Like they say in Jewish, a taytum nemt mir nit tsoorig foon besaylmem. You never bring a dead back from the “grave” Its a 1 way trip to that cemetery.What has happened has happened you need to wake up and think for yourself now.

  Maybe by now you have had heard from that utter schmok Steed or other legal. They will confuse you do not be confused all is well + clear between me and you + you are protected. Your accounts are all there + kosher. You have Altenberg the lawyer in New York. I put his card. It is all there for you, boyki. The car keys to your future. All you have to do is drive.