The Mandela Plot

by Kenneth Bonert

  The problem is there’s nothing in front of me but time and it just goes on and out like an infinite desert. When I get hungry I knock back a few of the pills and then the hunger goes away and the desert feeling is not so bad. I do two at a time and then three and then four. They make me feel as if someone’s pushed an on-switch inside me. Alive. But they also bring a humming and an itch under my skin. I’m patrolling a lot more, I like the walking. I check on the Sandy Hole, my money, my documents. I hide the burnt scrap carefully in the pages of a notebook and leave it buried there with my other secrets. The Fireseed videotapes. Secrets have gravity, they suck in more secrets like a black hole. They accumulate. I must stay alert stay alive.

  I feel hot and catch the notion of a swimming pool that won’t leave my head. I can dig one out and rain will come and fill it up, like the flash floods in Brandwag Park. It makes good cool sense so I fetch a pick and a shovel from the shed and start digging into the lawn and go on until my hands bleed. I lie down awake. I’m aching, leaving sticky bloodstains on the mattress and the shotgun. I wake up low again, suffocating. I take some pills with a can of Sprite and my lungs open up again. I go out with the shovel to dig my pool but then decide to clear the garden of sightlines. I’m in the thorns, chopping and hacking. That tree has to come down. I’m chopping at the trunk with the shovel, exposing wet white wood. The tree won’t fall. I get the shotgun and aim it and pull the trigger but there are no shells in the thing. I don’t remember taking them out. I go inside and have some pills and load and unload and load and loadunload for so long my fingers go numb while my mind is somewhere far away. It’s day, no it’s dark again. I don’t like the heat of the burning days. But then when it’s dark the noise of the crickets in the flower beds invades my teeth. I need to bite into things, to chew. There is a six-foot Parktown prawn stalking me. I need the shotgun at all times, have to keep checking it’s loaded. Got to ration my battle buttons. My jaw hurts, can’t stop gnashing. On patrol again now, walking my perimeter. Belongs to me. Got my weapon. They’re trying to cut the burglar bars. I can hear the wood bugs chewing in the trees. Meantime Arlene has started singing inside a little bubble deep inside my earhole. I try to clean it out with a twig but I can’t reach the bubble. Arlene’s voice is so high, she’s doing opera. Everything I do, she starts to sing about. He spins around but there is no giant prawn there! It comes to me that human thoughts are nothing but a nest of little cockroaches that live at the base of the skull and the spine is a hollow tube and the cockroaches go scuttling up and down it. This is what thoughts are. He discovers what thoughts are! Arlene sings, wailing. If I had something sharp and antiseptic I could cut open my face and clean out the cockroaches in there, but I’m scared they’ll scuttle down other holes in me and escape. I’m stuck inside my flesh, I’m entombed in it. I eat from a tub of Black Cat peanut butter. I take half a card of pills with it. Only one card left. I’m staring at the test pattern on the TV, working out that it’s a giant eye, a digital watcher. Government. He discovers the terrible truth in the test pattern! sings Arlene inside my ear bubble. It’s time to patrol. Got to. That squeaking noise in my skull is my teeth grinding.

  I hear noises from the carport, gate noises. I go over the inner wall, smooth as a cat, and pad along behind the cactus bed. Someone’s playing Jesus at the gate, arms out like a crucifix, shaking the bars. Then calling, “Mah-ten. Mah-ten. Are you in there?” He’s a terrorist, he’s got bombs at his feet. Here to lure me out. I creep up closer and put the shotgun on him from the edge of the gate where he doesn’t see me. Not so clever now, are you terror boy? I start pinching the trigger. Oh but it’s wrong so wrong to shoo-oot people!, sings Arlene. First see what he wants! I beg and be-see-ee-ch thee! Shut up, Ma. I’m working here. I’m surviving. But she keeps on shrilling in the bubble in my ear until I step out. He gasps and his eyes go huge in his dark face. I prod his chest through the bars with the barrel. “Don’t shoot,” he says. “Don’t shoot me. I didn’t do it, that is why I came. I didn’t do it. It wasn’t me. It is why I come here to tell to you. Please. Put down. Please. Mah-ten.”

  “Who sent you?” I ask. “Where are the rest?”

  He doesn’t answer, doesn’t move. Ma is singing, Maybe those aren’t bombs, maybe those are shopping ba-ags. “Just shut up, shut up a second,” I’m saying aloud as I realise I’ve been saying other things, maybe singing also. “You,” I say to the man. “You. Come closer. Who are you? Closer I said.”

  62

  The house is clean and neat, the windows are open, and a clean-smelling breeze is blowing through the rooms, fluttering the lace curtains. There’s a smell of Dandy floor wax and of Sunlight soap. The sun is shining but it’s what we call a monkey’s wedding, because it’s raining from a different part of the sky at the same time. It’s good to feel the soft rain, the spritzing of water on my skin, thin and cool and fresh. The sun is bright on the garden at one end and the clouds make it dark on the other. The lawn has been mowed, feels prickly on my bare feet. My digging has been filled in and neatly raked. A man comes out from behind the pomegranate tree, dragging a canvas bag. He stops to wipe his face with the back of his forearm. I know what the back of those overalls of his will say. It’s Sammy Nongalo. He looks calm as he walks up. “How are you feeling?” he asks. I don’t answer, I’m thinking I should have pulled the trigger. For my father. For my mother. He looks at his watch. “You have been asleep for . . . fifty hours.” I just stand there. “We have some things to talk about,” he says.

  “I think the police are looking for you,” I say.

  “Yes. Is true.”

  We go inside. It’s the first time I’ve ever sat at my dining room table with a black person. Gloria never sat at the table with us. She ate by herself in the kitchen or in her room. Sammy is in Zaydi’s chair and I’m opposite, where Marcus used to sit. We’ve got mugs of tea and an open Woolworths date loaf with a serrated knife leaning on it because Sammy stocked some groceries in the kitchen. Says he took some money from a drawer in the study. “Sorry. I don’t have any more of my own.”

  I just fold my arms.

  “Are they saying to you that I did it?”

  “I don’t know,” I say to the table. Then I say, “Yes.” Then I say, “I think you did. You did do it.”

  “Please. Will you look me, Martin?” I look up and Sammy’s face is solemn. I remember how calm he was that day at the Yard, pushing my father to the dirt.

  “Why wouldn’t you have?” I say. “I mean look what you did to Silas.”

  Sammy shifts, his chair creaking. “That was another thing,” he says. “It wasn’t . . .” He lifts up his hands but lets them drop. “Okay, I will tell you what happen. The MOMSU guys—” He looks at me to see if I know that meaning and I nod, it’s an acronym, the big labour union. He goes on telling me there were two men from MOMSU who came to meet with the guys at the Yard, wanting them to unionise. It wasn’t just for better pay, Sammy says, they told them it was part of the freedom struggle, to liberate the economy for the people. But there was a split in the staff. “The older ones chased them out,” Sammy says. “Silas was their leader. Silas very strong.”

  “So you decided what? Let’s be straight, hey? To . . . murder—”

  “No-no-no. Not me. This men, what happen . . .” And he tells me how the union guys said they would loosen a wheel and make an accident, not to kill Silas but to scare him. “We let them to the car, but they did it.”

  “The brakes.”

  “It wasn’t what they said, a wheel. What they did, they put little putties on the brake lines, the safety cable, and the clutch plate. They are know how to do it but not us. These putties will go off when the car is fast, then you cannot stop with gears or handbrake. Something we couldn’t do it ourselves. It was them.”

  I say wouldn’t the police have known this, after looking at the wrecked Peugeot? Sammy shrugs. “I don’t know why the police didn’t look. Or ask us anything.”

  “Victor. When Victor
came to the Yard that day, he wanted to see the wreck, to show my father, didn’t he?”

  He shrugs again. “I can’t say.”

  “But you were there. You chased him out, I saw it. I was told you would have killed him. You and Phala and them.”

  Sammy sniffs, rubbing his nose with the flat of his hand. “Was not me, but the police will take me otherwise. This union guys, they told to me they have put my fingerprint there on those things and will say it was me. So I must protect myself, you see. Afterwards I am not liking this union people. I am thinking I don’t know who they are, really. We don’t see them again. It’s maybe something else.”

  “What does that mean, something else?”

  “I think those two was police.”

  “Sure,” I say. “Right. Ja.”

  “You don’t believe.” Sammy leans forward, his hands going flat on the table. “Doesn’t matter. I am here to say not about Silas. I am here to say for you about your parents. I did not do this. I would never do this thing. Put them like that. Your mother. No, Martin.” He reaches across and picks up the serrated knife. “I am here, I am telling you I never did it. It’s true maybe sometime I never liked your father. True I wanted a union. But I did not go there and kill them that morning, I wasn’t there.” He raises the knife to his throat. “If you want, you can even kill me, Martin. But it wasn’t me.” This is meant to impress, I spose. But it does the opposite. Like he’s on a soap opera or something, acting.

  I say, “Why should I believe you, Sammy?”

  “This is why I have come here. Why should I come here? If I killed your mother and father would I do that?”

  “You have nowhere else to go,” I say. “They’re looking for you. They’ll pick you up.”

  “If I was a killer,” he says, gesturing with the knife, “I could kill you, and then I could hide here.”

  I shake my head. “Not really. I am good cover for you.”

  “Do you not believe in me?”

  I look away. “I don’t know.”

  63

  Sammy Nongalo moves some things from the house into Gloria’s old room in the back, starts to live there like any other domestic servant of the neighbourhood. Now and then I give him some cash from the Sandy Hole and he keeps the kitchen stocked and the place tidy. I watch TV, videos. I sleep. Read. I don’t take any more of Mr. Stein’s battle buttons so there are no more tiny singing voices inside my ears. Then one day I hear a woman’s voice in the back, a real one. Time passes and there are other voices. I start to see faces showing up. Coming through the gate, in the backyard. A lot of them are my father’s old staff, out of work. I don’t tell them they have to go, I let them stay with my silence. Maybe word is getting round because more of them keep coming. I don’t really mind the activity, the people-noise. I move the TV to my brother’s room and keep more to myself there. Lots of time is passing, it should be scary but I don’t really care. Are we in August, or is it September? I don’t know. I notice the power going out, they’re overloading the plugs again. I notice the toilets getting clogged. I go looking for Sammy one day and can’t find him. The grass is all overgrown. There are people sleeping in every bedroom. At night I hear live music. I go out and look at the people in the lounge, dancing on the spot, sitting around, drinking, smoking, heads nodding. There’s this woman from Mozambique. “Why are you doing this, letting all this people stay here?”

  “Why not?”

  “It will be trouble.”

  “Everything’s coming down,” I say. She comes to my bed.

  I go out at dawn, to the back fence to urinate, and Mr. Stein’s caterpillar eyebrow presses to the crack in the boards. “Thank you God,” he says, hissing. “It is you. Hurry.”

  I ask him what he’s talking about.

  “The only reason I haven’t called the cops is because those blue bulls will come charging in. They don’t know how to handle hostage situations. You’ll have your throat slit before they get through the gate. But for God’s sake, hurry man!”

  I yawn. “I’ll see you later, Mr. Stein.”

  “Don’t be a bladdy fool, Martin. Do not go back in. This is your chance. Listen to me and climb. You’ve got to.”

  “I’m not a hostage, Mr. Stein.”

  “They got you brainwashed,” Stein says. “Stockholm syndrome.”

  “I’m not a hostage, I’m a host.”

  “You what?”

  “Yes,” I say. “No more movie sets. We’re tearing it down.” This sounds so crazy to him that even crazy Mr. Stein has nothing to say.

  64

  Always the whine of the brakes on the trucks and their heavy diesel panting. Always the soft rain. Always waking up in my own bed and believing it to be real. Then out of the dark the big megaphones boom and the spotlights stab like lances through the rain. The noise of jackboots hitting the wet streets as the steel-headed soldiers in their dark greatcoats come off the back of the truck and rush to our walls.

  “Achtung! Achtung! Aller Juden raus! Schnell! Juden raussss!”

  There is no rain when I wake up truly but the whining of brakes outside is real and so is the panting of the heavy engines. Then something starts smashing at the gate. I get the shotgun from under the bed. There’s a diesel roar outside, then an almighty bang. Moving myself cautiously to the front door, I hear shouts and breaking glass from the far end by the carport. Women are screaming outside, men shouting and children crying and a dog snarling and barking. In the passage and the lounge I see people huddled low, looking frightened. Then the front door flies open and a light burns everything white and men are shouting at me to put the fokken gun down. I let it drop. Hands grab me and push me down, handcuff my wrists. They pick me up and rush me outside. I’m in my underpants and the night air chills my skin. They walk me through the carport. Two cops are holding a man down while a third keeps jumping up and down on his back, the man making an odd bleating sound. I recognise him, he is that quiet one who plays the lesiba. Up the little slope I see the front gates are busted open and a Mello Yello—a police Casspir—is stopped there. It reverses out and a police truck swings in and they start loading people up into it. They steer me a different way, to the right. There are more police cars in the street and some of my neighbours standing outside, watching and talking and nodding. It’s about time, is what I’m sure they’re saying. I look down to Mr. Stein’s house but there aren’t even lights on there. The street is gritty on my bare soles. The cops push me into the back of a parked squad car and leave me sitting by myself. Maybe an hour passes, my arms getting numb, when I see four squat, square headlights behind me. A red Jaguar XJ6 cruises slowly by. I don’t need to look at the licence plate—that’s Hugo’s car, with a driver and passenger inside. It parks in front of the car I’m in. The driver climbs out, so very tall it’s like watching scaffolding go up. He’s wearing a maroon blazer, the sleeves too short for his pole arms. Bokkie Oberholzer. I watch him move past, up toward the gate. Then I put my head back and close my eyes. Time passes. Rapping knuckles on the window wake me. Oberholzer opens the door, he has a bundle under his arm and a ring of keys. “Out,” he says. I climb out of the squad car and he motions for me to turn around. He takes off the handcuffs and pushes the bundle into my chest. It’s my own clothes, wrapped around my Nike takkies. “Get dressed.”

  I put the clothes on and then I say, “Captain—”

  “No! Can’t you see, boy?” He steps back and sweeps his hands down his front, lifts one foot to show me a cowboy boot. Making sure I notice he’s not in uniform. “I’m Major now,” he says. “Major Bokkie Oberholzer. Special Branch!”

  “Mazel tov,” I say.

  “Achieved my goal,” says Oberholzer. “Let’s go.”

  Since we’re standing there on the pavement right outside my garden wall, I think he means that we are about to go back into my house. But when I take a step in the direction of the smashed gate, he snorts and leads me to Hugo’s Jag. Someone’s still sitting in the passenger seat. When
the door opens for a second I get the sick feeling Hugo Bleznik is about to climb out but it’s some young white guy. He’s wearing a black T-shirt and ripped, peroxided jeans and oxblood Doc Marten boots and he’s got a stud in one ear and in the streetlight as he turns I see how thick the muscles under his T-shirt are, slabs of it running into the wide neck, a weightlifter for sure. Oberholzer tells me to hop in. As I get in I catch the muscleman looking at me, lighting a cigarette. “This him?” he says to Oberholzer. His accent is English South African, northern suburbs like mine. Oberholzer nods at him. Through the glass I see the muscleman shaking his head and whistling and they both laugh. Like I’m the joke, but I don’t understand the punch line. Now the muscleman is pointing to the house, talking with Oberholzer, the biceps swelling up as he lifts the cigarette and I see a tattoo there on his inner wrist—a fist holding two sticks of dynamite. I’m thinking about that, where I’ve seen it before, as the two of them move off.