The Mandela Plot

by Kenneth Bonert

  “This is unbelievable,” Dr. Norm is saying, shaking his head. “I remember this picture. I had the same one, in the banned years.” He’s getting emotional.

  Marcus says, “Dr. Norm, I’m not a virgin.” Dr. Norm looks up. Marcus says, “You asked me that once, if I thought I was a virgin. If I remember any sexual experiences.”

  “Do you?”

  He nods. “I remember a woman gave me that photo. She was older than me. Dark hair, so pretty. An American voice. I don’t know how I could have known her but I did.” Dr. Norm looks down again at the image, his lips twitching. Marcus says he was involved in the Movement just like you were, Dr. Norm. It was through the woman. She was the one who took him into a township, ja. And there were Molotov cocktails flying. And there was a policeman. He remembers that. A tall, thin cop . . . he remembers also there were codes written in Hebrew in a book—but Dr. Norm’s left eyebrow has pronged up by now, never a good sign.

  “Oright, okay,” he says. “Let’s slow down and be careful with this Hebrew codes business. There is fantasy and there is memory. Rule one is to be able to separate. This is one area we need strict apartheid, in your mind.”

  “I know, Dr. Norm. But I’m not imagining.”

  “You have an unusually potent imagination, we’ve talked about that, your fantasy playing.” He puffs out air, sitting back in his long chair. “Marcus, you exhaust me, my boy.”

  Marcus is pacing, itchy. “I was involved, I swear. I remember firebombs. I remember being in jail.”

  Dr. Norm winces at the ceiling. Shuts his eyes. “Does not,” he says, “seem plausible to me.”

  “I am telling you I remember.”

  “That a Solomon High schoolboy was involved in throwing firebombs at police in a township, with Hebrew code and an American woman? That you were in prison? Come on. You’re probably remembering a movie, Marcus. That’s why it’s so vital you don’t run away from the real.”

  “Run away?”

  “As at that school. You can’t duck these encounters, Marcus. Just the opposite. It’s exactly where the growth lies.”

  “Okay. Tomorrow.”

  “Okay?”

  “Yes. Let’s do it.”

  But when tomorrow comes Dr. Norm isn’t there.

  15

  One of the first things that Dr. Norm ever said to him was “You do understand that you are a miracle. I am saying this as a complete and utter atheist. Miracle.”

  He is a person who went to sleep as a boy in one country and woke up as a man in another land, with a different flag, a different look, a different everything. Dr. Norm told him once, “Your problem isn’t in the brain. You can remember if you want to. But you are blocking yourself.”

  And he said, “That’s such bull.”

  But maybe it isn’t bull. Maybe he doesn’t want to dig because digging makes everything feel shaky, like attacking the foundations of who he is, what he has managed to get back so far. But on the other hand without his past he can’t seem to get himself to do anything. Dr. Norm doesn’t come back for weeks but he is not needed, for Marcus is no prisoner here. He can leave the institute, visit the school on his own. Yet in practice he is stranded in his safe and comfortable routines. Now another month passes and they are in a third. Marcus eats his fatty breakfasts and does his exercises. He naps and reads. He notices fewer patients and more staff. They seem to spend their days playing cards or listening to music on tinny radios. Matron likes to watch TV in the staff lounge. There are dirty dishes in the dining hall and giant dustballs and cat waste in the corridors. The grass is burnt dead in the sun and in the shade it grows up too high. The tomatoes rot on their vines in the greenhouse.

  Now it’s what? Four months since Dr. Norm last disappeared—a whole season—and a letter arrives. No return address. European stamps.

  Greetings, dear Marcus,

  I am hoping that if this finds you it finds you well. On the other hand, I hope it does not find you at the institute at all! I hope that you’ve moved on, young man. As I have told you many times, memory is overrated. You have your blocks, but maybe you don’t need to crack the code. What do I know? What do any of us know? The brain is a black hole we’ll never understand, and that’s a fact I never hid from you, my friend. I know you’ve got no one now, and feel badly for it, though my leaving can’t have been much of a surprise. You are a sensitive soul, young Marcus, and you could see the pain I was in and that it was no good, no good at all to try to carry on.

  I realised for my own sanity I had to make a break, a sudden clean rupture before I could stop myself, in order to give my brain a chance to cleanse itself of all its many debilitating neural associations. I have to starve my memories, not be constantly reaffirming them with familiar sights and old associations, and that simply cannot be done there.

  So I have gone and committed what a good radical, card-carrying member of the ANC should never do which is undergo the humiliation of “taking the gap.” Ja, boet. I have flown the coop, done the chicken run, just like any other Whitey McFlighty out of SA. And the short and dirty answer is no, I will not be back. Not because I do not love the place with all my heart because of course I do, but because I love my sanity just a little more.

  Funny. We always said we never believed in Utopia. All during the Freedom Struggle we said we are not Utopians, we merely want our country to be normal. But you know what? That was a lie. The Struggle is what made us special. We had the answer with a capital A. But now there are just a million problems and they all have a lowercase p. There is no grand drama, no great war of good versus evil. Just the chintzy schlepping of goods to market. That’s what economic development means, you know. Just building more plastic water pistols or whatnot, to ship to America or China. Or filming silly movies where people pretend to kill each other.

  I don’t know how else to explain it but to say it bluntly, the New South Africa is a letdown. I would not have ever believed that I could write something like that with sincerity. Yet it’s all just sordid now. The corruption and the greed. Good comrades in the lean years have turned into fat cats no better than any other money-grubbers with their mansions in Houghton and their Swiss bank accounts. The proportion of haves to have-nots is the same or worse, only the skin tone has altered, slightly. And the killings go on—only now it’s foreign migrants who are the victims when it’s not one of the 500 a week murdered for ordinary criminal reasons. To say nothing of the assaults, rapes, kidnappings. The police officer murdered every hundred hours.

  So the happy ending of the Mandela story was never an ending ever after. The plot goes on. And on.

  I hated what there once was, but I can see as clearly as day that I am going to hate what is coming just as much. I fought to expand the first world, not to shrink it.

  My children will be what I miss most, of course, but the sad fact is that I hardly get to see them anyway. Even sadder, I believe I can best help them now by gaining a new citizenship that they may one day need to take advantage of. It’s getting tough for those with pale skins to get jobs in SA and will likely only get much tougher; yet as disparity and corruption continues there’s going to more populist anger directed against them. I believe it’s only fair that the worm has turned, but when it comes to one’s own flesh, historical justice is no consolation.

  Enough of that. Let’s talk about you, Marcus Helger. I want you to get your arse out of that institute pronto. Doctor’s orders. Nobody there is going to kick you out onto the street. They are privately funded to the hilt and no one cares to rock the boat. Unless things have changed drastically, I don’t believe you have to worry on that score. (I don’t even think you’re on the books there anyway!)

  But Marcus, please don’t get stuck in that honey trap. Get yourself out. Get yourself into school and get educated. Fill your blank slate with new knowledge. Meet people. Do things. You’re on your own, I know, but you’re a clever fellow. Stress means growth. Pressure is what makes carbon into diamonds.

  I am
also on my own here in this strange country. But I too am a clever fellow. I’ve given up on remembering and you should too. I don’t keep photographs of my past life. I shall learn a new language. Like a computer hard drive, I will “clear” my software and install a new “operating system.” I want the old faces in me to hurry up and die off as quickly as possible. The old words. You’ve already achieved that and I suggest you go on building on that achievement, the unknowable pillar of your early life.

  Certainly we can forget about publishing scientific papers together. Neuroscience will chug along fine without me! I don’t want to be special anymore, I just want to be small and happy.

  Marcus, I’m telling you the truth when I say I have genuine love for you. You’re a good soul. Good luck and stay blessed.

  Yours as ever,

  Dr. Norm

  P.S. Enclosed is a cash card. If you’re still there, I thought you might need it. I’ve posted the PIN in another letter. You’ll be able to draw up to R2500 a day till the account runs dry. Don’t be stupid and try to use cash machines at night or in dodgy spots. Go somewhere like Sandton City, nice and safe behind electric wires.

  Hugs.

  When the card number arrives he hikes down to the shops on the winding Parktown roads. There’s a small library there and he goes in and does a search for the Helger name in old phone books, white and yellow pages, reverse street directories. This gets him the address of Lion Metals Pty. Ltd. There is a computer system called the Internet that the librarian says would help, but they don’t have it at that branch. He searches periodical indexes and consults the whirring microfiche machines. This is how he finds out his parents are both dead. An index linked to an article in the Gold City Zionist: “Twin Murders Claim Jewish Couple.” There are no back copies of the Zionist at that library, but he checks the Star around that date and finds a short paragraph on a page near the back in a column called Crime Roundup. Isaac Helger, 70, and wife Arlene Helger née Cossington, 54, were the victims of an apparent murder-robbery. The couple had been locked in the vault of their scrapyard business in Vrededorp and died of asphyxiation, said police spokesman Lieutenant Hennie Strydom. He stares at the words and then shuts his eyes. What had Dr. Norm written? I want the old faces in me to hurry up and die off as quickly as possible. The old words. You’ve already achieved that. Marcus makes notes, leaves the library with a roaring noise in both ears. He orders a taxi from a public phone and drives to De La Rey Street, Vrededorp. The building is no longer Lion Metals but some sort of warehouse, the front of it armoured with welded steel plates and coils of razor wire all along the second floor to stop intruders from climbing. Like a wartime fort. Graffiti everywhere. Men sleep rough in the park beside it. The sign has Chinese letters.

  Marcus makes the cab drive slowly around the back. He’s remembering trucks parked outside, remembering an office upstairs, his mother, Arlene. He gets out and touches the wall. It’s been built up higher with new rows of grey bricks, topped with more loops of razor wire. A fat man floats into his mind. Hugo. Hugo who? Hugo Bez. Blez. He has the taxi drive him next to Westpark Cemetery. It takes a while to find a caretaker and then the graves of the Helgers. His mother and father are buried next to each other, but the grandfather, buried last, in 1990, is not next to the grandmother. Black slabs in the sunshine. Hebrew letters chiseled. They put you down in there and you never left again. When you thought about it, looked at it, it was astonishing. You had to force yourself to believe it would happen to you. He puts his pen to the notepad several times, but in the end he writes nothing except the words i am marcus helger. When he gets into the cab he asks the driver, white guy, an Afrikaner, if he knows where Solomon High School is. The driver says, “That’s the one in the news, izzen it?”

  “News?”

  “Where the big man’s ganna visit.”

  “I don’t know about that,” Marcus says.

  They arrive at the bombproof gate just as school is letting out. There’s a line of waiting cars. Marcus says he wants to sit for a minute. The cabdriver says his name is Dirk, asks if he can smoke. Marcus nods and Dirk lights a Gunston and whistles softly. “Hell of a nice collection, hey?” “How’s that?” “I count three Rollses and three Bentleys. Checkit that Porsche Carrera, man. I fink it’s the new-new model, I mean this year.” Marcus watches the kids coming out. Dirk says, “No wonder he’s coming here.”

  “Who is?”

  “Old Nelson, like I said.”

  Some cars in the line pull out. Marcus says, “Can you drive up closer, please?” School buses are swinging out also, without markings, each a different colour and with security grates over the windows. There had been a bomb once—he remembers that now. Someone bombed a bus. Now they are close to the driveway, the boys pouring through a turnstile in their purple blazers, their grey trousers. As in a dream, Marcus gets out of the taxi and walks up toward them, something in his abdomen clenching up like a fist. The closer he gets to the guardhouse, the stronger this bad sensation becomes. The faces are so young. Some glance at him, to most he’s nothing, just an adult standing there. A guard steps out and stares through mirrored sunglasses. He tries to smile, but he is shivering. He can see through the arched iron over the gate, an apex of thrusting glass and steel beyond—the school synagogue. And suddenly memories are on him like some attacking swarm. He turns and hurries back to the cab.

  He goes to a different library, to find back issues of the Gold City Zionist. In Observatory they have them kept in bound volumes, not microfiche, but the collection is incomplete and he can’t find the issue with the article on the death of his parents. But the newest ones are stacked loose and he looks through the covers—finds a photo that stops him.

  MADIBA TO SPEAK AT SOLOMON

  By Candice Milner, Staff Writer

  Ex-President Nelson Mandela is scheduled to address the staff and students of Wisdom of Solomon High School for Jewish Boys next month.

  The address will take place in the school synagogue on a Friday morning, the way honoured guests have traditionally been received at the elite private school for close to a century.

  “Madiba has consistently expressed his warm ties to the Jewish community,” said school board president Samuel Leibowitz, using Mandela’s clan name, a sign of affectionate respect. “It’s a theme in his life going all the way back to his first legal training in a Jewish firm, and up through the Jewish comrades who shared the burden of the Struggle years with him.”

  Headmaster Arnold Volper said that the school has “always been a strong supporter of Mr. Mandela.” He said Solomon values are the values of equal rights because “as Jews we too have suffered through the ages, therefore it’s only natural for us to feel empathy for the plight of those in similar conditions.”

  The colour photo that stopped him includes Headmaster Volper. When he sees that face he instantly remembers the cane, the whistling cuts. Volper is even fatter and wider and his mop of yellow scarecrow hair has turned mostly white but the chin is lifted like it used to be, stretching a line of blubber now, to point those flared nostrils at the camera, unsmiling. Reading over Volper’s quote, Marcus snorts—he remembers them singing anthems to the Nationalist government when Mandela was a terrorist. Back then Volper and his lot condemned the Jews who supported Mandela, now they praised them. Bootlickers of the old government had new leather to shine. In the background is the school synagogue, a long shot down through the pews toward the low-walled platform of the bimah. He reads that Mandela will stand at the traditional place at the rear of it. You can’t tell from the photo but he knows the waist-high wall around that bimah is made of glass bricks. He remembers.

  He returns to the institute. His parents are dead, they were murdered. The police will have a file. He will go and enquire. Tomorrow. Maybe. He sleeps.

  16

  He doesn’t leave the institute. He wanders around barefoot. He thinks of a dog tied to a pole. His leash is tied to a memory, an almost-memory. It must be the knowing that his par
ents were murdered—but it’s not that. Without deep memories of his parents it is hard to feel real grief. On the other hand his mind keeps flashing back to that synagogue photo, this visit of Mandela’s coming up. It feels important and dangerous but he can’t say why. He dreams of fire pouring up from holes in the ground. The woman with the dark hair is there. In an old newsmagazine he reads about how Mandela saved the country from civil war back in 1993. A white man had assassinated a popular black leader. It was right before the first election, the trigger for an all-out race war. But Mandela appeared on television and gave a speech to the nation, addressing blacks and whites, talking them back from the brink. But the question that keeps popping up unbidden in Marcus’s mind is what would have happened if Mandela had not been there. What if he’d been killed? He puts it to Thilivhali, an older patient, a Venda from Thohoyandou. “You must not say this,” Thilivhali says. “We need him. If he was taken, it would be very bad.”

  “Bad how?”

  “She would blow up.”

  “Who?”

  “This country.”

  He goes back to the items recovered from the garden. A hard hat with a torch on the front, like a mining helmet. Goggles. Why? And the pads—bizarre. Everything saturated with dirt. And he kept these in a hole in the garden, a secret place. Why? And took them out to use them. Or were they just found objects? No. He did use them. He feels this. He has a dream in which he floats into that synagogue photo. The pretty woman with the dark curly hair that he remembered giving him the photo—she is with him. Her name is Annie. Follow me, she says. She walks him around the bimah seven times. Like the walls of Jericho the glass bricks crumble. There’s fire inside, she tells him.

  When he wakes up he spreads the overalls on the floor and squats over them and feels them carefully. There’s something hard under his fingertips that he thought was a button but there’s a pocket inside. He feels carefully and brings out a key on a piece of string. You could wear this around your wrist. After a while he gets up and puts the overalls on, then he stands there, shaking.