The door bangs open hard, making him jump. Lukhele. He wants to know if Marcus is all right. Marcus nods. Lukhele puts his arm around him and walks him outside into the sun. “I think I need to go home,” Marcus says. Lukhele eases him down on the lawn, gives him a bottle of water, and gestures with the radio in his hand. “We’ll have to stay here for now, for a while.”
Marcus gulps, wipes his mouth. “Why?”
“We are going to wait here for them to arrive.”
“Till who does?”
“The big guys. Must be the bomb squad, number one. And the special team. They will put the special team. You know the Leopards?”
He shakes his head. Lukhele says the Leopards are an elite national police unit, formed to fight corruption. “These guys are the best to handle this kind of business. You’ll see. But we have to wait now on-site. They coming to investigate.”
Marcus shades his eyes, squinting. “Do I know you?”
“What?”
“Do I know you? From before, I mean.”
“Are you okay?” says Lukhele. “You look . . .”
“I don’t know,” Marcus says. He is fading, his eyelids closing in the heat.
“We have to wait here,” Lukhele’s voice is saying. “For the Leopards to come.”
18
He becomes aware he is rising from a crushing blackness that is no ordinary sleep.
“Did you give him too much?” says a voice.
“It wouldn’t last this long.”
“How long’s he been out like this?”
“All day. I’m telling you, man.”
“He looks bladdy dead.”
“Try wake him up.”
He feels his body being prodded. He’s almost there, climbing. He opens his eyes to an orange sky, it’s that late in the dying day. Two men in camouflage uniforms, wearing ski masks, are beside Lukhele, leaning over Marcus as he sits up and rubs his face. He asks what the time is. Seven, says someone. His mouth is dry. Lukhele hands him a bottle of water. He swallows and then Lukhele takes it back, saying, “That’s enough.” Already two more men with ski masks are coming from the direction of the Pimple. They have a strange waddling walk, heavy with equipment. Dark green body armour, helmets with visors—they must be bomb-squad technicians. Lukhele is helping Marcus up and they all move together toward the synagogue. Marcus is thinking why did they come from that side? All that equipment. Didn’t they drive in from the road?
In the lobby he glances at the door to the toilets, remembering what he saw. Dr. Norm once told him that the unconscious mind can dream while you are awake—it’s called a vision. Now they are entering the synagogue and they all climb the bimah. Marcus watches them assembling a work light on a stand, trailing an electric cord. It’s getting very dim in here as the sun sets, and they shine the burning white light on the open bench, the dusty paint cans inside, the wires and the battery. He watches them observing the old bomb for a long time, talking softly to each other and then gently touching with their gloved fingers, attaching clips and wires to meters. It goes on so long that the darkness grows solid around the light and Marcus says to Lukhele that he doesn’t want to be here. It’s stupid for them to be here. To stand right next to a working bomb squad. Lukhele too. “I’ll stay with you,” says Lukhele. “They need you. They will ask you.”
“But I don’t know anything.” His head feels bubbly, he’s drifting. He notices there are others now. More men with round black ski-mask heads standing on the bimah behind in the dark. Just standing, not moving or saying a word. Watching. Lukhele is holding his arm. The four bomb men are unrolling plastic sheets. They take out the paint cans one by one, slowly, remove some of the black stuff inside and drip some liquid from a dropper on it and watch the colour change in the white light. One of them takes the battery away. Then they replace the cans in the bench. They do other things he can’t see, their backs blocking the work.
He tries to whisper to Lukhele but it comes out loud, his tongue clumsy. “Why’s everyone wearing masks?”
“They fight corruptions. They keep their IDs secret, these Leopards.”
When the technicians straighten up and step away, Marcus feels Lukhele tugging on his arm, pulling him forward into the light. There’s a video camera in his hand. Now he’s attaching a wire to Marcus’s shirt collar. “Say something. I want to make a test for your voice.”
“What’s going on?”
“Good. That is good. We want to record on you a video statement. Go over to the bomb.”
“Why?”
“Don’t worry. I’ll tell you what to say. Is for the record.”
First he has to say that he set the camera up, the light, in order to record a statement. And provide the date. He looks down like he’s told to, and in the brightness he sees small blocks of yellowish stuff that looks like putty on a plastic sheet in front of the open bench. Lukhele tells him to pick them up and he does—they’re heavier than they look and there are some long silver cylinders attached to electric wires and Lukhele asks him to pick these up too. And then to take the cylinders and push them into the putty. “What is this?” he asks, trying to clear his head, to understand.
“Just do it please.”
“Why do you want me to do it?”
“Is for evidence,” says Lukhele’s voice. All Marcus can see now is burning white light and Lukhele’s voice out of the light tells him not to squint so much.
“Evidence?” Marcus says. “What do you mean evidence? Of what?”
“Your innocence. Of course. For the record. Your cooperation with us. We are the police, heh? We have to keep this on file, for the investigations. Ready now.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Marcus, we do it all proper for legal. Don’t worry about it. Just do what it is I say for you. It’s fine. We are the police. But pliz control your squinting. Now, we start again . . .”
Marcus lifts the putty blocks, pushes the cylinders into them. Next he’s asked to put them into the bench on top of the paint cans. He has to add a new kind of circuit board instead of the old one. They give him the camera to hold, to move around, position it as he wires in the new board for them. They explain to him how it works, the transmitter. And then they ask him to give that same explanation to the camera. It’s not the bomb he made, he made a different bomb, but they want him to say that he made this bomb. He’s sweating and his rubbery mind isn’t working as it should. Lukhele, Lukhele. “Your name,” he says to the burning light, “your name isn’t that. It’s something . . . I know you. I’m very thirsty . . .” He tries to walk out of the light and gets pressed back into it. The burning circle. “Please,” he says. “Water.”
“When you’re finished your job. Do your job.”
“I know you,” he hears himself say. The white light is burning right into his brain, through the backs of his eyes. Having only a voice to hear has shifted things in him, a memory. It’s there in him somewhere, that voice talking to him, droning, a long time ago. Saying so many things. It’s coming up again—a pressing urge like the need to vomit. “I’ll tell you my other name if you do your job,” says Lukhele. He tells him words to say and Marcus says them, not knowing what they are, the sense of them. He points at the bomb, he explains it. How it will blow up. What it’s meant to do. How he got into the school via an underground tunnel. When he’s finished, he is swaying. “So thirsty,” he says. But it’s not the bomb he made. This is a different one. Everything wrong. “What’s your name?” he shouts into the light. “I know you!”
“Is all right,” says the voice, soothing. “I will tell you my name. And give you a nice cold bottle of water also. Just finish it up here now. We coming to the end. Look here and say you set this bomb in order to kill Nelson Mandela. This is the reason you have set this bomb.”
He stares.
“Say it,” says the voice.
“Are you mad?” he says. “Why would I set a bomb for Mandela? That’s not what I did.” But what did he do
? Why did he do it? It’s there, almost. They gave him something to make his head rubbery but it’s lessening.
“You just say it for legal reasons,” says Lukhele. “Doesn’t mean anything, we do it like this, you see. What is called a legal formality for the case, okay. Is something too much to explain here but will make it easier for you, believe me. Otherwise you can be in heavy trouble with charges.”
“Lukhele, Lukhele. It was something else. I know you . . . I know you . . .”
“Say, I made this bomb in order to kill Nelson Mandela. We are getting very close to the end now. Say it and you can be finish and have some water.”
“No!”
“Yes, you will. Just relax and say it. Is nothing.”
“No! I know you . . . I remember . . .” He turns away from the burning light and presses his eyes against his palms and crumples over and in his head the pictures start to rush and flow like sputtering water from a broken hose—fragments, flashes—Annie with her black hair in the moonlight on a bench in his garden by a pomegranate tree and that was the night she gave him the book and her full name it’s . . . Annie Goldberg. God, Annie. American exchange scholar, teaching here. Leiterhoff School. Jules township. And down the hill was the shantytown and the cops and the firebombs that day, and that was when he met—this is him, this bald one, it’s not Lukhele, it’s something Chinese, it’s, it’s—“Shaolin!” he shouts. “Comrade Shaolin!”
A hand is grabbing the back of his neck and shaking him, pulling him upright. “Ach, enough already!” says an Afrikaans voice. “Enough!” He tries to wrench himself away from the hand. Other hands grab him. It’s all collapsing in his head. And the light stand falls also and he sees men in military gear, brown camouflage uniforms, bulky vests with pouches, black masks, submachine guns. Then the light is turned again and he’s held solid with an arm around his neck from behind and in front the Afrikaans voice says, “We will be here all fokken night. Put him on his arse here.” They pull him down and they have his arms and there’s a ski-mask face in close, the Afrikaans voice is coming from there on a waft of meaty breath, and he knows this voice also. Meantime in his head everything goes on collapsing . . . Comrade Shaolin talking in a hall where Annie brought a videotape called Fireseed. And his father in the Yard and the tall cop—the tall white cop . . . “Gee my daardie ander lig”—give me that other light—this one is saying on the bimah now, this voice that he also remembers . . . He saw himself in the toilets, on the ground and bleeding, but he was too stupid to understand he was being shown what happened to him, what put him in his coma. He was just a kid at this school. And he used to break into it every night, with Annie sometimes, using the pipe tunnel. She would fetch him in her Volkswagen or he’d pedal on his bike . . . “Hou sy bene oop”—hold his legs open—the voice is saying now . . . and then he’d make copies of the tapes. A different Ski Mask shown on them. The Fireseed tape. How to make bombs that work . . . “Now listen here to me, Mr. Martin Helger. Helger junior. You do what we tell you, oright? You hear me? You remember who I am? Of course you do. Cos I don’t believe your bullshit story about bullshit amnesia for one second, mate. Not one. And you know me and you know that I do not fok around. Izzen it so?”
Martin?
Martin?
Martin.
Something cold down there. He struggles, but they’re gripping him. This one in front is forcing something metal down into his pants, cool steel against his privates. “That’s a halogen light, boy. It burns at thousands of degrees. You want to play games with us? I can play games all night.” And there’s a click and a hum and now he sees a glow shining through the fabric of his jeans and almost immediately it starts to get hot. He tries to kick, they’re gripping him solid. “No!” he shouts. “Ahh! No, stop it!” . . . the sweet smell of gun oil and the dead meerkats scattered on the sand and Hugo Bleznik in his red Jag. And his name is Martin. And Hugo left him a letter. Bank accounts. The bomb wasn’t to get the school. The bomb was for this one, right here, the tall man. For him. Whose name is, whose name is . . . pain, bright unbelievably stinging hot burning pain against the side of his penis and, worse, the soft wrinkled skin of his scrotum and the testicle nestled there, and he starts to scream and to thrash but they have him held too tight, the light is burning. “Stop it! God, please stop!” The light goes off. “We are not monkeying around here, boy,” says the Afrikaans voice. “I’ll burn your dick off with a smile on my face if you won’t do what you are told to. Will you do what we say?” “Yes! Yes! Yes!” “I don’t think you’re serious enough.” “No, don’t. Don’t do it!” But the light blinks on inside his jeans again, that sickening blue glow. “Remember this,” says the voice, “while you do what you are told.” It starts to burn immediately, the steel and glass is already hot. It burns so fast that a curl of smoke lifts up from the fabric and someone chuckles beside him and he starts to shriek and buck and as he screams something snaps inside his mind, he feels it cleanly break. And through the break falls an avalanche, a vast, driving avalanche while far away a tiny voice is screaming, a voice that knows, screaming over and over the same words, “You’re Oberholzer! It’s Oberholzer! Oberholzer! Oberholzerrr!”
19
Ahhh God, it stings where my cock and balls are burned, it’s throbbing ten shades of red agony every second and I am stuck on a bimah surrounded by a pack of maniacs with machine guns who are trying to frame me for blowing up Nelson Mandela, but the truth is that on the inside right now all I’m truly feeling is relief relief relief. Swear to God. Cos I’ve been unclogged. The blockages in me have exploded. And what has rushed in with the flood of all my memories—at last!—is myself. There is no better feeling than becoming who you really are. I can see now that I have been watching myself like a stranger ever since the coma, I’ve been acting a part, mumbling my way through a numb life. And it was because I was too scared to face the memories that were there in me all the while. It’s taken this, it’s taken pain and near-death to force those memories up and out, to burst the blocks. And now I’m here and I am back and I am Martin Helger, I’m not Marcus my brother who dived in the river and boxed in the backyard and washed blood off his tux at dawn, and I will die here as Martin Helger, probably, and that’s better than living the way I was, it seriously is. Nothing is worse than losing yourself.
I look at the camera and say my name and I say the words Nelson Mandela has to die. Oberholzer is directing now. He asks for another take, with more feeling. Sure. Nelson Mandela has to die. “That’s better,” he says. “Let’s do another one with you explaining how you got in here, maybe we can improve on that stuff too.”
“I forgot you were a video director as well,” I say. “When you were king of Julius Caesar.”
“Well, I was Internal Stability. Video was only a small part.”
“Are you a major still?” I ask.
“They call us police directors nowadays in the New South Africa. To try to take away our military teeth, our rank. It should be colonel. But never mind my rank. Call me Bokkie, hey. Like old times. Let’s roll.”
I speak my part, gesturing to the bomb. Explaining how I entered and how I used fertiliser to augment the explosives, mixed with diesel fuel.
“Okay, we’ll cut there,” says Oberholzer. “You doing very well, Martin. Now when we start, you tell the camera you’re a member of a Zionist commando unit.”
“A what?” I say.
“Zionist. Tell the camera, South Africa must be corrected. Nelson Mandela refuses to do what he’s told, he is taking the country down the wrong path. He gives comfort to the enemies of global Zionism and Israel and United States . . . We ganna put later a quick few shots of other masked men. Won’t overdo it. Just a hint. Conspiracies need that hint.” I’m really not sure what to say to this madness so I just rub my chin. Oberholzer says, “Don’t have to say the word Israel more than once. Is better to keep it a little bit vague. Forensics on the explosion will identify the make of the detonators and that.”
; “Boss, I’m just ducking to the jazz”—going to the toilets—says a masked man. “Oright?”
Oberholzer shifts a bit on the far side of the light. “Ja, go. But quick now, Pienaar.”
“Ja, boss.”
“Zionist power will not be broken—try that,” Oberholzer says to me. “You ready?”
“But what’s it got to do with Mandela?”
“Listen, if it was a Boer, some Afrikaner like me doing it, it’d be the old story. White right-wingers. But if it is the Jews assassinating him in one of their own temples—ahhh now we talking, hey. Everyone fokken hates you lot. Conspiracy. Israel and Jews taking over the world. It’s perfick.”
I clear my throat. “I don’t know.”
“No? You’ll see. I’m miles ahead of you, mate. Remember you made this bomb to get me—now look where we are.” He chuckles.
I nod. “How’d the speech go, Bokkie?”
“Beg yours?”
“That speech of yours here, ten years ago.” I sweep my arm like a matador.
“Excellent, thanks for asking. Headmaster Volper, he gimme a lovely introduction and I got some wunnerful applause. I spoke about goal-setting to the boys. Keeping a pure and focused mind.”
“Super,” I say.
“Don’t get cheeky. Remember your balls. You ready to record?”
“What happens to me afterwards?”
“Now you being selfish,” says Oberholzer. “Think on the good of the country. Think history. You going to be our firestarter, Martin. We need our burning Reichstag and after Zionists kill off Mandela we’ll have it. You people ganna get it in the neck. But think Israel and America will stand still for that? That’s how war will kick off—like it should’ve done in ’ninety-three.” This raving gets him so excited he comes forward into the light so I can feel his spittle on my brow as I back away. I bump into waiting hands and turn to face Lukhele—no, Comrade Shaolin. He’s chewing away, I can even guess what brand of chewing gum, I remember that day on the hilltop in Jules township when he questioned me about the Annie tape and how he offered me some Stimorol, saying he likes fresh breath, before they pulled back the tarp on the charred bodies. The movement of history, he said then. Thesis and synthesis and Karl Marx.
The Mandela Plot Page 41