The Mandela Plot

by Kenneth Bonert

  “We’ll be gone by then anyway,” I say. “Once you chuck that it’ll take us like a few seconds to get back to the pipe. With this.” I waggle the envelope and then tuck it under my belt under my shirt, against my belly. Quickly I paw through the rest of the bag, pulling out the knee and elbow pads and hard hat, the overalls. The squashed overalls are stiff and mouldy-looking. But the pads seem okay even after ten-odd years in the earth, so I strap them on. Marcus is silent. He has that grenade out and is rubbing it and staring at it. Black blood has dried all over the side of his face where the dressing is taped against the ear. He shuts his eyes and blows air through puckered, trembling lips. “You oright?” I ask.

  “Not that much juice left in me, Martin,” he says.

  “You’re oright.”

  His eyes start leaking, thin silvery streams that scare me. “I had so much of it,” he says.

  “There’s plenty,” I say. “We’ll get to America, you’ll see. You’ll leave all this.”

  “Ja,” he says. “But all this won’t leave me.”

  “Marcus, there’s a mural on the wall over there that’s got you on it. Running with the ball. No one could stop you, man. They still can’t.”

  He wipes his hand under his nose, says nothing, his other hand clenching the grenade.

  “Marcus, chuck that thing and let’s go.”

  “I hammered them,” he says. “Made them suffer. But it doesn’t help the hate. There were always more.”

  “Marcus, please now. Or give it to me. I’ll throw.”

  He stares at the grenade. “Ja, like the one at the Yard, hey. You said the funerals. I saw photos of what was done to Ma and Da. I couldn’t come, I was already starting undercover, hitting them back.”

  That gets my head tilting like a dog to a strange noise. “Hitting who?”

  He frowns. “Who d’you think? Them. The boogs. The ANC. The PAC. The terrs. Whatever you want to call em.”

  “Wait,” I say. “You think it was ANC guys who killed Ma and Da? Is that what you meant before, that I would understand why?”

  “It wasn’t just some robbery, Martin,” he tells me. “Sorry if you didn’t know.”

  “Marcus,” I say. “It wasn’t the union or the ANC or anyone on that side.”

  “What you telling me?”

  “Marcus, it was Oberholzer. He did it.”

  There’s a silence. Marcus looks at me. I say I was there, at the Yard, in the office, I saw them lying there. And I remember the detectives saying the “giraffe” had had me brought there and I remember that Oberholzer knew our parents would be there that Sunday and what Shaolin said on the night of the red Jag, about the kind of grenade, and what Sammy Nongalo came to the house to tell me.

  The Motorola crisps and Oberholzer’s voice joins us, sounding relaxed. “I’ve done the erasing,” he says. “Nice job. Almost ready to bell the Flying Squad. Unless you want to change your mind, hey, Martin? . . . Martin?”

  I’m staring at the radio, not really hearing it, my brain spinning in overdrive. “Don’t you get it?” I say to Marcus. “He wanted me there. He did it because—oh Jesus.” And all-a-sudden the whole thing clicks in me and I see it all. “You told me you said no to him at first, right, but then—don’t you see? It was like two birds with one stone.”

  “Two what?” His voice has turned gruff, like he’s having trouble breathing.

  “Oberholzer had them killed,” I say, “and then—you said you saw photos, I bet you that he showed you the photos, didn’t he?”

  He nods stiffly.

  “There it is. He had Da and Ma killed like he wanted and that got you to help him. And me, he was planning me also. What could be a better revenge? Was perfect for him. You set him up with the bouncer gang and that got his promotion to Special Branch.”

  “You getting carried away, Martin.”

  “I’m not.”

  “You say Oberholzer’s murdering people just to get someone to work for him?”

  “But it’s not someone. It’s a Helger.”

  He shuts one eye, confused. “Hey?”

  “You know how much he hates us, our family.”

  “What’s this you saying?”

  “You know that Da and Oberholzer’s father were like this,” and I punch my fists together. “The poison history there.”

  “Who told you this?”

  My mouth is hanging open. I mean I cannot believe my brother’s ignorance, but then I think well why would he know? How could he? Everything I learned I found out after Marcus disappeared. So I tell him—about the trip with Hugo to see Oberholzer, about how he threw us out along with Hugo’s shoebox of cash. “See, Da ruined Oberholzer’s old man. And so he wanted to ruin us back. It’s deep with him. It’s like all he cares about. And it’s all my fault.”

  “Your fault.”

  Because I was the one who made that first contact. I got myself arrested in Jules township. I was taken to John Vorster Square where Oberholzer realised who I was. Then we went to the Yard where Oberholzer had the run-in with Da. But for me none of it would ever have happened. I was the one who put the Helger family back into Oberholzer’s mind and started it going. And I’m the one who told Oberholzer about my brother being a paratrooper on the Border. “He didn’t just pull your name out of a hat, Marcus,” I tell him. “He went for you because you are a Helger. Because you are Isaac Helger’s eldest son.” Just like he went for me also, tried to get me into some kind of training camp the night I ran with Hugo’s red Jag, taking Comrade Shaolin along with me. “Lukhele said you would’ve been there at that place, that farm, too. He probably wanted you to help train me. He would have sprung me on you—surprise. The man is sick. That was his revenge, don’t you see? To convert us both to his side. To use us. To not only kill Da but steal his children and help himself doing it.”

  Marcus is shaking his head, saying no over and over. “Can’t be. He chose me cos I knew the Dynamite Guys . . . I’d been a bouncer . . .”

  “Marcus, think about it. There’re probably twenty different people he could have used to set up with the bouncers. But it was you. He picked you, man, had you transferred and flown out of Namibia, all that trouble—it’s because you are a Helger. The Dynamite connection was a nice excuse and it was also a benefit to him. But then you said no. So he was stuck. He knew he had to do something to turn you.”

  The radio crackles but this time Marcus twists the volume knob and Oberholzer’s monologue dies to a murmur.

  “No,” Marcus says. “No, this can’t be right.”

  “Marcus, face it. Oberholzer killed our parents. It was an army grenade. He knew they would be there doing stocktaking. He did it for his father and to screw us up. He made you hate. You said he showed you photos, right? He musta talked and talked about it to you too, I bet. Talked you right into it, didn’t he? Probably said this is your chance to get them back. The bastards who did it—am I right? But all the time it wasn’t them, it was him, Marcus. It’s so obvious now. Oberholzer.”

  “No,” Marcus says, but he isn’t shaking his head anymore, and I can barely hear his whisper over the hissing of the grass but I feel the wind shifting slightly. “Throw it,” I say. “Let’s go.” Marcus looks down at what’s in his hand like he doesn’t know how it got there. “You’re right,” he says. “What you’ve said.”

  “Let’s go, Marcus.”

  He doesn’t move, so I grab his shoulder and shake him. “He doesn’t matter now,” I say. “Only this does. And that does.” I hit my belly and I point. The documents. The tunnel entrance. But Marcus isn’t looking at me.

  Exodus

  24

  On the packed sidewalks between the skyscrapers he feels like a drifting cinder in a steel foundry, a feeling that never leaves him. An accent and background as a white African Jew diluted in a million foreign accents, a million other worlds and combinations of worlds. You’re a nothing: this was America’s prime message against which each is alone and meant to rebel.


  Yet they all know Nelson Mandela. And every time he sees Mandela’s face on a magazine or a screen he’ll smile and think of his brother. The saviour’s saviour.

  He joined a college and took a diploma. Journalism. When he arrived he thought there’d be officials waiting to detain him at JFK. Thought the New York Times would have him on its front page with a picture of Solomon High School and the headline mandela bomb plot foiled, police massacred. But you’re a nothing in America. He searched diligently for a time for any mention online and in South African newspapers, but was never able to find even a single line. No massacre, no Jewish high school, no Leopards. He checked obituaries for the name Oberholzer but it was never the right Oberholzer. And no mention of the Helger name at all. Gradually his fervor for information passed, gradually the present subsumed the past, the future rose to dominance in his psyche, his accent transformed, his old self receded. Dr. Norm would have been well pleased. So would Hugo.

  His first job was digital, writing headlines for an online news aggregator. Hugo’s accounts had sustained him. He has a nice apartment in Brooklyn now, an open space with a water view. This is life, it flows on like that steely river. He met Carolyn at a yoga class and by the summer they were seeing each other. At odd moments he might think of Annie. He’ll try to summon the energy to investigate the location of her body, the cemetery, the family. But as always he’ll put it off. He’ll remember instead.

  “You go,” he says. “You don’t wait.”

  “We’re both going, brother.”

  He’s wrapped his lower leg and tied it off very tightly. “Get ready,” he says.

  “Marcus.”

  He looks at me. “Swear on Ma and Da. You go and don’t look back. Now.”

  “No,” I say. “I won’t do it.”

  “Yes, you will,” he says. Then he says, “Please.”

  And our eyes are wet and I say what he wants me to say and he turns and throws the grenade sidearmed and it flies in a high arc over the top of the mound of stones. Out to where it lands in the hissing grasses with a soft but immutable thud.

  18 June 2006. Home alone in Brooklyn he tore open a tough, strange mail package while watching a little barge towing a huge raft of garbage across his window like some machine version of an African dung beetle. In the package he found a folded newspaper article two months old and a pair of glasses with broken lenses. The frames were buckled and discol­oured, as if they’d been charred in an oven. The article covered the discovery of a mass grave site, unearthed by informal residents—what used to be called squatters—in Diepsloot, an impoverished township north of Johannesburg. A forensic team was at work identifying remains of an estimated half-a-dozen bodies. There appeared to be scraps of police uniform interred with the dead, along with traces of a corrosive agent. Attached to the bottom of the newspaper clipping was a pin with an ornament: a piece of metal painted gold. Looking closer, he saw it was a cat. Closer still were spots. A leopard. He held up the glasses and then remembered that tall, thin man putting on just such square spectacles. He’d had them on the first time he’d seen him, taking coffee with Principal Mokefi at the Leiterhoff School in Julius Caesar township, Johannesburg, South Africa. He hid the package and didn’t tell Carolyn about it. Or anyone. The past is a monster you put in a closet and shut the door on and put your back to and keep pressed shut.

  He was alone again when he took the package out. He poured a long drink and laid the items out. Raised his glass. He’d realised what anniversary had just passed. “L’chaim, brother,” he said. “Here’s to Ma, and to Da. For them.”

  The grenade blows up with a hollow steely bang like fireworks in a tin barrel. The flash of it hurls a ghost shadow, white as milk. There are gunshots, little cracks by comparison, that must be from Oberholzer’s reacting rifle. His Claudine. I smell burning grass and something chemical. Smoke curls on the air. I have the envelope against my belly. I can hear the crackling and licking of the flames. Marcus pushes me. When I peer around the stones there is a hedge of snapping yellow taller than me, stretching out across both ways with the fireball of phosphorous smoke boiling at the centre and the grasses already beginning to roar. My brother pushes me again. Go.

  I grab him. “You with,” I say. But I am already resigned, it’s just a gesture. He prises my hand off and checks the submachine gun. His lips are working. “He doesn’t matter,” I say. “We’ll go to America.”

  Marcus shakes his head. “Ganna finish him, Martin.”

  “And then?”

  “Go now. You already swore on Ma and Da.”

  I thrust my hand into the envelope and pull out his green card and push it into his pocket and tell him I will see him later. Then I run, but I stop and look back, like Lot’s wife. The burning is strong in the air and it stings my eyes. He is moving up the hill close behind the moving wall of fire. Running bent over with his one stiff leg making him seem to half stumble with each step but he is moving fast. He has the submachine gun on his shoulder and he is chasing the flames and I can feel the heat even from where I am and it is bright as day on our side but with thick smoke above so that I can only just make out the tops of the tennis court fences. And smoke also rises from the ground already charred and into this my brother burrows, disappears.

  An American on the outside but underneath the white skin beats the blood of an African, the heart of a Jew. He has learned only a few things. Everything you believe can be wrong. Truth is made by power. Never let the beast out. Beware of your certainties. Beware of your certainties.

  He was there the night Nelson Mandela almost got assassinated. They almost made him do it. There is the history everyone thinks they know and there are the secret truths underneath it. He knows that what is black now will be white tomorrow and what white now black the next day. Annie taught him we’re all living on our movie sets. Maybe it takes someone else to push us off them, to open our eyes.

  In a New York rainstorm he remembers his brother when they were little and the African rain caught them as they walked their dog. Marcus was all grins, he was all laughter. He ran to the water and dived in, he could have been anything.

  Glossary

  Afrikaners—white South Africans of mainly Dutch descent who speak Afrikaans, a language derived from Dutch

  alter kukker—old fart

  amandla ngawethu—“power is ours,” rallying cry of ANC supporters

  Amagabane—radical youth of the black townships engaged in protests and violence during the apartheid era, supporters of the ANC; also called Comrades

  ANC—African National Congress, a political movement that fought apartheid as a banned organisation, eventually becoming South Africa’s governing party with Nelson Mandela as state president

  arvy—afternoon

  aveyre—sin

  AWB—Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging, the Afrikaner Resistance Movement, a Nazi-like political movement based on Afrikaner nationalism

  baas—boss, with connotations of white supremacy

  backchat—truculent arguing

  backstop—protector

  baff, baffing—fart, farting

  bakkie—pickup truck

  barmy, barmies—bar mitzvah(s), the male coming-of-age in Judaism at age thirteen

  bell, belling—phone, phoning

  biltong—South African dried meat, similar to jerky

  bimah—a raised platform or focal point in the sanctuary of a synagogue, on which the Torah is read

  bioscope—cinema

  bladdy—corruption of bloody, with roughly equivalent usage

  blerry—Afrikaans version of bladdy

  boet, boetie—brother, little brother; also an affectionate address between friends

  boff, boffin—clever, a clever person or someone who has mastered a particular subject

  bohbi—grandmother

  braai, braaivleis—barbecue

  bru—brother

  cadenza—a fit, a nervous eruption or tantrum

  cafi—convenience store, cor
ner store; corruption of café

  Casspir—a large armoured vehicle used by South African police and military

  cause, causing—to make trouble, to needle, to create a disturbance, to look for a fight

  charf, charfing—to pretend, con, or flirt

  chazersa—disgusting, pig-like

  check—look or see

  china—good friend; derives from rhyming slang, china being a plate and plate rhyming with mate

  chorbs—pimples

  chutis, chutaysim—disparaging South African Jewish slang term for Afrikaners

  click—understand

  coch—vomit

  coloured—people of mixed black and white ancestry

  combi—a minivan, often used as a taxi

  Comrades—see Amagabane

  cuts—corporal punishment, caning, strokes of the cane

  dinkum—truly, genuinely

  dof—stupid

  donga—a dry riverbed, an eroded ravine

  dorp—a small, remote village or town

  dosh—money

  dumela—Sotho greeting

  dutchmen—disparaging South African English term for Afrikaners

  dwaal—a daze or trance

  effy—condom

  fah fee—a form of gambling, an illegal lottery

  farshtunkene—stinking

  fershtay—understand

  flattied or flatty—to slap hard, to strike with an open hand

  flip, flippen—relatively polite curse word

  freks, frekking off—dies, dying, passing away

  fress—to eat hungrily, to chow down

  friss—very nice, beautiful

  frum—pious, adhering strictly to the Jewish religion

  full stick—all-out, with maximum effort