Nowhere

by Roger Smith

  But still, as the Toyota creaked and clunked through the streets of Witsand, the strains of an Afrikaans hymn sung by ragged voices reaching Zondi’s ear as they passed the church, he battled to quell a sense of dread, tamping down his fear by removing the Glock from his waistband and gripping it in his sweating palm.

  The hymn faded as they drove on and after a minute the Toyota slowed and stopped and Zondi heard the creak of the safety brake.

  Van Staaden’s massive arm appeared over the back of the seat and he passed the shotgun to Zondi.

  “Cover me.”

  Zondi heard the door open and smack shut and the sound of Van Staaden’s shoes on gravel.

  Zondi lifted himself until he could see out the side window.

  The sad array of yesterday’s heroes was lit, incongruously, by a couple of strings of colored party lights, lending the display the air of a shabby amusement park.

  Kruger, as ever in his khakis, stood alone near a tiny likeness of Verwoerd, turning when he saw Van Staaden walking toward him.

  “Alwyn,” Kruger said.

  “Generaal.”

  Zondi heard no more as the two men stood close and spoke.

  Then the glare of headlights had him ducking as a truck drove up and parked. The headlights were doused and he heard two doors opening and closing and the sound of feet on the gravel.

  He raised his head and looked out and saw a pair of the fat old men he’d encountered the day he’d come here to take Kruger in as they wallowed down to where Van Staaden and the self-styled general stood, and Zondi knew that the run of good luck had just ended.

  Voices were raised and Zondi took the shotgun and eased the Toyota’s door open, lowering himself to the ground.

  One of the old men grabbed Van Staaden by the arm and the giant felled him with a backhanded smack, sending him sprawling at the foot of a bust of Paul Kruger.

  The other old man had a gun in his hand, brandishing it. Van Staaden replied by placing the barrel of his pistol to Kruger’s temple.

  Zondi, crouched by the fender of the Toyota, watched the Boer version of a Mexican standoff, watched as Van Staaden won, getting the old man to fling away his weapon and put his hands on his head.

  Van Staaden grabbed Kruger and started to march him to the truck. The elder on the ground stirred and Zondi swung the shotgun, racking it. Too late. The felled man had a pistol in his hand and shot Van Staaden twice, the giant slowly folding in on himself and hitting the sand.

  Zondi fired the shotgun and killed the prone man. He stood up and leveled the Remington at Kruger, racking it again.

  “Get in the truck.”

  “Fuck you, kaffir,” the old man who was still standing said and Zondi sighted down the barrels and killed him too.

  Kruger took this as a sign that Zondi meant business and raised his hands and walked toward Zondi, who stood and held the weapon on him.

  Too late he heard a sound behind him and swung just as a round took him in the side. He tried to bring the shotgun into play but another bullet slammed into his shoulder and he dropped behind the truck, feeling no pain, which scared him.

  He saw boots coming toward him and lifted the snout of the shotgun and fired at them and a man cursed and fell.

  Zondi, his left arm useless, his vision dimming, forced himself to his feet and, one handed, leveled the shotgun and killed the newcomer.

  The general had claimed a pistol from somewhere and was swinging it onto Zondi who let go with both barrels of the Remington and Kruger’s cranium splintered open and most of his brain was flung against J. G. Strijdom’s broken head.

  Zondi, even though he was descending into darkness, couldn’t but enjoy the rich irony of this.

  Bleeding and weak, his breath coming in small sips, he grabbed hold of the front of the Toyota and dragged himself to the driver’s door and clutched the steering wheel like a drowning man. The shotgun fell and he knew that he could never retrieve it, that if more khaki creatures appeared he was done for.

  If he wasn’t done for already.

  He hauled himself behind the wheel and started the truck and heard shouts and growling car engines, the night swept by flashlights, and he floored the pickup and sped across the rutted ground toward the fence, the barbed wire set ablaze by the beams of the Toyota’s headlights.

  He kept his foot flat and struck the fence and for a moment the Toyota hung suspended like a bird in a trap, and then the uprights pulled free and the truck surged forward, two of its tires punctured, the wire caught in the bullbar, a fence post dragging and clanking after him as he took off across the plain.

  Zondi set course for the road, guided by the small smear of light pollution from Nêrens, but before he reached it he passed out, head falling onto the steering wheel that was sticky with his blood, foot still jamming the gas pedal until the truck hit a rock and his foot was dislodged and the Toyota slowed and bumped and found its way onto the blacktop where it coughed and died, straddling the white line, where, ten minutes later, it was framed in the headlights of the emergency crew who were returning to town from the railroad track with a smorgasbord of what had once been Leon Louw shoveled into a body bag.

  NINE

  Keeping his distance, Steve Bungu stood beneath an oak tree in Maitland Cemetery watching as Joe Louw was buried beside his wife. Where the black sheep son was to be interred he had no idea.

  The media outnumbered the mourners at the graveside and Bungu suspected that for many in this fame-addicted age that would be taken as an indication that Louw had lived a successful life.

  Perhaps he had, the misstep at the very end of his days going with him to the grave.

  And at least the few mourners had a grave to weep beside, unlike Bungu who had never been given his wife’s body to bury.

  On the seventh day of her being locked in with him Bungu’s mind had shut down and he’d lapsed into a vegetative state.

  When he’d emerged from this—how much later he never knew—Nandi had disappeared and when he’d asked Oubaas Louw after her whereabouts he’d been met with a blank stare, as if his wife had never existed.

  After his release Bungu and his comrades had tried to unravel the knots of Apartheid bureaucracy and track down Nandi’s remains, but to no avail.

  She was gone.

  Ten years later, when Oubaas Louw had been forced to appear before the Truth Commission, Bungu had waited for details of Nandi, but she was never mentioned. The focus had been on another death in detention, that of a trade unionist, and Oubaas had testified that the body of the victim had been burned on a farm up the West Coast while he and his drunken bootlickers had barbecued meat on another fire.

  Had Nandi’s fate been similar?

  Maybe it was better that he never knew, Bungu thought.

  Although it was tempting to jog across to the old monster in the wheelchair at the graveside of his son, sitting in the shade of an umbrella held by his brown nurse, unseat him and beat the truth out of him.

  Bungu knew that would be futile. The old man would never disclose where they had disposed of Nandi, knowing this secret gave him power over Bungu, power he would wield until he, too, was lowered into the earth.

  The officiating dominee said something in Afrikaans and the mourners bowed their heads and Bungu heard snatches of a prayer.

  He too bowed his head and closed his eyes, not in deference to the prayer, but rather to compose himself, the events of thirty years before as raw as if they’d happened yesterday.

  Thirty years.

  He’d been twenty-seven when Nandi was tortured to death. And now he was staring sixty in the face.

  He sighed and opened his eyes, watching as the mourners filed away from the grave, the media in their flak jackets and jeans swarming around them with lenses and microphones, focusing most of their attention on Oubaas who was wheeled to a minivan, ready to be loaded inside.

  A group of thickset men in their forties and fifties—men who could only have been former colleagues of
Joe Louw—formed a protective cordon around the old man and eventually the media vultures flapped off to their cars and trucks and roared away with their booty.

  The men, shuffling their cheap shiny shoes like schoolboys, shook hands with Oubaas and departed, leaving the old man to be fussed over by a tired-looking bottle-blonde woman and a man in a flashy suit who gazed hungrily at the ass of a retreating reporter in a short skirt. Louw’s daughter and son-in-law, no doubt.

  Oubaas waved them away and, at last, he was alone with the nurse, the woman activating a contraption that lifted him in his chair and deposited him in the rear of the van.

  Bungu strolled up, looking like neither mourner nor media in his shorts and T-shirt, the trilby perched on his head.

  The nurse stood in his path, but Bungu moved her aside with a thick hand and leaned into the open rear of the van, staring down into the ravaged face of Colonel Louw.

  “You remember me, Oubaas?” Bungu asked.

  The old man stared at him with those blue eyes flecked with yellow that Bungu still saw in his nightmares, then he nodded.

  “For sure I remember you, Mr. Bungu.” A death’s head grin. “But I remember your wife even better.”

  Bungu breathed this away.

  “So have you come to do it?” Oubaas asked.

  “Do what?”

  “Kill me?”

  Bungu shook his mighty dome. “No, why the hell would I do that? Your wife is dead, your son and your grandson died within hours of one another. They’re chopping off your body parts like cold cuts. Why would I make it easy for you by killing you? No, I’m just here to tell you that you’re free. Free to live out what’s left of your miserable life.”

  The old man’s face contorted with rage and he spat at Bungu. “Fuck, you kaffir.”

  Bungu tipped his hat and walked away, feeling a lightness he hadn’t known in decades, and not even the sickly-sweet stench from the crematorium could contaminate his buoyant mood.

  TEN

  Disaster Zondi, drifting back from a place of infinite darkness, heard a man’s voice, soft and muffled, like a radio transmission reaching him across vast, empty space.

  “Zondi?”

  Prizing apart his impossibly heavy eyelids, millimeter by agonizing millimeter, Zondi saw the blurred outline of a figure looming over him.

  “Zondi? Can you hear me?”

  The blurred shape sharpened into the fleshy face of the director and Zondi wanted to tell him to fuck off but the tubes up his nose and in his mouth reduced his voice to a grunt.

  “What a sorry fucking fiasco,” the director said, massaging his temples with his fingers.

  Zondi heard the mechanical gasp of a ventilator and the chirp of a heart monitor.

  He couldn’t move his head and when he peered down to check on what was left of him he saw the swell of his body under the bedding, his right arm lying on top of the sheet, rendered immobile by a drip disappearing into a bruise below his elbow, a pulse monitor attached to the tip of his index finger.

  When Zondi tried to raise his body from the bed a lacerating pain in his chest tore through the fog of pain meds and spiked him to the mattress.

  He saw a white blur out the corner of his eye, a nurse coming into the room, agitated, speaking to the director who still loomed over Zondi: “Please, sir, you have to leave. The patient can’t be disturbed.”

  A black nurse, but speaking English.

  “Fuck off,” the director said and grabbed Zondi by the bicep. “Do you know how much shit you have caused?”

  Zondi tried to lift his left hand to punch the man, but it was immobilized, and at first he thought he was being held by a wrist restraint, then his scummy eyes found focus and he saw that he was handcuffed to the bed frame.

  “You’re facing four charges of murder, Zondi,” the director said. “Magnus Kruger and three of his followers.”

  Another blur in the doorway as a very pale man with tired eyes and dark hair, a blue shadow of beard along his jawline, hurried into the room. He wore a white coat, a stethoscope dangling from the pocket.

  “Get out,” he said to the director.

  “Do you know who I am?” The director said.

  “I don’t care who you are. This man is in no condition to be disturbed. How did you get in here anyway?”

  The director seemed intent on staying and the doctor grabbed him and there was a scuffle that was joined by a uniformed cop—guarding the door no doubt, and sent packing at the arrival of the besuited nabob.

  The director broke free and leaned in to shout into Zondi’s face, spittle hitting him on the cheek. “Do us all a favor, Zondi. Just fucking die.”

  Then director was receding, his features melting from his face as a powerful current dragged Zondi down, down, down . . .

  ELEVEN

  Steve Bungu knew she wasn’t gonna show. And why the fuck should she? She was the premier of the Western Cape and he, well, he wasn’t the kind of person she associated with.

  Not anymore.

  He checked his watch again, the luminous face glowing in the dark, and saw that it was nearly eight thirty, fifteen minutes past the time they’d agreed to meet here on the Sea Point promenade. He knew he was wasting his time but he stayed, leaning on the rusted railing, looking out at the last greenish wash of light fading from the sky.

  Joggers jogged and toned women speed-walked on this hot late summer night. A couple of kids were kicking a ball on the grass and it skewed off a foot and landed near Bungu. On impulse he spun the ball with his loafer and gave it a kick to launch it and got into the groove of a little keepy-uppy routine, knee to head to knee to foot, still managing to keep the ball aloft for nearly a minute despite his fucked up leg.

  A kid ran over to retrieve the ball and saw enough of Bungu’s face in the gloom to turn and sprint away like his ass was on fire.

  Bungu laughed and punted the ball back to the boys before resuming his ocean vigil.

  “This your way of keeping a low profile, Steve?”

  That unmistakable voice had him turning to Shanelle Filander, who—had she not spoken—would have walked past him unnoticed. She wore black sweatpants and running shoes and a gray hoodie that hid her hair and face.

  Bungu looked for her bodyguards.

  “Relax, Steve, you said alone so I’m alone.”

  “I thought you weren’t coming.”

  “I wasn’t going to.” Filander shrugged. “I got curious.” She bounced on her toes, as if she would like to run away. “Been a while, Steve.”

  “Ja. Different detours, you and me.”

  She laughed. “Oh, ja.”

  Filander turned her back to the ocean, away from the wind, and lit a cigarette, and he saw her face in the glow of the match, lined and middle-aged now, but it took him spinning back to a long, long time ago.

  “You still remember Nandi, don’t you, Shanelle?”

  “Jesus, Steve, you know I do,” Filander said, exhaling smoke. “She was the best of us all.”

  “Ja, she was.” He stared unseeing at the dark ocean. “I used to think that death was the end, you know? But I’ve realized that a person doesn’t die in one moment, they keep on dying as the people who knew them forget them, or die themselves.” He rubbed a hand against his pitted skull. “It’s been years since I spoke to anybody who remembered her.”

  “I’m sorry, Steve.”

  “Ah, it was a long time ago.”

  “But it still hurts, what those bastards did to her. And you.”

  They stood a minute in silence, Filander smoking and Bungu gazing into the dark, before the woman spoke.

  “What’s this about, Steve? Not Nandi?”

  “No. Not directly.”

  “No?”

  “No, but I think she would’ve wanted me to have this talk with you. I think she’d agree with you, these days.”

  Filander glanced at him. “Agree with me about what?”

  “About how fucked up things have gotten. About how all t
he old ideals have been lost.”

  “It’s politics now, Steve. There’s no place for idealism. It’s not the struggle anymore.”

  “I know. But still, it’s a fuckin mess. We all have our regrets, about what we’ve done.”

  “Yes, we do, but I didn’t think I’d ever hear you talking like this.”

  “Well.”

  “You going soft in your old age, Steve?” Filander’s chuckle became a smoker’s hack.

  “You should quit,” Bungu said.

  “I quit at least once a week.”

  Bungu watched her sucking at the cigarette greedily, then he said, “He did it, you know?”

  “Who did what?”

  “Our old comrade Mr. President killed his wife.”

  Filander mashed her cigarette on the railing in a shower of sparks and pocketed the butt.

  “You need to be very careful here, Steve.”

  “Why, you wearing a wire?”

  “No, I’m not wearing a fuckin wire. But this is a step you need to be sure you want to take.”

  “I am sure.”

  “Okay.”

  “He killed his wife. I covered it up. Got Joe Louw in as window dressing.”

  “I had my suspicions,” Filander said.

  “I knew you would.”

  “What did you have on Louw, anyway?”

  Bungu flapped a broad hand. “Doesn’t matter. Not now.”

  “So what are you telling me, Steve? That you’re going to go public with what you know?”

  He shook his head. “No, not that.”

  “What then?”

  “He’s going to be around a while yet, as president. At least another five years. If anything this has enhanced his status.”

  “Yes, ironically it has. A good career move, murdering his wife.”

  “So exposing him and getting rid of him would just allow another asshole to step up.”