Without warning, Jeppe started. “Meneer Myburgh! Where the hell did you go?” He dropped his glass and looked around the room as if Myburgh had left it. His glass, meanwhile, broke on the floor into a nebula of scattershot shards and chips.
“I’m right here.”
Jeppe recovered. “Ah, yes, there. You faded out on me. It’s this cold, I guess. My vision’s bollixed. My head aches. My nose feels like a cherry pepper.”
“You should go home,” Myburgh said.
But he was frightened. It wasn’t Jeppe’s cold that had caused him to fade; it was a brief reversion to shadow matter, the result of his again beginning to view things—a little, at least—from the pedestrian focus of Henning Jeppe. He had to cling to Thubana. If he did not, this entire nightmare would cease to signify.
“I should go home,” Jeppe said. “And so I will. Allow me to drive you to your own place, Meneer Myburgh.”
“I can’t. It wouldn’t—”
“The least I can do. For all the nasty inconvenience.”
In the end, Myburgh permitted Jeppe to chauffeur him along the tree-lined boulevards of Pretoria, past the monuments and parks and museums, to his condominium. A good ride. Last week’s clouds were only memories. The blue Transvaal sky—a dome of fragile porcelain—made him forget that it was winter, that the jacarandas would not blossom for another three months. Even Jeppe’s reminders not to speak of anything that had happened during his confinement seemed benign and sensible, for Myburgh had the odd feeling that his life was beginning anew.
* * * *
Back in his apartment, hanging his dry-cleaned but ruined suit in a closet, he realized that he had bought his mellow spirits with counterfeit coin. Thubana was dead, the victim of men hostile to the quixotic Grand Unified Theory toward which he had so touchingly—but ineffectively— pointed his dreams.
And Thubana, dead, was a living rebuke.
The dressing mirror on Myburgh’s closet door gave back an image that modulated in and out of visibility like the picture on a snow-afflicted TV set. He was there, then he wasn’t. He wasn’t there, then he was. The degree of reality he had was contingent on forces over which he had no direct control.
Or, at least, so it seemed at the moment.
Myburgh crossed his arms in front of his chest and clutched his shoulders. Stay put, he told himself; stay put. Arms crossed, he walked into his apartment’s living room—a studio decorated with opera posters, ferns, an aquarium with Chinese carp, and a wall of books, few of which he had opened since taking his degree from the University of Pretoria nearly twenty years ago. Today, his reading was almost all business related, with a smattering of international news to keep him abreast of fluctuating trends, and he did the bulk of it in his office at Jacobus & Roux.
Thubana was at the fish tank tapping nutritional dandruff out of a colorful box onto the water for Myburgh’s starving carp. The fish rose in pairs or trios, hit at the scaly food, then splashed away through the bottle-green water to allow another greedy pair or threesome to surface and feed.
—They’re hungry, Thubana said. —You were gone a long time, Mr. Myburgh.
—I left a key with the manager, Myburgh said. —He promised to take care of them for me.
—It appears he forgot.
Thubana looked exactly as he had hanging in his cell on the top floor of security police headquarters: naked, bruised, grotesquely cinched at the throat with his confiscated belt. Here, though, his body was relaxed, his manner courteous. The end of his belt hung straight down his chest like a tie instead of twisting stiffly away in a makeshift noose. Under the glances of Jeppe & Company, he had been humiliated. Here, he was at ease with his nakedness, relieved that an insufferable ordeal was over.
—Let me get you a robe. You must be cold.
—It’s all right, Mr. Myburgh. I can’t stay.
—No trouble, no trouble.
Myburgh returned to his closet (dismayed to find that there was nothing in the full-length mirror on its door but the framed poster for Die Götterdämmerung opposite it), rummaged distractedly among his hangups for a dressing gown, found one, and returned to Thubana with it. Thubana protested mildly, but at last took the gown and put it on—more to ease Myburgh’s embarrassment, Myburgh felt, than to satisfy propriety or to defeat the cold. Now, he looked a great deal like a lanky prizefighter, the undaunted loser of a bout with the world title holder.
—What are you doing here? Myburgh said.
—I must tell you something.
—Out with it, then.
—The challenge is to write one set of equations that will prove the four known basic forces to be separate showings of one even more basic force.
—You told me that on Grim Boy’s Toe.
—Reminders are necessary, I think. People keep forgetting how important this challenge is.
Myburgh raised and dropped his arms. —You’re not really here, Mr. Thubana. Maybe I’m not either.
Thubana ignored this. —Another thing.
—What?
—Someone narked on Winston.
—”Narked”? Do you mean that Skosana was actually involved in the Armscor bombing?
—Could be. Could be.
—I thought he was innocent, a victim.
—Few of us are innocent, Mr. Myburgh. Many are victims.
—A man who plants bombs, or who protects people who do, isn’t a victim. He’s a perpetrator.
Thubana, hands in pockets, shook his head disappointedly.
—Violence sickens me, Myburgh insisted.
—Sometimes it does. Sometimes. But Winston had a steel plate in his head. It broadcast to him almost continuously. The buzzing of one’s own bones is hard to set aside.
—I imagine it is.
—Another thing I wanted to tell you, Mr. Myburgh: Informers are everywhere.
—Who? Do you know who it was?
—Of course. It came to me while helicoptering under the blows of Pampoenkop and his goons.
—Tell me.
Thubana told.
* * * *
It was still daylight. Lightning bird (called by the Ndebele of Sebetiela masianoke a selwana and by Afrikaners the hammerkop) had done his work; he had brought the highveld rain. The coming summer drought would be easier to bear for his help in July. Now, though, the winter sun shone to the north again, and the people of Pretoria were enjoying both the freshness of the air and the brisk high rage of that rapidly westering sun.
In the same clothes he had worn home from police headquarters, Myburgh went downstairs and hailed a cab. The driver was a young Afrikaner who had probably never heard of the hammerkop. Myburgh felt an irrational resentment toward him even as the young man let him in and turned to receive his destination. (Or not irrational, Myburgh thought. Misplaced.)
“Marabastad,” he said.
“Are you sure? I don’t carry many of our kind there.”
“Do you carry any?”
“Yes, sir. Now and again.”
“Good. I’m another. Please take me there.”
“This is the rush hour. It’ll be slow going.”
Myburgh showed the cabbie a handful of rand notes. “More talk, young man, and it will affect my tip.”
“Yes, sir. Where in Marabastad?”
“Belle Ombre station.”
The cabbie started to speak again (Myburgh could see him in the rearview), but changed his mind and slid the cab into gear.
Because of traffic, the trip needed twenty minutes. During it, Myburgh recalled his final moment with Thubana: Nodding good-bye, Thubana had ascended through his apartment’s ceiling and beyond, carrying with him both Myburgh’s dressing gown and the self-pitying edges of his funk. Now, Belle Ombre station—a kind of soaring, concrete circus tent with attractive parterres and geometries of structural piping painted red, yellow, blue, and green—loomed out of the old Asian enclave like a Transvaaler’s Disneyworld.
This was the depot from which the architects of t
he homeland solution accepted the black “foreigners” from Bophuthatswana and KwaNdebele as day laborers, and from which they expelled them again every night. Bullet trains were the key both to white autonomy and economic self-sufficiency, and this afternoon, almost in spite of himself, Myburgh found himself admiring the sleek, high-tech trains that state planners had commissioned, and bought, to put their dear and preposterous scheme into action.
Unfortunately, not all the high-speed rail lines necessary to make this solution work were operating yet, and to make sure that no “foreigner” spent the night in the city, Putco had to continue to send commuter buses to KwaNdebele and some of the more distant corners of Bophuthatswana.
It was these grime-encrusted buses, not the sexy trains, that Myburgh had come to Belle Ombre to find; and when he saw the ramps leading to the passenger docks, he made his driver stop, gave him both his fare and an extravagant tip, and stepped out among milling armies of weary blacks, who looked at him (if they looked at him at all) with glazed, preoccupied eyes.
A ghostly twilight had begun to draw down.
What business did the white baas have here? His clothes didn’t identify him as a policeman, nor did they say that he was well off enough to be a bullet-train official or a Putco executive. He was, in fact, an intruder, and Myburgh became more and more aware of his status as an intruder the deeper into the crowd he walked, hurrying to reach Thubana’s bus before it filled and left for various closer settlements on its route to the Wolverkraal depot, three hours out of Marabastad.
“Bus four-nine-six,” he said, stopping a woman wearing a heavy, unbuttoned coat over a maid’s uniform. She merely stared. He said the same thing in English, and she gave him an I-couldn’t-tell-you shrug. Not hostile; indifferent.
He let her go, blundered on, asked others, got blank stares or confessions of ignorance, and finally approached a uniformed white policeman who wanted to know where he was going and why. Didn’t he know that, at this hour, Belle Ombre was no place for casual sight-seeing? Above the shuffling crowd, speakers piped a Mantovani-ized arrangement of the old Petula Clark hit “Downtown.”
Myburgh, putting his face in the policeman’s, explained that he had come to scold a Ndebele roofer for the shoddy work he had done on a Sunnyside housing project. The man had to return tomorrow and repair his labor, or he would forfeit his pay and any future chance to roof in the city’s white subdivisions.
“What bus is he riding, then?”
“Number four-nine-six,” Myburgh said.
The policeman sighed, as if being asked to find a diamond on a floor strewn with broken glass.
“It has a name too,” Myburgh said: “Grim Boy’s Toe.”
The policeman nodded. “Ah, yes, I know it.”
“You know it?”
“Of course. They’re not allowed names. Commercial buses with onetime passengers, yes. But not state-subsidized commuter buses run by good old Putco.”
“No? Why not?”
“Names on state-subsidized buses are disrespectful. Grim Boy’s Toe, for instance. Who’d want to ride that?”
Myburgh thought that even if it were called Bali Hi Express, he wouldn’t be pleased to ride it again (not so far as the Wolverkraal depot, anyway), but he bit his tongue.
“Over that way,” the policeman said, pointing across one of the esplanades to a down-sloping ramp. “Driver’s busy trying to bring his bus in line with Putco policy.”
“This way?” Myburgh said, already walking.
“Yes, sir. Right on over.”
Myburgh jogged across the esplanade. He found another nexus of ramps, looked around, selected the one he thought the policeman had meant, and, breathing raspily, jogged down it to the loading dock. People had not yet begun to queue here. Myburgh relaxed a little. He was no stranger in a crowd, and Ernest Kabini was standing next to his bus.
A closer look: Kabini was holding a small can of blue enamel and painting out the legend that had personalized number 496 for Myburgh on the drizzly highveld.
“Stop!” he cried.
Kabini glanced up at the white man coming irresistibly down the ramp, his heavy-heeled strut more the consequence of gravity than self-esteem. Myburgh, meanwhile, read confusion on Kabini’s face. Not guilt, not panic: confusion.
And then Kabini recognized him, knew him for the unlucky fellow who had wrecked his lekker Cadillac on the KwaNdebele Road. His confusion turned into something like both guilt and panic, and his eyes cut from side to side, looking for a way out.
“What are you doing, Kabini?” Myburgh put a hand on the mud-caked bus, almost as if he owned it.
Kabini lifted his brush and paint can. “Covering this unhappy name, nkosi.” He smiled. “Very good to see you again.”
“Don’t cover it.”
“Company regulation, my baas. Got to finish. Got to finish up before Mr. Krige comes back to check.”
“Leave it as it is.”
Kabini glowered at him. He had already glopped out most of the first two words, GRIM BOY—so that all that was visible now was ’s TOE (whatever that implied). Obviously, he could see no point in leaving only an orphaned possessive and the name of a rather lowly body part emblazoned on the bus’s side. Mr. Krige would not be pleased. His passengers would laugh.
“Forgive me, nkosi, but I must paint it out.”
“And I must tell your riders—” Myburgh climbed up into 496 and saw that maybe twenty people were already aboard, waiting for the rest of their fellow commuters to connect and climb on too. He came back down. “I must tell them you’re a paid police informant.”
Kabini’s puzzlement appeared to grow. “Why would you say that, my baas?”
“Because it’s true.”
Smiling, Kabini shook his head. “No. No, nkosi.”
“You had Ephraim turn in Winston Skosana. Skosana was a friend of young Mordecai Thubana’s. So Major Jeppe took him too.”
“Most unlucky.”
“Even unluckier, Kabini, is what happened to your ex-passengers while being detained.”
Kabini’s usual deference was giving way to guarded hostility. Lines clawed from his eyes. His mouth tightened, a piece of string pulled taut. He put his brush into the can of enamel and started to feather blue paint onto the ’s TOE. Myburgh shook his head in warning.
“You’re a government informer. Should I tell them?”
“Look at my eye. The police beat me.”
“For show. To protect you. But I have details. Details your passengers will believe. God’s truth.”
Kabini lowered his brush. He looked around. Possibly, he was imagining what it would be like for twenty to ninety outraged Putco customers to stomp him to death on a terminus ramp or maybe to wait until he had driven back to Tweefontein E, or Kameelrivier, to hang a petrol-drenched Firestone around his neck.
“What, my baas, do you want from me?”
Myburgh pointed. “Thubana gave your bus that name?”
“Only the word Toe. It was called Grim Boy even before I began to drive. Thubana made me add—” Kabini nodded at the apostrophe s and the three-letter word after it.
“Then leave it alone, please.”
Kabini stuck his brush into the can and threw the can down. It splattered blue on the passenger dock’s retaining wall and part of the bus’s undercarriage. Perplexity and distaste had fused to make Kabini surly.
“What else?” he said.
Myburgh wasn’t sure. He had to do something else. Wasn’t that why he had come out here?
“I want to drive your bus,” he said.
“What?” Kabini looked around for help. If he found a security agent who knew what services he had rendered the state, Myburgh was lost. Myburgh knew he had to act quickly. “Give me the keys to your bus.”
Kabini was hugely offended. “Surely not, nkosi.”
“I’ll blow the whistle on you. Loud.”
Kabini was at sea, a man in an unexpected gale. “The keys are in the goddamned ignition.”
“Thank you.”
“Why are you doing this? Are you crazy?”
“I want to take some people on a tour, Kabini. I want them to learn something of what I’ve learned.”
Myburgh climbed in and stood at the top of 496’s center aisle. He pulled the handle shutting the double-hinged door. He told his passengers —Kibini’s passengers—that although he intended to drive them back to KwaNdebele eventually, their trip this evening would take a little longer because he had an important errand to run in the heart of Pretoria.
Full Spectrum 3 - [Anthology] Page 61