We Are Not Such Things (32 page)

When I next saw Mongezi, he was standing on the same spot on the bridge. He popped into the car and said he didn’t want to go eat, but rather that we could talk in a parking lot in Gugulethu and I could drop him at the train station. He worked as a night shift security guard. He quite clearly had devised a plan to try to eventually bilk from me the cash I would have spent buying him lunch.

“How’s life?” I asked him.

“It’s fucking terrible,” Mongezi said. He smelled of winter air and sleep, and was wearing again his uniform of newsboy cap and leather jacket. “Work, school, work, school.” He said he was studying information technology at the local community college. He was also on parole, which meant constant visits to his parole officer thirty minutes away.

“Or else they will pick me up and put me in jail for forty-eight hours,” he said.

He placed his hand on the dashboard and I could see the dirt caked beneath his fingernails. We drove to Gugulethu, to the unused lot behind the Chickenland on NY1, just near the Caltex.

“I do remember the day of Amy,” he said. He put a toothpick in his mouth, his signature. He spoke slowly. He had a young daughter who lived with her mother in the Eastern Cape. He had been a member of the 28s prison gang. The prisons in the Western Cape boasted three legendary gangs known as the Numbers: the 26s, the 27s, and the 28s. The 28s were known for proving their mettle by stabbing disagreeable prisoners and guards alike; they lived by a strict, complex code and divided their members into warriors and sex slaves. Sex slaves were required to have homosexual relations with 28s who so desired.

The 1999 rape for which Mongezi had been convicted after he was released from prison, he insisted, was a misunderstanding: he had no idea that the girl was developmentally disabled, and plus, she was into him, and plus, her family and his family had had a feud and so that was why they went to the police, because they wanted money and his mom couldn’t give it.

“It wasn’t rape, that one. I never know she is, how you say, abnormal. She’s quiet and anything you say to her, she agree. But this woman wants me.”

But no matter the specifics, Mongezi had done his time for that crime, too. He’d been doing his time since he was a teenager, when he used to rob houses throughout the city—he’d just slip in and steal whatever he could get his hands on. Now he was on the straight and narrow, he swore. He was happy to think back to the Struggle years, when even a petty crook like him could be part of something bigger, something that could shake history.

“In ’93, everything is happening. We will rule the location, the cities, all of them, you see. We fighting for our right. So that time going from Langa, then we came back. I don’t know Easy correctly. Same Ntobeko. Vusumzi, we grow up together. Vusumzi doesn’t know anything about politics, but he was coming with me to the launch. In Langa, we see property of government, so we destroy the truck. We singing the song of apartheid. There is a lot of songs we are singing.”

Mongezi’s version of the day of Amy’s murder began in Langa, as did all versions, and ended in Gugulethu, where marchers were trying to overturn and loot another truck (“It was a march of repossession”) when Amy drove up.

“I see behind the truck is a white woman. Amy Biehl leave her car and I follow her and I trip her three times and it doesn’t fall and then finally is falling. She fall on that pole and turn around and looks at me. We face each other. I hit her with my stone. I believe I hit her in the head. Then the others come. This other guy come running around with a knife. He borrow me that knife and I sat on her thighs and I stab her. She said, ‘What did I do?’ She said, ‘I’m sorry.’ Then they come one by one with stones, and I stepped back and watched to avoid the stones. I was not alone, but I took the lead. Easy and Ntobeko were coming after me, with others.”

“Why were you so intent on killing her?”

“I don’t know,” Mongezi said, looking puzzled. “What I can say is I was just crazy. I was craving to do something to white people.”

“Did you feel good?”

“I feel good at that moment. I thought she was a boer. Even the time I was arrested, I thought, ‘No, this is cool.’ It used to be that if you do such a thing to the white, the state will hang you. So I thought, they can hang me for my sin but I remain proud. I will have my memories.”

“But she was not a boer.”

“In the court, when they said it, I was shocked to find out this woman was not South African. I was disappointed that I did not do my job properly.”

Three men strutted by on the side of the road, waving sticks.

“Do you hate me?” he asked suddenly.

“Why would I hate you?”

“Because
I
killed Amy,” he said. “Me.”

“Why do you admit killing her now, but you denied it in court?”

“Ma’am, when you caught by the police, you must clear your mind. You must forget.”

Once he and his three co-convicted were granted amnesty, the Biehl family stood before them like a shining white beacon of hope and opportunity. Mongezi wanted a piece, but only Easy and Ntobeko benefited from these now famous Biehls; they had somehow swindled the other two out of their due benefit.

“When we come from prison, we discuss to meet the Amy Biehls. I even had a contact number for them and we make an appointment. But Easy and Ntobeko go alone. I was released and journalists come from America and London and U.K., and they want the story. Easy and Ntobeko informed me that these journalists want to make money from us and so we can get money from them. I was stupid, really. I asked for the money, and Ntobeko stayed silent. The journalists were shocked and I looked like a fool. He looked good. Later, I was interested in the foundation, and so was Vusumzi. But they kick us out.

“When we were in prison, Biehls were asked by media what they think and Biehls say they forgive us,” Mongezi continued. “Say they want to support us. I came to apply for the foundation and Mrs. Biehl and Mr. Peter trust me, but then when they meet Ntobeko, they change. I knew then that I will never be part of the parcel, and I don’t want to beg. They open the foundation to help all of us but now only helps those two.”

“You know, the foundation was founded to help the community,” I said. “Not you personally.”

Mongezi shook his head dismissively. He wasn’t convinced, and he also had a point: the foundation had indeed helped the citizens of the townships, but it had certainly helped its employees, chief among them Easy and Ntobeko. They were a couple of uneducated men who had spent their formative years in prison, but who now collected regular paychecks and benefits, and had traveled to Europe and America. Mongezi, seeing Easy and Ntobeko driving cars, erroneously believed the Amy Biehl Foundation had been founded in part to aid in the rehabilitation of Amy’s killers, and in this sense he had been grievously wronged.

Mongezi and I spoke for an hour, and then I drove him to Heideveld station. I was heading back to town, close to where he worked. People in the townships generally relished the chance to get a free ride in a private car, rather than pay to take the dangerous trains or crowded taxis, and I gave them a lift whenever possible. In this case, though it would have been easy for me to ferry Mongezi to his job, I did not offer. Something about Mongezi unnerved me—something desperate and ruthless. I stopped by the ticket office. As I had predicted, Mongezi hit me up for cash for a train ticket, which he claimed cost ten times more than what I knew to be the actual price. I negotiated him down and handed over a few bucks, which he took, disappointed.

“Seems like only people involved in this massacre were Easy and Ntobeko,” he said before he slammed the door shut and headed for the tracks.

I felt like a kid who wants to hear the same bedtime story again and again: for comfort, or to better understand, or maybe hoping that this time some detail would shift to reveal a new, improved tale. I knew, from a rational point of view, that I should get on with my work: I had my characters and I had my narrative. In New York, publishers had been particularly interested in Linda Biehl, assuming that white American audiences would relate to her heroism and her grief, and one company offered me a book deal only if I would focus completely on her, relegating the black South African characters to background noise. But instead, I kept compulsively circling back to this township, driving the streets, asking the same worn-out questions about a long-ago story that had been told, nearly word for word, for almost two decades.

One afternoon, I called to arrange yet another meeting with Easy. He sounded particularly tired on the phone, but he encouraged me to come by, so I drove over to Gugulethu and waited in my car on a strip of mud across from his parents’ house. I called him again, and he directed me to stay put; he was coming.

It was one of those spring rainstorms in Cape Town, when it seems that some invisible force has lifted all the water out of the ocean and poured it down onto the land. A drenched mama dog, her teats bloated and caked with blood, passed the car, sniffing for food. After twenty-five minutes, I peered through my misty windshield and made out a silhouette weaving down the street. The silhouette wobbled its way toward me, struggled with the door, and dropped into the passenger seat, consumed by an oversized rain slicker. Sprightly Easy was gone, and in his place was a limp rag doll with shooting pains from the bleeding ulcer that acted up when he drank.

“It’s okay, my friend,” he slurred. “I have a good interview for you. Drive.”

Easy managed, miraculously, to guide me to a tidy house with a connected spaza shop, somewhere within Gugulethu. I parked the car on the sidewalk and followed him, slowly, through the rain. Inside, a group of people regarded me impassively. Easy motioned to a couch, onto which I lowered myself. He then fell softly to the ground, narrowly avoiding knocking over a propane heater. He righted himself and stumbled over to me, sat on the next cushion, and then fell asleep on my shoulder. Within seconds, he was snoring.

I looked around the room and, for lack of anything better to do, smiled. A heavyset young woman in a pink sweater, who had been staring grimly at me, broke into a broad smile in return. A slender old man in a trilby hat sat in the corner, silent but commanding, and he smiled, too.

The house was cozy, warmed by the pumping heater, humid from the storm, bathed in cigarette smoke and the saccharine sweat of drunk folks. People walked in and out, bringing brandy and beer, mixing cheap whiskey with soda, lighting cigarettes and letting them burn to ash. Stepping out of the cold and into the warm, humid room, they all briefly emitted that grassy smell of rain-damp skin. Outside, the water flooded the streets, overflowed from the gutters, and drenched the stray piles of garbage.

Ndumi, Easy’s pregnant girlfriend, was sitting in the corner, wearing her coat wrapped over a pajama top and blue jeans. On her feet were plaid socks and loafers, which gave the impression that she had simply rolled out of bed and walked across the township. She was studiously ignoring Easy and flipping through an old
YOU Magazine
.

Easy vacillated between sleep and wakefulness, occasionally leaning forward to gulp a beer. But when a certain man entered, Easy perked up.

“Justice, this is Masana,” he announced. Even when dead sober, even after I had known him for many years, Easy alternately addressed me as Justice, Justin, and Justine, and remained unconcerned by any inaccuracy or inconsistency. “He was my commander.”

“My sister,” Masana said, in a voice like coal. He shook my hand, lowered himself onto a chair, and lit a cigarette.

Masana was forty-five years old and his mouth was set in a permanent smirk. He sported a deep scar by one eye and wore a black wool hat, sewn with the Heineken logo, pulled low. He rolled his shoulders forward, which made him look slinky and untrustworthy. Rumor had it that he once murdered a man with his bare hands in broad daylight before an audience and then strolled off. Ever since, Masana could walk alone in Gugulethu at night and even the most reckless little smokehound knew well enough to stay away.

“They come to rob me, I rob them right back,” he rasped.

Masana was alternately unemployed or working hard labor on contract jobs: at the train tracks, at the electric yard, or a few months mining in Sierra Leone. According to Masana, black South African men were gathered up by mining corporations and shipped on contracts to West Africa to dig for diamonds; they were slightly more expensive to employ than impoverished Sierra Leoneans, but they were easier to manage and more skilled. But even with these intermittent jobs, Masana owned next to nothing. He lived in a shack in a nearby township, and he showered once in a while at his sister’s house. Men like him, he noted, were the government’s “last priority.”

“I’m a big man,” he said. “Where is my own place?”

Masana wasn’t shy, and he launched into a potentially fanciful tale that deposited him in the center of the South African border wars, in exile in Zambia, and fighting for freedom in the bush as a guerrilla. When he returned from Zambia, or maybe it was before that, he claimed that he had helped train Easy in guerrilla warfare and PAC ideology.