We Are Not Such Things (58 page)

As I grew more enmeshed in the South African side of this story, I had stopped calling Linda as often, and we no longer emailed regularly. I had seen her last in Pittsburgh in September 2012, when I visited her at the home of her son, Zach, for three days in order to comb through the family archive, a mountain of photo albums and letters and records and newspaper clippings kept in tidy plastic file boxes in the basement.

Pittsburgh was a grim and gray place when I visited, depressed and acutely aware of its status as a third-rate city. Linda stuck out against the grit—wearing all white, her toenails painted crimson. In the cab from the airport, I’d passed a roadkill raccoon, a collection of trailers warmed by coal smoke, a freestanding bar, and lots of old Pontiacs. I’d stayed two nights in a chain hotel plopped between strip malls, and lay in bed at night watching episodes of
Here Comes Honey Boo Boo
with my mouth agape. After over a year in South Africa, with no TV, no streaming, and slow Internet, I was out of the American pop culture loop.

Zach, the keeper of the family archives, lived in a new house in a small development among other McMansions and nouveaux country clubs. His refrigerator, peppered with magnets and kids’ drawings and school photos, was filled with gallons of milk and bags of baby carrots, the cupboards stuffed with Goldfish crackers and Oreos. The counters had little boxes full of disposable pop-up napkins and plastic pump bottles of hand sanitizer. The floors were spotless, despite a band of dogs: one soft-nosed black mutt and two hysterical little mushy-faced creatures.

Hemmed in by his own impeccable manners, Zach was compelled to drive me to and from the hotel, but he wasn’t happy about it. I suspected that he allowed me into his home because I was a human being on a quest for knowledge, because his mother wanted this, and because the Biehls never denied those whom they could help. But I also suspected that I represented something dark, old, and unwelcome to the family. This was the contradiction, too: the Biehls let people keep coming, but they hated opening up those boxes of memories time and again.

By June 2013, Zach’s family had relocated to New Jersey for his wife’s job and I had written Linda an email requesting her permission for access to the TRC records, a request she granted with a caveat: she wanted a copy of the records for herself. When I relayed this information to the Department of Justice, the official I spoke with noted that in order to secure a copy, Linda would have to make her own official Promotion of Access to Information Act request.

I called Linda to explain further about the process. On the other end of the line, Linda was waiting for her granddaughter’s school bus somewhere in Jersey. Linda had started doing the Bar Method classes, and her other granddaughter, an actress, would be starring in
Matilda
soon. But she was in a sour mood, having been at odds with the foundation for years now. Her youngest daughter was also embroiled in a divorce.

Plus, my waning attention, I think, had caused Linda to wonder what I was really up to. For so long, I’d hung on her every word. Now I was entrenched in a different story, one she didn’t know existed, and I had disappeared into it. I could not explain to Linda, or to anybody, really, that I was following an entirely new lead, searching for a ghost of a municipal worker. I could not tell her that I was no longer sure who had killed Amy.

Worse, Ntobeko was growing to despise me, without directly interacting with me more than once. According to people who spoke with him, he wanted to write his own book, and felt I might be stealing his story for profit. Whenever he saw me, he put his head down and slipped by, seething. He thought I was up to no good, and I wondered if he had begun to share his suspicions with Linda. Months later, as I was leaving South Africa, I wrote Ntobeko one last time. I informed him that I would be writing about him, and that it would be good to get his perspective, and I asked for a final interview. I had written him many emails over the years, all of which had been ignored. But to this one, he replied:
I will not grant you an interview. I HAVE NEVER GIVEN YOU ANY AUTHORISATION TO WRITE ABOUT ME AND I WILL NEVER DO THAT, I AM NOT AS STUPID AS YOU THINK I AM. Your email has evoked all the devil instincts that I have.

On the day I called Linda about the TRC files, I had not yet evoked anyone’s devil instincts, and Linda was still feeling ever so slightly gracious toward me. She answered the phone and began talking about how she wished to extricate herself from the foundation and focus on issues in America. She wanted to make a “graceful exit,” she said, her voice breaking. But the foundation management team—“ 
‘management team…’
if I hear that term again I will throw up”—still would not agree to drop Amy’s name. She was planning two trips to Cape Town in the coming months.

“July is gonna be awful,” she said. “I am hoping by August I will have my ducks in a row and it will be my swan song.”

At this point, I should have backed away from a seventy-year-old widow who was overwhelmed by personal issues and mourning a foundation, her life’s work and a monument to her daughter, that had turned away from her and her original intentions. Instead, so dogged was I in my determination to get the TRC files that I said: “I’m just hoping you could maybe write up this affidavit for the Department of Justice. All you have to do is write it out, then go to a police station, then have them stamp it, and scan it and send it to me.”

That’s when stoic Linda Biehl began to cry.

“No! I don’t want to have to run around looking into how she was killed in Gugulethu,” Linda said, her voice raised and broken. “I can’t keep doing this anymore. I just want my life back. Twenty years is enough.”

I stared at the blank Skype screen, Linda’s number glowing.

“Why did you talk to me?” I asked, scrambling. “Why do you help me?”

“I don’t know why. Because you seem like a nice young woman and Amy was a nice young woman. I thought you were trying really hard to discover. But I don’t care about your book.”

“What
do
you care about?”

“My family is important. The proper truthful legacy of who Amy was is important. I want my privacy. I want to grow as a person. I am stuck in South Africa. I am seeing more and more how this has affected my family. The time has come, and there is no one there to carry on. I have no one really to turn to. I cannot keep doing this to my family. They have got to be able to live their lives. They have their issues, their interests, and their cares and their concerns. I don’t want this to be on their necks anymore. I want to get my own place. I am really at a point where I want to move on.”

Linda grasped for composure. She lowered her voice, and I could hear her drying her face. I imagined her mascara running down her cheeks. “Nobody wants the truth,” she said. “Those TRC records aren’t the truth. They are graphic and ugly. The truth is that the country was still in turmoil. She represented the oppressor, and her white face was all that was wrong with the country, and she was killed.”

At that moment, I heard the school bus pull up and the sounds of children’s voices—and then her granddaughter. Linda put the phone down, but didn’t hang up.

“You’re carrying lots of stuff, do you need help?” she asked the girl.

“Thanks!” her granddaughter replied in her small, determined voice. “I had a big party to go to.”

Linda picked the phone up, and now she was calm.

“You write me an email, tell me what you want me to do, and I will do it,” Linda said, and then she hung up.

I stupidly wrote that email, explaining the complicated steps toward acquiring the release of the records, to which she replied:

This is a mess. I have worked with you in the spirit of Ubuntu (generosity of spirit) but I am not aware of what you are planning as you are not particularly forthcoming. If I can be more helpful when I am in the country, let me know….Linda.

So I explained to the Department of Justice that Amy’s next of kin was a woman of advanced age who lived in a far-off country, and that it would simply be impossible for such a person to officially grant permission using the complicated channels required by a clunky government. Easy wrote me out a signed and stamped affidavit. I didn’t bother to ask Ntobeko, Mongezi, or Vusumzi, and mailed in Easy’s permission. For whatever reason, after so much tangled red tape, this alone seemed to satisfy the bureaucrats, or perhaps they had simply grown tired of fielding my calls. Seven months after I’d begun the process, a heavy red cardboard box arrived in the mail, full of papers from the TRC. Daniel de Villiers’s name didn’t show up anywhere.

Sam and I took our honeymoon in Botswana, where we paddled down the Okavango River Delta at dusk, and watched the hippos lolling in the water. Then we traveled to Lesotho, where we trekked on horseback to the remote, untouched mountains. Back in Cape Town, I drove Easy, Aphiwe, and Aphiwe’s two cousins to a park by the water. It was a new development built by the city in conjunction with the soccer stadium, which hosted games during the 2010 World Cup. In keeping, the park, a World Cup “legacy project,” was a small sliver of utopia in the city. It abutted the Mouille Point golf course and the rugby fields where I ran my dog, and sat just east of the stadium.

“The World Cup went off flawlessly,” a friend of mine remarked. The event had been slick and crime-free and precisely orchestrated, as finely coordinated as any event in London or New York. “It’s a disgrace, because it proves that the government isn’t even inept, like they pretend to be. It proves that if they want to do something perfectly, they actually
can.
”

The fields, dotted with picnickers straight out of a Benetton ad, were broad and viridescent, covered in flocks of geese. A tiny footbridge ran over a salty stream. In the middle of the park was a small biodiversity garden, planted with the region’s indigenous flowers. Easy and I sat on a picnic blanket, where Aphiwe and her cousins had left a pile of pink and purple sandals. Aphiwe was the skinniest, while one cousin was medium-sized, and the other was fat. They had dressed up for their day in town, since they left the townships only a few times a year: white capris, patterned shirts, and the fat cousin donning a plastic tiara. They popped in once in a while, to have a piece of fruit or some chips, but for the most part they tore about the state-of-the-art playground, exploiting each and every slide, swing, and jungle gym. I had taken my Israeli niece and nephew, ages five and seven, to this very playground a few weeks earlier. They were children whose parents sought out fun, educational activities every weekend, and so the kids had wandered the playground unenthusiastically, having been-there-done-that all their lives. But not Aphiwe and her crew; they wanted to experience every single part of that park.

But try as I might, I couldn’t shake my obsession with Daniel de Villiers. One night, I searched Facebook for the twentieth time. Again, I typed in “De Villiers” and scrolled around. Nothing new. Then I typed in “Devilliers,” no space. Finally, I came upon the profile of an Alfred Devilliers, the name on that piece of paper from Home Affairs and uttered to me by the de Villiers cousin. He was the son of the elusive Gareth, the only de Villiers who might have an idea where Daniel was. The profile bore no picture, just the anonymous blue-and-white Facebook icon of a man’s head. Boasting thirty friends and zero photos, Alfred’s page had the look of a Facebook profile that had been set up and then abandoned within weeks as the owner lost interest. But since I had officially exhausted all my other leads, I sent Alfred a friend request. Then I clicked on his friends list.

Facebook had introduced a feature within a person’s friends list called “People You May Know,” which used an algorithm to suggest connections you might have with someone, no matter how tenuous. I clicked on the link and found a single viable suggestion: a man named Ruben Atkins. Beneath Ruben’s name and photo were the words:
1 mutual friend
. I clicked to find out who this mutual acquaintance might be.

Rito Hlungwani.

Much of my South African existence had involved hanging out with Sam, eating, sleeping, and walking my dog in Sea Point. I spent the rest of my time in Gugulethu with Easy and Mzi. But in the early days, I’d made a single friend, a Canadian named Aimee-Noel. Aimee-Noel had studied at the University of Cape Town, where she’d met her Xhosa husband. They now lived a six-hour drive away in Port Elizabeth, where her husband played professional rugby, but they often visited Cape Town, and stayed with the husband’s best friend: Rito Hlungwani.