We Are Not Such Things (62 page)

“Last I saw you, you were by the Kraaifontein Shoprite and we didn’t speak about nothing,” Daniel said.

“Ja,” Gareth agreed. He dug his hands in his pockets. Then, for lack of anything better to do, he suggested that Daniel take a seat near me. Daniel obliged. Light streamed in from the tall picture windows, warming the room. A few framed landscape prints had been arranged high up on the wall. A small palm plant was flourishing in the corner. I turned to Daniel and introduced myself.

“You have to speak a bit louder,” Daniel said. His glasses, with their thick lenses, had a magnifying effect: His eyes seemed extraordinarily large, and he therefore wore an expression of perpetual shock.

I started again, raising my voice. Amy Biehl, the attack, Gugulethu, 1993.

“A bit louder still.”

“Do you remember the Amy Biehl case, the American girl?” I said, as loud as I could without embarrassing myself.

“Ja,” Daniel said blankly.

“You were also in Gugulethu.”

He stared at me. “I used to stay in Kraaifontein, I was also there for six years.”

“Can I talk to you about this attack that happened twenty years ago. Do you remember?”

“Ja. Vaguely.”

“At the train station,” I said.
He doesn’t remember,
I thought.
His mind is gone.

“Ja, ja…” A pause. “You have to speak a bit louder.”

I looked around. A few people had stopped and were gaping. I pushed off my embarrassment and took a breath. “The train station!” I hollered. “The train station! Where you were attacked! They stabbed you!”

Suddenly, his eyes bulged.

“JA!”
he said. “Ja! You know Amy Biehl?”

When Daniel spoke, he let out low gurgles and gargles. He was missing his left lung, he said, which had been taken out at the hospital after the attack by the railroad. They’d saved his right one, just. His breathing was labored, and he wheezed perpetually. Talking was a significant effort, but he was energized, and now he leaned forward, held his cane in one hand, and began to tell us a story he had never thought anyone would come around looking to hear.

“What I heard is that instead of taking that Amy Biehl to a hospital, they took her to the police station, and that’s where she died,” he said. “I don’t know why they took her to the police station of all things. There is a hospital in that area. Even though there were colored people staying there, the hospital would have helped her. She was attacked there, opposite Heideveld. I can’t think of the name, where the blacks lived. Gugulethu, you say? Yes, that’s it. She was attacked there in the afternoon and me, in the morning. I heard about her first when it was in the news. I was laying in a hospital and the patient next to me, he lent me the paper.”

“What did the newspaper say?” I hollered. Daniel didn’t hear me, but he nodded and continued on.

“It was only about two, three lines where they spoke about me. And her business was right down the whole newspaper. Amy Biehl. I was left out of the picture altogether. All they said was a driver was attacked. I don’t know why. The reporter who put that piece in didn’t go around to find out who is this other person. Then they would have had the whole story from beginning to end.

“I was a supervisor, fixing the lights. I had two colored guys working with me. They were on the street. I’m driving. When they attacked me, it was about eleven. I was alone in the truck. One minute, I was sitting there. The next minute, this whole group of characters came toward me. There were forty of them. Without a word, they forced my door open and they took me down. They said, ‘Get out. Get out of the truck.’ I refused and they pulled me out. They were shouting ‘PAC!’ ‘ANC!’ ‘Viva PAC!’ ”

According to Daniel, the ANC kids had been part of these groups, too—just like Rhoda Kadalie and Mzi believed.

“They pulled me to the ground and then they stabbed me so many times. They started with screwdrivers, axle blades, and daggers. It happened so quick, it took me completely by surprise. The way they attacked me, you could see on their faces they wanted me dead.”

“Do you remember their faces?” I yelled. Daniel looked at me.

“Do you remember their faces?” Gareth yelled louder, into Daniel’s ear.

“No, I don’t. There was too many of them. They weren’t even men, more like schoolkids, high school kids. I do recall they had thick shoes on. This is why I’m deaf. They kicked me on the head. That is why my hearing is gone. If you had seen those people, you wouldn’t have believed it. They were just out to murder because of the color of your skin. I was lying down and they only got me in the back. They kicked me like that as if they were playing soccer. They stabbed me in the lungs, which is why I still can’t breathe right. They counted there was ten stab wounds in my back. And because they stabbed me in my pancreas, I’m a diabetic. They were like a couple mad things. I hope you never meet something like that.

“After they pulled me from the truck, railway police came off the train that was coming in. These guys ran and disappeared in three different directions. The police called on the radio for the ambulance to come but the ambulance refused to come. Said it was too dangerous. So my guys used the radio in my truck and called my boss. He was all the way over in Salt River. He picked me up an hour later and took me to the hospital.

“My doctors struggled to keep me alive. I hope you never meet something like that. I went into shock. I stayed in hospital for two and a half months. My bill for the time being there was two thousand rand short of a million rand.

“Later, I spoke to the police. I don’t remember now the police station I opened the case at. It was long ago. The policeman said, ‘We will never solve this case, there’s too many of them.’ But then Amy Biehl came into the picture and they got these guys and they took them to court. I said to the policeman, ‘Can I go to the court and see if it’s them?’ He said, ‘No, they will kill you right there, right in the court. We will leave it as an unsolved attack. We will leave the case open.’ And it’s still open.”

“Did you go to the TRC?” I shouted.

“TRC!” Gareth yelled.

“In late ’97 I think it was, I went to the TRC,” Daniel said. “I spoke to them. Brought details. I had to write down all the details word for word. Then Tutu came into the act and we all were paid thirty thousand rand, but we were promised more.” The TRC had, in its final report, recommended that the government pay each victim reparations in installments for six years. Only a select few received any reparations at all; like Daniel, they got a one-off payment.

“The Amy Biehl guys were there. They got freed. A lot of people thought it wasn’t so wonderful at all for them to let them go like that after they killed her. I don’t know about those people and those political parties. Never once, ever, did anyone say to me, ‘Sorry about that.’ If you get hold of anyone in leadership, tell them I can’t sleep at night. If somebody attacked you, wouldn’t you be nervous, wondering when someone will come and finish the job off? Maybe in the day I can shut my eyes, but I haven’t slept at night since 1993. You know, we could have all been killed if Mandela had not taken that action, but we’re all still alive today.”

“What action did Mandela take?” I yelled.

“He could have caused a disaster here. In those years, every time in the paper, it was so many people killed: this many blacks, this many whites, this many coloreds. But it was so many more blacks than anyone else. For every white person, there were twelve blacks. What did Mandela have to gain by letting us go? If not for him, you and I wouldn’t be around to tell about it.

“But me, I was destined to be attacked. The St. James Massacre, you know?” He was discussing the church attacked by APLA cadres just one month before Amy’s death. “I went to that church. I was supposed to be there that night that the militants killed the parishioners. There was a storm so I said to my mother, ‘
Ach
, forget it.’ You see, they reckon the militants were watching for six weeks. How can they attack a church? What is there in a church for them? There is nobody there to fight them back. I should have been killed there in church on July 25th of that year. I would have died then. But instead I had to wait till August 25th to get killed.”

Daniel had grown tired, his breathing more labored, the gurgling more pronounced. I shook his hand, cool and bony. We decided to meet again that week, when I would be able to speak to his brothers. He entered my number into his small cellphone, across the screen of which ran the sentence
ALWAYS BE HAPPY DANIEL
. On the drive back with Gareth, Daniel called. His cellphone was set to high volume, and so for the first time, I could speak fluidly with him. He had already asked his stepbrothers to tell me the whole story of his attack. Would I come back in a few days?

That night, I fell into bed at ten and woke with a start at 4:15. In my dream, a man was being brutally stabbed. He sat ramrod straight in a wooden chair at an office desk. He was an innocent son stabbed by his father. Then he was a father stabbed by his son. The son stabbed him with a screwdriver. It took such effort for that thin round of steel to pierce the skin and sinew, to run deep into the flesh of the face, the muscle, and then to penetrate the skull, boring through into the folds of the brain. Finally the man in the chair was dead.

Then I was the assailant, armed with the screwdriver. I put my strength into it, feeling nothing but determination. The metal went in and out of the man’s body, leaving wounds as perfect as hole punches. The man, alive again, but not for long, sat at that desk the whole time, his posture straight. He didn’t utter a scream or raise a hand in self-defense. He looked like a mannequin, but he was real.

When I sat up, in the dark and out of breath, I could sense Daniel’s chilly hand—how it felt clasped in mine. I could hear the ocean in the distance, the waves crashing on the shore. Late at night, when no traffic ran along the streets, the sounds of the water were clear. It had rained at some point, I supposed, and I could hear, too, the drops dripping through the ceiling cracks in the kitchen, hitting the linoleum.

That morning was the twentieth anniversary of Amy’s death. I wrapped myself in a parka and picked up a friend of Linda’s at his hotel—he was an academic who had come all the way from Georgia to observe this memorial. Linda had arranged for some out-of-town visitors to travel in the foundation’s van but there was no room for him, so Linda had asked that I drive him. Then I met Easy at Linda’s hotel. He was waiting in the parking lot next to the van, and was wearing an entirely new outfit: brown loafers, black trousers, a pale pink polo shirt, a white scarf thrown jauntily around his neck, and his Africa cap, which displayed the continent.

“I’m Italian,” he said, striking a pose to show off his new look. Someone had taken him on a shopping spree, either Tiny or Linda, it was unclear, and Easy would not divulge the information.

Then he loaded up Linda, a reporter and a photographer from
The
Orange County Register,
some of Linda’s friends, and the anthropologist Nancy Scheper-Hughes and her husband. They all stopped to buy white lilies, which Linda liked to lay beside Amy’s memorial every year. We drove in a two-vehicle convoy to Gugulethu, where the church memorial for Amy would begin.

After I had parked behind the church and everyone had gotten out of the van, I walked over to it and slid into the passenger seat. Easy had parked on a grassy mound by the church, turned the van off, and was fiddling with his phone.

“I found Daniel de Villiers,” I said.

“Who?”

“The
guy
.”

“And?” His expression revealed nothing.

“He’s not dead.”

“Where did you find him?”

“In an old-age home in Bonny Brook.”

“Is he okay?”

“Not really.” I fished out a photo of Daniel I’d taken on my phone the day before, drawn and blind, gazing vaguely at the lens. He leaned upon his little cane. His face was deeply lined, his eyes sad and unfocused, his mouth set in a mild, uncommitted grimace. Easy took my phone and studied the picture.

“Now you see, Nomzamo, I really tell you the truth. What I tell you is true.”