We Are Not Such Things (63 page)

Just then, an old colleague of Easy’s tapped the glass and mimed a kiss.

“I’m coming now,” Easy said, and hopped out of the van.

We walked down the street, everyone with the fabric hearts made to honor dead women pinned to their shirts, some holding flowers. The children sang songs and played the marimba. Linda, holding her
AMY BIEHL, OUR COMRADE
sign, clutched the hand of Ntobeko’s daughter in her purple dress. Kevin, the foundation director, was nowhere to be seen, and Ntobeko had slipped off into the township, far from the glare of the little group of journalists. Amy’s former colleague cried in Linda’s arms. Mzi met me, and we leaned on the car and watched Nancy’s twenty-minute address. She called Amy an “accidental hero.” She called her death a “Shakespearean tragedy.” Mzi’s hands trembled.

After the service, Linda’s American friends treated the staff and the hangers-on and the dribbles of media to a meal at Mzoli’s. They ordered vats of sausage and chicken and staked out a long plastic table that ran through the room. Since it was a Sunday, Mzoli’s was in “Sunday Chill” mode, as it was called. The place was pumping, full of people ending the weekend on a high note. Easy and I sat by each other on one end, and Linda sat far away, surrounded by admirers. The table was peppered with sodas, wine bottles, beer bottles, and Styrofoam plates.

After they’d finished eating, Easy and the other staffers got into the spirit. He was shaking his ass to a pop hit, circling his colleagues, who were bopping to the lyrics:
What do they make dreams for / When you got them jeans on.
From her seat at the end of the table, Linda was grooving, too, sipping her Chardonnay, eating sausages daintily with her hands.

Two days later, the foundation held its “Youth Spirit Awards” in a near-empty hall of the University of the Western Cape. They awarded three young people with checks of varying amounts for their community service. A colored boy won first prize, a white girl won second prize, and a black girl won third prize.

“Is not right,” Easy muttered. “Look who win and look who is on the committee. Never a black person.”

Kevin, in a blue shirt and red tie, his face rosy, stood behind the podium, talking about how his staff “aim to inspire the youth of South Africa…to greater heights of service.”

Linda followed and Kevin averted his eyes. Easy clasped my hand, terrified that she would make him stand before the room, but she skipped over him. “Sometimes I feel like I’ve lost Amy’s spirit,” she said, losing her train of thought in the midst of her speech. “Sometimes I feel the foundation has lost Amy’s spirit…but it’s changing is what it is….”

The foundation’s choir, kids in yellow and green shirts, harmonized as the South African opera diva Aviva Pelham led them in John Lennon’s “Imagine.” Linda and the crowd waved their hands in the air. When the evening was almost finished, Pelham treated the audience to an unrequested encore, directing the choir to sing a song about Mandela called “He Walked to Freedom,” and making everyone do a march in the aisles.

The next day, before Linda’s departure, I stopped in at her office to bid her farewell. We had both been busy during this time—me on my quest for Daniel, she in her endless, if uncertain, quest to cut ties with South Africa while keeping Amy’s story, and her own story, alive. Linda was holding court before an Irish filmmaker and the journalist from her hometown paper. As we said goodbye, Linda hugged me lightly, patting my back once, and said, “We’ll talk.”

That was the last time I ever had contact with Linda Biehl. Three months later, my publishing company received a letter from Scott Meinert, Amy’s old boyfriend, who worked as a lawyer for wine estates in California at that time. I had interviewed Scott that August, after Linda had given me his number; he’d sent me scans of old photos of Amy and connected me with some of her dearest friends, who shared their memories. Now the letter was written on behalf of Linda and Ntobeko, and it demanded that I cease and desist writing my book, explaining that I had misrepresented myself as working with Linda’s permission and was engaged in “the worst type of profiteering….Her continued attempts to exploit Mr. Peni’s participation in the story have caused him much harm due to her incessantly acting as if she has the privileged right to publicly exploit his personal story without his permission, which is unfortunately reminiscent of the tactics of the Afrikaans regime.”

The next I heard of Linda and Ntobeko was in April 2014. They had been invited to an interview on St. Louis Public Radio, before participating in a panel at an American university: “Nelson Mandela’s Legacy of Reconciliation: Lessons for Leading an Inclusive Community.” In a snapshot on the radio website, they stood next to each other, both dressed in blue, smiling broadly.

“You realized you were taking somebody’s life?” the interviewer asked Ntobeko.

“We were prepared to die for the cause, and in the process of that we automatically became prepared to kill for it,” Ntobeko answered in his soft voice. “I am prepared to give my life for the cause, and in the process I will pursue the target.”

“Um, Ntobeko is quite amazing,” Linda interrupted a few minutes later. “We often learn from each other when we talk like this, and I have to say that one of the things I’ve learned is that he took responsibility for this act because he was elected the leader of that particular youth group at the time. He was not maybe a perpetrator that actually committed the crime, but their whole process of how they dealt with rats and ratting on each other is really quite amazing, and I’ve learned so much about that. So you use the word killer, but I don’t use the word killer. I think he was one of the disenfranchised young males who Amy had talked about….You know, as much as we tell the story cut and dry, there are all these little sidebars and things that say many of them could have wielded a knife or thrown a stone, but eyewitnesses came forward and kind of picked out some. Ntobeko ran away, was not tried with the other three. But it’s more complicated than just—”

“These stories always are,” the interviewer said. “They get picked up and repeated and perpetuated. So my apologies for using that word, but that is basically the way it had been presented to us here.”

“No, I understand, I understand,” Ntobeko said.

I may never know what Linda and Ntobeko believed I was up to, but I thought of their sudden legal letter as the perfect coda to the general impossibility of South Africa, a place that had tried to divide each facet of life into black and white, and had succeeded only in creating a land where everything is rendered in shades of gray. Just as you thought you were coming to comprehend something or someone, you’d get thrown for a loop. There was no shortage of mystery and conflict here.

“Look at Daniel,” Easy had told me soon after the twentieth anniversary memorial. “Look at Pikker. Look at all the members of PAC. Look at ANC, a destroyer. We try to build together pieces. But is broken. Heartbroken.”

South African winters are merciless. Outside, it was chilly but not unbearable; it had nothing on American East Coast winters, or Midwestern winters, or European winters. No snow, no ice. The problem, rather, was that one could never get adequately warm, since the country was in denial about the existence of its most terrible season. Residences and offices had neither central heating nor fireplaces, and the cement walls of most structures held the chill inside. The sea air floated up the mountains and across the Cape Flats, burrowing into the bones of every structure, dispersing little droplets of dampness through the air. I wandered the house clutching a space heater, plugging it in wherever I went. I lay in bed in the mornings, trying to find the courage to poke a toe out from under the covers. People, rich and poor alike, shivered from June to September. My in-laws wrapped their parkas over their fleece bathrobes, and sat watching television, bundled up like a pair of Eskimos. Easy’s entire family gathered in a single room, warmed by their petroleum heater, and refused to leave except to fetch more food from the kitchen. Others in the townships kept gas stoves burning into the night, and when they tipped over, houses, streets, whole neighborhoods burned.

On the day I went to see Daniel for the second time, Linda Biehl had just left town. The Western Cape was not only freezing, but it was also in the grips of a merciless rainstorm. In the informal settlements surrounding the townships, people were emptying their homes with buckets. The portable toilets flooded, and raw sewage seeped out onto the dirt pathways. Shacks were scattered with pots and pans to catch the water dripping through porous tin ceilings; moldy furniture and linoleum tiles floated off. A man died sleeping rough somewhere in the province, the radio announced. The water pounded down on my windshield and I had to press my face close to the glass to see the road.

Daniel had been waiting at the door and came out of the building straightaway, balancing on the cane and maneuvering through the rain, wearing a Christmas sweater, short black corduroys that exposed his ankles, and large, heavy-duty sneakers. He sat in the car and directed me down the curving streets, past tidy suburban homes with trim lawns. We would visit his stepbrothers, Daniel said. They could tell me the full story.

“Do you have any brothers or sisters?” Daniel asked, and when I shook my head he seemed comforted. “You’re an only. Just like me.”

It had grown dark, and the windows of the homes glowed yellow and orange. Daniel peered out from behind his glasses, largely silent unless he wanted to direct me. When we weren’t speaking, the sounds of his wet breathing, gurgling up from his bum lungs, filled the car.

“Did you ever marry?” I asked.

“No, never did.”

“Why not?”

“Didn’t find a suitable girl.” He shrugged. His legs were just bones, silhouetted by the ill-fitting pants.

After a few minutes, we pulled up to a modest white ranch house, surrounded by a chain link fence behind which a brown-and-white Dalmatian growled ferociously. Daniel shakily exited the car and began to rattle the fence, which caused the dog to erupt into vicious barks. A fifty-something man, round and balding, poked his head out the door.

“Let us in, would you!” Daniel said.

“Wait a minute, for goodness’ sake,” the man said, before dragging the dog into a garage and locking the door behind it.

“This is Stephan and this is Willy,” Daniel said, when the man finally opened the gate, followed by another man. “They can tell you all about what happened to me.”

Stephan, wearing a striped fisherman’s sweater, shook my hand and led me into his sitting room, a cozy space filled with worn sofas and the verdant smell of split pea soup boiling on the stove. Willy, in a puce shirt and brown tie, was about five years younger and twenty pounds thinner, with a ruddy complexion and hair styled in a short, spiked mullet common to a certain set of white South African male. Daniel balanced on a small chair to the side, grasping his cane, and I sat next to Stephan, turning to him to explain myself. I hoped, I said, he could tell me about Daniel. Stephan nodded.

“To start with, Daniel is my stepbrother, but we at first thought that he was the brother of my stepmother,” Stephan said, settling into his seat. Without glancing at Daniel, and without raising his voice to make himself audible to Daniel, he summarized precisely what Gareth had told me: that Daniel was a child born of incest, raised to believe his mother was his sister. As Stephan spoke at length, I gazed over at Daniel. He was an interiorized person by nature, rendered more so by his inability to properly hear or see. The world around him was a blur of sounds and sights he could not entirely make out.

“Daniel, that must have been shocking,” I shouted, trying to confirm that he had been listening.

“You must make contact with
YOU Magazine
,” he announced, referring to the tabloid-run ladies’ rag. “This story is perfect for
YOU Magazine
.”

“What Stephan is saying, I mean. That must have been shocking.”

“
YOU Magazine
will expose the truth of my attack,” he said. No, he couldn’t hear me, and he hadn’t heard Stephan.

“Why would she put your attack in
YOU Magazine
?” Stephan shouted.

“Ja.” Daniel nodded.

Stephan shook his head, and continued on with Daniel’s biography, while Willy sat stiffly in his seat. Back in the day, according to Stephan, Daniel was quiet and withdrawn, and he found it tough to make friends. Once Daniel moved in with Stephan and Willy’s family, the boys all attended high school together. Daniel was a decent student, a wallflower. At nineteen, he graduated and started working for the state—first at the docks, where he kept the lights in good order, and later around town, where he fixed streetlamps and such. He was a dedicated worker, entirely peaceful, the type of man who’d be twenty minutes early before he’d be a minute late. After eight years, he resigned, with a plan to drive taxis—presumably with the sister of Clinton, the man whose house I’d first approached with Gareth and Aimee-Noel. That didn’t work out, so Daniel drove a hearse for a while. But eventually, unable to eke out a proper living, he returned again to the docks and the shadow of his father.