We Are Not Such Things (64 page)

“Do you have good memories of the docks?” I hollered to Daniel.

“No…” he said uncertainly. “What about when they attacked me?”

“How do you feel about your father?” I shouted.

“Two lines about me in the
Cape Times,
and Amy Biehl got pages and pages,” he said.

“How does he feel about his father?” I asked Stephan.

“When he found out about the abuse that had taken place and linked it to how he had lived as a child, he hated his father. He was tasked with getting rid of the old man’s remains, and he’s done something with it, something…not honorable.” Stephan let out a stifled laugh. “He never told us what exactly.”

“They attacked me like it was nothing,” muttered Daniel in his corner. One of his fingernails was ridged with a fungal infection.

“They targeted him,” Willy said, moving the conversation away from Daniel’s family and toward the assault. “He was like a red flag to a bull.”

“It’s true.” Stephan nodded. He thought back to 1993. He’d married by then, and had four kids, so he didn’t see Daniel much. Maybe at birthdays and braais, but nothing regular. But on August 25, Daniel’s hysterical mother—by then, the secret was out—learned that Daniel had been beaten severely and was in the hospital. Stephan and Willy drove over and found Daniel encased in a plastic oxygen tent, his smashed-up face a pale shade of gray where it was not black and blue and purple, his hands shaking. He could only moan and wheeze. His eyes darted back and forth, his ear was encased in a bandage.

“He was all open,” Willy recalled. “They split him open.”

Daniel’s family didn’t quite understand what had happened. The police said that there had been a riot in Gugulethu, and the crowd had targeted government property. They intended to burn the truck, and had pulled Daniel to the ground and hacked away at him.

“The PAC—” Daniel said.

“I don’t call them the PAC,” Stephan interrupted. “I always think of them as just blacks. Just blacks. Anyone with any grievance can say it was political. But it was thuggery.”

“They stabbed me in the pancreas!” Daniel exclaimed. “That’s why I have diabetes.”

“I don’t think the stab in the pancreas caused diabetes,” Willy said to me.

“Nearly three months in the hospital,” Daniel said.

“You weren’t in the hospital for three months!” Willy scolded.

“My hospital bill was two thousand rand short of a million rand,” Daniel said softly.

“He did develop pneumonia from the wounds to the lungs,” Willy said. “And all that went with it.”

Willy remembered that before the attack, Daniel used to go to the bars with a couple of friends, perhaps have a beer and listen to some music. But after the attack, he stayed at home, unwilling to brave the outdoors unless necessary.

“The PAC owes me for twenty years,” Daniel added. “They haven’t paid me a penny.”

Stephan thought of the TRC, when Daniel had been promised restitution. “This Tutu, he’s such a big man. This great archbishop, His Eminence. Nothing was ever pursued.

“The TRC washed its hands of this matter,” Stephan continued. “They never investigated. They washed their hands like Pontius Pilate. Maybe I should be more forgiving, but I never liked Tutu.”

After he had recovered as much as possible, Daniel was forced to retire.

“The lousy thing was, he was earning a decent salary,” said Willy. “He could have worked until he turned sixty-five and he would have had a fantastic pension. But he couldn’t do labor anymore.”

In the late 1990s, Daniel bought a little flat in a modest beach town north of the city, and invited his mother to come live with him. In a few years’ time, he’d fallen behind on his payments and gave the place up.

“What were his politics?” I asked Stephan. “Politics!” I screamed toward Daniel.

“Working-class people, you don’t really have a say,” Stephan insisted.

“I’m not interested in politics,” Daniel piped up. “Politics up and killed me.”

After losing his flat, Daniel had moved to a one-room rental in the back of a house in a nearby suburb, a place he rarely left but to do some shopping. A few years later, Daniel didn’t answer his phone for two days, so Stephan and Willy went to his place. They heard his voice, weak and small, from within. They tried to peer into the windows, but the entire space was high with papers and debris, old milk cartons and greasy plastic bags, a place of squalor and chaos. Daniel had become a hoarder.

“I’m no psychologist, but in my humble opinion, he was scared of losing what he had,” Stephan said.

The brothers broke off the burglar bars covering the window with a spade and pulled Daniel out from the mess. His diabetes, uncontrolled, had sent him into a coma, and he had lain, unmoving, on the floor for days. They took him to the hospital, where the doctor dictated that he could no longer live on his own. Willy and Stephan cleaned out his apartment, trashing his epic collection of junk, including his meticulously kept case folder on his assault. My sudden and impossible-to-predict appearance in Daniel’s life only confirmed his great conviction: that this crap was truly precious, no matter what anyone said, and that someday, somebody was going to come looking for the valuable pile of papers underneath the perfectly good cracked hamper full of totally fine used coffee filters.

“
You
threw it away like it was nothing,” he hissed at Stephan and Willy, who tried to explain that there was just so much, and how could they have possibly known?

A year before our meeting, Daniel was placed in the old-age home, which garnished 92 percent of its inhabitants’ pensions, no matter the amount. That left Daniel with 300 rand, then a bit less than $30, a month. He couldn’t afford new clothing or even, some months, toothpaste. The stepbrothers, themselves supporting families on salaries and pensions that were hardly generous, tried to bring him soap and socks, but that was all they could manage.

“His health seriously deteriorated after that beating,” Willy said.

“I don’t know how,” Stephan said, shrugging, “but Daniel never became bitter.”

It was pitch black outside and I still had a long drive back home. “Do you think Daniel’s case and the other case from that day were related?” I asked.

“Well, he’s the missing link that nobody speaks of,” Willy answered. “We also wonder why nobody has drawn a link with the Amy MacBiehl case.”

While Daniel was in the hospital, the Amy Biehl story had dominated the news. The media knew a good story, and Daniel was not that story. Daniel, a working-class white South African citizen employed by the National Party government, was “a nobody,” as Stephan said.

“Plus,
she
died,” Willy added thoughtfully.

“It was not through their efforts that he didn’t die,” Stephan said. “They wanted him to die.”

Daniel and I said goodbye and walked to my car. “You really must get in touch with
YOU Magazine,
” he said as he shuffled to the passenger side. “
YOU Magazine
can do an article on me.”

“Eish, man, why does she want to get in touch with
YOU Magazine
!” Willy said from the doorway. “She’s writing the story herself.”

As I pulled up at the old-age home a few minutes later, Daniel turned to me.

“Give this to Patricia de Lille,” he said, handing me a few pieces of paper covered in tight, tidy handwriting. De Lille was the current mayor of Cape Town and a member of the center-right Democratic Alliance, the ANC’s official opposition. The DA was favored by whites and well-off people of color, among others. But back in the 1980s and 1990s, de Lille, who is colored, had been a high-ranking member of the PAC.

“I don’t know Patricia de Lille,” I said. “I made a bunch of interview requests but she won’t speak to me.” Her office had told me that she simply had no time, ever, to see me and, presumably, discuss her radical past.

Daniel opened the car door and shakily stepped out onto the sidewalk. “Now don’t drive away until you see I am in there,” he ordered. “Don’t leave me standing here on the street at night.”

I watched him make his way through the rain, now falling in a light and steady drizzle, illuminated by a streetlamp and a strobe by the gate. He buzzed, waited nervously, and then pushed his way in. He continued on unsteadily to the glass door, never looking back, and finally disappeared inside, fading into the lobby.

I did a U-turn, back past the Shoprite and over the little bridge and onto the highway, bound for Sea Point. For forty minutes, the highway was bathed in darkness, punctuated only by tiny lamps in the secluded settlements along the way. I let out a sigh of relief when I hit Century City, that monstrous mall lit like Vegas. I could see the city in the distance now.

I curved down off the exit ramp where the highway ended, and drove past African Mama tourist restaurant, where in the mornings the refugees waited against buildings for trucks to come by and hire them to work for a few hours. I headed up toward Lion’s Head, past the luxury car dealership where homeless people slept huddled beneath a brightly lit showroom for Ferraris and Maseratis, and into Sea Point. A man stood on a corner, drenched by the rain, unmoving.

The bogeyman was everywhere in this country, alive in the horror stories that never stopped: a friend of a friend was carjacked and her baby driven away with the car (the baby was found, still strapped in his car seat, down the road, but other children had been killed in similar incidents); a neighbor was mugged on my block; a friend’s elderly father was tied up, beaten, and left for dead by three day laborers he’d hired to help clean out his office. There were smash-and-grabs (at a stoplight, someone might smash your window and grab your purse from the seat). There were these people who threw bricks from highway overpasses in order to cause a crash below, so they could loot the victim’s car before the ambulance arrived. There was a lady who slept with her window cracked, only to find a man in her bedroom. He warned her to be more careful, stole her valuables, and left without touching her.

What was particularly strange about my reaction to all this was that I felt increasingly paranoid in my upscale neighborhood of Sea Point and increasingly safe in Gugulethu. The statistics showed that Gugulethu was the more dangerous place: in 2012, Gugulethu saw 120 murders, while Sea Point saw 5. I was traveling between Ethiopia, where Sam had been posted for work and where I would soon move, and Cape Town, and so I was often alone in our cottage for a month or two at a time. Even the dog had moved across the continent. All along the ritzy Atlantic Seaboard, the streets seemed eerily empty and silent, and anyone could be hiding in the shadows, and who would hear my howls? Not the family across the way, in their secured mansion. Not the deaf senior citizen next door. But in Gugulethu, there were at least twenty people upon whom I could depend to extricate me from a situation. Then again, I had never had to make my way back to the township in the dark.

One day, on the way to visit Easy, I drove over a large plastic jerrican that had just fallen from an open truck onto the highway, and the can became wedged beneath my car’s chassis. I pulled over and tried to kick the thing out, but it would not budge. To my left was a barren field and then an informal settlement. To my right were six lanes of highway and then a tangle of trees and bush. I flashed to the many stories of stranded motorists swiftly losing their cars to criminals—this, despite the fact that Sam had earlier broken down on a highway and been helped by a stranger from Khayelitsha, who pulled over and happily fixed the problem without asking for any compensation, despite telling Sam he had just been let go from his job. I glanced around, took a breath, and calculated that I was just five minutes from the township, and there I knew plenty of people who, through necessity, could repair most anything when it came to cars.

I began to drive again, making a horrible racket. A bakkie with a white man driving and a colored man sitting next to him pulled up, and they motioned for me to stop and pointed down at the jerrican, but I waved them off and headed to the Gugulethu exit. The men frowned and shook their heads, and I imagined that they were wondering why a white girl with a can stuck to her car was dimly driving off into a township. But I dragged the can along until I reached NY111, where I spotted one of Easy’s brothers. I pulled over. He peered under the car and then kicked very hard and the can dislodged. Gugulethu had become for me a peculiar little sanctuary. When I finally moved away from South Africa, I would rarely yearn for Clifton Beach or the palm-lined streets of Camps Bay. But I missed Gugulethu all the time, and it was the first place I stopped by whenever I circled back.

After visiting Daniel, I called our security service when I was five minutes from home. The South African police, common knowledge dictated, were neither reliable nor trustworthy, and so each and every house in wealthy and middle-class neighborhoods, and even some homes in working-class areas, displayed the plaques of various security companies on their external walls. The country boasted nine thousand such companies, which employed 400,000 armed guards—more than the combined members of the police and army. These services typically installed burglar alarms, handed out panic buttons, and sent an employee to meet you at the entrance to your home and usher you in if you so desired. Were your alarm to sound, they arrived with guns cocked.