We Are Not Such Things (65 page)

A private car,
AVENUES RESPONSE
stamped across its side, awaited me, its lights cutting through the drizzle. A guard stood under an umbrella as I opened my gate and turned into my drive. I can’t say I trusted him entirely; there were reports of the guards themselves committing crimes, but he drove off once I had closed my front door behind me. I checked the windows, the iron bars mounted over the front door, the grates pulled across the back door. Then I wrapped myself in a blanket and studied Daniel’s letter.

Across the top of the page, Daniel had printed his identity number and his address:
Bonny Brook Old Aged Home.
Then he laid out the facts, or his version of them.

DATE: 25 AUGUST 1983

PLACE OF ATTACK: HEIDEVELD STATION

PERSON CAUSING ATTACK: HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS, BEING ATTACKED BY +40 STUDENTS.

WEAPON USED IN THIS ATTACK: HACKSAW BLADES—DAGGERS—SCREWDRIVERS

The specifics were shaky—1983 crossed out, 1993 crossed out, 1983 reconsidered and rewritten. Details deemed especially important were underlined in red. Daniel’s handwriting was labored and meticulous, except nearing the end, when he seemed to grow tired, and the letters sat on a rushed diagonal.

THEY STABBED THE TRUCK WHEELS TYRES FLAT WITH THE WEAPONS THEY WERE ARMED WITH. BEFORE THEY ATTACKED MR DANIEL DE VILLIERS. MAKING ALL THE FILTH INTO MY STAB WOUNDS.

I envisioned Daniel hunched over that desk with his felt-tip pen, recording the memories as they came to him.

I LOST A CONSIDERABLE AMOUNT OF BLOOD. RUNNING OUT OF MY BODY!

I had fantasized about a different narrative: a wise old man who perhaps hoped only to make peace with those who had hurt him.

THE POLICE CAME AND FOUND ME IN A BLEEDING STATE.

After the forgiveness of Mandela, there was a perpetuating myth of magical South Africa, place of forgiveness and fortitude. The impossible could happen in this country, and the world would be inspired. Except that wasn’t the case. Not here, not now, and really, not anywhere.

THE AMBULANCE REFUSE TO COME THERE BECAUSE OF WHAT WAS HAPPENING!

Daniel had never seen justice. He had never experienced truth and he was not interested in reconciliation.

MY PANCREASE WAS PENETRATED BY ONE OF THE WEAPONS THESE STUDENTS HAD!

When Daniel had adequately cycled through the events of that day, twenty years earlier, he laid out what he wanted from the PAC. It was all the worse for its impossibility. The PAC was a near-dead party that employed practically nobody. Most everybody I’d met who worked with the PAC was like Mzi: dead broke, unemployed, mired in disappointment, and marginalized.

I DANIEL DE VILLIERS REQUIRE FROM THE P.A.C. BECAUSE OF WHAT THEY DID TO ME:

1. THEY PAC TO PAY THE RENT AT THE OLD AGED HOME UNTIL I PASSAWAY IN DEATH.

2. A HEARING AID BECAUSE THE WAY THEY KICKED ME ABOUT MY HEAD.

3. IF AT ANYTIME I NEED TO ATTEND A HOSPITAL FOR ANY REASON THE PAC MUST PAY FOR MY HOSPITAL ACCOUNT

4. PAY ME DANIEL DE VILLIERS BACK FROM 25 AUGUST 1983!

5. URGENTLY A PAIR OF SPECTACLES. (EYEGLASSES)

Months later, Mzi organized a roundtable at the community center off of NY111 to discuss what had happened on the day of Amy’s death, and he convinced his old militant friends to come, a group of five men who ambled in, distraught, ragged, and high. Another man arrived, pudgy and round-faced in a leather jacket: when he was twelve, wearing his high soccer socks and standing on the field by the Caltex, he had seen Amy murdered; it was his dog whose stomach had been sliced open, and his mother who had refused the U.S. government’s offer of a new life in America. An old lady who had been walking by joined us, mostly to offer her memories. An incentivizing bucket of KFC and a package of white bread sat in the center of the room, and people helped themselves.

Mzi passed around a smooth wooden stick that he called the Talking Stick, and each man held it as he recalled the day, helping me to piece together a picture of the crime. Easy stopped by at the end, wearing a newsboy cap and drunk from attending a funeral. He spoke of his role as a freedom fighter, his involvement in Amy’s murder. He was used to changing his tune for his audience. For the white tourists and journalists, he had been caught up in a maelstrom of violence, and Amy’s death was the regrettable result. For these haggard old radicals, it was a different story.

“I am an African who can serve and suffer and sacrifice just for the benefit of the people,” he said. “They’ve seen me do it.”

When it was over, I drove Mzi home. It was late afternoon, and we attended a small birthday party for his niece Nanha. She was the daughter of Steyn, Mzi’s broken brother who lived in Kanana and smoked dagga all day long, the man arrested in the murder of Amy and then set free. Nanha’s mother had skipped out when Nanha was a baby. She lived with her extended family and slept next to her grandmother. Her teacher, impressed by her academic performance, had given her a pink notebook, which she hid beneath her grandmother’s mattress. She motioned me into the room, lifted up the bed, and fished it out.

“Nobody knows it is here,” she whispered. “It’s my birthday Saturday. I turn nine.”

“That’s great news.”

Nanha made her eyes into slits and pursed her lips, slipping the notebook back to its hiding place. “Don’t breathe
any
word of it!”

A family friend had baked her a multilayer magenta cake covered in sprinkles and candles and she was wearing a new dress and new shoes. Her cousin, a confident four-year-old, walked over to me. Her hair was pulled into two tidy Afro puffs.

“Do you want popcorns?” she asked, shoving a handful at me. Then she pushed her face close to mine. “I like your dimples,” she announced, a compliment I appreciated despite the fact that I don’t have dimples.

After we sang “Happy Birthday,” I left Gugulethu, but instead of returning to Sea Point, I took an alternate route. I drove off the highway, over the bridge, and turned left on a sleepy street. I buzzed in, walked past the walls covered in glitter and the other detritus of Christmas cheer, and arrived again at a barren brown door.

D. DE VILLIERS

DIABETIC

His phone had stopped working a while back, so I hadn’t bothered to call. I didn’t bother knocking either since he couldn’t hear me. I opened the door to find Daniel in exactly the same position in which I’d found him when we’d first met: back facing the door, hunched over a shallow bowl of soup. I walked to where he could see me. He paused and looked up, unsurprised.

“Hello, Justine,” he said in a soft warble.

I motioned to the hospital bed covered in a green and dark red cover, the only place to sit, and Daniel nodded.

“Can I ask you some questions?” I shouted.

“What?” he asked.

“Can I ask you some questions?”

“Can you speak up?”

How could this possibly work? I looked down at the notebook in my hand. I opened to a blank page and wrote, CAN I ASK YOU SOME QUESTIONS?

I held it up. Daniel leaned in.

“Sure,” he said.

HOW DID YOU GROW UP?

“How I grew up? In Green Point, near the Traffic Department, they had the houses in back, that’s where I grew up.”

WHY THERE?

“My father worked on the railways.”

HOW WAS YOUR FAMILY LIFE?

“Family was all right. Only my father was the troublemaker. Me and him could never see eye to eye.”

WHY?

“He was just like that,” Daniel said. As always, his face stayed in one position, betraying no emotion.

WHAT THEN?

“I was at the high school and then I went to work on the docks. That time, anybody that worked for the state, that person’s relative got a job immediately, no questions asked. I stayed there and kept the electricity working right. I start about seven in the morning and turn in at half past eleven at night. This went on for nearly ten years. Somebody came with a rumor, saying the Suez Canal will close and this will be the end of it. Now me, like a fool, listened to that, so I left there and went and drove a taxi for a while. I saw there was no life in a taxi. Went back to the docks, they took me back, and then I started driving to help fix up the lights all over town. Stayed there till 1994, when they boarded me.” He stared at me, his eyes made immense by his glasses. I stared back. “So that’s how my life went,” he said, finally.

DID YOU LIVE ALONE?

“I stayed with my mother and her husband. Me and my father couldn’t get along so I said to hell with him and I stayed with my mother.”

Here was what I was getting at. It was clear, now, that Daniel hadn’t heard a thing that his stepbrother had told me. His stepbrother had revealed Daniel’s secrets before Daniel’s face, and Daniel hadn’t been able to hear it.

YOUR MOTHER DIVORCED YOUR FATHER? I wrote.

“No. She was married at that time. Her husband, he died a couple of years later. He had that smoking disease—emphysema. But I stayed mostly around with her and then I moved on my own.”

TELL ME ABOUT YOUR FATHER.

“My father died in 1975, I think. My grandfather came from France during the war. He was a doctor on the warships and he jumped ship and met a woman here and died here. This is something you don’t put in there. My…that’s classified.”

WHAT IS CLASSIFIED?

“What I’m gonna tell you, your ear will fall off. My father raped her. She was my sister, supposed to be. But he raped her and that’s where I come in. Don’t write nothing about that in there. That’s my business.”

WHAT IF I USE A FAKE NAME FOR YOU? I scrawled. He leaned in and made out the letters.

“Ja, you can use another name,” he said, shrugging.

AND THEN I CAN TELL?

“Ja. But make it a French name.”

For this reason, Daniel de Villiers is not his real name. Nor are any of his family members identified here by their real names. Most other details surrounding Daniel’s life, including where he lives and his former profession, have also been changed.

WHEN DID YOU FIND OUT? I continued.

“I had a dirty habit of walking very quietly,” Daniel said. He turned toward me. Next to him was a grimy fan. He had a funeral announcement on his bulletin board: his mother pictured, presumably, a decade before her death, a lady with her gray hair in a short set perm. According to the dates, stamped in gold cursive, she’d died only a few weeks before. “Nobody knows I’m there and they’re having a vicious argument, that’s how I found out. I told him everything that happened. After that, his hate for my father was immense.”

HOW DID YOU FEEL? I scribbled.

“I was highly disgusted. Imagine yourself finding out something like that. I found out when he was still alive and I threatened him often, very often.” I recalled what Daniel’s brother had intimated: that Daniel’s father was hard and cruel. “One day, he came to hit me, and I grabbed his hand, and I put my foot on his throat. I said, ‘If you ever, ever lay your hands on me again, I’ll kill you.’ He said, ‘I’ll leave you nothing.’ I said, ‘You take your money, and you shove it where your mother never kissed you. And another thing, I am going to wait to Judgment Day, and on that Judgment Day, I’m gonna put all the things that you have done to me, and you will pay for it, you’ll go straight to hell, and I’ll make sure you get there.’ ”

His face, normally pale, was pink now. He stayed sitting in his wooden chair.

“I says, ‘A person like you doesn’t exist. Why do you do these things to me?’ From small, he ill-treated me, hitting me for nothing. Most of the time he was drinking. But I stood my ground and he turned me nearly into a murderer.”

An aide strode into the room then, a young colored woman with shoulder-length black hair. She took a step back—seeing a visitor there, I supposed, was a shock—and then composed herself. “Hello, are you done?” she asked.

“I haven’t touched anything,” Daniel said, motioning to the bowl of thin soup. The woman smiled and left.

DO YOU HAVE FRIENDS? I wrote.

“Friends can cause a lot of trouble, saying things they know nothing about. People must be kept in the dark.”

WHY IS IT SO IMPORTANT THAT THIS IS A SECRET?

“Put yourself in my position. My father is the one who instigated this nonsense. You would also keep your head under your arm. It’s not my fault but wherever I go, fingers get pointed. It’s damn embarrassing.”

HOW DOES IT FEEL TO KEEP IT TO YOURSELF?

“It doesn’t feel nice at all. I’ve got to walk around with this guilt that what her father did. Justine, you put it in your back pocket but one day you’re gonna take it out of your back pocket and you’re gonna be careful when you take it out, that nobody knows. Then your whole life will be uncovered. It’s a complete charade that you have to play, not to let anybody else know what’s going on. But I said: Judgment Day, he will answer for that. He won’t get away with it.”