We Are Not Such Things (66 page)

MAYBE IT WOULD HELP TO TALK TO SOMEONE? I wrote. He shook his head. A FRIEND?

“You think you know a friend. Turns out this friend is a somebody else, a Judas in disguise. Rather carry your own cross. It’s a helluva life, but what can I do? Look, I’m in this place. I’m safe here from anybody outside and they will only know what I tell them. I leave out where my father was concerned. That is blocked out. They know nothing about it. That’s how things go.”

BUT THEN NOBODY REALLY KNOWS YOU.

“Better that way, than walking around with people pointing at you, talking behind your back. There is no such word as love when somebody finds out the truth about you. Then he puts it on a scale. Somehow afterwards, you’ll find he starts to back out.”

Daniel paused here and sighed. He sucked in his breath.

“It’s a helluva life to live, but what can I do? I wanted a family of my own, but if I got involved with a woman, this had to come out. Children are given to you, and they got their lives to live, and they can’t live the results of your nonsense, your troubles, the trouble you cause them, and all that. That is how I look at it. Ja, Justine. I must be the strangest case you’ve ever written up.”

YOU’D BE SURPRISED AT HOW MANY SECRETS PEOPLE HAVE.

“Yeah? I thought I was the only one.”

NOT EVEN CLOSE.

“The wicked things, the evil things that men can think of,” he said.

After a bit, I got up to leave.

“Justine, what do I get out of this?” Daniel asked hopefully, standing with me.

“What do you want?” I shouted.

“Some clothes. Size extra-large.”

I looked at his diminished frame and told him I might not be back for a year. I was leaving the country to join Sam across the continent. Daniel nodded. He was used to waiting. He followed me out to the hall and took my hand briefly in his—as always, a cool and brittle hand. As I made my way down the wheelchair ramp, he waved.

“Don’t forget about me,” he said.

It was hard to conjure up a more forgotten individual. Daniel had never enjoyed the support of a world superpower, a major political party, or even a pair of devoted parents. He was “a nobody,” as his stepbrother said, so while everyone still remembered Amy Biehl, Daniel’s own family hardly gave him a second thought. Daniel’s triumph was that he escaped death, but his reward was a meager pension and a worn-out hearing aid.

Nelson Mandela’s lack of bitterness and his willingness to forgive had permeated all strata of society. South Africans were encouraged to follow suit and reconcile with those who had wronged them. But how could Daniel reconcile with a ghost, a fleeting image, criminals who had targeted him arbitrarily? In this, Daniel had unwittingly joined an unfortunate brotherhood, the majority of them black: people suffering from effects of apartheid—unable to pin their suffering to a precise person or group, but nonetheless expected to move forward with grace. Most of these people were victims of the entire apartheid system that stripped them and their forefathers of their basic human rights. But Daniel was a white government employee, who had quite literally benefited from apartheid before he was also taken down by its creations: a group of furious, poor, politically aligned young men from the township.

Despite going to TRC hearings to state his case, Daniel had received neither truth nor reconciliation. He trudged before the commission, but he did not really take part in any process—not like the Biehls had, or those who were involved in bigger, more captivating cases, where the perpetrators sat before the victims, answering questions, explaining themselves. Daniel couldn’t remember the faces of his attackers. They were only black schoolboys in heavy shoes. He was paused in time, living in the moment of his assault, unable to sleep for decades—waiting and wondering, as he said, “when someone will come and finish the job off.”

Daniel’s case at once proves the necessity and the insufficiency of the TRC. One theory behind the TRC was that if a victim and a perpetrator could face each other in a controlled setting and discuss the circumstances of the crime in which they occupied opposite roles, each would see the humanity in the other. The victim could begin to heal because his trauma would be recognized, his dignity reclaimed; he would no longer be a tortured body, an abstraction, making unbelievable claims; rather, he would become an individual again. Then the perpetrator, too, might take off the torturer’s hood, and maybe he could also be restored to humanity.

But Daniel, glossed over by the police and the courts and finally the TRC, had nobody with whom to reconcile. He was just a name entered in a log, nestled in the “D” section, between two other little-known victims of human rights violations, both of them black young men killed by unnamed cops during protest rallies in the 1970s and 1980s. After I went to speak to him, Daniel was reduced to writing letters to the former head of the PAC, a woman who, unbeknownst to him, was now the mayor of Cape Town, a former African nationalist lefty conveniently affiliated with a whole new, far more relevant, center-right party that garnered most of the white vote. Daniel wasn’t thinking about truth and reconciliation. The only justice he could wish for was an acknowledgment, perhaps an apology, and some token to improve his days: if not a hearing aid, maybe the PAC could get him a pair of spectacles?

Mzi and I once spent a day searching for some official record of Daniel’s beating. The Gugulethu Police Department pulled up nothing from August 25, 1993, or the days surrounding it. We sifted through the archives in the old army barracks off NY111, to no avail. Daniel, who had lost track of the department that had handled his case, suggested it may have been processed at Manenberg, the colored township next door to Gugulethu. We drove over the border and sat in the room of the station’s captain, an older white brigadier who knew how to click in Xhosa and welcomed Mzi in so politely that Mzi and I chattered on about him for hours after the fact. The captain was intrigued by our little mystery and seemed eager to help us solve it. Finding no evidence on the computerized database, he ordered an officer to bring to his office all the old physical files from the time in question. Together, we sifted through piles of mildew-stained papers. We inspected each one, but to judge by the old records, the assault on Daniel had never occurred.

“We want to talk to you about the Eastern Cape,” Easy’s uncle Taku said, taking a deep breath. We were in the living room of the other Nofemela house on NY41, where a bunch of relatives were huddled together, watching a Nigerian soap opera in which a murderous motorist hits a cyclist on a sandy street and the cyclist obligingly falls to the ground and dies with a flourish. The glossy violet paint covering the walls was cracking, and the unfurling tendril of a potted plant had been affixed to the wall with Scotch tape. One particularly friendly child with a particularly snot-covered face reached up to me, smiling broadly, and demanded to be picked up. The child was heavier than you would imagine and its gender was indeterminate and it kept giggling in my arms. An elder of some sort was wrapped in a plaid blanket next to a petrol heater, on top of which a steaming pot of water had been placed.

This was the house the family had been given after eight years in the shack on the open field, where all twelve of them, and then husbands and wives, had lived until one by one the brothers got their homes. This was the house in which Wowo and Taku had grown up. This was where I had interviewed Easy’s ex, Pinky. Now only two of Wowo’s siblings, and their multiple children and grandchildren, still lived there: an older brother who lived in the backyard and the eldest sister, the old woman who slept beneath blownup photo portraits of her deceased son, her deceased daughter, and her deceased mother.

Taku and Wowo, both wearing eyeglasses and sitting on a couch, stood and herded me to a corner of the kitchen, where they suddenly looked, for all their age and wisdom, like bashful schoolboys. Taku was a retired teacher. “The principal gave his friends jobs,” he said. “While we were twenty years in the field, that new chap will be our manager. So I decided to take my pension.” He was now studying to become a preacher. Wowo was the older one, a man inclined to silence, who had left school to work any and every job: on the assembly line at a steel factory, as a janitor at a nursing college, “putting dead people in the fridge” in the tuberculosis hospital morgue, stocking shelves at a grocery store, and finally working as a cleaner and then a gardener at Old Mutual Insurance. He had also played drums in a band of other gardeners, called the Cape City Kings. After thirty years, he took retirement on February 14, 2009. On February 15, his son Monks was thrown from a car and paralyzed. Upon retirement, Wowo got a one-time pension payout the equivalent of around $14,000 for three decades of service.

“You can’t do nothing on that money,” he observed. “When I think of it, I want to cry.”

Easy, who regressed to boyishness around older relatives, had followed us and was staring at the fridge as Wowo and Taku gathered up their courage to talk to me. I leaned against a kitchen counter, gazing down at the three short Nofemela men before me.

“We’re all going, right?” I asked. “You, too, Wowo?”

“I don’t know,” Wowo said.

“Why not?” Easy and I had been planning a trip to the Eastern Cape, which had absorbed the former Transkei homeland, to see where the Nofemela family had come from. Wowo and Taku, who had spent some boyhood years there, would accompany us and act as guides.

“We don’t have any pocket money, not even for a cool drink,” Wowo said apologetically.

“So, we can’t fund petrol,” Taku added. His shoulders slumped. “We don’t know if you are expecting that.”

Taku and Wowo had worked for white governments and white-owned corporations and then for black governments and corporations still run by whites, from the time of their youth until old age. They had stayed away from drink and drugs and all the temptations available to frustrated people in the depths of poverty. They had raised black boys in Gugulethu, none of whom was dead or in prison; they had lifted paralyzed adult children up on bad backs and slept in beds with little grandsons and taught neighborhood kids soccer and fed their hungry nieces and nephews; they had nurtured marriages for fifty years; they had built and improved family homes with their bare hands. These were the respected elders of their communities, heads of overflowing families. And here they stood before me, a young white American female thirty years their junior, chastened, admitting they were too broke to pay for the gas necessary to make it out to their ancestral land.

“I expect five thousand bucks each,” I said. “Three gourmet meals a day and a bottle of wine from everyone.”

For a moment, the room was quiet. Then Easy began to laugh, and the men followed.

“It’s my research trip and I am grateful you will come as my guides. I have already arranged funding.”

The two breathed out. Then they looked a little bit excited.

“Well then, we will be happy to show you our roots,” Wowo said.

A few days later, I woke at dawn and drove up to High Level Road, which ran parallel to the ocean but far above it. I passed the palms of the N2, the power plant, all the familiar landmarks, and entered Gugulethu. The shacks in the marshlands looked flat in the morning light. At such an hour, the township was more lively than town: these were the nannies that had to arrive before Mom left for work or yoga; the clerks who had to open up shop; the security guards changing over from the night shift to the morning shift. And before all that, everyone had to bathe, dress, and feed their own kids. The nine-to-five jobs were for the fortunate, the middle-class-plus. Those people were served. These were the people who did the serving.