And then the doctor fucked with Mozart.
The waiters were removing the dessert plates; coffee had already been served to some. A curious moment because the rest of the table was quiet and only the doctor’s strong, rich voice could be heard: he was complaining about a boring holiday in Austria, the unfriendly people, the overcommercialization, the exploitation of tourists, the dull entertainment.
“And what’s it with them and Mozart?” he asked rhetorically, and Van Heerden couldn’t help it, he said, “He was an Austrian,” and he had suddenly had enough of this man and his views and his superiority.
“So was Waldheim and he was a Nazi,” said the doctor, irritated by the interruption. “But no matter where you go, it’s Mozart. If it isn’t the name of a restaurant, they play his music on street corners.”
“His music is very nice, Daddy,” said Mrs. Doctor, two chairs away, soothingly.
“So is Abba’s until you’ve heard it for the third time,” said the doctor.
Van Heerden heard the galloping of the red bull in his ears.
“At the end of the day it all sounds the same. And there is no intellectual depth to his music. Compare The Barber of Seville with any of Wagner’s works – ”
“The Barber was Rossini,” said Van Heerden, his voice a finely honed blade. “Mozart wrote The Marriage of Figaro. A sequel to the Barber.”
“Nonsense,” said the doctor.
“It’s true,” said the actress from the other side.
“It still doesn’t give it more intellectual depth. It’s still musical candyfloss.”
“Bullshit,” said Van Heerden loudly and clearly and angrily, and even the waiters came to a halt.
“Your language!” said the doctor.
“Fuck you,” said Van Heerden.
“What does a policeman know about music?” said the doctor, red in the face, eyes widened.
“As much as a doctor about intellectual depth, you cunt.”
“Zatopek!” It was Hope’s voice, urgent, pleading, but it made no difference.
“You Nazi,” said the doctor, halfway up, his napkin falling off his lap.
And then Van Heerden hit him as he rose, right fist against the head, a glancing blow, not a direct hit. For a moment the doctor was off-balance, but he recovered quickly, swung toward Van Heerden, who was ready and hit him again, the businesswoman of the year shrieking and holding her head as she cowered between them. He struck the doctor full on the nose with a right, hit again, against the mouth, felt teeth breaking, more women screaming, Hope’s “No, no, no” shrill and high and despairing. The doctor staggered back against the wall, his foot hooked onto the chair, Van Heerden over him, lifting his arm for the last blow, white with anger, but then someone held his arm, a calm, coaxing voice behind him. “Steady on, slowly now,” murmured the cultural attaché, “slowly now, he was only a center.” He still pulled against the man’s firm grip, looked down at the bloody face below him, the glassy eyes. “Slowly now,” softly repeated, and he relaxed.
Deadly silence. He dropped his arm, moved his foot to regain his balance, looked up.
At the head of the table, almost upright, stood Kara-An Rousseau, an expression of complete sexual arousal on her face.
∨ Dead at Daybreak ∧
22
Sergeant Thomas “Fires” van Vuuren was a caricature, a peripheral figure in my Sunnyside days, a brandy addict who exhibited the evidence of his passion with a map of blue veins on his face and a knob of a nose, which he wore gracelessly, a man in his late fifties with a vast belly, unattractive and obtuse.
Of all the people at the station, he would have been the last on the list of my nominees of those who would have a lasting influence on my life. I hardly knew him.
In the police, as in any government organization, there are a number of them, those rather pathetic people who get stuck at a certain rank because of some deficiency, sometimes blatant laziness or an unforgivable misdemeanor – the cannon fodder of bureaucracy who trundle down the slow track to retirement without haste or expectation. Sarge Fires was always around. I don’t think we exchanged more than five words in my first two years.
I sat in the tearoom, cramming, my first set of questions for the promotion examination a month or so away. He came in, made himself coffee, dragged a chair to the table, and tinkled the spoon loudly against the cup as he stirred.
“You’re wasting your time with the sergeants’ exam,” he said.
I looked up, surprised, saw his watery little blue eyes watching me attentively.
“Sarge?”
“You’re wasting your time.”
I moved the books and folded my arms. “Why, Sarge?”
“You’re a clever boy, Van Heerden. I’ve been watching you. You’re not like most of them.”
He lit a cigarette, without filter, smelly tobacco, and checked the temperature of his coffee with a small sip. “I saw your service file. You were the top guy in the college. You read. You look at the shit in the cells and you see people and you think and you wonder.”
I was astonished.
He trickled the cigarette smoke through his nostrils, thrust his hand into his shirt pocket, and took out a creased piece of paper, then unfolded it and passed it to me across the table. It was a page from the police magazine Servamus.
Boost Your Career Now!
Enroll Now for the BA (Police Science) Degree at Unisa
Since 1972 the SAP and Unisa have offered a degree that is specifically aimed at professionalizing your post with an academic background. This is a specialist three-year course with police science as a compulsory major subject – and one of the following as a second major subject: criminology, public administration, psychology, sociology, political science, or communication science.
An address and telephone numbers followed.
I finished reading and looked up at Sergeant Fires van Vuuren, at the red hair that he had allowed to grow long on one side to enable him to comb the strands over the ever-increasing bald patch.
“You must do that,” he said through another mouthful of smoke. “These other little exams” – waving at my original reading matter – “are for policemen like Broodryk. And the like.”
Then he stood up, killed the cigarette in the ashtray, took his coffee, and walked out. I called, “Thanks, Sarge,” after him, but I don’t know whether he heard me.
Over the years I would often think about that moment in the Sunnyside station’s tearoom. About Thomas van Vuuren and his mysterious interest and encouragement. The Broodryk to whom he had referred was an adjutant in the terminology of the old ranks, a big, brusque, ambitious man who would later acquire notoriety as one of the most merciless operators at the infamous Vlakplaas, who had, in Sunnyside, already shown his willingness to physically abuse those arrested.
Fires van Vuuren never again tried to speak to me. Once or twice I tried to look him up after I had registered as a student at Unisa and started my studies, but he had withdrawn behind his rampart of obtuseness, as if our conversation had never happened. What had motivated him to draw my service file (without permission, more likely than not) and to tear out the magazine page carefully and bring it to me, I’ll never know.
I can only speculate that the truth lay somewhere in the contrast he had drawn between Broodryk and me. Was Van Vuuren’s weakness that he saw criminals as human beings? Had his physical unattractiveness hidden a sensitivity that had to be deadened by brandy so that he could get through his daily task?
He died a year or two later of a heart attack, alone in his house. His funeral was small and sad. A son was there, a single member of the family at the graveside, with a set face and a measure of relief, I thought. And the conventional wisdom of his colleagues was “It was the booze,” said with much shaking of heads.