The debt Joubert had spoken about was based on a breathtaking misconception that might never be corrected. No one must know how bad he really was.
Joubert, who had a message for him. What message?
He would have to see if he could get hold of the bridegroom today. It was going to be a great day. Schlebusch. The photographs in Die Burger were going to arouse anger in that beast. Were two soldiers enough to guard the women against a psychopath with an American attack rifle and a calm, white anger?
He got up in one smooth movement, pulled on jeans, shirt and sweater and sneakers, looked at the figures on the alarm: 3:57. He opened the door very slowly, very softly, stood still, heard Hope’s deep, peaceful breathing, put his feet down carefully, closer and closer to her, the woman who had brought him flowers, about whom he had fantasized before Kara-An arrived with her champagne. Hope’s face was almost buried in the blanket, she lay on her side, and he saw the rapid movements of her eyeballs behind the lids, wondered what she was dreaming of – court edicts and crazy private investigators? He looked at the shape of her nose and her mouth and her cheek. There was something sad in her features. Was it because the sum total, the architecture, the final construction, formed an incomplete beauty, forcing the imagination to reconstruct it, rearrange it so that she could be breathtaking? There was something childlike there, something untouched. Did that evoke this strange feeling in him? Had that woken the aggression in him during the past week because he didn’t want to be reminded of innocence, because it was lost to him forever?
He closed his eyes. He had to get out of here.
He walked softly and carefully to the door. First switch on the outside light, warn Tiny Mpayipheli and Billy September that he was on his way. Pressed the switch, opened the door very, very carefully, closed it behind him, the click of the lock muffled, stood outside, the night quiet and cold, but never as cold as the biting, black-frost nights of Stilfontein. He stood in front of the door, hoping the soldiers had seen him, walked to the big house, looked up at the stars. A satellite winked its orbit to the north.
“Coming to inspect the guard?” Tiny Mpayipheli’s deep voice asked.
He hadn’t seen him, the black man in the dark coat in a corner of his mother’s garden, on the bench under the cypress.
“Couldn’t sleep.”
“Only you, or both of you?” Humor in the voice.
“Only me,” and there was far too much disappointment in his voice, and Tiny laughed softly.
“Sit down.” Mpayipheli moved over, made room for him.
“Thanks.”
They sat next to each other, staring at the night sky.
“Cold, hm?”
“I’ve been colder.”
Uncomfortable silence.
“Were you christened Tiny?”
Mpayipheli laughed. “I was named after the Springbok lock, Tiny Naude, if you must know. I was born Thobela Mpayipheli, which is a joke on its own.”
“Oh?”
“Thobela means ‘respectful, well-mannered.’ Mpayipheli is ‘the one who never stops fighting.’ My father…I think he wanted to work in a counterirritant.”
“I know the burden of names.”
“The problem with whites is that your names have no meaning.”
“Hope Beneke wouldn’t agree with you.”
“Touché.”
“Tiny Naude?”
“It’s a long story.”
“It’s a long night.”
The soft laugh again. “Do you play rugby?”
“At school. Socially a few times after that. I never really had the talent.”
“Life leads one into strange ways, Van Heerden. I’ve considered writing the story of my life, you know, about that time when every single soul who was part of the Struggle wrote an autobiography to get a first-class compartment on the gravy train. But I’m afraid only one chapter would be fascinating. The rugby chapter.”
Tiny Mpayipheli was quiet, shifted into a more comfortable position. “It’s colder when one can’t move. But the whole point of guard duty is to sit still.”
He turned up the collar of his coat, put his weapon on his lap, and took a deep breath. “My father was a man of peace. Every time the hand of apartheid slapped him in the face, he turned the other cheek, said he loved the white man even more because that was what the Word told him. And his son, Thobela, was a man of hate. And violence and fighting. Not suddenly, but sympathetically, with every humiliation I saw my father enduring. You see, I loved him so much. He was a man of dignity, unbelievable, untouchable dignity…”
A night bird called somewhere, and a faraway truck droned against an upward gradient on the N7.
“I ran away when I was sixteen, looking for the Struggle. I couldn’t stay home any longer. I had enough hate to apply ‘one settler, one bullet’ myself and the channels were ready for me. I walked the road to Gaborone and Nairobi and eventually, when I was twenty, big and strong and full of fight, the ANC sent me to the Soviet Union, to a godforsaken place called Saraktash, in the south of Russia, about a hundred kilometers from the Kazakhstan border, a dusty base where their troops prepared for the war in Afghanistan. That was where some of Umkhonto we Sizwe’s people were trained. Don’t ask me why there, but on the other hand, I don’t think the struggle at the ass end of the Dark Continent was high on the USSR’s military agenda.
“I was a troublemaker. From the very first day I asked questions about method and content. I didn’t want to learn about Lenin and Marx and Stalin; I wanted to kill. I didn’t want to know about battle plans and tank warfare; I wanted to learn to shoot and slit throats. I didn’t want to learn Russian and I didn’t like the superior attitude of the Soviet troops, and the more my comrades told me I had to be patient because the road to war wound through a diversity of landscapes, the more I rebelled, until the day I and a sergeant in the Red Army, an Uzbek with shoulders like an ox and a neck like a tree trunk, locked horns in the NCO’s bar. I didn’t understand one word he was saying, but his hate was the white man’s hate and I couldn’t resist.
“They allowed us to fight. Eventually all the troops on the base were there. First we virtually demolished the mess and then we were outside. Fists, feet, elbows, knees, fingers in the eyes, I was twenty and I was big and strong and there were guys who said it was Ali against Liston, but it was bad, he hit me until my head stood still, he broke six ribs, and I bled in places where I hadn’t even known he had hit me.
“The difference, in the final analysis, wasn’t the size of the dog in the fight, but the size of the fight in the dog. My hate was bigger than his. And my lungs were clean. He was a smoker, and those Russian cigarettes, they told me, were fifty percent donkey shit. It wasn’t a spectacular knockout. For more than forty minutes we had systematically broken each other down until he sank onto one knee, spat blood, and couldn’t get his breath, and he shook his head and the small group of South Africans cheered and the Russians turned away angrily and left their man who had brought shame on the world power, and it would all have been over if the Uzbek hadn’t had a heart attack, later that night, in his bed, dead as a doornail. They found him the following morning and they came to fetch me out of the sick bay, the military police, and I ask you, what chance does a Xhosa have of a fair trial in a country that feels nothing for him – especially when his attitude hardly shows deep remorse?
“The cell was small and hot, even in the Russian late autumn the sun made the corrugated iron crackle, and at night it was so cold that my breath made crystals against the metal, and the food was inedible, and they kept me there for five weeks, alone in a cell as big as an outhouse, and in my head I walked the hills of the Transkei and spoke to my father and made love to plump girls with huge breasts and when my ribs had mended I did sit-ups and push-ups and squats until the sweat literally pooled on the floor.