“That Saturday the soccer stadium in Saraktash was packed with so many Soviet soldiers you couldn’t credit it. Each weekend pass had been withdrawn, every military soul had been called up to support their men, and when their team came out of the tunnel, it was a sea of red jerseys with a yellow hammer and sickle on the chest and the crowd went wild and for most of the game our small group of supporters were too scared to open their mouths.
“It probably wasn’t the greatest rugby to watch, especially the first half. To our great surprise the Russians weren’t masters of the game. More experienced than we were, but no oiled machine. At half time they were ahead by eighteen to six after Moosa had kicked two drop goals, and then he said to us, ‘Guys, these Reds can be beaten, I can feel it. Can you feel it?’ Perhaps we were no longer intimidated. Maybe we thought it was going to be a superior force that would grind us, bleeding, into the grass, and when it didn’t happen, we had to admit that he was right. These guys could be beaten…
“ ‘They’re slow,’ Moosa had said. ‘Get the ball to Zuma, doesn’t matter how. Get the ball to Zuma.’ Napoleon Zuma was our left wing, he was only nineteen, a Zulu, he was short, but he had a pair of thighs each of which you couldn’t encircle with two hands and he could run like the wind.
“It took us fifteen minutes to get him away for the first time and then he scored a try, and then it was as if something happened on that field, as if those fifteen South Africans from the townships and the small-town locations and the villages of the Bantustans suddenly had insight into this strange, wonderful game. And we played. And the better we played, the quieter the Red Army crowd became and the louder our small band of supporters shouted on the pavilion steps, and Napoleon Zuma scored two more tries and suddenly the score was equal with only ten minutes of play left and then we wanted to win, we knew we were going to win. You should’ve seen those guys, Van Heerden, you should’ve seen them play – it was wonderful, it was indescribably beautiful.”
And then Tiny Mpayipheli was silent and he looked at the faraway stars in the dark of a Cape winter and he shivered in his big, black coat.
“Is that Orion?” he asked eventually, and pointed a finger at the east.
“Yes.” They sat, staring at the morning star, but when the silence became too long, Van Heerden couldn’t help asking, “Did you win?”
The black man smiled broadly in the dark. “The nicest thing was that the referee saw his posting to Afghanistan coming up, but his whistle couldn’t save the day, though he did his best. On the rugby field that day, South Africa won its only test against the Red Peril, thirty-six to eighteen.”
∨ Dead at Daybreak ∧
44
I rented a two-bedroom house in Brackenfell and neglected the garden and borrowed the lawn mower of my middle-class neighbors, the Van Tonders, every second Saturday, but I wasn’t home very often.
I developed my own unique weekly routine. Every day and most nights I worked with the same blind dedication as my colleagues. Sometimes, when the workload permitted, I attended the Thursday-evening symphony concerts in the city hall, often alone. On Saturday evenings there was a barbecue at someone’s house, a closed police gathering with unwritten rules about meat and alcohol contributions, where drunkenness was excused as long as it didn’t upset the women and children.
On Sundays I cooked.
I went on a culinary journey of all the continents – Thai, Chinese, Vietnamese, Japanese, Spanish, French, Italian, Greek, Middle Eastern. I would plan the dish during the week, shop for the final ingredients on Saturday, and spend Sunday in the kitchen, taking time and care, with a glass of red wine and opera on the hi-fi and a woman who was my sole, deeply impressed audience.
I might as well admit it – the more heartless the dossiers on my desk, the greater the yearning for the love of my life, for love in my life, for that mythical soul mate, someone who would welcome and embrace me in a warm bed in the small hours of the night. Someone who on Saturday nights would put down our contribution on the salad table, among other women there, someone to whom I could refer as “my wife” with the same loving, jealous possessiveness of Breyten Breytenbach’s eponymous poem. There was a loneliness in me, an emptiness, an incompleteness that grew over the months. It was as if the nature of my work deepened this lack, so that I searched for her with growing determination – the Cape is a mecca for the unmarried, middle-class man, the ratio of men to women in the Peninsula an attractive statistic, the network for playing find-a-girl-for-a-cop surely the best in the world.
For that reason there was often someone at my side at the barbecue on a Saturday night. And in my bed on a Sunday morning. An admiring assistant in the kitchen, where I proved my culinary superiority to my colleagues with the preparation of the seventh day’s festive meal for two. And after lunch, sleepy and full of good food, we tried to still that other hunger on the living-room couch or the bed.
Because on Monday it was back to work, back to the dark heart of the world where other basic instincts applied.
With Nagel.
Our relationship was odd. It sometimes reminded me of the way an old married couple spend their lives bickering – a never-ending conflict on the surface but with a deep underlying respect and love that could bear anything.
It was a relationship forged in the furnace of policing, the pressure cooker of violence and blood and murder. For two years we stood side by side in the firing line and investigated every possible crime committed by people against people and hunted the guilty with total dedication.
Nagel was an ill-educated man with no respect for book learning. He proclaimed that you couldn’t get on top of police work using a textbook or lecture notes. He had no patience with pretense, even less with the butterfly dance of humankind’s social interaction – the small white lies, the fake politeness, the striving for superficial status symbols.
“Shit, man” was his general, head-shaking reaction to anything that sounded to him like a senseless statement, and he used it often, that and the general applicable possibilities and unlimited declensions of the word fuck. It was Nagel who taught me to swear – not deliberately, but the man’s handiness with it was a revelation, and contagious, like a deadly virus.
Nagel was the only detective at Murder and Robbery who was untouched by the heartlessness of our work.
He accepted the criminality of our species as a given – and his role was simply to let justice be done, to hunt and corner the murderer and the rapist and the thief, without thinking about it, without introspection, without tormenting himself over what the sometimes horrifying crimes said about him as a member of the same species.
It wasn’t as if all this was merely the petrified crust over a soft center. Nagel was one-dimensional and because of that he was probably the best professional of the long arm of the law that I knew.
Bickering. About the nature and motive of the murder, about the psyche of the murderer, about the ghostly traces at the murder scene that indicated an investigative direction, about the course and priority of the investigation itself. He was aware of my impressive academic career but he wasn’t intimidated by it. Perhaps Colonel Willie Theal had known Nagel would be the only mentor for whom my background posed no threat. He was certain of his views, his methods.
In the solution of crimes he was sometimes right with his astonishing instinct and feeling – and sometimes my pages and pages of annotations, my precise notes, my endless study of detail, my methodology in psychology, which the Americans now so pretentiously refer to as forensic criminology, provided conclusive proof. Only to hear Nagel saying that “Lady Luck shat on your fucking front porch again.”