Finally, something we can agree on.
They pulled into the lone gas station, one pump under an unsteady lean-to, and filled the tank. If there was an attendant, he was nowhere around.
Just off the road to their left was a paddock and couple of hungry horses standing listlessly around a trough full of rank water. One of the supports of the paddock was a bristlecone pine, all gnarled and twisted into a shape that belonged more in a nightmare than in the bright desert sun.
Odd tree, Salazar said, spitting.
Sunil wondered if that was some superstition or just bad manners.
It’s a bristlecone, he said. Oldest living organisms on the planet, I think. In fact, there is a bristlecone pine somewhere in Nevada that is perhaps the world’s oldest tree. It’s over five thousand years old.
No shit.
The tree was named Methuselah. I wonder if that’s what this town is named after. The location of the tree is a well-kept secret by the parks service, but maybe it’s around here somewhere.
What’s a Methuselah?
I figured you would know, being a Republican and quite possibly a hardline Christian.
Just tell me what the fuck it is, Salazar snapped.
It’s the name of the oldest man to have lived, at least according to the Bible, Sunil said.
Bible’s never wrong, Salazar said, walking over to the tree and peeing on it.
Is that some animal territory-marking ritual, Sunil asked.
Never seen a man pee on a tree before?
Sunil opened the door of the car and slid back in. There’s a bar-cum-diner over there called Cupid’s, he said. Let’s see if we can find a burger to fall in love with.
Salazar shook himself at the tree, inspected his work, and, satisfied, zipped up and returned to the car.
Thirty-three
Eskia had been waiting two hours and was already irritated when Asia arrived at his hotel, a little breathless, at ten thirty.
Sorry, she said as he let her in. I had to be somewhere. As always she laid out the Bible. He hurriedly stuffed some bills into it and barely let her undress before taking her roughly, bending her over the edge of the bed. He came quickly and as she straightened her clothes, he said, I’m not done yet.
Multiple pops count as multiple visits, she said, pointing to the Bible and walking into the bathroom to freshen up.
He walked over to his wallet and grabbed some more bills, which he stuffed into the Bible. The first time he found the ritual cute, but now it angered him. He guessed that part of Sunil’s attraction to this woman had to do with that Bible. That Asia was, in a way, a surrogate Jan. Even the Bible, that little detail, Sunil hadn’t overlooked. It wasn’t red, but one can’t have everything, Eskia mused.
While she was gone, he thought about Jan. How brave, single-minded, and so stubbornly sure of her convictions she had been — enough to risk everything. Jan had turned away from her upbringing as a racist Afrikaner, from her training and job as a spy for the South African Security Services in deep cover in a liberal South African university, to become an informer for the ANC. Although Eskia wanted to believe it was Jan’s love for him that turned her, he knew it wasn’t. The tipping point came the day she opened her father’s Bible. Eskia was there, saw her turn pale and let the book fall to the ground. He bent to pick it up and saw that her father had crossed out the handwritten dedication from President Botha, scrawling in red capital letters across it, the word “LIAR.” He saw the look that crossed her face, as if her entire universe was folding in on itself. There was a long moment when neither of them moved or spoke. They barely breathed. And then he let her kiss him. And make love to him.
Of course he fell, who can resist that kind of love, a love where you are needed desperately? Jan loved Eskia with a zeal he knew was driven by her fear of falling back into the old hate she’d been raised in. But in those dark times you took what comfort you could because in the end it was all grace.
Jan’s ring, which Eskia now wore on his thumb, was now the shape of his heart, hot and weighty with despair. It was all he had left of her. He lost track of Jan when she got arrested. She was gone long enough to accept, even beyond his verbal denials, that she was dead. In a way, his search, when it began, was not to find her, but rather to let her go properly. Working in the new government’s security services was a great help. That’s how he found out about the bodies turning up around the farm at Vlakplaas, and some in the river, too.
He had a hard time finding Vlakplaas. Trauma messes with recollection; things that never existed become part of your memory of a place, and the very things that are absolutely vital to remembering are erased. He got lost several times, stopping always to ask for directions, careful to choose only blacks or coloreds or Indians because it seemed like whites would never tell him how to get there. But everyone pretended they had never heard of it. The most feared place in South Africa, and people who were mere miles from it couldn’t remember where it was, or how to get there.
When Eskia finally found the farm, there was a white Afrikaans family, with very young children, living there. How was it possible? Everyone knew what had happened there. The bars on the windows, bloodstains on the guardhouse, faded but still visible. All of it still there and these people bought it to grow food on? Brought children to live there?
He saw them, a couple of slight girls, blond and sprightly, swimming in that river that had held so many rotting bodies. It was unnatural, and perhaps that was worse even than what had really gone on there.
Farther back from the edges of the farm, up in the hills, a small group was digging for bodies, like people prospecting for treasure. They moved across the stubby grass of the hills, in bright red or black, prodding the ground with converted ski poles or sharpened sticks, feeling always for a looseness, a hollowness in the red earth, for a hint. The figures would straighten up, heads cocked into the wind, listening as though hearing their names. A couple would stop while the others moved on. Engaged in some beautiful ballet only they understood. Moving forward, slowly, but always forward. Leaving a legacy of holes behind them.
Eskia approached and greeted them softly in Zulu, Sawbona. They paused and looked up and that was when he realized they were mostly women. They smiled and returned to their digging, stopping only when they unearthed a body, or bones, or whatever fragment of a person they found. Then they lifted the remains reverentially out of the ground and laid them on a white plastic sheet, awaiting identification. There was a tenderness in this scene, the sheer sorrow that stills anger into a river of serenity, into a clarity so cold its brittleness is more threatening, quivering before shattering into a rage that can obliterate.
He sat on an outcrop of stone and took deep breaths, noticing for the first time the small crowd of people walking between the excavators, pausing by each set of remains, looking for something to identify a loved one, something as small as a tuft of hair or a birthmark. When someone was identified, there was a silence as the remains were gathered and carried back down the hill, past the farm to the road where cars were parked, as though any sound — a cry, a wail — would desecrate the delicate balance the excavators worked with.
Eskia came regularly for six years, joining the silent search, until he found, among a pile of bones, Jan’s ring, with the shimmering butterfly wing. Unlike the others, he took no remains, just the ring. There would be no mourning for him, no grieving. Just a vain hate, one that had no target, no focus, until he found, on a list of names of Vlakplaas personnel, Dr. Sunil Singh.
Asia came back into the room, startling him. With the practiced ease of a croupier, she counted the money in the Bible without seeming to look. She crossed to the middle of the room, stripped, and said: I’m ready.