The sun never seemed to rest in this strange land; it had already climbed over the horizon. A bird of prey rose from a treetop and flapped its way over the mirror-like lake.
First of all he must sleep. A few hours, no more. He knew he did not need much sleep. Afterward, his brain would be able to assist him once again.
At a time which seemed to him as far distant as the dim and distant past of his ancestors, his father, Okumana, the man who could make better spear tips than anyone else, had explained to him that there was always a way out of any situation, as long as one was alive. Death was the last hiding place. That was something to keep in reserve until there was no other way of avoiding an apparently insuperable threat. There were always escape routes that were not immediately obvious, and that was why humans, unlike animals, had a brain. In order to look inward, not outward. Inward, toward the secret places where the spirits of one’s ancestors were waiting to act as a man’s guide through life.
Who am I? he thought. A human being who has lost his identity is no longer a human being. He is an animal. That’s what has happened to me. I started to kill people because I myself was dead. When I was a child and saw the signs, the accursed signs telling the blacks where they were allowed to go and what existed exclusively for the whites, I started to be diminished even then. A child should grow, grow bigger; but in my country a black child had to learn how to grow smaller and smaller. I saw my parents succumb to their own invisibility, their own accumulated bitterness. I was an obedient child and learned to be a nobody among nobodies. Apartheid was my real father. I learned what no one should need to learn. To live with falsehood, contempt, a lie elevated to the only truth in my country. A lie enforced by the police and laws, but above all by a flood of white water, a torrent of words about the natural differences between white and black, the superiority of white civilization. That superiority turned me into a murderer, songoma. And I can believe this is the ultimate consequence of learning to grow smaller and smaller as a child. For what has this apartheid, this falsified white superiority been but a systematic plundering of our souls? When our despair exploded in furious destruction, the whites failed to see the despair and hatred which is so boundlessly greater. All the things we have been carrying around inside us. It is inside myself I see my thoughts and feelings being split asunder as if with a sword. I can manage without one of my fingers. But how can I live without knowing who I am?
He came to with a start, and realized he had almost fallen asleep. In the borderlands of sleep, half dreaming, thoughts he had long since forgotten returned to him.
He remained on the stone by the lake for a long time.
The memories found their own way into his head. He had no need to summon them.
Summer, 1967. He had just passed his sixth birthday when he discovered a talent distinguishing him from the other children he used to play with in the dusty slum just outside Johannesburg. They had made a ball out of paper and string, and it suddenly dawned on him he had far more skill with it than any of his friends. He could work miracles with the ball, and it followed him like an obedient dog. This discovery led to his first great dream, which was to be crushed ruthlessly by the apartheid society held sacred. He would be the best rugby player in South Africa.
It brought him untold joy. He thought the spirits of his forefathers had been good to him. He filled a bottle with water from a tap and sacrificed it to the red earth.
One day that summer a white liquor dealer stopped his car in the dust where Victor and his friends were playing with the paper-andstring ball. The man behind the wheel sat for a long time watching the black boy with the phenomenal gifts of ball control.
On one occasion the ball rolled over to the car. Victor approached gingerly, bowed to the man and picked up the ball.
“If only you’d been born white,” said the man. “I’ve never seen anybody handle a ball like you do. It’s a pity you’re black.”
He watched an airplane sketching a white streak over the sky.
I don’t remember the pain, he thought. But it must have existed, even then. Or did I simply not react because it was so ingrained into me as a six-year-old that injustice was the natural state of affairs? Ten years later, when he was sixteen, everything had changed.
June 1976. Soweto. More than fifteen thousand students were assembled outside Orlando West Junior Secondary School. He did not really belong there. He lived on the streets, lived the obscure but increasingly skillful, increasingly ruthless life of a thief. He was still only robbing blacks. But his eyes were already drawn to the white residential areas where it was possible to carry out big robberies. He was carried along by the tide of young people, and shared their fury over the decision that education would take place in future in the hated language of the Boers. He could still recall the young girl clenching her fist and yelling at the president, who was not present: “Vorster! You speak zulu, then we’ll speak Afrikaans!” He was in turmoil. The drama of the situation as the police charged, beating people randomly with their sjamboks, did not affect him until he was beaten himself. He had taken part in the stonethrowing, and his ball skills had not deserted him. Nearly every throw hit home; he saw a policeman clutch at his cheek as blood poured out between his fingers, and he remembered the man in the car and his words spoken as he bent down to the red earth to pick up his paper ball. Then he was caught, and the lashes from the whips dug so deeply into his skin, the pain penetrated his inner self. He remembered one cop above all the others, a powerful red-faced man smelling of stale liquor. He had suddenly detected a gleam of fear in his eye. At that moment he realized he was the stronger, and from then on the white man’s terror would always fill him with boundless contempt.
He was woken out of his reverie by a movement on the other side of the lake. It was a rowboat, he realized, slowly coming toward him. A man was rowing with lazy strokes. The sound from the oarlocks reached his ears despite the distance.
He got up from the stone, staggered in a sudden fit of dizziness, and knew he had to see a doctor. He had always had thin blood, and once he started bleeding, it went on for a long time. Moreover, he must find something to drink. He sat in the car, started the engine, and saw he had enough gas for an hour of travel at most.
When he came out onto the main road, he continued in the same direction as before.
It took him forty-five minutes to get to a little town called Almhult. He tried to imagine how the name was pronounced. He stopped at a gas station. Konovalenko had given him money for gas earlier on. He had two hundred-kronor bills left, and knew how to operate the automatic dispenser. His injured hand was hindering him, and he could see it was attracting attention.
An elderly man offered to help him. Victor Mabasha could not understand what he said, but nodded and tried to smile. He used one of the hundred-kronor notes and saw it was only enough for just over three liters. But he needed something to eat and above all he needed to quench his thirst. He went into the gas station after mumbling his thanks to the man who helped him and drove the car away from the pump. He bought some bread and two large bottles of Coca-Cola. That left him with forty kronor. There was a map among various promotional offers on the counter, and he tried in vain to find Almhult.
He went back to the car and bit off a large chunk of bread. He emptied a whole bottle of Coca-Cola before his thirst was quenched. He tried to make up his mind what to do. Where could he find a doctor or a hospital? But he had no money to pay for treatment anyway. The hospital staff would turn him away and refuse to treat him.
He knew what that meant. He would have to commit a robbery. The pistol in the glove compartment was his only way out.