“On the way to the cemetery,” said the man, “I looked through your wallet. I memorized your address.”
“You attacked me,” he said. “And now you’ve traced me to my home, many miles away from Stockholm. You’d better have some good answers to the questions I’m going to ask you.”
They sat down in the kitchen, and Wallander closed the kitchen door so they wouldn’t wake Linda. Afterwards, he would remember those hours they sat opposite each other at the table as the most remarkable conversation he had ever taken part in. It was not just that Wallander received his first real insight into the strange world from which Victor Mabasha originated and to which he would soon return. He was also forced to ask himself how it was possible for a human being to be made up of so many incompatible parts. How could a man be a cold-blooded killer who approached his contracts as if they were part of an accountable day’s work, and at the same time be a rational, sensitive human being with well-thought-out political views? He did not realize the conversation was part of a confidence trick that had him fooled. Victor Mabasha had seen how the wind was blowing. His ability to give the impression of reliability could give him the freedom to return to South Africa. The spirits had whispered in his ear that he should seek out the cop who was hunting Konovalenko and obtain his help to flee the country.
What Wallander remembered most vividly in retrospect was what Victor Mabasha said about a plant that grew exclusively in the Namibian desert. It could live as long as two thousand years. It grew long leaves like protective shadows to shield its flowers and its complicated root system. Victor Mabasha regarded this unusual plant as a symbol of the opposing forces in his homeland, and also struggling for supremacy in his own being.
“People don’t surrender their privileges voluntarily,” he said. “These privileges have become a habit with roots so deep, they’ve become a sort of extra limb. It’s a mistake to believe it’s all down to a racial defect. Where I come from it’s the whites who reap the benefits of this habit. But if things had been different it could just as easily have been me and my brothers. You can never fight racism with racism. What has to happen in my country, so battered and bruised for so many hundreds of years, is that the habits of submission have to be broken. The whites must be made to understand that if they’re to survive the immediate future, they must step down. They have to hand over land to the deprived blacks who have been robbed of their land for centuries. They have to transfer most of their riches to those who have nothing, they have to learn how to treat the blacks as human beings. Barbarism has always had a human face. That’s precisely what makes barbarism so inhuman. The blacks, who are so used to being submissive, to regarding themselves as nobodies in a community of nobodies, have to change their habits. Could it be that submissiveness is the most difficult of all human failings to shake off? It’s a habit so deeply ingrained, it deforms one’s whole being and leaves no part of the body untouched. Progressing from being a nobody to being a somebody is the longest journey a human being can undertake. Once you’ve learned to put up with your inferiority, it becomes a habit which dominates your whole life. And I believe a peaceful solution is an illusion. The apartheid system in my country has gone so far, it’s already begun to flounder because it’s become impossible. New generations of blacks have grown up and refused to submit. They’re impatient, they can see the imminent collapse. But everything is progressing so slowly. Besides, there are too many whites who think the same way. They refuse to accept privileges requiring them to live as if all the blacks in their country were invisible, as if they only existed as servants or some strange sort of animals confined to remote shanty towns. In my country we have large nature reserves where wild animals can rove unhindered. At the same time, we have large human reserves where people are constantly hindered. Where I come from, wild animals are better off than humans.”
Victor Mabasha fell silent, and looked at Wallander as if expecting him to ask questions or make objections. It seemed to Wallander that all whites were the same to Victor Mabasha, whether they lived in South Africa or anywhere else.
“A lot of my black brothers and sisters think this feeling of inferiority can be overcome by its opposite, superiority,” Victor Mabasha went on. “But that’s wrong, of course. That just leads to antipathy, and tensions between various groups where there should be cooperation. For instance, it can split a family in two. And you should know, Inspector Wallander, that where I come from if you don’t have a family, you are nothing. For an African, the family is the be-all and end-all.”
“I thought your spirits fulfilled that role,” said Wallander.
“Spirits are part of our families,” said Victor Mabasha. “The spirits are our ancestors, keeping watch over us. They are invisible members of our family. We never forget their existence. That’s why the whites have committed such an incomprehensible crime in driving us out of the land where we have lived for so many generations. Spirits don’t like being forced to quit the land that was once theirs. The spirits hate the shanty towns the whites have forced us to live in even more than we do.”
He stopped abruptly, as if the words he had just spoken had given him such terrible insight he had trouble in believing what he just said.
“I grew up in a family that was split from the very start,” he said after a long pause. “The whites knew they could break down our resistance by splitting up our families. I could see how my brothers and sisters started reacting more and more like blind rabbits. They just ran around in circles, around and around, and no longer knew where they came from or where they were headed. I saw all that, and chose a different route. I learned how to hate. I drank of the dark waters that arouse the desire for revenge. But I also realized that despite their superiority, their arrogant assumption that their supremacy was God-given, they also had their weak points. They were scared. They talked about making South Africa a perfect work of art, a white palace in Paradise.
“But they could never see how impossible that dream of theirs really was. And those who did refused to admit as much. So the very foundation on which everything was built became a lie, and fear came to them in the night. They filled their houses with weapons. But fear found its way inside even so. Violence became a part of the everyday program of fear. I could see all that, and I resolved to keep my friends close by me, but my enemies even closer. I would play the role of the black man who knew what white men wanted. I would feed my contempt by running errands for them. I would work in their kitchens, and spit into the soup before carrying it in to their tables. I would continue to be a nobody who, in secret, had become a somebody.”