Part 54 (1/2)
Thubana barked a laugh. ”Who's going to decode it?”
This time, the policeman with the sjambok hit him, but Thubana deflected the blow by lifting a hand and hunching his shoulder. A second man made him pay by billying him in the groin. Thubana fell to his knees in front of the bakkie's yawning doors.
I don't have to watch this, Myburgh thought. I can walk home. Who's going to stop me?
Suddenly, Wessels realized that Skosana was again wearing the volleyball cap that, on the road from KwaNdebele, Major Jeppe had hurled off into the night ”What the h.e.l.l is this?” He s.n.a.t.c.hed the cap from Skosana's head, dangled it from his fingers as if it were a scroll of sodden toilet tissue.
”... King, Tutu and Boesak's reformism has been endorsed by the imperialists worldwide. Both King and Tutu received the n.o.bel Peace Prize for their efforts to restrict our liberation movements to nonviolent methods. However, their-”
”Shut up!” Wessels shouted.
”-timid political activity can only patch up a few of the more glaring injustices of their morally bankrupt societies. When the armed struggle is it low ebb, they condemn it outright, but when it intensifies and gathers -a.s.s support, they cry, ”Negotiate with us, or face them!” This is how they sell-”
”Shut up! Shut up!” Wessels struck Skosana, slapping him with open palms on both sides of the face, like a man playing cymbals in an orchestra.
”Don't!” Myburgh stepped forward. But, as he knew it would, this heartfelt caution went unheeded.
Skosana, stung, gave Wessels a two-handed shove in the chest, knocking him into Goosen and Dedekind. Meanwhile, his steel plate continued to receive and transmit: ”... revolutionary organizations like the Black Panther Party and the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement (DRUM) in Detroit. It is this common history that unifies ma.s.s struggle in-”
Recovering, Wessels jumped back at Skosana with a sjambok taken from the agent named Schoeman. His face as red and bloated as a rising sun, he lifted the flail with all the kinetic fury of Christ going after the money changers.
From his knees, Thubana cried, ”He can't help it, you tsotsis! Give him back his cap!”
Goosen and Schoeman caught Wessels from behind.
”Not out here, Lieutenant,” Goosen said, trembling excitedly. ”Save it. You'll have your chance. All of us will.”
Hyperventilating, Wessels resembled an inflatable, horror-show van der Merwe, an editorial cartoon of the Bad Afrikaner. Myburgh was simultaneously repulsed and fascinated. When Wessels finally gained control of himself, though, he saw the cap in his left hand and slapped it punis.h.i.+ngly into Skosana's palm.
”Put it on!”
Glaring contempt, Skosana obeyed, rendering the broadcast from Zambia as thin and reedy as water trickling through the pipes in an adjoining hotel room.
Wessels appealed to Goosen: ”Where did he get it? The major threw it away. I know he threw it away.”
”He probably had the other half crimped up in a pocket,” Goosen said. ”That's all.”
Myburgh bent down beside Thubana, gripped his elbow, put an arm around his waist, helped him stand.
”It's muddy just like the one Major Jeppe threw away,” Wessels said. ”He got it back somehow. The same way he got that coat.”
”How was that?” said Dedekind, nervously cutting his eyes.
”That old black magic,” Thubana whispered to Myburgh. ”That I know so well.”
Hearing Thubana quote from an old pop song, in a street next to security police headquarters, tickled Myburgh; against his will, he smiled.
”Go home,” Thubana whispered. ”It only gets worse now. Go on home, Mr. Myburgh.”
”No!” Skosana said.
Wessels looked up as if Skosana had spit in his face. ” 'No' is just what we don't want to hear, kaffir. We're in the business of manufacturing yeses.”
”Come inside with us,” Skosana said, speaking around Wessels to Myburgh.
”Never fear,” Wessels said. ”Steenkamp!”
A policeman came to grasp Thubana's arm. Myburgh tried to push him aside, to protect his own grip on Thubana, but his efforts only made Steenkamp stumble slightly. In fact, he glanced down at the street as if a stone or a bottle shard had tripped him, then went ahead and seized Thubana, incidentally brus.h.i.+ng Myburgh's arm away as if it were less than a spider's thread.
”Come inside with us,” Skosana said again. ”And stay, please, with Mordecai. He's never been in before.”
Wessels said, ”Neither of you kaffirs will be lonesome-don't worry about that. And if your friend's never been in before, it's past time, isn't it?”
”Please,” Skosana said. ”Come inside.”
Myburgh looked at the man pleading with him with such dignity. He looked at Thubana, and at the security police-Wessels & Company- whose eagerness to escort his two comrades upstairs seemed akin to that of small boys on Christmas. Packages to unwrap. New toys to break in.
”All right,” he said.
Getting in was easy. Myburgh squeezed through the street-level door beside Thubana and struggled up through the echoey stairwell behind Skosana.
Each prisoner was bookended by a pair of security agents, who had handcuffed Thubana and Skosana before bringing them in. Didn't this mausoleum have elevators? If so, they weren't for detainees, even in the off-limits parts reserved for suspected terrorists and other enemies of the state. So let the kaffirs climb the stairs to their inevitable comeuppance.
Myburgh could not clearly account for his lack of sympathy for Goosen, Steenkamp, Dedekind, and Schoeman. (Wessels had left them on the first landing, perhaps to check in with Jeppe.) After all, he'd grown up with such men. Men somewhat like them, anyway-the sons of farmers on the properties bordering Huilbloom. Freckled, sunburnt, sandy-haired toughs with callused hands and hard-edged laughs.
Several times, in fact, as a teenager, he had ventured out as a balaclava man with these fellows. Everyone wore a hood and rode in Anton Smoot's tiny Renault, headlights off, to shoot out the streetlamps and robots- traffic lights-in the black areas near Nylstroom. They had carried real pistols (he and Kiewit juggled Papa Myburgh's Ruger back and forth) and real bullets. And, to this day, Kiewit held that on one outing they had shot a pair of meths-drinking Ndebele drunks along with the streetlamps. Myburgh's memory of these jaunts wasn't as clear as his brother's, nor could he see himself engaging in anything so wild and reckless today. But, once upon a time, he had definitely ridden balaclava...
Jeppe, Wessels, Goosen, Steenkamp, Dedekind, Schoeman, and the others were just doing their jobs. A hard job. A necessary job, albeit a dirty one. And they weren't much applauded for the hard, dirty job they did. Folks didn't want to think about them. Just as a man-a city man, at least-putting away a juicy steak doesn't want to be told that the cow it came from died under the spattering thwack of a sledgehammer.
But Myburgh did know the reason for his animosity toward these men. Mordecai Thubana put roofs on houses and apartment buildings in the new white subdivisions in and around Pretoria; Skosana had paid for his crimes against the state long ago. They were kaffirs, sure, but neither of them belonged in this building. Myburgh knew that. A man who wanted to help the world's finest physicists come up with a Grand Unified Theory of Everything, and another who made his living loading snack foods onto trucks.
Such reprobates. Such traitors.
Stop worrying, Gerrit. Despite Thubana's fears (It only gets worse now), Jeppe and his men will see their error once they've asked a few questions.
Of course they will. They must.
At the third or fourth landing (during his reverie, Myburgh had lost track), the slightly overweight Schoeman, breathing raggedly, asked Dedekind, the ranking agent, if they could rest a while. His request was granted, and Thubana and Skosana positioned themselves at a rail fronting a narrow window looking down on a graveled roof; there, a peeling billboard glistened.
Skosana nudged Myburgh. Read the billboard, his nudge and his lifted eyebrows commanded.
Myburgh studied the sign. It was one he recognized from other venues -street bills, newspaper ads, magazine inserts. It showed a bottle of laundry bleach, with a slogan next to it that struck him this morning with a new, almost brutal, forcefulness: JIK, it said. (A brand-name.) And under that: WITH CONTROLLED STRENGTH, FOR THE WORLD'S WHITEST WASH.
”Oh, Lord, I'm feeling sick,” Skosana said, in a self-mocking lilt: ”Here in the land of Jik.”
Thubana said nothing. The sight of the billboard, along with his friend's doggerel, seemed to dispirit him. And Thubana's funk clouded Myburgh's efforts to regard the situation in an optimistic light. They were all in the land of Jik.
Must I keep on climbing these stairs? Myburgh wondered. Like Schoeman, he was winded. Trotting back down, after a short rest, seemed a more attractive option. At least, if he could get out again. Did the street-level door automatically lock? Did you have to have a key to go through it again?