My China: Excerpt
Seven
He has to be careful, he tells himself for the umpteenth time. Don’t just talk. First check things out, where exactly in the tree the cat is.
Not that he can see the tree. He is sitting on a mattress against the wall of a room in an old farmhouse, around which a township had been built. He has no idea where, although he has heard the word Nigel, and got a picture in his mind of some dilapidated shops and a sludge dam with a huge gravel mountain in the background. The underside of the backside of the Rand.
The varnish has long ago vanished from the plank floor, and its colour is now grey, instead of yellow or orange. The only window has been boarded up, one plank hammered fast over the other, as if it was a clever way of storing them. Sunrays push past them like a crowd of refugees outside an embassy gate.
The door only has a rickety breech-bolt, but the lock on the outside is big and heavy. As if the message is: You can try to escape and might even succeed, but it won’t be easy.
His hand is in a pair of stolen police handcuffs. He knows, because the letters SAP has been punched into them, followed by a number. The other end of the handcuffs has been clicked over a hook that is sitting so tightly in the wall that one would be able to tow away the whole house with it.
He has dragged the mattress halfway up the wall with his free hand to form a ridge on which he could rest his cuffed arm, so that the blood does not drain from it and his upper arm doesn’t ache from pins and needles. Already a few red scuff marks have appeared around his wrists.
To one side a porridge bowl has been left on the floor, one of those with a faint red edge and weak little flowers in blue in a ring on the middle of the rim. The porridge that he couldn’t swallow down that morning, is getting dry and hard as he watches. A sunray glints on the sugar of the porridge and on the edge of the bowl.
At least he got some this morning. He has been here for three days and every time he has had porridge. Porridge in the mornings, porridge in the afternoons, sometimes only by three, four or five o’clock, porridge in the evening. Covered with curry sauce, in which the rinds of fat form islands like amoebas. The giant among the microbes.
Microbes… he shudders involuntarily. He imagines the porridge has been greyed by all the microbes thronging on it, like a crowd on a koppie looking on some event down below. Like in ancient days, when people used to gather on ridges and hills to watch a battle taking place on the flats. The Charge of the Light Brigade…
How is he going to get out of here, he wonders for the umpteenth time. He has already begun to forget some of the details of the attack; every morning there is a little less in his memory, like a chalk drawing on a pavement in the rain, but he can still remember the worst parts, the shock of the blows in his face, and the pains in his side ache when he thinks of the kicks.
The baby whose head falls open under the panga. He has to shift around on his bum when he pictures the terrible scene. Barbaric, he thinks. This is not what I am fighting for. He sees himself standing over the astonished impi, his mouth open, the unceremonious puff when he falls back into the dust, the neat dot of blood between his eyes…
That is why his arm is getting so scuffed in the cuffs: He can’t sit still while the memories force his body in all sorts of directions.
He had been ready to tell them. But perhaps their mistake was that they had left him in solitary confinement. Even though it was the boot of the car, into which they had dumped him in the first place. Something was familiar about it, something like a trip as a child, on the back seat of a car, a blanket thrown over him, and being just awake enough to feel the car turn, slowly left, slowly right, when they go around a bend in the road, tighter angles when they turn into a street.
When they stopped it took only seconds for them, frantically looking around in all directions, to help him out,. He was virtually carried up the steps in their haste to get him out of sight as quickly as possible.
At first they tied his hands behind his back as he sat on a chair. They had a woman come, who nursed his wounds in linen pyjamas, dripping milk on his eyes and dabbing mercurochrome on his scabs which felt like the fire in which the squatters had wanted to burn him.
“So,” one of them began, “can you explain to us your business in X-ville?”
He looked at them: “I want a lawyer,” he said past his swollen lips. They looked at each other, and then burst out laughing. They couldn’t stop, the one slapped his hand against the wall, the other kneaded his crotch as if he was about to pee. Both wiped the tears from their eyes when they regained some control over themselves.
“Let me get this straight,” said the one eventually, “you attack a defenceless community, kill thirteen people and injure dozens, and when you get caught, you want a laywer?”
“Thirteen people?” he said. “Did they kill thirteen people?”
“They? You killed thirteen people, my friend,” said Number One. “You,” he repeated, and pressed his finger in his chest, “You, you, you.”
“I didn’t kill any of your people,” he said, carefully.
“Then what is this?” Number Two took the pistol he had taken from him out of his pocket and pressed the cold steel against his face, first the barrel only, then the side of the pistol, and the grip, but only the oily taste on his lips made any impression; the rest of his face was dead to its touch.
“Come on, come on,” said Number Two and pushed the barrel in-between Jansen’s teeth. “Whose is this?”
Jansen shrugged.
“Oh, you don’t know, don’t you. Then you also don’t know what went on here, do you.” He let the magazine jump out of the grip with a single practiced movement of his hand.
“This little piggy, went to market, this little piggy stayed home,” he counted out each of the spaces in the magazine.
He wanted to shout that he had only made one shot, but he stopped himself in time. Or did Number Two see the flicker in his eyes? He watched him with suspicion, and pressed the remaining bullet from the magazine with his thumb.
“I see you’re frightened. Frightened of whom? The ghosts of the people you killed? Or frightened of the name written on this bullet...” He tapped the bullet against his left temple. “Guess whose name.” Suddenly he held the pistol between Jansen’s eyes, so that he stiffened his legs in a spasm, causing the chair to judder over the floor.
“What is your name, by the way?” asked Number One, putting on a face of feigned interest. Jansen shook his head slowly; he was not too jittery to remind himself that the pistol was empty.
“Oh, you don’t have a name, then. In that case, what is your lawyer’s name?”
“Pen and paper,” he muttered, so that they might loosen his one hand. Number Two blew away the make-believe smoke from the pistol.
E.G. Jansen, he wrote in print on the piece of paper.
They grabbed the sheet torn from a notebook and dashed out of the room. He could have tried to escape, but he just sat there, trying to nurse the raw scrapings around his released wrist by blowing on them.
Three days later he is still here, and added to his cautiousness is the growing knowledge that he is doing the right thing by doing nothing.
They haven’t been treating him badly. Every now and then he gets a slap on the head, but that is understandable. On the second day, a doctor arrived to have a look at him, a white man who avoided his eyes. He had to be part and parcel of them, an integral element in the network.
What would he have gained anyway by fleeing? The Colonel and his former comrades would have tracked him down in a wink.
The doctor felt him up and prodded all over as if he was a doll in an anatomy class. Just one broken rib, for which he got a bandage around his torso, which they allowed him to have changed the next day. Which he had requested not because the bandage had picked up some dirt, but to test them.
They also brought him some reading matter. A newspaper from the previous week.
The attack was at the bottom of the front page. A Zulu impi, it said, had attacked the X-ville squatter camp after the bodies of two inmates of a hostel 30km away had been discovered there. They had smeared muti on their torsos.
The villagers had told the reporter that one of the attackers had been white and that the body of another had been found in the debris. Then a few paragraphs followed in which a police spokesman denied there were any whites involved. (That looked stupid, Jansen had thought, why leave it to the police to deny?)
He had continued by describing the fighting as factional violence, and said the squatters had been drunk. He had merely laughed when allegations about a Third Force were put to him. The subtext was that the blacks had begun fighting again, which they always did in the locations.
Other paragraphs quoted psychologists as saying that because of pre-talks violence in the townships fear of attacks by Zulus had increased and might have caused hallucinations in which whites were seen. The X-ville reaction had been typical of such collective regressions. It would have been better to focus on the hell of poverty suffered by the squatters, which cannot be avoided. Everybody should just wait for it to go away.
Like microbes, he thought. That was the common knee-jerk reaction. One had to wait it out, and when they were still there, learn to live with them.
He reaches for the paper on the mattress, and tries to find the place where he has stopped reading. The Briefs, which is what this newspaper called its In Shorts, tells of a woman who has been found in a hole underneath her parents’ home. They are two elderly people who had attracted the attention of the police when they put an iron in a microwave oven which had then exploded.
The woman is their daughter, and she could not speak, and couldn’t move her arms or her one leg. It has emerged that their relatives have not seen the woman for twenty years.
And there it stops. No further information. Which prompts one to ponder: How is this possible? How could nobody have heard anything? How can two people live for twenty years in the knowledge that they are keeping their daughter in a hole under the floor?
They could put him in a hole too and forget about him. The forgetful man who has been forgotten. It is a struggle just to move his painful limbs.
He jerks in fright as something hits the paper spread open across his lap, and falls on to the plank floor. Instinctively he tries to pull himself away from whatever it is. He tries to drag the mattress with him so that it could tip over on to him, but it is too heavy.
He opens his eyes and peers from under his arm. It is quiet again. He hears a child yell outside, and a piece of iron falling in a jingle of sound.
An object lies on the floor which he has not yet seen. He stretches his leg and pulls it closer with his toes. It is a piece of paper which has been wrapped around a stone with an elastic band.
He reads: “Whatever you do, don’t kill yourself.”
He recognises the handwriting immediately. It is in the neurotic script of the Colonel , all twenty-nine letters are as tall and hound-like as his lean and hungry body.
He has to be careful, he tells himself for the umpteenth time. Don’t just talk. First check things out, where exactly in the tree the cat is.
Not that he can see the tree. He is sitting on a mattress against the wall of a room in an old farmhouse, around which a township had been built. He has no idea where, although he has heard the word Nigel, and got a picture in his mind of some dilapidated shops and a sludge dam with a huge gravel mountain in the background. The underside of the backside of the Rand.
The varnish has long ago vanished from the plank floor, and its colour is now grey, instead of yellow or orange. The only window has been boarded up, one plank hammered fast over the other, as if it was a clever way of storing them. Sunrays push past them like a crowd of refugees outside an embassy gate.
The door only has a rickety breech-bolt, but the lock on the outside is big and heavy. As if the message is: You can try to escape and might even succeed, but it won’t be easy.
His hand is in a pair of stolen police handcuffs. He knows, because the letters SAP has been punched into them, followed by a number. The other end of the handcuffs has been clicked over a hook that is sitting so tightly in the wall that one would be able to tow away the whole house with it.
He has dragged the mattress halfway up the wall with his free hand to form a ridge on which he could rest his cuffed arm, so that the blood does not drain from it and his upper arm doesn’t ache from pins and needles. Already a few red scuff marks have appeared around his wrists.
To one side a porridge bowl has been left on the floor, one of those with a faint red edge and weak little flowers in blue in a ring on the middle of the rim. The porridge that he couldn’t swallow down that morning, is getting dry and hard as he watches. A sunray glints on the sugar of the porridge and on the edge of the bowl.
At least he got some this morning. He has been here for three days and every time he has had porridge. Porridge in the mornings, porridge in the afternoons, sometimes only by three, four or five o’clock, porridge in the evening. Covered with curry sauce, in which the rinds of fat form islands like amoebas. The giant among the microbes.
Microbes… he shudders involuntarily. He imagines the porridge has been greyed by all the microbes thronging on it, like a crowd on a koppie looking on some event down below. Like in ancient days, when people used to gather on ridges and hills to watch a battle taking place on the flats. The Charge of the Light Brigade…
How is he going to get out of here, he wonders for the umpteenth time. He has already begun to forget some of the details of the attack; every morning there is a little less in his memory, like a chalk drawing on a pavement in the rain, but he can still remember the worst parts, the shock of the blows in his face, and the pains in his side ache when he thinks of the kicks.
The baby whose head falls open under the panga. He has to shift around on his bum when he pictures the terrible scene. Barbaric, he thinks. This is not what I am fighting for. He sees himself standing over the astonished impi, his mouth open, the unceremonious puff when he falls back into the dust, the neat dot of blood between his eyes…
That is why his arm is getting so scuffed in the cuffs: He can’t sit still while the memories force his body in all sorts of directions.
He had been ready to tell them. But perhaps their mistake was that they had left him in solitary confinement. Even though it was the boot of the car, into which they had dumped him in the first place. Something was familiar about it, something like a trip as a child, on the back seat of a car, a blanket thrown over him, and being just awake enough to feel the car turn, slowly left, slowly right, when they go around a bend in the road, tighter angles when they turn into a street.
When they stopped it took only seconds for them, frantically looking around in all directions, to help him out,. He was virtually carried up the steps in their haste to get him out of sight as quickly as possible.
At first they tied his hands behind his back as he sat on a chair. They had a woman come, who nursed his wounds in linen pyjamas, dripping milk on his eyes and dabbing mercurochrome on his scabs which felt like the fire in which the squatters had wanted to burn him.
“So,” one of them began, “can you explain to us your business in X-ville?”
He looked at them: “I want a lawyer,” he said past his swollen lips. They looked at each other, and then burst out laughing. They couldn’t stop, the one slapped his hand against the wall, the other kneaded his crotch as if he was about to pee. Both wiped the tears from their eyes when they regained some control over themselves.
“Let me get this straight,” said the one eventually, “you attack a defenceless community, kill thirteen people and injure dozens, and when you get caught, you want a laywer?”
“Thirteen people?” he said. “Did they kill thirteen people?”
“They? You killed thirteen people, my friend,” said Number One. “You,” he repeated, and pressed his finger in his chest, “You, you, you.”
“I didn’t kill any of your people,” he said, carefully.
“Then what is this?” Number Two took the pistol he had taken from him out of his pocket and pressed the cold steel against his face, first the barrel only, then the side of the pistol, and the grip, but only the oily taste on his lips made any impression; the rest of his face was dead to its touch.
“Come on, come on,” said Number Two and pushed the barrel in-between Jansen’s teeth. “Whose is this?”
Jansen shrugged.
“Oh, you don’t know, don’t you. Then you also don’t know what went on here, do you.” He let the magazine jump out of the grip with a single practiced movement of his hand.
“This little piggy, went to market, this little piggy stayed home,” he counted out each of the spaces in the magazine.
He wanted to shout that he had only made one shot, but he stopped himself in time. Or did Number Two see the flicker in his eyes? He watched him with suspicion, and pressed the remaining bullet from the magazine with his thumb.
“I see you’re frightened. Frightened of whom? The ghosts of the people you killed? Or frightened of the name written on this bullet...” He tapped the bullet against his left temple. “Guess whose name.” Suddenly he held the pistol between Jansen’s eyes, so that he stiffened his legs in a spasm, causing the chair to judder over the floor.
“What is your name, by the way?” asked Number One, putting on a face of feigned interest. Jansen shook his head slowly; he was not too jittery to remind himself that the pistol was empty.
“Oh, you don’t have a name, then. In that case, what is your lawyer’s name?”
“Pen and paper,” he muttered, so that they might loosen his one hand. Number Two blew away the make-believe smoke from the pistol.
E.G. Jansen, he wrote in print on the piece of paper.
They grabbed the sheet torn from a notebook and dashed out of the room. He could have tried to escape, but he just sat there, trying to nurse the raw scrapings around his released wrist by blowing on them.
Three days later he is still here, and added to his cautiousness is the growing knowledge that he is doing the right thing by doing nothing.
They haven’t been treating him badly. Every now and then he gets a slap on the head, but that is understandable. On the second day, a doctor arrived to have a look at him, a white man who avoided his eyes. He had to be part and parcel of them, an integral element in the network.
What would he have gained anyway by fleeing? The Colonel and his former comrades would have tracked him down in a wink.
The doctor felt him up and prodded all over as if he was a doll in an anatomy class. Just one broken rib, for which he got a bandage around his torso, which they allowed him to have changed the next day. Which he had requested not because the bandage had picked up some dirt, but to test them.
They also brought him some reading matter. A newspaper from the previous week.
The attack was at the bottom of the front page. A Zulu impi, it said, had attacked the X-ville squatter camp after the bodies of two inmates of a hostel 30km away had been discovered there. They had smeared muti on their torsos.
The villagers had told the reporter that one of the attackers had been white and that the body of another had been found in the debris. Then a few paragraphs followed in which a police spokesman denied there were any whites involved. (That looked stupid, Jansen had thought, why leave it to the police to deny?)
He had continued by describing the fighting as factional violence, and said the squatters had been drunk. He had merely laughed when allegations about a Third Force were put to him. The subtext was that the blacks had begun fighting again, which they always did in the locations.
Other paragraphs quoted psychologists as saying that because of pre-talks violence in the townships fear of attacks by Zulus had increased and might have caused hallucinations in which whites were seen. The X-ville reaction had been typical of such collective regressions. It would have been better to focus on the hell of poverty suffered by the squatters, which cannot be avoided. Everybody should just wait for it to go away.
Like microbes, he thought. That was the common knee-jerk reaction. One had to wait it out, and when they were still there, learn to live with them.
He reaches for the paper on the mattress, and tries to find the place where he has stopped reading. The Briefs, which is what this newspaper called its In Shorts, tells of a woman who has been found in a hole underneath her parents’ home. They are two elderly people who had attracted the attention of the police when they put an iron in a microwave oven which had then exploded.
The woman is their daughter, and she could not speak, and couldn’t move her arms or her one leg. It has emerged that their relatives have not seen the woman for twenty years.
And there it stops. No further information. Which prompts one to ponder: How is this possible? How could nobody have heard anything? How can two people live for twenty years in the knowledge that they are keeping their daughter in a hole under the floor?
They could put him in a hole too and forget about him. The forgetful man who has been forgotten. It is a struggle just to move his painful limbs.
He jerks in fright as something hits the paper spread open across his lap, and falls on to the plank floor. Instinctively he tries to pull himself away from whatever it is. He tries to drag the mattress with him so that it could tip over on to him, but it is too heavy.
He opens his eyes and peers from under his arm. It is quiet again. He hears a child yell outside, and a piece of iron falling in a jingle of sound.
An object lies on the floor which he has not yet seen. He stretches his leg and pulls it closer with his toes. It is a piece of paper which has been wrapped around a stone with an elastic band.
He reads: “Whatever you do, don’t kill yourself.”
He recognises the handwriting immediately. It is in the neurotic script of the Colonel , all twenty-nine letters are as tall and hound-like as his lean and hungry body.