She Left Me the Gun: My Mother's Life Before Me (19 page)

“See that house?” he says.

“Yes.”

“There are no snakes in that house.”

We are at my front door. “See ya, Siya,” I say, and he wheels around grinning and heads back to the park.

In the evening there are drinks in the garden of the guesthouse, or else I drive to the cinema in one of the malls. Compared with London, the city is easy to get around, nowhere more than forty-five minutes from anywhere else and the roads wide and straight. The malls are American in style and full of affluent teenagers. Nobody who doesn't have to drives through the old city center at night.

I go to see Joan and Danny again. “Man, you've hardly eaten,” she says. “Pickled onion, Em? Avocado, Em? Shame, the man said they'd be ripe today, they're not ripe. Piece of Christmas cake, Em? Old Pa, what do you want?”

One night, I am invited to a party at the house of an English baroness. The baroness isn't in residence but has lent her house to an English friend for the summer. A journalist friend drives me there, to a neighborhood forty minutes away, in the north of the city. “Howzit, baba,” says my pal to the guard in the guard hut—showing off, I think—and the man waves us through.

When they colonize the moon, the developments will look like this, a series of units within the silent acres, devoid of life as if the air were unbreathable. The party is just getting under way as we arrive. In the back garden by the pool there is a barbecue presided over by South African men holding beer cans; a little way off, English men regard them with a mixture of superiority and envy. There is no denying it: South Africans have a natural authority with a pair of meat tongs.

A man asks me why I am in South Africa. “Escaping the English winter,” I say. He points to a man in a black V-neck sweater standing alone in the corner and mouths, “CIA.”

I don't know it then, that everyone on this circuit suspects everyone else of being a spy; that people who are not spies pretend to be spies; that one is to be alert at all times for suspicious behavior, to store away and thrill oneself with in duller times to come.

Later on that evening, with pitch-perfect postcolonial condescension, the spy explains to me that while in global terms South Africa is not terribly influential, it has “strategic importance within the region.” I nod vigorously.

There are a lot of aid workers here, mainly Scandinavian and British women in firm sports bras who dash around town alleviating suffering as you or I might wipe down a table.

I am introduced to an Australian journalist called Michelle, who hands me a business card featuring an underwater photo of a shark and the words “Michelle Bovine, journalist, General News, Foreign Affairs, Marine Science.” She is a minor celebrity at the party by virtue of having moved into a house where the Vaulting Wanker had last been sighted. This, it is explained to me, is a neighborhood streaker whose routine it is to run across people's gardens, masturbate in the general direction of their house, and then vault over the fence into the night. One of his early victims had been the daughter of a prominent antiapartheid campaigner murdered by the security police. When news of the Vaulting Wanker reached the papers, the man who murdered her father read about it and, wanting to atone, got a message to her from his prison cell that he would have his people look into it and, if she wished, make sure the Vaulting Wanker was quietly eliminated. She declined his kind offer. I sometimes think this story contains everything you need to know about South Africa.

Michelle, who had not seen the Wanker herself but had at least gazed upon the ground where he had wanked, offers to give me a lift home. A large, drunk man grabs us as we leave and reminds us to run through all the traffic lights. “Will they be all right?” he says to no one in particular and crumples into the wall.

In the car, Michelle tells me she has come to South Africa to make her name as a war reporter.

“Which war?” I say.

She frowns. “Well, in any case, what I really want is to get into television.”

•   •   •

I AM GOING ABOUT
this perversely, I know. I am here for a maximum of six months, and yet insist on this charade of spending the first five hours of every day at my desk in the pool house. Fay thinks I am crazy. She asks if I want to go on safari with her, but I can't face the four a.m. start. I can't face anything much beyond the pool house each morning. I tell my aunt I have work to do. I tell myself the same thing. I call the Department of Justice and have them fax me a list of prosecutors called Britz, past and present. Half are dead; the rest, when I call, turn out not to be relevant. From the court papers I have the name of the arresting officer: a Sergeant Nel. You may as well look for a Smith in the South African phone book, but I ring a dozen or so Nels, to no avail.

I have, I realize, become blasé about risk. It seems to me statistically improbable that anything will happen to me in this country, where everything bad that can happen in a family has pretty much happened. At night, I lie in my ground-floor room and look up at the narrow window beneath the ceiling, wondering, if push came to shove, whether I could fit through it. It is unclear what Albert's duties are in relation to me. It's also impossible to tell how old he is. He could be anything between forty and seventy-five. Albert arrives at dusk with a portable stove and refuses my offer of tea. While I sit on the terrace in the evening, I see the light from his stove dancing in the corner of my eye. In the morning he is gone.

At least once a week either Albert or I trigger the network of alarms I set and which crisscross the garden invisibly. Sometimes they trigger themselves when I am out during the day, and I get home to find a pink slip under the door—like the one you get from the postman when you've missed him, only what you've missed in this case is a fat man in a uniform limply waving a gun at the undergrowth and looking for signs of an intruder. I get the feeling I am one false alarm away from him saving us all the trouble and shooting me himself.

One morning, when I go into the kitchen, Dora tells me that a friend of mine's car, parked under my bedroom window overnight, has been broken into. She stands poker straight between the work surfaces, drinking her tea with her back to the door. I lean against the counter.

I ask what Albert said, and Dora waves a hand, either to signal the irrelevance of this or the irrelevance of Albert.

“What time did he leave this morning?”

“Seven.” Dora comes in on the first bus and leaves in mid-afternoon. I tell her about Siya's offer of night security. Siya is young and strong, I mean, he's usually stoned, but I might feel happier—

“Who?” says Dora.

I mime the shape of a large hat on my head. “Siya with the braids from the end of the street.” Dora has to cough suddenly and, excusing herself, leaps through the back door to throw her tea dregs into the flower bed. Who, she says, reentering the kitchen, do I imagine broke into the car?

“Absolutely not,” I say. “Siya wouldn't do that. He's my friend, he knows I live here.”

Dora looks at me. “He's bad, those boys are bad.” They robbed the bakery earlier that month, she says.

When I walk out for lunch that day, Siya is in his usual post at the end of the street. He holds up a hand in greeting. When I frown at him, he winks. I huff on to the shops.

As a liberal foreigner, you are discouraged from going on about crime in South Africa; it's seen to be rather poor form when there is so much else of cultural interest to talk about. I am on my cell phone one night, walking the block from my house to the guesthouse for drinks, talking to my friend Merope in London. She is complaining that the real estate agents have overvalued her flat; now it'll stick around on the market forever. As I round the corner, I walk straight into two large men who with a swiftness approaching grace grab my wrist, twist it up my back, and, in what feels like a weird country-dance move, wrench it upward until my hand instinctively releases. “OK, OK, take it,” I say, in what I think later was an oddly petulant tone. Barely breaking their stride, they continue up the street while staring at the phone and trying to work out how to hang up the call. Merope's voice issues mosquito-like out of the earpiece.

I walk into the guesthouse, shaking. “I got mugged,” I say to the room full of people, and despite my fright, try to pull off a complicated maneuver of getting maximum sympathy for the mugging and maximum kudos for appearing not to care about it. The English in the room start flapping gratifyingly. The South Africans, once it has been established no gun was involved, assume a total lack of interest. I turn to the host. “I need to make a call,” I say. “The person I was speaking to will think I've been murdered.”

I am shaking so much it takes a few tries before I can remember the dial code.

“When are you going to learn how to use your fucking phone?” says Merope.

“I was
mugged
.”

“Oh. Shit. I thought you hung up by mistake like you always do. Are you all right?”

“Yes. They just took my phone.”

“Sorry. I thought you were being an idiot.”

“It's OK. They couldn't work out how to switch it off. I think you killed them with that really boring story about your flat.”

I don't want to worry my dad about it, but the next morning I feel I haven't had enough sympathy for the mugging and, against my better judgment, ring Fay.

“I was mugged,” I say pitifully.

“Oh,” she says. There is a short silence. “Are you OK?”

Her tone is neutral, not unsympathetic exactly, but not encouraging either, and I imagine she is thinking, “Really? You're coming to me, of all people, with this trivial nonsense?”

I laugh. “It was quite funny, actually,” I say, and we are back on safe ground.

•   •   •

IN ALL THOSE AFTERNOON
drives I've been taking there is somewhere I haven't felt inclined to visit. It is one outrage too many, a place where something happened that I decline to take on as mine. And then my friend Adam, a British journalist, has an interview come up four hours or so south of Johannesburg and halfway to Durban. He suggests a road trip; we will stay overnight at his contact's house and drive on to the coast for a day or two. When I look at the map, I gulp; his contact lives five miles or so from where, six years before my mother was born, my grandfather committed the murder.

There is no exact address for Adam's contact, whom I will call Z; just instructions to drive south for three hours on the highway, look out for a biltong shack at the side of the road, turn left, and drive for another twenty minutes up an unpaved track. When we get to the crest of the hill, says Z, we're to call him. The path to his house is impassable; he will come and collect us in his Land Rover.

He is, from what Adam says, the type of man I naïvely thought didn't exist anymore: a former British Army officer involved in what might delicately be called risk assessment, a job that requires him to spend long periods of time in countries that don't issue tourist visas. Unlike the people posing as spies on the Johannesburg barbecue circuit, these men are older, wider, redder in the face, and not inclined to wear cashmere. Adam is writing a book about the mercenaries of southern Africa and has been spending a lot of time in the company of these men, by far the most entertaining of whom is Z.

We follow his instructions to the letter—left at the shack, along the unpaved road—but take a wrong turn somewhere and end up at a dead end, a grassy clearing outside an abandoned-looking barn. “Is there someone we can ask?” I say. We look around at the desolate scene and burst into laughter. Z doesn't answer his phone.

For a while, the excitement of plans gone awry keeps us going. There is no real urgency. We have potato snacks. We get out of the car and, like children after a long journey, unfurl and lean into the thick humid air. Then it is dusk. Adam backs the car up the track and we retrace our steps until we find the crest of the hill. A jagged path leads sharply down, around a bend where, just visible, is the roof of a building with a number of large satellite dishes on it.

We imagine Z has been called out. That he is attending to an emergency at a neighboring property. That he can't get reception on his cell phone, although we are sure he must have a satellite phone. We imagine They have found him, whoever They are, and he is lying in a pool of his own blood with a knife through his chest. Adam opens the door and gets out.

“I'll stay with the car,” I say. “It's not because you're the man. It's because you're the one who knows him. It would be rude for me to turn up at the door.”

“Right.”

There is a moment's pause and then, in a burst of determined energy, Adam heaves himself up and starts off down the hill.

I decide to give him twenty minutes before heading back to the main road to call the police. The sound of a vehicle climbing the track makes my heart soar, then plunge. What if it isn't them? What if it's them? Roaring over the crest of the hill is a Land Rover with a red-faced man at the wheel. “Sorry about that!” he booms. “I got separated from my phone!” From the passenger seat, Adam gives me a wan smile.

•   •   •

TWENTY MINUTES LATER,
we are installed in Z's country-style kitchen. The inside of the house is like a Swiss chalet, with warm, exposed beams and thoughtful furnishings in a variety of pastel colors. “Pink gin?” says Z. He pours generous measures, while reminiscing about his days on the intelligence circuit in Cape Town. “Of course,” he says, “Mr. Bong was very obviously Chinese intelligence. And I said to our new ambassador, ‘You're very lucky, the head of French intelligence is over there, I should go and introduce myself if I were you.'”

His specialist subject is African coups, many of which have been centered, at the recruitment stage, in South Africa's second city. “You know who was behind it all, don't you? The Nigerian-Lebanese axis. Bloody Lebos. And of course everybody knew about it before it happened. Even the bloody Canadians knew. Six knew and decided not to tell the Foreign Office, in their wisdom.” Z looks off into the distance, as if at a parallel and infinitely better universe where people listened to their spies. More pink gin. “I mean, for goodness' sake, you don't debrief at that level in-country!”