The Monster's Daughter (37 page)

“You are in danger.”

“It means we're on the right track. We just need to figure out whose track it is.”

“If you are sure.” Mathebe opened the door and hesitated. He looked back at Alet, mulling something over before deciding to speak. “We have a comfortable couch.”

It took Alet a moment to realize that he was extending an invitation. Her first reaction was to decline, but she thought about going home and the possibility that she might disintegrate into a puddle if she was alone. “Thank you,” she said. “I think I will.”

Mathebe nodded. “Tonight we rest. Tomorrow we find this criminal.”

A gunshot rang out. A girl screamed as the limp body of her thirteen-year-old brother fell. Schoolchildren froze, the stones that they had picked up to fling at the police still in their hands. The ones who had adhered to the directive of a “peaceful” march stood dazed, confusion marring their youthful faces. Pop. The second gunshot ignited a fervor that defied reason, ignored fear. The children surged forward. The white men in their police fatigues let the dogs loose.

The placards proclaiming
“DOWN WITH AFRIKAANS”
and
“IF WE MUST DO AFRIKAANS, VORSTER MUST DO ZULU”
fell to the ground. The bearers reached for bricks and trash cans, anything they could use to defend themselves against the beasts. An Alsatian's growl turned to a yelp as the first stone hit its side, its body failing under the assault. The children's frenetic rage converged on the dumb animal, bashing it to a bloody pulp. A boy of no more than ten lifted an empty Coke bottle above his head. Pop. The bottle fell from his hands, blood spreading where the bullet had ripped his chest. He looked disbelievingly at the dog, quietly falling next to it. His companions dispersed, their eyes wide with fear. This was not supposed to happen. This was not how this day was meant to end.

The law had been passed two years before. Instruction in black schools was to be given in Afrikaans and English only. Teachers showed up to class with Afrikaans dictionaries, trying to teach their subjects in a language they themselves could barely speak. Jacob had felt the mood change as the screws were tightened one more turn, his own resentment burning.

They had rallied early that morning. As unsuspecting students showed up for school, they were told by the Students' Representative
Council Action Committee that today would be the day of protest, kept secret to catch the police unawares. They would march to other schools in the township, gain strength in numbers, make their voices heard. Their parents didn't know, but the older generation had become complacent, beaten down by so many years of oppression that they would not fight anymore.

Once the march started, they had found their way blocked by the police. But peace held. The procession rerouted, a sense of elation as the students sang “Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika” over and over, a mantra of hope. Their number grew, joined by township gangsters and brave adults. “God bless Africa, let its horn be raised, listen to our prayers, Lord bless us, we are its family.”

But then the line was crossed. Automatic rifle shots hailed down. Government buildings and school buses burned, charred symbols of the oppressor that took their land, their dignity, their power. The violence only receded with nightfall as women searched the streets for their children, the day's events punctuated by raw, inconsolable wails.

Jacob felt nauseated as he looked at the rows of bodies covered by newspapers because there weren't enough sheets. He had not allowed himself to think or feel, only react, running for shelter from the tanks that roamed Soweto. Leaning against the wreckage of a car, he noticed the body of a white man. Around his neck hung a hastily drawn board reading
BEWARE AFRIKANERS
. Jacob stepped closer. He recognized the man, a social worker in the township, always good for a laugh or to bum a smoke. He stared into the man's glassy blue eyes. It felt unreal to him, this thing that had happened. He never thought that they would be able to strike back. All his life he had believed that the white man was untouchable, yet here one of them lay. He reached out to touch the man's cold cheek, to make sure he wasn't dreaming.

Pop. A hot pain seared through Jacob's left side and he fell on top of the social worker. Pop. Dust rose up a few feet ahead of him. Pop. Jacob rolled off the body and slid under the car, his instinct for survival trumping the pain. Pop. His leg felt warm and wet, but he waited, too frightened to move. Pop. Pop. Shots fired, not at him this time, but in the distance. The nearest building was a sink-plate outhouse. As soon as he was sure they had moved on, he crawled over to it, thankful too for the cover of rapidly descending darkness. Let it end, please, God,
he thought as he closed the flimsy door behind him and sank to the floor, the dank stench enveloping him. Just for tonight, let the slaughter stop.

Jacob didn't know how long he'd lain on the outhouse floor before the two women had found him. They had hoisted him between them and carried him to the hospital. A blood trail led to the emergency-room entrance. Jacob felt dizzy. The confusion of bodies and doctors distorted in his fever dream, mashing into one being, a red, undulating monster. “I am Jacob Morgan,” he managed to tell the creature as it put its arms around him. The red thing's lips moved, but he couldn't hear what it was saying.

When Jacob opened his eyes again, he was on a gurney, his left side throbbing with a warm pain that extended all the way to his stomach. His mother's careworn face floated in front of him. She wore a black beret and her good Sunday dress. He thought it funny that she had dressed up. The ward was filled with beds, identical to his, their occupants bandaged and beaten down, adults hovering at their sides, their expressions mirroring his mother's.

“Jacob?” She was crying.

“He's all right, Prudence.” His father put his hands on her shoulders.

“We scared those Dutchmen
lekker
.” Jacob forced the words through parched lips, ignoring the look in his father's eyes. He had watched his dad deal with the apartheid government for years, defending activists, trying to remain civil, and for what? They, the youth of Soweto, did more to put a dent in the armor of the white man in one day than his dad had done in a lifetime. They had shown them that they would fight back.

“What you did was stupid. You don't think.” His dad pointed a finger up at the sky. “You hear that?” Jacob became aware of a constant drone. “The police are coming down on Soweto. The only thing you've accomplished was to give them an excuse to fire on us without asking questions.” His dad's anger spilled into white-hot fury, and he turned his head, clinging to Jacob's mother as if she were the only thing keeping him standing.

“No more, Jacob. Please.” His mother touched her palm to his father's chest, an intimate gesture that made Jacob uncomfortable.

“We have to get you out of here.” His father wiped his eyes. “The
police are taking names of everyone who was treated for bullet wounds.”

Jacob let his mother help him up and dress him, as if he was a little boy.

“I bought a train ticket.” His father stood by the door, hands restless in his pockets, eyeing everyone that walked into the ward. “Tessa will take you for a while.”

“I'm not going,
Pa
. People have to stand together. Not
chaile
like rabbits. We've had enough.”

“I'm not going to allow you to
toyi-toyi
and be target practice for those animals.”

“Please, Jacob.” His mom clutched his hands. “Don't break your mamma's heart.”

“If I'm in danger, so are you.”

“We'll be all right.” His dad had the look of finality about him, a steel door lowering between them. Jacob knew arguing would be useless.

A nurse rushed into the ward and handed his dad paperwork. “We documented it as an abscess,” she said.

“
Ke a leboha
.” His dad had a look of earnest gratitude on his face.

Jacob leaned on his mother, while his father led the way. Outside, the air was hazy and thick with smoke. Riot police manned the perimeter, rifles gripped in front of them, scowling at a crowd of retreating stone-throwers, the smell of tear gas lingering. Jacob's packed suitcase perched on the backseat of the Volkswagen Beetle and he sidled up next to it. His father navigated past the crowds, taking narrow back alleys between shacks and government housing. People spilled in and out of liquor stores and shops, running off with their loot before a bullet had the chance to stop them.

His father jerked the wheel as a stone bounced off the windshield. Jacob crouched behind the front seat. His mother reached for him across the divide and he clung to her hand, fear breaking through the fuzzy reality of the past day, his breath coming in shallow rasps, his pain forgotten. The stones became a horse's hooves pounding in rhythm with his heart. His father screamed. The car skidded to a halt. His mother's grip grew limp. Her body slouched forward.

A police officer flung the door open. “What you doing?” he shouted. “Get out of the car.”

His dad raised his hands, his face pale with terror. He addressed the young policeman in Afrikaans. “My wife, sir. She's hurt. We have to get her to a hospital.”

“You stand over there. Move.”

His father got out and moved away from the car, his hands behind his head. The policeman leaned over the seat.

Jacob felt something explode in him as the man touched his mother. “No!” He reached over the seat to stop the man.

The policeman punched him in the face, a sharp blow that threw him back onto his suitcase. “Want to die today,
kaffir
?”

“Please, Officer. Please. He's my son. Only a boy,” his father pleaded from the curb. Jacob had never seen him like that, scared, begging, raw fear forcing him to his knees. His father addressed Jacob in Sotho, pleading with him to remain calm, to do what the police said. Jacob slowly opened the car door, hatred raging in his veins, his hands shaking behind his head, the stitches in his side straining painfully as the policeman trained the gun at his head.

“Please, Officer.” His father cupped his hands to the white man like a beggar. “My wife, she needs a doctor.”

The policeman sneered. “What she needs is a morgue. If your son's not careful, he'll join her.”

“Please,
Baas
. Please. We do not want trouble. We want to get away. Please,
Baas
.”

Jacob looked at his father with his knees in the dirt, his pride gone, his dignity shattered. It was too much. Even as he told himself not to cry in front of these men, sobs of anger and grief and shame convulsed his body.

The policeman focused his attention on a column of smoke in the distance. Through his tears, Jacob noticed the look of embarrassment on his face. So they had a conscience, these men. Perhaps they were even human.

“The coloured hospital in Eldorado Park is open,” the policeman said, his gun still trained on Jacob. “You go there.”

Soweto writhed in fire as they drove away. Jacob reached for his mother's hand in the front seat. It was still warm, the faint line of death barely crossed. But from this, he knew, there would be no return.

The government had fought to keep it out, and yet the brand-new devil's box stood in the faculty lounge. Television. It was the harbinger of civil disobedience, the symbol of deteriorating family values, the mass dissemination of ideas like communism and equality. Benjamin turned the dial and a signal sprang to life. He sat down and stared at the static, the constant
shhhhh
mesmerizing.

In the middle of the floor, the girl lay facedown. The back of her head was a tangled mess of bloody blond hair, her shirt torn in the back, one shoe flung to the other end of the room during their struggle. Pity. She'd had promise, for a woman—smarter than everyone else in her class, the previous three years' classes, in fact. Benjamin wondered if Tessa would have made it that far, given the chance. Of the two of them, she was the smart one, but things were different back then. Benjamin glanced back at the girl. She wasn't one of them, that much he knew. Her eyes were brown, her hair bleached. But she had paid enough attention to realize that there was something strange about him. He shouldn't have let her get that close. She had found the tissue samples he had taken of himself: Subject 302091.
PRIMATE. UNIDENTIFIED SPECIES
.

Light and truth were coming soon, Benjamin could feel it. The work had started to excite him again. Advances were happening so fast that he could hardly keep up with the research. The work that Jooste's man had done back then was oafish, clumsy, the necessary technology still years away. Benjamin had realized it early on, but Jooste had paid him, kept his position in the Broederbond secure, so he had participated in the farce until the old man died and the government shut the project down. Benjamin had often found himself staring at Jooste, trying to catch a glimmer, a flash of Tessa in the old man. He convinced himself that it was there, the way Jooste sometimes stared off into the distance as if he was gazing into another world, the way he tilted his head when something excited him, or curled his mouth when he was thinking. Benjamin often wondered about Dr. Leath and the experiments that had created all of them. With the primitive tools Leath had had at his disposal, did he really know what the result of his experiment
would be? Or were they all a great cosmic accident, flung into existence by something nobody could control?

Rage burst through the static of Benjamin's mind. The girl had made the mistake of confronting him, threatening to expose what he was doing if he didn't let her in on the discovery. She was ambitious, he had to give her that. He told her the truth, everything he knew, the confession briefly setting him free. Throughout it all she had studied him closely as if he were an animal that should be put in a cage. He wasn't human. But then what was he? Somehow less than human? Is that what people saw in him, did they somehow know? Or was he perhaps more than human? Could that be what they instinctively feared? The girl would never have kept it to herself. He was too great a discovery.