Absolution (23 page)

But the boy barely knew his aunt and the others didn’t know if she could be trusted. And then he said to them,
What about Laura’s parents? Laura said I could go to her mother. And her father – her father told me that if I ever needed anything …

And that was how they came to be on the woman’s front porch, staring through the screen door, and how the woman shook her head and took her daughter’s papers and said they should go.

The boy and the men stood there, the door slammed in their faces, and though they were in the shade it was a hot February day
with no wind and the boy came out in a sweat all over his body and the men turned to him and told him not to worry. He stood on the porch looking up at the mountain so that he didn’t have to look at the men or at the windows of the house. He did not want to be seen or to see anyone else as he listened to the rush-hour traffic on Camp Ground Road, thinking of how it became other roads, Liesbeek Parkway, Malta Road, Albert Road, roads that curved around to the north, following the contour of the mountain, circling back to his own neighbourhood, to the house that had once, until recently, been his.

They walked back to the car and sat for a while in the shade while the men argued the boy’s fate in front of him.
I think we should ask the boy
, Lionel finally insisted, and when the boy was asked he said he did not want to stay with them. He wanted to go to his aunt in Beaufort West, where Laura was taking him in the first place, or not in the first place, but as a last resort, after rescuing him from the situation he had gotten himself into. Sitting in the car, he was sure it was his fault that these men had to decide what to do with him, his fault that Laura had been forced to look after him, his fault that his parents disappeared in the first place. It was his fault and his failure.

He promised he wouldn’t say anything about them to his aunt or to anyone else.

Not until all of this is over, not until, you know, all of this is history, my friend
, Timothy said.

They would leave him on his aunt’s doorstep. If anything went wrong, if his aunt refused to take him, if he felt he couldn’t live with her after all, they gave him a number to phone, and someone would come get him.

Clare

You drove for the rest of the day and into the night until, an hour’s walk from the border, you abandoned the truck and began following your compass to a place where you hoped you would be able to slip out of the country unnoticed.

The mountains were dry and the scrubby trees old and thickening. As you walked a mist settled in the depressions, wafting through the low branches. A light wind was coming from the south-west, but the sky above was clear and would be bright for another few hours. If you kept your pace, you would reach the border well before dawn.

As you walked, your thoughts began to fill with the deaths of others, and your own inevitable death, and the absence of Sam – an absence you felt in the weight of the bag on your back, the mesh of red vinyl bearing into you, opening and inhabiting you. The thought of deaths you had caused – the deaths for which you alone were ultimately responsible – filled the whole of you, was played into fullness by a song beating through your memory. You were deep inside yourself, absorbed, death filling you past the point of contentment,
erfüllte sie wie Fülle
, sweetened by the thought of your own death, the death that must come, that might arrive within the hour or the next day.

Your sandals hit the first bale of razor wire before you saw it, but you stepped back in time to keep from lacerating your hands. You took the rucksack from your shoulders and put it on the ground, listening for any noise. Digging to the bottom of the red vinyl cavity, you found wire cutters and a pair of thick leather gloves, then returned the pack to your shoulders and began cutting through the bale until you could pull the two ends apart and pass
through. You had trained for this, cutting through heavy wires, and the muscles of your hands were strong and responsive. You knew there might be multiple lengths of baling, each separated by a treeless stretch of land. On the other side you paused, turning your ears to the wind and then sheltering them, listening in the vacuum. There was no sound apart from the wind. Moving forward, you tried to walk a straight line from the first bale but had no idea how far apart the lines might be. Your heart began to race as the sounds of your footsteps and pulse thundered in your head. The mist was too thick to see beyond the end of your arms and your lungs were filling with the damp air. After five minutes your feet met another bale. You cut through this as well, opened a passage, and began walking again. Five minutes later, another bale, and then another after that. You worried that you might have turned, that you were walking parallel with the border rather than across it – that there might be perpendicular sections of baling designed for the very purpose of confounding anyone trying to cross. You remembered your compass. Its glowing green dial confirmed you were still moving towards freedom. After another two lines of baling you began to lose hope, and fell to your knees, exhausted, heart echoing, your breath irregular, labouring under the damp rucksack. Only the ground immediately around you was visible. Your watch said it was two, but it felt much later. There were places, some said, where watches did not work.

When you tried to stand, you found you could not, and had to crawl. At least at dawn, you thought, I will see where I am. You crawled for an hour, always south-south-east, but came to no further bales. Your mouth was dry, joints aching. Finally you managed to stand and, as you did, lights exploded from the right. A man shouted. A dog barked.

And then the man and the dog were upon you.

You could not recall how many days it had been; perhaps five, perhaps as many as fifteen hundred. You had been deprived of any
means of recording the passage of time, and living permanently inside, in a windowless cell, with transitions down windowless corridors, to other windowless rooms, windowless showers, windowless examination chambers, all lit by the same orange lights, you could not say how many days it had been since you had last seen the sky and the sun. And the sun! The shock of its brilliance initially left you blind. They had placed you supine, your face burned in hard sunlight, so that instead of examining the world, to be sure it was still as you remembered it, you had to close your eyes against the glare; although compared to the time you had spent inside, those moments of closing your eyes against the sun and seeing the orange brilliance through your greyed lids was no more than a pause. It was a relief, after the stagnant air of the prison, to breathe ocean winds, to feel the sun heating the length of your body, so that even the constraints that held you in place were almost forgivable, and the fact that your spine and legs were supported by nothing more than a slender metal pole, no thicker than your own wrist, almost forgettable for the first minutes. You could taste salt in the air, and shout if you wanted to, but you had long since lost the courage to shout, and dared only to whisper to yourself, barely moving your lips, the salt on them sharp white flowers. They had closed the cage and trudged off, up the dunes, and you were left listening to the waves breaking down the beach, and when the wind shifted, the voices of others like you, whispering to themselves, whimpering, crying silently, and then a throttled scream.

‘It is a simple system, ladies and gentlemen, not unlike a fishing rod, but with an almost opposite purpose, as you can see here. The cages, made of ultra light titanium, are tethered to these gear mechanisms, which can drag them on their cables up beyond the reach of high tide, or allow them slack enough to be pulled out by the retreating waves as much as half a kilometre into deep water, depending on what’s required. On this stretch of beach, very secluded – an hour’s drive to the perimeter fence, as you
well know, and another hour still to the nearest artery – there are twenty-five cages, usually operating at full capacity.’

‘What are the dimensions?’

‘Each cage is a metre square and three metres tall, and inside, along the vertical axis, is a pole, with an adjustable crossbar that can be raised or lowered according to the height of the detainee’s shoulders; it’s essential that there always be a good fit, so the detainee is held securely in position, even when submerged. Shackles at the feet, the neck, and the wrists hold each detainee in place, and these are also adjustable, so there’s no chance that someone could slip out when wet, and swim to the top of the cage.’

‘Even then, they wouldn’t be able to escape, would they?’

‘No, but they might be able to catch a breath.’

The memories were very clear, the early ones; it was your grasp of the recent past that was insecure. You knew the first time you had walked on a beach, when you were two, with your father and me and your brother, and could feel your red swimming suit with its yellow fish design tight against your skin. You could remember the first steps you had taken, wholly unafraid, for you knew all about the ocean, knew it was for swimming, knew also that it was colder than it looked. You had marched into the surf and began paddling with confidence, your father and I swimming on either side. There was the thrill of the buoyancy, which made swimming easier than in the dam on the farm, but also the force of the waves, which made you work harder. After ten minutes in the water you were ready to rest on the beach, to let your chest rise and swell in time with the surf, hair salty, stringy round your face as you watched the waves approach and recede. Collapsing on your back, you stared at the white-blue sky until your father opened an umbrella to shade us.

‘If you watch the one closest to us, you can see that we’ve given the tether substantial slack, and the water is already around her ankles. Not long now and the waves will take the cage out
into the surf, and that’s what we call the “testing threshold”. If they withstand that without screaming, then we know there’s no breaking them, and we might as well just let them go all the way. It’s a clean system, too, because once we’ve let them out to five hundred metres, there’s an automatic release function, which opens the cage to predators, to sharks and the like, and we just leave them out there until we see a little activity in the water, and then we know we can bring the cage back in, more or less empty.’

‘So there’s no burial necessary.’

‘Anything left over is incinerated. Sometimes the predators take everything. What we call a “clean sweep”. No work for us to do but put the next one in.’

‘But there are some, presumably, who do break?’

‘Like that fellow over there, the one who screamed a few minutes ago. You see, my men have gone out into the water, they’re getting what they need to get from him, and if he doesn’t give them everything they want, then back he goes. Sometimes it takes a dozen trips out before they realize we’re serious; they scream every time, but don’t tell us everything we want to hear, and back they go. Ones like that always break down eventually, though. It’s the most efficient system we’ve found, and it serves an ecological function, too. Fish stocks in the area have increased ten-fold over the last three years.’

‘This is the court of last resort, so to speak, for the hardest cases.’

‘These are the ones who’ve been through everything else and still not cracked. I can’t explain what it is about the ocean, some kind of natural rhythm that just scares the hell out of them. We figured out how to do it best, too. You leave them out for a day, in a secure position, and let them roast. Then the next morning, after they’ve been shivering all night from the burns, we drag the cages down to the water line and let the tide start to work its magic. It’s a beautiful thing to watch. There’s something redemptive about it.’

Your fingers and toes were throbbing and burning as the salt worked on the exposed tissue where the nails had been torn away, and the sores that covered your back were alive with sand kicked up by the breeze and the persistent sting of fleas. You were aware that you were beginning to burn when you chafed your bare thighs together or shifted your wrists in their shackles. The inside of your mouth was cottony and you closed your eyes to preserve the little moisture that remained. Sleep was impossible because of the strength required to hold yourself in place; if you relaxed, the shackles at your wrists and ankles would cut into your flesh, and it would be a short time before they began to cut into bone.
I have resisted this long, I can go longer. It is not like illness or fever, not even like shame. Nakedness no longer matters. They can do what they want to me, they can watch me pissing and shitting myself, if I had anything left inside me to piss or shit. No food in my stomach to vomit, not even bile. This is not the worst they have done. This is almost a reprieve
.

Suspension over sand might not have the hot flush of shame, or the chills of sickness, but was nonetheless both hot and cold. Shame had been rife indoors. You did not want to remember what they had done to shame you; it was impossible to return to that and still remain yourself.

You could hear the voices of the guards and the officials who accompanied them, but couldn’t catch individual words; they were spending more time watching than you would have expected, as if they were attending a test match, with lunch and tea breaks. Turning your head to one side or another, you could see cages just like yours, stretching out on either side, nine to the left, fifteen to the right, the furthest at the limits of your vision; some were in line with your cage, others were closer to the water. In the cage to your left was a young woman. Like you she was steeling her body, holding it in place so that the shackles would not cut into her extremities. You thought you recognized her from inside, but without any hair, and several metres distant, it was difficult to be sure. You clicked at her, as you had taught yourselves to do, but
she did not respond; perhaps she had gone elsewhere, travelling. The guards were too far away to take any notice of what you were doing. Turning your head to the right, you found the cage on that side was closer, and you recognized a friend from inside. Together you had learned the ancient alphabet, taught by one of the first prisoners, the knowledge passed down over the years. To the guards, it was only noise, mumbo jumbo.