Gods and Soldiers (44 page)

There was a moment of silence between the two corrupt officers and myself. Then the red-faced officer bent over and grabbed my beer bottle and two of my grocery bags. He was mumbling something in Afrikaans. The other officer grabbed me by the scruff of my neck and picked up my other plastic bag with the sealed beers inside.

“It seems my friend it is that time again, when you have the right to remain stupid and silent because everything that you say can be used against you in court.”

“Whaa! I can't believe how some people can be stupid. We gave you a chance my friend and you blew it. Boom!” said the Indian officer.

They opened the rear door of the police car and pushed me inside with my grocery bags. The walkie-talkie inside the car started belching and cutting. The red-faced officer retrieved it and muttered something in Afrikaans as they got inside and started the engine.

By then I realised that I had messed up my chances of buying myself out. I still had about one hundred and fifty rand that I had taken out at the ATM that afternoon. I knew that the officers would try everything to incriminate me.
They are used to the system. They are also the ones who corrupt it. They know how it works and how to exploit it in their favour. Even if it means that I sleep in a cell just for one night for my disrespect, it would please them.

The earphones that were lying on my shoulders were still blasting music. I groped inside my pocket in an attempt to find the stop button on my Walkman. I was familiar with the buttons because I had owned my Walkman for the past four years, but suddenly I changed my mind about switching the music off. I opted just to rewind the tape. I found the button I was looking for and rewound the tape.

The car hadn't moved even five metres when I began to plead with them to stop. “I'm terribly sorry, officers. I don't want to go to jail. I think I have eighty rand for you.”

The red-faced officer smiled and stopped the car.

“Now you talking sense.”

Pleasant smiles broke quietly on their lips as I searched my pockets for my wallet. I unzipped it and handed them four twenty-rand banknotes, money that my mother sacrificed from her pension every month to help me through my cashless varsity life.

The two officers looked at each other and took the cash. I groped inside my pocket again to reach the play and record buttons on my Walkman. Simultaneously, I pressed the two buttons down. Then very politely, in a friendly tone as if I was admitting my guilt, I asked them, “Are you sure that you'll be fine with only eighty rand? I have a feeling that this is a very serious offence?”

“You're right. You can add more if you have it. But do not make the same mistake again next time. OK, my friend?” said the white officer.

“I won't.”

I looked at the nametags on the pockets of their blue police shirts. “Sergeant Naicker and Sergeant Vilijoen, I'm terribly sorry for the inconvenience that I've caused you. Because of my behaviour I will add twenty rand just to apologise.”

I offered them another twenty-rand note. Sergeant Naicker took it. He smiled at me and said, “Ja. If it wasn't for Sergeant Vilijoen we would have taken you in today.”

“You're a really lucky bastard, my friend. Do you know that? This is what we call being clever. Ask Sergeant Naicker here. We normally fine people two hundred rand for a case like this. We just thought that you are a poor student and decided to fine you less, my friend.”

“Hmm! Are you sure a hundred is fine because I can add another twenty.”

“Just give us another ten and disappear. One hundred and ten from a student who cares about his future is fine. The next time you're in trouble you must call us or come straight to our police station along this road. You know the station, mos? Ask to speak to either Sergeant Vilijoen or Sergeant Naicker here and you'll be safe.”

“Thanks a lot.”

The engine was running and the right indicator light was flickering. I opened my rear door to leave.

“Sorry we can't drive you to our place. We are in a hurry for an emergency in Hillbrow. I'm sure you can manage.”

I took my grocery bags out of the car and closed the door behind me. The car moved slowly to join the flow of traffic heading for the CBD. I stood on the pavement and began to wave goodbye. Then suddenly I signaled at them to stop the car, as if I had forgotten something inside. I put my grocery bags down and approached the driver's side door, while they both looked at the back seat to see if there was something I had left there. I took my Walkman out of my pocket; the record and play buttons on it were still pressed down, and the red record light was flickering. I showed it to Sergeant Vilijoen.

“What now?” he asked, perplexed.

“Are you stupid? Can't you see that our conversation is recorded on this cassette?”

“Shit! You fucking bastard! You will pay for this.”

“Hey! Mind your language, Sergeant Vilijoen! This thing is still recording.”

“F-fuck!” swore Sergeant Naicker from the other side.

“He's only trying to scare us. There's nothing there,” said Vilijoen to console his colleague.

“Suit yourselves, I'll see you in court then.”

I turned my back and pretended I was leaving, but before I could go very far they called me back. “Hey you! Come here, you.”

Within the blink of an eye the two officers were out of the car. I thought they were going to negotiate a deal with me, but that was not the case. Suddenly Naicker's big hand was around my balls and I was standing on my toes with pain. Vilijoen grabbed the Walkman from my pocket. I tried to resist, but Vilijoen's fist struck me across my mouth. I tasted blood. Naicker let go of my balls and I staggered and fell down. I lay still on the pavement pretending I had lost consciousness, but Vilijoen's boot struck me in the ribs. A few minutes later I was handcuffed and bundled inside the car.

“Never fuck with the police again, my boy,” warned Vilijoen as the car turned past Hillbrow Hospital.

I didn't have the nerve to utter even a single word. I looked at my grocery bags on the floor of the car next to my legs. The brick of butter that I had bought had melted and was almost flat. One of us must have stepped on it. The bottle of mayonnaise had been broken and there was the smell of it inside the car.

At Esselen Street the car turned to the right in the direction of Berea. Ahead of us were about half a dozen police vans with flickering lights parked next to a tall block of flats. The handcuffs were very tight and I felt like the blood wasn't circulating properly in my hands. I looked at the time on the dashboard. It was already twenty minutes past seven in the evening. I had missed my dinner at the Y.

“These things are too tight, please loosen them,” I pleaded.

“That serves you right, boy,” said Naicker as the car came to a standstill next to the other police vans.

There were lots of people standing around. All eyes were on the block of flats. Policemen were all over the place with sniffer dogs. Naicker and Vilijoen got out of the car without saying a word to me, locked the doors and walked towards the entrance.

After about an hour some policemen came down through the door with some guys who were handcuffed. Deep in my heart I was hoping that Naicker and Vilijoen were amongst them, but they weren't. I sat there wondering what the guys might have done. They had probably been arrested for a much more serious offence than mine. I looked at my plastic bag again and spotted the Black Label.
No more drinking,
I told myself.

At about ten minutes to ten, I spotted Vilijoen coming towards the car. He opened the driver's door and sat inside. “Where do you stay?” he asked.

“YMCA,” I answered.

Without asking my permission he opened one of my Black Label dumpies. He drank about half of it without taking a break and gave a loud disgusting belch. “Do you want some?” he asked, as if he was going to give me the one that he was holding in his hand.

I nodded, but all that I really wanted was for him to set my hands free. In a while I saw Naicker coming towards the car as well; he stopped in the middle of the road and lit a cigarette. Vilijoen put the bottle on the dashboard and searched his pockets. He took out some keys and unlocked my handcuffs. Naicker opened the front door and within seconds we were on our way back in the direction of Braamfontein. Vilijoen tossed a cold beer to me and twisted the bottle open. Naicker offered me a cigarette, but I found it too difficult to smoke with my swollen lips.

At half past ten they dropped me at the entrance of the Y with my plastic bags. My ribs were still very painful. My front teeth were loose and my left eye was nearly shut. I had lost my Walkman, my beers and my money.

 

 

 

CACHES OF OLD papers are like graves; you shouldn't open them.

Her mother had been cremated. There was no marble stone incised “Laila de Morne, born, died, actress.”

She had always lied about her age; her name, too—the name she used wasn't her natal name, too ethnically limiting to suggest her uniqueness in a cast list. It wasn't her married name, either. She had baptized herself, professionally. She was long divorced, although only in her late fifties, when a taxi hit her car and (as she would have delivered her last line) brought down the curtain on her career.

Her daughter, Charlotte, had her father's surname and was as close to him as a child can be, when subject to an ex-husband's conditions of access. As Charlotte grew up, she felt more compatible with him than with her mother, fond as she was of her mother's—somehow—childishness. Perhaps acting was really a continuation of the make-believe games of childhood—fascinating, in a way. But. But what? Not a way Charlotte had wanted to follow—despite the fact that she was named after the character with which her mother had had an early success (Charlotte Corday, in Peter Weiss's “Marat/Sade”), and despite the encouragement of drama and dance classes. Not a way she could follow, because of lack of talent: her mother's unspoken interpretation, expressed in disappointment, if not reproach. Laila de Morne had not committed herself to any lover, had not gone so far as to marry again. There was no stepfather to confuse relations, loyalties; Charlie (as her father called her) could remark to him, “Why should she expect me to take after her?”

Her father was a neurologist. They laughed together at any predestinatory prerogative of her mother's, or the alternative paternal one—to be expected to become a doctor! Poking around in people's brains? They nudged each other with more laughter at the daughter's distaste.

Her father helped arrange the memorial gathering, in place of a funeral service, sensitive as always to any need of his daughter's. She certainly didn't expect or want him to come along to his ex-wife's apartment and sort the clothes, personal possessions to be kept or given away. A friend from the firm where she worked as an actuary agreed to help for a weekend. Unexpectedly, the young civil-rights lawyer with whom there had been a sensed mutual attraction, taken no further than dinner and a cinema date, also offered himself—perhaps a move toward the love affair that was coming anyway. The girls emptied the cupboards of clothes, the friend exclaiming over the elaborate range of styles women of that generation wore, how many personalities they could project—as if they had been able to choose, when now you belonged to the outfit of jeans and T-shirt. Oh, of course! Charlotte's mother was a famous actress!

Charlotte did not correct this, out of respect for her mother's ambitions. But when she went to the next room, where the lawyer was arranging chronologically the press cuttings and programs and photographs of Laila in the roles for which the wardrobe had provided, she turned over a few programs and remarked, more to be overheard by him than to him, “Never really had the leads she believed she should have had, after the glowing notices of her promise, very young. When she murdered Marat. In his bathtub, wasn't it? I've never seen the play.” Confiding the truth of her mother's career, betraying Laila's idea of herself—perhaps also a move toward a love affair.

The three young people broke out of the trappings of the past for coffee and their concerns of the present. What sort of court cases does a civil-rights lawyer take on? What did he mean by “not the usual litigation”? No robberies or hijackings? Did the two young women feel that they were discriminated against? Did the plum jobs go to males? Or was it the other way around—did bad conscience over gender discrimination mean that women were now elevated to positions they weren't really up to? Women of any color, and black men—same thing? What would have been a sad and strange task for Charlotte alone became a lively evening, an animated exchange of opinions and experiences. Laila surely would not have disapproved; she had stimulated her audience.

There was a Sunday evening at a jazz club, sharing enthusiasm and a boredom with hip-hop, Kwaito. After another evening, dinner and dancing together—that first bodily contact to confirm attraction—he offered to help again with her task, and on a weekend afternoon they kissed and touched among the stacks of clothes and boxes of theatre souvenirs, his hand brimming with her breast, but did not proceed, as would have been natural, to the beautiful and inviting bed, with its signature of draped shawls and cushions. Some atavistic taboo, a notion of respect for the dead—as if her mother still lay there in possession.

The love affair found a bed elsewhere and continued uncertainly, pleasurably enough but without much expectation of commitment. A one-act piece begun among the props of a supporting-part career.