We Are Not Such Things (31 page)

“Parking special, 9.99,” a guard informed me. “Payable up front.”

“Where’s my one cent back?” I asked, after I handed him a 10 rand note.

His face collapsed. “We just say 9.99, like in the supermarket. Is advertising.”

“Ha!” Easy said. “She joking, my friend.”

I spent time with Easy’s pregnant girlfriend, Ndumi, a slender woman with a beauty mark on her right cheek and perfect white teeth. Ndumi had met Easy at a party five years earlier, at which time, she recalled, “Something happen in my mind…and in my
body.
” She recognized him from TV; she knew he’d killed Amy Biehl, and she regarded him as something of an anti-apartheid hero. Famous friends, no matter the source of that fame, were hard to come by in Gugulethu.

I sat in the sun with Monks, Easy’s paralyzed brother. I sat on the couch with Wowo. I sat with the extended family around a TV, watching wrestling in grainy black and white. Easy’s great-uncle glared at me when I entered.

“Kunjani?” he said. How are you, in Xhosa. Xhosa people compulsively greet each other and inquire into each other’s state of being.
How are you? Are you well? Are you fine? Are you cool?
When people addressed me in Xhosa, it was sometimes a greeting and sometimes a test. In this case, judging by the man’s expression, it was a test. The unspoken question was: You come here asking around, but have you bothered to learn our language?

“Ndiphilile. Kunjani wena, tata?” I asked. I’m well—and how are you, father? I had been taking night classes in Xhosa and had been practicing the clicks and the basics. One sixth of Xhosa words are estimated to contain click sounds. For the X, you slap your tongue against the side of your upper back teeth. For the Q, the hardest click to master, you pop your tongue on the roof of your mouth. For the C, you hit your two front teeth with your tongue and quickly suck in. For native Xhosa speakers, clicks are innate. For a student of the language, they are nearly impossible to perfect.

“Ndiphilile nam, enkosi,” the old man said, his face breaking into a broad smile. I’m also well, thank you. Though his bearing was stern, he was easily satisfied—which was good, because greetings were as far as I’d gotten in my classes.

No matter what we did or where we went, again and again, Easy and I circled back to Amy’s death, to his days in prison, to his childhood. We retraced the day, step by step, from the still standing school in Langa, down the railway line. Easy euphemistically called the spot where Amy was attacked “Amy’s last home.” But after months of listening to Easy and a single interview with the stubbornly mum Ntobeko, I knew that I also needed to find the two other men who had been convicted of Amy’s murder. I needed their versions of the events of that day.

First, I looked for Mongezi Manqina, the alleged ringleader of the foursome, or at the very least the man widely believed to have stabbed Amy in the heart. He would be the easier of the two to find, since his mother still lived on NY1. One day, Easy and I drove to her house, which also functioned as a shebeen. Mongezi’s mother was still there, after all these years, a large, slack-jawed woman with few teeth. She sold beer and sheep’s head to locals.

I had seen her in old videos, interviewed upon Mongezi’s release. Her daughters were rejoicing at their brother’s return home, but she sat in the corner of her living room, eyeing Mongezi apprehensively. Only three years after he gained amnesty, Mongezi was rearrested, this time for raping a sixteen-year-old mentally handicapped neighbor, and he had come out of Pollsmoor again in 2011. According to Mongezi’s mother, Mongezi no longer lived at home, but she handed Easy the number for Mongezi’s cell. Easy called, and we decided to meet up the next day.

Mongezi lived in Philippi, the small township south of Gugulethu, and he wanted us to come to his house. It’s difficult to give directions in the townships; if a person lives on a side street or in an informal settlement, there are no roads or house numbers. So Mongezi asked us to meet him on a bridge. As we made our way, Easy turned to me and said, “Don’t worry, my friend. Just throw him the question and he will relax.”

As we neared the bridge, the skies opened up and rain poured down. Mongezi emerged into view: tall and gaunt and sharply dressed in a houndstooth newsboy cap and a large black leather jacket.

“So thin,” I said to Easy.

“Because prison.”

Mongezi hopped into the back of my car, nodded at me, and directed me to drive back over the bridge and to then turn onto a dirt path.

“I have good news for you,” Easy said, turning back.

“For me?” Mongezi asked, flattered. I could see him in the rearview mirror, his face perpetually boyish. Easy, too, had the features of a child, but brawls and accidents had marred him. I remembered that once Easy had told me, “Prison makes you beautiful.” Shielded from the sun and the elements, your skin becomes baby-soft. Indeed, with his youthful face, forty-year-old Mongezi looked almost precisely as he did in old newspaper photographs from nearly two decades earlier. The only difference was that while he had been lean but muscular in his twenties, he was now rawboned. The two men switched to Xhosa, but I could understand that Easy was telling Mongezi that he could reconnect him with his ex-girlfriend, for whom Mongezi had been pining. Mongezi’s face lit up.

Meanwhile, I was navigating the dirt path, which cut through a trash-strewn field, covered with tufts of anemic grass, piles of dirty diapers, crumpled paper, empty soda bottles, beer cans, used condoms, and plastic bags balled up and bouncing in the breeze like tumbleweed. The path narrowed and then led underneath the bridge, where a few destitute, drug-addled men and women seemed to have constructed a living area, with a couple of mattresses and a dim garbage-can fire. To our right was a defunct railway track.

I did not feel entirely confident that I would leave this area with my car or my wallet. Moreover, the car technically belonged to my conservative in-laws, and I pondered how, were it to go missing, I might explain that I had voluntarily driven it to a strange, informal settlement set out of view on the outskirts of Philippi.

A small shantytown rose up past the turn: a hundred tin shacks crowded together in a dip of a hill, hemmed into a triangle of land by its circumstantial borders: the main thoroughfare we’d just turned off, the tracks, and the rise of the bridge. Few cars ever took the path, as evidenced by how skinny it was. Only one resident here owned a car, as far as I could tell, and whether or not it functioned remained unclear. It was a white jalopy with red paint splashed on its doors, locked behind a steel gate secured with a padlock. My driver’s-side mirror hit the swung-open plastic doors of six pit toilets. Easy peered out of the passenger side as the car inched by the walls of shacks, urging me to keep going.

Passersby gawked as they slipped around the car. We drove until we came upon Mongezi’s shack, which was the last and newest structure in the area. It effectively created a dead end to the road, placed between another, older structure and the track, and was separated from its neighbor by a thin, mucky footpath. The corrugated silver tin was shiny and new, having been erected only four days earlier. We got out of the car, Easy with my cellphone protectively shoved into his pocket, and entered Mongezi’s home. It was the size of two office cubicles. To the right of the door sat a bed topped with a cherubic baby propped up on pillows. Across from the bed, against the wall, was a wooden dresser. A large, crackling flat-screen TV sat atop the dresser, along with a display of lotions, men’s body spray, and a lady’s hairbrush. Two ancient, weathered men were sitting on the dirt floor, mixing concrete by hand. A young woman was bent over a hotplate that sat on the ground, stirring a potful of beans and chicken trimmings.

“So,” Mongezi said, looking at me and holding the door open with his foot. “Why do you even want to talk to me?” He lit a cigarette and held it cupped in his hand when he took a drag. “You talk to my comrade Easy. You know everything.”

“Everyone has a different story,” I began, hesitating.

“Did you talk to Ntobeko?” he asked.

“A little,” I said.

“She talked to Linda,” Easy added hopefully. He was now smoking Mongezi’s cigarette, which the two were handing back and forth. “And everyone in the office, and also Nancy from America.” Nancy Scheper-Hughes, the anthropologist, had met the men many years ago.

Mongezi seemed more convinced.

“I thought maybe we could go to Mzoli’s,” I said. “Get some food, talk.”

“I don’t have a problem with that,” he said, perking up. “What about Vusumzi? Have you talked to him?”

“I haven’t looked for him yet but would like to speak with him,” I said. We were referring to the lost Vusumzi Ntamo, the other man convicted in Amy’s murder. “Are you friends?”

“From when we were small.”

From there, Easy and Mongezi began to briefly reminisce about their time in jail. They sounded like old college buddies, nostalgic for youth and its antics—the good ol’ days, one would almost think from the way they were talking. But it was really just the common thread connecting two estranged men, a way of finding something to say. Prison had been a nightmare for both of them.

Meanwhile, the front door kept falling shut because the shack sat on a slight slope. When it did close, the only light streamed in weakly from a single plastic window covered, for privacy’s sake, by a worn towel. The ancient men smoked their cigarettes and stirred their cement. If the purpose of Mongezi bringing me here was to impress the old cement mixers, it had failed. The pot of beans and trimmings simmered on the ground. The baby fell asleep. The woman was joined by a friend, and they sat together on the edge of the bed, listening to music on a cellphone, each with one earbud. A neighbor came by and stuck his head in. He was the president of the block committee, I was informed, and wanted to check on the building progress and collect his bribe. Mongezi and I made a plan to have lunch in a few weeks, and then Mongezi and Easy stood by the car, directing me on how to back out of the tight spot in a fifty-point turn.

“Is she going alone?” asked an old man in a red sweater who was passing by.

“No, I am going with her,” Easy said.

“Good. Some of those boys up ahead are not right.”

Easy got in the car and Mongezi gave me a fist bump and then sauntered back into his shack. As we squeezed past the pit toilets again, a teenage boy popped out of the web of shacks, clutching a hammer in his hand.

“Just keep going,” Easy said.

The boy saw a pretty girl and pretended that he was going to attack her, and they both laughed. Then he skipped up ahead and disappeared. I swerved past one of the people that lived under the bridge, sped through the trash piles, and turned onto the paved road.

“I really didn’t like that,” I said. “Weren’t you scared?”

“No, I was not,” Easy said.

“Why not?”

“I know I am ready and Mongezi is ready,” he said unconvincingly. “And I’m thinking, nothing can happen, because if something happen to you, your fiancé will have a lot of questions for me.”

After we met Mongezi, Easy and I went to Maphinde’s, a butchery-and-barbecue joint in Nyanga East and Mzoli’s main competitor. We drank sodas and ate meat while a group of ladies ordered brimming platters of sausages and popped open fruit-and-vodka coolers. Their laughter and conversation were so lively and high-pitched that we couldn’t possibly talk, so we sat in silence, watching. After, we parked outside Easy’s house and talked about our day. Rain beat down on the roof and the car windows fogged. Aphiwe came out and tapped on the window. Easy handed her a small takeaway box of lamb.

“She is my angel,” Easy said, and we watched Aphiwe walk inside, her hair pushed into a knit cap.

“The conditions of Mongezi’s house were not good,” I said.

“I agree. But he is a man. He want to live in his own space with his family. Not at his mother’s house.”

“Would you live there?”

“Is only temporary, Mongezi’s house,” Easy said. Of course the shack was only temporary. To say it was permanent would be to admit defeat.

I drove home, and that night I found myself at dinner with a group of well-off white South Africans. Their house was near the Camps Bay beach, in the fanciest part of the city. It was made of concrete, with marble floors and a dunk pool on the patio. Table Mountain rose behind us. All around the home, gates hemmed us in, threaded with electrified cable. All of the women wore diamond rings on their fingers.

“What kind of engagement ring do you have?” one asked, peering at my bare finger. The ring itself still sat locked in a safe, never to be flaunted in Gugulethu. Once, I was scared of being robbed, but now I was mostly embarrassed by my obvious fortune.

“It’s a sapphire.”

“Oh yes, because of the blood diamonds!” she said, referring to the fact that African diamonds are often mined in conflict zones, on the backs of impoverished locals, the profits used to finance warlords. She flashed a two-carat princess-cut stone floating in a square of sparkling chips. “I also don’t like blood diamonds, but I needed one for an engagement ring.”