We Are Not Such Things (33 page)

“Tell her, m’Africa,” Easy said, using the PAC’s Struggle term for a comrade, which literally means “African.” Across the room, Ndumi flipped angrily through her magazine.

“I liberated people from their lives,” Masana said as the old man in the trilby looked on impassively. “Killing was victory.”

“You white, you classify as settler,” Easy added.

“Amy Biehl didn’t belong here,” Masana reflected back to that day. “Why did her friends bring her here? They knew the situation in our location.”

For Masana, the two black women who asked Amy for a ride home were at fault. They should have known better. He shook his head. The place was all burning tires and protests; you couldn’t miss it for the world.

“You blame her friends?” I asked, incredulous.

“Yes,” Masana said without pausing.

“
You
blame her friends?” I asked Easy.

Easy roused himself. “Yes,” he said and nodded.

“You blame yourself?”

Easy shook his head. “No,” he said. He looked past me, his eyes unfocused, and then fell back asleep, now in the crook of my arm. I moved to the side, cradled his head, and placed it on a small pillow. He let out a little sigh.

“My organization, we see white, we kill,” Masana continued. “Even if you have white friend who want to come here, you must tell them no. You must say, ‘I love you. I don’t want to lose you.’ ”

The woman in the pink sweater brought out a tray of glasses full of a dense, juice-type concoction. A nearby jug did little to further identify the liquid.
ORANGE SQUASH
, it read.

“If you are white, you are enemy,” Easy piped up again.

“Do you hate whites?” I asked Masana.

“Then yes, but not now,” Masana said. He smiled. “Now I’m flexible.”

I asked Masana to tell me about Easy the soldier.

He was good, Masana said: eager, and fearless. He wouldn’t back down from battle or compromise a friend or comrade, but his main strength, as far as Masana could tell, did not lie in his fighting bravado. His main strength, Masana said, was cheering folks up. No matter how bad you felt, Easy could always turn it around.

“And his weaknesses?” I asked Masana.

“You seeing it now,” Masana said, motioning to Easy, who had turned to one side. “When he drink, he lose focus.”

“The township is full of frustrations,” the woman in the pink sweater added. “We’re all living this life.”

Later that afternoon, I rose to leave, and the old man tipped his trilby. Ndumi shuffled behind us, grumbling, and climbed furiously into the backseat.

We rode over to a settlement called New Rest, just down the street from NY111. There, we visited Easy’s aunt, a woman named Princess who lived in a simple one-bedroom set on the mud. A male nurse was sitting there, a nice guy, drinking beer. The family was constantly self-medicating for their ailments and I realized that this person, a cousin, was everyone’s source for pills; tell him what you need, he’ll pocket it at the clinic. This led to mass confusion over illness and cures, but I knew why nobody ever went to state-run hospitals unless they were utterly desperate.

“You get there at nine and you leave at five,” Ndumi explained to me. Whenever she had a prenatal checkup, she left the house at 6 
A
.
M
. to begin queuing. If she was lucky, she’d be home by three.

I had once accompanied Easy and Aphiwe to such a clinic in Khayelitsha, where hundreds of black people sat on rows of wooden benches for the entire day. The bathrooms at the clinic lacked soap and toilet paper, though the staff, unaccustomed to seeing white people, assumed that I—in my T-shirt and sneakers—was a doctor or another person worthy of special treatment, and swept me into an employees’ bathroom. After, Aphiwe had her tooth pulled by the dentist. She lay down stiffly in the chair, her toothpick legs outstretched. In a matter of seconds, the dentist, an older bald black man dressed in a polo shirt, held out his hand. The nurse handed him an enormous hypodermic needle. The dentist squirted a substance into the air once and then, swiftly propping Aphiwe’s mouth open with his hand, began to insert the gigantic needle into her gum. Her tiny body tightened immediately, she let out a shocked screech, and closed her mouth as tears began to stream down her cheeks. Easy screamed at her to
“vula”
—open. As she complied, the dentist jammed the needle in and pulled it out. Aphiwe went limp. Next, the old man reached in with a pair of heavy steel pliers and ripped her molar from her gum. For a split second, the room froze and the dentist stood still, brandishing high above his head a tooth held between two prongs. Then Aphiwe let out a full-throated wail, bolted from the room, flew into the waiting room, and flung herself to a chair and then to the floor, where she let out a series of loud, brokenhearted moans and spat out a stream of blood. People in the waiting room calmly shuffled their chairs out of the way. Easy lifted her by the shoulders, pressed some gauze in her mouth, wrapped her school sweater across her chest to stop the blood from further staining her yellow shirt, and marched her out of the clinic.

In New Rest, Princess’s table was covered with bottles of lemon soda. The walls and couch were blue, the shelf dotted with a few pictures: a young girl in a school portrait, a man and woman kissing. The TV was blaring, connected to speakers with a heavy bass beat.

“See how we living?” a guy piped up, handing his cigarette to the person next to him. “Socialist.”

Princess flashed me a wide smile. She was bone-tired and lonely, with close-cropped hair, no front teeth, and teary eyes. Her husband had died, followed closely by her only son, who, undone by grief, overdosed before he turned twenty-one. She worked in a factory all day and invited everyone to drink in her living room at night, beneath a blowup print of her late son at his dad’s funeral. A few years earlier, the cops came to Princess’s house and punched her in the face when she opened the door, but it turned out they had the wrong address. She got her picture in the paper, a sixty-year-old lady with a bloody lip, but never a payout like she wanted. Once I glimpsed her walking home from the train station after a long day. Every step, it seemed, caused her pain.

“Don’t you need somebody to work as domestic, sisi?” she asked me, hopefully. This was our little routine, every time we saw each other. “A few days a week?”

“I’m sorry, Princess, but I don’t need.”

“What about your husband, your boyfriend?” a young guy, a relative of some persuasion, asked. “Does he have a job for me?”

“Justice is from New York,” Easy said.

“Can I take a train to New York?” Princess asked.

After Easy and Masana had topped up, and Easy had offered, weakly, to cook me an egg, I decided to leave. Easy and Masana hitched a ride, since they had plans to pick up supplies for further boozing. Easy folded into himself in the passenger seat and Masana helped me navigate the road and told me to stop just before the overpass and let them out. I pulled up onto a curb and put on my hazards. My wipers were flying frantically back and forth.

“I need fifty rand for bread, my sister,” Masana said.

“Bread is eight rand, Masana.”

“I need money, my sister.”

I sensed that Masana was a person who had no qualms about slipping a knife to someone’s throat as a way to settle a difference of opinion.

“Hayi, Masana,” Easy protested mildly.

“I have some change here,” I said, motioning to the ashtray, where I kept loose coins to tip car guards. “I guess if you want it, it’s yours.”

As Masana reached for the change, Easy’s hand flew out and grabbed Masana’s wrist. Masana tried to pull away.

“No, no,” Easy said. “I don’t like it.”

“It’s fine,” I said. “Take the change.”

“I don’t like it,” Easy repeated, shaking his head, slow motion, and then he let go.

Masana scooped up the coins and put them in his pocket. “Thank you, my sister,” he said, getting out of the car. “Bread money.”

Easy followed, and stood unsteadily on the sidewalk in the pouring rain. A settlement built on a dirt patch stretched behind him, people in mud-caked shoes making their way between the shacks, followed by mud-caked dogs.

“I’m sorry, my friend,” Easy said, leaning into the car. His face had collapsed into that of a child on the verge of tears. Masana was counting his take, pleased.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

“I’m okay. Are you okay?”

“Me? I’m okay.”

“Well, Easy, take care of yourself.”

“Yes, yes. I’m strong, Justice.”

He patted the roof and moved away. He and Masana pushed against each other, waving—two small, dark silhouettes in the middle of a downpour—as I headed out of Gugulethu.

On a whim, I called the PAC offices. They were located, as far as I could tell from the party’s paltry website, in some guy’s apartment in Cape Town. It was a waning group of radicals, garnering 0.21 percent of the vote in national elections, but its members seemed hopelessly dedicated.

A man answered on the first ring, confirmed that his home phone served as the provincial PAC official line, and listened as I explained my project. I asked if he knew any PAC members who had been around at the time of Amy’s death and who, perhaps, could share their insights with me. He called back the next day. He had found someone who was willing to meet, he explained: “He knows about Amy Biehl.”

Little did I suspect then how much he knew, and how he would single-handedly shift the narrative forever.

This other man came on the phone next, mumbling his name, unintelligible, garbled through the line. He spoke softly, with a heavy Xhosa accent, and I couldn’t understand what he was saying.

“Okay then,” I said, flustered, pressing the phone against my ear. “Can we meet? Tomorrow, say?”

The man mumbled his assent.

“Royale on Long Street—two
P
.
M
.?”

“Two
P
.
M
., sharp,” he said, a little louder. Then he hung up.

The next day, I situated myself at a table by the window at Long Street’s downtown burger institution, Royale Eatery, a cozy split-level restaurant just below a popular bar and music venue. Cape Town’s younger, cooler contingent, all skinny jeans and burnished skin, sat at the other tables, drinking candy bar milkshakes and eating kimchi-topped burgers, their various touchscreen devices beeping and shrilling and glowing beside them. I didn’t necessarily expect my mystery man to show up, and I certainly didn’t expect him to show up on time, but then there he was, at precisely two.

I knew it was him before we made eye contact, an old militant bright against a hipster backdrop. He wore military green pants, a military green jacket, a black cap, and spiffy emerald sneakers. He was six feet tall and unsmiling, with pale brown skin, a moon-shaped face, and a pert upturned nose. He scanned the room, his small, dark eyes resting on me. I was looking at him expectantly, so he walked over, gave me the African handshake—the Western grip, followed by a clasping of one another’s thumbs by the fingers, back to Western grip—and sat across the table. He leaned forward, resting his elbows.

“Please inform me of who you are and what you are doing,” he said.

“Of course, yes,” I stumbled. People almost never questioned my intentions, so I didn’t have a ready spiel. I launched into a sloppy, meandering, and oddly bubbly explanation: American, writer, Amy Biehl, 1993, people of Gugulethu, investigating, greater meaning, townships today, bring attention to cause. “And I understand you have some knowledge of the case,” I said in closing. He stared at me, unblinking. At a loss, I grinned. “So, would you like a burger?”

“I am a vegetarian,” he said.

“A Xhosa vegetarian?” I asked. This was South Africa, land of the
braai,
or barbecue. Charring meat on the open flame was perhaps the single tradition everyone could come together on. Heritage Day, during which all South Africans were encouraged to celebrate their diversity, had been rebranded National Braai Day. For most black South Africans, there was often an added cultural importance to meat: animals were slaughtered to appease ancestors and mark occasions. And, as for many poor people around the world, meat represented luxury—people dreamed of the day they would be able to eat steak or lamb chops or chicken regularly.

“It is in line with my Buddhist belief system.”

“Well,” I said after another moment of silence. “What’s that like, being a vegetarian Buddhist in Gugulethu?”

“Lonely.”

I scanned the menu. “What about the Yentle Express?” I pushed the page over to him. He read the description suspiciously—a lentil burger heaped with caramelized onions—and nodded.

“And an orange juice,” he added when the waitress approached. He settled into his seat, took off his cap to reveal a round and nearly imperceptibly misshapen head, shaved clean. He leaned forward, his voice low. I leaned forward, too.

“My name,” he said, “is Mzwabantu Noji. But I am known, famously, as Mzi.”