We Are Not Such Things (54 page)

“That was why Mongezi doesn’t want us to find him,” Mzi later theorized. “Perhaps Mongezi did…things to him in prison.” I recalled that Mongezi had raped his developmentally disabled neighbor in 1999.

When the police tracked Vusumzi down in 1993, he was sitting in the living room while his aunt washed clothes in the bathroom. He heard the police vehicle pull up in front of the house, and he heard the officers enter. They told Vusumzi’s aunt that he had been involved in Amy Biehl’s murder, that big story she’d read about in the papers. Vusumzi was considering making a break for it, but a black officer entered his bedroom speaking in Xhosa.

“He said, ‘Small boy, what are you running away for,’ ” Vusumzi testified before the court twenty years earlier. “He added by saying, ‘I’m going to shoot you so that you shit,’ my Lord…he said, ‘Small boy, you killed a white person.’ ”

The policeman dragged him to a van full of other officers, and shoved him inside. He sat on the bench, but they pushed him to the floor and then drove to an isolated area on the outskirts of the township, where they beat him and interrogated him. They then drove him to the Bellville police station, where Pikker was based, and presented Vusumzi with a confession, which he signed, and then later denied, on his lawyer’s recommendation. The confession held up in court; because no eyewitness could identify Vusumzi, it was this confession that sealed his fate.

“There were a lot of white people, speaking Afrikaans” was all he remembered of the interrogation. Vusumzi didn’t understand Afrikaans.

“Vusumzi, you only threw a rock?” I asked. “Nothing else?”

“Nothing else,” he whispered. “But I did throw that first stone.”

“Did it hit her?”

“No, I only hit the car. I break the windscreen.”

“Are you sure you never hit Amy?”

“Yes. But after my stone, she was driving low and she can’t see right. Then the mob came for her and everyone is throwing stones.”

“Did you deserve to go to prison for what you did?”

Vusumzi paused. His aunt let out a series of loud burps. “Yes, I did deserve the sentence. I broke the law and I was found guilty, so I did deserve my time.”

“Do you
feel
guilty?”

Vusumzi nodded. The room was silent, and all of Vusumzi’s relatives stared at him.

“Do you think Amy would still be alive today if you hadn’t thrown that stone?” Mzi asked.

“Yes,” Vusumzi said. He looked at Mzi and his eyes turned wet, and then he bent his head into his arms and began to weep. In all my time interviewing people about this crime, I had never seen anyone shed a tear. Vusumzi looked up and wiped his cheeks. “She was running and yelling ‘Help me, help me!’ I saw Mongezi doing it, and I wanted to stop him but I was too far.”

“Why did you get involved?” I asked.

Vusumzi sighed. “It was the mood of the moment.”

In the more current moment, Vusumzi was unemployed and lived with his girlfriend in the one-room hovel where I’d found him. I asked if he had children, and he answered that he did, at which point everyone burst out laughing.

“You?” his aunt said between guffaws.
“You?”

“Well, I don’t have children of my own, but I am a good man and take care of the children of my girlfriend,” he said softly.

Vusumzi’s dream, he said, was to get a job so that he could help his mother. She was straining, you see. Usually, he made money by gardening—he was “good with a spade”—and cleaning people’s cars. The last real gig he’d had was ten years earlier, cleaning municipal parks until his temporary contract ran out. If given the opportunity, he would clean the parks again, “with a passion.” Or, in his dream world, he would work at the Amy Biehl Foundation, where you could make good money, where you worked in an office, where you could imagine a future.

“It is because of me that there is now a foundation called Amy Biehl and I believe I deserve to be there. But I only see Easy and Ntobeko working there. Maybe this is because they had a better education?” He slumped back against the wall. In 1993, he had lied to police officers, claiming to be in grade nine, and then admitted to being in grade seven. This was because, as he explained to the court, “I wanted to give the impression that I am attending a high school. I did not want to make a disgrace of myself to say I am in [grade seven]…because I am too old for [grade seven].” In fact, at age twenty-two, Vusumzi had just barely made it to sixth grade.

“Why is he not included?” his mother asked me, palms up. “Even as a family we cannot help him. We try to tell him that his time will come. We have faith. But people make him so many empty promises, from the PAC up to the Amy Biehl Foundation.”

“Even the public thinks I am a fool,” Vusumzi said. “I don’t benefit like the others. It takes my confidence.”

It was an unusual logic that the family shared, and that Mongezi had previously expressed, as well. All of Amy’s killers were, in a sense, responsible for the creation of the Amy Biehl Foundation, and so shouldn’t they be rewarded with jobs? And yet, to their befuddlement, only two of the convicted killers had benefited. They didn’t understand that Easy and Ntobeko had taken the first step by approaching Linda and Peter, and had slowly proved themselves willing to work for a salary, continually demonstrating that they did not expect charity and that they understood the foundation’s stated mandate to help the townships. Vusumzi’s continued lack of employment was, according to his family’s rationale, an injustice. When I suggested that the foundation had not been founded to help Vusumzi, they stared at me, unconvinced.

The evidence they had gathered—watching Easy and Ntobeko drive new vehicles, often containing white people, around town—was that the foundation benefited its employees most of all. More than the kids. More than the community. The community had enjoyed some free bread, but Easy got a plot of land. Ntobeko was a
manager
. And this foundation would never have maintained its prominence were it not for the services of Easy and Ntobeko, the reconciled, redeemed perpetrators. So why, then, had Vusumzi not been included in this radical form of rehabilitation? Had he not, too, served his time for the exact same crime? If Amy’s killers got jobs to make a grand point about South African redemption, and if he was a killer, then why didn’t he have a job?

As we got up to leave, I spotted a minuscule brown puppy in an overturned milk crate by the back door. He looked to be only a few weeks old, too young to be separated from his mother. I stuck my finger into the crate and he stumbled toward it. His fur was dry.

“What’s his name?” I asked.

“Chester,” the aunt informed me. Presumably he was named for Chester Williams, one of the first colored rugby players to play for the beloved Springbok national rugby side, a traditionally white sport. “My friend give me this puppy.” She clasped my palm in her cool, soft hands. “When you come back, lovey, bring the book you are writing…and a big bag of meat.”

“I am thankful that my story won’t die,” Vusumzi said as I stood by the door. “The story can educate children of Africa, to empower our minds.”

“Vusumzi was denied his right to work with the Biehl family,” Vusumzi’s mother said, as a final word. Vusumzi lingered behind her, his shoulders dragged down. “What perplexes our minds is that Mongezi said he stabbed and Vusumzi admitted he threw a stone, but there is nothing to connect Easy and Ntobeko to the incident. I’m not saying that Easy and Ntobeko don’t have the right to benefit from the Biehl Foundation, but in court, the evidence only pointed to Vusumzi and Mongezi. Easy and Ntobeko, nobody knows what they did on that day.”

Monks may have known what Easy and Ntobeko did that day, but he was difficult to interview. I was accustomed to meeting people on neutral ground, in a private space, but Monks was immobile and surrounded, at all times, by people. He hated his wheelchair, and could not use it. Though he had some mild movement in his arms, he rarely visited a physical therapist and so in the six years since his accident, he had lost muscle tone. Therefore, he functioned essentially as a quadriplegic. He would have needed an electric wheelchair to gain some independence, but he had only a basic, unwieldy manual number that required he be pushed by another person. Monks had no interest in this, and so he was restricted to his home and driveway, to the places where he could be lifted and comfortably set. And because his parents feared that he might need something, and he was frightened to be left alone and vulnerable, either Wowo or Kiki was always within a few yards of him. Even when he slept, one of his brothers was nearby, in the next bed over. His friends, many of them unemployed and at loose ends, liked to come sit with him and shoot the breeze.

I found him alone on one occasion, laid out in the sunny car where he liked to bask in warmth to avoid pneumonia. He had that one gold front tooth and a beautiful, chiseled face.

“Can we talk?” I asked.

Whether or not he had much of a choice, confined as he was to the car, I don’t know, but he said yes. To my questioning, which was rushed and nervous, he was agreeable but evasive. He was at the rally and in the march, yes, but that was all. He was walking with his friend Ntobeko. His brother Easy was around, yes, he was. He did see Amy in the distance, but he couldn’t say much more than that.

“Did you throw a stone?”

He paused. “No.”

“I heard from many people that you did throw a stone.”

“No,” he said. Then with more emphasis, as if convincing himself: “I could not have thrown a stone. No. No.”

Just then, a neighbor got in the back of the car; I knew him from the area. “Justine, let me tell you about my new tae bo training center,” he said with excitement. “I call my method GetFit.” I’d only managed five minutes alone with Monks.

Months later, Easy, Monks, and I sat together in the Nofemela living room. “Lucky day, I find some photos for you,” Easy said, absently dabbing the sweat from Monks’s forehead. Monks’s head was wrapped in a white terry-cloth towel, the effect of which made him look like a nun.

Easy left the room and returned with a red leather album with gold trim, so worn and cracked that it looked like a relic from some archaeological dig. I opened it. A yellowed newspaper clipping had been pasted on the interior of the front cover and then ripped out. I could make out the headline:
ANONYMOUS TIP…LED POLICE TO AMY MURDER SUSPECT
. Above the ripped article were words written in labored, flowery capital letters:
THIS IS MY HISTORY IT BELONGS TO EASY NOFEMELA.

Another line of writing had been crossed out frantically with a black marker. The first three pages of the album were blank. On the fourth page, upside down, was a photo of a white woman whom I recognized as a friend of Linda Biehl’s and a teenage boy whom I had never seen. The next three pages were blank, and then a photo of what looked like a choir of young black men in black suits and white shirts, Easy nestled among them in a sweatshirt and sneakers. Peter Biehl stood to one side. Linda Biehl, in a gown, stood to the other, grinning.

In one picture, Easy crouched down, saluting the camera, with two friends behind him, while Ntobeko, skinny and sulking in a red cap, looked off to the side. Another picture, askew on the page, was a portrait of Easy’s late aunt. On the back interior cover was a color photo clipped from a paper of three APLA militants who had bombed the St. James Church in Cape Town. The men had applied for and received amnesty, with Norman Arendse as their attorney. Across from the militants, Easy had pasted a picture of the 1990s pop star Brandy, her lips slicked with red gloss, wearing a shiny baby-blue jacket.

The end of the album contained haphazardly arranged photos from a few separate days, it seemed, of a post-incarcerated Easy and his friends running around Cape Town, playing soccer, and hiking up Table Mountain. They posed in front of fancy houses and in parks, exuberant. There was a small kid, younger than the rest, in a turquoise shirt, barefoot and dancing. Monks was in the picture, too, wearing khakis and a white T-shirt. I recognized him, his sharp cheekbones and dark eyes. In one picture, he and Easy are caught mid-stride, their steps mirroring each other’s: left leg down, right leg up. They have the same shaved round head, the same pale skin, and the same scrawny build.

Monks lay still on the sofa.

“Monks, can I ask you again about the day Amy Biehl was killed?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said pleasantly.

Then, as though possessed of some maternal antennae that received radio signals from her boys, Kiki entered the room and made her way to her favored chair. She lowered herself down and turned toward the TV, though she was pointedly listening to us.

“Again, do you remember what happened? You were there, right?”

“I was there—” Monks began.

Kiki let out a short, angry command in Xhosa. Monks immediately shut up.

“What did she say?” I whispered to Easy.

“She says we must stop talking about the dead and the past,” he said. And so we did.