We Are Not Such Things (59 page)

Rito Hlungwani—nicknamed Shangaan, for the small Southern African tribe of his roots—was a six-foot-five former professional rugby player currently working as a quantity surveyor. Rito lived just down the street from me in Sea Point, and I saw him once or twice a week. I dialed Rito’s number. “Yo cuz,” he said in his baritone.

“Cuz,” I said, “I need your help desperately.”

“Shoot.”

“How do you know Ruben Atkins?”

“Ruben? We played rugby together. Why?”

I explained to Rito that Ruben seemed to be connected to a person I needed to interview for my book. Alfred de Villiers, I said, was possibly a relative of a man I’d been trying to track down for months, and I just needed a way to reach him. Okay, Rito said—he would send Ruben a message asking about Alfred.

Five minutes passed. My phone pinged.
Ruben is
Alfred’s relative.

I stood up and started pacing back and forth in my kitchen. I could see Ruben’s picture on Facebook. He was colored, as were his siblings, which led me to believe that Alfred, identified only by his blue-and-white Facebook icon, was therefore also colored. This was a hitch, since the de Villierses were white.

I messaged Rito:
Could Alfred be the colored son of a white father?

Rito was chatting with Ruben, relaying my questions. After a brief pause, my phone lit up.

His dad is white.

The next morning, I woke up early and spent the next few hours refreshing my phone. Finally, a tiny red flag popped up: Alfred Devilliers had accepted my Facebook friend request. A moment later, another tiny red notification beeped, a message from Alfred:

Hey,wu u n whre did u get my contact?

I immediately wrote him back, using a series of exclamation points, but I could see, as I frantically circled back to the message throughout the day, that he had not checked his account. After nine months of searching, I was achingly close to finding Gareth—and therefore, I hoped, Daniel. After Gareth, I was out of all other options.

I clicked around impatiently. I inspected the profile picture of Ruben, Alfred’s cousin and Rito’s friend: it was a poorly lit desktop selfie, probably taken with a PC video camera. He was a handsome, powerful fellow grinning wide in his cubicle, wearing a green-and-white T-shirt. Around twenty-eight, I guessed, with that rugby player neck and a head that had taken some serious knocks. I hit “request friend.” An hour later, the red flag appeared.

You are now friends with Ruben Atkins.

I looked through Ruben’s profile for information on getting in touch with him. He managed the help desk for an IT company out in the suburbs, I discovered. I called and asked to be put through.

“Hallo, dis ek Ruben,” came the voice. Like most of the colored population, Ruben’s mother tongue was Afrikaans. His English was studied and formal.

“Ja, mam,”
he said when I introduced myself and explained the situation.

Alfred was Ruben’s nephew. Ruben’s sister had married Gareth. He would call his sister and explain the situation. Twenty minutes later, he called back: his sister’s number wasn’t working.

“Could you maybe find her new number?” I asked. “I’m sorry but it’s urgent.”

“Ja, ja. Maybe I must call my father.”

Another twenty minutes passed and the phone rang again.

“Hi mam,” Ruben said. “I have the number and you can call.”

“Ja? This is Gareth.”

He had a gruff voice and an Afrikaans accent: the rolling
r
’s, the heavy inflection. He had been expecting my call, I could tell.

I launched into my explanation: I’m an American journalist, I am working on a book about an important—major, significant,
huge
—part of South African history, and I’ve been trying to find you, Gareth, for quite some time. You simply can’t imagine how happy I am to have finally tracked you down. You do have a cousin named Daniel de Villiers, do you not?

A long pause.

“Ja, Daniel, he is my cousin,” the man said slowly. “But I haven’t seen him in years.”

My heart sank.

“Do you have a phone number?” I asked.

“
Ach
, no, man, nothing, hey. Last I saw him was back at the Shoprite in Kraaifontein, a few years ago. He was looking thin, and he said he lived over the bridge in Brighton but I never did see. I don’t know why he didn’t invite me over. He used to always invite me over.”

“So you never saw the house?”

“No, man, and Brighton is big, hey!”

“Well, do you know his parents’ names? Maybe that would help me track him down. Nobody can remember his parents’ names.”

“I think his mother’s name was Evelyn. I think Evelyn, she never liked me, and maybe that’s why he didn’t invite me to his house. Maybe she was there. Now that’s what I’m thinking.”

“Does he have siblings?”

A long pause, a grumble. Silence.

“Any other family? Anyplace I might find him? Any idea at all? Maybe if I had the name of his sister or his brother—”

“Listen, it’s complicated,” Gareth said, cutting me off. “Can’t you come see me?”

An hour later, I veered off the N2. I was practically in the Winelands, out by Cape Town Studios, the soundstage that a couple of South African–Indian tycoon brothers—friends of Linda Biehl’s—had built on a vast plot of undeveloped land. This is the place where Linda and I had wandered around the set of the Mandela movie, where a little fake Soweto had been painstakingly re-created. Now, in the distance, past the tough prairie grass, a couple of miles from the most isolated shacks along the highway, rose a vast pirate ship and a French medieval village.

I turned away from the studios and headed into the working-class colored neighborhood of Eersterivier, a collection of little cracked houses surrounding a central strip of shops: a butcher, a market, some hardware stores, a burger place. It was a sunny day, pretty and bright, and Cape Town was showing off, as she did, with the endless blue sky, the rolling hills, Table Mountain clear and snowcapped in the distance. I had written down the address but the streets either had no signs or had their names written only in small black letters on the curbside. Twice I circled around, finally making my way past a bodega and over a hole in the road patched, by enterprising locals, with bricks piled to street level. I pulled up to a lawn full of people who appeared to be braai-ing while stoned, and asked for directions. After three minutes of shouting animatedly to each other in Afrikaans, one turned to me.

“Sorry, lady!” he said. “We don’t know!”

“Maybe you must continue that way?” another motioned.

I drove straight and weaved around the small streets until I arrived at a cul-de-sac. The house numbers were arranged seemingly at random. I drove back and forth: 76, 43, 21, 78. I rolled up to a house where an old man was standing on the porch.

“Do you know where number 45 is?” I asked.

He shook his head, put his finger up in the universal sign for “wait a second,” and hobbled indoors. A younger woman came out. She spoke English, it seemed, but she didn’t know where number 45 was.

“Well, do you know anyone named Gareth?” I asked.

“Sorry, I don’t know no Gareth,” she said.

“A white guy,” I clarified. “With a colored wife? And a kid maybe, a teenage kid.”

The woman thought for a moment. “
Ja,
there is a guy who is white of complexion down that road,” she said, pointing. “End of the street, to the right.”

I pulled up to a pale house by a patch of dry grass. A gate ran around the property, secured with a chain and padlock. I rattled the gate and waited. Silence. I looked around. Some kids ran by with a basketball. Two doors down, a fuzzy dog chained to a laundry carousel curled up sorrowfully on a barren lawn.

A man in his early fifties emerged from behind the pale house, accompanied by a honey-colored American Staffordshire terrier. He was slender, with squinty eyes, a big nose and big lips, and crinkled leather skin. He wore black shit-kicker boots, a turquoise T-shirt over a white long-sleeved shirt, and black jeans. He had tucked his curly gray hair, which hit the middle of his neck, beneath a black cap emblazoned with the words
I REGRET NOTHING
. He held a cigarette between his right thumb and forefinger and had his left hand shoved in his pocket.

“You must be Gareth,” I said. His dog, sleek and muscled, wagged her tail.

Gareth cocked his head and regarded me with exaggerated suspicion.

“I’m Justine,” I said, extending an arm through a gap in the gate. Gareth warily took my hand in his and shook once. Then he opened the gate and led me into his house, a swept-clean, single-level four-room number with a flat-screen and two love seats covered in leopard-print throws. He walked to the open kitchen and looked over at me. He poured himself a small glass of beer.

“So. My mother says I must not talk to you,” he said, giving me a sidelong glance. “There are a lot of scams out there.”

“But my friend Rito knows your brother-in-law. So you know I’m a real person.” He nodded slowly, amenable to my point. “Anyway, what would the scam be? I don’t want money from you. I just want to find your cousin Daniel.”

He nodded more vigorously. Then he stood to the side, pondering for a little while.

“So tell me why you want to find Daniel then?” Gareth asked, sitting down and leaning back, legs spread. I also sat down, unbidden, on an adjacent couch. I explained to him that Daniel had, I believed, been brutally beaten in Gugulethu in 1993 and was, perhaps unknowingly, involved in a significant event in South African history. Did he know of Amy Biehl? I asked.

“No,” Gareth said. He looked up briefly. “Oh wait, that student the blacks killed?”

Daniel was also beaten on that day, I said. Maybe by the same person. Daniel was important.

“Daniel wasn’t in Gugulethu, though,” he said. “Not Daniel.”

“I believe he was. I believe he was injured there.”

“But what was Daniel doing there?” Gareth wondered aloud, shaking his head. “He’s scared of black people!” He lit another cigarette and explained that he hadn’t seen Daniel in years. “There is something about Daniel you have to know,” he said. He leaned back, inhaled, and exhaled. “Daniel was of another world.”