We Are Not Such Things (61 page)

I woke up early on the 24th, and picked up Aimee-Noel at Rito’s house at eight sharp. We arrived at Gareth’s place an hour later, and he bounded out of the door, wearing his
I REGRET NOTHING
cap, his boots, and a black T-shirt that displayed an enormous, disembodied mouth sticking out its pierced tongue. He was stone-cold sober.

“Come inside for a second,” Gareth said, excitedly.

Aimee-Noel and I followed after to find Sarah sitting at the table in her dressing gown, face scrubbed bare, just home from her night shift at the hospital. She held a scrap of paper in her hand, all-caps written in ballpoint pen, at an angle:

DANIEL DE VILLIERS 7/5/2009

LOOP STR 8

EDGEMEAD

Below was a phone number. After listening to my conversation with Gareth in the living room, Sarah had been intrigued by my search for Daniel. That night, when she wasn’t dressing wounds or inserting catheters, she had made her way to the records room. She’d opened the patient database. She scrolled through the
D
s, one after another, until it popped up, bright text against a black screen: Daniel’s name. He had been a patient at that very hospital, brought in back in 2009. Sarah called Gareth again and again all night, so excited by her discovery.

“But we tried the number all night and day, and it don’t work,” Gareth said. “Plus, it must have been 2010 when I saw him in Kraaifontein, so this address was before then. Must have moved.”

We could always try it, I said. I didn’t want to get my hopes up, but it was an address. Things were going my way, courtesy of an intrepid nurse-cum-detective.

“Ja,” said Gareth. “First, let’s see if he’s at the Shoprite in Kraaifontein. He’s a creature of habit, slips in to do his shopping and slips out. But if he’s there, I’ll recognize him.”

“Because of his hair,” I said.

“The hair!” Gareth exclaimed. He turned to Aimee-Noel. “He had hair of a colored. Nobody could forget his hair! You know, once he dyed it orange, so it was like a bright orange Afro, that’s what I remember.”

Aimee-Noel sat in the back and Gareth hopped in the front. We drove twenty-five miles south to the Kraaifontein Shoprite center, a collection of shops and fast food restaurants organized around the supermarket. Gareth had a plan: I was to park in the front lot of the Shoprite, facing the market. Aimee-Noel and I could scan the pedestrians: Remember to keep an eye out for a red Ford or a terrified-looking freak with the craziest hair you’d ever seen. Meanwhile, Gareth would get out and search for Daniel on foot. He would
become
Daniel, in a sense, trying to inhabit his cousin’s psychology.

Gareth slipped out of the car and stalked around the parking lot before entering the market. He saw a few old friends and greeted them exuberantly. He patted the hood of my car and leaned on the side. His friends stared at me and Aimee-Noel, confused.

“He’s showing off,” Aimee-Noel muttered from the back.

Gareth smoked and rocked on his heels. He ran into the market and walked the aisles. No Daniel. He stuck his head out to the back parking lot.

“No, he wouldn’t park there,” he reported back. “Blacks are drinking back there, he’d think it was dangerous.”

Aimee-Noel and I surveyed the foot traffic. An elderly white man plodded by, followed by a small black boy, who clutched his hand.

There was a guy with a mullet. “That’s bad, but not steel-wool bad,” Aimee-Noel said.

A man stumbled around, sporting a deep blue bruise around his eye.

“His eye is messed up, but his hair looks unremarkable,” I said.

A gentleman strolled up to a friend to shake hands. He was bald, so the quality of his hair remained unknown. “Too young though,” Aimee-Noel offered.

Finally, Gareth came out, his spirits high despite the fact that he’d had no luck. He leaned into the car as a red-faced woman in a neon vest walked by, carrying a whip. She smiled broadly at me.

“Why does she have a whip?” I asked.

“I dunno,” Gareth said. “These people is all crazy.”

After an hour, Gareth circled back. “
Ach,
man, he may be dead,” Gareth said. “If he was here, I’d see him.”

“Should we try the address Sarah found?”

We drove back onto the highway and got off at Edgemead, making our way through a row of shops and into a quiet residential neighborhood. We turned off onto a tiny dead-end street with six single-level houses, each set on a tidy lawn. Here was the place Daniel had lived four years ago, number 8, a pretty stone house with a brown wooden door. It had no garage, and there was no car in the driveway. It didn’t look like anyone lived there. Or at least, it didn’t look like anyone was home.

The next house over, a young blond woman was unloading groceries from the back of her car.

“Do you happen to know if a man named Daniel ever lived next door?” I asked her.

“Hmmm, the man who lives there is named Clinton,” she said. “I don’t know a Daniel.”

“How long has Clinton been there?” I asked.

“Oh gosh, has to be six years or so.”

“And nobody named Daniel even stayed there?”

The woman shook her head. Actually, she said, she didn’t live here. It was her parents’ house and she was merely visiting for the weekend. If we would give her a moment, she’d go ask her parents about this Daniel character.

She returned a few minutes later.

“You know, there was a boarder there some years back,” she said. “A small guy, real quiet, kept to himself. He could have been named Daniel, my parents also recall.”

“Did he have strange hair?” Gareth asked.

“I don’t quite remember his hair,” the woman said. “He was just a nice little man. He always wore jerseys and walked to do his shopping.”

I looked again at the stone house, its blinds drawn. I thanked the woman, turned the car around, and parked. Unbidden, Gareth hopped out and started off toward the front door. I imagined my own reaction were I to open a door and find Gareth standing before me.

“Do you think I should go, too?” I asked.

“Definitely,” Aimee-Noel said. “And fast.”

I rushed after Gareth. He knocked loudly. After a few moments of silence, we heard footsteps, followed by the voices of children.

“Daddy!” they were yelling. “Daddy, the door.”

Then the mumblings of a man, a rustling of keys, steps, and the door pulled open. Two little girls peered out from behind their father.

“Can I help you?” he asked. He was a tall colored man in his early thirties. He inspected me and then looked back at Gareth, who lit a cigarette and flipped his chin.

“Are you Clinton?”

“I am.”

“I’m sorry, this is probably a strange question,” I said. “But do you know Daniel de Villiers? This is the address we have for him, and I’ve been looking for him for some time.”

“Daniel?” Clinton said, craning his neck to look out at Aimee-Noel in the car and then shifting his gaze from me to Gareth and back. “Ja, Daniel was a renter here.”

“Did you know him?”

“Ja, ja, lovely guy…” He paused. “Do you mind if I ask who you are?”

“Of course! I am writing a book, and I think Daniel was involved in a serious incident in South African history.”

“And I’m his relative,” Gareth explained.

“Daniel? In a serious incident in history?” the man said, taken aback. “Daniel?”

“He got beaten up in Gugulethu back in 1993,” I said. “Did you ever know about that?”

“Ja, ja, everyone knew about that.”

“They did?”

“Sure, that’s why he retired from the municipality.”

“Hrmph,” Gareth mumbled.

Clinton’s sister was a taxi driver, and Daniel had worked a bit with her, which was how he’d come to rent this room, Clinton explained. But Daniel had moved out a few years back, and unfortunately Clinton didn’t have a phone number for his old tenant.

“Any idea where he stays?” I asked.

“Well, I did see him last year.”

“And, where was he?”

“At the old-age home in Bonny Brook. He was at the old-age home with his mother, I think.” He told his daughter something in Afrikaans and she left the room only to return a moment later. Amazingly, she was holding a photograph.

“Daniel was really a lovely guy. He is the girls’ godfather. Here’s a christening.” Clinton passed me a faded, low-quality 3 x 5 snapshot.

This was the first time I’d seen Daniel de Villiers and I inspected the picture. Daniel stood beside a priest in the sunlight, outside a brick church. He was a small person, of average weight, wearing charcoal slacks, a white short-sleeve button-down shirt, and a maroon striped tie. His face rested in a neutral expression. He wore round, unfashionable sunglasses. In short, Daniel de Villiers was perhaps the world’s most nondescript man, right down to his gray hair, styled in an unremarkable buzz cut.

Gareth directed me to the old-age home in Bonny Brook. We doubled back for forty minutes toward Kraaifontein until we arrived at the three-story white building on a quiet street, protected by gates. I pressed a square orange button and the buzzer sounded. Gareth, Aimee-Noel, and I filed through and opened the lobby door. There was a small sitting area immediately before me, but no signs of life. I planned to find some sort of office, where perhaps a receptionist or administrator would be able to confirm whether a Daniel de Villiers resided here.

A lady with teased blue hair plodded over on her walker. She was a full foot shorter than me. She looked up and asked if she could help me.

“Do you know if a Daniel de Villiers lives here?”

“Daniel? De Villiers? Sure, just upstairs. Here, I’ll show you.” She gave Gareth a once-over. We followed her up a long wheelchair ramp to the second floor, hung right, and looked ahead. There was a plain wooden door, slightly ajar. On it was taped a white paper sign with computer print:

D. DE VILLIERS

DIABETIC

Nine months of searching, and here he was: D. de Villiers, diabetic.

I knocked. No answer. I knocked again.

The woman teetered around nearby.

“Just go in,” she urged. “He can’t hear a thing.”

Gareth courageously pushed the door open. Past the hospital bed and the little bathroom with a dim light, near the small window, sat a frail figure hunched over a table, facing away from the door. Before him was a tray of mushy, brown foods arranged in little indentations. He was bent close to the tray, spoon in his hand, toiling away at his meal. The room was silent. He had no reaction to the squeak of the hinge or the sudden presence of three unseen visitors behind him.

Gareth strode over and touched the shoulder of the man. The man looked up and his mouth opened wide. He was a waiflike creature, wasted and pale, with wide black eyes. He was missing the bulk of his teeth, without whose support his mouth had collapsed inward, pulling his face with it. He wore enormous glasses and a white hoodie that said
BILLABONG
in bright red script across the chest. The same man as in Clinton’s picture, but a hundred years older. He had very plain white hair, cut short.

Gareth put his hands on his hips and raised an eyebrow. The man stared at him in wonder. Then, screwing up his face, he said with a rasp, “What the hell are you doing here?”

The day after I found Daniel was the twentieth anniversary memorial, to be held in St. Columba Anglican Church in Gugulethu. Linda Biehl, along with the anthropologist Nancy Scheper-Hughes, a reporter from
The Orange County Register
, and the foundation staffers were all preparing for the celebration of Amy’s short life, as Gareth, Aimee-Noel, and I sat on a few hard couches in an open lobby that smelled like bleach and overcooked vegetables.

“We started off thinking we were going to check out the whorehouses, and we end up at an old-age home,” Aimee-Noel whispered. Gareth jiggled his leg.

I thought we’d be waiting for a while, as Daniel had needed to freshen up, but in under a minute he was making his way down the ramp with surprising speed, balanced on his curving metal cane.

Daniel and Gareth stood facing each other at the end of the stairway. They tried to exchange pleasantries, but neither was a skilled conversationalist and they just ended up talking briefly about a relative who had pancreatic cancer that needed to get “cut out of her.” Then they lapsed into silence.