"I dreamed other things, too."
"Good dreams?"
Myburgh started. "Why are we stopped?"
"Never mind that. Tell me what you dreamed."
"For one thing, I"d... died. Heart attack. In my car. But somehow I was you in my dream, Mr. Thubana, and I looked into the window of my car to see me lying in it dead. Then I got on the bus with you and Kabini again. I was a ghost. I was dead, but at the same time I was you seeing me dead and seeing my ghost here on Grim Boy"s Toe, just another pa.s.senger."
"Ah," Thubana said. "Fascinating. You being me and you being your own ghost at the same time."
Myburgh shot Thubana a pleading look. How to tell him that he had taken a weird sort of comfort from hearing Thubana"s comrades mock him with their chant? Even from seeing a dream picture of himself in his car, where death had relieved him of both responsibility and culpability? Such things were unsayable.
Myburgh looked down. "You gave me your coat."
"Of course. Your suit"s all torn. And I have a sweater." He did: an ugly, ribbed, reddish-brown sweater with more pills than a discount pharmacy.
Myburgh tried to remove the coat and thrust it back at Thubana, but Thubana held it to him with a hard, heavy-veined hand. "Keep it, Mr. Myburgh. Shortly, I fear, you will need it even more than you do now."
What was going on? Myburgh glanced around. Other riders were peering uneasily into the relentless drizzle. Kabini wasn"t in his driver"s cage. Further, some sort of armor-clad paddy wagon had parked in front of the bus, blocking its way. Africans called such vans "nylons," because of the mesh in their windows. Several men-Myburgh couldn"t tell how many- stalked the asphalt and the boggish shoulder. A confusion of moving silhouettes.
"The police?"
"From BOSS," Thubana said. The Bureau of State Security, he meant. Ordinarily, Myburgh would have felt-what?-a frisson of ambiguous pride thinking on these dedicated state functionaries, but this morning, right now, he experienced their presence as all the others on Grim Boy"s Toe must have-as an ominous interruption, a clamp slowly tightening on the heart. But why? These were men who could help him. Myburgh rapped on his window.
"In here!" he called in Afrikaans. "I"m in here!"
"They"re not looking for you," Thubana said. "Best not to call attention to yourself."
"That"s crazy. I have to talk to them." Hindered by the seat back in front of him and Thubana"s unyielding presence to his left, he tried to stand.
"It will do no good, Mr. Myburgh."
"Nonsense. I"ll tell them about my accident. They"ll see that I get home." At last, he had allies again. But Thubana would not budge; the only way to reach the aisle would be to shove past him-a distasteful, maybe even a dangerous, option to pursue.
A plainclothes security police agent in a trenchcoat similar to Thubana"s, and a dove-gray fedora, stepped up into the bus. Facing the pa.s.sengers, he spoke in Afrikaans in a high-pitched voice that unexpectedly conveyed an intimidating authority: "Everyone off the bus! And be orderly about it!"
"Who are you?" said the woman in the checkered head scarf. She spoke in English.
"Major Henning Jeppe," the man said. And again in Afrikaans, "Off the bus, please. Step quickly."
Myburgh pulled himself up and said, "Gerrit Myburgh here. I"ve had an accident, Major Jeppe. Please help me."
But Jeppe had already gone back down the steps into the night, and the pa.s.sengers on 496, cursing and grumbling, rose from their seats or their newsprint mats and began shuffling toward the front of the bus. Thubana also rose. He took Myburgh by the arm (not so much patronizingly as custodially, as if Myburgh were an expensive polo horse belonging to a doting employer) and introduced him into the sluggish stream of bodies. Well, so be it. The sooner he got outside and reported his accident, the sooner he could forsake the company of these cattlelike Africans and go back to the steady and uneventful life he"d built for himself at the financial inst.i.tution called Jacobus & Roux.
On the desolate bundu"s edge (Myburgh"s digital now read 4:38, about two hours till sunup), he heard Kabini begging a uniformed policeman not to detain his bus: "It will be my neck. I"m late as it is. The weather-you see what it"s like. Don"t be so cruel, nkosi."
The policeman muttered something unintelligible, shoved Kabini around the bonnet of the bus, and disappeared with him behind the scattershot parade of the pa.s.sengers. Myburgh began searching for Jeppe or some other member of State Security upon whom to dump his story, but all the white policemen had moved to the edges of the shadowy field into which they were herding everyone, depriving him of any chance to make his case. Thubana, settling his coat on Myburgh"s shoulders from behind, helped him step over muddy earth toward a stubble-spiked piece of ground so exposed and barren that it stank of its own infertile clay.
"Hullo! My name is Gerrit Myburgh! I"m here by mistake!" In dry weather, his cry would have echoed resoundingly; this morning, it had no more impact on the indifferent Transvaal than a m.u.f.fled cough.
"Shhhhh," Thubana said, "Save your breath."
Soon, all ninety pa.s.sengers had shaped three sides of a square in the field beyond the bus. The fourth edge was the bus itself. Major Henning Jeppe reappeared from behind Grim Boy"s Toe, where he and two or three policemen in rainslicks had been pumping Kabini for information. To speak to the detained, Jeppe stood in front of 496"s tall, inward-pleated door.
"Most of you are honest workers," he said in his stentorian squeak. "But, this morning, at least one terrorist-traitor has ridden from KwaNdebele with you. If the law-abiding residents of your homeland help us identify this person or persons, we will let you reboard and go on to your jobs." He pinched the bridge of his nose, as if his head ached.
Myburgh began waving an arm. "Major Jeppe! Major Jeppe!"
Jeppe ignored him. "If you refuse to help, if you stay silent in the misguided belief that you are observing a higher patriotism, we will detain you here until you p.i.s.s yourselves or your bladders burst. One or the other. Understand?"
"Gaan kak in die mielies!" (Go s.h.i.t in the corn) shouted a squat male pa.s.senger only a meter or two from Jeppe.
Myburgh was stunned by the black"s impertinence. What it would bring him, after all, was immediate notice and swifter punishment. In fact, two policemen in macintoshes rushed into the field, seized the man, and chivvied him back aboard the bus with their sjamboks and a series of hammerlike blows between the shoulder blades. A moment later, the man was bellowing inside 496"s tin sh.e.l.l, begging to be returned to his people in the field. In the rising twilight, his cries produced demoralizing echoes.
"Fool," murmured Thubana, shaking his head.
"Major Jeppe, I don"t belong here!" Myburgh shouted. He wanted to walk manfully up to the major, but Thubana, sensing this intent, locked an arm through his elbow. "d.a.m.n you. Let go."
One of the bus"s windows slid down: Kmrrrack! A policeman leaned out. "This isn"t the man, sir. We now know our terrorist is someone called Mpandhlani."
Myburgh looked three people to his right and saw Mpandhlani, a raw-boned figure with a face like an inoffensive baboon"s, staring at the ground. Actually, his nose was pointing earthward, but his eyes seemed to be rolled back in his head, contemplating a dimension where a person could write poetry unmolested. He was wearing his volleyball cap, which made him look like an escapee from either an insane asylum or a circus train.
"Christ," said Thubana.
"Aren"t you folks lucky?" Jeppe said, walking into the field in his new boots, unmindful of the mud. "One of you has already come to our a.s.sistance. Good. Excellent." Abruptly, he turned back to the bus. "What was that name, Wessels?"
"Mpandhlani, sir. It"s a nickname. It means Baldhead."
"Thank you, Wessels." Jeppe did as neat a military pivot as he could manage on the sloppy ground, then strode toward the detainees in Myburgh"s crooked line. "Baldhead," he murmured. "Baldhead."
"Psssst, Winston," Thubana said, softly hissing.
A woman beside Mpandhlani nudged him, and he looked at Thubana through glazed, beyond-the-pale eyes.
"Keep your cap on, Winston," Thubana said. "Keep it on."
Myburgh straightened his arm, breaking free of Thubana"s elbow lock. "Here he is, Major Jeppe! The terrorist you want is right here!" Myburgh stepped out of the line of detainees, leveled an accusing finger at Mpandhlani, and briefly held this stance as if posing for a new statue at the Voortrekker Monument.
"Bring that man out of the bus, Wessels," Jeppe called over his shoulder. "He"ll point us to the filthy b.u.g.g.e.r."
What the h.e.l.l? Myburgh glanced at Jeppe, then at the policemen strong-arming the informant off Grim Boy"s Toe, and then at Thubana throwing him a stare of such singeing, blast-furnace hate that his nape hairs crackled.
But Jeppe... was he deaf? Was he blind?
One of those who had informed on Mpandhlani (an African, thought Myburgh, not me) had a rugger"s body and a flat-cheeked face with a pair of big, liquid eyes. Jeppe"s policemen dragged him along each line of detainees until, head down, he stopped in front of Winston Skosana and stood there incriminatingly shamefaced.
"Ephraim," Thubana said. "You s.h.i.t."
"They already knew," Ephraim said. "Your friend"-nodding at Myburgh "-just fingered him."
"No, he didn"t," Thubana said. "He"s nothing to his own people this morning. Nothing, Ephraim. He could strip naked in front of these snakes, man. They"d never notice."
"In any case," Ephraim said, "I wasn"t the only one who-"
"Watch that talk," said Wessels, angry and puzzled. He slapped Thubana across his lips: a crisp, open-handed blow.
Myburgh turned around. Jeppe, Wessels, Wessels"s partner, and the man named Ephraim were all near enough to touch-as, of course, was Thubana. But Myburgh suddenly understood that he was a ghost to the Afrikaners: a nonent.i.ty, a person-shaped void. Those he"d expected to rescue him-fellow whites-could neither see nor hear him, while the blacks-Kabini, Mpandhlani, Ephraim, and so on-had no more interest in him than he had in them. The exception to this judgment, at least until he"d tried to betray Skosana, was Mordecai Thubana, who had given him his coat.
Why should I be ashamed? I"m being a good citizen, aren"t I? Standing up for stability and order?
Myburgh went to Jeppe and shouted into his pinched, bloodless face: "I"ve had an accident! My name"s Gerrit Myburgh. If you want proof, ring up my brother Kiewit-Kiewit Myburgh-on the farm called Huilbloom! He"ll vouch for me!"
Jeppe blinked. He recoiled imperceptibly. That was all. It was as if he"d suffered a mild pang of heartburn or caught a faint whiff of sewage from a settlement upwind. Then he turned about and piercingly commanded all the hangdog laborers from KwaNdebele to reboard their bus. He dispatched Wessels"s partner to a.s.sist in overseeing the boarding, then approached Mpandhlani with his hands jammed Humphrey Bogart-style in the pockets of his trenchcoat. All Myburgh could do was skip aside. Then, as 496"s riders straggled bemusedly back to the bus at the urging of Jeppe"s henchmen, Jeppe eyed Mpandhlani with a rote and clinical ill will.
Over his shoulder, he said, "Don"t let the bus go until we"ve questioned this gentleman."
Myburgh heard Kabini, the driver, cry, "Please, nkosi, you"ve got your man! Let me finish my route!" This plea was followed by a thump, an outraged yell, and the sounds of argument as the police goosed Kabini up the steps to his driver"s cage. Myburgh could see only kaleidoscope pieces of their scuffle through the bobbing heads and shoulders of the people stumping back to Grim Boy"s Toe.
Thubana was not among their number. He stood out in the field with Mpandhlani, Major Jeppe, and the pumpkin-headed cop whom Jeppe called Wessels. Myburgh stood with them, of course, but he seemed not to count, having even less impact on the events now unraveling than would a beside-the-point memory or an unheard song. Should he go back to 496 with the others, strike out on foot for Pretoria, or stand here like an undressed department-store mannequin, humiliated and useless?
Jeppe took note of Thubana. "Go back to the bus, kaffir," he said, abandoning all pretense at courtesy.
"If Winston"s a terrorist, I"m a terrorist, Major."
"Then you are," Myburgh said. "You told me Mpandhlani was held for almost three years for terrorist activity."
Simultaneously, Jeppe said, "Very well. I believe you. Stay here with your b.l.o.o.d.y accomplice."
Thubana replied to Myburgh: "I told you I supposed he"d been a guerrilla. Nothing more."
"Guerrilla, terrorist-it"s all the same to us," Jeppe said, squinting perplexedly at Thubana. He turned to Wessels. "Aren"t we lucky this fellow"s so talkative, though."
"Yes, sir." Wessels had three or four chins. Even in the mud, he seemed to be bouncing lightly on his toes, minutely jiggling his chins in antic.i.p.ation of the fun he was soon going to be having at the two Africans" expense.
"But no more out of you until we"ve talked to Mister Baldhead," Jeppe told Thubana. "Understand?"
Thubana merely stared at the major.
Myburgh lifted his arms in exasperated disbelief, dropped them to his sides again. He was invisible to the very authority to whom he should be is lumpishly self-evident as a marshmallow in a mug of cocoa. And his words were as inaudible to Jeppe and Wessels as the high-pitched piping of certain kinds of dog whistles. Suddenly, he found himself-as he had been on the road right after that elephant demolished his Caddy-on the verge of tears.
Four men in an open field on a damp morning. From nowhere, it seemed, the fancy came to Myburgh that if only they had a folding table and chairs, they could sit down and play a few hands of bridge or canasta or hearts. Cards were plasticized, after all-they didn"t usually go soggy on you. He and the others could take partners and enjoy themselves. So what if it wasn"t quite c.o.c.kcrow and he was missing a shoe... ?
Jeppe ended this absurd reverie by stepping up to Mpandhlani, his eyes level with Mpandhlani"s lips, and saying, "Take off that stupid cap, kaffir. When in the presence of a state official, you show respect."
"We"re outdoors," Myburgh blurted. "What the devil difference does it make, Major Jeppe?"
Mpandhlani"s spirit seemed to have left his body. It had flown away to a thatched Ndebele house with freehand-painted fences and exterior murals, frescoes of wild geometric designs in mint green, lemon yellow, concrete blue. Or that was what Mpandhlani"s fallen lower lip and fish-eyed gaze suggested to Myburgh, who thought the man looked catatonic, as if the mere arrival of the security police had irreversibly traumatized him. He was taking refuge in memory, in a fitful, private idyll of childhood.
"Take off your cap!"
"Leave him alone," Thubana told Jeppe.
"Shut up!" Wessels said, and, wincing, he struck Thubana with his rhinoceros-hide whip.
Up, involuntarily, went Myburgh"s arms as he flinched away from the unexpected blow. When he looked again, a raw, triangular gash on Thubana"s cheek had begun busily leaking scarlet.
Mpandhlani"s spirit flew back from his boyhood home (probably only a few kilometers from the Myburgh family farm) and reanimated his upright corpse: He took off his cap.
Jeppe seized it from him, examined it with distaste (for, yes, it stank of both rubber and man sweat), then hurled it into the twilight with a contemptuous flip. The volleyball-half whistled through the air and landed wetly, a sound like two hippopotamuses kissing. Jeppe, noticing Mpandhlani"s naked, saddle-st.i.tched pate, gave a squeaky guffaw. Perhaps his laugh embarra.s.sed him, for he cut it off immediately.
"My," he said. "What an ostrich egg. I"ll bet old Christiaan Wessels here would be glad to scramble it for you."
Now Mpandhlani"s eyes were at least semialert. He looked at Jeppe, at Wessels, at Thubana, at Myburgh. It seemed to Myburgh that he started to speak. But, in fact, what came out of his mouth was a staticky tirade: "... our express purpose to kill more and more South African security forces, especially the Boers, because unless whites are made to feel unsafe, and until they too are killed, they will yet feel safe to go on killing the Africans. And, in fact, although some whites are among the security forces killed by the Azanian People"s Liberation Army, time has almost come when-"
"Shut up, you b.l.o.o.d.y kaffir!" Jeppe cried.
"-for every African killed by the racist security forces, a white person must be killed. One racist, one bullet! Phambili Nomzabalazo Wabantu!"
At that moment, Mpandhlani stopped broadcasting propaganda and began transmitting a medley of pompous marches. Jeppe and Wessels appeared nonplussed, uncomprehending. But Jeppe seized Mpandhlani by the arms, pulled him to him, and then brutally shoved him toward the roadway. Mpandhlani bent double, clutching his head as if to dam the symphonic battle hymns spilling out.
Headlamps and flashlights reflected off the windshield of Grim Boy"s Toe like strobes in a Joburg nightclub. Confusion reigned. Myburgh literally had no idea where, or to whom, to turn.
"Take this walking radio station to the van, Wessels. Get the filthy b.u.g.g.e.r out of my hearing."
"Me, too," Thubana said.
Jeppe nodded. "Of course. You, too." He swept his hand after Wessels and Mpandhlani, a command and a dismissal.
"What about me?" Myburgh asked Thubana. "What am I supposed to do?"
"Go find Winston"s cap."
"His cap?"
"I beg your pardon," said Jeppe, glaring at Thubana.
"Sure. Otherwise, the broadcasts he"s picking up will drive us crazy before we reach security police headquarters."
Myburgh hobbled deeper into the field, trying to find the spot where their comrade"s volleyball cap had made its obscene-sounding, sucking touchdown.
"Hurry!" Thubana yelled after him. "Or we may go off and leave you, Mr. Myburgh!"
"Shut up!" Jeppe said. He twisted Thubana"s arm, chivying the much taller man after Wessels. He appeared to believe that Thubana was playing mind games with him, maybe even communicating by means of code words and gestures with a squad of guerrillas farther out in the bundu. In fact, Jeppe was royally spooked. Myburgh would have sympathized with him more if his own predicament had not been so outre and ego-crippling. No one could feel as isolated as he did.
By what seemed pure luck, he found Mpandhlani"s volleyball cap, pried it out of the mud, then stumbled back to the roadway to the bakkie-the nylon-into which Wessels and two more security agents were herding Mpandhlani and Thubana.