remained silently in a state of impotence she could only make up for by constantly betraying the man who was the father of her daughter.
Soon, she thought. Soon I must tell my daughter that her mother has retained a little bit of her life force, despite everything. I shall have to tell her, in order to win her back, to show how the gap between us is not an abyss after all.
In secret, Matilda was a member of the ANC youth organization. She was active, and had already undertaken several undercover assignments. She had been arrested by the police on more than one occasion. Miranda was always frightened she would be injured or killed. Every time the coffins of dead blacks were being carried in swaying, chanting processions to their graves, she would pray to all the gods she believed in that her daughter might be spared. She turned to the Christian god, to the spirits of her ancestors, to her dead mother, to the songoma her father always used to talk about. But she was never completely convinced they had really heard her. The prayers merely made her feel better by dint of tiring her out.
Miranda could understand the confused feeling of impotence in her daughter because her father was a Boer, knowing herself to be sired by the enemy. It was like being inflicted with a mortal wound at the very moment of birth.
Nevertheless, she knew a mother could never regret the existence of her own daughter. That time seventeen years ago she had loved Jan Kleyn just as little as she loved him today. Matilda was conceived in fear and subservience. It was like the bed they were lying in was floating in a remote, airless universe. Afterwards, she just did not have the strength to cast aside her subservience. The child would be born, it had a father, and he had organized a life for her, a house in Bezuidenhout, money to live on. Right from the start she was resolved never to have another child by him. If necessary Matilda would be her only offspring, even if her African heart was horrified by the thought. Jan Kleyn had never openly stated he wanted another child by her; his demands on her as far as lovemaking were concerned were always equally hollow. She let him spend nights with her, and could stick it out because she had learned how to take revenge by betraying him.
She observed her daughter, who had once again lost herself in a world to which her mother was not allowed access. She could see Matilda had inherited her own beauty. The only difference was that her skin was lighter. She sometimes wondered what Jan Kleyn would say if he knew that what his daughter wanted most of all was a darker skin.
My daughter betrays him as well, Miranda thought. But our betrayal is not malice. It’s the lifeline we cling to as South Africa burns. Any malice is all on his side. One of these days it will destroy him. The freedom we achieve will not be primarily the voting slips we find in our hands, but the release from those inner chains that have been holding us prisoner.
The car came to a stop on the drive outside the garage.
Matilda got up and looked at her mother.
“Why have you never killed him?” she asked.
What Miranda heard was his voice in hers. But she had convinced herself that Matilda’s heart was not that of an Afrikaner. Her appearance, her light-colored skin, those were things she could do nothing about. But she had preserved her heart, hot and inexhaustible as it was. That was a line of defense, albeit the last one, which Jan Kleyn could never overcome.
The shameful thing was that he never seemed to notice anything. Every time he came to Bezuidenhout his car was laden with food so that she could make him a braai, just as he remembered it from the white house where he grew up. He never realized he was transforming Miranda into her own mother, the enslaved servant. He could never see that he was forcing her to play different roles: cook, lover, valet. He did not notice the resolute hatred emanating from his daughter. He saw only a world that was unchanging, petrified, something he considered it his main task in life to preserve. He did not see the falseness, the dishonesty, the bottomless artificiality on which the whole country was based.
“Is everything OK?” he asked as he placed all the bags of food in the hall.
“Yes,” said Miranda. “Everything’s fine.”
Then she made braai while he tried to talk to his daughter, who was hiding behind the role of the shy and timid girl. He tried stroking her hair, and Miranda could see through the kitchen door how her daughter stiffened. They ate their meal of Afrikaner sausages, big chunks of meat and cabbage salad. Miranda knew Matilda would go out to the bathroom and force herself to throw up the whole lot, once the meal was over. Then he wanted to talk about unimportant matters, the house, the wallpaper, the yard. Matilda withdrew to her room, leaving Miranda alone with him, and she gave him the answers he was expecting. Then they went to bed. His body was as hot as only a freezing object can be. The next day would be Sunday. As they could not be seen together, they took their Sunday stroll inside the four walls of the house, walking around and around each other, eating, and sitting in silence. Matilda always went out just as soon as she could and didn’t come back until he had left. Only when Monday came would everything begin to return to normal.
When he had fallen asleep and his breathing was calm and steady, she got carefully out of bed. She had learned how to move around the bedroom in absolute silence. She went out to the kitchen, leaving the door open so she could check the whole time that he did not wake up. If he did, and wondered why she was up, her excuse was a glass of water she had poured earlier.
As usual, she had draped his clothes over a chair in the kitchen. It was positioned so he could not see it from the bedroom. He did once ask why she always hung his clothes in the kitchen rather than in the bedroom, and she explained she wanted to brush them down for him every morning before he got dressed.
She carefully went through his pockets. She knew his wallet would be in the left inside pocket of his jacket, and his keys in his right pants pocket. The pistol he always carried was on the bedside table.
That was generally all she found in his pockets. That particular evening, however, there was a scrap of paper with something written on it in what she recognized as his handwriting. With one eye on the bedroom, she quickly memorized what it said.
Cape Town, she read.
12 June.
Distance to location? Wind direction? Roads?
She put the scrap of paper back where she had found it, once she was certain it was folded exactly as it had been.
She could not understand what the words on the piece of paper meant. But even so she would do what she was told to do whenever she found something in his pockets. She would tell the man she always met the day after Jan Kleyn had been to visit her. Together with their friends, they would try and work out what the words meant.
She drank the water and went back to bed.
He sometimes talked in his sleep. When that happened it was nearly always within an hour of his falling asleep. She would also memorize the words he sometimes mumbled, sometimes yelled out, and tell the man she met the following day. He would write down everything she could remember, just as he did with everything else that had happened during Jan Kleyn’s visit. Sometimes he would say where he had come from, and sometimes where he was going as well. But most often he said nothing at all. He had never consciously or accidentally revealed anything about his work for the intelligence service.
A long time ago he had said he was working as a chief executive officer in the Ministry of Justice in Pretoria.
Later, when she was contacted by the man who was looking for information and heard from him that Jan Kleyn worked for BOSS, she was told she must never breathe a word about knowing what he did for a living.
Jan Kleyn left her house on the Sunday evening. Miranda waved goodbye as he drove away.
The last thing he said was that he would come back late in the afternoon the following Friday.
As he drove along, he decided he was looking forward to the coming week. The plan had begun to take shape. He had everything that was going to happen under control.
What he did not know, however, was that Victor Mabasha was still alive.
In the evening of May 12, exactly a month before he was due to carry out the assassination of Nelson Mandela, Sikosi Tsiki left Johannesburg on the regular KLM flight to Amsterdam. Like Victor Mabasha, Sikosi Tsiki had spent a long time wondering who his victim was going to be. Unlike Victor, though, he had not concluded it must be President de Klerk. He left the question open.
