“Do you love your husband?”
“He’s not my husband. He’s her father.”
“What about her?”
“She hates him.”
“At this very moment she’s standing behind her door, listening to our conversation.”
“She’s sick. She has a fever.”
“But she’s listening even so.”
“Why shouldn’t she listen?”
Scheepers nodded. He understood.
“I need to know,” he said. “Think carefully. The slightest little thing might help us to find the men who are plotting to throw our country into chaos. Before it’s too late.”
It seemed to Miranda the moment she had been awaiting for so long had finally arrived. Before now she had always imagined nobody else would be present when she confessed to how she went through Jan Kleyn’s pockets at night, and noted down the words he uttered in his sleep. There would just be the two of them, herself and her daughter. But now she realized things would be different. She wondered why, without even knowing his name, she trusted him so implicitly. Was it his own vulnerability? His lack of confidence in her presence? Was weakness the only thing she dared to trust?
The joy of liberation, she thought. That’s what I feel right now. Like emerging from the sea and knowing I’m clean.
“I thought for ages he was just an ordinary civil servant,” she began. “I knew nothing about his crimes. But then I heard.”
“Who from?”
“I might tell you. But not yet. You should only say things when the time is ripe.”
He regretted having interrupted her.
“But he doesn’t know I know,” she went on. “That has been the advantage I had. Maybe it was my salvation, maybe it’ll be my death. But every time he came to visit us, I got up during the night and emptied his pockets. I copied even the smallest scrap of paper. I listened to the random words he muttered in his sleep. And I passed them on.”
“Who to?”
“To the people who look after us.”
“I look after you.”
“I don’t even know your name.”
“That doesn’t matter.”
“I spoke with black men who lead lives just as secret as Jan Kleyn’s.”
He had heard rumors. But nothing had ever been proved. He knew the intelligence service, both the civilian and military branches, were always running after their own shadows. There was a persistent rumor that the blacks had their own intelligence service. Maybe linked directly to the ANC, maybe an independent organization. They investigated what the investigators were doing. Their strategies and their identities. He realized this woman, Miranda, was confirming the existence of these people.
Jan Kleyn is a dead man, he thought. Without his knowing it, his pockets have been picked by the people he regards as the enemy.
“These last few months,” he said. “I don’t care about the time before then. But what have you found recently?”
“I’ve already passed it on, and forgotten,” she said. “Why should I strain myself to remember?”
He could see she was telling the truth. He tried appealing to her one more time. He had to talk with one of the men whose job it was to interpret whatever she found in Jan Kleyn’s pockets. Or what she heard him muttering in his sleep.
“Why should I trust you?” she asked.
“You don’t have to,” he said. “There are no guarantees in this life. There are only risks.”
She sat in silence, and seemed to be thinking.
“Has he killed a lot of people?” she asked. She was speaking very loudly, and he gathered this was so that her daughter could hear.
“Yes,” he said. “He’s killed a lot of people.”
“Blacks?”
“Blacks.”
“Who were criminals?”
“Some were. Some weren’t.”
“Why did he kill them?”
“They were people who preferred not to talk. People who had rebelled. Causers of instability.”
“Like my daughter.”
“I don’t know your daughter.”
“But I do.”
She stood up suddenly.
“Come back tomorrow,” she said. “There might be somebody here who wants to meet you. Go now.”
He left the house. When he got to his car parked on a side street, he was sweating. He drove off, thinking about his own weakness. And her strength. Was there a future in which they could come together and be reconciled?
Matilda did not leave her room when he left. Miranda left her in peace. But that evening she sat on the edge of her bed for a long time.
The fever came and went in waves.
“Are you upset?” Miranda asked.
“No,” replied Matilda. “I hate him even more now.”
Afterwards Scheepers would remember his visit to Kliptown as a descent into a hell he had thus far managed to avoid in his life. By sticking to the white path mapped out for Afrikaners from the cradle to the grave, he had trodden the path of the one-eyed man. Now he was forced to take the other path, the black path, and what he saw he thought he would never forget. It moved him, it had to move him, because the lives of twenty million people were affected. People who were not allowed to live normal lives, who died early, after lives that were artificially restricted and never given the opportunity to develop.
He returned to the house in Bezuidenhout at ten the next morning. Miranda answered the door, but it was Matilda who would take him to the man who had expressed a willingness to talk to him. He had the feeling of having been granted a great privilege. Matilda was just as beautiful as her mother. Her skin was lighter, but her eyes were the same. He had difficulty in making out any features of her father in her face. Perhaps she kept him at such a distance, she simply prevented herself from growing to look like him. She greeted him very shyly, merely nodding when he offered his hand. Once again he felt insecure, in the presence of the daughter as well, even though she was only a teenager. He started to feel uneasy about what he had let himself in for. Perhaps Jan Kleyn’s influence over this house was altogether different from what he had been led to believe? But it was too late to back out now. A rusty old car, its exhaust pipe trailing along the ground and the fenders broken off, was parked in front of the house. Without a word Matilda opened the door, and turned to him.
“I thought he’d be coming here,” said Scheepers doubtfully.
“We’re going to visit another world,” said Matilda.
He got into the back seat and was hit by a smell he only later recognized as reminiscent of his childhood’s henhouse. The man behind the wheel had a baseball cap pulled down over his eyes. He turned and looked at him without saying a word. Then they drove away, and the driver and Matilda started a conversation in a language Scheepers did not understand but recognized as Xhosa. They took a southwesterly direction, and Scheepers thought the man was driving much too fast. They soon left central Johannesburg behind them and came onto the complicated network of highways with exits leading off in all directions. Soweto, thought Scheepers. Is that where they’re taking me?
But they were not headed for Soweto. They passed Meadowland, where the choking smoke lay thick over the dusty countryside. Not far beyond the conglomeration of crumbling houses, dogs, children, hens, wrecked and
