African Airforce. More wire, more sentries.
Thiroko had said it was impossible.
Across the road from him was Local. He stopped, and bent down to flick his shoe lace undone. It took him several seconds to retie the lace. He looked down the side street that ran under the wall of Local, he stared down Soetdoringstraat while his fingers fumbled to make the knot. Immediately across Potgieterstraat, at the top of the angle of the Local walls, was a jutting fire position. There were dark slits, Jack couldn't know whether he was observed. The main gatehouse of Local was down Soetdoringstraat, covered by another fire position. At the end of the Local wall on Soetdoringstraat he saw the lowered barrier of a check point. The walls of Local were thirty feet high. Local was covered by enfilading gun positions, and Local was only the gaol for the short-term Black criminals. Further down Soetdoringstraat, past the checkpoint, was the gaol for White politicals, and away and hidden from the road were the old Pretoria Central and the women's gaol, and further away and further hidden was Pretoria Maximum Security. At that moment Jack Curwen would have believed Jacob Thiroko.
He stood. He tried to resume a casual walk, and the walk was dragged and slow.
He went on up Potgieterstraat.
Over the height of the Local wall he could see the top floor cell windows of five blocks. There were clothes hanging from some of the windows, underpants and socks and shirts, and once he saw the face of a Black who gazed out into the bright morning light. A terrible quiet about the place.
Difficult for him to realise that hundreds of men were held behind that wall, that they made no sound. At the end of the Local wall the brickwork gave way to a mesh wire fence that stood between the road and tropical gardens, and then the wildness of high trees climbing over a steep hillside. He knew from his map that the hill was Magasyn Kopje. He knew that Beverly Hills was set back on the slopes of Magazine Hill.
Behind the trees, out of sight, were the walls of Beverly Hills.
A daft fantasy in Jack's mind. If he yelled his father would hear him. He reckoned he must be within eight hundred yards of the cell blocks of Beverly Hills. And he had seen high walls and gun positions and sentries with assault rifles.
The fantasy slumped. He was eight hundred yards from his father, but he might as well have been in Churchill Close and five and a half thousand miles away. Despair, hurrying after the fantasy. He thought there was nothing more for him to see on Potgieterstraat. Despair, because he thought the bomb in John Vorster Square was for nothing.
Jack retraced his steps. He came briskly down the hill.
He snatched one glance down Soetdoringstraat. He saw the checkpoint barrier rising, and a car coming out, leaving the cocoon of wire and walls and fields of fire. He looked away.
On down the hill, back towards the ordinariness of Pretoria.
The car that had come through the checkpoint sped past him. He went back towards the railway bridge. He felt he had turned his back on his father because he had been intimidated by the walls of Local that he had seen, and the walls of Beverly Hills that the trees obscured.
He took the first train back to Johannesburg.
• •*
Jacob Thiroko had heard the news of the John Vorster Square bomb on the radio in the morning.
He was astounded. He had thought in terms of an un-guarded civil administration building, a noisy gesture simply.
John Vorster Square was something else… He had heard on the radio that the attacker had picked his moment to charge through an opened gate, hurl his bomb, and then escape under the nose of an armed sentry. An attack with the spontaneity of passion, nothing that was cold and pre-determined. Thiroko recognised the extent of the danger.
The most feared soldier was the man who was prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice.
Thiroko thought that he had gambled hugely on Carew's son, and the boy had repaid him by throwing a bomb into the most hated institution on the whole of the East Transvaal.
The radio had said that long into the night there had been crowds on the streets of Soweto cheering the success of the attack, jeering at the police in their Casspirs who had come to disperse them with gas and bird shot.
The Indian owner of the safe house had long since gone about his business of selling motor car accessories when Thiroko came down stairs. In the kitchen he ate a slice of toast and drank strong coffee prepared for him by the Indian's wife. He ate increasingly littje. Easier not to eat.
His suitcase was packed, his room ready for another guest.
He said his goodbyes to the Indian's wife, and left her home, and walked slowly with his suitcase to the Finchley Central underground station.
For the first time since he had arrived in London he journeyed to the offices of the African National Congress.
A terraced house in a side street off the Pentonville Road.
A heavy green door beside windows covered with close mesh that was proof against fire bombs.
He endured the back slapping greeting of the London comrades – Blacks and Indians and Whites. He elbowed his way with little grace through the earnest congratulations of those who fought the regime from trenches that were separated from the battlefield by thirteen hours' flying. A small few he trusted. A great many he regarded with contempt. Thiroko was a military man. These were the pam-phleteers and the speakers at fringe meetings, and the dreamers who said that the total revolution was at hand and that power was at the corner to be grasped. Thiroko was at home in the training camps of northern Angola, or with the young people of the Solomon Mahlangu school in Tanzania, or with the fighters when they retired across the Botswana border to rest up in Black Africa. He thought they were all communists in the London office. They were the men and women with whom he hardly cared to pass the day. There was one man in the terraced house with whom he would have entrusted his life. A man who was old, a skinny tent pole with a pebble rolling accent of Hungary, a man they all called Magyar and who had spent fourteen years in the regime's gaols, and served his time to the last day without an hour of his sentence remitted before travelling to London and exile. A pale, pinch-faced man with a whispered voice who had never been heard to boast of his commitment to the Movement, a man who had made his sacrifice and expected no praise for himself. This one man he would trust.
Thiroko handed his plane ticket to Lusaka to a young White who he thought was at heart a Boer because he wore jogging shoes and a tracksuit and cut his hair as if he were a conscript in the S.A.D.F. He asked to be booked on the evening's flight home.
He took Magyar to a small room, and when they had sat down amongst the cardboard cartons of A.N.C. literature that were expensively printed but not distributed, he turned up the volume of a cassette radio. Thiroko took few chances.
He had no right to take chances, not with the safety of a young man who was prepared to run inside the John Vorster Square perimeter with a homemade bomb.
Magyar wouldn't ask him, so Thiroko gave the information.
The Hungarian had been in the Movement from the early days of the dive underground at the time of the banning of the African National Congress. He had stood in the same dock six years after it had held Nelson Mandela and Sisulu and Mbeki and Mhlaba and Motsoaledi and Kathrada and Denis Goldberg and Mlangeni. And now, in his 67th year, he was hardly listened to by the members of the London office. He pushed paper and he drafted press releases that would be rewritten. He was the one for Thiroko to talk with.
Thiroko told Magyar that the attack on John Vorster Square was the work of a single committed individual supplied by the agencies of Umkonto we Sizwe. He saw the quiet pleasure on the wrinkled face. Thiroko knew what the security police had inflicted on the old man.
Their voices were low against the barrage of the music.
'You were in the maximum security section of Pretoria Central?'
'What we called Beverly Hills, the hanging gaol. Yes.'
'For how long were you there?'
'There was a group of us, White politicals, we were there for two years and eight months. From 1980 to 1983 we were there. It was after Jenkin and Lee and Moumbaris escaped from the White political section that all of the rest of us were taken up the hill while they rebuilt our former place.'
