Dead at Daybreak

the cypress.

“Couldn’t sleep.”

“Only you, or both of you?” Humor in the voice.

“Only me,” and there was far too much disappointment in his voice, and Tiny laughed softly.

“Sit down.” Mpayipheli moved over, made room for him.

“Thanks.”

They sat next to each other, staring at the night sky.

“Cold, hm?”

“I’ve been colder.”

Uncomfortable silence.

“Were you christened Tiny?”

Mpayipheli laughed. “I was named after the Springbok lock, Tiny Naude, if you must know. I was born Thobela Mpayipheli, which is a joke on its own.”

“Oh?”

“Thobela means ‘respectful, well-mannered.’ Mpayipheli is ‘the one who never stops fighting.’ My father…I think he wanted to work in a counterirritant.”

“I know the burden of names.”

“The problem with whites is that your names have no meaning.”

“Hope Beneke wouldn’t agree with you.”

“Touche.”

“Tiny Naude?”

“It’s a long story.”

“It’s a long night.”

The soft laugh again. “Do you play rugby?”

“At school. Socially a few times after that. I never really had the talent.”

“Life leads one into strange ways, Van Heerden. I’ve considered writing the story of my life, you know, about that time when every single soul who was part of the Struggle wrote an autobiography to get a first-class compartment on the gravy train. But I’m afraid only one chapter would be fascinating. The rugby chapter.”

Tiny Mpayipheli was quiet, shifted into a more comfortable position. “It’s colder when one can’t move. But the whole point of guard duty is to sit still.”

He turned up the collar of his coat, put his weapon on his lap, and took a deep breath. “My father was a man of peace. Every time the hand of apartheid slapped him in the face, he turned the other cheek, said he loved the white man even more because that was what the Word told him. And his son, Thobela, was a man of hate. And violence and fighting. Not suddenly, but sympathetically, with every humiliation I saw my father enduring. You see, I loved him so much. He was a man of dignity, unbelievable, untouchable dignity…”

A night bird called somewhere, and a faraway truck droned against an upward gradient on the N7.

“I ran away when I was sixteen, looking for the Struggle. I couldn’t stay home any longer. I had enough hate to apply ‘one settler, one bullet’ myself and the channels were ready for me. I walked the road to Gaborone and Nairobi and eventually, when I was twenty, big and strong and full of fight, the ANC sent me to the Soviet Union, to a godforsaken place called Saraktash, in the south of Russia, about a hundred kilometers from the Kazakhstan border, a dusty base where their troops prepared for the war in Afghanistan. That was where some of Umkhonto we Sizwe’s people were trained. Don’t ask me why there, but on the other hand, I don’t think the struggle at the ass end of the Dark Continent was high on the USSR’s military agenda.

“I was a troublemaker. From the very first day I asked questions about method and content. I didn’t want to learn about Lenin and Marx and Stalin; I wanted to kill. I didn’t want to know about battle plans and tank warfare; I wanted to learn to shoot and slit throats. I didn’t want to learn Russian and I didn’t like the superior attitude of the Soviet troops, and the more my comrades told me I had to be patient because the road to war wound through a diversity of landscapes, the more I rebelled, until the day I and a sergeant in the Red Army, an Uzbek with shoulders like an ox and a neck like a tree trunk, locked horns in the NCO’s bar. I didn’t understand one word he was saying, but his hate was the white man’s hate and I couldn’t resist.

“They allowed us to fight. Eventually all the troops on the base were there. First we virtually demolished the mess and then we were outside. Fists, feet, elbows, knees, fingers in the eyes, I was twenty and I was big and strong and there were guys who said it was Ali against Liston, but it was bad, he hit me until my head stood still, he broke six ribs, and I bled in places where I hadn’t even known he had hit me.

“The difference, in the final analysis, wasn’t the size of the dog in the fight, but the size of the fight in the dog. My hate was bigger than his. And my lungs were clean. He was a smoker, and those Russian cigarettes, they told me, were fifty percent donkey shit. It wasn’t a spectacular knockout. For more than forty minutes we had systematically broken each other down until he sank onto one knee, spat blood, and couldn’t get his breath, and he shook his head and the small group of South Africans cheered and the Russians turned away angrily and left their man who had brought shame on the world power, and it would all have been over if the Uzbek hadn’t had a heart attack, later that night, in his bed, dead as a doornail. They found him the following morning and they came to fetch me out of the sick bay, the military police, and I ask you, what chance does a Xhosa have of a fair trial in a country that feels nothing for him – especially when his attitude hardly shows deep remorse?

“The cell was small and hot, even in the Russian late autumn the sun made the corrugated iron crackle, and at night it was so cold that my breath made crystals against the metal, and the food was inedible, and they kept me there for five weeks, alone in a cell as big as an outhouse, and in my head I walked the hills of the Transkei and spoke to my father and made love to plump girls with huge breasts and when my ribs had mended I did sit-ups and push-ups and squats until the sweat literally pooled on the floor.

“While I waited for something to happen, other powers were at work to get me out. Odd how life sometimes goes. The officer commanding the base was a rugby fan – only later did I realize rugby wasn’t unpopular in the Soviet army, not nearly as popular as soccer but there were enough men who played rugby for Saraktash to be able to send a good team onto the field. They had come in second in the previous year’s Red Army championships and the league was on its way to playing again when the OC got it into his head that the South Africans, coming from the land of the Springboks, were just the people to give his team a good warm-up before the first league match against the previous year’s champions.

“You can imagine, among the one hundred and twenty of us, there were only colored guys who knew anything about the game. The rest were Xhosa, Zulu, Tswana and Sotho and Venda, and rugby was the sport of the oppressor and what we knew about it was just about nothing, but our Umkhonto leader was Moses Morape and if one of your men is in the cells and you see a gap, you take it. When the Russian OC came to issue the challenge, the guys had an indaba, and Rudewaan Moosa, one of the Cape Malays, a committed Muslim, who in any case hated the Russians because they were so godless, said he had been a fly half in the South African Rugby Federation setup and he would be their trainer because it was an opportunity to put the whiteys in their place.

“Morape went to negotiate. First suggested soccer as an alternative because we knew we could beat their Soviet asses hollow, but the OC wouldn’t hear of it. Then Morape said they would play rugby but that Mpayipheli must be freed. And the South African team must get the same equipment as the Russians.

“ ‘But Mpayipheli is a murderer,’ the OC said, and Morape argued that it had been a fair fight and the OC shook his head and said justice had to take its course and Morape said then there wouldn’t be a warm-up match, and for two weeks there was coming and going until the OC agreed, but there were two conditions. You have to win. And Mpayipheli must play, otherwise his troops wouldn’t accept the deal, and Morape said okay.

“I didn’t want to know. I said I’d rather go back to the cells, but the chief indunas explained the choices: either I play, or they would send me to Zambia, where I could be a pencil pusher in a supply store for the rest of the Struggle – if the Soviet army’s justice system had finished with me. They were sick and tired of me. I had to choose.

“Two days later we had our first practice. Two teams chosen according to size and height and potential talent. It was chaos. Like grade-one kids who gather around the ball and yell and run all over the place. The Russians who stood at the side of the practice field laughed so much that we couldn’t hear what Moosa was saying and we were so stupid that the writing was on the wall. Three weeks was far too little. We were cannon fodder.