In Amsterdam the air was heavy and somber as his mood. He wandered through the busy streets, with his thick gray coat wrapped around him, Christmas carols spilling out from the doors along with the heat and eddying over the sidewalk, children in bright colors with red cheeks laughing like bells. He cast a long shadow in all this light. The assassination in Munich lay a week behind him, but he could not shake off the shame of it, it clung to him: this was not war. At a little shop on a corner opposite the canal, he spotted the ostrich eggs first, a heap in a grass basket, fake Bushman paintings on the oval, creamy white orbs; CURIOS FROM AFRICA, cried the display window. He saw wood carvings, the familiar mother and child figures and the tidy row of small carved ivory hippopotamuses and elephants, Africa in a nutshell for the continental drawing room, sanitized and tamed, the dark wound bound up with a white capitalistic bandage, peoples and tongues and cultures packaged in a few wooden masks with horrible expressions and tiny white ivory figurines.
Then he spotted the assegai and the oxhide shield, dusty and half forgotten, and he pushed open the door and went in. The bell tinkled. He picked up the weapon, turning it in his hands. The wooden shaft was smooth, the metal tip very long. He tested the shiny blade that was speckled with flecks of rust.
It was expensive, but he bought it and carried it off, an awkward parcel gift-wrapped in colorful ethnic paper.
He had sawed off the shaft in the shower of his hotel room, and the smell of the wood crept up his nose and the sawdust powdered the white tiles like snow and he remembered. He and his uncle Senzeni on the undulating Eastern Cape hill, the town down below in the hollow of the land as if God?s hand were folded protectively over it. ?This is exactly where Nxele stood.? He laid out the history of his forefathers, broadly painted the battle of Grahamstown: this was where the soldiers had broken off the shafts of the long assegais, where the stabbing spear was born, not in Shaka?s land, that was a European myth, just another way to rob the Xhosa. Even our history was plundered, Thobela.
That was the day that Senzeni had said, ?You have the blood of Nqoma, Thobela, but you have the soul of Nxele. I see it in you. You must give it life.?
He had laid the sawed-off assegai at the feet of his Stasi masters and said from now on this is how he would wage war, he would look his opponents in the eye, he would feel their breath on his face, they could take it or leave it.
?Very well,? they agreed with vague amusement behind the understanding frowns, but he did not care. He had made the scabbard himself so that the weapon could lie against his body, behind the great muscles and the spine, so he could feel it where it lay ready for his hand.
sang the male voice choir in his head, and a road sign next to his path said Makgadikgadi and he found the rhythm in the name, the music of syllables.
?The sins of the fathers shall be visited upon the children even unto the third and fourth generation,? said his father in the pulpit.
Makgadikgadikgadikgadi,
?We are our genes, we are the accidental sum of each of our forefathers, we are the product of the fall of the dice and the double helix. We cannot change that,? said Van Heerden with joy, finding excitement in that.
In Chicago he was awed by the unbelievable architecture and the color of the river, by the plenty and the streets that were impossibly clean. He walked self-consciously through the South Side and shook his head at their definition of a slum and wondered how many people of the Transkei would give their lives to let their children grow up here. Once he called out a greeting in Xhosa instinctively, as they were all black as he was, but their throats had ages since outgrown the feel of African sounds and he knew himself a stranger. He waited for the young Czech diplomat below the rumbling of the El, the elevated railway in the deep night shadows of the city. When the man came, he stood before him and said his name and saw only fear in the rodent eyes, a tiny scavenger. When his blade did the work, there was no honor in the blood, and Phalo and Rharhabe and all the other links in his genetic chain drooped their heads in shame.
One day his victims would return, one day the deeds of his past would visit him in the present, the dead would reach out long, cold fingers and touch him, repayment for his cowardice, for the misuse of his heritage, for breaking the code of the warrior, because with the exception of the last, they were all pale plump civil servants, not fighters at all.
He thought the assegai, the direct confrontation, would make a difference. But to press the cold steel in the heart of pen pushers betrayed everything that he was; to hear the last breath of gray, unworthy opponents in your ears was a portent, a self-made prophecy, a definition of your future? somewhere one day, it will come back to you.
Were the same words used for the people he had killed? Some were fathers, at least somebody?s son, although they were men, although they were part of the game, although they were every one a traitor to the conflict. And where was that conflict now, that useless chess game? Where were the ghosts of the Cold War? All that remained were memories and consequences, his personal inheritance.
The emptiness in him had grown; merely the nuances had changed with each city where he found himself, with the nature of the hotel room. The moments of pleasure were on the journey to the next one, when he could search for meaning anew at the next stop, search for something to fill the great hole, something to feed the monster growing inside.
The praise songs of his masters grew more hollow as time passed. At first, it was salve to his soul. The appreciation that rolled so smoothly off their tongues had stroked the shame away. ?Look what your people say? and they showed him letters from the ANC in London that praised his service in flowery language.
he told himself.
but he could not escape, not in the moments when he turned off the light and laid down his head and listened to the hiss of the hotel air-conditioning. Then he would hear his uncle Senzeni?s voice and he longed to be one of Nxele?s warriors who stood shoulder to shoulder, who broke the spear with a crack over his knee.
NATA , read the road sign, but he scarcely saw it. He and the machine were a tiny shadow on the plateau? they were one, grown together on a journey, every kilometer closer to completion, to fulfillment, engine and wind combining to a deep thrumming, a rhythmic swell like the breaking of waves. ?Your friend was looking for you early today,? the petrol jockey in Francistown had said. He knew, he knew it was Mazibuko, the voice of hate. He had not only heard the hate, he had recognized it, felt the resonance and knew that here was another traveler? this was himself ten or fifteen years ago, empty and searching and hating and frustrated, before the insight had come, before
