The October Killings (20 page)

While telling this part of the story, she did not look at Yudel. The memory of that night so long ago absorbed her completely. Now she turned her attention to him. “Yudel, you have to understand. Until then I had been a schoolgirl in a comfortable private school. My main challenges in life were being accepted by the in-crowd at school and staying out of the way of our awful English teacher.”

“Just tell me,” he said. “Tell it in the order in which it happened.”

“I don't know in what order anything happened. I do remember that I was out in the living room at one point. There was a terrible pain in my right side and I was rolling on the ground. Some of the men in camouflage were in the room, but none of our people were there. I heard the explosions coming from the bedrooms and from the kitchen. At one point I was looking out of the open door and seeing more soldiers on the dirt road outside.

“I was in the hallway, trying to get to the closed door of my parents' room, but the pain in my side was terrible. There was a loud crash against the door from the other side, as if something big had been thrown against it. Then I think the door burst open and one of the soldiers fell headlong into the hallway. His rifle was on a shoulder strap. It clattered to the ground next to him. He was young and I saw him raise a hand to his forehead, then suddenly my father was there and trying to take the rifle from him. That was the first time I saw Leon. Of course, I didn't know who he was at the time.

“You have to understand, Yudel, that while my father was a member of the armed wing of the movement, he was not a soldier. He was a medical doctor, deployed by the movement to any area where his skills were needed. The young man was still stunned and I thought my father was going to be able to take the gun from him, when suddenly he was struck by the stock of a rifle. He fell to the floor, holding his shoulder where the blow had landed. Immediately one of the men was standing over him. That was the first time I saw that man.”

“Van Jaarsveld?”

Abigail had started weeping. Until this moment she had not been able to hide her distress, but her control had been complete. Yudel saw that now the story had reached the point that had, until now, made telling it impossible. “What happened to your father?” he asked.

“He … he…” Continuing suddenly seemed impossible.

Had she been a patient, Yudel might have waited to hear the rest of the story. But she was not a patient and Leon Lourens had been taken from his workshop. Waiting was out of the question. “You have the strength to tell me,” he said, speaking slowly. He reached out to take one of her hands in his.

“My father … my father … he and Leon were on the floor … I was crawling…”

“Crawling? Where were you crawling to?”

“Toward my father. I was crawling … toward my father. He was unarmed and injured, but to me he had always been the place I could find safety. Then…”

Yudel knew what happened then, but he had to hear it from her. Inserting his own assumptions into her memory could do no good. He waited for the weeping to stop. When it did she was again in control and the words again came pouring out.

“I was almost touching him when van Jaarsveld killed him. I never saw where the bullet entered. I only saw him fall backward onto the floor with his eyes closed. He could have been asleep, but I knew he wasn't.

“There was terrible screaming. I was sitting up and I remember the room swaying as I rocked myself back and forth. I could not immediately tell where the screaming was coming from, only that every time I gasped for breath it stopped. Van Jaarsveld hit me across the face and the back of my head. I was flat on the floor again, but my screaming continued. I could do nothing to stop it. I heard him shouting at me. He pointed his rifle at me and for the first time I could make out words in all the surrounding noise. ‘If this doesn't stop, I'll kill the kaffir
meidjie
too.' I understood enough Afrikaans to know what he was saying. But I had no control over the screaming. He lifted his rifle to his shoulder and said something about shutting me up permanently.

“Then there was another voice, telling him to put down his weapon. It was Leon, and he was pointing his rifle at van Jaarsveld. Van Jaarsveld shouted something at him about obeying orders, but he kept his rifle pointed at van Jaarsveld. I heard him say that if van Jaarsveld shot me, he would be the next to die. I don't think this was what van Jaarsveld expected. I remember startled faces of young men around us. Van Jaarsveld was shouting an order at him, but Leon kept his rifle pointed straight at him.

“I don't know how long it went on like that, but I remember van Jaarsveld saying that he did not have time for this. He said he had work to do, and he turned and left. As he went I heard him shouting orders at the others. Even then I realized that he was trying to save face. There was something about Leon. I believe he would have killed van Jaarsveld if he tried to shoot me. I think van Jaarsveld believed it too.” The torrent of words that had been pouring out of Abigail stopped abruptly and she fell silent.

“Of the people in the house, how many survived the night?” Yudel asked.

“Just six of us.”

“And you were taken to cells in Ficksburg?”

“Yes. At the police station.”

“And something happened there?”

“We were freed by the movement.”

“How?”

“The three policemen on duty were killed, all in the same way. And all in the way that these apartheid policemen have been dying over the last twenty years.”

“And the date of the incident in Ficksburg was October 22?”

“Yes.”

“And you know who killed the policemen in Ficksburg?”

“His name is Michael Bishop.”

“You saw him that night?”

This time Abigail did not answer, nor could she look at Yudel. There was a desk calendar on Yudel's desk. He turned away from Abigail to look at it.

“It's the nineteenth,” she said.

“And this man who saved your life in Maseru was abducted today?”

“Yesterday.”

“If it's any consolation, Abigail, you can be sure that Bishop, or whoever is doing this, will wait till the twenty-second. Where is Bishop?”

“No one seems to know. Will you help me find him?”

“And if we find him, what will we do with him?” he asked.

She was looking helplessly at Yudel.

“We need the police,” Yudel said.

“I can't even interest my own department.”

“Tell me about Bishop.”

He believed her and he wanted to help. Abigail could see that. It seemed to her that there was more than a desire to help in Yudel. He needed to help. Perhaps, she thought, he needed to atone for the fact that throughout the bad years he had worked for the apartheid government. “Why, Yudel?” she asked.

“So that I can try to understand…”

“No, not that. Why did you stay in the service of the apartheid government all those years?”

“I'm a criminologist,” Yudel said. “They had the criminals in their cells. There was nowhere else for me to work.”

“Is that all it was?”

“That's all.”

“And private practice?”

He shook his head. “No. I wanted the real thing.”

And now we are here, Abigail thought. Me from the movement and you from the old prison system. And will you really be able to help me?

“Tell me about Michael Bishop. Tell me everything you know.”

Abigail told him what she was able to and everything Jones Ndlovu had told her. In the telling it all sounded pitifully thin to her own ears.

“And Ficksburg? Tell me more about Ficksburg.”

“I have to go,” Abigail said.

“Did Michael Bishop kill the policemen in Ficksburg?”

“Yes.”

“Tell me about it.”

“I must go.”

“Don't do this,” Yudel said. “Don't run away again. I need to understand.”

“I'm not running away and I will tell you everything, but I have to fetch Robert at the airport.”

“Before you go—surely the thing is to find Leon, not Bishop.”

“If we find Bishop, we will find Leon. I know it.”

Yudel stood outside in the gathering twilight and watched Abigail drive away. Will you tell me everything? he wondered. What is it that happened in Ficksburg that still cannot be approached after all these years? Whatever it is, right now you are fleeing from it again. How many times in the past have you fled from it?

24

“Why?” she had asked Yudel. “Why did you stay in the service of the apartheid government all those years?”

They had the prisoners, he had replied. Yudel sat at his desk, crouched forward, his eyes directed to the floor between his knees, but he was seeing nothing. His hands were on his thighs and his shoulders were hunched tightly together. He was rocking slightly.

Why? was indeed the question. He had often explained it to himself by remembering that the government had the prisoners. But the truth was that Yudel was ashamed of those years. He had often told himself that he was doing some good and there were times when he
had
done good. He had tried to bring sanity to situations in which sanity was in short supply. But there was no avoiding the fact that he had been part of the apartheid apparatus. If Abigail was fleeing from something, then so was he.

Perhaps that was part of his resentment of Freek. It all seemed so easy to him. He seemed to suffer no self-doubt. What Freek Jordaan did was the right thing to do—unlike Yudel Gordon, who was never entirely sure what the right path looked like.

Now there was Simon Mkhari, whose final chapter had been written in the dirt of a dusty Marabastad backyard the previous day. There had been many like him.

Yudel was not one to harbor hatred, but there were classes of criminal to whose cases he had been unable to bring objective detachment. Foremost among these were those who killed for political reasons. The self-righteousness with which they explained the burning alive of an old woman or the blowing to unrecognizable fragments of late-night revellers in a beachside bar was more than he had ever been able to digest. In recent years he had come face to face with some of them, now dressed in the respectability of senior government positions. They repelled him still.

Mkhari had not been one of those that the new government either needed or wanted. He disgusted Yudel, but not as much as those who had profited from their past homicides, under the cloak of liberation. This afternoon at lunch he had felt no regret at hearing about Mkhari's end. It had seemed a fitting one.

Despite all this, there had been a few minutes he had spent in Mkhari's company that would stay with him always. It had been to his shame, not Mkhari's.

Mkhari had originally been sentenced to death for the burning of the old woman and Yudel had visited him on death row. The prisoner had asked for the visit. He had heard the story that occasionally did the rounds on death row that no one was ever really executed. They fell through the floor of the gallows to an underground passage that led to the mint, where they made money for the rest of their lives. The theory was that the government could not allow people to go free who knew how to make money. So those who were sentenced to death went to the mint instead.

Yudel had been telling him that this was not so, and Mkhari had started to interrupt loudly when he suddenly stopped speaking. Something had happened down the passage toward the entrance of the block. Yudel had also heard it, but had not immediately attached any importance to the single word that now hung in the air like a sharp lowering of the temperature. The humming of voices that was always a part of death row had all but stopped. Within seconds, there was complete silence. The skin covering Mkhari's face had become taut. His pupils had dilated until the brown of the irises had all but disappeared. His nostrils flared with a sudden intake of breath. He had forgotten what he had started to say and even seemed to have forgotten that Yudel was with him in the cell. Like everyone else in the entire community of some 130 condemned prisoners, he was listening.

Yudel was listening too. That one word had been submerged below conversation level, yet it clung to the edges of his memory, an anonymous intrusion. The double row that made up the death cells had been reduced to a single, quivering sensor, straining to pick up whatever more there might be.

The door of a cell closed. Yudel heard steps in the passage and the sound of another door opening. Then the word he had heard before, but had not been able to hold on to.

“Pack.”

Mkhari's eyes were set, unblinking. There were other words too, but it was that one for which all were now listening. Again a door closed, the steps came closer and another opened.

“Pack.”

That was three. Yudel knew that there was not a man who was not counting. To know the number meant nothing in itself. It was only a statistic on which to hang their wondering. Again the man who had spoken was in the passage. The sound of his footfalls and those of his entourage was sharp and clear, leather heels clicking on the concrete surface. He stopped, just a few doors away. The heavy steel bolt slid clear and the hinges creaked briefly as the door swung open.

“Pack.”

And that was four. They were close enough for the other words to be audible. “I want jacket and address now.”

Again the footsteps in the passage. Just a little way and they would be level with Mkhari's cell. Yudel saw the expectancy with which the prisoner's eyes were fixed on the door. But this was fear, not excitement.

Then the sliding of steel against steel was coming from the solid steel door of Mkhari's cell. With a jerk it swung open and Sergeant Paulsen, senior warder in charge of the block, came in. He stopped at seeing Yudel. “Mr. Gordon … I didn't realize … I have to…”

Yudel nodded. Unconsciously he had taken a step back, so that he would not be between the warder and prisoner. There was no avoiding what had to be done. Paulsen stepped aside to let the sheriff come through.