Dead at Daybreak

∨ Dead at Daybreak ∧

22

Sergeant Thomas “Fires” van Vuuren was a caricature, a peripheral figure in my Sunnyside days, a brandy addict who exhibited the evidence of his passion with a map of blue veins on his face and a knob of a nose, which he wore gracelessly, a man in his late fifties with a vast belly, unattractive and obtuse.

Of all the people at the station, he would have been the last on the list of my nominees of those who would have a lasting influence on my life. I hardly knew him.

In the police, as in any government organization, there are a number of them, those rather pathetic people who get stuck at a certain rank because of some deficiency, sometimes blatant laziness or an unforgivable misdemeanor – the cannon fodder of bureaucracy who trundle down the slow track to retirement without haste or expectation. Sarge Fires was always around. I don’t think we exchanged more than five words in my first two years.

I sat in the tearoom, cramming, my first set of questions for the promotion examination a month or so away. He came in, made himself coffee, dragged a chair to the table, and tinkled the spoon loudly against the cup as he stirred.

“You’re wasting your time with the sergeants’ exam,” he said.

I looked up, surprised, saw his watery little blue eyes watching me attentively.

“Sarge?”

“You’re wasting your time.”

I moved the books and folded my arms. “Why, Sarge?”

“You’re a clever boy, Van Heerden. I’ve been watching you. You’re not like most of them.”

He lit a cigarette, without filter, smelly tobacco, and checked the temperature of his coffee with a small sip. “I saw your service file. You were the top guy in the college. You read. You look at the shit in the cells and you see people and you think and you wonder.”

I was astonished.

He trickled the cigarette smoke through his nostrils, thrust his hand into his shirt pocket, and took out a creased piece of paper, then unfolded it and passed it to me across the table. It was a page from the police magazine Servamus.

Boost Your Career Now!

Enroll Now for the BA (Police Science) Degree at Unisa

Since 1972 the SAP and Unisa have offered a degree that is specifically aimed at professionalizing your post with an academic background. This is a specialist three-year course with police science as a compulsory major subject – and one of the following as a second major subject: criminology, public administration, psychology, sociology, political science, or communication science.

An address and telephone numbers followed.

I finished reading and looked up at Sergeant Fires van Vuuren, at the red hair that he had allowed to grow long on one side to enable him to comb the strands over the ever-increasing bald patch.

“You must do that,” he said through another mouthful of smoke. “These other little exams” – waving at my original reading matter – “are for policemen like Broodryk. And the like.”

Then he stood up, killed the cigarette in the ashtray, took his coffee, and walked out. I called, “Thanks, Sarge,” after him, but I don’t know whether he heard me.

Over the years I would often think about that moment in the Sunnyside station’s tearoom. About Thomas van Vuuren and his mysterious interest and encouragement. The Broodryk to whom he had referred was an adjutant in the terminology of the old ranks, a big, brusque, ambitious man who would later acquire notoriety as one of the most merciless operators at the infamous Vlakplaas, who had, in Sunnyside, already shown his willingness to physically abuse those arrested.

Fires van Vuuren never again tried to speak to me. Once or twice I tried to look him up after I had registered as a student at Unisa and started my studies, but he had withdrawn behind his rampart of obtuseness, as if our conversation had never happened. What had motivated him to draw my service file (without permission, more likely than not) and to tear out the magazine page carefully and bring it to me, I’ll never know.

I can only speculate that the truth lay somewhere in the contrast he had drawn between Broodryk and me. Was Van Vuuren’s weakness that he saw criminals as human beings? Had his physical unattractiveness hidden a sensitivity that had to be deadened by brandy so that he could get through his daily task?

He died a year or two later of a heart attack, alone in his house. His funeral was small and sad. A son was there, a single member of the family at the graveside, with a set face and a measure of relief, I thought. And the conventional wisdom of his colleagues was “It was the booze,” said with much shaking of heads.

And the evening after my first graduation ceremony, I quietly drank a toast to him. Because he had given me two gifts: Direction. And self-respect. I know it sounds dramatic but one must draw the comparison accurately, rather like those kitsch slimming ads that use the “Before” and “After” pictures (often touched up) to convince. After two years in Sunnyside I was firmly on the road to nowhere, frustrated, unstimulated, professionally at sea, unwilling to admit that I had made a mistake in my career choice. The police, more than any other occupation, has a way of blunting one’s sensibilities, both by the endless routine and by the nature of the work – the constant exposure to the dregs, the scum, the aberrant, the socially and economically deprived, and, sometimes, the purely evil.

Thomas van Vuuren had opened a door in this maze.

As I advanced academically, the stimulation and focus would systematically act as the deus ex machina to haul me out of the professional quicksand. I started liking myself.

Oh, the psychology of positive feedback.

“Your essays show singular writing and dialectic skills. It is a pleasure to receive them.”

“Your insight into this subject is impressive and considerably above the level of what is expected from an undergraduate. Congratulations.”

What the lecturers didn’t realize and I, on a subconscious level, did, was that the course was a lifeline. I studied at every possible moment, read more than necessary, analyzed. I chose police science, criminology, and psychology as my main subjects, unwilling to give up any of the three. I achieved (not without self-satisfaction) distinctions in all three, every year. I was promoted, even though the promotion was due to my passing the sergeants’ examination, and transferred to the Pretoria station. The three stripes meant very little to me. I had far higher ideals.

My mother was overjoyed with her son’s newfound focus, with the fact that I was acquiring an “education.”