Dead at Daybreak

∨ Dead at Daybreak ∧

23

She knocked on his door at seven in the morning and when he opened it, his hair tousled and his eyes sleep-filled, she walked in out of the dark, the red mark on her cheek bright from lack of sleep and the anger in her, the powerlessness because she couldn’t understand him.

She stood with her back against the gray wall while he remained at the open front door. “Shut the door,” she said. “It’s cold.”

He sighed, closed the door, walked to a chair, sat down.

“You’re my employer, Hope. You can fire me. It’s your right.”

“Why did you hit him, Van Heerden?”

“Because I wanted to.”

She dropped her chin onto her chest. Slowly shook her head from side to side, silent.

The silence spread through the room.

“Do you want coffee?” he asked without any tone of hospitality.

Her head was still moving from side to side. She looked at the running shoes on her feet, looking for words. “No, I don’t want coffee. I want answers.”

He said nothing.

“I’m trying to understand, Van Heerden. Since you left me there last night with a bleeding man lying next to the table and simply walked out and drove off, I’ve been trying to understand how your mind works. You were – ”

“Is that why you’re angry? Because I left you there?”

She lifted her eyes to his, silenced him with a look. When she spoke again, her voice was even softer. “You were a servant of justice, Van Heerden. According to all reports a good one. In the past few days I’ve had enough experience of you to come to the conclusion that you’re an intelligent man. Someone who understands causality. Someone who has the capacity to realize that action and consequence cannot be separated, cannot be restricted to those immediately involved. That’s what the whole legal system is about, Van Heerden. To protect the community against the wider implications. Because there are always wider implications.”

“Have you come to fire me, Hope?”

She didn’t hesitate for a moment, would not be driven off course.

“What I can’t understand, Van Heerden, is that you give yourself the right to hit someone, to wreak your own infantile rage on a defenseless person without giving a thought to the other nineteen people there.”

“Defenseless? He wasn’t defenseless. He was a provincial rugby player. And he was a cunt.”

“Do you think it makes you more of a man if you swear, Van Heerden? Do you think it makes you strong?”

“Fuck you, Hope. I never asked you to like me. I am what I am. I don’t owe anyone anything. You have no right to come into my house, to tell me how bad I am. I hit the cunt because he deserved it. He spent the entire evening looking for it. With his fucking superiority.”

“I don’t have the right? Are you the one with all the rights? To go to someone else’s house as a guest, as someone who needs Kara-An’s help for your work, and then attack one of her friends like a barbarian because you didn’t like his attitude? Your fists told him how bad he was. That was your right. But when I do it to you in a reasonably civilized manner, you’re suddenly touchy. Where’s your sense of fairness, Van Heerden?”

He sank back in his chair. “I told you. I’m bad.”

And then the mark flamed bloodred, a glow that spread over her entire face. She leaned forward, away from the wall, her hands gesticulating as she spoke. “Ah, the great excuse, the answer to everything: ‘I’m bad.’ Extrapolate that, you coward. Just think for a moment about a community in which we all do as we please as long as we admit we’re bad. We can murder and rape and deceive and assault, because we’re bad. It explains everything, it justifies everything, it excuses everything.”

He rested his chin on his hand, his fingers almost covering his mouth. “You wouldn’t understand.”

“I don’t understand. That’s the whole point. But I’m here because I want to understand. If I have insight into what you are, I can at least try to understand. To comprehend. But you don’t want to tell me anything. You live behind the barrier of your senseless excuses, your rationalization based on pathetic arguments. Speak to me, Van Heerden. Tell me why you’re like this. Then I’ll be able to understand. Or at least have some sympathy.”

“Why do you want to know, Hope? What’s with you? What does it matter? Next week, when this Van As affair is over, you’ll be rid of me. Then you can carry on your practice for women, the sad victims of society, and you need never think of me again. So, what does it matter?”

“Last night your behavior involved me and nineteen other people. You tainted my memory with an experience I didn’t ask for. You upset me. You humiliated me because the others assumed you were there with me. I was involved by association. I’m now part of your behavior. That is why, if you don’t have the courage to ask yourself questions, I’ll do it for you. Because I’ve been given the right to know, to try and understand.”

He snorted, wrinkled his nose. “Your reputation as the great female attorney has been dented because you were there with me. And you don’t like that.”

“You want to believe that, Van Heerden. That everyone is as selfish as you are.”

She walked across to him, her feet soundless in the running shoes, sat on the coffee table in front of him, her face almost touching his, her voice urgent, her words boiling up, tumbling out of her.

“I voted for the National Party, Van Heerden. Before ’ninety-two. In two elections. Because I believed separate development was right. Fair. Believed like my father and my mother. Like my friends. And their parents. Like my teachers and lecturers. Like the whole white population of Bloemfontein. I believed the local Afrikaans newspaper. And Afrikaans radio and TV. I questioned nothing because I saw blacks as we all saw them. As people who believed in witchcraft and the tokoloshe and the spirits of their forefathers, who worked in the house and garden and fetched the rubbish and smelled of Lifebuoy soap. I accompanied my father when he took Emily to the location and I looked at the dirty streets and the small, gardenless houses and I knew separate development was right because they were so unlike us. Why didn’t they garden? How could people have so little pride? Homelands. If they murdered so easily, let them do it in Thaba Nchu or Mafikeng or Umtata. I shuddered every time they planted a bomb or shot people in a restaurant. I was angry…shake your head as much as you like, Van Heerden, but now you’re going to listen. I was angry with the rest of the world every time they applied sanctions or criticized us because I thought they didn’t know, didn’t understand. They didn’t know our black people. They thought ours were like theirs, Sidney Poitier and Eddie Murphy and Whoopi Goldberg. Ours were different. Destroyers and wreckers, always angry and unfriendly. Ours spoke languages that no one understood. Theirs spoke the same American English as they did. And wore beautiful clothes and played Othello in the movies. And then ’ninety-two arrived and I was scared, Van Heerden, because now they would take everything and make a mess of it so that the entire country looked like dirty townships. My fear made me search for reasons why it shouldn’t happen. No logical thought, no open-mindedness, no sense of fairness. Fear. And then I found a book about Mandela, an old biography, written by some Dutch woman or other, and I read it and it was like being reborn. Do you know what it feels like to change your opinion of yourself, your views, your people, your parents, your leaders, your background, your history – all within two days? To realize everything you believed, and believed in, was wrong, twisted, without insight, even evil? But I’m proud of one thing, Van Heerden. That I had the ability to do it. To open my mind to truth. To see, after being blind for so long. And after I’d assimilated and processed the guilt and the humiliation, after working through my own anger and the anger I felt against all the whites who had assisted in my seduction, I came to a decision. Never again would I make a judgment based on a lack of exposure and knowledge and insight and comprehension. I would search for truth. I wouldn’t judge people because of their color, beliefs, or actions before I understood why they were like that. And if you think that I’m going to drop it, that I’ll believe your infantile excuses, that I’ll be thrown off course by your fencing and flight, you’re making a big mistake.”

She sat in front of him, her finger emphasizing each point, centimeters away from his nose, and then she laughed at herself, a short, derisory sound.

Slowly she released her breath.

“Talk to me.” The first word almost pleading.

He looked blankly at the wall.

“Our view of the world differs too much, Hope.”

“How do you know? You don’t know me.”

“I know enough, Hope. I know enough of your kind to know. You think life is fair. You think that if you try hard enough, try to live a good life, everything will be fine. You think it’s contagious. You think if you try, others will do the same, one after another, a wave of goodness that will cover all the evil in the world. I know you because I was like that once, Hope. No, I was better. I reached my lucidum intervallum long before ’ninety-two. At three in the morning I looked through the bars of the Pretoria police station cell and among the fifteen or sixteen black people in there, drunks and knife wielders and rapists and burglars, I saw a man sitting on the edge of the steel bench with a book of Breyten Breytenbach poetry open in his hands. A black man. I was the lieutenant, Hope – I was second in command. I had him taken out and brought to my office. I closed the door and talked to him. About poetry at first. He was a teacher in the black township Mamelodi. His Afrikaans was better than mine. He was arrested because he was on foot in a white suburb after midnight, on his way to the railway station, twelve kilometers away. He’d been visiting a professor who taught at the University of South Africa. By invitation. Because he had to discuss the progress of his thesis for his master’s degree on Breyten. They locked him up because what was a black man doing in a posh white suburb at that time of night? That was my moment of truth. It changed me. And suddenly I was the poor man’s Afrikaner Gandhi who wanted to bring the message of passive resistance to the tearoom, the bedroom, and the living room. In a civilized manner. I made a point of starting conversations with petrol attendants, office cleaners, and road-café waiters. Joking and sympathetic, I focused on them as people. I knew we differed culturally, but different isn’t wrong; different is merely different. Basically we’re all human, Hope. I knew that.”

He looked at her. Her eyes were on him, stunned: he was speaking to her, and he was speaking like an adult, like an intelligent, live human being.

“And that is the core. I thought that we were all good. Most of us. And let me tell you, that was a giant step, a great achievement for a cop. I made the big mistake of believing we were all good because I was good. Inherently, naturally.”

Then he was quiet. He sat in the worn chair in front of her and looked at her, moved his eyes over the contours of her face, familiar by now, saw the intensity with which she listened. He felt she was too near and he got up slowly, careful to keep his body turned away from her, avoiding physical contact. His mouth was dry. He took a few steps to the kitchen corner, switched on the kettle, turned. Her eyes were still fixed on him.

“My mother is an artist. That’s her work.” He pointed to the wall. “She creates beautiful paintings. She looks at the world and she makes it more beautiful on canvas. I think it’s her way of distancing herself from the evil that is in all of us. She says one must look at our whole history if we want to understand people. She says we’re retrospectively shortsighted: we only look back to the Greeks and the Romans. Some even look back as far as Moses, but she says we must look back far further. She says that sometimes when she’s working in her studio and it’s quiet, she hears a sound and she feels all the tiny muscles in her ear contracting to turn the shell in the direction of the sound, like a cat’s. She says that’s her proof, her reminder that we mustn’t forget to look back as far as the animal world. But even my mother won’t admit that we’re bad. She cannot. Just like you. Because you believe that you’re good. And you are. Because you have never had the opportunity to let the evil escape, because life has never given you the choice.”

The water boiled.

He turned away, took out two mugs. Coffee, he thought. The planet around which his and Hope Beneke’s social contact revolved.

She had courage, he thought. To come here. No one else had ever done it.

“Sugar and milk?”

“Only milk, please.”

He took the carton out of the fridge, poured milk into her mug, carried the two coffees. She moved from the table to a chair opposite his. She wanted to say a thousand things, but she didn’t want to put this miracle of an eloquent, new, intelligent, other, strange Van Heerden at risk with the wrong phrase.

He sat down. “You see, Hope – ”

The telephone rang. He looked at his watch, stood up, picked up the phone.

“Van Heerden.”

“Could I speak to Mike Tyson?” It was Kara-An.

“Are you looking for Hope?”

“No, Mike, I’m looking for you. I’m on the Morning Star road and I can’t find your house. I’m looking for directions.”

What did she want? “I don’t know where you are.”

“I’m in front of a gate. Next to the gate is a sign with the words TABLE STABLES. I presume it refers to the mountain, not a piece of furniture. Otherwise the owner should have his head examined.”

“The turnoff is a hundred meters farther on.”

“How will I know it when I see it?”

“There are two white pillars. One on each side of the entrance.”

“No cute little name?”

“No.”

“Didn’t think so, Mike. I’ll be there in a minute.”

“Come to the little house, not the big one.”

“Not the one on the prairie, I trust.”

“What?”

“Never mind, Mike, you’re a boxer, not an intellectual.” Then the line went dead. He replaced the phone.

“That was Kara-An.”

“Is she on her way?”

“She’s here. Down the road.”

Hope said nothing, merely nodded.

“What does she want?” he asked.

“I haven’t the vaguest idea.”

Then they saw headlights approaching the gate.

If she had a penchant for swearing, Hope Beneke thought, she would have employed one of Van Heerden’s words with a vengeance.