A song in the morning

Gerald Seymour
1

They were four.

They walked abreast, dodging the lunchtime crowd. They were unremarkable to the point of anonymity. When their line broke it was to let a White through because even for these four that was ingrained instinct. They all wore jogging shoes and loose shapeless trousers and long overcoats and their woollen caps were tight down on their skulls. The Whites passing between them, ignoring them, were still clothed for the rem-nants of the drought summer, girls in light frocks and cotton skirts and blouses and the men in shirt sleeves. But these four had started out on their journey to the city long before the Whites had stirred in their suburban beds. They had moved out of the township before the sun had glimmered onto the electricity pylons and over the horizon of galvanised tin roofs.

When they had caught their first bus the frost was still on the ground, crystal lights on the dry dun veld.

They didn't speak.

A security policeman or an interrogator might have noticed the tightness at their mouths, or the brightness in their eyes, or a certain stiffness in their walk, but the secretaries and the salesmen and the shop girls and the clerks saw nothing.

For each of them it was the first time that they had been given a mission into the very centre of the city.

A security policeman or an interrogator, any man who was accustomed to the scent of fear, might have noticed the way that one of the four held in two hands the strings of a duffel bag that was heavy and bulky. He might have seen that two others each had a hand thrust deep into the side pocket of the overcoat as if to guard or hide something of importance.

But the city was at peace and at its lunch hour, and the four young men aroused no attention as they made their way along Pritchard, going west.

For the Whites who shared the pavement with these four young Blacks the sun was high, and the violence of the townships was beyond sight, out of mind. A relaxed and safe and comfortable warmth shimmered on the fast traffic flow and the rough pavement on Pritchard. There were queues at the sandwich bars. There were men with their heads in the afternoon newspapers, not searching for the statistics of the previous night's unrest but for the selections of the local rugby teams. There were women eyeing the big plate glass windows of the department stores and the clothes that came by sea from London and Paris and Rome.

Together, at the same moment, the young Blacks saw the cream and grey Combi van that was parked against the kerb on the junction of Pritchard and Delvers. And they looked at each other and saw that they had all found the van.

A White man lounged behind the Combi's wheel.

The White couldn't have missed the four Blacks as they hesitated on the pavement, their faces split with nervous smiles, and stared at him. He couldn't have missed them but he gave no sign of having noticed them. He looked ahead and sucked the wet filter of a cigarette. The engine of the van was idling. The four Blacks went on, and one turned and saw that the rear doors were marginally open. It was all as they had been told it would be.

They waited for the green pedestrian light and crossed Van Wielligh.

Each of the four would have wanted to run now, to charge on the target, but the discipline held and so they waited for the light and then walked across the wide street and past four rows of cars. Past the Methodist Church offices and the bookshop. The one with the duffel bag stole a glance at the books in the window because he had been educated to Grade 3 at a church school, and the books in the window were something familiar to him where nothing else was familiar.

The ones with their hands in their pockets and the one with nothing to carry in his tight, clenched fists were of the townships round the city. The one with the duffel bag was a country boy and a member of this cadre only because of his special training.

The pavement narrowed, its width cut by high wooden boards, filled with advertising, that masked a building site.

They were jostled by Whites and Blacks alike hurrying against their flow.

The one with his hands clenched went first, a ram against the tide. He was followed by the one who held in his overcoat pocket a Makharov automatic pistol. Next was the one whose fingers were coiled round the smooth metal of an R.G.-42 fragmentation grenade. Last was the one with the duffel bag. They were past the building site, and the pavement opened out and in front of them were the tended lawns and the mock Gothic mass of the Rand Supreme Court.

They had all stopped. One thing to walk past the court when they were clean, carried nothing. Different now because three of them were the escort and the fourth carried a duffel bag that held a 5-litre can of petrol that was strapped with adhesive tape to nine sticks of explosive each weighing 250 grammes, and taped to the can and wired to the explosive was a battery for the electrical timing device manufactured to provide a 30 second fuse. They all waited on one of the others to take a step forward.

The courthouse was an attractive building, wide steps and a dominating portico, entered through double doors. The front part of the building housed the court rooms. Behind and towering was the eight storey administration block, the work place for the clerks and their records. Two years earlier comrades of these four young Blacks had smuggled a limpet mine into the administration. It had been defused before it exploded, but it remained something of a symbol. Not enough of a symbol for the men who had sent this cadre back for a second attack. Inside the courthouse the sentences were handed down on the comrades, on the captured cadres, in the broken cells. One year's imprisonment for playing a audio tape distributed by the African National Congress.

One year and six months for engraving a tea break mug with the words MANDELA – t h e people's leader. Six years for singing in gaol S university a song in praise of Mandela who was in gaol and Aggett and Biko who had died in police custody. Eight years for membership of the banned underground African National Congress and being found in possession of T-shirts with the logo viva mandela. Ten years for collecting political information for the African National Congress. Fifteen years for possession of firearms and explosives. Twenty years for sabotage. The sentence of death for the man who in the name of the African National Congress executed a policeman. On their way to the gaols the comrades had come in their tens and in their hundreds to the Rand Supreme Court on Pritchard Street.

It was a good target.

They were beside the sweeping entrance road that went down the side of the court building and then turned sharply into the tunnel that burrowed under the tower. It was the way the prisoners went, and the informers who gave evidence against them, the most secret of the state's witnesses. A White stood at the mouth of the entrance road, blocking it, short cut hair, pressed slacks, a club tie neatly knotted, and his arms crossed and cradling a personal radio. They had seen this policeman each time that they had come to look at the court, they would have to run back past him after the bomb. They had been told that everyone would be dazed after the bomb, that the Boer too would be confused, and they had the Makharov and the R.G.-42 fragmentation grenade.

The bustle and swim of the city eddied around them. The sun shone down on them. The noises of the city drifted between them. The one who carried the duffel bag closed his eyes, seemed to look upwards and his lips moved in silence as if he repeated a single word again and again. He was the country boy who was fearful of everything that was beyond the farm where he had been raised. He was the country boy who had stifled that fear and travelled by aircraft two years before from Tanzania to the great city of Moscow, who had gone to the camp outside Kiev and who had flown back with his knowledge of explosives and his expertise in detonators and fuses. The others huddled close to the country boy and they heard the whispered hiss on his lips, the one word.

The word was Amandla, meaning Freedom.

Muscles strained under the overcoats, veins swelling from under the woollen caps. They were together, they were as one.

The country boy took a great gulp of air into his lungs and his hand loosened the mouth of the duffel bag and slid down inside it.

They walked along the pavement, beside the low wall that bordered the court's lawns. They saw the Blacks who lay on the grass on their backs, servants of the court and outside because it was the lunchtime recess. They saw a barrister trotting towards the doorway with his gown folded like a raincoat over his arm. They saw the Japanese cars parked at the kerb immediately in front of the doors and their high radio aerials which showed they were driven by the security police and the crime squad detectives. They saw a White youngster kiss his White girl. They saw a Black man wobble and swerve on his bicycle when he was cut up by a shining Mercedes. They saw the dark open doorway of the court.

The country boy wondered if the White in the Combi would really wait for them after the blast and the fire…

The country boy led.

On the skin strip between the collar of his overcoat and the wool of his cap he could feel the separate breath of the one with the Makharov and the one with the R.G.-42. He knew what the bomb would do. At the training camp he had seen the scattering flame of the bomb. He liked what he had seen. What he did not like was the order that the timing of the attack should be for the lunch hour. There had been a fierce argument between those who would carry the bomb and those who gave order for its use. Those who gave the order had said they wanted only damage to the buildings, not casualties. Those who carried the bomb had insisted on damage to the buildings and also to the Whites who were the apparatus of the state and the Blacks who were the accomplices of the state, The compromise had been the lunch hour… He led up the path between the lawns. His right forefinger rested on the switch inside the duffel bag, when he pressed the switch they had half a minute. The two doors were open. The lunch hour, so they said, was the likeliest chance that the lobby of the court would be empty.

The country boy thought it was a wrong decision. A heavy wooden bench was placed across the doorway leaving only a small entrance through which the court's visitors could be filtered by the police when the adjournment was over, when the friends and relations of the accused would be admitted.

On the first floor judges were clustered round the table in the chamber of the most senior of them, talking not of law but of bloodstock form. In the Whites' canteen, waitress service, barristers briefed by the state sat with their poorer Pro Deo colleagues who would make the defence case, seldom successfully, for their clients, and chewed over disinvestment and the slide of the rand and the collapse of residential property prices. In the basement cells a White businessman charged with fraudulent conversion ate the fried chicken sent in by his mistress, and in their separate cells there were Blacks who squatted against the cold concrete walls and bowed their heads over bowls of porridge.

The country boy was on the the bottom step. The doorway yawned in front of him. His finger was rigid on the switch.

They were panting behind him. He pressed the switch.

Again the draught of air sank in his throat.

"It's closed."

The Boer's voice. The enemy's voice. His hand snaked back out of the bag. The arm that was to hurl the bag into the lobby of the court frozen useless.

"You can't go in there for another eighteen minutes."

He spun his head. He saw the one with the Makharov and the one with the R.G.-42 and the one who had nothing at all gawping back down onto the path. The uniformed warrant officer stood in the centre of the pathway, his arms were clasped behind his back on a short leather-coated swagger stick. An immaculate police tunic, knife-edge trousers, shoes that a servant had polished.

"Seventeen minutes actually." The warrant officer grinned cheerfully. "For now, get yourselves away."

The country boy flexed his arm, turned and threw the bag into and inside the doorway.

He ran.

He cannoned into the one with the Makharov, felt the bite of the barrel into his thigh, and he ran. Across the grass.

Jumping the wall. All of them charging together. None of them hearing the shout of the warrant officer. None of them seeing him stagger from the shoulder charge of the one who had nothing, and then go as if from instinctive duty through the doorway, none of them seeing him grope for the duffel bag under a table deep in the lobby and take it in his arms and twist again for the bright sunlight of the doorway. All of them sprinting. None of them seeing the fast sweep of understanding chisel the face of the plain clothes policeman with the personal radio.

They were past the building site. They were running, swerving, sidestepping, jumping into the traffic on Van Wielligh, going chicken with a bus driver and having him brake when the bomb exploded.

A bomb detonated in the centre of a safe city, in the middle of a safe lunch hour.

A bomb that spewed fire, showered glass, ripped at plaster and concrete and brick work.

All four would dearly have loved to have seen the explosion. Only the country boy had an exact idea of the scale of the flame blown outwards in a blazing spray. They would dearly have loved to have seen the warrant officer disintegrate when he was a yard from the door, when he was at the moment of throwing the bomb away from him and onto the grass. In the few seconds that the warrant officer had screamed of the danger of the bomb he had attracted enough attention for there to be seven civilians and two policemen in the court lobby. They would dearly have loved to see those nine persons bowled over by the blast and the smoke cloud and the fire draught. They saw nothing of the devastation, and nothing of the policeman chasing after them, the radio in one hand and a revolver in the other.

They reached the Combi van.

They flung open the door and scrambled inside in a confusion of knees and elbows and shouts, and the van was accelerating into the wide spaces of Pritchard before they'd managed to close the doors. The last thing the country boy saw before the doors were shut was the policeman on the pavement, panting, heaving, yelling into his radio.

Jeez drove like he hadn't a tomorrow.

And he didn't reckon he had, a tomorrow.

Shit, and he'd heard the explosion. Couldn't have missed it. Half choked on his cigarette, and the windows around him had rattled fit to break and he'd seen the heads on the pavement spinning to stare up the street. He'd been facing away from the explosion, he'd had only the shock wave, none of the sights… left into End, up past the Kerk junction, left onto Jeppe… Jeez going hard, and with the frown slashed on the old weather-stained skin of his forehead. He was going hard because he'd heard the bang and a bang like that at mid-day in central Jo'burg meant a bloody big show.

Nobody had said anything other than that he was to be parked in a Combi van on the corner of Pritchard and Delvers, north side, looking east, back doors unfastened.

Done as he was told, because that's what they all did in the Movement, Blacks and Whites. Shit, nobody had said it was a bloody headline grabber they'd be running from… Right off Jeppe and into Rissik. He was burning the tyres, hitting the turns. Way ahead, up Rissik, was the railway station, that's where he'd been told he had to get. Four kids to catch a train that's all. He had been told that if there was a police block then a White in a commercial van would sail through.

But this was an arsehole.

Because of his initials James Carew had always been Jeez.

He rather fancied it. He used that name on the telephone, used it to anyone who knew him marginally. He'd had the name since the time he left school, since he was in the army.

The name was his possession, his style, like kids who had a ring in their ear, or a tattoo. He was Jeez, had been for more than years.

He heard the siren.

Shit… Jeez saw the traffic in front of him swerving for the slow lane, and that told him that the bells and the whining were behind, and his ears told him the bastards were closing.

Nobody had told him who he would be driving. Hadn't said it was a getaway. Just that four kids who were a bit hot needed picking up on the corner of Pritchard and Delvers and needed dropping off at the station. When he'd seen them earlier, he'd thought: bright lads, these, not piling into the van straight off. They'd have been checking for a tail.

Well, now they had a tail all right.

He'd been on the road of bells and sirens before, more than twenty years before, but the memory was still sharp, not the sort of sound that any bugger ever forgets. What was sharpest was the same dingy old thought, that when he heard the sirens and saw the uniforms then there wasn't a hell of a lot of point in beating your guts out and running faster.

A bloody shambles the clowns had dropped him in. Shit up to his nose.

In the back was a babble of screaming for more speed.

He looked into the side mirror. The unmarked car had the bell going, and the yellow police wagon had the blue light going and the siren… right up to his bloody nose and down his bloody nostrils. When he looked again through his front windscreen he saw the police jeep that was slewed across the road a bit over a hundred yards ahead. There were no side turnings between him and the police jeep. Back to the mirror. The car and the wagon weren't trying to get past him, didn't have to, were sitting on his arse, shepherding him.

The poor bastards were frantic in the back, spittle on his neck the way they were shouting through the close mesh grille.

You win some and most often you lose, that's what Jeez reckoned.

He eased his foot onto the brake pedal. He changed down.

He could see that there were pistols aimed at him from behind the cover of the police jeep. Down again to second, and his foot harder onto the brake and stamping.

"Sorry, boys," Jeez said softly.

If they hadn't been making such a hell of a rumpus they might have heard the genuine sadness in his voice. He brought the Combi to a halt. He took the keys out of the ignition and tossed them out of the window, onto the roadway. He looked into the side mirror. The policemen were spilling out of the unmarked car and out of the wagon, crouching and kneeling and all aiming their hand guns at the Combi. Nobody had told Jeez what the hell he was into.

Silence in the van.

"Let's have a bit of dignity, boys." An English accent.

"Let's not give the bastards the pleasure of our fear."

Jeez opened his door. He stepped down onto the street.

He clasped his hands over the top of his head.

In front of him and behind him the policemen began to run warily forward.

Johannesburg is a hard city. It is a city where the Whites carry guns and the Blacks carry knives. Not a city where the pedestrians and shoppers cower on their faces because the police have drawn revolvers and have blocked off a Combi and are handcuffing four kaffirs and a kaffir lover. A crowd had gathered inside the minute that it took the police to hustle their five prisoners towards the wagon and to kick them up and slam the doors on them. There was something to see. The White guy was the something to see. Must have been more than forty, could have been more than fifty, and wearing decent slacks and a decent shirt. The crowd wondered what the White guy was doing with those Black bastards, what the hell he was at.

Four long blocks away a cloud of slow moving smoke was settling above Pritchard Street.