A song in the morning

12

The minibus driver kept the stops short. Just enough time for the tourists to take their photographs, and for the guide to give her spiel to a German couple, four Americans, and Jack.

The guide was an attractive girl, might have been thirty years old but she wore her hair young in the blonde Diana style. She had sensible shoes, and perhaps that was the giveaway that the girl who had the job of introducing tourists to Soweto was not a child. She talked well. She had to talk well because the material for her to talk about was pathetic in the uniform dreariness of the streets and the homes.

They had come through the Orlando area of the township city. They were on high ground and looking down over the corrugated roofing and the straight roads and across the railway yards and away over further hills that were blistered with roofs.

The guide said, "We don't really know what the population of Soweto is. It's very difficult to get these people to fill in a census form, and they have their relations come to stay with them. They aren't the sort of people who are good with forms. So, it could be anything between one and two million people, we really don't know.. . "

The first reason for Jack to come to Soweto was that he must behave as a tourist. Yesterday he had gone to Pretoria.

Today he was waiting for his contact. And he needed desperately to be out of the hotel, was fearful of every footfall in the corridor, dreaded having to go back, wondering whether his room would be staked out, the explosives discovered.

The day porter had made the telephone call, placed the hooking. The Rand Development Board tour was back on schedule, he said, because Soweto had been quiet for a week.

"You can see with your own eyes that this is a community into which a great deal of government money has been placed, millions of rand have been spent on making the living conditions of our Black people more acceptable. Most of Soweto now has electricity, most of it has running water.

All of the main roads now have tarmac, and later you will see that we have started to build shops, the supermarket type of shops. The amount of money that we are spending is a very great drain on the country's resources, but we are spending it…"

The second reason for Jack to have made the journey into Soweto was vaguer. He felt that he had joined a war, that he had become a part of the armed struggle of the people who lived in this and other vagabond townships. He wondered how many of the one or two millions who eked out an existence in Soweto acknowledged the legitimacy of the tactic of bombs and bullets to change the conditions of their existence, how many of them knew the name of Jacob Thiroko. Not one of them would have heard of Duggie Arkwright. He thought of his journey into Soweto in part as a tribute to Duggie. He had thought that he might learn something of the people in whose cause Duggie had laboured. Driving past the stunning repetition of the homes of one million, or two million, people gave him not an iota of an idea of what their notion of a political future might be.

"Why are there high lights in the middle of open ground, illuminating nothing?"

The German man waved airily in the direction of hugely tall arc light stands that were dispersed over an open area of rubbish and building debris and raw earth. The German woman looked at her husband sheepishly as if she thought it impolite to ask a question.

The ready answer. "They are there to make it safer for the residents. Unfortunately, Soweto is a very lawless place.

On average, every weekend, there are thirty murders in the township boundaries. The gangsters prey on the wage earners, rob them and kill them when they are coming back from the beer halls. We call the gangsters tsotsis, they are just hoodlums, sometimes they are ordinary criminals, sometimes they are agitators trying to intimidate the peace loving people… "

"I was told," the German said, "that they put the electricity in so that the Africans would buy televisions and radios and all the electrical appliances that are sold in the White owned shops. I was told it was just to expand the market that they put the electricity in."

"Whoever told you that was lying." The guide withered the German.

She had a fixed smile when she was talking to the tourists.

But in the front seat beside the driver her smile dropped.

When the tourists were muttering amongst themselves or trying to photograph from the moving bus, then Jack saw the reality of her face. He saw the frowns on her neat forehead as she talked with the driver, discussed where it was safe to go. The driver would pause at each cross roads, and the White guide and the Black driver would stare and hesitate. Jack couldn't help but see the reasons for the hesitation. Slogans aerosol-ed on walls.

KILL ALL WHITES. Be Kind to Animals, Adopt a Policeman. Death to Traitors and Informers and Collaborators. Children of the African Heroes Do Not be Afraid of Whites.

Jack thought it was lunatic to be running a scenic drive round friendly Soweto. The Germans and the Americans didn't seem concerned. The Germans were preoccupied with their focal lengths. The Americans were so busy in a denunciation of their own media, and Edward Kennedy and all the liberal East Coasters who gave them the picture of South Africa in flames, that Jack wondered if they had even seen the armoured personnel carriers parked at the side of the petrol station, and the second group that were parked close to the big school complex. He wondered if the Black polite were local, what it was like for them to be on law enforcement in their own community. He kept his peace.

Jack thought the rows of small brick homes, match boxes, and the pitted streets and the piled rubbish and the pitifully few shops were pathetic. He couldn't understand how the authorities could put a bus on, with a pretty girl as guide to boast about how much had been achieved, and drive tourists round so that they could see with their own eyes how bloody awful the place was.

"The impression you get back home, back in the State of Washington, is that the whole place is aflame. Looks pretty peaceful to me."

"What I reckon is that all these folks want is work and to be left in peace."

The bus jerked to the right. Jack saw the guide pointing to a group of young Blacks standing on waste ground a hundred yards ahead. The driver had turned down a holed track. They went fast past a fire-blackened house. He saw the driver's face when he turned to the guide for instructions.

There was a sweat sheen on the driver's skin. Jack wondered how it would be to go back to the township each night when your job was driving White tourists round your backyard by day. They came back onto a main road. There was no commentary from the guide. He could sense the mood between the driver and the guide, that they had been around too long. There were school children streaming along the sides of the road.

An American woman said that the kids looked cute in their white shirts and black trousers or skirts. The German woman was complaining that the minibus was going too fast for her to take photographs through the window. They went along two streets where the houses were larger. Black middle class homes. The guide started to talk about the owner of a taxi fleet, and the owner of a Black football team. Jack thought the houses belonged to White clones, because there were leaping German Shepherds in the front gardens. There was smoke rising ahead.

The German man was tapping the guide's back, then pointing to a bungalow that was larger than the others, once the queen of the street. A smoke charred bungalow, with fire scorched beams littering a front lawn.

"What happened there?"

The guide turned to speak to the German, wasn't looking ahead, hadn't seen the smoke rising from tyres in the road.

"That was the home of the Mayor of Soweto. That is the work of the agitators. His home was burned down. It was an attempt by the agitators to intimidate those who are trying to better the life of the Blacks in Soweto… "

The driver was slowing, but he was Black. He couldn't tell the guide to shut her mouth and concentrate on what was going on in front of them and tell him what the hell to do. Over the guide's shoulder, Jack saw the schoolchildren, cute, running forward from the tyre barricade towards the bus.

"It would be quite wrong to think that the majority of Blacks are hostile to the reforms that we are making, only a very few try to sabotage the sincere efforts that the State President is making to involve Blacks in local government… "

Cut off in her speech the guide looked irritably at the driver. The bus was stopped. He was wrenching through his gears, looking for reverse and panicking, spinning his wheel. She was about to snap her impatience at the driver, when she saw the sprinting children.

Jack saw the fury on their faces.

The faces were blurred in the dust-dirty windows of the bus, but the rage was unmistakable. Ecstatic loathing. Arms raised, stones held up. Boys and girls running together, shouting together.

The bus was across the road, the engine racing.

The guide was shouting high-pitched at the driver, and covering her face with her arm. She shouldn't have screamed at him, she should have let him get on with taking them clear.

He stalled the engine.

Stones rained on the minibus. The windscreen cascaded into the driver's face, across the guide's lap was a shower of diamond glass. Jack was rigid in fear, couldn't move, didn't know how to help himself. Everyone inside the bus shouting, and one of the Americans starting a prayer, and the German pulling his wife back from the side window and replacing her head with his wide-angle lens.

Black faces against the window. A hand with a knife, fists with stones. Muscles to rock the bus. Almost a darkness inside, because the window light was blocked by the Black faces, Black bodies, Black fists.

It was over very suddenly.

Jack hadn't heard the crack of the gas grenade guns, nor the patter of the shotguns, nor the roaring power of the Casspir A.P.C.

When he was aware of the silence he lifted his head. The screaming had stopped. There was a whimpering from one of the American women, the one whose husband had said that the Blacks just wanted work and to be left in peace.

The guide was shivering, but upright, and was painstakingly starting to pick the windscreen fragments from her sweater.

The Casspir had gone past them. The schoolchildren had scattered.

The Casspir bumped on the body of a kid who had been shot in the legs and was writhing, and who was still when he emerged to view again from under the wide heavy tread of the tyres.

A police jeep pulled up alongside the minibus.

Jack saw the savage expression on the officer's face as he climbed out. He couldn't follow the detail of the language as the officer tongue-lashed the guide in Afrikaans. The message was clear enough, they were bloody fools to have been there, they should get the hell out.

Subdued, they drove back to Johannesburg.

The German had damaged his wide-angled lens but by God he'd have a picture or two. The American, from Wash ington state, announced that he'd be making a donation to the South African police. The guide looked straight ahead, hugging herself against the wind through the jagged edges of the windscreen. Jack had learned something of the war.

He had seen twenty kids who would have stoned him to death because he was White. He had seen a kid, minutes out of the classroom, become a statistic in death because he was Black.

At the Carlton Hotel where the bus dropped them off there were no goodbyes, no tips for the driver. The guide had nothing to say to them, not even about communists and agitators.

He went back towards the Landdrost. He approached it as calmly as he could from three angles. No sign of a police presence. And eventually just a friendly greeting from the day porter. Infinite regrets that sir had not had the best impression from his tour.

There was no message.

•**

The solicitor looked again at his watch. In four and a half minutes it was the third time he had looked at the gold face on his wrist.

The prison officer stood behind him, ignoring him.

He sat on the hard wooden chair and looked through the plate glass at the mirror of the room that was opposite him.

The room he looked into was the same in each detail to the one in which he sat. There were no decorations in the visit rooms. A room divided by a wall and a window of plate glass. An identically placed door in each section. Identical tables below the plate glass. A single chair on each side of the glass, and a voice pipe that was like an inverted elephant's trunk for speaking into and for listening through.

He hated this little room, had hated it each time that he had come to visit his client. His one aim was to get his work done, to get back to his car, to drive with his escort to the airlock gate in the outer wall, to get himself through the identity check point on Soetdoringstraat, to get himself out onto Potgieterstraat, as soon as it was marginally decent for him to do so. They had treated him like dirt when he had come in through the checks and searches and delays. They seemed to despise him as they had walked him across the lawn to the visit room. No small talk, as if the presence of a solicitor, a man trying to cheat them from their work, was an irrelevance to their way of work. He had the job because he had once represented James Carew in a case involving a minor traffic accident. In John Vorster Square Carew had given the name of the young solicitor, and a damned black day that had been. He wished to God he had never been involved.

Because he was frightened being so close to the hanging shed, and to the man who was to walk into that shed, he felt resentment against Carew.

He had been telephoned by the colonel of the security police. He had endured a lecture from the Boer policeman.

He knew what had happened. He was a lawyer and he was a citizen of the Republic of South Africa. He had done his damned best to represent Carew at committal, at trial, and since sentence. He had not considered it possible that his client would reject the colonel's deal, not when the rope was the irrevocable alternative. He had done his best for his client, and he had hoped to God that his client would do the best thing for himself and talk to the security police about the A.N.C. The solicitor's parents lived in Durban; that city had been the target of a bomb at Christmas of all times; the A.N.C. were foul murderers. From all he had seen of his client he could not place him in the same category. But then Carew, for all the sessions they had had together, remained an enigma to the young solicitor. The man had a past, he was certain. The nature of the past, his ignorance of it, burned as resentment.

He had done as much as he could for Carew and Carew had done nothing for him, nothing for himself.

He was quite justified in his resentment.

He heard the approach of footsteps down the corridor, sounds distorted through the tube that was the link between his outside world and Carew's inside world in the hanging place.

He had prepared what he would say to Carew. He would tell Carew that he had done all that was possible to save his life. He would tell his client that rejecting the colonel's offer had been an act of egregious folly. He was going to tell his client that it would be a waste of time to attempt another clemency petition.

That in his view it was so damned unnecessary.

The door was opened.

Jeez was led in.

Through the glass the solicitor stared at Jeez. He thought his man was frailer than when he had last seen him, as if he had lost weight, as if the skin on his cheeks had been peeled back and the flesh underneath scalpelled away and then the skin rolled back again to sag over the hollowness.

Jeez sat down opposite him.

God, how to be sharp with a man who was going to walk to the gallows.

There was a small smile on Jeez's face. The solicitor understood. The bastard knew. The obstinate bastard had known what he had done when he had walked out on the colonel. The solicitor could not consider how a man voluntarily turned his back on life, not when the choice was his.

"Good of you to call round, young man. Did you have a pleasant drive over?"

The solicitor swallowed hard. The resentment died in him. In a torrent flow he told Jeez that the legal options were exhausted.

• •*

It was all because of a series of coincidences.

Because an assessor had been called back into the army for reserve service, and another assessor had been at home with his wife and newly-born baby, and her supervisor had thought it would be good experience for her to be out of the office, Ros van Niekerk had gone to a fire damaged home in Sandton. The cook/maid had left the electric chip frier on all night. The chip frier had finally caught fire in the small hours, gutting an expensive kitchen. She had gone to work that morning in a pure white skirt, and that skirt had been dirtied as she had moved about the kitchen assessing the damage and agreeing the size of the claim. Ros went home to change after the call.

Because her father was at work and her mother was at morning bridge, she let herself into the house that she expected to be deserted except for their maid. The maid had been a young nanny once, but with Ros and Jan grown up the nanny's role was gone. She could hear the maid in the back washhouse. Ros didn't announce herself, went up the stairs to her room.

Because the radio was playing in Jan's room she went to the slightly opened door. It surprised her to hear the radio.

She thought her brother must have left it on when he had gone to Wits – always late. She eased the door open. The room was empty. The bed was made. The radio was playing.

There was a sprawl of papers on the small teak wood desk where he did his studying.

Because Ros sometimes wished that she had gone to university and not straight to work when she had left school, because she always took an interest in what Jan read and what he wrote in his essays, she glanced down at the papers on the table.

Because of that short series of coincidences Ros van Niekerk found herself staring down at the drawn plans made by the old Hungarian for Jacob Thiroko.

She was no fool. She understood immediately the content of the map drawn on the uppermost sheet of paper. The broad strokes of the roads were marked. Potgieterstraat, Soetdoringstraat, Wimbledonstraat. There were rectangular blocks drawn beside the roads. Local, White Political, Pretoria (Old) Central, New Women's, Beverly Hills. She knew what she looked at.

Mechanically, as if she sleepwalked, she lifted the piece of paper. The second sheet was drawn to a larger scale. A rectangular block enclosing another block, and a part of the inner block was drawn in detail. She read. Gate house and radio control, wooden gates, steps, light, watchtower. She read measurements. The longest of the outer lines was marked as 200 metres, what she took to be an inner wall was marked at 100 metres.

She heard the toilet flush down the landing. Her eyes didn't leave the detail. She read. Corridor, C section 1, exercise yard, visit r o o m… She heard Jan's trailing footstep shuffle towards his room. .. She read. Workshop, washhouse, preparation room. She read the one word… She heard him stumbling from the door towards her… She read. Gallows… Jan's hand caught at her, spun her away from the papers.

"What the hell are you doing?"

She faced up to him. He was the boy but he was no taller than her. She could look straight into his eyes.

"You bloody ask yourself what you're doing."

She had never before seen such violence on Jan's face.

She said, "This is bloody treason."

He shouldered past her, he was snatching at the papers.

She caught his arm.

She said, "You can't undo what I've seen. I've read the word. Gallows. That map's treason."

He shook her hand off him. There was a high livid flush on his face. He was vulnerable, in her eyes always had been.

"You shouldn't have come snooping in here… "

"I come in here, I find a map of Pretoria prison. I find a map of the place where they hang people. You have to do better than tell me I'm snooping."

He thrust the papers into his desk drawer. He locked the drawer with the key on his waist chain. He turned to her, defiant, cornered.

"So what are you going to do?"

"What the hell does that mean?"

"Are you going to inform on me?"

"I'm your sister, Jan. Your bloody sister. Where did you learn that sort of bloody talk? Sister, got it."

"Are you going to Father, are you going to the security police?"

"For God's sake, I'm your sister. I love you, you're my brother."

They clung to each other.

Ros said softly, "How long have you been living a lie, Jan?"

"I swore an oath of secrecy."

"I'm your sister, I'm not your enemy."

"It was an oath, Ros."

"We never had secrets."

"You wouldn't understand."

"That my brother is involved in treason, perhaps I wouldn't understand that."

"Treason is their word. It isn't mine."

"Jan, I love you, but you are involved in something that is against the law."

"That's important?" He shouted at her. "It's only important because it's against the law? Don't play the bourgeois cretin, Ros. The evil in this country is ending, its time's up.

We're on the march, going forward. It's over for the Boers and the racists… "

"The Boers make the laws." Her voice raised against his.

"If you go against the law then you go to prison."

"I swore the oath, Ros."

"For what?" A snap of contempt.

"To be able to look in the eye the men and women of our country. To have my pride. You have to fight something that is wrong. Not like those bastard businessmen fight it, mealy statements about 'concern', plane trips to Lusaka to plead with the Freedom Movement not to give all their shares and their stocks to the people when the revolution comes. Not like those crappy Liberals at Wits, all piss, all wind. I fight the evil with the language the system understands."

She snorted at him. "What do you do?"

"I do my part."

She couldn't help herself, there was the sneer of the elder sister. "What's your part? Running messages on your little moped?"

"My part."

"How can little Jan van Niekerk hurry the revolution?"

"I do my part."

"The Blacks wouldn't trust you."

"They trust me."

"How do they trust you?"

He turned away from her. He went to his bed, flopped down. His head was in his hands.

"I swore an oath of secrecy."

"How do they trust you?"

She knew he would tell her. She had always had the power to take anything from him, even the things that were most

" precious. He was always weak in her hands.

"Is it the terrorists of the African National Congress? How do they trust you?"

He spoke through his fingers. She had to lean forward to hear him.

"The bomb in John Vorster Square. I delivered it to the man who placed it."

"What?" Incredulity widening her mouth.

"They trust me that much. I moved that bomb."

"You could go to prison for the rest of your life."

"That's a God-awful reason for backing off the fight against evil."

"Rubbish."

He looked up at her, clear faced. "You go to the police, Ros."

She hissed, "Say that again."

"Just go to the police, Ros, turn me in."

She took the step towards him. She raised her hand. He didn't flinch. She slapped his face. His head rocked. She saw the smile that was beaming up at her.

"What are you going to do?"

She stared out of the window. She saw the maid hanging the washing on the rope line. She saw her father's good quality shirts, and her mother's good quality underwear, and she saw Jan's T-shirts and her blouses. She saw neat gardens ablaze with shrubs and flowers. She saw a Black man collecting grass cuttings. She saw their world that was comfortable and familiar, and now threatened.

"I'm going to fight to keep you out of prison."

"What does that mean?"

"It means that on your own you'll rot the rest of your life in prison."

The words were music to Jan van Niekerk.

Quietly he told her that he was under instruction to go to a certain place and deliver a message for a man to make a rendezvous. He knew the name of the man. He said it was the man who had taken the bomb into John Vorster Square police station. He told her that he had to meet the man and give him the plans of the Pretoria Central prison complex.

"Left to yourself, little brother, you'll rot for the rest of your life," Ros said.

The man was White.

He had been born in Latvia. He was a colonel in the K.G.B. He was marked for assassination by the security police and National Intelligence Service in Pretoria. He was the chief planner of Umkonto we Sizwe operations inside South Africa. More than a year before he had authorised the fire bomb attack on the Rand Supreme Court. That attack was one of a long list of projects that had crossed his desk.

He had approved the bombing of the Air Force headquarters in Pretoria, and the attacks on the Sasol synthetic petrol refinery and on the Koeburg nuclear power plant and on the Voortrekkerhoogte military base. More recently he had sanctioned the laying of mines in the far north east of the Transvaal on roads that would be used by civilians, and the detonating of a shrapnel bomb in a Durban shopping mall crowded with Christmas custom. The long retaliatory arm of the security police and N.I.S. had swiped close to him.

His former wife had died, mutilated by a letter bomb in her office at the Centre for African Studies in the Mozambique capital.

The meeting was in a small air-conditioned office at the back of the A.N.C. compound on the outskirts of Lusaka.

Jacob Thiroko was not interrupted.

He stated his plan. Five men, Kalashnikovs, grenades, one hundred kilos of explosives, four cars for the run to the Botswana frontier, the skill of the White explosives expert now loose in South Africa. Thiroko had spoken of John Vorster Square, he had sung of the pedigree of the expert.

He had been heard out. He kept his high card for the end.

"I will lead the cadre."

Nothing astonished this White man. His eyebrows flickered a trace of surprise. He stayed silent.

"I will go back myself into South Africa, into my mother-land. I have not been there since I was a young man. Perhaps it is a hallucination. Perhaps it is my duty to the men who otherwise will hang. I have a responsibility for them, five times of responsibility. You gave the authorisation, I prepared the plan. I cannot escape my responsibility… The young man in Johannesburg is the son of James Carew, the driver. The son taught me about sacrifice, when I thought I had nothing to learn. For his father he is prepared to sacrifice his life. I should be prepared to make the same sacrifice. They are sons to me, Happy, Charlie, Percy and Tom. What did we do when Benjamin Moloise walked to the gallows? We issued statements… I don't want to issue a statement this time!"

"Tell me about London, Comrade."

"In London I went to see a physician."

"What were you told, Comrade Jacob?"

"To live each day of my life to the full, to enjoy each minute of each day."

"Is there pain?"

"The pain will be nothing to the joy if I can give life to my children."

"Is it possible, to bring them out?"

"I would have said it was impossible for a stranger to carry a bomb into John Vorster Square. I no longer know what is impossible."

The pain was deep in the lower bowel of Thiroko's stomach. He winced as he stood, as he shook hands with the man from Riga. He had chosen the four men who would go with him, who would return with him to South Africa.

The physician had not been specific, he had spoken only of the few months that remained.

Jack came back into his room, closed the door behind him, slipped on the security chain, checked the suitcase.

In the afternoon, after the experience in Soweto, he had had to force himself to go out into the city, to walk on the streets amongst Blacks, be a tourist. Be a tourist and also make some enquiries.

He had gone to a small engineering firm in the back streets^ down from Marshall. He had asked about the availability of a short length of 8" iron piping.

When he crossed the room he saw, lying on his dressing table, left there by the bellboy, a sealed envelope.

He saw the bold handwriting. He thought the envelope had been addressed by a girl.

When the colonel left the meeting he brought back to his office a copy of the initial forensic report.

Embedded in the walls of the hallway of John Vorster Square had been found the synthetic fibres of a cheap bag.

Blown clear through the doorway and into a flower-bed had been a piece of a metal can. This first examination stated that the fibres came from a little-used bag, and the fifty cent sized piece of metal from a clean painted can without corrosion or rust.

The colonel had given it as his opinion that both items had been bought specifically for the bombing, for the making up of the explosive device, for carrying it.