The White Lioness

Chapter Nineteen

Jan Kleyn had a weakness, a well-preserved secret. Her name was Miranda, and she was as black as a raven’s shadow.

She was his secret, the crucial counterpoint in his life. Everyone who knew Jan Kleyn would have considered her an impossibility. His colleagues in the intelligence service would have dismissed any rumor about her existence as preposterous fantasy. Jan Kleyn was one of those very rare suns that were considered free from spots.

But there was one, and her name was Miranda.

They were the same age, and had been aware of each other’s existence since they were kids. But they did not grow up together. They lived in two different worlds. Miranda’s mother, Matilda, worked as a servant for Jan Kleyn’s parents in their big, white house on a hill outside Bloemfontein. She lived a few kilometers away in one of a cluster of tin shacks where the Africans had their homes. Every morning, at the first light of dawn, she would make her way laboriously up the steep hill to the white house, where her first task of the day was to serve the family breakfast. That hill was a sort of penance she had to pay for the crime of being born black. Jan Kleyn, like his brothers and sisters, had special servants whose only assignment was to take care of the children. Even so, he used to turn to Matilda all the time. One day when he was eleven, he suddenly started to wonder where she came from every morning, and where she went back to when her day’s work was done. As part of a forbidden adventure-he was not allowed to leave the walled-in yard on his own-he followed her in secret. It was the first time he had seen at close range the clutter of tin shacks where African families lived. Of course, he had been aware that the blacks lived in quite different conditions from his own. He was always hearing from his parents how it was part of the natural order of things that whites and blacks lived differently. Whites, like Jan Kleyn, were human beings. The blacks hadn’t yet got that far. Some time in the distant future they might possibly be able to reach the same level as the whites. The color of their skins would grow lighter, their powers of understanding would grow greater, and it would all be as a result of the patient upbringing the whites gave them. Even so, he had never imagined their houses would be as awful as those he could see before him.

But there was also something else that attracted his attention. Matilda was met by a girl of his own age, lanky and slim. That must be Matilda’s daughter. It had never occurred to him that Matilda might have children of her own. Now he realized for the first time that Matilda had a family, a life apart from the work she did in his home. It was a discovery that affected him badly. He could feel himself getting angry. It was as if Matilda had deceived him. He always imagined she was there for him alone.

Two years later Matilda died. Miranda had never explained to him how it happened, just that something had eaten away her insides until all life left her. Matilda’s home and family had broken up. Miranda’s father took two sons and a daughter with him to where he came from, the barren countryside far away on the Lesotho border. The idea was that Miranda would grow up with one of Matilda’s sisters. But Jan Kleyn’s mother, in a fit of unexpected generosity, decided to take Miranda under her wing. She was to live with the master gardener, who had a little cottage in some remote corner of their large grounds. Miranda would be trained to take over her mother’s job. In that way, the spirit of Matilda would live on inside the white house. Jan Klein’s mother was not a Boer for nothing. As far as she was concerned, maintaining traditions was a guarantee for the continuation of the family and Afrikaner society. Keeping the same family of domestic servants, generation after generation, helped to provide a sense of permanence and stability.

Jan Kleyn and Miranda continued to grow up near each other. But the distance between them was unchanged. Even though he could see she was very beautiful, there was in fact no such thing as black beauty. It belonged to what he had been taught was a forbidden area. He heard young men his own age telling secret stories about white Afrikaners traveling to neighboring Mozambique on weekends, in order to bed black women. But that just seemed to confirm the truth he had learned never to question. And so he went on seeing Miranda without actually wanting to discover her, when she served his breakfast on the terrace. But she had started appearing in his dreams. The dreams were violent and sent his pulse racing when he recalled them the following day. Reality was transformed in his dreams. In them, not only did he recognize Miranda’s beauty, he accepted it. In his dreams he was allowed to love her, and the girls from Afrikaner families he associated with normally faded away in comparison with Matilda’s daughter.

Their first real meeting took place when they were both nineteen. It was a Sunday in January, when everyone but Jan Kleyn had gone to a family dinner in Kimberley. He was not able to join them because he was still feeling weak and depressed after a lengthy bout of malaria. He was sitting out on the terrace, Miranda was the only servant in the house, and suddenly he stood up and went to her in the kitchen. Long afterwards he would often think he had never really left her after that. He had stayed in the kitchen. From that moment on, she had him in her power. He would never be able to shake her off.

Two years later she got pregnant.

He was then studying at Rand University in Johannesburg. His love for Miranda was his passion and at the same time his horror. He realized he was betraying his people and their traditions. He often tried to break off contact with her, to force himself out of this forbidden relationship. But he could not. They would meet in secret, their moments together dominated by fear of being discovered. When she told him she was pregnant, he beat her. The next moment it dawned on him that he would never be able to live without her, even if he would never be able to live with her openly either. She gave up her position at the white house. He arranged a job for her in Johannesburg. With the help of some English friends at the university, who had a different attitude toward affairs with black women, Jan Kleyn bought a little house in Bezuidenhout Park in eastern Johannesburg. He arranged for her to live there under the pretense of being a servant for an Englishman who spent most of his time on his farm in Southern Rhodesia. They could meet there, and there, in Bezuidenhout Park, their daughter was born and, without any discussion being necessary, christened Matilda. They continued to see each other, had no more children, and Jan Kleyn never married a white woman, to the sorrow and sometimes even bitterness of his parents. A Boer who did not form a family and have lots of children was odd, a person who failed to live up to Afrikaner traditions. Jan Kleyn became more and more of a mystery to his parents, and it was clear to him he would never be able to explain that he loved their servant Matilda’s daughter, Miranda.

Jan Kleyn lay in bed thinking about all this, that Saturday morning of May 9. In the evening he would be visiting the house in Bezuidenhout Park. It was a habit he regarded as sacrosanct. The only thing that could get in the way was something connected with his work for BOSS. That particular Saturday he knew his visit to Bezuidenhout would be very much delayed. He needed to have an important meeting with Franz Malan. That could not be postponed.

As usual, he woke up early that Saturday morning. Jan Kleyn went to bed late and woke up early. He had disciplined himself to get by with only a few hours sleep. But that morning he allowed himself the luxury of sleeping late. He could hear faint noises from the kitchen where his servant, Moses, was making breakfast.

He thought about the telephone call he had received just after midnight. Konovalenko had finally given him the news he was waiting for. Victor Mabasha was dead. That did not only mean a problem had ceased to exist. It also meant the doubt he had been entertaining the last few days about Konovalenko’s abilities had been put to rest.

He was due to meet Franz Malan in Hammanskraal at ten. It was time to decide when and where the assassination would take place. Victor Mabasha’s successor had also been chosen. Jan Kleyn had no doubt he had once again made the right choice. Sikosi Tsiki would do what was required of him. The selection of Victor Mabasha had not been an error of judgment. Jan Kleyn knew there were invisible depths in everybody, even the most uncompromising of people. That was why he had decided to let Konovalenko test the man he had chosen. Victor Mabasha had been weighed in Konovalenko’s scales and found wanting. Sikosi Tsiki would undergo the same test. Jan Kleyn could not believe that two people in succession would turn out to be too weak.

Shortly after half past eight he left his house and drove towards Hammanskraal. Smoke hung low over the African shanty town alongside the freeway. He tried to imagine Miranda and Matilda being forced to live there, among the tin shacks and homeless dogs, the charcoal fires constantly making their eyes water. Miranda had been lucky and escaped from the inferno of the slums. Her daughter Matilda had inherited her good fortune. Thanks to Jan Kleyn and his concession to forbidden love, they had no need to share the hopeless lives of their African brothers and sisters.

It seemed to Jan Kleyn that his daughter had inherited her mother’s beauty. But there was a difference, hinting at the future. Matilda’s skin was lighter than her mother’s. When she eventually had a child with a white man, the process would continue. Sometime in the future, long after he had ceased to exist, his descendants would give birth to children whose appearance would never betray the fact that there was black blood somewhere in the past.

Jan Kleyn liked driving and thinking about the future. He had never been able to understand those who claimed it was impossible to predict what it would be like. As far as he was concerned, it was being shaped at that very minute.

Franz Malan was waiting on the veranda at Hammanskraal when Jan Kleyn turned into the forecourt. They shook hands and went straight in to where the table with the green felt cloth was waiting for them.

“Victor Mabasha is dead,” said Jan Kleyn when they had sat down.

A broad smile lit up Franz Malan’s face.

“I was just wondering,” he said.

“Konovalenko killed him yesterday,” said Jan Kleyn. “The Swedes have always been very good at making hand grenades.”

“We have some of them here in South Africa,” said Franz Malan. “It’s always hard to get hold of them. But our agents can generally get around the problems.”

“I suppose that’s about the only thing we have to thank the Rhodesians for,” said Jan Kleyn.

He recalled briefly what he had heard about events in Southern Rhodesia nearly thirty years ago. As part of his training for his work in the intelligence service, he heard an old officer describing how the whites in Southern Rhodesia had managed to evade the worldwide sanctions imposed upon them. It had taught him that all politicians have dirty hands. Those vying for power set up and break rules according to the state of the game. Despite the sanctions imposed by every country in the world apart from Portugal, Taiwan, Israel, and South Africa, Southern Rhodesia had never run short of the goods they needed to import. Nor had their exports suffered any serious downturn. This was due not least to American and Soviet politicians who flew discreetly to Salisbury and offered their services. The American politicians were mainly senators from the South, who considered it important to support the white minority in the country. Through their contacts, Greek and Italian businessmen, hastily established airlines and an ingenious network of intermediaries, they had taken it upon themselves to lift the sanctions by back-door methods. In their turn Russian politicians had used similar means to guarantee access to the Rhodesian metals they needed for their own industries. Soon there was nothing left but a mirage of isolation. Nevertheless, politicians throughout the world continued to preach condemnation of the white racist regime and praise the success of sanctions.

Jan Kleyn realized later that white South Africa also had many friends throughout the world. The support they received was less noticeable than what the blacks were getting. But Jan Kleyn had no doubt that what was happening in silence was at least as valuable as the support being proclaimed in the streets and public squares. This was a fight to the death, and in such circumstances everything goes.

“Who’ll replace him?” wondered Franz Malan.

“Sikosi Tsiki,” said Jan Kleyn. “He was number two on the list I made earlier. He’s twenty-eight, born near East London. He’s managed to get himself banned by both the ANC and Inkatha. In both cases for disloyalty and theft. He’s now full of such hatred for both organizations, I’d call it fanatical.”

“Fanatics,” said Franz Malan. “There’s generally something about fanatics that can’t be completely controlled. They have absolutely no fear of death. But they don’t always stick to the plans that have been laid.”

Jan Kleyn was irritated by Franz Malan’s magisterial tone. But he managed to conceal that when he responded.

“I’m the one calling him fanatical,” he said. “That doesn’t necessarily mean he’ll live up to the description in practice. He’s a man whose cold-bloodedness is scarcely any less intense than yours or mine.”

Franz Malan was happy with the response. As usual, he had no reason to doubt what Jan Kleyn said.

“I’ve talked to the rest of our friends on the committee,” Jan Kleyn went on. “I called a vote, since we were talking about picking a replacement after all. Nobody disagreed.”

Franz Malan could picture the committee members in his mind’s eye. Sitting round the oval-shaped walnut table, slowly raising their hands one after another. There were never any secret votes. Open decisions were necessary in order to make sure members’ loyalty never wavered. Apart from a determination to use drastic methods to secure the rights of Afrikaners and by extension all whites in South Africa, the committee members had little or nothing to do with each other. The fascist leader Terrace Blanche was regarded with ill-concealed contempt by many of the other committee members. But his presence was a necessity. The representative of the diamond family de Beers, an elderly man whom no one had ever seen laugh, was treated with the double-edged respect often aroused by extreme wealth. Judge Pelser, the Broederbond representative, was a man whose contempt for humankind was notorious. But he had great influence and was seldom contradicted. And finally there was General Stroesser, one of the air force high command, a man who disliked the company of civil servants or mine owners.

But they had voted to give Sikosi Tsiki the assignment. That meant he and Jan Kleyn could go through with their plans.

“Sikosi Tsiki will be leaving in three days,” said Jan Kleyn. “Konovalenko is ready to receive him. He’ll fly to Copenhagen via Amsterdam on a Zambian passport. Then he’ll be ferried over to Sweden by boat.”

Franz Malan nodded. Now it was his turn. He took some blackand-white enlarged photographs from his brief case. He had taken the pictures himself and developed them in the laboratory he had installed at home. He had copied the map at work when no one was looking.

“Friday, June 12,” he began. “The local police think there’ll be at least forty thousand in the crowd. There are lots of reasons why this could be a suitable occasion for us to pounce. To start with, there’s a hill, Signal Hill, just to the south of the stadium. The distance from there to where the podium will be is about 700 meters. There are no buildings on the summit. But there is a serviceable access road from the south side. Sikosi Tsiki shouldn’t have any problems getting there, or making his retreat. If necessary, he can even lie low up there before making his way down the hillside later and mixing with the blacks who’ll be milling around in the chaos that’s bound to follow.”

Jan Kleyn studied the photos carefully. He waited for Franz Malan to continue.

“My other argument,” said Franz Malan, “is that the assassination should take place in the heart of what we can call the English part of our country. Africans tend to react primitively. Their first reaction will be that somebody from Cape Town is responsible for the killing. Their rage will be directed at the locals who live in the town. All those liberal-minded Englishmen who wish the blacks so well will be forced to face up to what is in store for them if ever the blacks come to power in our country. That will make it much easier for us to stir up a backlash.”

Jan Kleyn nodded. He had been thinking along the same lines. He reflected briefly on what Franz Malan had said. In his experience every plan had some kind of weakness.

“What is there against it?” he asked.

“I have difficulty in finding anything at all,” replied Franz Malan.

“There’s always a weak point,” said Jan Kleyn. “We can’t make a final decision until we’ve put our finger on what it is.”

“I can only think of one thing that could go wrong,” said Franz Malan after a few moments’ silence. “Sikosi Tsiki could miss.”

Jan Kleyn looked surprised.

“He won’t miss,” he said. “I only pick people who hit their targets.”

“All the same, 700 meters is a long way,” said Franz Malan. “A sudden puff of wind. A flash of reflected sun nobody could have foreseen. The bullet misses by a couple of centimeters. Hits somebody else.”

“That just cannot happen,” said Jan Kleyn.

It occurred to Franz Malan that while they might not be able to find the weak point in the plan they were developing, he had found a weakness in Jan Kleyn. When rational arguments ran out, he reverted to fate. Something simply could not happen.

But he said nothing.

A servant brought them tea. They ran through the plan once more. Spelled out details, noted questions that needed answering. Not until nearly four in the afternoon did they think they had gotten as far as they could.

“Tomorrow it’s exactly a month to June 12,” said Jan Kleyn. “That means we don’t have much time to make up our minds. We’ll have to decide by next Friday if it’s going to be Cape Town or not. By then we must have weighed everything, and answered all the outstanding questions. Let’s meet here again on May 15, in the morning. Then I’ll get the whole committee together at twelve o’clock. During the coming week we’ll both have to go through the plans, independently, looking for cracks or weaknesses. We already know the strengths, the positive arguments. Now we’ll have to find the bad ones.”

Franz Malan nodded. He had no objections.

They shook hands and left the house at Hammanskraal ten minutes apart.

Jan Kleyn drove straight to the house in Bezuidenhout Park.

Miranda Nkoyi contemplated her daughter. She was sitting on the floor, staring into space. Miranda could see her eyes were not vacant, but alert. Whenever she looked at her daughter, she sometimes felt, as if in a brief fit of giddiness, that she was seeing her mother. Her mother was as young as that, barely seventeen years old, when she gave birth to Miranda. Now her own daughter was that same age.

What is she looking at, Miranda wondered. She sometimes felt a cold shudder running down her spine when she recognized features characteristic of Matilda’s father. Especially that look of intense concentration, even though she was staring into empty space. That inner vision that no one else could understand.

“Matilda,” she said tenderly, as if hoping to bring her back down to earth by treating her gently.

The girl came out of her reverie with a start, and looked her straight in the eye.

“I know my father will soon be here,” she said. “As you won’t let me hate him while he’s here, I do it while I’m waiting. You can dictate when. But you can never take the hatred away from me.”

Miranda wanted to cry out that she understood her feelings. She often thought that way herself. But she could not. She was like her mother, Matilda senior, who was saddened by the continual humiliation of not being permitted to lead a satisfactory life in her own country. Miranda knew she had grown soft just like her mother, and remained silently in a state of impotence she could only make up for by constantly betraying the man who was the father of her daughter.

Soon, she thought. Soon I must tell my daughter that her mother has retained a little bit of her life force, despite everything. I shall have to tell her, in order to win her back, to show how the gap between us is not an abyss after all.

In secret, Matilda was a member of the ANC youth organization. She was active, and had already undertaken several undercover assignments. She had been arrested by the police on more than one occasion. Miranda was always frightened she would be injured or killed. Every time the coffins of dead blacks were being carried in swaying, chanting processions to their graves, she would pray to all the gods she believed in that her daughter might be spared. She turned to the Christian god, to the spirits of her ancestors, to her dead mother, to the songoma her father always used to talk about. But she was never completely convinced they had really heard her. The prayers merely made her feel better by dint of tiring her out.

Miranda could understand the confused feeling of impotence in her daughter because her father was a Boer, knowing herself to be sired by the enemy. It was like being inflicted with a mortal wound at the very moment of birth.

Nevertheless, she knew a mother could never regret the existence of her own daughter. That time seventeen years ago she had loved Jan Kleyn just as little as she loved him today. Matilda was conceived in fear and subservience. It was like the bed they were lying in was floating in a remote, airless universe. Afterwards, she just did not have the strength to cast aside her subservience. The child would be born, it had a father, and he had organized a life for her, a house in Bezuidenhout, money to live on. Right from the start she was resolved never to have another child by him. If necessary Matilda would be her only offspring, even if her African heart was horrified by the thought. Jan Kleyn had never openly stated he wanted another child by her; his demands on her as far as lovemaking were concerned were always equally hollow. She let him spend nights with her, and could stick it out because she had learned how to take revenge by betraying him.

She observed her daughter, who had once again lost herself in a world to which her mother was not allowed access. She could see Matilda had inherited her own beauty. The only difference was that her skin was lighter. She sometimes wondered what Jan Kleyn would say if he knew that what his daughter wanted most of all was a darker skin.

My daughter betrays him as well, Miranda thought. But our betrayal is not malice. It’s the lifeline we cling to as South Africa burns. Any malice is all on his side. One of these days it will destroy him. The freedom we achieve will not be primarily the voting slips we find in our hands, but the release from those inner chains that have been holding us prisoner.

The car came to a stop on the drive outside the garage.

Matilda got up and looked at her mother.

“Why have you never killed him?” she asked.

What Miranda heard was his voice in hers. But she had convinced herself that Matilda’s heart was not that of an Afrikaner. Her appearance, her light-colored skin, those were things she could do nothing about. But she had preserved her heart, hot and inexhaustible as it was. That was a line of defense, albeit the last one, which Jan Kleyn could never overcome.

The shameful thing was that he never seemed to notice anything. Every time he came to Bezuidenhout his car was laden with food so that she could make him a braai, just as he remembered it from the white house where he grew up. He never realized he was transforming Miranda into her own mother, the enslaved servant. He could never see that he was forcing her to play different roles: cook, lover, valet. He did not notice the resolute hatred emanating from his daughter. He saw only a world that was unchanging, petrified, something he considered it his main task in life to preserve. He did not see the falseness, the dishonesty, the bottomless artificiality on which the whole country was based.

“Is everything OK?” he asked as he placed all the bags of food in the hall.

“Yes,” said Miranda. “Everything’s fine.”

Then she made braai while he tried to talk to his daughter, who was hiding behind the role of the shy and timid girl. He tried stroking her hair, and Miranda could see through the kitchen door how her daughter stiffened. They ate their meal of Afrikaner sausages, big chunks of meat and cabbage salad. Miranda knew Matilda would go out to the bathroom and force herself to throw up the whole lot, once the meal was over. Then he wanted to talk about unimportant matters, the house, the wallpaper, the yard. Matilda withdrew to her room, leaving Miranda alone with him, and she gave him the answers he was expecting. Then they went to bed. His body was as hot as only a freezing object can be. The next day would be Sunday. As they could not be seen together, they took their Sunday stroll inside the four walls of the house, walking around and around each other, eating, and sitting in silence. Matilda always went out just as soon as she could and didn’t come back until he had left. Only when Monday came would everything begin to return to normal.

When he had fallen asleep and his breathing was calm and steady, she got carefully out of bed. She had learned how to move around the bedroom in absolute silence. She went out to the kitchen, leaving the door open so she could check the whole time that he did not wake up. If he did, and wondered why she was up, her excuse was a glass of water she had poured earlier.

As usual, she had draped his clothes over a chair in the kitchen. It was positioned so he could not see it from the bedroom. He did once ask why she always hung his clothes in the kitchen rather than in the bedroom, and she explained she wanted to brush them down for him every morning before he got dressed.

She carefully went through his pockets. She knew his wallet would be in the left inside pocket of his jacket, and his keys in his right pants pocket. The pistol he always carried was on the bedside table.

That was generally all she found in his pockets. That particular evening, however, there was a scrap of paper with something written on it in what she recognized as his handwriting. With one eye on the bedroom, she quickly memorized what it said.

Cape Town, she read.

12 June.

Distance to location? Wind direction? Roads?

She put the scrap of paper back where she had found it, once she was certain it was folded exactly as it had been.

She could not understand what the words on the piece of paper meant. But even so she would do what she was told to do whenever she found something in his pockets. She would tell the man she always met the day after Jan Kleyn had been to visit her. Together with their friends, they would try and work out what the words meant.

She drank the water and went back to bed.

He sometimes talked in his sleep. When that happened it was nearly always within an hour of his falling asleep. She would also memorize the words he sometimes mumbled, sometimes yelled out, and tell the man she met the following day. He would write down everything she could remember, just as he did with everything else that had happened during Jan Kleyn’s visit. Sometimes he would say where he had come from, and sometimes where he was going as well. But most often he said nothing at all. He had never consciously or accidentally revealed anything about his work for the intelligence service.

A long time ago he had said he was working as a chief executive officer in the Ministry of Justice in Pretoria.

Later, when she was contacted by the man who was looking for information and heard from him that Jan Kleyn worked for BOSS, she was told she must never breathe a word about knowing what he did for a living.

Jan Kleyn left her house on the Sunday evening. Miranda waved goodbye as he drove away.

The last thing he said was that he would come back late in the afternoon the following Friday.

As he drove along, he decided he was looking forward to the coming week. The plan had begun to take shape. He had everything that was going to happen under control.

What he did not know, however, was that Victor Mabasha was still alive.

In the evening of May 12, exactly a month before he was due to carry out the assassination of Nelson Mandela, Sikosi Tsiki left Johannesburg on the regular KLM flight to Amsterdam. Like Victor Mabasha, Sikosi Tsiki had spent a long time wondering who his victim was going to be. Unlike Victor, though, he had not concluded it must be President de Klerk. He left the question open.

That it might involve Nelson Mandela had never even occurred to him.

On Wednesday, May 13, shortly after six in the evening, a fishing boat pulled into the harbor at Limhamn.

Sikosi Tsiki jumped ashore. The fishing boat pulled out right away, headed back to Denmark.

An unusually fat man was standing on the dark to welcome him.

That particular afternoon there was a southwesterly gale blowing over Skane. The wind did not die down until the evening.

Then came the heat.