Blood Safari (22 page)

Mona changed me without knowing that she had. There is only so much room for baggage. If you bring in humour and light-heartedness, you must throw rancour and melancholy overboard. And then you travel easy. And light.

There were other lessons too. Mona accepted her own weaknesses with cheerful resignation. She was the one who tried to teach me that regret does not pay, we are what we are and there’s no sense in hiding that. It was only much later that I was able to master that lesson.

It was an easy relationship. She didn’t make demands, she just lived every day for itself. When I told her I would be away with the minister for three or four days she would genuinely say, ‘I’ll miss you.’

When I returned, her smile was real and she held out her arms and laughed happily when I carried her with some effort to her massive double bed. Then I would undress her and caress her wonderful body inch by inch, until desire flamed up in her, like a she-bear coming out of hibernation. Her body would hum and she would open herself up to me as if opening the doors to wonderland. When I went into her, her face showed intense pleasure without shame. I became addicted to that, as I was to her laughter.

With Mona nothing was conventional.

When I had to accompany the minister to Cape Town for six months the following February, she said, ‘I have to tell you something.’

‘What?’

‘You can do what you like down there.’

‘What do you mean?’

She looked out of the window and said, ‘Lemmer, I can’t…’

‘Can’t what?’

‘I can’t do without sex for six months.’ ‘I’ll come and visit you.’

She said it didn’t matter. If I met someone in the Cape, that was fine. She just didn’t want to know about it. When I came back after six months and still wanted to live with her, she would be here. If I didn’t want to, that was fine too. But she would not promise to be faithful. Not when I was so far away.

‘Why not?’

‘There is a type of man I can’t say “no” to.’

‘What type?’

‘Your type.’

‘What kind of man would that be?’

She wouldn’t say.

‘Come with me to Cape Town.’

‘This is my place. Right here.’

For nine years she was my summer wife. My house and haven in Pretoria. We never fought. We never talked about the six months that we didn’t see each other. Then I took the golden handshake and I knew I would have to go to Cape Town, to Seapoint. I would have to go and find myself.

Once more I said, ‘Come with me.’

Once again she said she could not.

Three years after I left her, she called me, the night before I was found guilty and all the papers were full of it. She said, ‘Now you know.’

‘Now I know what?’

‘What type of man I meant.’

I told Emma why I left government service.

‘In 1998 they said they had to increase the number of black bodyguards. We could choose a severance package, or a transfer. A transfer to where? They couldn’t say. So I took the package.

‘I bought myself a flat in a block between Fort and Marine Streets in Seapoint, just a kilometre from where I grew up.

‘I looked for my father. I couldn’t find him. Nobody knew where he had gone. The Ford dealership was still there with the same name. New owners. The whole of Seapoint was full of new people. The Italians had gone, and the Greeks. Of the Jews, only the women were still there, old ladies walking along the seafront alone or in groups waiting for their children to come and visit them. There were Nigerians and Somalis, Russians and Romanians, Bosnians, Chinese, Iraqis. New tribes that I could not be part of.

‘I started a karate dojo at Virgin Active in Greenpoint. In the mornings I taught self-defence to English and Afrikaans women; in the afternoon, JKA karate to kids – South Africans and all the other tribes of Seapoint. I did that for nearly two years. It was a job. At
the gym the women called me “Lemmer” and the children called me “sensei”. I was neither happy nor unhappy.

‘But I began to see things. I had a new perspective, because for the first time in over thirteen years I was a civilian again. The Man on the Street.

‘I saw the new wealth. I saw the new consumerism, the frenzied buying of brands and status and just-because-I-want-it. I saw it in everyone. White, black and brown. Did they want to hide the past behind a wall of possessions? Or was it the present they wanted to hide?

‘The biggest surprise was the new urban aggression, an attitude of “I’ll take what I want”, of “don’t stand in my way”. I noticed it on the roads first, the lack of consideration. The absence of the chivalrous, the charitable, the community spirit. Lawlessness too, as though there were no rules any more. Or rather as if the rules were not for everyone. Driving through red lights. Driving slowly in the right lane – or fast in the left. Cell phones to ears on the freeway, and the glare they gave you of “just try and say something”. As though this country had become a place where you did as you pleased, took what you could before it all went to hell. Or before someone else took it.

‘And the moaning and groaning and gnashing of teeth. Everyone was unhappy, irrespective of race, colour or creed. Unhappy with the government, with each other, with themselves. Everyone pointing fingers, blaming, complaining.

‘I couldn’t understand it. The Russians and the Romanians and the Bosnians would collect their children after the evening karate class and they would say, “This is a wonderful country. This is the land of milk and honey.” But the South Africans complained. They drove smart cars, lived in big houses and seafront flats, they ate in restaurants and bought big flat-screen TVs and designer clothes, yet no one was happy and it was always someone else’s fault.

‘The whites complained about affirmative action and corruption, but they forget that they had benefited from the same for fifty or sixty years. The blacks blamed apartheid for everything. But it was already six years since it had been abolished.

‘The loneliness. In the evening I would walk down the passage in my block of flats to my door, following the pizza man, who was delivering boxes to lonely fat women who opened their doors with frightened eyes and who ate alone while looking for friends on TV. Or the Internet. In the morning a woman would occasionally invite me for coffee and then would sit and tell me how lonely her marriage was. Sometimes I was lonely enough to relieve their need. But then they would stop coming. That’s when I formulated Lemmer’s Law of Lonely Moms.

‘I knew something was going to happen. Not a conscious knowing, just a vague premonition. A city sucks you in systematically, changes you, squeezes and polishes you, so you become like the rest. Lonely, aggressive and selfish. Also, you are aware of who you are on a certain level, of the things that lie dormant inside. The things you are capable of, the things that being a state bodyguard had channelled and suppressed. But you don’t think about them or talk about them, you are just aware of the tension, a growing unease.

‘You must think I’m rationalising, Emma. You must think I’m making excuses. I did what I did; I can’t get away from that. I sat in front of my lawyer, a big man by the name of Gustav Kemp, and I tried to explain to him why it wasn’t my fault. He said,
“Kak
, man. You play the hand life deals you and you take your punishment like a man.” He gave me a day to think it over, and if I still thought I was innocent he would organise another lawyer to represent me.

‘He remained my lawyer.

‘So what happened had to happen. Sooner or later. In prison I thought about that day a lot, how I should have seen it coming, all the signs were there. In me. In other people’s eyes when they bump into you on the pavement or give you the finger in traffic.

‘But hindsight is always perfect vision. We are like the proverbial frog in water that keeps heating up.

‘That evening …

‘I had to go to Bellville for a JKA grading meeting. I was in a hurry after the karate class. I showered and changed and ran down the Virgin Active steps to my car. There were four of them
busy with Demetru Niculescu, one of my students. He was a Romanian, fifteen years old with bad acne and a floppy fringe. The men were between twenty-two and twenty-five, that smartass age when you are nobody, but know everything. Four whites with gym-built muscles and a gang mentality who were taunting Demetru.

‘“Show us some moves, karate kid.”

‘“Hey, nice pimples, dude. Grow them in the dark like mushrooms?”

‘When Demetru opened his mouth they homed in on his accent.

‘“Where the fuck are you from?”’

‘“Seapoint.”

‘“Bullshit, dude. What’s your nationality?”

‘“South African.”

‘“Your daddy in the Russian mafia?”

‘That was all I heard. I said, “Leave the kid alone.”

‘“Whoo, it’s the karate master. Now I’m scared.”

‘“Go home, Demetru.”

‘He left, relieved.

‘The biggest one heard my accent. “Hey, Dutchman, are you going to show us some moves?”

‘I walked away. He followed me. “I’m talking to you, Dutchman.” The others shouted, “Chickening out? We won’t hurt you, Chop Suey.”

‘I heard the big one’s footsteps behind me. I knew if he touched me there would be trouble. He followed me right into the car park. I felt his hand on my shoulder and I turned and there he was up close, taller and bigger, and I was ready, really ready.

‘I said to him, “I will kill you,” and I knew and he knew it was the truth.

‘Something shifted in his eyes, I saw the flicker of fear. That’s what stopped me at that moment. I hadn’t expected that. But I suppose it was also what made him drive after me, that moment when he lost face.

‘So I turned away, got into my car and drove off. Never even looked back.

‘I wanted to go through the Waterfront to save time. There was traffic at the circle near the BMW Pavilion, a long queue. I felt another car bump me from behind. Not hard. A nudge. Then I saw them in the mirror, in a Volkswagen Golf GTi. They shouted and gestured. So I got out.

‘I should never have got out, Emma. I should have kept on driving.

‘They got out too.

‘“We’re talking to you, arsehole.”

‘“Who the fuck do you think you are?”

‘“Fucking hairy back cunt.”

‘The big guy was the driver of the Golf. Vincent Michael Kelly. Vince. Twenty-four years old, an articled clerk at KPMG. One point nine metres tall, ninety-five kilograms. I would learn all that in court.

‘I inspected the rear end of my car. There was no damage.

‘“Hey, he’s talking to you.”

‘All four approached. Vince came up to me. “Got a hearing problem, rock spider?” He shoved me in the chest. There was only bravado showing in his eyes now.

‘Steroids were mentioned during the court case, but we couldn’t prove anything. I think they did it because there were four of them, because they were young and strong. I was shorter and smaller than them. It creates a visual illusion. But I think it was because at the gym Vince was momentarily not the man he thought he was. He had come so that he wouldn’t have to live with that moment.

‘He pushed me and I hit him. Not hard. Just enough to bring him to his senses. But it didn’t. Then the others pitched in. I tried, Emma. Part of me knew what would happen if I let go. I tried. But we are what we are. That’s what I learnt, that night. It doesn’t matter what they say, it doesn’t matter how hard the prison psychologists try, we are what we are.

‘That’s why I moved to Loxton, Emma. That’s why I went looking for a tribe of my own. I had to avoid these situations. Try and avoid the possibility of trouble. If I had to stand in that street at the circle, if they came at me again, I would do exactly the same, go to that place, that other world.

‘If it had been just one guy, I wouldn’t have lost myself. Not even then. But there’s something about two or three or four that gives you new rights, at least in your own mind. Switches off the warning lights. And there was this frustration too, about who I am and where I came from and thirteen years of repression.

‘I let it all loose.

‘The big one, Vincent, he …’

Even though she could not hear, would not remember, I chose my words carefully. ‘He died,’ I said. ‘They charged me with manslaughter. With extenuating circumstances. A six-year sentence. I did four.’

For a long time I sat beside the bed without speaking. Ten, maybe twenty minutes.

Aware of what went unsaid.

Vince falling and hitting his head against the Golf. I had hit him, in rage and hate, with everything I had. Three, four, five times. He whiplashed backwards and the back of his head had connected with the right front corner of the car. I can still hear the sound, that hollow, hard, clear sound.

He was in a coma for four days. Brain damage. Kemp used words like parietal and epidural haematoma with great disapproval. And then Vince died.

And the other thing. The thing I had not told Kemp, the lawyer, or the judge, not anyone.

How sweet it was.

Those moments, those minutes when I released myself, when I could kick and hit, could inflict hurt, could break and
bliksem
, that was where I belonged. When I killed Vince and hammered the other three until they begged for mercy, the tumblers of the universe were lining up perfectly. I felt at one with the world, whole and complete, good and right. It’s a terrible thing. It intoxicates. It’s addictive.

And so terribly sweet.

Dr Eleanor Taljaard came and chased me out just after twelve. She looked rested and professional. ‘I have work to do here and it’s lunchtime. Koos is waiting for you in the restaurant. Maggie left a message. It’s in your room. You can come back at two.’

‘OK, Eleanor.’

‘You did well.’

Had I?

The restaurant was full. ‘Sunday,’ said Dr Koos Taljaard. ‘Conscience day. They visit the sick.’

Over a meal of tasteless chicken schnitzel with cheese sauce he told me they had been in Nelspruit for sixteen years – at the Provincial Hospital first, then the SouthMed Clinic.

‘In all those years we never had a patient falling off a train because of a bullet wound.’