‘I saw his body. I saw him — I mean I saw him dead. I was hitchhiking and came upon the truck and Bernard’s body. Sam was hiding in the bush. They were hijacked.’ You knew the hijacking story was plausible, hijackings being not so uncommon. And in a way, it had been a hijacking.
‘So much the better. I mean Bernard dead. Not the hijacking. Would you like a cup of tea or something?’ the aunt asked.
‘I should be getting on,’ you said, anxious to get moving. ‘You’ll look after Sam?’
‘You mean you’re leaving him with me?’
‘He’s your nephew isn’t he?’
You stared at each other. The aunt’s lips spread and flattened against her teeth.
‘I guess I have to take him, then.’ Sam had finished the peach and turned back to you, rolling the stone around in his mouth, eyes confused. You thought again of taking him into the wilderness, renewing him, as you thought of it, calling him Samuel. But you knew this was impossible. ‘You’ve dropped a real burden on me, Miss — what’s your name?’
‘It doesn’t matter.’
Sam’s aunt rolled her eyes and snorted. ‘I don’t mind saying I think there’s something funny about all this. Just turning up with nothing. I don’t mind saying I think it’s strange,’ she said, grabbing Sam, pulling him towards her and clasping him against her faded jeans. He shuffled his red shoes, trying to squirm out of the woman’s grasp, but she held him closer, her arms tightening around his chest. ‘That’s right. I think this woman is strange.’ She coughed, a deep productive cough that pushed her off balance, freeing the child.
You studied Sam with the same intense focus he had once turned on you. After all the unwanted embraces, the grabbing and clinging, you found yourself desperate to be held by him, to hold him, to feel that heat again around your waist. You reached out three dry fingers to touch his cheek. He did not flinch. You wanted him to throw out his arms and cling to you, cry out not to be abandoned, force you into doing what you could not.
But he had nothing to say.
Of course I remembered him at once. Not just here. I knew him immediately in Amsterdam. And finding him suddenly before me, it was like being faced with my own assassin. I wondered if he had come to exact his pound of flesh. But he has only ever been charming. What does he want? I ask. Why can he not say what he has come to say?
1989
It wasn’t chance that Laura and the boy knew each other already, before she found him there in the dark, in the truck, with Bernard lying dead on the ground. The only chance was them being in the same place at the same time. When his parents blew themselves up with three other people outside a police station the only person in the world the boy had wanted to see was Laura because she was as close to a mother as any he had left in the world. He put his hand out to her and she took it and drew his head against her arm and for a moment he couldn’t remember whether she’d only appeared after Bernard was dead or if she’d been there earlier. They sat in silence for a while looking out on the darkness. The boy wanted to ask Laura if she could be his mother, now that his own mother was dead, but he didn’t. He knew it was impossible.
There was a roadblock on the way, but she showed her ID book, as well as the boy’s, and explained she was going to meet his uncle, the owner of the truck. The boy wondered what would happen to them if the police opened the hold and discovered what was inside. But they were lucky. The police sent them on their way and told them to be careful.
Laura drove almost until dawn to a farm outside Beaufort West where she found her associates waiting for her and there the boy met Timothy and Lionel for the first time. Laura told the boy he must trust the men but that she had to leave — there was something she had to do. It was possible she might see him again and she promised to look for him and said he should look for her and if they were both looking they would find each other someday. She told him to go to her mother, to look for her if he ever needed anything. My mother is a good person, she promised. My mother won’t fail you.
The boy watched her leave in a car with a man, but he didn’t know who the man was and never saw his face. He only knew that Laura and the man had something important they had to do and that it was too dangerous for him to go with them. He never saw Laura again. If she was going to come back she would have done it by now.
She left behind the truck that was the boy’s inheritance and in the coming days he watched Timothy and Lionel and other men dig graves for all the bodies, Bernard included.
Timothy stripped the truck of its identifying marks, put on new number plates, and one of the other men left with it. The boy never saw the truck again but he didn’t care any more.
At first, when he asked them what was going to happen, Timothy and Lionel would laugh and say, You’re going to be our mascot. But as the weeks passed they didn’t know what to say and the boy reminded them that he had an aunt in Beaufort West and for days everyone talked about whether or not they should take the boy to his aunt or if that was too risky, and wouldn’t it be better just to let him stay with them because he had been born into the movement and shouldn’t he grow up in it since he was already almost a man who could be taught to shoot? Lionel said it would be wrong, that it wasn’t fair to the boy, and they should take him to his aunt.
But the boy barely knew his aunt and the others didn’t know if she could be trusted. And then he said to them, What about Laura’s parents? Laura said I could go to her mother. And her father — her father told me that if I ever needed anything …
And that was how they came to be on the woman’s front porch, staring through the screen door, and how the woman shook her head and took her daughter’s papers and said they should go.
The boy and the men stood there, the door slammed in their faces, and though they were in the shade it was a hot February day with no wind and the boy came out in a sweat all over his body and the men turned to him and told him not to worry. He stood on the porch looking up at the mountain so that he didn’t have to look at the men or at the windows of the house. He did not want to be seen or to see anyone else as he listened to the rush-hour traffic on Camp Ground Road, thinking of how it became other roads, Liesbeek Parkway, Malta Road, Albert Road, roads that curved around to the north, following the contour of the mountain, circling back to his own neighbourhood, to the house that had once, until recently, been his.
They walked back to the car and sat for a while in the shade while the men argued the boy’s fate in front of him. I think we should ask the boy, Lionel finally insisted, and when the boy was asked he said he did not want to stay with them. He wanted to go to his aunt in Beaufort West, where Laura was taking him in the first place, or not in the first place, but as a last resort, after rescuing him from the situation he had gotten himself into. Sitting in the car, he was sure it was his fault that these men had to decide what to do with him, his fault that Laura had been forced to look after him, his fault that his parents disappeared in the first place. It was his fault and his failure.
He promised he wouldn’t say anything about them to his aunt or to anyone else.
Not until all of this is over, not until, you know, all of this is history, my friend, Timothy said.
They would leave him on his aunt’s doorstep. If anything went wrong, if his aunt refused to take him, if he felt he couldn’t live with her after all, they gave him a number to phone, and someone would come get him.