Yes, there’s something appealing about those songs whose words we cannot understand, something that speaks to us deep down. We can give them wings, embroider them with flowers and stars, and color them however we want. I’ve always preferred sitting down to listen to music. I’ve never known how to dance. Neither did you, Fiela. My reputation followed me throughout my teenage years: “She’s hopeless at jamming,” the boys would whisper in contempt. For years I was a wallflower, like you, watching my cousins perform boisterous dancing moves with their partners.
When the music stopped, the dancers surged back to their seats, Dido delighted at having smooched with her widower. At that moment, Bishupal, still flanked with Archie, loomed up at their table. They formed an odd couple: Bishupal, handsome and melancholic like an archangel driven from paradise, and pretty-boy Archie with an evil streak. On seeing them, tongues began to wag. Shame on them! Those two with their vice and wickedness had gone to live with Archie’s mother, the widow Anna van Emmeling. The poor woman had no idea two boys could make love together and, deeply shocked, she had run to her confessor. Ever since, she had been immersed in novenas. She couldn’t sleep a wink at night while the two demons got drunk, copulated, and quarreled.
Oblivious to this gossip, Bishupal gave Rosélie a piercing look, then without a word, a smile, or a blink, he turned round and, dragging Archie with him, disappeared into the crowd.
Despite the liters of Plaisir de Merle ingurgitated and the late hour they had come home — even then Dido hadn’t gone to bed and sat up all night watching Keanu Reeves in Sweet November, lamenting his solitude on film and her own in real life — the sun hadn’t opened its eyes when Dido dashed into Rosélie’s room to announce the news.
The verdict was splashed all over the front page of the Cape Tribune.
Fiela had been sentenced to just fifteen years in prison. Naturally, the counsel for the prosecution had asked for life, deploring between the lines that capital punishment had been abolished along with apartheid. Only the ultimate punishment would have fit the horror of the crime. But the jurors hadn’t agreed with him. The two lawyers requisitioned for the job, those pink-skinned, fair-haired youngsters whom everyone took for a pair of nincompoops, had accomplished wonders. Halfway through the trial they had skillfully changed tactics. They had called to the bar a load of witnesses from goodness knows where! One man swore he had seen Adriaan more than once blind drunk at some ungodly hour. A woman testified he had exposed himself to her eight-year-old daughter on a secluded path. One of his colleagues at the Vineyard Hotel complained he fondled her breasts and buttocks at the slightest opportunity. Another claimed he organized secret poker games in a corner of the hotel kitchen. In short, the picture of a model father and upstanding husband, a regular churchgoer, singing the Psalms loud and true, endured a setback. The two pink-skinned, fair-haired youngsters whom everyone took for a pair of nincompoops had introduced a doubt. That’s all it needs in justice, a serious doubt! Suddenly Adriaan was suspected of having led a double, even a triple or quadruple life. Obviously, public opinion protested, convinced that Fiela was guilty. An angry crowd surrounded the courthouse, demanding an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. Kill the murderess. Cut her into little pieces like she had done to poor Adriaan.
There was a photo too with the article in the Tribune. Standing between her guards, a great gawk of a woman, like me, an enigmatic face, like me, preparing to add her name to the already long list of mad women and witches. Nobody would ever know the truth. Fiela hadn’t said a word during the ten days of her trial. She hadn’t betrayed her joy on hearing her sentence. She hadn’t thanked her saviors. In short, she took her secret with her into jail.
Fiela, Fiela, during all this time I was so preoccupied with my own tormented life I neglected you. You at least know the path mapped out in front of you. It seems as if I’m on the brink of a precipice where I shall fall and never climb back up. Tell me. You can tell me everything. Why did you kill Adriaan? What was his crime? You forgave him the first time when he gave Martha, the little neighbor, a belly. What was worse about this new crime? Did your lawyers hint at the truth? What was he hiding from you again and again, that you finally found out?
Rosélie cut short Dido’s recriminations she had already heard so many times about the barbarity of the country ever since the Kaffirs had come to power, and extricated herself from the sofa bed. Joseph Lema’s consultation was at eleven o’clock on Faure Street. The buses took forever, so she would just have time to stop over on Strand Street. She didn’t know what she was hoping for from Inspector Sithole. To talk. To talk about Fiela. To talk about Stephen too. Both stories were now muddled in her head.
Where does mine begin? Where does his end?
But Inspector Sithole was not at the police station, where there reigned an atmosphere of utter pandemonium. Black offenders, black and white police officers. Offenders and police officers, their brutal, vicious faces identical, as if good and evil, order and disorder, justice and injustice were one and the same thing. Probably through close contact they ended up looking like each other. A white officer, his face covered with acne, though he was long past the age of this juvenile scourge, his upper lip bristling with a führerlike mustache, as fat as Lewis Sithole was willowy, was sitting at his desk. Frowning, he put Rosélie through a formal interrogation — Name — Address — Profession — Purpose of Visit — before informing her:
“Sithole has lost his wife. He’s left for KwaZulu-Natal. He’ll be back tomorrow or the day after.”
As she was about to leave, he stopped her with the same old song, uttered in that indefinable tone of voice that was both reassuring and threatening:
“It’s often said that the police don’t do anything. But it’s not true. We are not idle, and we always end up discovering the truth.”
Once outside, Rosélie walked in the direction of the Threepenny Opera without realizing it. It was as if her body were obeying orders from her brain without her knowing it.
Bishupal’s incomprehensible rudeness obsessed her. Never very communicative or smiling, at least he was polite. One evening, tired of seeing him crouched in front of Stephen’s study, she had brought him a chair and a glass of Coca-Cola, which he had accepted.
At this time of day the shopkeepers were still washing down the sidewalks. The homeless had cleared off, leaving behind their empty wine bottles, open cans of food, piles of old rags, and litter. Fiela’s much too light a sentence was on everyone’s lips. The way justice worked, in ten years she would be as free as a bird, free to reduce another innocent body to shreds.
She could see from the entrance that there was no trace of Bishupal or Archie at the Threepenny Opera. Sitting on a stool, a blond girl was leafing through a magazine. Some white customers were rummaging through the opera shelves, some blacks through world music. Mrs. Hillster looked more ravaged than ever. With her hooked nose and her beady eyes between wrinkled eyelids, she looked more and more like the wicked fairy, or rather the picture we have of the wicked fairy, since, should we forget, she is a fictional character. Mrs. Hillster must have been the only person not to be shocked by the jury’s clemency toward Fiela. She had other things on her mind.
“I can’t find a serious buyer either for the house or the shop,” she complained. “An African embassy made an offer for the house. But I don’t trust them. You know what I mean, don’t you?”