Those Who Love Night Page 5

  She laid the photographs down and reached into the parcel, bringing out a letter from Krisj Patel and two files of what seemed, at a glance, to be newspaper articles. She opened the letter first. “Dear Abigail,” she read. “These are the only photographs I have of Katy and Tony. As you can see, the one of Katy was taken many years ago. I’m afraid we’ve lost contact with her. The one of Tony is recent.

  “He is a great writer and a real force in the democratic resistance to the dictatorship—a person of real quality. He writes wonderful, brave words for our underground Web sites, strong words to expose the regime’s thugs. I have included some of his writings so that you can judge for yourself.

  “Over the last year he has been very ill. We have seen him grow weaker, and we don’t understand what the problem is. We feel that a prolonged stay in Chikurubi prison could have a permanent effect on his health. It could even result in his death. I’m afraid people are very poorly fed in our prisons. As far as we can make out, Chikurubi is the worst of all. And of course there are six others with him, all of whom are wrongly imprisoned.”

  The letter ran on for six pages. Abigail’s eyes skimmed over them quickly. She already understood what Patel wanted. Two hours before, it would have been out of the question. But now? No, it was still absurd. And this thing of Tony being a writer? What had he written?

  That question was answered in the two files. Among the hundreds of pages in the first file were printouts from Web sites, pages of uninterrupted text from a computer and what appeared to be photocopies of newspaper articles, some of which carried Tony Makumbe’s byline …

  The articles had headlines that were filled with a young man’s anger. “The Gukurahundi slaughter remembered,” said one. Another screamed at the reader: “Thousands left homeless after Murambatsvina.” A third article was headed “More MDC dissidents arrested without cause.”

  The language of the articles themselves was filled with phrases that would have found an echo in all Zimbabwean dissidents and minorities. “Freedom will not come until every right-thinking Zimbabwean is willing to lay down his life,” Abigail read in one. “Death is preferable to our continued suffering,” the article screamed at the reader. “Many of us are willing to make the ultimate sacrifice.”

  Abigail had the general idea after only a few minutes. She was not sure that she agreed that Tony was a great writer, but she could see why people who were involved in the Zimbabwean freedom struggle might think so.

  She had almost finished skimming the first batch of articles when the phone rang. Gert Pienaar was on the other end of the connection. “Abigail, I’m just calling to say goodbye,” he said. “I’ve decided to move on.” Despite the three days he had spent in police custody, he sounded surprisingly relaxed.

  Gert did not stay on the line for long. Abigail tried to extend the conversation, seeking to persuade him to stay, even going over to the argument put forward by both Robert and Gert himself. “It’s not a perfect world,” she told him, “but we can do a lot of good within those imperfections.”

  Now that he had tasted them, Gert seemed to have changed his mind about those imperfections. He told her that, as far as he could see, this was payback time, a warning that he was overstepping his limits. “I was on the wrong side then. Maybe I’m the wrong color now.”

  “That’s bullshit,” Abigail had told him, “and you know it.”

  “Do I?” he had asked. “Maybe I do, maybe I have some doubts.”

  After Gert hung up, it was some time before Abigail could go back to her reading. The events of the last few days had brought back memories that she would rather have left hidden. She had been in a safe house in Lesotho when the house was attacked and her father murdered by soldiers of the old regime. Two years later her mother had been killed by a parcel bomb.

  In some ways, the way they had died was easier for her to accept than the death of her aunt. Her parents were victims of the racist regime that she had accepted as being evil, an enemy of the people. Her aunt’s death, on the other hand, had been at the hands of what she had been taught was an army of liberation. She was nine years old at the time and altogether unable to grasp this new reality. How had the heroes of the liberation struggle become murderers?

  It was her father who had told her what had happened. For an hour or more she had questioned him, trying to understand something that was beyond all understanding. Eventually he had said, “Abigail, I really don’t know the details. I was not there. All I know is that they were killed by the same soldiers who in the last year have killed a lot of Ndebeles.”

  “But why, Papa?” she had asked. “They fought for freedom too, didn’t they?”

  “Perhaps that’s not quite what they were fighting for, but you’re too young to be wrestling with these things now,” he had said. “Later, when you’re older, we will discuss them. I promise you that.”

  It was a promise he had been unable to keep. Six years later he was killed by soldiers of the apartheid regime.

  The second parcel of Tony’s work was quite different than the strident pamphleteering of the first one. So absorbed was Abigail that she found herself reading every word of every page. Robert came in and was surprised by how quickly she returned to her reading.

  Most of the pages were straight from a computer printer, seeming to indicate that their contents had never been published. A few were photocopies from a publication that carried its name, Kultur Zimbabwe, in small letters at the bottom of every page. A few were copies of standard-size magazine pages, and others of trade paperback pages.

  By the time Abigail finally laid aside the last page, Robert was asleep. She looked at the bedroom clock, saw that it said a quarter to one and wondered if it was too late to call Yudel. Apart from the lateness of the hour, it had been nearly four years since she had last seen or spoken to him, and she was not sure how she would begin the conversation.

  Although she barely admitted it to herself, Abigail felt uneasy about the differences in the paths her life and Yudel’s had taken. Yudel had been retrenched from the Department of Correctional Services in order to bring about what government considered more acceptable representation, without ever specifying what sort of representation they were talking about. On the other hand, Abigail’s Robert had been the beneficiary of an empowerment deal of such excessive proportions that she still did not feel comfortable in the seemingly endless expanses of their home.

  It was true that when the department discovered how short they were of the requisite skills, Yudel was brought back on a generous contract. But, if her memory served her well, that too was about to expire.

  She reached twice for the telephone on her side of the bed, but eventually did not make the call. The matter of Tony Makumbe’s writing could wait till morning. Anyway, Yudel would probably not be able to contribute much.

  9

  Yudel Gordon sat at his desk in the office the head warder of C-Max high-security prison had allocated to him. Two hours before, it had taken him ten minutes to get through the gate at the outer perimeter, park his car in the lot outside the walls of the prison itself, pass through the security check at the main entrance and then gain access through another two heavily barred gates before he reached his office.

  None of this was unusual. Changing shifts in C-Max took at least half an hour, sometimes longer. The system had been designed to keep the inmates within its walls. A little inconvenience to the personnel had to be expected.

  Yudel was not a patient man. He hated queues, inept bureaucrats, dithering people who were slow to make decisions and any person or body that seemed to be conspiring to waste his time. That he spent so much of his life entering and leaving prisons, all of it without resentment, was a reflection of how much he was absorbed by his work.

  This was not something to which he readily admitted. He was aware that it seemed crass to enjoy imprisoning other people. It is not the act of imprisoning people that I enjoy, though, he thought. It is the crawling through the channels of t
heir minds, even if I sometimes get lost in the worst of those sewers.

  He had often asked himself how enjoyment could be defined. He did enjoy his work, but, on reflection, that often seemed absurd. The petty thief, the white-collar swindler, the political loony, the serial killer, the family murderer: Yudel dug into the minds of every one of them with equal dedication. Perhaps enjoyment came from fascination, he thought. At least, in his case, this was probably so.

  Yudel was physically a small man, in a nation of large ones. The unruly fuzz of his hair had been graying for some years now. He would have loved to have been a man whom women remembered after one meeting. The truth was that often they had to be introduced to him more than once. He was aware though that an occasional woman found his untidiness and absentmindedness somehow endearing. He was grateful to them.

  In many respects Yudel lacked confidence. He was never sure how much to tip waiters, whether to expect a porter when arriving at a hotel, how to address his seniors in the department, or how to deal with what he saw as the impenetrable solidarity of his wife’s circle of female friends.

  It was for his work that Yudel was noticed, and then as much for his irregular forays into the territory of the detective branch as for his efforts at bringing sanity to a corner of the nation’s prisons. Unconventional activities had, on occasion, brought him to the attention of the minister. Because of some of these activities he had been passed over for promotion a number of times under the old government and had been retrenched once by the new.

  For most of his adult life, Yudel had worked for the Department of Correctional Services in a segregated prison system in which black prisoners were sometimes hired out at slave wages. Down the years he had been asked on many occasions how he squared working in such a place with his conscience. It was a question to which he had never found an answer to satisfy even himself. He imagined that it probably had to do with the fact that the prison system had an endless supply of criminals with which to satisfy his curiosity about this subgroup of humanity.

  He also told himself that his presence there and his well-known readiness to rock the departmental boat was a threat to that category of warder who was attracted to the prisons for the chance to employ violence against men who could not retaliate. But most of all, he knew that his presence in the department had to do with the sheer stimulation of it. He was fascinated by the forces that turned men into criminals. Yudel hated the thought that he loved it all, but he loved it all the same.

  He also knew and understood the longer-term prisoners better than anyone else in the service. An hour before, a lockdown had been initiated, because, after the prisoners had been returned to their cells, one had seemed to be missing. Yudel had directed the search to cell D22, where the warders found an extra prisoner. “He just wanted to be with his wifey,” Yudel had told the warders. “He’ll go back without any rough treatment.”

  The pile of paper in his in-basket was topped by a few requisition forms which, when signed, would go to admin to be processed. He expected to see the required equipment some time within the next eighteen months. They were followed by a letter from the director of human resources, telling him that he was owed ten days’ leave. The letter went on to add that his contract was due to expire in three months. If he had not taken his leave before that date, he would forfeit it. It ended in capitals: NO LEAVE CAN BE PAID OUT!

  After the admonition from human resources, a pile of self-evaluation forms of staff members were clipped together by a large paper clip. Yudel had to assess the way they had evaluated themselves and give his opinion. He lifted what remained in the pile and slid the self-evaluations to the bottom.

  The next item was a letter to him personally, from the minister. She wanted him to shed light, if any light could be shed, on the matter of allegedly terminally ill prisoners being released on compassionate grounds and recovering to such an extent that they returned to their former criminal activities. One had even been released twice on compassionate grounds and the police were looking for him, because his trademark way of entering a safe had been used on a big job in Cape Town, a city he was known to favor. The minister went on to add that only thirty percent of compassionate parolees had the good grace to die within six months of release. It was shocking. Did Yudel have any suggestions?

  The letter was irresistible. Yudel started his response immediately.

  Dear Madame Minister,

  May I suggest reinstating the death penalty for the limited use of dealing with these problem cases. Any of these allegedly terminally ill parolees still alive after six months could be picked up and brought to Pretoria Central for administering the coup de grace. Their prompt demise would, after all, be an element of the agreement we had reached with them. A short period of the zealous implementation of this policy should have the effect of limiting frivolous claims of terminal illness.

  Your avenging and enthusiastic servant, Yudel Gordon.

  The temptation to print the letter was almost overwhelming. He would have referred to such an urge in others as a pocket of immaturity. A more sensible and sober part of his personality intervened. He reached for the delete button and dispensed the message to cyber heaven. Then he took the tried-and-tested civil-servant route of passing the responsibility to someone else.

  The reply he sent to the minister read like this:

  Dear Madame Minister,

  My own concern for this phenomenon is, if possible, as intense as your own. Accordingly, I have forwarded your letter to the two functionaries whose signatures appear on these parole documents, the head surgeon of our department and the District Surgeon for Tshwane. I shall insist on speedy replies from these gentlemen and will forward them to yourself as soon as I receive them.

  Yours faithfully, Yudel Gordon.

  He was answering a mail from the department’s director general, wanting his opinion of stun belts that temporarily disabled the wearer, when a knock on the open door of his office revealed a young warder, carrying a box file. “From the Department of Justice for you, sir,” he said.

  Yudel reached for it. “What’s it about? Any message?”

  “No message. Only that it comes from the Department of Justice and that it’s urgent.”

  Yudel put the director general’s mail aside. He would deal with it later. Receiving the file had surprised him. He had few dealings with that department.

  Yudel was a man who, for all his many eccentricities and his readiness to champion unpopular cases, was concerned that in certain matters people should think well of him. First among these was in his relationships with younger women. He could not tolerate the idea that he might be thought of as an old fool who chased after any woman young enough to be his daughter. He also prized his relationship with Rosa, his wife of many years, and was determined to do nothing to upset that. Despite all that, he was pleased, too pleased for his own peace of mind, to see that the file had come from Abigail.

  He had only had dealings with Abigail once, some years before, over a period of little more than a week. But the period had been so intense and the stakes so high that it had brought them closer than they would have been had they been lovers; far closer than either expected. Yet, when it ended, neither had made any attempt to contact the other.

  Dear Yudel,

  How are you? It’s been a while. I trust that both you and Rosa are in good health. I have a little matter that interests me and I hope may interest you. This file contains some of the writings of a Zimbabwean relative who is in trouble with their authorities. I discern personality elements in his writing that surprise me and that I do not understand. Please have a look and tell me what you think.

  Love to Rosa—Abigail.

  After years of silence she wants me to be her literary critic, he thought. Nevertheless, he turned the page to the first of Tony Makumbe’s writings, read it slowly, then read it again.

  Yudel knew something about the state of Zimbabwe’s prisons. He also knew that almost all the waiters in restaurants in th
e province he lived in came from Zimbabwe’s Ndebele minority. They had flooded across the border in their millions to escape the political and economic devastation of their own country. Nurses, journalists, businesspeople, hotel night managers and whatever other kind of occupation they held back home, they had found a living of sorts in South Africa’s restaurants. At least in their adopted country they could afford food. Beyond that, what he knew about Zimbabwe came from newspaper reports and the occasional professional tidbits reaching him from its prisons. It was a place to avoid.

  * * *

  Yudel was surprised to find Rosa waiting for him in his study when he came in. It was the one room in the house that she rarely visited. “Abigail phoned,” she said, rising to meet him.

  He offered the usual perfunctory kiss. “She sent me a file that she wants me to read.”

  “Yudel, what does she want this time?”

  Yudel knew that his wife’s anxiety had nothing to do with Abigail’s charms. “It won’t be like that this time,” he said. “Nothing like that.”

  “What, then?”

  “I thought you liked Abigail.”

  Rosa lifted a threatening finger. “Yudel, don’t you try to dance around me that way. You know that this has got nothing to with what I think of Abigail. I think she’s a wonderful person, but what does she want?”

  “As far as I can see, she wants me to analyze someone by reading his writing.”

  “His handwriting?”

  “No, his prose.”

  Rosa’s puzzlement showed on her face. “Why? Shouldn’t the person be present when they’re being analyzed?”

  “As far as I can make out, the person is not available. Abigail wants my opinion.”

  “I hope that is all she wants.”

  “I’m sure it is,” Yudel said. Perhaps not, he thought, but that is what you need to believe.

  After she had left, he opened the file again. During the next four hours, stopping only for a half-hour break during which he consumed in silence the dinner Rosa had prepared, he read everything in the file. Then he paged back, searching again for the sections that interested him most and reading them more slowly. Of those passages, he studied every word, looking for a meaning that, he was aware, may not be there. A section that seemed to be photocopied from a book drew his attention: