each man held it as he recalled the day, helping me to piece together a picture of the crime. Easy stopped by at the end, wearing a newsboy cap and drunk from attending a funeral. He spoke of his role as a freedom fighter, his involvement in Amy’s murder. He was used to changing his tune for his audience. For the white tourists and journalists, he had been caught up in a maelstrom of violence, and Amy’s death was the regrettable result. For these haggard old radicals, it was a different story.
“I am an African who can serve and suffer and sacrifice just for the benefit of the people,” he said. “They’ve seen me do it.”
When it was over, I drove Mzi home. It was late afternoon, and we attended a small birthday party for his niece Nanha. She was the daughter of Steyn, Mzi’s broken brother who lived in Kanana and smoked dagga all day long, the man arrested in the murder of Amy and then set free. Nanha’s mother had skipped out when Nanha was a baby. She lived with her extended family and slept next to her grandmother. Her teacher, impressed by her academic performance, had given her a pink notebook, which she hid beneath her grandmother’s mattress. She motioned me into the room, lifted up the bed, and fished it out.
“Nobody knows it is here,” she whispered. “It’s my birthday Saturday. I turn nine.”
“That’s great news.”
Nanha made her eyes into slits and pursed her lips, slipping the notebook back to its hiding place. “Don’t breathe any word of it!”
A family friend had baked her a multilayer magenta cake covered in sprinkles and candles and she was wearing a new dress and new shoes. Her cousin, a confident four-year-old, walked over to me. Her hair was pulled into two tidy Afro puffs.
“Do you want popcorns?” she asked, shoving a handful at me. Then she pushed her face close to mine. “I like your dimples,” she announced, a compliment I appreciated despite the fact that I don’t have dimples.
After we sang “Happy Birthday,” I left Gugulethu, but instead of returning to Sea Point, I took an alternate route. I drove off the highway, over the bridge, and turned left on a sleepy street. I buzzed in, walked past the walls covered in glitter and the other detritus of Christmas cheer, and arrived again at a barren brown door.
D. DE VILLIERS
DIABETIC
His phone had stopped working a while back, so I hadn’t bothered to call. I didn’t bother knocking either since he couldn’t hear me. I opened the door to find Daniel in exactly the same position in which I’d found him when we’d first met: back facing the door, hunched over a shallow bowl of soup. I walked to where he could see me. He paused and looked up, unsurprised.
“Hello, Justine,” he said in a soft warble.
I motioned to the hospital bed covered in a green and dark red cover, the only place to sit, and Daniel nodded.
“Can I ask you some questions?” I shouted.
“What?” he asked.
“Can I ask you some questions?”
“Can you speak up?”
How could this possibly work? I looked down at the notebook in my hand. I opened to a blank page and wrote, CAN I ASK YOU SOME QUESTIONS?
I held it up. Daniel leaned in.
“Sure,” he said.
HOW DID YOU GROW UP?
“How I grew up? In Green Point, near the Traffic Department, they had the houses in back, that’s where I grew up.”
WHY THERE?
“My father worked on the railways.”
HOW WAS YOUR FAMILY LIFE?
“Family was all right. Only my father was the troublemaker. Me and him could never see eye to eye.”
WHY?
“He was just like that,” Daniel said. As always, his face stayed in one position, betraying no emotion.
WHAT THEN?
“I was at the high school and then I went to work on the docks. That time, anybody that worked for the state, that person’s relative got a job immediately, no questions asked. I stayed there and kept the electricity working right. I start about seven in the morning and turn in at half past eleven at night. This went on for nearly ten years. Somebody came with a rumor, saying the Suez Canal will close and this will be the end of it. Now me, like a fool, listened to that, so I left there and went and drove a taxi for a while. I saw there was no life in a taxi. Went back to the docks, they took me back, and then I started driving to