know come to know. A good journalist must have his contacts in both the regular police force and the security police. A manhunt was on, routine roadblocks and a close watch on all airports and border posts were being maintained: there was to be no further information supplied to the public while important leads were being followed. The important leads – everyone knew what those were. Another routine in such cases: a number of people, mostly blacks, had been detained even more promptly than normal power supplies could be restored, and were under interrogation, day after day, night after night, during which a name extorted by an agony of fear and solitude, and if that didn’t bring results, by the infliction of physical pain, might or might not be that of someone who would attempt to blow up a power station. John Vorster Square and its suburban and rural annexes were working at optimum capacity. But Sergeant Marais Chapman had been taken off interrogation duty and sent with a couple of black security men to question people within a cordon of the area in which the towers of the power station were the veld landmark. One of the good journalists knew, without being able to publish a word in the meantime (the story was on file) that the police had been to the Indian at the store, who did not recognise any of the photographs they showed him, and that they had visited all plots and farms, questioning black labourers. It was in the course of these visits that they found an empty house, a deserted yard, at Plot 185 Koppiesdrif, where an old man with some story about being there to weed his mealie patch told them this was Baas Kleynhans’s place but the oubaas was dead and the boys that worked there now, they had gone away two weeks ago, and the white people who were living in the house, last week he saw the missus but now this time when he came to weed his mealies, they were gone, too. The old man gave the name of the baas who looked after the farm now Baas Kleynhans was dead. So Naas Klopper – out of nowhere! – found the police sitting in Klopper’s Eiendoms Beperk, waiting to ask what he could tell them about the Kleynhans place.
The journalist interviewed him shortly after. He wanted to talk to Klopper’s wife, as well, because Klopper let slip that the white couple had ‘taken us for a ride’, they’d even had (the refreshment grew in proportion to the deception) a meal at the house – his wife had felt sorry for the girl, who was pregnant. But Mrs Naas did not want to give an interview to the English press; they would always twist in a nasty way something innocent that Afrikaners said. She did, however, talk to a nice young man from one of the Afrikaans papers, serving him coffee and those very same buttermilk rusks she’d baked and taken along to the young couple just after they’d moved in. She described again, as she had to the police, what the black looked like who had come from the yard, for a moment, with a tool or something (she couldn’t quite remember) in his hand. Just like any other black – young, wearing jeans that were a bit smart, yes, for a farm boy. He hadn’t said anything. The white girl hadn’t spoken to him. But she was flustered when Mrs Naas – out of kindness, that’s all, the girl said she was a foreigner – remarked she hoped the boy wasn’t some loafer who’d come to the back door. Rosser their name was. They seemed such polite young people. Whenever she got to that point in her story, Mrs Naas was stopped by a long quavering sigh, as if somebody had caught her by the throat. She and whomever she was telling the tale to would look at one another in silence a moment; the journalist was not excepted. Something alien was burning slowly, like a stick of incense fuming in this room, Mrs Naas’s split-level lounge, which had been so lovingly constructed, the slasto fireplace chosen stone by stone by Naas himself, the beasts whose skins covered the bar-stools shot by him, the tapestry made stitch by stitch by Mrs Naas in security against the rural poverty of the past and in certainty that these objects and artefacts were what civilisation is.
Mrs Naas – being a woman,