being artistic – notices things more than a man does, Naas Klopper advised the police. It was Mrs Naas’s description of the girl and the young man that they took back to compare with their files and photographs at John Vorster, and to use in the interrogations that, if they couldn’t always wring words from the obdurate (and sometimes you couldn’t get a sound out of these people, no matter what you did to them) might reveal an involuntary change of expression that made it worthwhile to press on for recognition, names, evidence of collusion. So it was the police had in their files, the journalist had in his article (biding its time for a Sunday front page), a description of the wanted white couple as a blond bearded man in his twenties and a young pregnant woman. The journalist had no description of any blacks who had taken part in the sabotage attack, although it was known that the actual job was done by blacks. It was the involvement of whites that was the newsworthy angle; one white revolutionary was worth twenty blacks.
If it was detrimental to state security to allow publication of any details about the saboteurs, it was useful to use certain details of the attack to impress upon the public evidence of what threatened them. Let State Information pick up the saboteurs’ weapons and hold these at citizens’ heads: that’s the way to shut any big mouths asking awkward questions about why they had come to be threatened – everyone’d be quick enough to agree, then, they must give the Prime Minister, to save their skins, anything he demanded. A photograph of a cache of arms was released to all newspapers; AKM assault rifles, limpet mines with detonators and timing devices of the type it had been established had blown up part of the power station, defensive and offensive hand grenades with detonators, several hundred rounds of ammunition. Some Dragonov sniper rifles, actually from a different, earlier cache, were thrown in for added effect, as a piece of greenery gives the final touch to a floral arrangement. The sites on which these arms were discovered were not shown, but it was stated that some had been buried in the veld at a hideout among bushes where the saboteurs appeared to have lived prior to the attack, and some had been stored in the garage of a house on a plot. The ‘reinforced’ outhouse was thought to be an arsenal on which more than one group of saboteurs had drawn. A biscuit tin displayed in a corner of the photograph contained ammunition. When Mrs Naas Klopper saw it she gave a cry of recognition. There was the child with the puppy and the roses; her own biscuit tin, in which she had made the offering of rusks.
A baboon has been found dead in a lane.
The stench of decay led some children to it while they were roller skating. Its right arm was shattered and its fur tarred with blackened blood. Now somebody got a photograph of it, before the Baca municipal street-cleaners’ gang were persuaded by a fifty-cent bonsella to take the carcass away on Monday morning.
Nobody wants to publish the photograph. The dead baboon was found the Sunday an attempt was made to blow up the power station. The sabotage attack filled the newspapers and has given people other preoccupations; after all, some of the suburbs the creature had made uneasy were without electricity for eighteen hours.
It has been identified as a young, full-grown, male Chacma baboon. Only a baboon, after all; not an orang-outan, not a chimpanzee – just a native species.
The Kleynhans Place has now been photographed by newspapermen for papers published in English, Afrikaans and Zulu for specific readerships, black, white and in-between, and for the international press. It has acquired a capital ‘P’ to distinguish its ominous status as a proper noun, the name of a threat within the midst of the community of law and order. If the Kleynhans Place can exist, undetected, a farming plot like any other on the books of Klopper’s Eiendoms Beperk, what is left of the old, secure life?
Investigating the Kleynhans Place attack the police found two mattresses on the floor in the house, as well as two beds; old newspapers going back many weeks to that story about a monkey seen by some kids while they were swimming. Nothing there to work on. The only thing the white couple seemed to have forgotten was a