We Are Not Such Things - Justine van der Leun Page 0,172

the TRC files that I said: “I’m just hoping you could maybe write up this affidavit for the Department of Justice. All you have to do is write it out, then go to a police station, then have them stamp it, and scan it and send it to me.”

That’s when stoic Linda Biehl began to cry.

“No! I don’t want to have to run around looking into how she was killed in Gugulethu,” Linda said, her voice raised and broken. “I can’t keep doing this anymore. I just want my life back. Twenty years is enough.”

I stared at the blank Skype screen, Linda’s number glowing.

“Why did you talk to me?” I asked, scrambling. “Why do you help me?”

“I don’t know why. Because you seem like a nice young woman and Amy was a nice young woman. I thought you were trying really hard to discover. But I don’t care about your book.”

“What do you care about?”

“My family is important. The proper truthful legacy of who Amy was is important. I want my privacy. I want to grow as a person. I am stuck in South Africa. I am seeing more and more how this has affected my family. The time has come, and there is no one there to carry on. I have no one really to turn to. I cannot keep doing this to my family. They have got to be able to live their lives. They have their issues, their interests, and their cares and their concerns. I don’t want this to be on their necks anymore. I want to get my own place. I am really at a point where I want to move on.”

Linda grasped for composure. She lowered her voice, and I could hear her drying her face. I imagined her mascara running down her cheeks. “Nobody wants the truth,” she said. “Those TRC records aren’t the truth. They are graphic and ugly. The truth is that the country was still in turmoil. She represented the oppressor, and her white face was all that was wrong with the country, and she was killed.”

At that moment, I heard the school bus pull up and the sounds of children’s voices—and then her granddaughter. Linda put the phone down, but didn’t hang up.

“You’re carrying lots of stuff, do you need help?” she asked the girl.

“Thanks!” her granddaughter replied in her small, determined voice. “I had a big party to go to.”

Linda picked the phone up, and now she was calm.

“You write me an email, tell me what you want me to do, and I will do it,” Linda said, and then she hung up.

I stupidly wrote that email, explaining the complicated steps toward acquiring the release of the records, to which she replied:

This is a mess. I have worked with you in the spirit of Ubuntu (generosity of spirit) but I am not aware of what you are planning as you are not particularly forthcoming. If I can be more helpful when I am in the country, let me know….Linda.

So I explained to the Department of Justice that Amy’s next of kin was a woman of advanced age who lived in a far-off country, and that it would simply be impossible for such a person to officially grant permission using the complicated channels required by a clunky government. Easy wrote me out a signed and stamped affidavit. I didn’t bother to ask Ntobeko, Mongezi, or Vusumzi, and mailed in Easy’s permission. For whatever reason, after so much tangled red tape, this alone seemed to satisfy the bureaucrats, or perhaps they had simply grown tired of fielding my calls. Seven months after I’d begun the process, a heavy red cardboard box arrived in the mail, full of papers from the TRC. Daniel de Villiers’s name didn’t show up anywhere.

Sam and I took our honeymoon in Botswana, where we paddled down the Okavango River Delta at dusk, and watched the hippos lolling in the water. Then we traveled to Lesotho, where we trekked on horseback to the remote, untouched mountains. Back in Cape Town, I drove Easy, Aphiwe, and Aphiwe’s two cousins to a park by the water. It was a new development built by the city in conjunction with the soccer stadium, which hosted games during the 2010 World Cup. In keeping, the park, a World Cup “legacy project,” was a small sliver of utopia in the city. It abutted the Mouille Point golf course and the rugby fields where I ran my dog, and sat just east of the