Despite the Darkness, page 34
When asked, Cameron said he wanted to see van Zyl because he had important information for him. No, he wasn’t prepared to divulge the information to anybody else. He was told to phone back later. It took five attempts before he was finally told that van Zyl would see him on Friday afternoon.
In the meantime what passed for everyday life had an air of unreality. Cameron still wasn’t allowed to speak to his children. His first and second year classes were largely depopulated, leaving only the unreceptive right wing rump. His Honours class ignored the boycott, knowing him well enough not to believe he could be a police agent, and the same applied to most of his third years. Those who had any doubts about him could see their final exams looming too ominously for solidarity with a student protest to win the day.
The Staff Association Executive meeting had come to nothing – the Principal had done his homework. The Executive was indignant about the abuse of process, but was worried that the association would shed members in large numbers if it were to be seen to take up the cause of someone suspected of being a police agent. The overwhelmingly white members of the Non-Academic Staff Association had already made their stance clear, while a majority of the unionized black workers were UDF supporters and had accepted at face value the account they had been given of Cameron’s visit to Edendale.
Without the support of any of the University’s representative bodies, there was nothing the History Department could do to bring effective pressure on the Principal to change his mind. Patrick had insisted on a meeting with him but, as Cameron had anticipated, he might as well have put his request for Cameron’s reinstatement in a letter to Father Christmas.
Patrick had called a second department meeting to report back on his encounter with the Principal. His assessment was that the Principal was just using the week in Cape Town as an excuse, and was not going to change his mind. The Principal’s real issue, as far as Patrick was concerned, was Cameron’s high profile in the media. The Principal clearly saw Cameron as a reputational risk best managed by getting rid of him. Patrick was a lot sharper in his analysis than Cameron had expected.
There was nothing for it but to look for another job. Jules might be persuaded to come with him if it would take her entirely beyond the reach of Venter – Fiji would have done that. He hadn’t heard anything from that quarter, and it was too early to expect to have heard, even if they were in a hurry to make an appointment. But when he had unpacked after getting home he had emptied his briefcase and taken another look at the conference papers. Glancing again through the list of those attending the conference – the Roll of Honour of those who had boycotted his plenary – he noticed the name of a Dr James Stanbridge from Suva University in Fiji on the list. A glance at the Commonwealth University Yearbook when he visited the library the next day had revealed the worst – James Stanbridge was the Head of Department.
It had been a waste of time sending in an application. Somebody who thought that he was a police agent capable of betraying his research student to the Special Branch would be overseeing the selection process. Nothing could have disabused Stanbridge of that view in the interim.
In the meantime Cameron still had three months to go before he would have to clear his desk and hand in his keys. He would only be able to survive those three months by getting Jules and the children back home. The only possibility seemed to lie with letting van Zyl know just how bad a risk Venter was to the Special Branch. He needed, at the very least, to persuade van Zyl to keep Venter well away from Jules.
Chapter 27
Friday morning brought with it another Berg wind – not as strong, or as blustery, as the one that had heralded Mirambo’s midnight arrival at their back door, but just as hot. It was late in the year for Berg winds.
The meeting was scheduled for 2.00pm which meant that the morning had to be got through somehow, just as the night before had been. The phone hadn’t rung and there had been no knocking on the door, but there had been very little sleep. Cameron had managed to restrict himself to one whisky – his mind needed to be as clear as possible for the meeting. He suspected that his sleeplessness might have been attributable, at least in part, to his abstinence.
Cameron’s two tutorials would have provided the Principal with all the evidence he wanted that Cameron wasn’t going to be any further use to the university as a teacher. None of the first year students had turned up, and only two of the second years – but it could be that the attraction of a long weekend had trumped the moral high ground of a lecture boycott.
Cameron had lunch at the Staff Club with Lynn, who seemed almost as nervous about his impending meeting as he was. She had tried to dissuade him from going. As far as she was concerned, nothing positive could possibly come from the meeting, which could only put him in greater danger. Cameron said she was probably right, but it was just possible that van Zyl might let something slip. He didn’t tell her that the main reason he wanted to see van Zyl was to get him to stop Venter from harassing Jules – he hadn’t told Lynn that Jules had left him. He just promised to drop by her office afterwards to let her know what happened.
The nondescript 1960s concrete and brick building looked far too bland to have witnessed so much pain over the past thirty years or so. As he sat in the Renault on the other side of the road gathering himself for his meeting, Cameron wondered how many bodies had been carted quietly out of the back door of that building during those years. He hoped Mirambo’s hadn’t been one of them.
When the time came for his appointment, Cameron was shown into a sparsely furnished secretary’s office. Van Zyl’s gatekeeper was sitting at a desk that took up a large part of the uncarpeted floor space. She introduced herself as Desirée van Wyk, giving an impression of immovable solidity. The upright chairs against the wall reminded him of the school dentist’s waiting room.
Van Zyl’s office was unexpected. It was a striking departure from the government-issue furniture and standard décor of the gatekeeper’s office. Government stores don’t run to oil paintings for the walls or expensive Persian rugs for the parquet floors. Van Zyl, who had clearly been allowed to bring his own furnishings, was sitting behind a pedestal desk with a red leather top. He gestured towards a stinkwood carver chair with a basket-weave seat placed in front of the desk.
‘Good afternoon, Dr Beaumont,’ van Zyl said. ‘Please sit down. I understand you have been very insistent on having a meeting with me. It is unusual for those whom we suspect of trying to subvert the State to want to meet with us – they usually do whatever they can to avoid such meetings. So I am intrigued to hear what you have to say. Would you like a cup of coffee?’
Van Zyl turned towards a cafatière on a tray at the end of his desk. Cameron’s dry-throated thanks came out croakily. The coffee-pouring ritual would delay a conversation he had insisted on having but would now prefer to avoid. But he couldn’t just get up and leave.
The coffee cups were fine bone china – Delft to judge by the blue windmills. They were very much in keeping with the mantel clock and the pair of Tinus de Jongh oil paintings on the wall behind the desk. Van Zyl reached over and put a cup of black coffee down in front of Cameron and pushed a small matching milk jug across to keep it company. Van Zyl drank his coffee black. Cameron didn’t pick either up – the shaking of his hands would have betrayed his nervousness.
Cameron knew very few people who had ever encountered van Zyl. He seemed very seldom, if ever, to involve himself in interrogations. He was said to be the brains behind SB operations in the region and, perhaps because nobody knew precisely what he did, the one word consistently used to describe him was ‘sinister’. He didn’t look at all sinister – he looked as if he could be the Chairman of his local primary school Parents Teachers Association. Come to that, he probably was.
‘How can I help?’ van Zyl asked.
‘You people are destroying my life,’ Cameron said, he hoped evenly.
‘I am sorry to hear that, Doctor Beaumont,’ van Zyl replied. ‘But isn’t a destroyed life, as you put it, what is to be expected if people persist in trying to undermine the authority of the State in these dangerous times?’
Cameron didn’t answer.
‘How is your life being destroyed?’ van Zyl interjected into the silence.
It was important for Cameron to keep his voice steady. He took a sip of the black coffee whose astringent taste provided a momentary distraction.
‘You know perfectly well that I’m not working for the Special Branch,’ Cameron said. ‘And you must know equally well that I wasn’t sleeping with the woman who used to work for us. And yet your people have circulated rumours about both matters. If your intelligence is any use at all you will also know that I didn’t have anything to do with the bomb that Warrant Officer Venter seems to think I was involved with, nor do I know where Mr Sithole is.’
Better gather himself before going on to talk about Jules and the children. Too much emotion would be evidence of the success of whatever game they were playing, for which van Zyl would ultimately have been responsible.
‘Knowing that we were looking for Mr Sithole,’ van Zyl said, ‘would you, as a patriotic citizen, have told us if you had found him?’
‘Were’ looking for him? If they were no longer looking for him, that could only mean that they had found him. Of course he wouldn’t have told them, van Zyl knew that perfectly well. Avoiding the question would be interpreted as an implicit admission of guilt, but there was no way he could answer it. If he said ‘no’, he would provide them with justification for his immediate detention. If he lied and said ‘yes’, they would make it public and, by doing so, vindicate anyone who thought him capable of betraying Mirambo.
‘Venter has been threatening to assault my wife,’ Cameron said, unable to keep his voice entirely steady. ‘You will know she has gone down to Cape Town to stay with her mother and taken my children with her. Half this city has been told that we are getting divorced – the other half has been told we are leaving the country in a hurry. I’ve been expelled from an international conference. Nobody will now publish my research. My lectures are being boycotted. I have just been given three months notice. Does that provide you with some kind of pointer as to the ways in which my life is being destroyed?’
‘As I said,’ van Zyl replied, ‘a destroyed life is the price you pay. Your wife hasn’t just gone down to Cape Town to stay with your mother. She has left you – although I can understand that you would find it difficult to admit it. Venter is a dangerous man who has some very distasteful proclivities. He is a sadist. I would strongly recommend that you and your wife both make sure he is never in a position to carry out his threats. Your wife is much better off in Cape Town than she would be here. There is no question that Venter is a thug – but he is a useful thug. I keep him on a leash but I allow the leash to be relatively loose most of the time. As for your articles…’
‘What you don’t know,’ interrupted Cameron, ‘is that Venter smokes pot while he is on duty. That, as I am sure you are aware, has the potential to turn a sadist into a psychopath. Is that what you call keeping him on a leash?’
‘Of course I know he smokes marijuana from time to time,’ replied van Zyl, a harder edge creeping into his urbanity. ‘There is very little I don’t know. One of the many things you, by contrast, don’t know is that a good bit of the time he has been spending outside your house, particularly before your wife left you to go to Cape Town, was not time spent on duty – it was in his own time. I obviously wasn’t going to stop him – the more closely your house is watched the better. He is obsessed with your wife and seems to spend an unhealthy amount of his time fantasizing about what he would like to do to her.’
The idea that it had been his spare time Venter had been devoting to watching them was peculiarly chilling – and van Zyl knew all about it, even the dope, and did nothing to stop it.
‘As to Venter’s smoking marijuana in his own time, Doctor Beaumont,’ van Zyl said, ‘why would I stop him? I am at heart a libertarian. I agree with John Stuart Mill’s proposition that liberty consists in the freedom to do everything which injures no one else. We only detain, or otherwise deal with, people whose beliefs or actions injure others, either directly or by delaying or undermining the peaceful and prosperous future this country will achieve through Separate Development. Besides which, your disapproval of Venter is hypocritical. You are on record as arguing that marijuana should be treated in exactly the same way as alcohol, and we both know that you do not disapprove of alcohol.’
Cameron had been expecting van Zyl to make reference to his alcohol consumption at some point, but for him to claim to be a libertarian boggled the mind. Karl Marx claiming to be the Pope would have seemed less incongruous.
‘As I was saying, before you interrupted me earlier,’ van Zyl continued, ‘your papers do not deserve to be published, Doctor Beaumont. They present a distorted version of African history. I have read them all. Their Marxist frame of reference is misguided, as is their assumption that you can posit future outcomes for Africa on the same basis as those for Europe. Your papers assume that there is no difference between the psychology of Africans and those of Europeans.’
Van Zyl’s ‘Doctor Beaumont’ carried none of the sarcasm or venom of Venter’s use of ‘Doctor’ as a swear word. If an entry on van Zyl were ever to appear in Who’s Who, one might well find that he had a doctorate from Stellenbosch – although finding entries for SB officers in Who’s Who was about as likely as finding entries for MI5 officers.
‘You play the Japanese board game Go, Doctor Beaumont, as I do,’ van Zyl continued, allowing himself the shadow of a smile. ‘When I first mentioned Go to Venter I had to assure him that it had nothing in common with touch rugby. He had been listening to you playing the game with your Philosophy friend. He said it was boring as hell and went on for hours – mostly with nobody talking. He wanted to know what happened.’
Could there be anything wholly abhorrent about anyone who played Go? Cameron’s hands had stopped shaking so he felt confident enough to pour milk into the remainder of what was now cold coffee and drink it.
Go was boring enough to watch if you weren’t an expert – it must be excruciating to listen to. They had only ever played in one of three venues: at Francois’ house, on random tables at the staff club, and in Cameron’s office. They wouldn’t have bugged Francois’ house and they wouldn’t have a bug on every table at the club, so it had to have been in his office. His long-standing suspicion that his office had been bugged had been confirmed when he borrowed Vishnu’s detector, but that was well over a year ago. They must have planted another bug since. The immediate question was why van Zyl felt so obviously relaxed about letting him know that his office had been bugged.
‘I told him,’ van Zyl went on, ‘that it was a game played with black and white stones that the players put down alternately on the board. He wanted to know how many stones there were, and asked whether there were many more black ones than white ones. I said I didn’t know how many stones there were – it had never occurred to me to count them – but there were always enough for each player, so there were probably the same number of white as black. Venter said we should be so lucky, and added that he would always want to play with the white stones. I told him that the stronger player always plays with the white stones – which he thought made a lot of sense. I told him that it was an ancient Chinese war game, adopted and refined by the Japanese, whose winner was the person who had the most territory at the end, and that along the way individual stones, or groups of stones could be captured or killed. Venter said the territory bit sounded true enough and he liked the sound of the rest of it. He said he would like to learn to play. I haven’t taken the hint.’
‘There are two things I like about Go,’ van Zyl went on after a brief pause for reflection. ‘One is the need for long term strategy – the other is the way the game allows a number of individual battles to be fought out on the board simultaneously. You have been one of my more interesting skirmishes, Doctor Beaumont.’
Van Zyl looked directly at Cameron.
‘There is a third thing I like,’ he said. ‘I like the process of killing my opponent’s groups of stones by surrounding them and squeezing the lives out of them. It is satisfying that the groups of stones that I have killed usually get to lie on the board – sometimes not yet completely dead – until the end of the game when the score is added up.’
Cameron could think of nothing to say. It was clear that there could be quite a lot that was abhorrent about some people who played Go. As if to reinforce what Cameron was thinking, van Zyl added an afterthought.
‘Of course the difference between Go and life is that in Go a group of stones is safe and cannot be threatened so long as it has two lives. People like us, Doctor Beaumont, only have one life and there are no rules of the game to stop us being captured or killed. What were you hoping to achieve by talking to me?’
‘I have come to ask you to instruct Venter to leave my wife alone,’ Cameron said. ‘I also need to find out what has happened to Mr Sithole – and you are the only person who can make it clear that I am not a police spy.’
‘You disappoint me, Doctor Beaumont,’ van Zyl said, looking genuinely downcast. ‘I would have thought you much too intelligent to imagine that I might help you with any of that. To start with Mirambo, as he preferred to be called, even if I knew what had happened to him, where would the advantage to me lie in telling you?’
