White Dog Fell from the Sky

32



For two days now, there’d been no porridge. The footsteps brought only water to his door. Isaac tried to speak to the man in the cell next to his, but there was no answer.

His belly had stopped crying out. There is a point when the body relinquishes its pain and waits dumbly. He was growing unable to stand with any steadiness. He noticed that his mind had blurred like his body, his thoughts increasingly muddled, his fear wilder. He imagined there would come a time when fear too would go the way of hunger: the savage animal eating his heart would someday grow weary.

The wall beside him had once been whitewashed, but was now gray and smeared. Before darkness descended, a dim light fell through the transom slats, and he peered at what looked like scratchings. A series of lines. Sixty-seven of them. What had happened on the sixty-eighth day? He wanted to believe the man who’d made those scratches was alive, but he’d never heard of anyone being released from Number Four. Nelson Mandela, yes, but they’d taken him to Robben Island and would never let him go.

He laid a finger on the sixty-seventh line. His eyes strayed around the wall as the cell grew dark. He believed he could see marks farther above his head, perhaps a word. He rose to his knees to see it better, but the light was too dim.

From an early age, Isaac had been taught to believe he’d been chosen for a life above the ordinary. He saw now that hubris had crept into his soul, inhabited his thoughts. Perhaps he had been chosen not for the extraordinary, but for this.

As dark overtook him, he heard a group of prisoners singing in a distant cell block.

Hamba khale umkhonto

Wemkhonto

Mkhonto wesizwe

Thina Bantu bomkhonto siz’misele

Ukuwabulala

Wona lamabhulu.

They were singing of Umkhonto, the spear of the nation. Singing to bring death and destruction down upon the heads of the Boers. Around him, down the block of the isolation wing, a voice joined them, here, there, and his own lifted into the darkness.

At dawn, he heard the footsteps of two guards. His heart pounded. The door of the cell next to his clanged open.

There were rough voices, a scuffling sound.

“Eish, that gave me a fright.”

“Fokken klank.”

“Jou dronkie!” You drunkard. “Ag man, get his legs.”

This is how he’d go, with bickering and swearing and a heave ho into a hole in the ground.

His sense of time was gone. How much time passed before another door clanged down the row? And then the moans began: that terrible labor. The screams would be coming. He knew this particular voice now and believed this man would die. Afterward, they would come for him. Amandla! he whispered. Ngawethu! Power! The power is ours! Not today, not tomorrow, but … it had almost ceased to matter whether he was here to see a world transformed.