PART TWO
The more I see of men, the more I like my dog.
Madame de Sta?l
Chapter 5
On an anonymous letter, peace on earth and a hungry scorpion
Engineer Westhuizen’s servant relapsed into the distant hope that a general societal change would come to her rescue. But it wasn’t easy for her to predict the chances of anything that might give her a future at all, whatever the quality of that future might be.
The books in the library of the research facility gave her some context, of course, but most of what was on the shelves was ten or more years old. Among other things, Nombeko had skimmed through a two-hundred-page document from 1924 in which a London professor considered himself to have proved that there would never be another war, thanks to a combination of the League of Nations and the spread of the increasingly popular jazz.
It was easier to keep track of what was going on within the fences and walls of the facility. Unfortunately the latest reports said that the engineer’s clever colleagues had solved the autocatalytic issue and others besides, and they were now ready for a test detonation. A successful test would bring the whole project far too close to completion for Nombeko’s comfort, because she wanted to keep living for a while longer.
The only thing she could do there and then was try to slow their progress down a bit. Preferably in such a way that the government in Pretoria would not start to suspect that Westhuizen was as useless as he was. Perhaps it would be enough to put a temporary stop to the drilling that had just begun in the Kalahari Desert.
Even though things had gone as they had with the antifreeze, Nombeko once again turned to the Chinese girls for help. She asked if she could send a letter through them, via the girls’ mother. How did that all work, by the way? Wasn’t outgoing post checked at all?
Yes, of course it was. There was a white on the guard staff who did nothing but go through everything that wasn’t being sent to an addressee who already had security clearance. At the least suspicion he would open the outgoing post. And he would interrogate the sender, no exceptions.
This would, of course, have been an insurmountable problem if the director of security hadn’t held a briefing a few years ago with those responsible for the post. Once he had told the Chinese girls in great detail about the security measures in place, adding that such measures were necessary because not a single person could be trusted, he excused himself to go to the bathroom. Whereupon the Chinese girls proved him right: as soon as they were alone in the room, they skipped around his desk, fed the correct paper into the typewriter, and added another addressee with security clearance to the 114 that already existed.
‘Your mother,’ said Nombeko.
The girls smiled and nodded. To be on the safe side, they had given their mother a nice title before her name. Cheng Lian looked suspicious. Professor Cheng Lian inspired confidence. The logic of racism was no more complicated than that.
Nombeko thought that a Chinese name ought to have caused someone to react, even with the title of professor, but taking risks and getting away with them seemed once and for all to be part of the girls’ nature – aside from the reason they were as locked up as she was. And the name had already been working for several years, so it ought to work for one more day. So did this mean that Nombeko could send a letter in a letter to Professor Cheng Lian, and the girls’ mother would forward it?
‘Absolutely,’ said the girls, showing no curiosity about whom Nombeko wanted to send a message to.
To:
President James Earl Carter Jr
The White House, Washington
Hello, Mr President. You might be interested to know that South Africa, under leadership of a regularly intoxicated ass, is planning to detonate one atomic bomb of approximately three megatons within the next three months. This will take place in early 1978 in the Kalahari Desert, more specifically, at these exact coordinates: 26°44'26"S, 22°11'32"E. Afterwards, the plan is for South Africa to equip itself with five more of the same type, to use as it sees fit.
Sincerely,
A Friend
Wearing rubber gloves, Nombeko closed the envelope, addressed it and added ‘Death to America!’ in one corner. Then she put it all in another envelope that was expedited the very next day to a professor in Johannesburg who had security clearance and a Chinese-sounding name.
* * *
The White House in Washington was constructed by black slaves imported from Nombeko’s Africa. It was a majestic building from the start, and it was even more impressive 177 years later. The building contained 132 rooms, 35 bathrooms, 6 levels, a bowling alley and a cinema. And an awful lot of staff, who between them received more than thirty-three thousand pieces of post per month.
Each one was X-rayed, subjected to the sensitive noses of specially trained dogs, and visually inspected before they went to each individual recipient.
Nombeko’s letter made it through both X-ray and dogs, but when a sleepy yet observant inspector saw ‘Death to America’ on an envelope addressed to the president himself, the alarm was sounded. Twelve hours later, the letter had been flown to Langley, Virginia, where it was shown to CIA director Stansfield M. Turner. The debriefing agent described the envelope and informed him that the fingerprints on it were limited in extent and placed in such a way that they were unlikely to lead to anything more than various postal workers; that the letter had not caused the radiation sensors to react; that the postmark appeared to be authentic; that it had been sent from postal zone nine in Johannesburg, South Africa, eight days earlier; and that a computer analysis indicated that the text had been formed from words cut out of the book Peace on Earth, which had been written by a British professor who first argued that the combination of the League of Nations and jazz would bring good fortune to the world and then, in 1939, took his own life.
‘Jazz is supposed to bring peace on earth?’ was the CIA director’s first comment.
‘Like I said, sir, he took his own life,’ the agent answered.
The CIA director thanked the agent and was left alone with the letter. Three phone calls and twenty minutes later, it was clear that the contents of the letter were in complete agreement with the information he had, embarrassingly enough, received from the Soviets three weeks earlier but had not believed at the time. The only difference was the exact coordinates in the anonymous letter. All in all, the information appeared to be extremely credible. Now there were two main thoughts in the CIA director’s head:
Who the hell had sent the letter?
Time to contact the president. The letter had been addressed to him, after all.
Stansfield M. Turner was not popular at the agency because he was trying to exchange as many of his colleagues as possible for computers. And it was one of them – not a person – that had been able to trace the cut-out words to the book Peace on Earth.
‘Jazz is supposed to bring peace on earth?’ said President Carter to his old schoolmate Turner when they met the next day in the Oval Office.
‘He took his own life a few years later, Mr President,’ said the director of the CIA.
President Carter – who loved jazz – still couldn’t let the thought go. What if the poor professor had been right? And then the Beatles and the Rolling Stones showed up and ruined everything?
The director of the CIA said that the Beatles could be blamed for a lot of things, but not for starting the Vietnam War. And then he said that he was sceptical of the theory, because if the Beatles and Rolling Stones hadn’t already destroyed peace on earth, there was always the Sex Pistols.
‘The Sex Pistols?’ the president wondered.
‘“God Save the Queen”, you remember?’ the CIA director quoted.
‘Oh, I see,’ said the president.
Now to the question at hand. Were the idiots in South Africa about to detonate an atomic bomb? And was this work being led by an ass?
‘I don’t know about the ass part, sir. We have indications that the work is being supervised by an Engineer Westhuizen, who graduated with top grades from one of South Africa’s best universities. He must have been handpicked.’
But there were many indications that the rest of the information was correct. The KGB had, of course, already been so kind as to tip them off about what was going on. And now this letter, formulated in such a way that the CIA director was prepared to bet his life that the KGB wasn’t behind it this time. Plus, the CIA’s own satellite images showed activity in the desert exactly where the mystery sender said it would be.
‘But why this “Death to America” on the envelope?’ said President Carter.
‘It meant that the letter landed on my desk immediately, and I think that was the point. The letter writer seems to have great insight into how security around the president works. That makes us even more curious about who he is. Cleverly executed, in any case.’
The president hemmed and hawed. He had trouble seeing what was so clever about ‘Death to America’. Or, for that matter, the assertion that Elizabeth II was of any race other than the human one.
But he thanked his old friend and asked his secretary to call up Prime Minister Vorster in Pretoria. President Carter was directly responsible for 32,000 nuclear missiles that pointed in a number of directions. Brezhnev in Moscow was in a similar situation. The world did not need another six weapons of the same magnitude. Someone was going to get a talking-to!
* * *
Vorster was furious. The president of the United States, that peanut farmer and Baptist, had had the nerve to call and claim that preparations were under way for a weapons test in the Kalahari Desert. Furthermore, he had recited the coordinates of the exact location of the test site. The accusation was completely baseless and incredibly, terribly insulting! In a rage, Vorster slammed down the phone in Jimmy Carter’s ear, but he had enough sense not to go any further. Instead he called Pelindaba right away to order Engineer Westhuizen to test his weapons somewhere else.
‘But where?’ said Engineer Westhuizen while his cleaning woman swabbed the floor around his feet.
‘Anywhere but the Kalahari,’ said Prime Minister Vorster.
‘That will delay us by several months, maybe a year or more,’ said the engineer.
‘Just do as I say, dammit.’
* * *
The engineer’s servant let him spend two whole years thinking about where the weapons test could be done, now that the Kalahari Desert was no longer available. The best idea Westhuizen had was to shoot the thing off in one of the many homelands, but not even he thought this sounded good enough.
Nombeko sensed that the engineer’s share value was on its way to a new low, and that it would soon be time to drive his price up again. But then something lucky happened – an external factor that gave the engineer, and by extension his cleaning woman, another six months of respite.
It turned out that Prime Minister B. J. Vorster was tired of being met with complaints and ingratitude in nearly every context in his own country. So with a little help, he magically made seventy-five million rand disappear from the country’s coffers, and he started the newspaper The Citizen. Unlike most citizens, this one had a uniquely, completely positive attitude towards the South African government and its ability to keep a tight rein on the natives and the rest of the world.
Unfortunately enough, an extra-treacherous citizen happened to let this come to the attention of the general public. Around the same time, the goddamn world conscience referred to a successful military operation in Angola as the slaughter of six hundred civilians – and thus it was time for Vorster to go.
Oh, f*ck it, he thought one last time, and left the world of politics in 1979. All that was left to do was to go home to Cape Town and sit on the terrace of his luxury home with a whisky in his hand and a view of Robben Island where that terrorist Mandela was sitting.
Mandela was supposed to be the one who rotted away, not me, Vorster thought as he rotted away.
His successor as prime minister, P. W. Botha, was called Die Groot Krokodil – the big crocodile – and he had scared the engineer out of his wits in their very first phone call. Nombeko realized that the weapons test couldn’t wait any longer. So she brought it up one late afternoon when the engineer was still able to speak.
‘Um, Engineer . . .’ she said as she reached for the ashtray on his desk.
‘What is it now?’ said the engineer.
‘Well, I was just thinking . . .’ Nombeko began, without being interrupted. ‘I was just thinking that if all of South Africa is too crowded, except for the Kalahari Desert, why couldn’t the bomb be detonated at sea?’
South Africa was surrounded by practically endless amounts of sea in three directions. Nombeko had long been of the opinion that the best choice for a test site should have been obvious to a child, now that the desert was no longer an option. Sure enough, the childlike Westhuizen lit up. For one second. Then he realized that the intelligence service had warned him not to collaborate with the navy under any circumstances. There had been a detailed investigation after President Carter in the United States had obviously been informed of the planned test in the Kalahari, and it had singled out Vice Admiral Johan Charl Walters as the prime suspect. Admiral Walters had visited Pelindaba just three weeks before Carter’s phone call, and he had gained a clear picture of the project. He had also been alone in Engineer Westhuizen’s office for at least seven minutes while the engineer was stuck in heavy traffic one morning (the engineer had edited this last bit during the interrogation, because he had spent a little too much time at the bar where he always drank breakfast). The leading theory was that Walters had become pouty and tattled to the United States once it became clear to him that he would not be allowed to arm his submarines with nuclear warheads.
‘I don’t trust the navy,’ the engineer mumbled to his cleaning woman.
‘So get the Israelis to help,’ said Nombeko.
At that moment, the phone rang.
‘Yes, Mr Prime Minister . . . Of course I’m aware of the importance of . . . Yes, Mr Prime Minister . . . No, Mr Prime Minister . . . I don’t quite agree with that, if you’ll excuse me, Mr Prime Minister. Here on my desk is a detailed plan to carry out a test in the Indian Ocean, along with the Israelis. Within three months, Mr Prime Minister. Thank you, Mr Prime Minister, you are far too kind. Thanks again. Well, goodbye then.’
Engineer Westhuizen hung up and tossed back the whole glass of brandy he had just poured. And then he said to Nombeko:
‘Don’t just stand there. Get me the two Israelis.’
Sure enough, the test was carried out with the help of Israel. Engineer Westhuizen aimed a kind thought in the direction of former Prime Minister-slash-former-Nazi Vorster for his genius in establishing cooperation with Jerusalem. Israel’s on-site representatives were two pompous Mossad agents. Unfortunately, the engineer would come to meet with them more often than was necessary, and he never learned to tolerate that superior smile, the one that said, ‘How could you be so f*cking stupid as to buy a clay goose that was hardly dry and believe it to be two thousand years old?’
When suspected traitor Vice Admiral Walters was kept out of the loop, America couldn’t keep up. Ha! Sure, the detonation was registered by an American Vela satellite, but it was a bit too late by then.
New Prime Minister P. W. Botha was so delighted by the results of the weapons test that he came to visit the research facility and brought three bottles of sparkling wine from Constantia. Then he threw a cheers-and-thanks party in Engineer Westhuizen’s office, along with the engineer, two Israeli Mossad agents, and a local darky to do the actual serving. Prime Minister Botha would never allow himself to call the darky a darky; his position demanded otherwise. But there was no rule against thinking what one thought.
In any case, she served what she was supposed to and otherwise made sure to blend into the white wallpaper as best she could.
‘Here’s to you, Engineer,’ Prime Minister Botha said, raising his glass. ‘Here’s to you!’
Engineer Westhuizen looked fittingly embarrassed about being a hero, and he discreetly asked for a refill from whatshername while the prime minister had a friendly conversation with the Mossad agents.
But then, in an instant, the relatively pleasant situation became rather the opposite. The prime minister turned to Westhuizen again and said, ‘By the way, what is your opinion on the tritium problem?’
* * *
Prime Minister P. W. Botha’s background was not entirely different from that of his predecessor. It was possible that the country’s new leader was a bit cleverer, because he had given up Nazism once he saw the direction it was heading, and started referring to his convictions as ‘Christian Nationalism’ instead. So he had avoided internment when the Allies got a foothold in the war, and he was able to start a political career without a waiting period.
Botha and his Reform Church knew that the Truth could be read in the Bible, if one only read very carefully. After all, the Tower of Babel – man’s attempt to build his way to Heaven – came up in Genesis. God found this attempt presumptuous; he became indignant and scattered the people all over the world and created language confusion as punishment.
Different people, different languages. It was God’s intention to keep people separate. It was a green light from on high to divide people up according to colour.
The big crocodile also felt that it was God’s help that let him climb in his career. Soon he was the minister of defence in his predecessor Vorster’s cabinet. From this position, he commanded air raids on the terrorists who were hiding in Angola, the incident that the stupid rest of the world called a slaughter of innocents. ‘We have photographic evidence!’ said the world. ‘It’s what you can’t see that’s important,’ said the crocodile, but the only person he convinced with this was his mother.
Anyway, Engineer Westhuizen’s current problem was that P. W. Botha’s father had been the commanding officer in the Second Boer War and that Botha himself had military strategies and issues in his blood. Therefore he also had some knowledge of all that technical stuff for which Engineer Westhuizen was the nuclear weapons programme’s top representative. Botha had no reason to suspect that the engineer was the fraud he was. He had asked his question out of conversational curiosity.
* * *
Engineer Westhuizen hadn’t spoken for ten seconds, and the situation was about to become awkward for him – and downright dangerous for Nombeko, who thought that if the idiot didn’t answer the world’s simplest question soon, he would be toast. She was tired of having to save him time and again, but all the same she fished the plain brown spare bottle of Klipdrift from her pocket, stepped up to the engineer, and said she had noticed that Mr Westhuizen was having trouble with his asthma again.
‘Here, take a big gulp and you’ll soon regain the ability to talk so that you can tell Mr Prime Minister that the short half-life of tritium isn’t a problem because it is unrelated to the bomb’s explosive effect.’
The engineer drained the entire medicine bottle and immediately felt better. Meanwhile, Prime Minister Botha looked wide-eyed at the servant.
‘You know about the tritium problem?’
‘Goodness, no.’ Nombeko laughed. ‘You see, I clean this room every day and the engineer spends almost all his time rattling off formulas and other strange things to himself. And apparently some of it got stuck even in my little brain. Would you like a refill, Mr Prime Minister?’
Prime Minister Botha accepted more sparkling wine and gave Nombeko a long look as she returned to her wallpaper. Meanwhile the engineer cleared his throat and apologized for the asthma attack and for the servant’s impudence in opening her mouth.
‘The fact is, the half-life of tritium is not relevant to the bomb’s explosive effect,’ said the engineer.
‘Yes, I just heard that from the waitress,’ the prime minister said acidly.
Botha didn’t ask any difficult follow-up questions; he was soon in a good mood again thanks to Nombeko’s eager refills of bubbly. Engineer Westhuizen had made it through another crisis. And so had his cleaning woman.
When the first bomb was ready, the next phase of production went as follows: two independent, high-quality work teams each built a bomb, using the first one as a model. The teams were instructed to be extremely accurate when it came to accounting for the steps they took. In this way, the production of bombs two and three could be compared in detail – first compared to each other and then compared to number one. It was the engineer himself, and no one else (except a certain woman who didn’t count), who was in charge of the comparison.
If the bombs were identical, then they would also be correct. It was highly unlikely that two independent teams could make identical mistakes at that high level. According to whatshername, the statistical likelihood of that was .0054 per cent.
* * *
Nombeko continued to search for something that would give her hope. The three Chinese girls knew some things, like that the Egyptian pyramids were in Egypt, how to poison dogs, and what to watch out for when stealing a wallet from the inner pocket of a jacket. Things like that.
The engineer frequently mumbled about progress in South Africa and the world, but the information from that source had to be filtered and interpreted, since for the most part all the politicians on earth were idiots or Communists, and all of their decisions were either idiotic or Communistic. And when they were Communistic, they were also idiotic.
When the people chose a former Hollywood actor to be the new American president, the engineer condemned not only the president elect but also all of his people. However, Ronald Reagan avoided being labelled a Communist. Instead the engineer focused on the president’s presumed sexual orientation, based on the hypothesis that all men who stood for anything different from what the engineer stood for were homosexuals.
All due deference to the Chinese girls and the engineer, but as sources of news they couldn’t compete with the TV in the waiting room outside the engineer’s office. On the sly Nombeko would often turn it on and follow the news and debate programmes while she pretended to scrub the floor. That corridor was by far the cleanest in the research facility.
‘Are you here scrubbing again?’ the irritated engineer once said as he came strolling in to work at ten thirty in the morning, fifteen minutes earlier than Nombeko had counted on. ‘And who turned on the TV?’
This could have ended poorly from an information-gathering perspective, but Nombeko knew her engineer. Instead of answering the question, she changed the subject.
‘I saw a half-empty bottle of Klipdrift on your desk when I was in there cleaning, Engineer. I thought it might be old and I should pour it out. But I wasn’t sure; I wanted to check with you first, Engineer.’
‘Poured out? Are you nuts?’ said the engineer, rushing into his office to make sure that those life-giving drops were still there. To make sure that whatshername wouldn’t get any other dumb ideas, he immediately transferred them from the bottle to his bloodstream. And he soon forgot the TV, the floor and the servant.
* * *
Then one day it finally showed up.
The opportunity.
If Nombeko played all her cards right, and also got to borrow a little of the engineer’s luck, she would soon be a free woman. Free and wanted, but still. The opportunity – unbeknown to Nombeko – had its origins on the other side of the globe.
The de facto leader of China, Deng Xiaoping, had early on displayed a talent for outmanoeuvring out his competition – before the senile Mao Tse-tung even had time to die, in fact. Perhaps the most spectacular rumour was that he hadn’t let Mao’s right-hand man, Zhou Enlai, be treated when he got cancer. Being a cancer patient with no cancer treatment seldom leads to a positive outcome. Depending on how you look at it, of course. In any case, Zhou Enlai died twenty years after the CIA failed to blow him to smithereens.
After that, the Gang of Four were about to intervene, with Mao’s last wife at the forefront. But as soon as the old man finally drew his last breath, the four were arrested and locked up, whereupon Deng purposely forgot where he’d put the key.
On the foreign-affairs front, he was deeply irritated by that dullard Brezhnev in Moscow. Who was succeeded by that dullard Andropov. Who was succeeded by Chernenko, the biggest dullard of them all. But luckily, Chernenko didn’t have time to do more than take office before he stepped down permanently. The rumour was that Ronald Reagan had scared him to death with his Star Wars. Now some fellow called Gorbachev had taken over, and . . . well, from dullards to whippersnappers. The new man certainly had a lot to prove.
Among many other things, China’s position in Africa was a constant concern. For several decades, the Soviets had been poking around in various African liberation movements. The Russians’ current engagement in Angola was a prime example. The MPLA received Soviet weapons in exchange for getting results in the right ideological direction. The Soviet direction, of course. Blast!
The Soviets were moving Angola and other countries in southern Africa in a direction that was the opposite of what the United States and South Africa wanted. So what was China’s position in all this mess? To back up the renegade Communists in the Kremlin? Or walk hand in hand with the American imperialists and the apartheid regime in Pretoria?
Blast, once more.
It might have been possible not to take any side at all, to leave a walkover, as the damn Americans liked to say. If it weren’t for the contacts South Africa was presumed to have with Taiwan.
It was an open secret that the United States had stopped a nuclear weapons test in the Kalahari Desert. So everyone knew what South Africa was up to. In this case, ‘everyone’ meant all intelligence organizations worth their name.
The crucial problem there was that, in addition to the Kalahari information on Deng’s desk, there was an intelligence briefing noting that South Africa had communicated about the weapon with Taipei. It would be completely unacceptable for the Taiwanese to procure missiles to aim at mainland China. If this happened, it would lead to an escalation in the South China Sea, and it was impossible to predict how that might end. And the US Pacific Fleet was right around the corner.
So somehow or another, Deng had to manage the loathsome apartheid regime. His chief intelligence officer had suggested they do nothing and let the South African government die on its own. Thanks to that piece of advice, his chief intelligence officer was no longer a chief intelligence officer – would China really be more secure if Taiwan was doing business with a nuclear nation in freefall? The former chief intelligence officer could ponder this as he worked at his new job as a substitute station attendant in the Beijing subway.
‘Manage’ was the name of the game. Somehow or another.
Deng couldn’t possibly travel there himself and let himself be photographed alongside that old Nazi Botha (even if the idea was a bit tempting: the decadent West did have its charm, in small doses). And he couldn’t send any of his closest men. It must absolutely not appear that Beijing and Pretoria were on friendly terms.
On the other hand, there was no point in sending a pencil-pushing lower official with neither the ability nor the sense to make observations. Of course, it was also important that the Chinese representative was important enough to be granted an audience with Botha.
So: someone who could get things done – but at the same time was not close to the Politburo Standing Committee and who couldn’t be considered an obvious representative of Beijing. Deng Xiaoping found the solution in the young party secretary of the province of Guizhou, which had practically more ethnic groups than people. The young man had just proven that it was possible to bring together peevish minorities like the Yao, Miao, Yi, Qiang, Dong, Zhuang, Bouyei, Bai, Tujia, Gelao and Sui.
Anyone who could keep eleven balls in the air like that also ought to be able to handle the ex-Nazi Botha, Deng thought, and he made sure to send the young man in question to Pretoria.
His task: to get the message to South Africa, between the lines, that collaborating on nuclear weapons with Taiwan was unacceptable, and to get the South Africans to understand who they were picking a fight with, should they choose to pick a fight.
* * *
P. W. Botha was not at all excited to receive the leader of a Chinese province; that was below his station. Furthermore, Botha’s station had just become even higher – the title of prime minister had been replaced by president. What would people think if he – the president! – were to welcome just any old Chinese like that? If he were to receive all of them, for a few seconds each, it would take him more than thirteen thousand years. Botha didn’t think he would live that long. In fact, despite his new title, he felt rather worn-out.
At the same time, he understood why China had chosen the tactic of sending over a minion. Beijing didn’t want to be accused of embracing the government in Pretoria. And vice versa, for that matter.
The question remained: what were they up to? Did it have something to do with Taiwan? That would be funny, because their collaboration with the Taiwanese had been over before it had led anywhere at all.
Oh well, perhaps Botha would go and meet that errand boy after all.
Why, I’m as curious as a child, he said to himself, smiling even though he really didn’t have anything to smile about.
To lessen this great breach of etiquette, a president meeting with a gofer, Botha got the idea of rigging a meeting and a dinner on the Chinese man’s level – and Botha himself would happen to stumble across it. Oh, are you here? May I sit down? Something like that.
So Botha called the director of the top secret nuclear weapons programme and ordered him to receive a Chinese guest who had requested a meeting with the president. He said that the engineer and the guest would go on safari together and then have a fancy, delicious meal in the evening. During the dinner, the engineer must make the Chinese man understand that one oughtn’t underestimate South African military engineering, without actually telling the nuclear truth straight out.
It was important for this message to make it through. They had to show strength without saying anything. It would just so happen that President Botha was in the vicinity, and a person has to eat, so he would be happy to keep the engineer and the Chinese man company.
‘If you don’t mind, of course, Engineer Westhuizen.’ The engineer’s head was spinning. So he was supposed to receive a guest the president didn’t want to meet. He would tell the guest the truth of the matter without saying anything, and in the middle of all this the president, who didn’t want to meet the guest, would show up to meet the guest.
The engineer realized he was getting into a situation in which one might make a fool of oneself. Other than that, he didn’t understand anything beyond that he must immediately invite the president to the dinner the president himself had just decided should take place.
‘Of course you’re welcome to come to the dinner, Mr President!’ said Engineer Westhuizen. ‘You really must be there! When is it, by the way? And where?’
This is how what started out as Deng Xiaoping’s concern in Beijing became a problem for Engineer Westhuizen in Pelindaba. The fact was, of course, that he knew absolutely nothing about the project he was directing. It isn’t easy to sit and chat and seem gifted when you’re rather the opposite. The solution would be to bring along whatshername as a servant and briefcase-carrier. Then she could discreetly feed the engineer clever facts about the project, carefully considered so that he didn’t say too much. Or too little.
That sort of consideration was something whatshername would manage splendidly. Just like everything else that cursed person set out to do.
* * *
The engineer’s cleaning woman received strict instructions before the Chinese safari and the following dinner, at which they would be joined by the president himself. To be on the safe side, Nombeko helped the engineer with the instructions so that they would turn out correctly.
She was to remain an arm’s length away from the engineer. Each time an opportunity presented itself, she would whisper conversationally appropriate wisdom in his ear. The rest of the time, she would keep quiet and act like the nonentity that she basically was.
Nombeko had been sentenced to seven years in service to the engineer nine years ago. When her sentence came to an end, she didn’t bother to remind him, since she’d decided it was better to be alive and imprisoned than dead and free.
But soon she would be outside the fences and the minefield; she would be miles from the guards and their new German shepherds. If she managed to break away from her chaperon, she would turn into one of South Africa’s most wanted. Police, intelligence agents, and the military would look for her everywhere. Except maybe in the National Library in Pretoria. And that was where she would go first of all.
If she managed to break away, that is.
The engineer had been kind enough to inform her that the chauffeur-slash-safari guide was carrying a rifle and he was instructed to shoot not only attacking lions but also fleeing cleaning ladies, should any appear. And as an extra precaution, the engineer made sure to carry a pistol in a holster. A Glock 17, nine by nineteen millimetres with seventeen bullets in the magazine. Not something you can take down an elephant or a rhinoceros with, but it would do for a 120-pound servant.
‘One hundred and fifteen, if you please,’ said Nombeko.
She considered waiting for a convenient moment to unlock the safe in the engineer’s office where he kept his pistol and empty it of the seventeen bullets, but she didn’t. She would be blamed if the drunk happened to discover it in time, and then her escape would be over before it had even begun.
Instead she decided not to be too eager, to wait for the right moment – but when it came, she would take off into the bush as fast as she could. Without taking a bullet in the back from either the chauffeur or the engineer. And preferably without encountering any of the animals that were the point of going on a safari.
So when would the right moment be? Not in the morning, when the chauffeur was on his toes and the engineer was still sober enough to manage to shoot something other than himself in the foot. Maybe right after the safari, just before the dinner, when Westhuizen was sufficiently blotto and nervous about the meeting with his president. And when the chauffeur was done being a guide after many hours on the job.
Yes, then the time would be right. She just had to recognize the moment and seize it when it came.
* * *
They were ready to start the safari. The Chinese official had brought along his own interpreter. It all began in the worst possible way when the interpreter was foolish enough to walk into the tall grass to take a leak. It was even more foolish to do this in sandals.
‘Help, I’m dying,’ he said as he felt a sting on his left big toe and saw a scorpion crawling away in the grass.
‘You shouldn’t have walked into five-inch grass without real shoes – or at all, really. Especially not when it’s windy,’ said Nombeko.
‘Help, I’m dying,’ the interpreter said again.
‘Why not when it’s windy?’ wondered the engineer, who didn’t care about the interpreter’s health but was curious.
Nombeko explained that insects take shelter in the grass when the wind blows, and this means that the scorpions crawl out of their holes for a bit of food. And today there was a big toe in the way.
‘Help, I’m dying,’ the interpreter said once more.
Nombeko realized that the whimpering interpreter actually believed what he was saying.
‘No, I’m pretty sure you’re not,’ she said. ‘The scorpion was little, and you’re big. But we might as well send you to the hospital so they can wash your wound properly. Your toe will soon swell up to three times its size and turn blue, and it will hurt like hell, if you’ll pardon my language. You’re not going to be much good as an interpreter, anyway.’
‘Help, I’m dying,’ said the interpreter for a fourth time.
‘Soon I’m going to start wishing you were right,’ said Nombeko. ‘Instead of sniffling that you’re dying when you aren’t, look on the bright side – it was a scorpion and not a cobra. And now you know that in Africa you can’t just pee however and wherever you want and go unpunished. There are sanitary facilities everywhere. Where I’m from, they even come in rows.’
The interpreter went quiet for a few seconds, shocked that the scorpion he was about to die from could have been a cobra that he definitely would have died from. Meanwhile the guide found a car and a chauffeur that could take the man to the hospital.
The scorpion-afflicted man was placed in the back seat of a Land Rover, where he resumed his repetition of the path he expected his health to take. The chauffeur rolled his eyes and departed.
This left the engineer and the Chinese man to stand there and look at each other.
‘How is this going to work?’ the engineer muttered in Afrikaans.
‘How is this going to work?’ the Chinese official muttered in his Wu Chinese dialect.
‘Might you be from Jiangsu, Mr Chinese Official?’ Nombeko said in the same dialect. ‘Possibly even from Jiangyan?’
The Chinese official, who had been born and raised in Jiangyan in Jiangsu Province, couldn’t believe his ears.
How could that cursed whatshername always be so incredibly irritating? thought Engineer Westhuizen. Now she was standing there speaking some totally useless language with the Chinese guest, and the engineer had no control over what was being said.
‘Excuse me, but what’s going on?’ he said.
Nombeko explained that it just so happened that she and their guest spoke the same language, so it didn’t matter that the interpreter would soon be lying there whimpering in a hospital with a blue toe instead of doing his job. If the engineer would allow them to speak, of course. Or perhaps he would prefer that they sit in silence all day and night?
No, the engineer would not. But he would ask whatshername to stick to interpreting and say nothing else. It would not be appropriate for her to make small talk with the Chinese official.
Nombeko promised to do as little small-talking as possible. She just hoped that the engineer would understand if she happened to answer the Chinese official if he spoke to her. That was what the engineer himself had always said she should do. Furthermore, one might say that things had worked out for the best:
‘Now you can say whatever you want about advanced weapons technology, Engineer, and other things you don’t quite have a grasp on. Should you say the wrong thing – and we can’t rule that out, can we? – well, then I can just adjust it in translation.’
Essentially, whatsername was right. And since she was utterly below him, he didn’t have to feel distaste. One does what one must to survive, thought the engineer. He felt that luck had increased his chances of making it through tonight’s dinner with the Chinese official and the president.
‘If you take care of this, I’ll see if I can’t order a new scrubbing brush for you after all,’ he said.
The safari was a success: they had close encounters with all of the big five. In between, they had time for coffee and small talk. Nombeko took the opportunity to tell the Chinese official that President Botha would happen to run into them five hours later. The Chinese official thanked her for the information and promised to look as surprised as he could. Nombeko did not say that they would probably all be plenty surprised when the acting interpreter suddenly disappeared in the middle of dinner at the safari lodge. Then they could all sit there, staring at one another.
Nombeko climbed down from the Land Rover to walk into the restaurant with the engineer. She was fully focused on her approaching escape. Could she go through the kitchen and out the back? Some time between the main course and dessert?
Her thoughts were interrupted when the engineer stopped short and pointed at her.
‘What is that?’ he said.
‘That?’ said Nombeko. ‘That’s me. Whatever my name is.’
‘No, you idiot, what you’re wearing.’
‘It’s a jacket.’
‘And why are you wearing it?’
‘Because it’s mine. Have you had a bit too much brandy today, Engineer, if I may ask?’
The engineer no longer had the energy to reprimand his cleaning woman.
‘My point, if you even have sense enough to listen, is that that jacket looks awful.’
‘This is the only jacket I have, Engineer.’
‘Doesn’t matter. You can’t look like you come from a shanty-town when you’re about to meet our country’s president.’
‘Although, to be precise, I do,’ said Nombeko.
‘Take off that jacket at once and leave it in the car! And hurry. The president is waiting.’
Nombeko realized that her planned escape had just been cancelled. The seam of her only jacket was full of diamonds, which she was to live on for the rest of her life – if circumstances allowed her to have one. Without them, fleeing South African injustice . . . no, she might as well stay where she was. Among presidents, Chinese officials, bombs, and engineers. Awaiting her fate.
* * *
Dinner began with Engineer Westhuizen explaining the day’s scorpion incident to his president; it was no big deal, he added, because the engineer had had the foresight to bring along one of the servants, who happened to speak the Chinese official’s language.
A black South African woman who spoke Chinese? And wasn’t that the same person who had both served bubbly and discussed the tritium problem during the president’s most recent visit to Pelindaba? P. W. Botha decided not to investigate this any further; he already had enough of a headache. Instead he let himself be satisfied with the engineer’s word that the interpreter wasn’t a security risk for the very simple reason that she otherwise never left the facility.
P. W. Botha took command of the dinner conversation, president that he was. He began by telling them about South Africa’s proud history. Interpreter Nombeko had resigned herself to the thought that her nine years of imprisonment would not end there. Thus, in the absence of any new, spontaneous ideas to the contrary, she interpreted word for word.
The president went on to say more about South Africa’s proud history. Nombeko interpreted word for word.
The president went on to say even more about South Africa’s proud history. At that point, Nombeko grew tired of giving the Chinese official more of something he could do without. Instead she turned to him and said, ‘If you would like, Mr Chinese Official, I can say even more of the president’s self-righteous nonsense. Otherwise I can tell you that what they’re getting at is that they are very good at building advanced weapons and that you Chinese ought to respect them for that reason.’
‘I thank you for your honesty, miss,’ said the Chinese official. ‘And you’re quite right that I don’t need to hear more about your country’s excellence. But please translate now and say that I’m grateful for this vivid account of your history.’
The dinner continued. When the main course arrived, it was time for Engineer Westhuizen to say something about how gifted he was. What he came up with was a mishmash of technical lies that didn’t make any sense whatsoever. But Westhuizen got so entangled in what he was saying that even the president could no longer follow (the thing about the engineer’s luck was that it lasted all the way up until it ran out). The engineer’s muddled tale would have been difficult for Nombeko to translate, even if she had tried. Instead, she said, ‘I’m going to spare you the nonsense the engineer just spouted, Mr Chinese Official. Basically, it’s like this: they’ve figured out how to build nuclear weapons, and they’ve already completed several – despite the engineer. But I haven’t seen any Taiwanese sneaking around and I haven’t heard anyone say that they’re going to export any of the bombs. Might I recommend that you answer politely now, and then suggest that the interpreter be given some food? Because I’m about to starve.’
The Chinese messenger thought that Nombeko was absolutely charming. He gave a friendly smile and said that he was impressed by Mr Westhuizen’s knowledge, and that it demanded respect. Beyond that, he didn’t want to show disrespect for South African traditions, not at all, but in China it simply wasn’t right for someone to sit at a table without being served just like everyone else. The Chinese official said he was uncomfortable because the superb interpreter hadn’t had anything to eat, and he wondered if the president would allow the official to share some of his food with her.
President Botha snapped his fingers and ordered a plate for the native. It wasn’t the end of the world if she got something in her stomach, as long as it made their guest happy. Moreover, the conversation seemed to be shaping up for the best; the Chinaman was looking pretty docile.
By the time dinner was over, several things had happened:
China knew that South Africa was a nuclear nation
Nombeko would for ever have a friend in the secretary-general of Guizhou Province in China
Engineer van der Westhuizen had survived yet another crisis, because . . .
P. W. Botha was generally pleased with the way things had gone, because the president didn’t know any better. And last but not least:
Twenty-five-year-old Nombeko Mayeki was still a prisoner at Pelindaba, but for the first time in her life she had been able to eat until she was completely full.