A Library to Flee

Etienne van Heerden

A LIBRARY

TO FLEE

translated by Henrietta Rose-Innes

Tafelberg

For Kaia

NOTE

This historical thriller is a ‘first draft of history’.

Liberties have been taken with actual events.

The order of incidents does not follow real chronology.

Necessarily, characters in this novel of spectacle are imaginary,

the storyline suspect.

Fake news, all the way.

Bizarre literature.

Pulp history!

A trigger warning is appropriate.

Jia zuo zhen shi zhen yi jia,

Wu wei you chu you huan wu.

Truth becomes fiction when the fiction’s true;

Real becomes not-real when the unreal’s real.

– Cao Xueqin, The Story of the Stone

#

PART 1

Firewall

1

The Bund, Shanghai

’Ellos partner! Can I trust you?

#

At the end of this story you’re now starting to read, the tide that comes in from the East China Sea is pushing Thuli slowly southwards. She drifts on the black water of the Huangpu River that flows past the Shanghai Bund. Her limbs are dark and stiffly splayed.

It’s late summer, and evening. Most of the walkers on the promenade wear jackets or overcoats and, across the street, long shadows move down the buildings.

She lies face-down in the water, but from time to time part of her face is visible. It’s as if she’s drawing breath.

Her body turns in the foamy wake of a dredger. The froth is silvery white, reflecting light from across the water.

On a night like tonight, there’s hardly a whiff of smog in the air. From this side, you can see beams of light playing over the hypermodern buildings of the famous Pudong skyline across the water. Above the Oriental Pearl TV tower, from the Deng Xiaoping era, the full moon hangs like a soap bubble. Sky-high, the tower shines silver, like a postcard photo. Thuli had read the Lonely Planet description of the tower: a blend of science fiction and Soviet-inspired brutalist architecture.

But this bank is the romantic side of the water. The neoclassical strip. Here is the famous promenade, where city police keep a watchful eye. Just on the other side of the Waibaidu Bridge is the Astor House Hotel with its Peacock Ballroom, to this day the darling of visiting Westerners who love colonial nostalgia. Beyond that is the grim granite block that serves as the Russian consulate.

On the wide Zhongshan Road alongside the promenade, the marble-and-granite buildings of the Bank of China, with two fluttering national flags, extend past the former Palace Hotel to the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation with its twelve sun signs, for the world’s erstwhile twelve financial centres.

It’s as if the heavy footprint of the colonial buildings across the shining water is answered by the blank, futuristic face of new ambition. Technological. Hypermodern. Clean lines, without sentiment. Glass and steel.

On this side, brides in red silk pose against the Bund’s railings to be photographed with the backdrop of black water and the illuminated Pudong skyline. Thuli had come walking here on many nights, marvelling at the brides all dressed alike. Blood-red, shiny dresses trailing on the ground. Metres of veil blowing in the wind, fluttering like silk curtains against the Pudong lights.

#

It’s just opposite the Custom House building that, as the photographer trains his camera on her, one such bride cries out and points across the glittering black water: there. Shocked, she gathers her bright-red skirt so you can see her Adidas trainers with neon-green socks.

For a moment, the tide lifts the torso. The back and shoulders are clearly visible and someone is screaming about an arrow in the back.

At first, no one sees the man who runs forward in desperation. A group of nine Buddhist monks, posing for photos against the railings with their shaved heads and orange robes, scatter in fright; they think he’s making for them.

The man, an African, screams something incomprehensible. As he runs he wrestles his coat from his shoulders. A language full of click sounds, exotic. And the bystanders realise: the person in the water is something to him, and he to her.

The policemen who’ve come running try to restrain him, because it seems he desperately wants to leap into the water, clicking his tongue against his palate and – or so it sounds to them – sucking his cheeks in distress.

This sound, then, is almost the end of our story.

Not quite the end, though, because what story can ever entirely end? Isn’t the end of one story inevitably the start of another?

History is a tumbleweed, and it rolls through our dreams.

#

Huff-huff-huff!

The national vastrap. The toyi-toyi.

Cape Town. Décor: the iconic image of the broad steps, Jameson Hall with its pillars as symbol of institutional scholarship, and behind it, the rugged head of Devil’s Peak.

A sullen piece of rock.

On the University of Cape Town’s Upper Campus, at the foot of the steps, the boot of a shabby car springs open. From here, where the car’s oily vapours linger from its slammed brakes, one gazes up the steps to Jameson Hall as if to the heights of learning. Up there, like a red anemone in the tides of the times, the crowd, excited, is already folding and unfolding.

The message flashes out on WhatsApp – ritual sheep slaughter on Jammie steps, now!

To purge Jameson of the evil spirits of colonialism!

Huff-huff!

In the boot: the sheep with its thin, bound legs. A ewe with white, staring eyes, tongue pushing out to loll over the teeth. A bleat that you do not so much hear as see in the tremor of the tongue.

Eager hands clumsily pull the animal out. Thud, on the tar. A murky day, with haze over the Cape Flats: mist or smoke. The cellphones miss nothing – like eyes on outstretched arms.

Half-drag, half-carry the animal, which kicks and wheezes and shows the whites of its eyes. Above, the red sea parts for the passage of the Fallist leaders hauling the sheep. Up the steps, to the hall’s topmost stairs.

Huff-huff! Huff-huff!

2

Mission to China

Thuli has not said a word to her parents about her plans to go to China.

Why not? Because she’s an assassin – kind of – who’s going to wipe out her own family. She’d only really understood this as the plane made its descent at Shanghai Airport. When a writer is born, a family starts dying. She’d heard that once, in some undergraduate lecture hall.

As a thirty-year-old postgraduate student still living with her parents, she’s always had to find the balance between independence and dependence. Sometimes her mother would say to her, ‘You’re my little girl. Stay with us for as long as possible,’ and other times: ‘You’re a grown woman now. Come on.’

That ‘grown woman’ was never exactly convincing. She’s the most petite in the family. Slender. Shorter than her parents. High cheekbones, a wide, open forehead that always looks just washed, like it would never carry the worries of the world. Delicate, sharp chin: stubborn. She usually wears her hair tightly knotted against her scalp. Or covers it, as is the custom among some women in the Fees Must Fall movement, with a bright, striking headscarf. A celebration. Something that catches both the sun and the camera’s eye.

On the one hand, then, her reluctant departure from Cape Town was a declaration of independence, which gave her an unexpected joy. On the other hand, she thought she might discover the truth in China. What she had not foreseen was the horror of choice. Like that old Yogi Berra saying: When you come to a fork in the road, take it.

What does that mean? That there never really is a choice?

That the fork, and neither of its two branches, is your fate?

Because how do you choose between two homelands? One homeland, your father. Because for her, yes: the father as homeland – as incorrect, as patriarchal as that sounds. But still, in her case, true.

Your troubled, overworked, thoroughly life-soaked father.

Dad, out of his depth.

And the second homeland, the other branch of the impossible and cruel fork, is the republic, which, more than twenty years after what was called liberation, is still waiting to be born.

The republic, like her father, tormented to breakdown. Overworked and overwhelmed. An impossible thing to govern. Her father’s words.

‘Such a history,’ he always says.

Just take it, she wants to say then. Take the republic. Take the land!

Grab it.

Land grab!

Because: the republic, one big white title deed.

And, as far as she is concerned, one big gangster state. A kleptocracy, the deep state too feeble to seize the land in one fell swoop, skimming off with all kinds of crimi-offshoots instead. The trade in contraband, from Adidas shoes to cigarettes, police officers conniving with gangs. Cadre deployment. Municipalities that degenerate into ATMs for ANC families, the tender circus …

How can you be an African if your feet stand, your feet walk, on ground whose title deed, more than twenty years after so-called liberation, is still pure white? And is that what the republic wants to be: the world leader in state thuggery?

Yes, China would bring her up against the branches of that cruel fork: one, the promise of a prosperous republic in Africa. The other: her dear, dear, father, drunk on intrigue.

To her, his only daughter (‘My only child!’ he often cries out sentimentally), he is still the smell of the sea-mist that morning long ago when the ferry inched from Calais to Dover and she, a little girl, sat on his lap. Into the wind, on a bench at the very front of the prow while the breeze played with their scarves: ‘Look, look, Thuli, the white cliffs of Dover.’

Only later, when she was older, did she realise there was a sharp edge to that phrase. The white cliffs of Dover. And that there’s been a sharp edge, for all these years, to many of his seemingly casual remarks.

A man, in many ways, unfathomable.

A man who, despite everything he’s built up since his days as a goatherd on the edge of a dilapidated township in the Eastern Cape, is now threatened by his own.

His only.

His beloved daughter.

A man who’d come a long way and had to hustle his way to the top.

But that day, crossing the English Channel, she was too young to know all of that. She’d just watched the bright, white land moving closer, feeling secure in her father’s arms. He’d held the knee-blanket, which he’d brought for her from the car in the belly of the boat, under her chin. Snug and protected.

Because wasn’t he (as she’d always thought) impossible to betray? He was the scent of his scarf: ingrained sweat and cigarette smoke, whisky and dispute. Hope and despair.

But hope, she’d learnt in her childhood in London, is intrigue. There was a condition. If you want to make the hope come true. If you want to realise that hope. You have to hustle.

And it was this she wanted to shake off. She wanted to get to a point where hope was hope. She’d come to China, to Shanghai, on a journey to hope.

Pure hope. Hope without conditions.

Do you first have to kill your parents before you can find that hope?

This was her question as the plane descended in Shanghai and she realised: you are an assassin, Thuli.

There are targets painted on your father’s chest, on your mother’s back.

What hope can there be for someone like you?

That fragrant ANC scarf was his favourite. It was tied around his neck the day Mandela walked out of prison. Pale and fragile he looked, this bandit the whole world awaited. At home, her father often replayed the VHS tape (Struggle-days sentiment, her mother explained) and would show her: ‘Look, Thuli – that day Mandela had an uncertain fame. His fist wavering in the air, his long body too thin and constrained in that prudent church suit.’ (This was before the time of the shirts.)

Indeed: Mandela walked ill at ease into the field of view of the TV cameras that day, the church suit too conventional for him, the icon.

He looked exhausted. A man who’d risen from the sickbed of captivity. Look closely: nothing of the later, robust Mandela. So frail.

Winnie, at her place by his side, once more a bride in the eyes of the world. (Remember, this was before everything came out at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the court cases; and before the foul play of the security police and the football club came to light.)

Winnie, proper and restrained, next to him. No sign to the outside world of how their two souls – Nelson’s and Winnie’s – were wrestling with each other at that moment.

Only the initiates, which included her father, knew.

And then they see on the VHS tape: Her father, still young, so young and eager, slightly to one side behind the leaders on the City Hall balcony on the Parade in Cape Town, when Mandela first addressed the people. With Cyril Ramaphosa, the Crown Prince (remember, this was before), holding the microphone for Mandela.

Yes, her father for her was the smell of the food from the Indians’ shop after they moved from Dover to the British capital, when he was deployed to the ANC’s London mission. He was the scent that drifted out of the store from street level to her bedroom window, just under the roof tiles of Kensington – masala and naan and chicken tikka, incense and oranges and steaming pots of rice. And indignation.

For what she also remembers about that Indian family with their restaurant was their outrage at the hardships of the little family of exiles from Africa who had to live above their restaurant.

The three bowls of lamb tikka and rice that were sometimes sent up when the British newspapers published something about the South African regime.

That’s what her father was and is to her – fragrance.

The smell of the Indian family’s approval and sympathy, the smell of concern and messengers and unexpected journeys. Strange people suddenly standing in their low-ceilinged little kitchen, their raincoats dripping and their umbrellas that smelled of fright and drizzle and cigarette smoke. Her father was the smell of unanticipated stations and pursuits and train platforms and suddenly jumping on the bus and at the next stop abruptly grabbing her hand and jumping out and then into the shop and then suddenly, at the sweet counter, chocolate as comfort. The dizziness of sugar on top of fright.

It was a fragrance that imbued her life, and to this day she struggles to shake off the seduction of that London comfort sugar. With Fees Must Fall she’d gained six kilos. Stress and sugar destressing.

All of these things carried the name Dad. It was the world of her first memories. The fatherland north of the equator.

And later, without certainty, south.

For all these reasons, Thuli stayed alive in the water of the Huangpu River, with the arrow that first numbed her back muscles but then shot burning pain through her spinal cord and over her shoulder up her neck. Yes, because of the memory of her father’s scarf-smell, Thuli clung to life there in the water, the Pudong Tower’s long neck like a silver heron’s guarding the river.

Every breath is for this. Hope. I have to. I must.

#

The smell of the match’s sulphur and a burning candle was the smell of family betrayal.

Because it was a big decision: how to leave her Cape Town bedroom behind. She would have to leave something for her parents before she headed off to China – a message. But what?

Her parents were already on edge about the student protests on the UCT campus, and very nervous about her involvement. Her mother understood, but also did not understand. Her father kept chiding her. He saw a threat to the ANC in these stroppy young people who loved the red of the EFF so much. They’d already stormed Parliament and humiliated the Minister of Higher Education, who’d engaged the protesters, stammering through the closed iron gates. In Johannesburg, student leaders wanted to force the ANC secretary-general to sit before them. To humiliate him. Until one of the ANC-inclined student leaders saved him. What else might still happen?

And above all: his own daughter!

Thuli knew that, after her departure, her mother would be the first to come home. First the rumble of the automated security gate in her mother’s ears, then the car’s handbrake. The beep of the alarm when she deactivates the system next to the palm tree by the front door, and then stands still to make sure she hears no footfall, no rapid rustling of clothes between plants, no drawn breath.

Old London habits. Then, caution for the feared operatives of the South African regime, as well as the hitmen of the international arms dealers. (Thuli would only discover this later.) And now: fear of the burglar, here in the crime-ridden southern suburbs.

That was her mother. Ears pricked, always. In the family they said: Ears are Ma’s primary organs. Her heart might stop, but she’ll still be listening. Her father’s playful warning: ‘One day she’ll be listening to us from the grave!’

Then her mother would turn the key in the lock. Then, the sound of her own footsteps on the spacious foyer’s floor, at the foot of the broad staircase. For all those years in exile, her mother dreamed of a house with just such an elegant staircase to an upper floor; a staircase that promises spacious bedrooms with large sliding windows that let the light stream in, that look out on a green garden, beds with double-cotton sheets, generously stuffed pillows and bathrooms with Italian taps …

Table Mountain, Devil’s Peak, framed in every window.

Her parents have not bought the property yet; they’re still getting the capital together. It’s coming. It’s coming.

Her father had wanted to buy. Immediately. Of course, he earned enough to service a large mortgage right away. But her mother. Old fashioned, conservative. A prize she saw before her, that’s what the house was for her mother. ‘We’re going to buy in cash.’

Her father had protested. ‘It’s unnecessary! We take out a bond and pay off the interest, plus a portion of the capital loan every month!’

Her mother had been resolute: ‘If the bank’s the owner, I still won’t feel the land is black. The banks are white, you know that. Only when I pay cash do I know black feet are walking on black earth. It’s mine. I’m in Africa.’

So now you’re buying the land back from the whites? Thuli wanted to ask her mother.

Wasn’t it taken from us long ago?

Take it!

But instead she stayed quiet. Because her parents also had to pay black tax. Help a distant cousin’s son who wanted to study. Gogo in the Eastern Cape Karoo, monthly. Blood family and mendicants, who cannot be turned away.

There, at the foot of the stairs, her mother, instinctively the mother hen, her dear, dear, life-scarred mother; there her mother would stand, tilt her head and, without any other information, hear by the quality of silence, hear in the whisper of nothingness, in it she would hear, as only a mother can hear, with the ear of blood and umbilical cord:

Her daughter, her Thuli.

Their only.

Is gone.

And there’s the scent of a burning candle in the house.

#

As the airplane took off from Hong Kong Airport on its way to Shanghai, swinging over towering apartment blocks, her eyes following the red tip of the wing as it swept across thick green forests, apartment blocks, petroleum parks and forested inlets, Thuli wanted to start crying.

Her mother, listening at the foot of the stairs.

Her mother, she knew, would rush to Thuli’s bedroom, push open the door and immediately see – hand at her mouth – what Thuli had so carefully set out.

A little altar.

A candle flame flickering in the draught of the quickly pushed-open door.

Framed photos:

Photo one: Thuli and her mother, laughing in front of the ANC office in Paris at the time. There is the corner bistro where, over wine with cigars and bravado and immersed in intrigue, her father, a very young youth, listened to the elders, the Thabo Mbekis, the Steve Tshwetes, the Jacob Zumas.

Mbeki, complexity-in-tweed-jacket-and-pipe and dreamy look in the eyes, a teddy-bear-like intelligence that would later conceive of the African Renaissance, a concept that the country has since forgotten. Steve Tshwete, sporty jaw in contrast to improbably thick glasses and a gravitas that inspired confidence, even at that age.

And Zuma, hail-fellow-well-met, your beer-and-braaivleis friend. A cavalierishness, a recklessness, in his come-let’s-party smile.

And now he is the president who makes his country eat dirt. First at the trough.

She’s sorry for her parents. All those years in exile. And now it’s come to this! This man!

All her father, Cat Khumalo, ever says when her mother brings up Jacob Zuma is that the republic is ‘a work in progress’.

Then her mother replies: ‘More like a disaster!’

Photo two: There, the bus stop where she and her mother waited for the bus to the kindergarten in the winter cold. Her mother, insistent that they should dress more neatly than the Londoners. Be cleaner and nicer and better groomed. Her mother’s great fear: that they’d be seen as slovenly, backward Africans, lost in a world city. Beggars at a bus stop.

‘Thuli, go back to the mirror. Is that how you want to go out into the streets?’

And: ‘You represent the new Africa.’

Photo three: Hogarth Road, Kensington. The little playground. You can hardly breathe, it’s oppressive. Three-storey apartments everywhere. Six trees – she learnt to count properly in that park. Tree one, tree two, tree three, then the swing. Tree four, tree five, then the roundabout! And at tree six, the dangerous one, the stomach turning, the hissing down the slide into the waiting hands of her laughing father.

Photo four: Her father, her mother, and her, much younger. In the middle, the icon in his gleaming Mandela shirt, the messiah.

Her father’s messiah, but one he grumbled about nonetheless. As glamorous as they all looked in the photo, she remembers, clear as day, her father’s grouching in the car afterwards about how Mandela’s man, Cyril, was going to sell out the ANC to big capital; how everything comes down to compromise and not revolution; how the land, the soil, continues to slip through their grasp, a trick of the light, always just ahead of them, right there … in her father’s words, the ‘mirage of an Africa that is ours’, slipping ever away.

There he sits, displayed among the photos with his short, fat legs and shiny soles: her teddy bear, which her father once brought from the East. That day, on his arrival at Heathrow, he went down on his haunches and gave it to her. For her, a little girl, the mission had been impossibly long. Already, on the tube from the airport to the house, she fell in love with the bear’s little frowning face and thick fur.

But at home at Hogarth Road, she had to watch, weeping, as before her eyes he took his pen-knife and cut open the bear’s belly and took out a parcel.

Her mother stitched up the little bear with needle and thread afterwards, tied a yellow ribbon around his neck, and gave him back to the anxious child. Just back from the hospital, as she put it to little Thuli.

And now, as the campus statue of Cecil John Rhodes is finally swinging from a crane as from a well-deserved noose, the bear is there in Thuli’s bedroom. Still frowning, still martyred, the surgical scar a crude suture across his chest.

In a jar next to the teddy, a red carnation.

And a note. I’m sorry, Mom, and I’m sorry, Dad. I’m on a mission to China.

Pointedly, she uses the same phrase her father so often left them alone with, there in Hogarth Road during the Struggle years: on a mission. She knows how the suddenness, the lack of destination, of that phrase pulls the ground from under your feet; how you then start to lose your way in the great expecting.

That unexpectedness, part of her father’s scent.

Only later, at university, could she begin to give a name to how she and her parents experienced London. You wander through the unfamiliar streets. You realise: nothing binds you to this city. Exile. You wander as if you will never go home – to South Africa; as if you’ve lost not only the angle of the light and the smell of the land, but also your own name.

On a mission to China.

#

Ian Brand is pleased with his blog’s first popping sentences: From now on, your face will be your biggest burden. You’ll curse yourself for your generosity with your ugly mug – yes, you – me too; all of us!

Just the other day, I saw the media taking the faces of Afrikaans TV stars and actors, feeding them into an app that ages them to show what they’ll look like two decades from now. Broadcasting this on paper and digitally.

Do the media people realise what they’re doing? Do these TV stars and actors realise what’s being sacrificed in their names?

As he sits in his apartment on the slopes of Cape Town’s city bowl, the city slowly begins to vibrate. Rays of sunshine spear out across the metropolis from far behind the Hottentots Holland Mountains.

The morning Boeings are bright fireflies that sink towards Cape Town International after a wide, generous turn over the peninsula. A nod of the wing seawards to give passengers a better view of the foot of Africa and the city with its lights, still sparkling like a jewel in the quicksilver sea.

Ian feels the lovely city breathing around him. He imagines he smells the scent of waves splashing against the Atlantic coast, and the white foam in the inlets of Bakoven and Clifton. He also imagines the smell of dew on pine needles in Newlands Forest at the foot of Devil’s Peak and, as a reminder that he lives in Africa, wood smoke from Gugulethu and Langa.

His abdominal muscles are a tight six-pack from gym work. If he looks carefully, far below, he can see his office building just beyond the port’s cranes, and a five-storey cruise ship near to where once – before 1994 – he trained for special operations in the depths of the night alongside navy divers, as a soldier in the army. Those were the days when his head was shaven and the doubt balled his stomach like a fist.

You people just aren’t woke enough! he writes now. You dolts, who so generously answer Facebook’s fun call to post a photo of yourself as you look now next to one from ten years ago, are unknowingly building a brilliant data set – for free.

What do you think Facebook is going to do with those pairs of photos, spaced so nicely ten years apart in each Facebooker’s case?

Well, it’s like this: those sets of photos will undoubtedly be fed to an algorithm as free training material.

The result? Better insight into the aging human face.

It will make facial recognition even more dangerous – you’ll never escape your youthful self.

See what Kate O’Neill writes in Wired!

From now on, if your face looks noticeably older than the algorithm says you should look by this time, you may struggle to get health insurance, or you’ll have to pay more for medical aid – because clearly you’re aging faster than expected.

Maybe you’re not looking after yourself! Not keeping fit enough!

Penalise! I, Ian Brand, am announcing a protest campaign.

My request is that we pepper the information bank with fake photos – go right now, wherever you are, and post a photo of yourself from any year, next to a photo of what you look like now.

Then make it clear that you’re not going to reveal the year of the older photo, thus undermining the neat ten-year formula.

Let’s drown Facebook with fake pairs!

This is how we destroy the formula the algorithm relies on, and you become a privacy activist.

But wait! First read on: make sure your digital photo contains no information about when it was taken. Delete the EXIF data. Or, rather, take a screengrab of an existing photo.

You know, every photo carries a genetic code, just as each of us carries information in our cells about our origins and nature.

You must first delete that data.

Your face, you see, is less innocent than you think.

Your smile is a snake that will bite you.

Surveillance, after all, is the internet’s business model!

Ian sits and looks at his words for a bit and decides it’s enough for now.

He copies and pastes the paragraph that concludes each of his blog posts: Remember, like the wise man said: the impact of artificial intelligence on humanity will be greater than the impact of fire or electricity.

We, the legal fraternity, must move our arses!

Ian Brand; Brand, Nortier & Cele Inc.

The Glass Palace

Penthouse, Farsight Building

Foreshore, Cape Town.

www.theglasspalacelawboys.org

‘Forget the fly-by-nights – come to the Legal Eagles!’

Satisfied, he launches the blog into cyberspace. He has to get going, the Alfa awaits, an interesting day lies ahead.

#

Eventually, Thuli answers her father’s calls. She’s already at OR Tambo in Johannesburg. The flight from Cape Town landed an hour ago.

The altar she left for her parents, with the teddy and candle and photos, burned in her mind all through the flight.

She could smell that candle the whole way.

After passport control, she wandered through the bookshop and boutiques with a switched-off phone. When she turned it on, there were already six calls from him. A pain lanced her chest. Nothing from her mother. In times of great crisis, her mother defers to her husband. Almost immediately after it’s switched on, the phone nags again.

She replies, head spinning:

I’m on my way to China.

Why not? Why can’t I?

Well, Dad, I’m a grown woman. Is this news to you?

No, I couldn’t, because you would never have let me go.

No, I won’t. No.

No, Dad, it has nothing to do with Fees Must Fall. Nothing.

I’ve told you so many times. Not the EFF. I’m not EFF.

Then your information is wrong.

Do you still not know how many splinter groups there are now in Fees Must Fall?

No, I’m not.

And if I were, so what? I’m over thirty!

I’m going to do a project in narrative non-fiction for my course.

What is it? It’s a thumb-suck, Dad. Just relax. Narrative non-fiction isn’t important.

Yes, I know it’s a pretentious term.

Yeah, it’s a term that makes no sense, okay, Dad.

Yes, Dad. For university work. A long essay. For one of my courses. Yes, I know.

Dad, it’s about writing. About books. About land. About Chinese writers and their life there and their relationship with the land. Land and precarity.

I know it’s another fancy new word, Dad.

I have to. I have to go to China.

Why not?

I borrowed it.

I went to the bank.

I know you have to pay off debt. Of course I know that.

Of course I know China is expensive.

It’s my choice, Dad.

You know how I feel about that.

Dad? Betrayal? Where do you get that from?

Why would I …?

I …

Her father’s voice grows hoarse and for the first time she hears fear, his fearing her. How are hierarchies reversed? She’s always going on about that at Fees Must Fall. How to destroy the hegemony.

And now, her own father. The moment she, the daughter, gets the upper hand.

She feels sheepish, and angry. At the same time.

She knows he realises she knows something. He knows she heard some of his chats with his friend Sello. He knows she’s on the trail.

He must feel terrible. My daughter. I sent her to university. To do what she’s doing now. To do the very things she’s doing now to knife me.

I sent her to university to get smart. The first one in our family to get a qualification.

And then she got too smart.

More than smart.

Too smart for me.

She has her knife out for me.

She’s going to slaughter me.

She’s going to bring me down (one of her father’s favourite expressions), my own daughter. My darling.

My only.

She has to end it.

Dad, I refuse to listen any further. My flight is leaving. We have to board. People are already going in.

Dad. Dad!

This after she’d already killed the call. She says it so loudly that two passing Nigerian men in long robes turn questioning looks towards her.

#

Begin in Beijing, her father said. Many South Africans who want to live elegantly but quietly in Beijing stay in that nice little hotel in the (she can’t quite hear the name) hutong. He can call them, Cat Khumalo tells his daughter. He knows the owner, a fugitive from New York, well. The man will help you with a good VPN to get through China’s digital firewall. That man knows all about Abdullah Ibrahim and Hugh Masekela. His knowledge of South Africa’s music is incredible. It’s stunning to find someone in Beijing who knows so much about our music. Miriam Makeba in a hutong in China!

What a hutong was, she didn’t know. This was also before she read Susan Sontag’s essay on China. But the word ‘hutong’ had sounded appropriately Oriental and exotic.

No, I only have one destination, Dad. Shanghai.

I know it’s a cruel city, Dad.

I know.

I don’t care.

With private people. With contacts.

Dad …

She kills the phone, against his voice that’s out of breath. She’d realised. If he wants to send her to Beijing, Shanghai is actually the right choice. She’s on the right track. He was worked up. He was distressed. He was in a corner. He knows. He knows the real reason for her mission to China. He knows, or he suspects; he suspects strongly. In that muddied, untrusting way he suspects things and, in her mother’s reproachful words, sometimes brings things into being that were never there, just by suspecting them so stubbornly.

But, as with many other things, this thing now remains unsaid between them. Unsaid, behind a wall as impenetrable as the one she was warned against: the huge digital firewall of China, behind which she is about to disappear.

‘Dad …’ she whispers, joining the boarding line. Her laptop drags on her shoulder. Lonely Planet’s Shanghai gleams in her hand.

Travel, missions, unknown destinations. It’s in my blood, Thuli says to herself.

Strong. Steel. Come on.

3

Skin cred

It only really hits him now. Delayed shock. Ian Brand sits in his office in the Glass Palace, Foreshore, Cape Town. High in the air, at the top of the tower block, he waits for his clients. Grateful that they’re late. Exposed, he sits here in the southeaster, blinded by the light bouncing off Table Bay. He’d just pulled in moments ago in the basement, the reception desk people were busy and just waved, and luckily there was no one in the lift.

He’s come here to flop down at his desk, and then the shakes hit him. About what just happened. He mustn’t let these things overwhelm him.

No.

Because.

He’s there again. Inside it. The helicopter and blood. Stink. Tilting.

Nothing smells. Smells like.

Death.

He shakes his head. You’re here. You’re here, he mutters. Cape Town. Swank pad, Glass Palace. Kick-arse lawyer.

Here.

Come on.

He’d been driving down from Jannie Smuts’s statue in Adderley Street and was thinking back to the previous evening’s dinner at his parents’ house. One of the guests, an elderly novelist who now lives in a retirement home in Oranjezicht, had started talking.

As he drove past Jannie Smuts’s statue, Ian’s mind was still full of her words. Her quiet and relentless certainty about the passing of things, the way history repeats itself, and the times they were living through, which were stranger than fiction.

‘It’s as if we, the white Afrikaners,’ she said, ‘are being wrenched into reality. Torn from our unique Afrikaans story, which was dreamed up with the fervency of pioneers and which we’ve told ourselves for generations until we all believed it.

‘We still cling to nostalgia by displaying old front pages of Landbouweekblad. Reprint commemorative issues of old magazines. To read about dominees and dancing and bottle-fed orphaned lambs, church bazaars and old railway sidings.

‘But it was all just a dream. An Ithaca,’ were her words to them. ‘A historical error, the Afrikaner. Our culture is like a huge library that is ablaze. A blink in time, the white tribe of Africa.’

Yes, that’s how it is these days at Ian’s parents’ dinner table, they who receive the Cape aristocracy so gladly.

#

As Ian, with these thoughts, passes Jannie Smuts and then the flower sellers, the protesters suddenly stream around him. The planned march to Parliament had been announced in the media the previous day, but he’d thought it would only happen later. Now he’s ended up in the middle of the chaos.

Some demonstrators are armed with stones, sweat pouring off them. Alongside the protesters, the riot police clumsily beat a retreat, their equipment frightening and strange in this zone of shops and flower sellers and tourist apartments.

To the right is the Golden Acre, its large glass windows reflecting the sun, with the Wimpy’s logo. Glass shards lie scattered across the street, crunching under the tyres of his car. Big slices of glass still hang in the window frames.

As Ian slows down for the pedestrian crossing, protesters stream around him and slap the roof of his car. Some start rocking the car, trying to turn it over, fail, and then run on.

When a young black man some distance away from Ian pulls back his hand to throw the brick through the Wimpy’s windows, the target on the other side of the glass is already recoiling.

They saw him coming.

It’s a Muslim family, and the woman in the burqa is already half on her feet. The man with his stubble beard hooks his arm and shoulder around the little boy, who’s still sitting with his milkshake, straw in mouth.

He’s a little prince. Ian might as well be somewhere in the Middle East. The boy has dark, intense eyes, Ian now imagines as he sits in his office, shaking. Genes that hark back to a distant past, back through the pain and grief of apartheid, through the ages, through slavery and captivity to a country far from here.

And at that moment.

Just as the brick begins to fly, an arrow from behind pierces the bare-chested brick thrower, between the black, shining shoulder blades and out the front of the chest, as if it’s slid through butter.

In his car, Ian almost loses control. His foot slips off the brake and he steps on the petrol by mistake. The Alfa jumps forward and when Ian brakes in time to avoid hitting the car in front of him, the engine stalls.

The starter motor sputters.

Spectacularly, the brick thrower’s red bandana flies off his head. A man with a camera catches the red halo above the thrower’s head, and also captured is the fleeing family, that shocked second just before the brick hits the glass.

The traffic, brought to a halt, begins to move nervously. In the background, coming across the street towards the attacker: a phalanx of riot police in macho uniforms. Rubber-bullet shooters.

And in the subsequent YouTube clip: blood from the man’s chest squirts after the arrow as if it were chasing it, and the blood fans red across the window just before the brick bursts through the glass. The brick hits the stubble-beard man on the temple so that he staggers, falls backwards and pulls the child off the chair. The child brings the splashing milkshake with him and, in another photo, from another angle (by someone at the Wimpy’s counter): the splashing green milkshake, the thrower Maxwell Tshabalala’s spraying blood, glass scattering in glittering crystals against the morning sun, and the astonished stubble-beard man’s spittle shooting from his distorted jaw.

If you look closely, in the still photos you can also see something that looks like a line in the image. A bit shiny. Wet, red. You only see it if you zoom in. At first it looks like a ledge, maybe, against the Wimpy’s wall, or even a flaw on the image – an eyelash on the lens, perhaps.

But later it would be pointed out: it’s the murder arrow, still in full flight.

Clearly shot by a highly sophisticated crossbow or longbow. Lethal. An assassin who knows what he’s doing.

Against such an arrow, the rocks and broken paving stones with which the students wage their revolution look like primitive weapons.

#

The small and barely audible ping that indicates that his clients have arrived. Here at Brand, Nortier & Cele Inc. everything is muted and discreet. Hypermodern, stripped down and paperless offices. The data storage system hums gently in the room next door.

He takes a deep breath. Gets up; sits down again.

Rubs his eyes. Not the first person he’s seen die, no.

Up, Ian! Hup!

#

‘Come in, gentlemen. Welcome.’

They all have their eyes on their smartphones. The reason for the traffic jam in the city centre that made them late, the assassination with the arrow – it’s all in their hands.

‘I saw it myself,’ says Ian. ‘I just drove past it.’ He takes another deep breath. ‘So, where should we start? Would you like to see the view first?’

‘If we’d installed Chinese face-recognition technology on Cape Town’s CCTV camera system, that murdering bowman’s face and his name would be all over the internet by now,’ the tall client tells his colleague.

They’re standing in the roof garden of the Brand, Nortier & Cele Inc. offices, which from a distance looks almost comical, like a glass box on top of a high-rise. Ian’s partner, Rudolph Nortier, always says: ‘When you walk out here, into the roof garden, you know only one species breeds here – and that’s the eagle. Legal eagles!’

Ian, differently wired, would never describe the roof garden in such dashing terms. Still shaken after what he experienced in Adderley Street, he stands with the five men, potentially new clients, at the edge of the garden, leaning over the edge. It’s like hovering in a heli over the city. And as always when he thinks of helicopters, Ian smells blood and lymph and that smell you can never wash off your hands: the smell of death. From up here: the bright white flash of morning sun on the sea and, far away over there, a column of smoke where some train is burning on the Cape Flats again today, and even further away the blue waves of the Hottentots Holland Mountains that roll towards the city like the leading curl of a tsunami.

Here there’s a faint smell of teargas in the air, but buildings block the view of the part of the city through which the students were moving.

They stand there speculating about what just happened, and Ian is only too glad to have a chance to get his thoughts in order.

The man with the golden tie is startled (‘Whoa!’ he laughs) when the roof garden’s irrigation suddenly comes on. Later they go inside, but Ian has already measured them up. Golden Tie is the alpha male – and he suffers from attention deficit disorder. When the cable car started reeling itself up against Table Mountain, his eyes flashed towards it like a chameleon who’s spotted a fly.

Golden Tie’s eye also falls, as they sit around the oval table, on the microjet closest to the glass door, the drops splashing the glass. His eye follows the movement of a seagull passing to the west. His eye flashes to the drumming fingers of his colleague, the extraordinary professor.

This is the man who, as they sit, looks at Ian’s iPhone next to his hand on the table and without a hint of irony says, ‘Hello, Google.’

Ian wants to come up with a crack about Google, the great eavesdropper, but when he sees that the others accept their colleague’s remark as perfectly normal, he gets up, smiles at the professor and goes to put his phone in the office next door.

‘So yes,’ he says when he takes his seat again.

The five hadn’t wanted to divulge much about their visit ahead of time. Just that they wanted an hour-long appointment to ‘suss out’ Brand, Nortier & Cele, as Golden Tie put it. After reading Ian’s blog. ‘We think you might be the man for us.’ And added: ‘It’s just a possibility meeting.’

Still, Ian had a good feeling about the terrain they were covering. Beforehand, to secure the appointment, Ian had to write and send them an opinion piece on the conflict between privacy and security. Unusual request. Even before they’d formally instructed him, he’d had to work.

When he saw what it was about, he decided to write the piece anyway. The topic interested him. He’d been at the annual Privacy Conference in Amsterdam a year ago, and it’s not every day that a Cape Town lawyer receives such a request.

He kept it superficial, because what good would it do to reveal his whole arsenal with the first shots? He began with a failsafe reference to one of the internet’s greats. Jeff Bezos describes the conflict between privacy and security as one of the great conflicts of modern times.

The five men in front of him are not exactly the geeks you’d expect behind a project like the one they have in mind. They own a company that wants to start investing in technology, explains the guy with the golden tie, the restless hands and barely noticeable burr.

The brain is a part-time professor (‘extraordinary professor’) of engineering at Stellenbosch University and affiliated with the Lab, a quasi-research company dedicated to data-driven technology and things like artificial intelligence, satellites and biotechnology – ‘a field as wide as the Lord’s grace’.

Ian: ‘After all, we know what awaits, gentlemen: Data is the new oil. The data tycoons are the new mine bosses. We read this everywhere. And when data, artificial intelligence and biotechnology form a triad, the new now has arrived.’

With the ‘now’ he taps the tabletop with his index finger.

The extraordinary professor taught at Chinese universities during his sabbatical and made contact with some geeks in Pudong, Shanghai, who are developing software ‘that will blow you out of the water’ (Golden Tie).

‘One of China’s millions of startups.’

Ian’s done his homework on the Lab in Stellenbosch. Seed capital, apparently, from the mythical Stellenbosch mafia – but those are rumours. What’s clear, when Ian discusses fees with them, is that they’re basically comfortable with the amounts he throws out.

Between the lines: there’s also seed capital from China. Contacts.

‘Do we get each other. Do we get each other.’ It’s the tall, thin man, who looks attentive, like a priest. He talks about the internet in spiritual terms, rocking his shoulders along with his sentences. Tends to repeat phrases. ‘Domains of surveillance. Domains of surveillance.’

He’s the dreamer, Ian thinks. Clearly an introvert, and he comes closest to the typical geek image. Arrived here without a smartphone in sight, no bag or laptop.

Says little. Struggles with eye contact.

Coughs regularly. Armed only with a dream.

Golden Tie, Grotius de Grootte, explains. He puts the spin on things: They want to invest in facial-recognition systems (for a moment he loses his thread when a teaspoon clicks against glass and his eyes flash there). ‘Where was I … again … oh, yes, we want to invest in systems that … that … for … housing estates … you know, like Kleine Zalze outside Stellenbosch …’ He searches for the word. ‘Security estates …’ He clicks his fingers. ‘Ah, that’s the word. Lifestyle estates. The modern equivalent of the ox-wagon laager.’ He glances over his shoulder as if something has moved behind him. Then continues. ‘It can initially be installed in such estates, and if there’s no resistance to it or legislation then later, for any private homeowner and maybe small businesses – for neighbourhoods … later, big chain stores and shopping malls.’ He glances outside. ‘Maybe whole cities.’

‘The whole fucking country,’ mutters one of his colleagues under his breath. ‘The bloody criminals …’

Grotius groans, bends down and takes something out of his briefcase. It’s a handkerchief. ‘But we can’t start mass production until there’s at least reasonable legal certainty. Unlike in China, with us this is something that might be stopped by human-rights activists.’

Ian leans forward immediately. Through his mind flashes the warning: Keep it general. Do not reveal that you only need one activist in South Africa, like the USA’s Brian Hofer, and then these gentlemen’s project is yesterday’s news. Here comes a nice little account. Keep it vague.

‘You’re right. The hope may indeed be in vain. There may just be too many people in this country who think that you have an automatic right to privacy – the right not to be photographed and recorded and identified.’ He pushes the tray of coffee towards them. ‘As far as the internet and new technologies are concerned, sharp ideas and technological development are far ahead of the law. I’m now speaking against my own interests, but our lawyers, tired and puzzled, are plodding far behind these innovations. Only putting out fires, pointing out landmines and doing our utmost to map out routes.’

He sniffs. ‘But perhaps more important for us are the human-rights watchdogs. Even if the law takes a line, it doesn’t mean that pressure groups from that sector will accept it.’

‘I like your approach,’ says the quasi-professor. ‘Better to be practical.’

‘First, then,’ Ian continues, ‘how should the law respond to massive systems such as those already implemented by China to monitor its one-comma-four billion citizens?

‘Even more importantly, before you spend big money on deep learning or Chinese-developed software: How will South African law react? For example, the Protection of Personal Information Act is still sitting waiting for Number One’s signature. For how long now! Why won’t he sign? You ask me!

‘And: Does the one hand know what the other is doing? It’s said that while Jeff Bezos is giving a heads-up on the conflict between privacy and security, his own Amazon doesn’t shy away from selling face-recognition technology to authorities and even private businesses.

‘There’s a big debate surrounding Amazon’s Rekognition, which can recognise people in real time.’

And just to show that he’s done his homework on China: ‘Hypersurveillance is already solidly established in China. For example: cameras cover one hundred per cent of Beijing’s surface area, and the rest of us know face recognition is the destiny of smart cities around the world. Tremendous implications for privacy, not so?

‘I mean, which of us is ever offline? Our smartphones are our bodies’ prostheses. Never more than a metre away from our hearts.

‘And cellphone companies are promiscuous with sharing information about our exact geographical location, any time of the day or night, I assure you. Their excuse is that they need to know where you are to keep call quality high. In the US, another reason is given: if you call 911, they can quickly establish where you are.

‘I doubt all this can be stopped. There are simply too many startups that promise a faster, safer and healthier life with this technology. And they promise it to the eager Chinese government, which already has 170 million CCTV cameras active, and will install another 400 million within the next three years.

‘Go and read what Shoshana Zuboff says about the nature of the transaction that underlies surveillance capital.’

He says nothing about the fact that Brian Hofer’s activism in Oakland, USA, was already calling out the authorities back in 2014.

Coffee steams from the glass mug and a Boeing drifts past slowly, almost dangerously slowly and life-size, close to the Glass Palace as it descends to Cape Town International. Golden Tie follows the course of the heavy bird. Looks over his shoulder. Back to the table. Outside, the seagull. Also catches his eye.

‘Facial recognition will create a faster and easier environment – you can, for example, already check in at a Chinese airport by just showing your face. No more standing in line. Big plans. At railway stations, if you’re paid up, you won’t have to buy a ticket or even show your ticket to a conductor on the train. Your face will be your ticket. Or your palm. You just swipe it over a palm reader and there you go! Huawei is investing heavily in this. Think of the implications: in Beijing, more than ten million people commute by train.

‘The Chinese want to set up visual surveillance systems across the whole country, based on facial recognition. They reassure the population that it promotes a safer environment. More important, however, is that this biometric technology can also read emotions in faces and body language – already.

‘What will make people sit up is that the Chinese are already using this technology to name and shame people for petty municipal offences. For example, if you cross the street on a red light, the next day you’ll see your face up with the others on the video wall in the station subway.

‘Just for example,’ Ian repeats. ‘I’m letting my imagination run here. And that’s why I say we can’t just grab this one out of thin air. We have to determine the lay of the land. For example. You’ll think I’m going too far now. What is the American Civil Liberties Union doing around face recognition? I ask because: Do they have any South African contacts? Do you know of anyone in this country who’s started moaning because his privacy is threatened by some algorithm?

‘Someone who might ask: What is the aim of your recognition technology? Security? Yes, but how do you prevent it being used for other ends? From my quick and provisional research, I’ve found there’s a whole conversation going on in the EU about purpose.

‘To my knowledge, TV anchor and forever-young Riaan Cruywagen never mentioned that my neighbours …’ – and he points to the Media24 building some distance away – ‘… fed his mug into a face-aging app?’

The Boeing has passed and Bloubergstrand’s skyline vibrates in its heat stream.

Perhaps, Ian thinks as he watches Grotius smooth his (too long, Trump-style) gold tie over his paunch, I’ll knock out a Huffington Post piece about how our lawyers struggle to see in the blinding light.

Later he would realise: that was his first mistake.

#

It’s two weeks after the investors’ visit to Ian Brand’s office and many months before Thuli Khumalo’s departure for China. Everything still lies ahead. Ian drives down Adderley Street in the direction of the harbour. What he saw two weeks ago on this same route now haunts him. The large windows of the Golden Acre on the right have been restored, but the glass splinters work their way into his mood.

Like a video clip, the scene he saw – no, lived – sits in the hard drive of his brain. It plays over and over: the moment before, during and after the arrow bored through Maxwell Tshabalala and the Wimpy window.

The brand-new Alfa Romeo SUV swings out of Adderley into Strand Street. Ian’s on his way to Main Road, Observatory, and deep in thought. On the face of it, he’s got nothing to complain about. He’s attractive, in his forties. Fit forties, he might add. A sharp lawyer working at the cutting edge of legal issues with artificial intelligence, machine learning, privacy, cybersecurity and biotechnology (the new frontier, he likes to say).

In the Cape law environment, he’s actually still a youngblood: Mandela-Rhodes Scholarship holder with an LLM from Oxford and one from Cambridge, where he won his spurs in the wet and cold.

Nothing to complain about, other than the feeling that the helicopter is tilting over the landscape, turning in a great arc, almost touching the dark-green tree tops and you take off and the smears of green and brown flash past the open door next to you and you feel dizzy, on the verge of jumping. Nothing to complain about, except this season in South Africa, which troubles the minds of all who live here. The country smells like battery acid shortly after a car accident and that’s the smell that rises up in him now, from the pit of his stomach, when he looks up from Strand Street, surprised, at the Castle on his right.

Normally, the grey stone of the Castle melts away against the city skyline. But today! The stone walls provide the perfect grandstand for the student activists, who are out on display with their red bandannas and Castle Must Fall banners. The slanting morning sun does its part, rising gloriously from behind the Hottentots Holland Mountains to the east.

Overnight, the Castle of Good Hope, built in the seventeenth century when the Dutch set foot on the face of Africa, has been transformed into a battleship.

Yes, a ship – that’s exactly what the Dutch merchants’ stone fort looks like to him. Ian sits in his Alfa staring. The traffic has stopped and motorists are gaping at the scene. Ian is on guard; that helicopter alertness comes over him again. How thin the shiny membrane of the windscreen between me and that fury! he thinks. Nothing between my car’s red, tin skin and those students! I’m a sitting duck. A car on each bumper, front and rear.

Helicopter vigilance sharpens his senses. Around him, the city breathes the scent of low tide, impatient traffic, teargas and expensive perfume. And the comrades draw breath in unison. In the early-morning sun, their skins gleam with the charm of their times. They’re spread out on the walls, each individual or group grateful for the equally grateful cameras. The politics of spectacle.

Almost every student stares at a cellphone. It’s the season, Ian thinks, of tweets rushing through cyberspace like a school of sardines through the depths of the ocean. Now and then, a shark shoots through the dark protein cloud and scatters the multitude.

It’s as if the country is slipping, Ian thinks, into an era where nothing is surprising any more. Recently, all over the city, hanging roosters have appeared. One morning, unexpectedly in the Heerengracht as he was on his way to the Glass Palace, from a lamppost: a rooster hung by the neck, the comb lolling pale over the beak. In front of a boutique in Green Point’s gallery neighbourhood, all of a sudden: