Counting the Coffins

By Diale Tlholwe

Perhaps Thabang Maje should be grateful. He has a beautiful wife, Lesego, a newborn baby daughter and a good job as a private investigator. But Lesego and their baby girl are still recovering in hospital after a car crash which took the life of their unborn son, and Thabang is finding it impossible to focus on his paperwork and even harder to forgive and forget. Then an old file surfaces, naming the man already uppermost in Thabang’s mind: Sandile Nkosi, ruthless businessman and father to the teenager who caused the fatal car crash. Next, re-enter Tokoloho Mohapi, journalist and Thabang’s one-time flame now friend. Tolo and Thabang start asking questions about some very powerful men, and things are about to get very complicated . . .

• Language: English
• Publisher: Kwela
• Release date: Apr 22, 2011
• ISBN: 9780795703836

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DIALE TLHOLWE

Counting the Coffins

KWELA BOOKS

To Maseloane and Puleng Tlholwe

You can put a tree in a river for a thousand years; it will not turn into a crocdile.

Malian proverb

Prologue

It begins.

It should not have been such a beautiful morning. The new sun should not have been shining with such promise or the spring breeze blowing with such freshness and the greenery sighing so sweetly. In fact, none of what was happening should have been happening.

It should have been cold, dark and gloomy. It should have poured slanting sheets of rain and hard hailstones. The wind should have been demented and howling bitter curses. Memorial stones vast and small should have been bowed in pensive melancholy. Instead . . . instead . . . they were the same as they had always been. Our little cortège meant nothing to them. They followed and obeyed the seasons and the hands that had crafted them with unfailing loyalty and constancy.

It should not be happening. Yet all of it was happening, here in this graveyard, with its well-tended graves and swept pathways between them. Long-forgotten monuments not far off watched sardonically as we unveiled our own, pledging never to forget the small, cold relic lying six feet below.

The mother had screamed and threatened suicide if she was not allowed to come to bid her child farewell. I had pleaded and argued to no avail, until the doctors had once again sedated her when they saw that I was losing my resolve.

I turned the scene over and was perplexed by my distance from it all – my separation from the others who were making these noises of grief and consolation. I saw them, heard them but could not understand them. Finally, I could not bear to look or listen, so I sidled to the back.

A tall female soloist dressed in severe black and caught in the balmy atmosphere of this warm late-spring morning struck a poignant yet jazzy tune about children at play, happy children forever at play . . .

Lebelela hodimo, dinonyana di bapala hamonate – Look upwards, and see all the birds in joyous play, she sang.

The treetops, the wind, the clouds and the sun – all at play with little baby Morena amidst them, at the very centre and happy heart of things. For a moment something cold and hidden gingerly unclenched and thawed inside me.

It was soon all over and done with and I was shaking hands, patting the backs of some and deflecting the hugs of others. The lacerating anguish had settled into a dull ache that now sought only privacy.

We then all turned away and walked to our different cars to re-enter the frantic fray and turmoil of our separate lives, leaving the serene dead to their eternal dreams. What had brought us together was now history for most. Except for a few of us, who were walking into lifelong waking nightmares – those few of us who refuse to forget, because forgetting is also abandoning.

Chapter 1

The depth of the pain of loss, the breadth of its torment, is far greater than all the plagues in the entire expanse of the universe, its permanence too obvious to ignore.

Some insensitive fool once said work is the best way to take your mind off your troubles. A multitude of pathetic fools parroted the one who had first said it until it became an established truth that allowed no contradiction. It always happens with all these old sayings, incubated in the brains of halfwits.

So I was allowed no break in my work – to do so would be an admission of weakness on my part. I could read all this in the eyes of my comforters. It was now almost a month since the dreadful accident had happened and I was expected to have snapped out of it and moved on.

So, on this Tuesday morning, I sat at my desk in my disorderly cubicle (which I call an office when I feel grand) and looked blankly at an orange file. All I could see was the Lesego I had left at the hospital that morning. The inconsolable Lesego had lost our unborn child when her car skidded and rammed into a concrete wall while trying to avoid a drugged, misbegotten teenager in his father’s car. That the boy had overturned the car and killed himself trying to flee the scene did not comfort me. He was now just another body in another coffin in a country of coffins, beyond all recrimination and blame.

It was the parents I had found objectionable.

I had listened to them trying to justify their child’s actions at the scene. They went so far as to almost blame Lesego for the tragedy. Modimo – God! How I nearly went for that stupid man, the father, but Thekiso’s stern eye had been on me as he shook his head in warning. And, of course, the police, the media and the paramedics had been all over the place. It was not the right time or place to be hysterical. Not with Lesego on a stretcher looking at me with pained and questioning eyes. So I had got into the ambulance with her and held her hand, even after she slipped into merciful unconsciousness.

We had not even been properly married yet, according to our more censorious relatives and other like-minded types. We had had just a small private ceremony and lunch and a limp party afterwards with close relatives and a few friends. The Big Bang Wedding was scheduled for after the babies were born. Only the girl twin had survived the crash and was now clinging desperately to flickering life in an incubator in the same hospital in which Lesego was confined.

Have you started on that file? Thekiso’s uncompromising voice interrupted my thoughts. He is a firm believer in the work as a palliative adage. He is also the chief partner of our firm – Thekiso and Ditoro: Security Consultants and Private Investigators, a highly elastic and useful tag that encompasses everything from providing bodyguards to minor celebrities and politicians with delusions of grandeur, to investigating dubious business people on behalf of suspicious associates. But there are genuinely frightened people out there with real enemies, just as there are indeed virulent human viruses polluting the ethical bloodstream of this city, if not the country.

I thought you might find it interesting, Thabang, he went on in a softer tone. A tone I did not like at all. Surely Thekiso was not going to go mawkish and sentimental on me? I could not handle that. I would take a leave of absence if that was the way things were going. I would resign. I would lock my personal desk drawer. I would work from home. I would call a staff meeting and tell them . . . I fumed and did nothing.

Though Tex Thekiso was a fully qualified lawyer, he had never practised. Still, I did not expect this kind of putting-a-fragile-witness-at-ease tone from him. It was vaguely disorienting.

But I was reading all the while as these furious ideas churned and tumbled in my head. A name caught my eye. Here was a name I would never forget: the name of the drugged boy’s father.

I turned around sharply but Thekiso had already left. I nearly overturned my chair as I leapt after him. He was seated behind his desk when I burst into his large, comfortable office.

What is it now? You want to go home? he asked with a straight face.

What is this? I dumped the orange file on his desk.

He frowned and then, unbelievably, he smiled. Once, maybe twice since I began working with him had I seen that crazy, lopsided smile. It was boyish, disarming in its own wry way, and removed a dozen years from his forty-year-old face. Why he was so stingy with this asset was not the point now.

This is a file, if I am not mistaken, he said.

But where did you get it?

You mean the notes? I wrote them. The information I got in the usual way. Someone wanted us to check on something.

When was this? It can’t –

It is an old file. The client never turned up for a meeting and we put it aside and forgot about it. No client, no money, no investigation.

But you remembered.

I always remember.

Was the investigation going anywhere?

It could have. But no client, no –

No money, no investigation, I finished for him. I grinned sourly, but he had retreated into his usual impassible self.

We are not a government agency or the United Nations peacekeeping force, he rebuked me. I didn’t mind. We were back on familiar ground – slightly cordial and mildly acerbic.

Right, then, can you fill me in?

You can still read, can’t you?

Why did you give it to me?

You have motivation and that’s usually half the battle won right there.

Even so – I started to protest that we would be saving time and I’d be better prepared if he just told me. That same motivation might make me see things less clearly – but I was not going to tell him that. He saw it coming, and stopped me before I began. The torrent of my impatience dried up before I had said a word of it.

Go and read the damn thing first. Thoroughly. Then we’ll discuss it. I will also want Ditoro in on it.

He was talking about our own resident ex-policeman and intimidation expert, Tau Ditoro. I sometimes wonder how many of Tau’s type are out there. Sometimes it seems to me they are all over the place, toiling diligently on both sides of the legal fence.

I left him staring morosely out of the window before him at his favourite view: a dirty old brick wall. What did he see or read in it? The changing history of our society recorded on its slimy dampness? I used to wonder. I personally preferred the view out of the window behind him. It offered a more congenial and attractive skyline of Johannesburg – the sight of brave new buildings thrusting ever upwards. But destined to be consumed by smoggy skies if they were ever finished. Still, for a moment you could believe in the human spirit . . . an unstoppable force in everlasting upward motion.

These days, I sometimes think I can also catch a glimpse of the future in the dreary and scarred griminess of the wall.

Chapter 2

I looked in dismay at my desk when I came back in. Someone, probably Mama Mary, our office manager, had left a huge pile of ancient files on top of my desk. They were old in the sense that I was no longer interested in what they contained and had already subconsciously pushed them out of my mind. But they had to be looked at and brought up to date, and action had to be taken where necessary.

For one rebellious moment I thought of going back to Thekiso and asking him to shift them onto someone else or put them on hold for a while, but I could already imagine the curt refusal I would be met with. That was the price one paid for that brief, unguarded smile.

Anyway, I put aside my new-old exciting orange file and got stuck into the old-old boring ones. To do this, I had to do a lot of telephoning. Getting in touch with informants, clients and other interested parties. I also had to go out and ascertain a few facts personally from a reluctant eyewitness who had no phone and was wary of technology of any kind. He had heard too many ghost stories about taped telephone conversations. Somehow he didn’t seem to think I could be so devious as to carry a hidden recording device on my person – innocence, like self-delusion, is always with us.

I was back just about lunchtime and approached our stunning receptionist, Tumi. She has been a rock ever since I joined the firm and even more so in the recent past. She gave me no simulated and false pity but good, practical advice. She was wiser than her years, which I had never presumed to ask about. I guessed she was in her early twenties. You never can tell.

She had my hospital bag ready. Inside there were things she had bought and repackaged, insisting they were the right things to take to a patient like Lesego. I did not have the heart to tell her that Lesego rejected everything except apple juice and sometimes oranges. But I had told her about the flowers. She seemed to understand and had not bought them again. Lesego had said they reminded her of withered flowers on neglected graves.

I almost beat the traffic and the clock. I arrived just as they began letting in afternoon visitors. I don’t know why they have visiting hours here, in a private hospital, which everyone had assured me was the best in the city. Somehow one doesn’t question doctors. A childish hangover, I suppose.

I knew the doctor who was bending over the incubator, taking notes.

Dr Harrison, I said solemnly, as I always did when I met him on his irregular rounds.

Mr Maje, he answered with equal gravity. That was something: he remembered people’s names.

We paused, as usual, to commemorate the awful moment.

She is doing fine. Very well, in fact, he then said. The last part he had begun adding in the last few days. To him she had always been a person and not some textbook foetus, as those young doctors had insisted on saying when Lesego had first been admitted.

Harrison cracked a joke about a cricket match foul-up. I chuckled and cracked one about a soccer debacle. We beamed at each other in mutual high regard and complete mystification. We got on well together.

Excellent, he said.

Exactly, I said.

There is really nothing wrong though with your wife. A broken arm and a few bruises, that’s all. And she will have other children. She should not worry about that.

She is not worried about that.

I know.

Do you still think she will not need . . . 

"No. I don’t think so. She is a strong young woman and her inner wounds will heal themselves without any help from that. You be there for her."

I will be always there.

Excellent.

That was, of course, psychological therapy and counselling. Harrison was my kind of doctor – he shared my mistrust of these things. I don’t say they don’t work, but I hear too many people boast about their treatment as if they are martyrs.

He walked with me to Lesego’s room, nodded me in and went on his measured way down the green corridor.

Lesego’s mother and mine were already there. They must have come in even before the official visiting time, or I had missed them in the chattering knot of visitors when I had arrived. There were two other women with them. They all had their eyes closed tight while their lips moved in earnest, sibilant prayers.

Only Lesego had her eyes wide open. She looked at me from her bed and her eyes pleaded silently for me to get rid of them as soon as possible. The prayers Lesego and I understood these days were those of people in a far-off place called Marakong-a-Badimo near Mafikeng. We would go there as soon as she was back on her feet again.

I shrugged and smiled ruefully. She smiled too. A small smile, but a smile all the same. She had begun doing that lately. And she was also getting impatient with her immobility and incapacity. We waited until the last amen of the longest prayer. The women snapped their eyes open and saw me at the door.

I greeted them and they responded a little shyly and self-consciously. We chatted about this and that, avoiding the central issue. We might have been casual acquaintances passing the time at a bus stop.

Well, I think we should now go and see the baby, my mother said. Lately, she seemed to have put herself at the helm.

We’ll come back on our way out, Lesego’s mother seconded the motion. There was general agreement and, as they bustled out in stiff, sombre-coloured dresses, Lesego’s mother cast a stabbing eye at me, just as I saw a gleam of triumph in my own mother’s eye. They were soon clattering down the corridor.

I placed the bag near the night table next to the one I had left for her the day before. That was one of Lesego’s conditions regarding hospital gifts: she would open the bag after I was gone. The fact that she didn’t actually use anything seemed neither here nor there.

So that a little something of you remains with me. It feels more special if I open it alone. Like something from a secret lover or a gift from far away, she had said when she had started talking to me.

I felt guilty each time, because it was a little of Tumi I was leaving behind. Was this one of the small lies that led to the big lies, the often talked-about slippery slope to disaster and separation for grieving parents? I did not think so; not because of this, anyway.

We were silent for a long while, holding hands like shipwreck survivors on a disintegrating ice floe. There are things too vast and deep for normal words.

After a while she asked me about her construction business. I stressed the difficulties and problems to make her want to get out of bed to go fix them. She was not one to let things get out of control when she could do something about them. She smiled and said, You are exaggerating. My people were here in the morning and they say everything is fine, except that they can’t wait to get out from under the thumbs of the new tyrants.

We all want you back. And who are these tyrants anyway?

I mean your gang of smooth thugs – Thekiso and Ditoro.

Ah, hell. I asked them not to tell you.

Hey, hey, hey! I’ve come a long way with these people, starting from nothing. Before I even met you.

Ah, hell.

Ah, hell, you too. Anyway, I will be there as soon as I can. This weekend I’ll be home, as I told you. Fetch me on Saturday afternoon. These disgusting bruises will be better.

I myself had long stopped giving much significance to those livid bruises.

The baby . . .  I whispered.

I’ll be home just to see if everything is all right. But I am coming back straight here on Sunday. I have arranged for a private room for both of us. It is expensive but, ah, hell, as you say.

That’s better. Your business runs itself anyway.

That is not what I want to hear. No business runs itself !

On that explosive note I bid her goodbye and speedy health.

Ah, hell, she said when I kissed those unsightly bruises.

Of course no business runs itself: hers and mine included, and I would be attending to hers after clearing the last of the deadweight files from my desk. Lesego was getting contracts from government but she was wary, as she should be – as we all should be. The money was good but it came with tangled strings attached. It was a delicate tightrope that she was walking on – in the overall scheme of things, she was both irrelevant and expendable. A rainbow-nation showpiece.

The new file would be my bedtime reading. There had been a regulation against taking files out of the office, but I don’t exactly have sleepless nights if I sometimes depart from the rules.

On reaching the Bedlam Building in upper Pritchard Street, where we have our offices, I was just in time to intercept Thekiso on his way out. As usual he was wearing one of his dark, mismatched and outsized suits that make him seem smaller and more