taken during their first meeting and was weighed down with a cracked brick, of the sort that had been used to bludgeon Amy. Amy’s old Cape Town university colleagues had offered to arrange a memorial day a while back but hadn’t done anything, so this whole makeshift show had been put together on the fly in the days since Linda had landed a week earlier.
“Who wants to give a speech?” Linda asked. A curly-haired former colleague of Amy’s stood up, said a few words about her departed friend, let out a sob, and threw herself into Linda’s arms. Linda patted her while maintaining a close-mouthed smile; the photographer snapped away. Some others filed before the small crowd and spoke about the loveliness of Amy, the strength of Linda, and the importance of grace and transformation. Nancy, holding her STOP THE SENCELESS VIOLENCE sign, took the stage for twenty minutes, during which her husband shot her a stream of “cut-it-short” glares, which she ignored.
“Amy was a beautiful soul!” Nancy said. She wore wire-rim glasses and long colorful earrings.
I stood away from the group and leaned against a white sedan. Mzi Noji, a middle-aged, unemployed ex-militant, ex-con, and army veteran, arrived on foot, wearing his green cap, embroidered with the phrase UNIVERSAL MESSAGE over a Rastafarian flag. Mzi was a lifelong social activist, raised during the height of the anti-apartheid struggle. Even today, when he claimed that he wanted to get on with his life, he continually found himself embroiled in protests, marches, negotiations, meetings, neighborhood committees, and organizations.
I’d met Mzi by chance a year earlier, and he had become an unexpected kindred spirit, as well as my guide, my translator, my friend. He accompanied me on my expeditions and investigations into the Amy Biehl story, often driving my car and dredging up forgotten people from within the depths of the townships. Mzi was also to be my key to unraveling the truth, or as much truth as possible, of what really happened on that fateful day twenty years before.
Until I met Mzi at a burger shop downtown, I had been tracking the same story that every journalist before me had written, except that my aim had been to tell for the first time the full tale as it stretched over two decades. But Mzi informed me that he believed that this long-accepted story of the circumstances of Amy’s death was not exactly accurate. His revelation had led me, in a series of nearly unbelievable coincidences, to a meeting I had had the day before. After months of frenzied searching, I had finally found an old and ruined man who had also been in Gugulethu on August 25, 1993, though few remembered him. Nobody had ever told his account of that day, nor made the chilling links between what had happened to him and what had happened to Amy Biehl five hours later and a quarter mile away. The old man knew something about brutal mobs and racial violence, and he was the final piece in the jigsaw I had been painstakingly piecing together for two years.
Mzi sidled up next to me, his cap pulled low over his deep-set eyes. He was tall and strong, with a little paunch he was self-conscious about, so he was always abstaining from chocolate milkshakes even though he loved them. We each crossed our arms on the roof of the sedan and rested our chins on our forearms. By then, Easy had reappeared and parked the van to the side of the memorial, and was hiding behind us, hoping he would not be called on to talk. He was mumbling: Man, he hoped Makhulu did not make him stand up before the group.
“Amy was an accidental hero,” Nancy said.
Mzi’s hands were shaking. He looked down at them, and so did I.
“Her death was a Shakespearean tragedy!” Nancy said.
The old lady and the girl had hit up everyone, I noticed. Every lapel boasted a beaded pin and a cutout heart.
“Linda is strong, charismatic, beautiful,” Nancy said.
I looked around. I felt a surge of fury, inexplicable in its intensity. I moved closer to Mzi. In a few days, his great-aunt’s house would burn down, with his great-aunt inside. Just like his own mother’s house back in the old days of politics and firestorms, when the ANC kids in the neighborhood shot it full of lead and set it alight with petrol bombs. Now there was no liberation movement to blame, no just cause or grand scheme, no enemies intent on your demise. Just faulty wiring and cheap petroleum heaters. Mzi was listening intently to Nancy, his face set in that practiced flat expression of his, composed specifically to shroud the fact that he was almost always overwhelmed by various emotions.
Nancy praised Easy and Ntobeko. This was a story of “gentle forgiveness,” she said. “Of lived apology!”
When she finished her speech, the crowd applauded.
Linda stood before her guests. She looked for Easy and Ntobeko. Ntobeko was long gone, so she called for Easy. A sharp intake of breath, back straightened, and then he emerged from behind us and went to her. Easy hooked his arm in Linda’s and stood with her as a local reporter scribbled, a pair of student videographers filmed, the hometown newspaper photographer snapped away. Linda began to say her part. Easy and I looked at each other for the briefest of moments, eye-to-eye above the small crowd, and then he turned back to smile for the cameras.
They tell me: eat and drink. Be glad to be among the haves!
But how can I eat and drink
When I take what I eat from the starving
And those who thirst do not have my glass of water?
And yet I eat and drink.
—BERTOLT BRECHT,
When I went to live in South Africa in November 2011, I didn’t know what to expect, and I didn’t reflect on it. My husband, Sam, then my fiancé, wanted to return on sabbatical to the country he had left at age eighteen, so I followed. Career-wise, I was untethered. Years earlier, I had published a light travel memoir to nobody’s notice, and since then I had no real writing prospects as far as I could tell. Every single article I pitched to magazines was rejected. I kept submitting short stories set in Montana to literary journal contests, in the hopes of winning $500, but I only came in as runner-up twice, so I actually lost money, since it usually cost $20 to enter. To make ends meet, I had taken to editing a celebrity doctor’s website, despite having no medical knowledge. If Sam wanted to move across the world, I had no argument against it.
Soon after Sam took off to find us a place in Cape Town, I sold the old SUV I’d had for years, moved my boxes to a storage locker in New Jersey, packed an oversized duffel bag full of clothes, forced my flailing dog into a travel-safe crate at the JFK cargo terminal, and hurtled fourteen hours across the ocean to Johannesburg. Sam met me at Arrivals. We planned to drive the nine hundred miles to Cape Town rather than put the dog on another connecting flight, so we rented a car and cut through the Karoo desert.
Karoo, which means “land of thirst” in the indigenous Khoikhoi language, is a vast, bleak scrubland that stretches through the country, searingly hot in the afternoon and cold as steel at night. Sheep roam across its inhospitable terrain, dotted with rugged little shepherds’ dwellings where young boys with hard feet spend months alone. I sat in the passenger seat and gazed out the window at the monotonous landscape. It looked like a place picked over, as if anything of value, anything lush or desirable or even a little bit sweet or pretty, had been collected by a determined band of looters sweeping across the plain, leaving behind only dry bush and dust. The N1 highway slices through that rugged expanse, wide and smooth and lonely.
Only a few hours from Johannesburg, we came upon a gruesome car accident. The remains of a car sat diagonally across
