Hum If You Don't Know the Words by Bianca Marais

Author:Bianca Marais
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2017-07-11T04:00:00+00:00

Twenty-nine

BEAUTY

1 AUGUST 1976

Melville, Johannesburg, South Africa

I have more possessions now than a month and a half ago when I first made the trip to Soweto. All I had then was one small case filled with a few items of clothing and my bible. I thought it would be a short journey that would end with my returning to the Transkei with Nomsa; instead, it ended with my suitcase’s meager contents strewn across a battlefield. I could not retrieve my things from the street that day, as I did not want to invite evil into my life. I even threw away the clothes I had been wearing. How naive I was then to think that bad luck could be shed and that misery would never arrive unannounced.

Maggie replaced everything for me during the time I was with her and then, on the night I fled the Houghton mansion for this safe house in Melville, another gift was bestowed.

“Here, I’d like you to have this,” Maggie said, handing across a velvet box.

I opened it and drew out a silver pendant hanging from a chain. I held it up to the light; it was a rendering of a holy man carrying a baby across water to safety.

“I wanted to give you a proper gold Saint Christopher, but I’ve learnt that expensive gifts can attract unwanted attention,” Maggie said. “I give the pendants to the people I’ve met in the resistance whose friendship I most cherish.”

“Thank you, Maggie,” I said, touched by her sincerity. “You chose the metal wisely. I could never have accepted gold.”

“Because of its value?”

“Because I know the men whose backs break and lungs fill with dust as they dig for it. No object’s value should ever be placed above the worth of a man’s life.”

“You’re so right, of course you are. I can’t believe I never thought of it that way before. Turn it over,” Maggie said.

I did. The back of the pendant was engraved with a single word: “Believe.” I asked Maggie to help put the necklace on, and when I turned around again, she wrapped her arms around me. We hugged tightly and it was an embrace filled with love.

“I’ll be in touch as soon as I can organize papers for you. After that, we’ll arrange a meeting with Nomsa.”

But in the week and a half since I have been at the safe house, Maggie’s intelligence has lost track of Nomsa’s whereabouts. While all of her people were scrambling to ensure they evaded the security police’s net, Nomsa was moved from the smallholding and the trail has gone cold. Maggie is confident that it is just a matter of time until a member of her network hears something, but I cannot just sit and wait.

I am befriending everyone I come into contact with and am making my own inquiries through less official channels. What I am hearing makes me nervous. People say the man Nomsa is with, “Shakes” Ngubane, is a dangerous man, that he is violent and has a taste for alcohol and drugs, both of which he sells illegally along with stolen weapons.

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