How to Be a Revolutionary by C.A. Davids

Author:C.A. Davids
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books

19

CAPE’S CONFESSION

Grief blotted all the light. Only ever letting in a ray at a time, if that, before guilt shut it out again.

Grief and guilt. Guilt and grief. But if you’re resolute at this thing called life, you learn to live under the twins’ miasma.

~

Please could you speak directly into the microphone, says the head of the commission. His black gown flows from his neck in fat pleats, the folds ironed hard and straight.

And when you are ready just begin, just tell the story like you remember it, he coos, and for a moment it seems as if he’s invited me into his lounge and over a bowl of biltong and bottles of Coke, we will chat. He is too kind for this line of work, I think, as I watch him wipe his forehead neatly with a handkerchief, despite the cold outside and the fact that I’m the first person to testify this morning.

I’d read the notices inviting people to make statements to the Truth and Reconciliation Committee months earlier: hand- illustrated posters at my local corner store had read: “Silence is Complicity,” “Speaking is Healing.” Offices had been set up around the country, encouraging people to tell their stories about apartheid, the pain they’d suffered, missing relatives or—even—to confess to harm they’d caused. The great post-apartheid reckoning.

Who knew such a simple appeal would lead rows of people from the quietest passages into daylight? Even mass murderers who’d twisted and defaced bodies for fun as they’d drunk beers and roasted meat, had come forward to cleanse their souls, or at least to confess in the hope they’d avoid jail time. Though it had been almost eight years since Kay’s death, her memory, presence, clung. So I knew it was time to answer the questions that only I could, and ask the ones I alone had.

I spy the geometry of my commissioner’s handkerchief, flattened in a quadruple fold. His soul is quite naked for all here to see: the people seated on rows of plastic folding chairs behind me, those in the gallery on long wooden benches, the stenographer with her fingers poised, and the silent judgment of the television cameras. Surely everyone sees from the front-page photographs, the nightly news coverage how the testimonies trouble him: the tales of missing children and parents, worse, cracked human bodies that crawl home behind him and will not be ignored; how tired he is of trying to absorb the sorrow of perfect strangers though he can do no less.

I flip through the countless newspaper articles about her death, the insinuations, the outright claims and the pages I’ve been writing and rewriting about Kay’s murder, my role in it, for the better part of a decade. So I will not slip up.

Name? Date? Address? he asks, smiling when I say I’ve recently been employed as a communications officer in the Presidency.

We are about to begin but my throat is dry, so dry that I find I cannot speak. I’m proverbially lost for words.

Just take your time, the commissioner says with practice, with care.

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