The Mandela Plot Read online

  Contents

  * * *

  Title Page

  Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Note to the Reader

  The Name

  1

  2

  3

  4

  The Nightmare

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  Exit Garden

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  School of Walls

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  Yesod

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  Xanadu

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  If Not Now

  43

  44

  45

  46

  47

  48

  49

  50

  Apocalypse

  51

  52

  53

  54

  55

  56

  57

  58

  59

  60

  61

  62

  63

  64

  65

  66

  67

  68

  69

  Who by Fire

  70

  71

  72

  73

  74

  Nothing

  Genesis

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  Revelations

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  Exodus

  24

  Glossary

  Acknowledgments

  Sample Chapter from THE LION SEEKER

  Buy the Book

  About the Author

  Connect with HMH

  Copyright © 2018 by Kenneth Bonert

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [email protected] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

  hmhco.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Bonert, Kenneth, author.

  Title: The Mandela plot / Kenneth Bonert.

  Description: Boston : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, [2018]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017060208 (print) | LCCN 2017050070 (ebook) | ISBN 9781328886156 (ebook) | ISBN 9781328886187 (hardcover)

  Subjects: LCSH: Mandela, Nelson, 1918–2013—Fiction. | Politics and government—Fiction. | Political violence—Fiction. | Jewish families—Johannesburg (South Africa)—Fiction. | Johannesburg (South Africa)—Fiction. | Political fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Literary. | FICTION / Coming of Age. | FICTION / Jewish. | FICTION / Political.

  Classification: LCC PR9199.4.B6743 (print) | LCC PR9199.4.B6743 M26 2018 (ebook) |

  DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017060208

  Cover design by Gregg Kulick

  Author photograph by Anne De Haas

  v1.0418

  For Nicole

  It is a haunting truth, not to say a tragedy, that the story of a family or a nation is nothing but a succession of echoes. All human patterns repeat, all return to overlay and re-present what has already been—only the style of each repetition may vary. Different actors may interpret an ancient text yet the essential drama remains beneath, as unmoving as the rock of the place in which it must play itself out, again and again. All that stands against this is the flimsy weapon of memory, as fragile as a web of dreams.

  —H. R. Koppel, A Light for the Abyss

  La haine est le vice des âmes étroites, elles l’alimentent de toutes leurs petitesses, elles en font le prétexte de leur basses tyrannies.

  Hatred is the vice of narrow souls. They feed it with all their smallness. They use it as an excuse for their vile tyrannies.

  —Honoré de Balzac, La Muse du Département

  Note to the Reader

  A glossary appears on page 456 for the benefit of those unfamiliar with South African terminology.

  Neither the township of Julius Caesar nor the suburb of Regent Heights can be found on any map of Johannesburg. They are fictional locations that are wholly the product of the author’s imagination. Both places contain schools—the Leiterhoff School and Wisdom of Solomon High School for Jewish Boys, respectively—that are just as fictional and imaginary as their locations. Needless to say, the characters populating these nonexistent places are also entirely fictional creations of the author, as indeed are all the characters in this novel.

  The Name

  Here they come in the night with their long boots and heavy machine guns, their steel helmets and wolf dogs on chains. The megaphone booming raus-Juden-raus and I’m sprinting down the passage and they keep dropping over the garden walls like giant snakes. Bambam they’re at the front door, bursting it, splinters flying, a sledgehammer smashing the mezuzah. My brother has made it outside but a spotlight freezes him and he’s kneeling on the lawn in his underpants, hands laced behind his neck, rain dripping from his bowed face. Now explosions of smashing glass from the big bedroom where Ma is screaming and I turn and run through the kitchen to the back door. Backyard’s empty. Just reach the fence. Climb it and escape. But when my fingers touch the door handle I am stone.

  Zaydi.

  They haven’t got to Zaydi yet, in his room at the far end. The megaphone voice won’t stop saying all Jews out now move it Jews out get out.

  They’re inside. But Zaydi. I have to go back.

  1

  I’m playing slinkers like always and then this weird thing happens—I start winning. I’m stocking points left and right and they can’t stop me. My heart pops like fireworks and whenever the toe of my polished Jarman touches the slink it shoots exactly where I want it to. I start giggling like a spaz. Meantime Pats and Ari have gone all quiet and serious. They won’t look at me.

  Slinkers is this game we invented, it’s a combo of soccer with snooker with golf plus chess. But it’s like a million times more lekker than any of them, I swear. I mean it’s just the best, hey. I can’t even explain how good. One day we are ganna organise selling it and it’ll be bigger than rugby even, once the people try it out, no jokes. Me and Ari Blumenthal and Patrick Cohen—to be honest we started it cos shul is so bladdy boring. You sit and sing in Hebrew or you stand quiet till your feet hurt. Fat Rabbi Tershenburg gives his blahblah. It takes hours and when it’s finished everyone goes into the foyer and the hatted ladies come down the stairs from the women’s gallery. They kiss their husbands good Shabbos and they get hold of their kids. Then the whole lot herds off up the path to the kiddish hall where they fress off paper plates piled with kichel and herring and gargle down little bottles of Coke and Fanta. Not us. Our folks don’t come to shul on Shabbos. Instead we’ve s
aved up the bottlecaps from those little bottles. We’ve rubbed the tops of the caps like mad on the rough steps outside, like we’re trying to set them on fire, which gets them all silver and smooth. A ready one is called a slink.

  All the time the people are in the foyer the three of us are waiting all ants-in-pants but pretending not to show it, pockets full of slinks. When they’re gone, old Wellness, the Zulu caretaker, he comes limping in and switches off the big bronze chandeliers one by one. When the last one is out and it’s darkened and Wellness has hopped off, we three jump in like a shot and start our match. It’s like this every week. We use the patterns on the foyer’s marble floor for lines and goals. Slinkers is complicated, hey. Got like a million special rules. Pats always says it’s not just scoring a goal that’s the hard part, it’s getting to the goal. Well not for me! Not today! I score another one off a free kick and I’m giggling so hard I have to lie down. When we start the next round it hits me like an uppercut to the body (a liver smasher, Marcus calls it) that I am about to win the whole bladdy match. I look at my friends. They’re still not looking at me. Not a good feeling. Basically I only have these two friends, ukay, my shul friends. I mean that’s it. I don’t really like to think about why that’s so, but it’s the truth.

  I miss blocking Pats’s slink and so I lose the next point and then the next. Now my friends start smiling and talking again. Soon we start arguing. We always argue. This one is about our air force and how we have Mirage fighter jets and whether they are better planes than the Cuban Migs we are fighting on the Border. The Mirages were used by Israel in the Six-Day War but the Migs were invented by a Jew. Ari says Mirage. Pats says what bulldust. I say what my brother Marcus would tell me, that it depends which model the Cubans are sending to fight us cos our Mirages are quite old and no one will sell us new ones cos of sanctions. In a little bit we are shouting like usual. It echoes in the roof which is round up there, like the inside of one of those helmet hair dryers old ladies sit under, but super dark without the lights. In the end I lose the argument, like usual. And then I carry on losing slinkers points and the more I lose the more the okes start laughing and patting me on the back and that. And then I lose the match, like usual. And then I lose the argument about which way to walk to Pats’s house. Basically, I always come off third out of three with my two friends. That’s my place. But today is the first time I’m seriously wondering why.

  2

  We are walking to Pats’s house, taking Route Alpha Kilo Leopard. We have these code words for all our routes. Sometimes we argue about how long we would last if we got tortured for our codes. It’s a vote of two to one that I’d be first to talk, but it’s three out of three that the worst torture is the one where they stick pins in your balls. We walk cos you have to walk to shul on a Shabbos, you’re not allowed to drive on Shabbos anywhere, obviously—it’s against the Torah—so it would be chutzpah deluxe to rock up at the shul in a car. Old man Meyerson did it one time, got a lift with his son Neil who dropped him off outside, and no one talks to him anymore.

  We reach the Emmarentia Dam by one o’clock or so and I feel the wind fresh in my face with the hot sun. The water is sparkly and full of little waves. The fishermen put nobs of mooshed bread on their lines so they can see them stretching from the rods. Kayakers are going hell for leather and windsurfers are falling and getting up and bending over to pull up their heavy sails. Ice cream man has those fat round granadilla lollies like cricket balls on sticks and he’s also shouting to sell “cendy floss, cendy floss, anybody loves cendy floss?” and we’re walking on the roadside next to the parked cars. All along on the grassy bank people are lying on towels with oil on their skin. White people trying to get brown. The African sun is happy to cook the hell out of them and I smell coconut sun cream and baby oil and sausage smoke. The air gets all bendy over the hot road. A radio from one of the parked cars is playing “Do You Really Want to Hurt Me?” and I think of Boy George singing, with his hat and his girl’s make-up, on Pop Shop which we always tape at home—Fridays at five. I remember old whatsisname saying on Pop Shop that 1986 belongs to New Wave, which sounded lank cool, but I don’t know how our year can belong to anything or what New Wave actually means, really.

  A yellow Volkswagen Golf, not the GTi fast one but the one that Da says only ladies buy, is slowing down behind us. It makes me super tense, I swear. It’s happened lots of times before that someone shouts antisemitism from the back of a car at us. Ari is wearing his yarmie, he keeps it clipped in his hair and never takes it off because he’s more religious than us two. Pats sometimes wears his outside of shul as well, he wants to test himself to be proud to be a Jew. Pats is full of weirdo ideas like that, he gets it from Laurel, his sister who’s a drama student at Wits and lights black candles in her room and that. But even me, obviously I’m wearing my shul clothes which look completely funny here at the Dam on a nice Saturday—my smartest shirt with long sleeves and collars and a pair of smart brown long pants and a pair of leather Jarmans that are like the most expensive things Ma ever bought me which she is always telling me—so they know what we are even without yarmies on our heads. The last one shouted Yo! Bladdy fucken Jewsss! I remember the face sticking out the window, some blond oke with an earring. He didn’t look cross, he looked sort of happy when he saw me looking back at him. Like he’d just swallowed down some lekker strawberry ice cream with chocolate sauce. Sometimes I think about what he must have seen, I mean what my face would have looked like to him. And why would it make blondie so happy to shout that antisemitism at us? But we just ignore them when it happens. What could we do? Anyway this yellow Volksie passes us with no hassles and I feel better.

  Then when we reach the far side where the road starts going up away from the Dam, I see something hectic down in the willows and I have to stop. Aloud I ask, “You check them down there?”

  Pats shades his eyes, wrinkling his pointy nose while he looks. “Who’re they?”

  “That’s a Solomon rugby jersey he’s wearing,” I say.

  “No,” says Pats.

  “Ja, those are the colours,” I say. “That’s what he’s got on, I swear. Solomon.”

  “So what?” says Ari.

  I take a breath. “Let’s go say howzit to them.”

  “You know them, hey.” It’s not a question, Pats is being majorly sarcastic.

  “Ja, I do,” I say. Sometimes lies just fly out of my mouth by themselves. Pats laughs and the two of them carry on walking but I don’t move. I’m back to thinking about slinkers and how I’ve never won a single match since we started playing when we were little all the way till now when we’ve already had our barmies and become proper men of thirteen and high school is coming round the corner. It’s specially nuts cos I’m the oldest of us—man, I’m ganna be turning fourteen years old this year, soon. So why couldn’t I win the match today when I was so unstoppable? Why must I always come last? Something inside of me like a car alarm light on a dash keeps blinking an answer that I don’t like. It’s because it keeps them happy.

  Meantime the okes have stopped on the road and are looking back and calling to me as if I’ve lost the plot. But I don’t move. My heart’s boombooming. “Come on, okes,” I say. “Follow me.” I start walking down to the place where the grass hits the willow trees. There’s this huge kukload of trees here, so thick it’s like a mini jungle, I swear.

  When I look back, they’re actually following. It’s a hell of a surprise, on a level, but then all-a-sudden I start feeling lank chuffed cos I want them to see this, I really do. Want to mash their bladdy faces right in it.

  3

  I reach the willows first. The trees hang their whippy branches down into the water and there are more trees behind so they block you off like a wall. I catch a whiff of cigarettes but I can’t see into the shadows cos you know how it is when you look from the bright sun into shade—it makes you into an instant Stevie Wonder. So I’m still blinking and trying to see when these three okes step out. Straightawa
y I’ve got a tingly feeling I should leave but Ari and Pats are coming up behind me and then I see the colours again—they belong to only one high school in Johannesburg. A skinny oke who’s older, like fifteen or sixteen, steps up to me pulling a cigarette from his mouth. He’s got one of those floppy mouths where the lips are about two sizes too big for his face and the bone part of his forehead by the eyebrows sticks out, making me think of a picture of a skull I saw this one time except that skulls look like they smiling with all their teeth and this oke has no smile for me. Instead he pokes his hot cigarette straight at my eye, I swear. It only just misses cos I use my reflexes to bend back. When I get my balance I see the other two have gone around and they’ve got Pats and Ari inside a circle.

  “What you lighties doing down here?” says the skull face.

  I say, “I was—I just saw him wearing that Solomon rugby jersey.” And I look around to point to that one with my chin. “Do you okes all go to Solomon? What Standard are you?” I’m trying hard, grinning away, but this is all wrong, it’s not how it should be.

  “Oh, sweetie,” says skull face. As he says this his other arm is busy coming up and around and something explodes bang clap almighty hard over the whole of the side of my face. I go away for a second and when I come back all three of us are being pushed into the willows by the three older ones. Duck poo is everywhere here. There’re suckholes in the dark muck round the bottoms of the long weeds by the water and millions of dragonflies zipping and hovering like tiny helicopters. No one else is here, everyone’s back there in the sun on the grass. I’m cold and start to shake but it’s not from the shade. My face on the side feels as thick as the blue rubber they make slipslops out of, throb-throbbing like mad. The tall one’s hand is scratching down the back of my neck, grabbing my collar. I look around and he's reading the label on my shirt. One of the other ones says to him, “What is it, Crackcrack?”