We Are Not Such Things: A Murder in a South African Township and the Search for Truth and Reconciliation. Литагент HarperCollins USD

       2.

      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, “To Those Who Follow in Our Wake”

      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 two lanes, its mangled hood smashed into its windshield, its roof sliced clean off. The pavement was strewn with glass, sparkling like crystals in the high spring sun, and a couple of truckers had pulled to the side to call for help and to snap cellphone photos. Some merciful soul had rolled a heavy woolen blanket across the top of the car to try to conceal three bodies sitting upright.

      The image lingers bright and precise in my mind: two men flank a woman in the back of the ruined car, which was slammed—by what? a tractor trailer?—with such force that the passengers must have died on impact but were not ejected from their seats, perhaps because they were packed so tight in there. All three are slender with dark brown skin, and young, judging by their builds. The woman wears a pink T-shirt. Her hair is jet black and plaited into stiff shoulder-length braids that stick out in all different directions—like Pippi Longstocking, I remember thinking.

      From then on, we drove slowly and anxiously to the guesthouse where we planned to stay the night. It was situated in the stark Northern Cape desert town of Colesburg, the halfway point between Johannesburg and Cape Town, where it seemed every other home offered a bed for weary travelers. The owner, an elderly man of British ancestry, led us to our room, a white square filled with pink floral pillows, a pink comforter marred by a tiny blood spot, and a knitted woolen throw so rough that the dog used it to scratch her back. The decoration was minimal: a single straw hat, pinned with a fake rose, nailed to the wall.

      That night, we drove through the town, which gave the impression of overwhelming flatness—flat roads, flat land, flat houses—and ate tasteless, mushy vegetables at a pub patronized only by white people. After, we stopped for snacks at a local twenty-four-hour shop. As I stood in line to pay for chips and a drink, a tired-looking light-brown-skinned woman at the register spoke to me in a heavy Germanic-sounding language I couldn’t understand. She was, Sam explained, a colored woman, a term that sounds offensively retrograde to Americans but is in fact the designation for the population of mixed-race South Africans. The language she had directed at me was Afrikaans, a derivation of Old Dutch spoken mainly by South Africa’s colored people and white Afrikaners, the descendants of early European settlers.

      The next day, as we were leaving, we chatted with our host, a former school principal who said he had taken a buyout package for state employees when the black majority came to power in 1994. He had retired early to run this unique interpretation of an inn.

      “So, what’s the population of Colesburg?” Sam asked.

      “Two thousand whites, five thousand coloreds, and fifteen thousand blacks,” the man answered. That was how he automatically understood his hometown—as a collection of people broken into racial categories. We herded the dog into the car and headed toward our final destination: Cape Town.