Deon Meyer - Dead at Daybreak

He looked at her. Her eyes were on him, stunned: he was speaking to her, and he was speaking like an adult, like an intelligent, live human being.

“And that is the core. I thought that we were all good. Most of us. And let me tell you, that was a giant step, a great achievement for a cop. I made the big mistake of believing we were all good because I was good. Inherently, naturally.”

Then he was quiet. He sat in the worn chair in front of her and looked at her, moved his eyes over the contours of her face, familiar by now, saw the intensity with which she listened. He felt she was too near and he got up slowly, careful to keep his body turned away from her, avoiding physical contact. His mouth was dry. He took a few steps to the kitchen corner, switched on the kettle, turned. Her eyes were still fixed on him.

“My mother is an artist. That’s her work.” He pointed to the wall. “She creates beautiful paintings. She looks at the world and she makes it more beautiful on canvas. I think it’s her way of distancing herself from the evil that is in all of us. She says one must look at our whole history if we want to understand people. She says we’re retrospectively shortsighted: we only look back to the Greeks and the Romans. Some even look back as far as Moses, but she says we must look back far further. She says that sometimes when she’s working in her studio and it’s quiet, she hears a sound and she feels all the tiny muscles in her ear contracting to turn the shell in the direction of the sound, like a cat’s. She says that’s her proof, her reminder that we mustn’t forget to look back as far as the animal world. But even my mother won’t admit that we’re bad. She cannot. Just like you. Because you believe that you’re good. And you are. Because you have never had the opportunity to let the evil escape, because life has never given you the choice.”

The water boiled.

He turned away, took out two mugs. Coffee , he thought. The planet around which his and Hope Beneke’s social contact revolved.

She had courage, he thought. To come here. No one else had ever done it.

“Sugar and milk?”

“Only milk, please.”

He took the carton out of the fridge, poured milk into her mug, carried the two coffees. She moved from the table to a chair opposite his. She wanted to say a thousand things, but she didn’t want to put this miracle of an eloquent, new, intelligent, other, strange Van Heerden at risk with the wrong phrase.

He sat down. “You see, Hope – ”

The telephone rang. He looked at his watch, stood up, picked up the phone.

“Van Heerden.”

“Could I speak to Mike Tyson?” It was Kara-An.

“Are you looking for Hope?”

“No, Mike, I’m looking for you. I’m on the Morning Star road and I can’t find your house. I’m looking for directions.”

What did she want? “I don’t know where you are.”

“I’m in front of a gate. Next to the gate is a sign with the words TABLE STABLES. I presume it refers to the mountain, not a piece of furniture. Otherwise the owner should have his head examined.”

“The turnoff is a hundred meters farther on.”

“How will I know it when I see it?”

“There are two white pillars. One on each side of the entrance.”

“No cute little name?”

“No.”

“Didn’t think so, Mike. I’ll be there in a minute.”

“Come to the little house, not the big one.”

“Not the one on the prairie, I trust.”

“What?”

“Never mind, Mike, you’re a boxer, not an intellectual.” Then the line went dead. He replaced the phone.

“That was Kara-An.”

“Is she on her way?”

“She’s here. Down the road.”

Hope said nothing, merely nodded.

“What does she want?” he asked.

“I haven’t the vaguest idea.”

Then they saw headlights approaching the gate.

If she had a penchant for swearing, Hope Beneke thought, she would have employed one of Van Heerden’s words with a vengeance.

∨ Dead at Daybreak ∧

24

T he two letters arrived within a week of each other. One was an appointment to Brixton Murder and Robbery; the other offered new, unexpected crossroads.

Dear Zatopek ,

I’m not sure whether you read the Careers section in the Sunday newspapers; therefore this letter is to inform you that the Department of Police Science has grown and the increasing number of students necessitates the creation of a post for a lecturer. Applications for the post are being considered .

Best wishes ,

Cobus Taljaard (Prof.)

PS: When are you coming to discuss your master’s?

How does one make such a choice? Not based on salary, because there wasn’t a huge difference. Not by looking at the potential professional stimulus, because both posts offered unique challenges. Working conditions? It depends on what you like.

I believe that I eventually made the decision I did because I could see myself as a lecturer, because it would make me feel even better about myself, the teacher (in contrast to the executive role), the cerebral world. The potential of a title with so much more weight than a rank. Doctor, one day. Still later, professor.

During my studies in psychology, I developed the theory that most of the decisions we make, if not all, are to feed the ego. The choice of a car, clothes, a suburb, friends, favorite drinks – all are aimed at creating a specific image for the world, to announce This is who I am so that the world’s perception can become a mirror to reflect ourselves and, like Narcissus, make us love the reflection. I started working at the University of South Africa’s Department of Police Science in February 1989. At the same time I moved to a larger, better flat in Sunnyside. And changed my battered Nissan for an almost new Volkswagen Golf. I was unashamedly and irresistibly on my way to the top.

All I still needed was the Big L.

There were women in my life. The brief interactions of the first years in Pretoria systematically changed to longer relationships. When I look back, I must admit, with a certain degree of shame, that, all in all, they were relationships of convenience. It wasn’t conscious exploitation, more a natural way to pass the time until the Damascene experience of Love happened to me, until that intense, wonderful moment when I would look at the face of a woman and know that she was the One.

They all accused me of being afraid of being tied down. ( Commit was a favorite word, taken, I think, from magazines like Cosmo and Femina , articles with headings like “Ten Ways to Make Your Relationship Last.”) And they were right. I tried to halt deepening relationships with weak excuses (“We don’t have to be in such a hurry. Can’t we get to know each other better?”) and their duration was often directly linked to the levels of patience.

Was I wrong? Given the rules of the game of love, was it unethical of me to use the togetherness, the regular sex, the availability, without committing myself?

I’m not always entirely sure. I never lied. I never promised eternal love, evidence of deeper devotion than I was prepared to give. Because not one of them was the One.

But the one thing a woman wants to hear more than “I love you” are the words that pave the way to marriage.

I’m not sexist. I grant women every possible right they want to appropriate for themselves. To be perfectly honest, I often and easily admit that women do many things much better than men. Especially in the professional field. They have more sympathy, more tact; they’re not burdened with the curse of testosterone-driven aggression; they have a natural talent for differentiating between problems in the workplace and the contaminating politics of ambition and (male) ego. But that they’re positively driven in the identification of a companion for life and the processing of a relationship through all its conventional stages to down-the-aisle-and-up-to-the-altar, I can attest to from firsthand experience.