Читать книгу My Only Story - Deon Wiggett - Страница 23

I am back in Johannesburg, back in my loft, with 199 new pictures from a twenty-four-hour trip. By the end of winter, I will know these pictures – these strange boys’ names and faces – like we went to school together.

I make printouts of the 199 photos, which is an extravagance in the face of ecological cataclysm, but the only way I can keep track. Kind of. To Riaan’s further disappointment, the printouts mark a tipping point for our loft. In addition to the index cards, there are now basically 200 pages divided into piles in a haphazard fashion. If Marie Kondo were to materialise in the loft, Riaan would instantly dematerialise from shame.

I must bid you two paragraphs’ worth of narrative housekeeping. First: I do not believe in hierarchies of rape, because it denigrates some of its forms. I was raped in the mouth – am I therefore luckier than someone who was raped in the anus, but not as lucky as someone who was just ‘molested’? Progressive law, such as South Africa’s, no longer differentiates between the kinds of rape, and neither do I. All sex abuse will fuck you up; by exalting anal and vaginal rape, we discourage the acknowledgment of sex abuse in all its forms. In this book, as in life, if I touch your penis without your consent, I am raping your penis.

Second: as I introduce you to more suspected survivors, it becomes harder to protect everyone’s identity. If I note, for instance, that I spoke to a Grey boy who is now a matador in Spain, that does narrow down the options. Therefore, in addition to blanket pseudonyms, in these pages I may have to fudge an occasional geographic or personal detail to protect the men who spoke to me. But never, ever will I fudge anything that Willem did to anyone. Their privacy deserves to be respected, but their stories deserve to be told.

Each of the 199 photos now strewn about in piles is accompanied by a caption providing the boys’ names, but only to a degree. Their surnames are there, and so are their first initials, so I see row upon row of – not their real names, as you are now assured – J Smit, A Smit, D de Klerk, G de Klerk, B Smit, T Smit. I will have to find out their first names, and then track down these young boys who are now men older than me.

Anyone I cannot find gets an index card. Everyone I can find gets an index card and a sensitive message of the kind my sage-like therapist taught me to send.

There are many, many ways to get the message wrong, and maybe only one to get it right. The message must be a dog whistle, but only for dogs who are ready to hear it.

In my loft, as I manage to track down a boy in a picture, I may write: ‘Dear Neels, I’m a Johannesburg writer and I’m working on a big justice project. I got your name from an old Grey College yearbook and found you via Facebook. I am investigating a teacher from your time at Grey; are you maybe willing to have a chat? No pressure, hey, you can completely ignore this message if you want to. All the best!’

The tortuous prose serves a purpose: I must allow for all eventualities, because I do not know what happened to anyone my message may reach. Every guy I contact is a potential rape survivor, and I do not know the extent of his amnesia.

In detective novels, amnesia is dramatic. A mysterious stranger with an unfamiliar accent comes to in a hospital bed, unable to recall an apparent chain of recent tragedies. In real life, most forms of amnesia are not so apparent. We forget specific events, and then necessarily do not remember the forgetting. That’s dissociative traumatic amnesia for you. You are raped, which is impossible, and therefore it did not happen, because it could not.

If my message reaches a guy who has forgotten his abuse, I must not force him. I cannot make him remember if he is not ready. If I ask too specific a question – ‘Were you ever raped by Willem Breytenbach, hey?’ – I might re-traumatise him. Our brains bury these things for a reason.

The message cannot be too pushy either. Raped people hang on to the lessons they have learned. Men want to trap you. An ambush could always be imminent. Seemingly good people are not to be trusted, because things are not what they seem.

In my loft, I try to navigate the pitfalls. Only if I am supremely lucky will my message reach a man who is angry about being raped. Angry like me. These are the brothers I am looking for. Men who are furious and want to keep other boys from losing what we did. These men will hear a dog whistle, and when the message says ‘justice project’ and ‘a teacher from your time’, they will think: This sounds like it could be Willem Breytenbach, because he was at Grey when I was, and a justice project sounds like it could be about the sex stuff. Who is this Deon Wiggett, though? Is he to be trusted?

Aside from men who can help and men who forgot and men who remember, there lurks another danger: people who remain loyal to Willem. People who will say something if I say his name – but to him, and not to me. If an explicit claim reaches Willem, it would be premature defamation.

In old-money Westcliff, in leafy northern Johannesburg, attorneys are costing News24 quite the penny. I drink some excellent coffee while we discuss keeping me safe from ruinous litigation.

The stakes are high and I need them on tape. The firm’s bigwig, Willem de Klerk, is smashing and kind and dislikes microphones, so he makes his junior, Charl du Plessis, do the recorded interview with me. In the course of the year, I will see Charl do many things his boss does not feel like doing.

Charl is a lawyer and a bit of a bad-ass; he rides a motorbike, smokes loads of Stuyvesants and used to be an investigative journalist at City Press, a Sunday paper. He stopped being a journalist years before I sort of became one again. Glancing out of his office window onto Saxonwold’s mansions and Johannesburg Zoo, it is clear to me who made the smarter choice.

Okay, I say to Charl, so defamation is when I tell people that Willem rapes children?

Basically, yes, says Charl, ‘because it would tend to lower a person’s esteem within the eyes of right-thinking members of the community’.

‘Can you defame somebody that everyone agrees is a horrible person anyway?’

‘You can be a totally rotten person with a horrible reputation, but your reputation is still an inherent part of your right to dignity, and you cannot strip someone of a right.’

‘So if I say, “Charl du Plessis is a corrupt and dreadful lawyer,” that would be defamatory; but if it is true, does it stop being defamatory?’

‘An allegation of criminality is always a defamatory allegation,’ he says. ‘If you say, “Charl du Plessis is a corrupt lawyer”, and I [can prove you said so], at that point the onus then shifts to you, as the journalist or member of the public or whatever it may be, to justify your defamatory communications.

‘If something is true and in the public interest, it is not wrongful to publish the defamatory material.’

These are glad tidings: I find it easier to justify the things I say than not to say them in the first place. And so I ask Charl the question on which all of this hangs – how do I defame Willem lawfully?

In South African law, ‘“truth and public interest” is the primary defence to defamation’, says Charl.

First, there is ‘truth’, and Charl explains ‘truth’ in that tediously long and qualified way that all lawyers do, even bad-ass ones. Essentially: we need sufficient evidence to convince a High Court judge that Willem is a child rapist, which he is.

‘And then the second [element] is public interest,’ says Charl, and he has turned unexpectedly heated: ‘When someone is still a danger … there is a very strong case to be made that the identification of the perpetrator of a sexual offence, who is still at large, and who has never been held accountable for these actions, would be a matter of substantial public interest.’

It really is as simple and as hard as that. To warn boys against Willem, I need indubitable proof of something that can only be witnessed by the two parties involved. In cases like this, there is mostly just one way: an overwhelming number of compelling affidavits. Enough to convince a High Court judge that I am not dizzy or fleetingly mistaken.

I do not have such proof as yet. If I claim, in a Facebook message, that I was raped by Willem, and then it gets back to him, he could sue me and win. How’s that? Sued by your own rapist.

Even if he does not sue, the damage will be done: he will know I am onto him. So far, my digging has been in the dark. If he finds out, he will plot and scheme, and the combat will become too psychopathic to stand. At the moment, I am able to do this, just about; if I become the target of Willem’s legendary rage, I will bend and maybe break.

And so, through autumn mornings and afternoons and nights, I whittle away in the loft with a yellow highlighter and yearbook photos, scouring online groups and people’s friends lists to try to determine who is ‘A Smit’ and who ‘G Smit’, and scribbling down their first names in the caption of a printout so glossy a pen will not write on it.

The evenings grow colder and my red-wine intake escalates as I send non-pushy, non-specific messages until late while trying to do no harm. While also trying to get people to tell me what they know, and tell me now, please, I do not have all year, because Willem’s summer holiday comes up in December, and he is going to the beach again.

But for all the care I take, none of them get back to me. Maybe a Grey Gentleman does not talk to strangers about matters such as these.

Until one day, finally, I get a message from a guy not called Matthew.

He wants to talk to me about Willem. There was, he writes, ‘definite dodge stuff going on’, and he is eager to get it off his chest. Within a day, we are talking on the phone. He is a family man; can only talk at work; and has found an empty conference room. We have half an hour.

Matthew is telling me about one evening in Bloem when he was fourteen years old.

Willem used a trick to lure Matthew to his house. It is the first time I hear about the trick. It is a good trick, if you are Willem.

Matthew says he was alone in Willem’s bedroom one night, and that Willem somehow convinced him to take off his shorts.

Matthew says: ‘I was so naive then, I …’

And then he just stops, mid-sentence. ‘And that is all that happened; I have to go now,’ he says.

I say ‘Um’, but Matthew says: ‘Send me your other questions, but I have to go now.’ And so he does.

I send him a number of messages, politely spaced out between autumn and spring, but he has remembered something that does not make sense to him and he does not want to talk about it any more. I never hear from Matthew again.

And it seems that Matthew is as good as it gets. Grey College is clearly a closed brotherhood; what happened there, stays there.

But my crushing trip to Bloemfontein was not a complete waste of time. Remember ‘New blood for STABILIS’, which said that Willem left Grey for Willowmore? Now – and I say this with the greatest respect for the fine folk of Willowmore, some of whom I’ve got to know – moving to Willowmore from Grey College would be a disastrous career move for a person with ambition. Willem, remember, does not lack ambition. He lacks things like empathy, conscience and grace. He has things like ambition, resourcefulness and bullfroggery. The bullfroggery is not currently relevant; I just like pointing it out.

‘New blood for STABILIS’ gave me an answer, but it is one that leads to more questions. I know now that Willem spent just two of his seven missing years in Bloem. Why would he have lied about that to me? What happened after Grey College that he was so desperate for me not to know about? And what happened at Grey College that made him beat such a hasty retreat? Oh Willem, you did what you do, didn’t you?

I am in my loft, and I have had to buy more index cards, because now I’m also making a record of people who went to a desolate school in the countryside. Maybe Willem had more luck there than he did at Grey College. Maybe I will have more luck there too.

And, boy, do I need a lucky break here. My entire quest – to bring Willem to justice to prevent him raping other boys – is predicated on the idea that my rape was not exceptional; that he has been doing it to other boys; that at least some of the rumours and dark stories are true; and that, sooner or later, someone will say ‘Me Too’.

It is hard to admit this, but it is lonely being just me saying this.

If I were a real detective, this is the bit where I would start drinking too much, knowing the answer is lying right here on the desk in front of me, or at least scattered around me in tenuous piles.

After months of seeming like Fortress Grey, by late autumn, cracks are starting to appear. It is sunset in Johannesburg and I am sitting outside on my stoep, even though it is too cold.

My phone rings at exactly the time that we agreed. One of the men from Grey College has responded to my message; one of the boys I tracked down from a yearbook picture.

This guy, Ben, has a bunch of questions for me. ‘Who is this man you’re talking about?’ ‘Why are you doing this?’ ‘Who are you working with?’ ‘What’s your interest in the story?’ Not quite confrontational, but sure as hell taking no prisoners.

I answer all his questions, saying as much as I can without slandering Willem. I do not quite say, ‘I think Willem raped his way through a bunch of your classmates,’ but I do hint at it, and heavily.

On the other end of the line, it has gone quiet. He is reading between the lines, right? Right?

Finally, I say: ‘Um, you do know what I’m talking about, right?’

He answers immediately: ‘Of course I know what you’re talking about. What do you want to know? I can tell you everything.’