LITMIR.BIZ

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      Then she went home to her shack. And said to herself once again: What am I doing here?

      She would turn fifteen the next day.

      * * *

      On her fifteenth birthday, Nombeko had a meeting with Piet du Toit of the sanitation department of the City of Johannesburg; it had been scheduled long ago. This time he was better prepared. He had gone through the accounting in detail. Take that, twelve-year-old.

      ‘Sector B has gone eleven per cent over budget,’ said Piet du Toit, and he looked at Nombeko over the reading glasses he really didn’t need, but which made him look older than he was.

      ‘Sector B has done no such thing,’ said Nombeko.

      ‘If I say that Sector B has gone eleven per cent over budget, then it has,’ said Piet du Toit.

      ‘And if I say that the assistant can only calculate according to his own lights, then he does. Give me a few seconds,’ said Nombeko, and she yanked Piet du Toit’s calculations from his hand, quickly looked through his numbers, pointed at row twenty, and said, ‘We received the discount I negotiated here in the form of excess delivery. If you assess that at the discounted de facto price instead of an imaginary list price, you will find that your eleven mystery percentage points no longer exist. In addition, you have confused plus and minus. If we were to calculate the way you want to do it, we would have been under budget by eleven per cent. Which would be just as incorrect, incidentally.’

      Piet du Toit’s face turned red. Didn’t the girl know her place? What would things be like if just anyone could define right and wrong? He hated her more than ever, but he couldn’t think of anything to say. So he said, ‘We have been talking about you quite a bit at the office.’

      ‘Is that so,’ said Nombeko.

      ‘We feel that you are uncooperative.’

      Nombeko realized that she was about to be fired, just like her predecessor.

      ‘Is that so,’ she said.

      ‘I’m afraid we must transfer you. Back to the permanent workforce.’

      This was, in fact, more than her predecessor had been offered. Nombeko suspected that the assistant must have been in a good mood on this particular day.

      ‘Is that so,’ she said.

      ‘Is “is that so” all you have to say?’ Piet du Toit said angrily.

      ‘Well I could have told Mr du Toit what an idiot Mr du Toit is, of course, but getting him to understand this would be verging on the hopeless. Years among the latrine emptiers has taught me that. You should know that there are idiots here as well, Mr du Toit. Best just to leave so I never have to see you again,’ said Nombeko, and did just that.

      She said what she said at such speed that Piet du Toit didn’t have time to react before the girl had slipped out of his hands. And going in among the shacks to search for her was out of the question. As far as he was concerned, she could keep herself hidden in all that rubbish until tuberculosis, drugs or one of the other illiterates killed her.

      ‘Ugh,’ said Piet du Toit, nodding at the bodyguard his father paid for.

      Time to return to civilization.

      Of course, Nombeko’s managerial position wasn’t the only thing to go up in smoke after that conversation with the assistant – so did her job, such as it was. And her last pay cheque, for that matter.

      Her backpack was filled with her meagre possessions. It contained a change of clothes, three of Thabo’s books, and the twenty sticks of dried antelope meat she had just bought with her last few coins.

      She had already read the books, and she knew them by heart. But there was something pleasant about books, about their very existence. It was sort of the same with her latrine-emptying colleagues, except the exact opposite.

      It was evening, and there was a chill in the air. Nombeko put on her only jacket. She lay down on her only mattress and pulled her only blanket over her (her only sheet had just been used as a shroud). She would leave the next morning.

      And she suddenly knew where she would go.

      She had read about it in the paper the day before. She was going to 75 Andries Street in Pretoria.

      The National Library.

      As far as she knew, it wasn’t an area that was forbidden for blacks, so with a little luck she could get in. What she could do beyond that, aside from breathing and enjoying the view, she didn’t know. But it was a start. And she felt that literature would lead her onward.

      With that certainty, she fell asleep for the last time in the shack she had inherited from her mother five years previously. And she did so with a smile.

      That had never happened before.

      When morning came, she took off. The road before her was not a short one. Her first-ever walk beyond Soweto would be fifty-five miles long.

      After just over six hours, and after sixteen of the fifty-five miles, Nombeko had arrived in central Johannesburg. It was another world! Just take the fact that most of the people around her were white and strikingly similar to Piet du Toit, every last one. Nombeko looked around with great interest. There were neon signs, traffic lights and general chaos. And shiny new cars, models she had never seen before. As she turned round to discover more, she saw that one of them was headed straight for her, speeding along the pavement.

      Nombeko had time to think that it was a nice car.

      But she didn’t have time to move out of the way.

      * * *

      Engineer Engelbrecht van der Westhuizen had spent the afternoon in the bar of the Hilton Plaza Hotel on Quartz Street. Then he got into his new Opel Admiral and set off, heading north.

      But it is not and never has been easy to drive a car with a litre of brandy in one’s body. The engineer didn’t make it farther than the next intersection before he and the Opel drifted onto the pavement and – shit! – wasn’t he running over a Kaffir?

      The girl under the engineer’s car was named Nombeko and was a former latrine emptier. Fifteen years and one day earlier she had come into the world in a tin shack in South Africa’s largest shantytown. Surrounded by liquor, thinner and pills, she was expected to live for a while and then die in the mud among the latrines in Soweto’s Sector B.

      Out of all of them, Nombeko was the one to break loose. She left her shack for the first and last time.

      And then she didn’t make it any farther than central Johannesburg before she was lying under an Opel Admiral, ruined.

      Was that all? she thought before she faded into unconsciousness.

      But it wasn’t.

CHAPTER 2

      On how everything went topsy-turvy in another part of the world

      Nombeko was run over on the day after her fifteenth birthday. But she survived. Things would get better. And worse. Above all, they would get strange.

      Of all the men she would be subjected to in the years to come, Ingmar Qvist from Södertälje, Sweden, six thousand miles away, was not one of them. But all the same, his fate would hit her with full force.

      It’s hard to say exactly when Ingmar lost his mind, because it sneaked up on him. But it is clear that by the autumn of 1947 it was well on its way. It is also clear that neither he nor his wife realized what was going on.

      Ingmar and Henrietta got married while almost all of the world was still at war and moved to a plot of land in the forest outside Södertälje, almost twenty miles southwest of Stockholm.

      He was a low-level civil servant; she was an industrious seamstress who took in work at home.

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