Image by Ashraf Hendricks, GroundUp, CC BY-ND 4.0

 

 

The court asks nothing of you. It receives you when you come and it releases you when you go.

—Kafka, The Trial

There is law and justice on Earth, there is, I will find it! Wait a bit, godless creature!

—Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

 

 

December 2015. I parked my white Volkswagen City Golf in front of my partner’s flat in Main Road, Rondebosch in Cape Town. I had the customary chat with the resident part-time car guard and full-time purveyor of jat¹. I’d given up attempting to avoid him. I had tried different tactics. Parking behind the building. Running in head down. Dangerously texting while driving so the gate would be open when I stop. Feigning deafness. Pretending that the lorries thundering to the Newlands brewery down the road had drowned out all other sound. All futile. He always bested me. The bass voice boomed from the darkness, as it always did.

“Good evening!” he said with an impresario flourish.

I mumbled a greeting. The police station was clearly visible across the road, the neon blue lights of the patrol cars splintered by the trees. This didn’t affect either of his trades.

“What about a car wash, boss?” he asked.

“Sorry bra, I can’t today. I’m broke,” I said.

“Ag, that’s oukei. Don’t you have some coins? Next time bring me some fish and bread again, please boss. I got the pneumonia!”

The recurring pneumonia was the least of his problems. He was regularly stabbed. He was always innocent, or shafted for some noble deed. He once deemed it necessary to show me a fresh wound, by pulling down his trousers. He pointed out his injuries, detailed the specifics of a cinematic fight as people and cars streamed by without interest.

His wife or partner was never far off. They jousted in expletive-riddled bursts, she sitting on a paint bucket or crate, he hovering with a nonchalant arm on the chain-link fence. He holds the distinction of being the only person I’ve ever heard capable of saying “ma se p___”² in a plaintive manner.

I gave him some coins and went inside. I cooked dinner. My partner and I ate and watched some documentaries. There was a loud crash from outside. It sounded alien and drawn out, as crashes often do. When neon blue lights started dancing on the curtains, we went to have a look. My car was wedged between another, older white Golf and a black Opel Corsa. The other white Golf had spun around 180 degrees from the impact. A bashed-up white Peugeot was hugging the barrier across the road. It was a spree killing of a humble hatchback.

A young woman was standing in a gaggle of paramedics and police officers. She didn’t appear hurt. She was wearing a silver dress. She had come from an office Christmas party, someone said. The police whisked her away before I could get a look at her face. The breakdown people claimed she was fucked. As in drunk. As in crashing into three parked cars on a straight stretch of road. As in getting caught. The police officers mumbled something similar in their ubiquitous zombified drawl. An enormous fire truck was there as some petrol was leaking from somewhere. There was no fire.

I stood looking at my car, cursing fate and the driver for messing up my holiday, which was supposed to begin in the morning. As per usual, when matters of law and practicality arise, I phoned my father for advice. I come from a legal family, my father is a judge and brother an advocate. While I share the idealistic yearning to see justice done, I lack their legal mindset of black and white, instead I received a brain full of swirling colours.

Admin loomed large. Bureaucracy. Phone calls. Quotes. Insurance. None of which I understand. And this in December when South Africa moves at half speed. I didn’t think of what could have been, and was far more important than a car or a holiday or an alleged irresponsible drunk. The area is usually thronged with people, even late at night. This wasn’t very late, only around 23h00 or so. There could easily have been the twinkling silver of body bags around. Luckily there wasn’t. Just the usual crowd of onlookers, police officers, breakdown bakkies³. The car guard was nowhere to be seen. When I told him later what had happened, his first observation was to ask whether the driver was “coloured”⁴.

The breakdown guys swarmed on me. They have a peculiar form of community. They possess an atavistic sense of psychology, learned on the job no doubt, having to deal with thousands of traumatised, shocked, or injured people. There is also a cut-throat competition. Whichever souped-up, wide-tired, big wheel can get to the scene fastest can bring home the mangled metal bounty. Partners and children are often part of the entourage. Yet there is also an eerie chivalry and sense of honour, along with the paramedic-like detachment. Everything, and everyone, is fair game until the breakdown’s business card reaches the hand of the owner of the crocked car. Then there is no more haggling or self-promotion. The deal is done. Then they talk as comrades. My breakdown duo was a particularly Zen set of young men, at pains to reassure me and calm me down. They looked as if they had just stepped out of an early nineties gangsta rap video on MTV. Their business card was white with a cartoonish picture resembling a breakdown bakkie-dragon hybrid spewing flames and smoke. A man and his son waited for the possibility of towing the Corsa. They were still there the next morning, sleeping in their car. As my crew towed the Golf away, the bumper fell off, in a Monty Python-esque moment. I had to laugh somehow. One of them jumped out and threw it on the back seat. The car disappeared into the orange glow of the night. I never saw it again.

The other white Golf victim, a foreign postgraduate student, and I were told we needed to give a statement. He appeared bemused by it all, even though he told me that he didn’t have insurance. We steeled ourselves to face the midnight shift at Rondebosch police station. It was exactly like you would expect, if you’ve ever been into a South African Police Service station. Surly desk officers who expect the public to have memorised every aspect of police work before daring to face them. Morose victims of crime. The unhoused who shelter close to the relative safety of a police station. Detectives who seem to be not fully sentient. The foreign student mounted these various obstacles with a growing smile of disbelief. The detective asked us some questions, scrawled a few lines, added the curse upon our souls that the scrawl is the whole truth and only truth. He gave it to me to sign. I could make out one or two lines perhaps. I signed it. I heard nothing more for almost five years.

*

I immediately regretted answering the phone, like I always do. A friendly voice informed me that Justitia was in need. You remember that car that crashed into you guys’ cars? Yes, I said, that was years ago though. He laughs. Yes, 2015. I realised this man must’ve been looking for me for a long time. There is a court case coming up on the 12^th, he said. Please man, he added, we need you to come be a witness. My mind failed to wrangle an excuse in time. I promised to be there. The voice sounded genuinely elated at this and said that all I need to do is to come to the police station to pick up the forms, and sign them. The forms turned out to be a subpoena. Later my brother, the advocate, told me that the police are supposed to deliver a subpoena into one’s hands. If this is not done then they have nothing on you. Once you sign, however, then you’re in for the distance.

So I headed back to Rondebosch police station. It was the middle of a bright autumn day but much else remained the same. The desk officers glared at me when I told them that I’d come to sign some forms. I explained that there was an accident, years ago, and that someone just told me I must pick up some forms they’d left at the service desk. Both officers’ glare deepened when I could not supply them with the policeman’s name. Was it warrant officer so-and-so? I’m not sure, I said. You should listen better, one told me. They disappeared through a door. One was shouting for the captain. Soon after the chief glarer waved the forms at me, wearing the now-familiar scowl. I ventured a joke. You should get the other guy to give you a tip, I said, because you’re doing his job for him. I couldn’t quite make out the expression he wore then, but it was definitely not a smile. I signed the subpoena. I was now part of the judicial system.

*

“All rise!” a man with a stylish goatee and sunglasses thundered into the dusky courtroom due to rolling blackouts. We all rose like sour breath. Upon high there were a few clanks and metal-on-metal scrapes. A magistrate with a red and black wizard robe glided in.

“You may sit. Baie Dankie (Thank you very much),” the man intoned, quieter this time, in clumsy Afrikaans.

Up in front of your worship were three advocates and the prosecutor. Your worship sat and shuffled the innumerable files on her desk and exchanged some inaudible words with the prosecutor. After a minute she left, for no apparent reason. Again the goateed man relayed his messages. We sat in the dark. About an hour later your worship appeared once more, to the same feudal hails from the goateed man.

This time it appeared as if the proceedings might just start.

The three advocates requested postponements. All granted. I heard my name along with three others. We formed a sombre line behind the prosecutor. A new advocate had appeared in the meantime. She bemoaned the delays. The mics were broken again. Or, still broken. How can this be? The magistrate countered with surprising grace. There followed a long explanation of the history and mechanics of microphone breakage in Wynberg Magistrates’ Court. The defence advocate yielded with a curt “Thank you, your worship”.

The prosecutor was nonplussed and claimed that the State was ready to proceed. Look, your worship, he said with a flamboyant sweep of an arm, my witnesses are all here, ready to go. Our line looked decidedly not ready. I could feel the public speaking anxiety draining the blood from my face. I could see the opposing advocate reducing me to a blubbering heap. To us, I am sorry. Whispered. The microphones are broken. We’ll have to postpone but I’ll give you a sick note for work. Not one of my co-witnesses, including a police sergeant, looked in any way surprised..

Your worship issued the inevitable postponement. She looked at us with a slight smile, and apologised for the inconvenience. In a school principal voice she reminded us to be back in May. I pointed to the door.

“Yes, you may go,” she said. “Thank you very much.”

Before I left I looked at the accused. There is a devastating isolation for the person in the dock, standing alone and naked, towering above everyone else. Her face was strained, she looked straight down. They look oddly similar as they stand there, murderers and frauds and drunks and the innocent, all with a strange pathos.

She looked at me with an inscrutable expression when we left. She now knew who I was. This wasn’t the case earlier.

*

The legion of couch legal experts’ first obsession is with guilt. Usually in some salacious celebrity or political trial. Already there is a mismatch. Guilt, innocence, law and justice can mean different things at any given time.

Those in the legal profession serve this law. A small or large stage doesn’t matter. Guilt or innocence does not exist until after the job is done. There can be no questions of morality. Only the law, and a judge, can decide guilt. It is the advocate or lawyer’s job to give a client the best possible legal service. A bad advocate is not immoral but inept. It is a job, like any other.

This is the official line, cobbled from conversations with my legal relations and friends. It satisfies my mind. I’m not certain about the heart.

There is rarely an outright winner in the battle between brain and heart. As was the case as I sat thinking in Wynberg Magistrates’ Court Two. I vacillated. There was frustration at the tediousness, the pedantry of the law. It seemed slow and less about justice than self-perpetuation. This was supplanted by two more powerful feelings which ended in a stalemate.

I felt that the law is important. There must be laws. There must be justice. Those who err should redeem themselves. You must take responsibility. It is above all necessary here to arrest the slippery slide we are on. The law, and linked morality, appears more wonky by the day. Living here you quickly sense that people see the law as a far off thing, something that can be evaded. South Africans, for a variety of reasons, see it as unimportant and malleable. This lies at the core of our problems. People don’t seem to get the connection between grand government corruption and smaller people taking less. The process and mindset is the same.

But still, while the person who crashed into my car was standing in the dock I felt a deep sadness. I felt sorry for her. I wanted to take her side. A whole lot of maybes swirled around in my head. Reasons for pity and reprieve. Everybody makes mistakes. Who hasn’t done something tangibly or outright illegal? What price must one pay for absolution? What could she do or be if given unconditional forgiveness?

Could our lawlessness be another ill of the past? All those old white men who gave the orders for atrocities died peacefully in their beach houses. Some cronies went to prison, but not many. I wondered what our country would look like if there was no law at all, if all we had to rely on was an inner law, a morality that depended only on yourself or your immediate circle. I get the feeling that it would not look substantially different from the current version, where the law exists, often more in spirit than in reality.

I’ve been in a court only once. Well, one and a half times. The last court was empty. It was in the Supreme Court of Appeal. The court sits in a beautiful sandstone building in the wreckage of Bloemfontein’s CBD. Even the colours inside are appealing. Dark wood with intricate carving. Crimson curtains. An amber light slanting in through the windows. There are still oddities of days gone by. Inkwells and wooden baubles. It exuded a sense of weight and authority.

At the heart of the building is the judge’s library. It is a magical old place. You realise it quickly by the smell. The mixture of wood, pages, and the traces of human. There are huge old books with covers like artworks dating all the way back. There are grand old chairs in nooks and crannies. There are busts of the old sages. A feeling of fraternity. It is a place of the mind. I felt as if I was in the heart of it, the law. It is good, clean, and strong. It beats unflappably.

On our way out I looked at the faces of the old judges. These men are some of my father’s heroes. He told me anecdotes and stories of great deeds and eccentricities. My favourite is one of an old judge who often stalled proceedings so he could go next door to his house and listen to a radio soapy with a cup of tea.

The portraits snake their way around the walls. The rows of faces slowly changing from white to Black, and more slowly from man to woman. This too is as it should be. It should be right and easy. But somehow in this country it just isn’t. In South Africa nothing is simple.

*

While we were waiting for your worship to reappear I walked about the crepuscular courts and halls. The accused and her mother were sitting outside by themselves. She looked furious as she bashed away at a MacBook. Her mother wore an expression of worry and as if she was enshrouded by a vile smell. Air circulation in Wynberg Magistrates’ Court is non-existent, to be fair. Eventually I went back to court number two and took my habitual seat in the back corner. The court was dotted with pockets of the public. My position would easily be the hardest to get to.

I saw the accused and her mother come into the court just as proceedings were about to start. They both walked past large open spaces to come sit close to me, the only other white person in the courtroom. Both mother and daughter flashed me a weird conspiratorial smile. They had no idea what I was doing there, only that I’m their kind. I knew who they were though, and almost broke into a laugh.

The subpoena put a name to the person who crashed into my car. Before that I had no idea who she might be. I had forgotten about her existence. Armed with a name, curiosity got the better of me. A quick search lit up her existence.

The sleuthing sketched a person who all but lives on a different planet. Her social media pages were littered with things that alternatively rile and confuse me. Combed quiffs, bikinis, muscles, expensive real estate and cars, sport. But mostly because I am not in the mask-making business of social media to begin with.

We couldn’t possibly be farther apart, she and I. Chances are that we would never have become aware of each other’s existence. I would likely have been all but invisible to her. She would perhaps only have induced a grumble about yuppies from me. But that would have been it.

Now we were linked by the law.

*

The proceedings over, I was standing on the steps outside, making a note to return on 7 May for another round of legalese. The accused appeared and walked past me. I wanted to talk to her, but there were no words I could find. Our eyes met for the last time. There was a look I couldn’t quite place. Either derision or shame or annoyance. She didn’t know one of the Golfs was mine. Or how insurance payouts can’t replace an old car in good condition. She saw me as part of the prosecution’s witnesses. We were legal foes. I was in the other team. A person who can contribute to guilt, prison, or a fine.

She stomped off, boring into her phone screen, an expensive-looking designer backpack bobbing as she went. She went right. After a while I went left.

There was a line outside composed of the sort of hangers on you would expect. A spaza shop was doing brisk trade. Police officers mulled about. I turned the corner and was wedged between an overgrown graveyard on the right and two advocates smoking and joking on the left. The one could have been my brother, or a decade or two ago my father or uncle. There was a hint of recognition in the way they spoke, how they looked. My father’s voice suddenly popped into my brain as I passed the pair. I had called him just after getting the papers from the police station.

“They will probably waste your time but it is your civil duty to go. Maybe it will be an adventure,” he had said.

*

My court total still stands at one and a half. The date of return arrived and I walked back to Wynberg Magistrates’ Court. The world had changed since March. We were in the middle of the world’s harshest lockdown. Last time I walked largely on my own, and cars chugged by interminably. This time there where hardly any cars but many walkers, joggers, cyclists, and possibly illegally walked but innocent dogs, taking advantage of a three-hour exercise window, all but the dogs wearing the obligatory ninja mask.

The graveyard was lush from recent rain. I bumped into something as I looked at it. The something turned out to be a man. A queue in excess of a hundred people snaked around the perimeter of the court. People were standing around in clumps, as if the snake had swallowed a series of tennis balls. Many were wearing masks, but lowered so they could speak to other people in the line. Many people seemed to know each other, and a lot were smoking. The social distancing mandated by the hard lockdown was all but absent, presaged by the five or six erratically measured tape strips on the pavement at the head of the queue. South Africans’ newfound zeal for rules and laws was nowhere evident in the shadow of the court.

Most people greeted the line emotionlessly, perhaps with a reserved sigh. One or two people marched past the obvious line to go argue with the officials at the entrance. They sulkily walked back showing the characteristic repressed fury of Caucasians in a queue.

A man ahead of me never once stopped talking.

“Porsche, waar kry jy daai entjie?” he shouted to a young woman standing in front of the spaza shop across the road. (Where did you get that cigarette?)

It occurred to me later that her name might be Portia, and only sounded like the luxury car. It was apt. A trace of Shakespeare’s heroine who famously outdid her father and Shylock by either loopholes or technicalities.

Porsche/Portia’s eyes narrowed perceptibly as she looked at him. She took a long drag and replied: “Vannie huis af”. (Brought it from home.)

“Verkoop daai man nie?” he shot back. (Does the shop sell cigarettes?)

“Nie,” she answered coldly. Cigarette sales were banned by the government under lockdown regulations, and thus valuable currency. This was not enough to prevent the man ambling over to bum one. When he got back he regaled his friends with the best place to park your car if you had to come to court, where they didn’t charge anything.

Behind me a group of guys were mocking one of their absent friends who was recently busted for something “as stupid as weed”.

A young man unintentionally skipped me in the queue. His mother came to speak to him a few times, her eyes huge and bulging with worry. Each time she gave him inaudible but obvious words of encouragement. She returned to the area directly in front of the court, with Wynberg park verdant through the bars. This area was a gallery of sorts. Family members and other bystanders congregated there while those they were attached to stood in the line.

We inched forwards, ten or so people let in at a time. There was a separate, much shorter queue for women. This can mean either a lot, or nothing at all, depending on what one’s views are. Neither my accused nor her mother were in the line.

I reached the front after an hour or so. A man indicated his authority by a clipboard. I told him that I was there to be a witness, although I wasn’t sure if the case was going on. He told me that no witnesses were being allowed in because of the lockdown, only serious cases. I asked if there was anything I must do, sign a form maybe. No, he said, they will send you another subpoena. “Then it will all start over,” he added. It’s years later and I’ve not heard anything.

As I walked back, the official exercise time was over and the streets were empty once more. A woman passed me, we waved to each other and she gave me a huge smile, a gold tooth glinting in the sunshine. A few delivery guys, one on a motorcycle and the other in a van, were shouting at each other. I was happy to be outside, with a valid excuse to stave off paranoia.

My phone rang. It was my mother.

She told me that they had decided to cancel my nephew’s first birthday party. Instinctively I thought this was pointless. My brother and his wife then stayed a few hundred meters from my parents’ house in a quiet suburb in a largely unaffected province. My brother’s family had just returned after spending a month in the scorched middle of nowhere in the Karoo on his in-laws’ farm. Thus there would be about no chance anyone would infect each other, or that they would be caught for breaking hazy lockdown rules.

My nephew’s Sesotho name is Dikgetho. He was given it because he was born on election day. The word is mostly used for ‘election’, but more literally means the act of choosing or making a choice. I thought of the thousands of daily fantasies I had during the lockdown to systematically break rules and laws either sensible, draconian, or just stupid.

“We decided it was the right thing to do,” my mother told me. And she was right, of course, but for an instant I didn’t know if it meant anything in the end.

 

 

 

 

Christiaan van der Merwe is a writer based in Cape Town, South Africa. Apart from writing he debunks misinformation about climate change for a pan-African nonprofit. This is his first published essay.