An Ordinary Day Read Online Free PDF Page A

lift on the sixth floor and waved at the security officers as he clipped on his identification badge and entered the secure area.
    ‘You’re late!’ Masondo’s deep voice echoed up the corridor.
    ‘Sorry, chief,’ Durant said, trying to focus on the bear-like man in front of him. ‘I had one hell of a night and an even worse morning.’
    ‘In my office.’
    Alfred Masondo, the chief of operations, had bold light-brown eyes, a shaven head, and a strong, good-looking face. Impeccably dressed in a dark suit, he looked more like a TV presenter than an intelligence officer. His metamorphosis from bush fighter in the liberation movement’s Umkhonto We Sizwe to intelligence chief in the civilian intelligence agency was nothing short of mind-boggling.
    Years earlier, Durant had himself been a soldier, conscripted into the South African Defence Force like thousands of other white South Africans to fight a war they didn’t really understand. They were told socialist revolutionaries in a type of black army, backed by the Russians and Cubans, armed with AK -47s and limpet mines, were poised on South Africa’s borders, ready to march into the cities of South Africa and kill all the whites. The military lecturers had drummed this into him during basic training, where the indoctrination was as arduous as the physical training. Hindsight only told him it was indoctrination. At the time, he clung to the lecturer’s words with a naïve terror, which drove him to offer little resistance to the physically and mentally tortuous training programme. Durant remembers arriving at the military base only a few weeks after leaving high school and being thrust into a confusing and complicated world which suddenly appeared very different from the sheltered one from which he had come.
    He’d grown up in a ‘grey’ area in Rondebosch East in Cape Town, where apartheid never really worked because children, coloured and white, played together in the streets, built tree houses together in the bush lands, and made box carts which they took turns to push. ‘Separateness’ might have worked as an idea on the statute books, but it didn’t work on the streets where the children played. The apartheid designers should have known that children who want to play cannot be separated. Durant remembers how the children, with a childish recklessness born from boredom, had set fire to the surrounding bush every Friday afternoon then watched transfixed as the firemen doused the fires. To his young friends this was perhaps a childish first strike at authority, and Durant, as an accomplice, was an unwitting participant in the struggle. At the time, though, he saw the firemen as heroes, symbols of authority protecting him from the flames.
    When Durant, as a boy of ten, fell off his bike in Kromboom Road, it was a young coloured boy called Neil Ackers who had carried him to his parents’ house with his broken arm wrapped up in a makeshift newspaper sling. As a child, Durant never really understood why he and his friends went to different schools and why they weren’t allowed to go to the beach with him, but he remembers that they accepted each other as friends, and the colour of their skins was never considered an issue worthy of discussion. When Durant’s family moved to a more affluent neighbourhood, and he lost contact with his childhood friends, he spent less and less time with people of colour. His high-school teachers started painting frightening scenarios of communist-inspired revolutions and the slaughter of whites at the hands of the majority black population. This unlikely scenario became a real fear, made worse by the occasional bomb blast in the city centre or other manifestations of the ANC ’s struggle against the nationalist government.
    In 1983, when Durant was conscripted to the army as a medic, he was relieved, but during training he found out that being an Emergency Operational Care Orderly meant more than bandaging up soldiers’ injuries