Mani closed his eyes, the hot stabbing in his arm starting to recede. He could hear the whoosh of running water and the rattle of stones against metal. When he opened his eyes, Volker was back in his booth. Mani fumbled with his bandage, binding up his wound.
Volker flicked a switch on his console. ‘Into the cubicle.’
Mani shuffled into the x-ray capsule, positioning himself in the centre of the circular platform. The door slid shut with a whunk. A motor hummed as the C-arm of the x-ray machine enclosed the base of the cubicle and began inching its way up along the walls. Mani felt his limbs relax, the pain in his arm now a dull throb. He closed his eyes. Thank God tomorrow was his last day at the mine.
He had only come back because Ezra had begged him to, saying that he was ill. At first, Mani had refused. He had exams to sit, a scholarship to honour. He didn’t have time to return to his home village where children coughed in their sleep, and where Asha now lived as Ezra’s wife. So he sent money instead. But Ezra pleaded with him, saying that he might die. Blood poisoning from a knife wound, he’d said. He didn’t explain till later that the knife wound was self-inflicted.
So Mani had gone to see him, bracing himself for the crushing misery of the shantytown he’d managed to escape. His was a family of diamond diggers. His grandfather had crawled along the Angolan sand dunes, scrabbling for diamonds by hand, carrying them in the tin can that hung around his neck. The mine owners had stuffed a gag in his mouth to stop him from swallowing any stones. Mani’s father had washed gravel by the riverbeds, gripped by a gambler’s conviction that the next stone would change his life. When Mani was ten, his father moved them to the Northern Cape in South Africa, where he swapped riverbed mining for the underground pits. He’d been killed in a fight over a diamond the size of a sunflower seed.
‘You must take my place in the mine,’ Ezra had said when Mani went home. ‘Until I am well.’
Mani had looked away. The shack was dark, filled with the oily smell of the Primus stove. He shook his head.
‘I will send you more money, I will find another job in Cape Town.’ He already worked two jobs between his studies, sending most of his money home, but anything was better than the incarceration of the mines.
Ezra sighed. ‘Money, it will not be enough.’
Mani squinted at his brother’s face. Ezra’s eyes were feverish, his voice weak. What trouble had he got himself into now? Mani knelt beside the bed, the mud floor warm from the heat of the day.
‘I don’t understand,’ he said.
‘The Van Wycks mine.’ Ezra licked his parched lips. ‘There is something about it you need to know.’
And then, in the smoky, stifling hut, Ezra had explained.
He’d been on a toilet break when he found the first stone. He’d wandered up to the waste pit behind the latrine, putting off going back to his shift, and the diamond had glowed at him from underneath the rubble.
Ezra’s eyes glazed over. ‘It was bigger than a sparrow-hawk’s egg.’
He’d hidden it again beneath a deeper pile of stones until he could figure out what to do with it. One thing was certain: if there was one diamond, there were others. But after several furtive visits to the pit, he still hadn’t found any more.
Then late one night, he’d thought about the waste rock. Most of it was debris, discarded by the crusher and the separation plant. But piled here and there were larger boulders, the kind Van Wycks had been dumping for years. The geologists had tested them but declared them uneconomical to mine. So they fell uncrushed out of the separation plant and ended up in the waste pits along with the rest of the rubble.
But what if the Van Wycks scientists were wrong?
The next time Ezra had visited the waste pit, he’d taken a lump hammer with him.
Mani stared at his brother in the smoke-filled hut, the crackle of the cooking fires starting up outside. ‘You broke up the boulders?’
‘Van Wycks, they were wrong.’ Ezra’s eyes were bright. ‘One boulder, it gave me three diamonds, over a hundred and fifty carats each.’
He went on to explain how he’d smuggled the diamonds out. A cousin of theirs supplied cocaine to many of the mercenaries guarding the mine, and according to him, the x-ray operator was in deeper than most. Volker, it turned out, was more than willing to take payment in diamonds in exchange for clearing Ezra’s x-rays.
Ezra had brought his first stones out of the mine over a year ago and sold them on the local black market.
‘For a day, I was rich.’ Ezra closed his eyes and smiled, his gums a ghostly grey around his missing tooth.
Mani groaned. Like his father, Ezra never held on to money for long. Drink and gambling usually soaked up most of it. ‘What happened?’
Ezra dragged his eyes open, the smile gone. ‘Stones that big, it is hard to keep them a secret.’
Avoiding Mani’s gaze, he explained how he’d woken up in the dark, after several days of celebrating. His drunken friends were gone, and so was all his money. But he wasn’t completely alone. Kneeling over him was a man in dark clothes, his white face smeared with mud. The blade of his knife was pricking Ezra’s throat.
Three other men had crept out of the shadows and held Ezra down while the first man wielded his knife. First he carved it along Ezra’s chin, then sliced it into his shoulder, then worked his way down into the softer areas of flesh, until finally Ezra gave them what they wanted. From now on, he was to act as their courier, funnelling large stones out of the mine and selling exclusively to them. He’d been following their orders now for almost a year.
Mani stared around the dingy shack. ‘But then, where is all the money?’
Ezra swallowed, his throat working hard. ‘He pays me next to nothing.’ His eyes slid over to the hanging sack that served as a door. On the other side of it, Asha was stoking the fire. ‘If I don’t do as he says, he will kill us.’
And then Ezra told him what the man with the knife had said, as he’d left him whimpering on the ground. Go home and see what I have done, just in case you feel like changing your mind.
And so Mani had learned the truth about how his mother had died.
The x-ray machine clanked to a halt. The cubicle door slid open and Mani stepped outside. Volker was still at his console. Mani didn’t know how the guard smuggled out his stones, but white workers weren’t subjected to as many searches as blacks.
Mani exhaled a long breath. His body felt warm and sluggish. Today was his last time. The last time he’d open his gullet to swallow a diamond so big it tore up his insides. The last time he’d cram stones into a seeping wound, tears burning his eyes. The last time he’d drink the foul mixture of water and spoiled milk that would purge his body out.
His brief contract with Van Wycks was up. Tomorrow Volker would clear him and the contraband in his luggage as he finally left the compound. And he was never coming back.
Volker raised his head. ‘You can go.’
Mani nodded, making his way towards the exit. ‘Tomorrow there will be more.’
Volker shrugged. ‘I won’t be here.’
Mani froze. He stared at the guard. ‘But I leave the compound. You must pass me through x-ray, my luggage—’
‘You’ll have to make other arrangements.’ Volker turned back to his console. ‘My time here is up, I leave this evening. It’s getting too risky, Okker’s asking questions. My replacement starts in the morning.’
Mani’s