One Monday morning in 2005 Rob’s call came through.
“Harry, I hope you can help – sorry” – he added as an
afterthought – “it’s another problem case”.
Rob was an estate agent who always brought me his crap sales.
The good ones went elsewhere.
“Sure!” The prospect of new work, however troublesome, was
better than none – “what’s up?”
“I’ve got this buyer, he only speaks Hebrew – will you
explain the contract to him? I’ll bring him to your office, but it’s urgent.
When can you see him?”
“If it’s urgent, bring him now”
I finished up some immediate matters and made a few calls,
and about forty-five minutes later Lianne buzzed me to say that Rob was in
reception.
And there he was, with a weak-looking elderly man in tow.
Before Rob could introduce us, the man’s sharp blue-grey eyes shot an enquiring
glare at me from out under his bristling grey eyebrows:
“Who you?” he demanded, as if I needed to explain my
presence. An Israeli alright, I thought.
“I’m the lawyer … ”
“What?” – deaf too …
“I’m the lawyer” I said, much louder, “and I’m going to help
you with the contract … “
“What?”
Oh shit.
“Bring him through to the boardroom Rob. We’ll talk there”
There were other people in the reception area, and there was no need to conduct
this performance before an audience. It was going to be tricky enough anyway.
He followed the estate agent meekly enough down the passage
to one of our consulting rooms and settled into a seat with some relief. In
fact, he seemed exhausted.
We went through the getting-to-know you ritual again.
“This is Yosef” Rob announced loudly (possibly forgetting
momentarily who the deaf one was), gesturing to the old man, and then turning
to Yosef, “This is Mister Feinstein,” gesturing towards me, “He’s going to help
us with the contract”. Yosef grunted to indicate understanding and proffered a
limp hand.
And they’re off, I thought, as if commenting on a horse race.
Rob produced a crumpled Deed of Sale and smoothed it out on
the table in front of Yosef. Yosef ignored the paper. He was studying my face.
What was he looking for?
Now it was over to me. So I skimmed through the contract, a
little annoyed that Rob hadn’t faxed it through to me before he arrived, and
acquainted myself with the terms. Oh G-d, I thought, I recognise the seller’s
name – he’s a German who also owns property in my own block of flats. Well,
he’s not my client, so let’s press on. Broken Hebrew here we come. I started
off in that language, or as close thereto as possible under the circumstances.
“Do you know what this contract is for?” I shouted in his
face. He was still staring at me as if he was puzzled as to how I had got into
his office. “This is for you – I was battling to find the words – for you to
buy the flat – the flat in Costa Brava!”
- Grunt
Slowly he lowered his eyes to the paper. His face was
totally devoid of understanding, but the name of the block of flats provoked a
glimmer of recognition.
- Grunt. He reached under his shirt and produced a money
belt. When I looked into his face, he was staring at me again.
“How much?” he demanded, slowly unzipping the belt as if to
take out cash.
This was a little unexpected, considering that in this
country, notwithstanding the high price of property, a buyer isn’t expected to
show the colour of his money until quite long after he has signed the contract
– and if you are still at the bargaining-over-the-price stage, you don’t do it
with the cash in your left hand.
Rob rolled his eyes. ”Oh, G-d … “ he said echoing my
feelings – as if it had also just occurred to him that this was going to be a
long day. “We’ve already agreed the price. It’s R1,100,000.00. I’m not going
over that again”
“You might have to, brother … “ I said.
I needed to be absolutely sure that Yosef understood the
terms of the deal. I gestured to him to put the money belt aside. He didn’t do
that. Slowly and very deliberately he zipped it closed, lifted his shirt,
refastened it around his waist, lowered the shirt, tidied up, and finally
looked at me and grunted his readiness to proceed.
If I was going to get anywhere, I’d have to be as forceful
as he was. I held the contract up to him, pointed to paragraph one, and we
started the slow and painful process again. It took about an hour to work
through the four-page contract. Finally, I was satisfied that he understood,
and in the interim he became satisfied that he wasn’t about to be mugged and
that there were laws in this country and that he would get some kind of justice
in the deal. In other words, there was a glimmer of some kind of relationship
of trust.
Now, about the money, I went on. We need a deposit (blank
stare). I didn’t know the Hebrew word for a deposit, and had to look it up. If
there had been any opportunity to take advantage of my weakness with the
language, he clearly would have done so - but I held the aces, fortunately.
Again, he took out the pouch, unzipped it, and dumped a collection of coins,
British Pound notes, Francs and Shekels on the table. It was a large amount of
cash, but it wasn’t a deposit for a property. He was impatient and getting
angry. I signalled and explained that he would have to get the money from his
bank account and transfer it into my trust account. Could he do that?
He pointed to the phone. “Be my guest”, I said.
He dialled a long sequence of digits, and commenced an
argument with the recipient in Hebrew. I couldn’t follow the barrage of rapid
speech. A shouting match ensued. He interrupted it in order to push the
receiver into my hand. I wasn’t sure whether he wanted me to put it down or to
speak on it. Hesitantly I put it to my ear and said, “Hello?”
“Yes” said a rasping male voice at the other end. Then
silence. Then I could hear a heavy inhalation of air. Obviously, the speaker
was irritated by my lack of understanding (had I followed the conversation
between Yosef and him, I would have understood what he was waiting for)
“What are your bank details?” he asked, as if he had already
repeated the question a few times. This was a little too Israeli for me, so I
thought we should take a few steps back and start over.
I explained who I was, what I was doing, how Yosef’s rights
would be secured, and so on, and the voice softened up. He reciprocated by
supplying his own details. He was a branch manager at Bank Leumi. He explained
that he would need a written order to pay me, signed by Yosef, faxed to him,
with the original to be posted to him thereafter – this sounded so much like
normality that I was relieved, and over the next hour or two I complied fully
with his requirements.
In the meanwhile Yosef announced that he was hungry and
demanded lunch. You can’t phase me. We ordered take-aways and placed them
before him, and he wolfed them down. He really was hungry.
Now, there was the issue of the cash on the table to be
taken care of. We couldn’t receipt that quantity of cash at the office, and I
would have to march Yosef down to the bank to do that. He was frail, walked
badly, and took another half an hour to get there. He asked a lot of questions
on the way, but was very frugal with his own responses when I asked him
questions.
Where were his family? – “I have no family!”
What did he intend to do here? – “I come to live!”
Had he ever been here before? “No!”
Did he know anyone here? –“Just Zev” (a well-known Cape
Jeweller, who had come from Israel a long time ago and established a thriving
business in Cape Town. I would hear more about the jeweller later.)
“Do you know Hebrew poetry?” he asked me. “Do you know your Torah?”
“A little”
“Do you know the Song of Songs?”
“Sure”
“It’s the most beautiful piece of poetry ever written in
Hebrew. It’s a love song, you know”
I knew that, and I knew that this was the most superficial
of many interpretations for the Song. Clearly, he read it merely as poetry, and
not as a work of much religious depth. That’s also fine, I thought to myself.
It tells me something about Yosef.
There is a brand of Israeli, a sort of very earthy
individual with just that take on his religion, his love for his country, his
view of his place in the universe – a simple, almost literal interpretation of
his bible as a history book. These people are the salt of the earth. They have
a kind of faith which has nothing to do with black hats and coats, or even with
kippot, not holding to any kind of deep intellectual learning or understanding
of the voluminous books of centuries-old analysis of this complex and ancient
faith. They have a passing acquaintance with G-d but they have a passion for
their land and culture. They go to the army, fight with ferocious and
unquestioning conviction, and take the consequences, good or bad, with utter
stoicism. Do not get in their way, and listen when they speak.
At that point it occurred to me that I liked the old man. I
could never have guessed what lay ahead for us.
We settled the business of the deposit, the estate agent
took Yosef back to Sea Point, and I got started with the paperwork for the
property transfer. Yosef moved into the property immediately.
One evening a few days later, I was at home and took a call
from Rob the agent.
“Do you remember that Israeli guy I sold the beachfront flat
to a few days ago?”
“Uh, sure”
“He’s had a bad accident. Really bad”
“What?”
“He’s been admitted to Tygerberg Hospital
with 30 degree burns”
“Bloody hell. What happened?”
“They say he fell into a bath of boiling water. He nearly died”
“And now?”
“I dunno. I guess you’d better carry on with the transfer.
But hurry. He may still die.”
I proceeded with arrangements for transfer. Three days later
I got another call from Rob.
“Joe.”
I had a bad feeling about his tone of voice.
“Yosef died in hospital this afternoon”
“Oh, G-d”
A thought occurred to me.
“But we don’t know anything about him. Who do we tell?” – I
was thinking as I spoke – “Who’se going to bury him?” – but Rob had no answers
for me, and I wasn’t surprised by that either.
The next morning I called the Chevra Kadisha. They knew
about Yosef, but he couldn’t be buried until someone had identified him. His
friend Zev knew about the death, but did not want to go on record by
identifying him. I had no problem with that, but then it would probably have to
be me.
A flurry of telephone calls ensued. I called the Israeli
Embassy to ask for advice because the man was an Israeli citizen. The Chevra
Kadisha was growing impatient. I spoke to Zev, Rob was calling intermittently,
and eventually Rabbi Moshe came into the picture – he would perform the burial
service – so I spoke to him too.
But the most curious conversation which I had was the one
with a lady at the Israeli Embassy.
“Yes, we know about Yosef” she said, “if you cannot locate
his family, you should go ahead and bury him as soon as possible. Just secure
the pouch in the meantime”
She added that they were unhappy with the SA Police handling
of the matter.
The pouch? – What pouch? – Was she referring to the yellow
pouch which Yosef had carried strapped around his waist? I had no idea, nor did
I have any notion as to how I could “secure” it, whatever that may mean.
Later that day I made my way to Tygerberg Hospital’s
morgue. When I arrived a few cars were standing outside the entrance – I
recognised the Chevra Kadisha wagon and Rabbi Moshe’s car, and there were one
or two others. Everyone was standing around in the entrance hall, including a
few police who had this gruesome special duty. I had to complete a register and
some forms, and then I was ushered through to the cold room where a
much-damaged corpse lay on a metal table. It was poor old Yosef alright – but
he looked as if he had been battered, aside from being burned (although that,
too). I confirmed the identity, we left the room, and in the entrance hall
settled the time for the burial. We would all have to go, it seemed, because
there would be no-one else to make up the necessary minyan.
There are many re-statements of the priority which Judaism
places upon the act of burying the dead. The one which came to me that day, was
the one which we say early every morning – it is an extract from the Talmud
Bavli, Tractate Shabbos 127a:
“These
are the precepts whose fruits a person enjoys in this world but whose reward is
not diminished in the world to come: They are: the honour due to father and
mother; acts of kindness; early attendance at the house of study morning and
evening; hospitality to guests; visiting the sick; providing for a bride;
burying/mourning for the dead; absorption in prayer; bringing peace between man
and his fellow – and the study of Torah is equivalent to them all”
The burial took place the same day. It was a bleak,
white-sky day and a nasty little breeze whipped through Pinelands cemetery. It
would rain eventually. We had to get this over. Our little group – the symbolic
kernel of any Orthodox Jewish congregation – stood alone in the deserted
cemetery, as we laid this stranger to rest amongst people who, although they
did not know him personally – were nevertheless his people. But for me, Yosef’s
story was far from over.
I had to tell the sellers of the Costa
Brava flat that their buyer had died. Legally, it is possible to
coerce the executor of a deceased estate to abide by contracts concluded during
the lifetime of the deceased – but if I found no family, if I had no trace of
overseas assets, I would be comforting the sellers with false hopes by assuring
them that the sale could go ahead, because I only had about half the purchase
price in my trust account and I would never be able to locate the rest of the
money. It would be better to cancel the sale and re-market the property
immediately.
But it was becoming apparent that the property had been sold
to Yosef for more than its real market value (I had never actually seen it
myself and Rob had never confided this to me) – there was no way that it could
be re-sold for the same price again. And the sellers, like any person who has
allowed himself to be persuaded that his property is worth more, were not
prepared to relinquish the deal. Foolishly, they held on, and threatened to sue
Yosef’s estate.
In the meanwhile, of course, there was no estate in the
formal sense: I was sitting with about half a million rand in my trust account,
for a dead client, contemplating a bill for burial costs, hospital fees, my own
fees – and now, this angry seller and his damages claim.
Once again, the Israeli Embassy lady urged me – “Get the
pouch. It’s at the hospital …”
I contacted the hospital. Were there any personal effects to
be collected? – No, none, they said – he was brought in from an accident scene
by an ambulance, no-one ever visited him, and then he died – and anyway, who
was I? Was I the executor, a family member, or what? In fact, I was none of
those things.
Of course. I had to apply to the Master of the High Court to
be appointed as Yosef’s executor in order to speak with any authority, to do
anything at all. So I reported the estate, and had myself appointed as Yosef’s
executor. I faxed the proof of my appointment through to the hospital
administrator and called again.
Ah, yes, indeed, it seems that late Yosef did have some
personal effects with him. Standard hospital procedure required that they be
sealed in a bag and kept in the ward safe pending his release. Yes, certainly,
I could come and fetch them – anytime, anytime, of course ...
So back to Tygerberg
Hospital I went. I was
kept waiting for two hours outside the administrator’s office. There were a lot
of uniformed police around, and some bustling admin staff. Eventually I was
invited into a small office occupied by about 10 people. I must have had what
Marshall McLuhan calls my 15 minutes of fame – everyone in that office knew who
I was before I was introduced. Someone made a great performance of pretending to
unlock a large safe door which was quite clearly already unlocked, and
ceremoniously opened the door, and amongst all the bundles of stuff in there
went straight to a small parcel bearing a label with Yosef’s name and other
particulars.
A desk was cleared, and the parcel was placed there. “Would
you like to check it?” an official asked with a smirk. “No thanks” I said,
“I’ll open it later”, and snatched up the little bag. I had no idea what was in
there, but I wasn’t about to give anyone the satisfaction of seeing me search
for something specific either. I could feel the disappointment around me. The
bag was stapled closed, but there was no formal seal, and it could have been
opened and re-sealed a dozen times, and no-one would have been any the wiser. I
had no idea who these people were, or why this seemed to be such a source of
amusement to them. I just wanted to get out of there. “Oh, you’ll have to sign
for that …” the admin lady said, and slid a register in front of me. I signed
accordingly and left.
Back at the office, I called my deceased estates PA into the
boardroom and we tipped out the contents of the bag onto a table. All the usual
items which one finds amongst the possessions of a recently deceased person - which
become worthless immediately upon their death - were there … and so was the little
pouch. I separated it from the other stuff, but didn’t open it. We put
everything back in the hospital bag and I called the Embassy to let them know
that I had it. “Thank you” the embassy lady said – not, “Thank you, we’ll have
our top spy come round and collect it in 15 minutes”, or, “Thank you, would you
please get on the next plane, all expenses paid, and get that pouch up here
asap” or indeed anything else at all: just, “Thank you” … I was a little disappointed.
The bag was locked into one of our safes in the estates department pending the
discovery of an heir or other entitled person, and I proceeded with the
administration of the deceased estate of the late Yosef.
I made no concessions to the seller as regards his
insistence that Yosef’s estate must take the property, but I agreed that it was
necessary to remove whatever personal possessions he may have left at the flat.
We agreed to meet there the following Sunday afternoon.
It was a beautiful, elegant bachelor pad, high up in the
building, with a commanding view of the sea and the coastline. The sea sparkled
playfully though the open sliding patio doors and the sun shone benevolently
onto the patio. The kitchen was state-of-the-art, with all modern conveniences,
and the place was designed with summer in mind – white Italian floor tiles,
white walls, white lounge furniture, Scandinavian wood fittings.
No-one but the police and the ambulance men had been into
the flat since Yosef was collected. What we found was shocking. There was
broken glass in the bathroom, blood – a lot of it – in the bath, and a trail of
dried blood from the bathroom, down the white-tiled corridor and into the
lounge. The white couch was thickly crusted with coagulated blood. There was a
lot more broken glass in the lounge.
And this man died of burn wounds?
I stood firm in refusing to proceed with transfer of the
property to the estate and in due course, the estate agent sued the seller for
his commission, the seller sued the estate for breach of contract, and all the
time I waited for someone to come forward as an heir and claim the money in my
trust account.
I was bothered by Yosef’s statement that he had no family.
Only Adam had no family – and that wasn’t for long, either. Everyone else has
family somewhere – whether you like them or not. I had to make a decision:
either I could spend thousands searching for his family, or I could just sit
and wait for them to find me. Thirty years of experience have taught me that
where there is money up for grabs, if you just sit tight for long enough,
sooner or later, someone will find out about it and will seek you out.
I found four Israeli lawyer’s business cards amongst Yosef’s
possessions. I called each of them in turn to ask if they were currently his
lawyer and whether they had a will for him. Each of them promptly confirmed
that they were his personal lawyer and assured me that they had his will. I
asked each of them for a certified copy of the will, whereupon I never heard
from any of them again.
I asked Zev, the only person who knew Yosef in South Africa
aside from the estate agent and myself -
but he knew of no family, friends or acquaintances. He believed that Yosef
owned a house in a suburb of Tel Aviv, but he had no details about that.
All of this took time, and Zev was adamant that I must
bypass the South African authorities and remit Yosef’s money to his (Zev’s)
lawyer in Tel Aviv. The more I told him that this would be illegal and a
criminal offense on several counts, the more he insisted that I should do so.
He even implied that I had acted improperly in getting Yosef to sign the
contract as he was not of sound mind when he signed. See more of that below. He
also called Rabbi Moshe and persuaded him to phone me and make the same
request, and I had to explain the law to the Rabbi as well.
And then – lo and behold! – about a year after Yosef’s death
I received a letter from a fifth lawyer, who purported to represent a nephew
who was sole heir to Yosef’s estate. Unlike the others lawyers however, she
produced “sealed and certified” copies of a will and supporting documentation,
and on the basis of that documentation we were able to finalise Yosef’s estate.
Three more interesting fragments of evidence emerged during
this time: in 2004, Zev had published his memoirs in a book “Zev the Zulik” – an
account of his childhood in Europe through the years of the Second World War,
subsequently his life as a young adult in Israel through the Israeli Wars of
Independence and his army life in the Six-Day war, and finally the story of his
life and business in South Africa. There is a photograph in the book, of Yosef
and Zev marching together in a platoon. They had a military friendship of some
kind, extending beyond their army years afterwards. Zev gave Yosef a copy of
the book and inscribed it for him when meeting him in Cape Town on 4 February 2005.
I already knew that the very first call which Yosef made
when he landed in South
Africa, was to his old friend Zev. But why
had he come here at all? Just to say hello to Zev? To die, in a strange land,
far from family and friends?
I went through the entries in Yosef’s passport: he had
certainly never been to South Africa
before, but he was in and out of the Taba Crossing between Israel and Egypt,
many times, right up to the time immediately before his visit to South Africa.
He had also travelled frequently to all points of the compass in Europe and England.
There were papers and accounts from City
Park Hospital
amongst Yosef’s things which showed that almost immediately after his arrival,
he was admitted to City
Park with a heart attack.
He spent a short time there, fought with his doctors and eventually, against
their orders, signed a self-discharge and walked out of the hospital. No wonder
he was so weak when I met him.
It also emerged that Zev had then driven Yosef to Sea Point
and introduced him to an estate agent, who showed him the flat which he signed
for in my office. Zev was unaware that I had accumulated all this information
on how Yosef had come to sign for the flat, including the fact that he had
personally driven Yosef to Sea Point and introduced him to an agent for just
that purpose.
I finalised Yosef’s estate by paying out the nett proceeds
of the cash which I held in trust to the Israeli attorney who represented his
Israeli estate, and the nephew who was named in Yosef’s will. The process was
full of acrimony, since neither the Israeli attorney or Zev understood the need
for me to abide by South African law, and I had constantly to fend off
accusations of being obstructionist, if not downright motivated by a desire to
make a bundle of fees for myself. I think that if they were honest, they would
have to admit that they were surprised by how little my fees amounted to in the
end!
In the background, there was the litigation between the
estate agent and the seller, and between the seller and Yosef’s estate. It took
from early 2005 to 2007 to resolve all of this.
And then, late in 2007, I received a letter from the
Magistrate’s office in Cape Town.
It was an invitation – not an order – to attend an inquest into the death of
one Yosef X. The letter stressed that I could not be coerced to attend, but
that I should attend if I felt that I had any information to contribute to the
inquest. I resolved not to respond to the letter, and not to attend the
inquest. Nothing would be served by it, and no good would come of it, I
thought. I forgot about it, and the date of the inquest came and went.
But history is not that easily ignored. The day after the
inquest, I received a call from Mrs Freitag, the inquest magistrate. She
sounded pleasant enough, and explained that she had my name because I was the
person who identified the body, and we had quite a lengthy chat about the
absurdity of the case. She disclosed that she had precious little information
in her inquest file – the police had done an exceptionally poor job of
investigating the death.
I know what an inquest file ought to look like, what
constitutes absolutely basic data for any crime investigation, and what is
superfluous. There ought to be immediate, clear and unambiguous answers to the
following questions:
Describe the victim
Describe his/her situation
Time and date and place of discovery
Who found the victim?
Positive ID of the victim
Post mortem medical report
Names of police officers first on the scene
Names of ambulance personnel/medical personnel
Statements by the above
… and so on.
She had none of this. Her report came from the hospital –
because he died there, I guess – but nothing about the point of origin of the
trail.
I was fascinated. In spite of myself, I needed to know what
had happened.
So I called the seller. How was Yosef’s plight discovered?
He didn’t know, but gave me the cellphone number of the
building supervisor.
The supervisor told me that a maid who had been asked to
clean the flat as a once-off job, came to the flat and discovered Yosef
bleeding in the lounge. He couldn’t give me contact details for the maid, but
told me that she raised the alarm, and he called the security company who
covered the block.
I called the security company . The call operator remembered
the incident, and the name of the patrolman who went to the scene. He gave me
the patrolman’s cellphone number.
I called the patrolman. He remembered the incident well. He
said he did two things: firstly, he called the police. Secondly, it occurred to
him that Yosef was Jewish, so he called the CSO.
I called the CSO.
They, too, remembered the incident, and told me that they immediately passed
the call to a Jewish paramedic who works under the CSO
in his own rapid response vehicle. He, in fact, got to the flat ahead of the
police. They gave me the paramedic’s cellphone number.
I called the paramedic. He had quite a detailed recollection
of these events. He responded to the CSO’s
call, went to the flat, found Yosef badly burned and bleeding, and immediately
called a private ambulance to take him to Tygerberg Hospital,
which has a famous burns unit and which was probably better equipped to deal
with the situation than the closer private hospitals. The paramedic dismissed
the trail of blood and the broken glass – perhaps he was so focused on the
apparent burn wounds that he didn’t notice or remember these.
He made one interesting observation, however: he said Yosef
was near hysterical, but conscious, and was clutching a pouch, which he
wouldn’t relinquish. In fact, he held on to it so tightly that when the
ambulance came, it went onto the stretcher with him, and from there all the way
to Tygerberg Hospital.
Oh, my G-d, the pouch! I had forgotten all about it in the
intervening months!
As soon as we terminated the call, without thinking further,
I dived out of my chair, scrambled for the safe keys, ran to the estates
department, and yanked the safe open.
The pouch was gone. Yosef’s whole damn bag of personal
possessions was gone. “It can’t be gone!” I said, possibly aloud, to myself. I
yanked things out of the safe, tossing them onto the ground, frantically
grabbing at things to prove that my eyes were lying to me. But eventually the
safe was empty. Nothing remained of Yosef’s possessions. I wasn’t breathing. I
was just gulping air. This is an 80-year-old law firm, dammit, and NOTHING ever
goes missing here! NOTHING! So where’s that bag?
It was late. Everyone had gone home. Our offices are pretty
soundproof, so the roar of the traffic outside was just a distant hum. It was
still, and very quiet. The chaos in my head subsided. I looked at the mess
around me, consciously forced my breathing back to normal, knowing that my
pulse would follow, and slowly started tidying up. I was glad no-one had seen
my little performance. But it was creepy. Our offices are so secure that I have
never given a second thought to being there alone at any hour – but is it
possible that someone had got in there, removed this one item from a locked
safe, and left, unobserved? G-d knows when they might have done that. It had
been two years since the case began, and I had forgotten about that pouch in
the interim. It could have happened anytime – unless perhaps someone moved it
in tidying the safe, and it was still lying there somewhere in the room,
undiscovered, and waiting to yield up its secret. But somehow I doubted it.
Eventually I went home.
I wrote a little report for the inquest magistrate, but I
left out the bits about the pouch. She wrote back to thank me, and that was the
last I heard about the inquest. I have no idea what her findings may have been.
I really didn’t want to follow it up. I was sick of the whole business.
Finally, I thought, this must surely be the end of the story
of Yosef.
POSTSCRIPT #1
But there was a bit more.
I attended a funeral at Pinelands cemetery in April 2009.
When it was over, my wife wanted to visit her father’s grave – but somehow, we
missed the row and ended up wandering about for a while before we got our
bearings. In order to speed up the search, we split up and I checked some rows
while she checked others.
While searching, a name caught my eye on one of the
tombstones: it was Yosef. I never paid for a tombstone out of the estate funds,
and never had anything to do with the purchase or erection of a stone. Usually,
when that happens, the grave is marked with a simple marker and the deceased’s
name is painted on an ordinary stone at the gravesite, and computer records are
kept of the deceased’s details and the location of the grave. I went back for
another look. Incredible. Here was this beautiful tombstone, and this was
definitely the grave of my client (known to me more in death than in life),
Yosef.
Someone, somewhere, cared enough to do this for the man who
claimed that he had no family.
I have now laid the story of Yosef ben Amy to rest, and I
never want to hear more of it. I don’t care who put up that stone. Perhaps it
was Zev, but I will not phone him to ask. Perhaps it was the heir in Tel Aviv,
but I will not phone that damn quarrelsome lawyer to ask. There are already too
many unanswered questions about Yosef. I swear, I am not going to follow yet
another trail to nowhere.
But if you think you may know something, call me …
POSTSCRIPT # 2
It is the year 2011. January.
I get a call from Magistrate Freitag.
"Do you remember our conversation a few years ago about
a gentleman Yosef X"?
I can't believe it! Again?
"Sure"
"You know, we never held that inquest", she says,
"we just never had anything to go on. Except your notes."
Me and my big mouth!
"We're going to fly a medical expert down from Pretoria", says she
"I need to look into the possible causes of death"
Oh, no …
"Will you be able to make it on 14 February?"
This sounds more like an order than the casual invitation of
a few years ago.
"OK …"
"Good. We'll see you then!" – and she hangs up.
So off I go to the Cape Town Magistrate's Court at about
9:30 on 14 February. I haven't been into that building in 25 years, but
nothing's changed: the usual crowd of ne'er-do-wells and their families in a
throng around the metal detector, police shoving people aside and shouting
orders, lawyers and prosecutors pushing through the crowd, everything grubby, dust
floating in the shafts of sunlight coming through the windows, general chaos
and mayhem.
Because I'm not carrying a black gown, the police don't
believe that I'm a lawyer (I'm a property lawyer, for G-d's sake, and I think
standing up on your hind legs in a courtroom is the most ridiculous way to earn
a living – I gave my gown to an articled clerk about 20 years ago!) – so I have
to go through the public metal detector and I get sent round to another door
for that purpose. OK, I'm cool, relax … Then I get shunted up and down
staircases, along dusty corridors with rows of hapless souls sitting on benches
along the side, awaiting the fate of their battle-scarred loved ones …
Eventually directed to a door on the first floor which I have already passed
three time.
A matronly lady with a friendly face pops out.
"I'm Susan Frietag!" she announces. "Come
in!"
This is a court? I ask myself
She has a lovely air-conditioned office, an imitation
Persian carpet, and aside from her desk, a large round table, at which sits an
elderly gentleman who looks like a retired farmer.
"This is Dr X", she announces, and we shake hands.
Dr X leans back in his chair and gives his credentials as if
he was telling his grandchildren a fairy story, smiling at us with a benevolent
smile. Finally he leans forward and looks me in the eyes.
"I want to tell you. I've examined the records. I am
absolutely convinced that Yosef died of extensive burn wounds. No doubt about
it. None at all", he says emphatically.
I want to shout out, "but you never saw the body! What
about the terrible facial injuries that I saw?"
- but I shut up.
Magistrate Frietag is studying my face.
"Do you accept the doctor's testimony?" she asks.
I take a deep breath. "Yes" I say.
Obviously, they are anxious that I should go on record as
having said that I accept the doctor's testimony. Why?
Magistrate Freitag makes some notes in her file. I can hear
the sound of her air-conditioner (I'm pretty sure no-one else in the building
has one). Distant sound of traffic. I can hear the scratching of her pen, it's
that quiet.
"Right" she says with a bright smile, extending
her hand, "we're done!"
Obviously, its over. I've attended inquests before. This has
been the weirdest inquest I've ever attended. I don't know what to say. I shake
the doctor's hand, and excuse myself. The doctor stays behind, and I can hear
the voices of the two of them as I leave. I pass the witnesses for next inquest
in the passage. Now, THAT looks like a REAL inquest, I think as I walk away.
What was that all about?
Again, I think to myself, why does an old man come to a
strange country, almost with the intention of dying there in anonymity
(although probably not as soon as it actually happened)?
Who was Yosef?
What was he up to?
Who put up that tombstone?
Why was the magistrate so keen that I should concede that he
died of burn wounds?
Why am I unhappy about that?
-
And what happened to that pouch?
It's late. My head is sore. I'm going to bed
