Aside: No 1266/07 - end of journey

By Alex Eliseev (The Star)

Date: August 24, 2007

The lone journey

Part 1: Out of the cold room into a coffin

For 55 days he lay on a shelf in a dark mortuary cold-room, waiting for someone to unlock his secrets. Now his time is up.

One of the 14 cheap, chip-wood coffins lined up outside has his number on it.

He has no name. Only the number. "1266/07".

This is the final chapter for the homeless man who froze to death on a Joburg pavement while an enchanting blanket of snow fell over the city for the first time in 23 years.

His entire existence is summed up in one sentence on a police report: "found dead on the street".

While he lay in cold room No 40, routine efforts were made to uncover his identity.

But hope died on August 10.

On that day news came that his fingerprints - which were tested by both the police and Home Affairs - had come back unknown.

He was not a convicted criminal. He may have been a foreigner or, perhaps, he simply never applied for an ID document. Whatever the case, he was invisible.

Police Inspector Mongezi Ngubane - investigating the death - had just two families who came to look at the body. Neither knew him.

The grey-bearded man's final journey begins early on Tuesday morning.

Two surgically masked men arrive at the door of the cold room, open it and locate his number. They haul the naked body on a bloody steel trolley.

Outside the back entrance, all but three coffins spread out on the ground have been filled. All will be buried in pauper's graves the next day.

The undertakers, like construction workers, push the trolleys. Like wheelbarrows of sand, they tip the metal tray over at each coffin. One by one, the corpses slide off and fall into the wooden boxes.

Some fit perfectly into the narrow coffins. Other bodies are stiff and stubborn and have to be pushed in. It's a grim routine.

At 12.11pm, body No 1266/07 tumbles into its coffin with a thump.

The corpse is wrapped in a plastic sheet - lining each of the coffins - and a lid is placed.

Thud. Thud. Thud. Thud.

Four nails are driven in at 12.15pm. The man's mysteries imprisoned.

There are 14 adult coffins and six baby coffins - no larger than a shoebox. At 12.30pm the loading begins.

One of the workers is sitting on the ground several meters from the coffins, catching a short break.

When he's called to help he swears loudly.

"Shit!"

He seems exhausted and troubled. But duty calls and, while mumbling more angry words, he takes up his place.

Each coffin has four handles and it takes four men to lift them onto the truck. Body 1266/07 is the last adult one to go in. The baby coffins are feather-light and one man takes care of all of them before locking up.

The engine awakens and the truck leaves the mortuary through a narrow tunnel.

The sun shines as the white truck weaves through the small streets of Braamfontein.

It finds the offramp to the highway and heads towards Soweto. It passes Southgate shopping centre and turns onto Old Potch Road.

The truck has no markings on it. It blends into the thousands of others making deliveries all over town. There are no flowers. No ribbons. No music.

This is a delivery - not a funeral cortege.

The truck driver has a heavy foot and darts from lane to lane. Bara hospital is on the left, the bustling taxi rank on the right. In the distance the colourful twin chimneys of the former Orlando power station against the blue sky.

There is life all around. Except inside the truck.

Part 2: The Funeral

Eunice Mlangeni prays for the forgotten. She is the only guest at the funeral of body number 1266/07 and the others at Ennerdale cemetery in Elandsfontein.

With silence all around, the woman reads Psalms 90 from her tattered Bible.

The contract between the government and the undertaker makes this final mercy compulsory.

The 20 bodies spent a night at Kay Vee Funerals, the Soweto-based undertakers. The digger is only available on Wednesday for the men and women with no names.

By the time the burial takes place the sun is blazing. The desolate hills are covered in endless fields of dry grass.

The procedure is simple: one grave, three coffins and soil to cover the dusty grave.

Three workers use long metal rods to lower the coffins into the holes.

Because of their size, the babies receive their own, more shallow graves.

Each one takes no longer than a minute or two.

The burials are short but dignified. Afterwards discarded surgical masks and gloves are thrown into the graves.

Because of thefts, the cemetery has stopped using small metal plates for grave numbers and now places cement blocks on the ground.

Markings are crucial in case a family comes forward and demands an exhumation.

At 10.19am the homeless man is lowered into the ground. He is the first in the grave, and takes up "position 1". Once they come in, two more coffins will be placed above him. But today he is the last of the bodies to be buried.

There, underground, is where all his answers will lie. Where was the homeless nomad born, did he have a family and how did he land up on the streets?

Police discovered the body on the corner of Noord and Wanderers streets in downtown Joburg in the early hours of June 27.

The old man collapsed at the same time as hundreds of cellphones across the city must have been ringing to spread the news of the rare snowfall. Families were rushing out to make snowmen and take photographs filled with giant grins.

The old man died alone. It appeared he succumbed to natural causes and no crime scene investigations were done. No photographs were taken and no detective was called out. The body arrived at the morgue at 3.10am.

Forensic pathologists described the man as "Neglected. No injuries."

He was 1,7m tall but weighed just 42kg. Lice were found in his armpits. The cause of death was: "Pneumonia (natural)."

The mortuary eventually guessed his age at 72. But that's only a guess.

The fingerprints were, in reality, the man's only hope. No one was going to go the extra mile for him.

A Star reader volunteered R1 000 for a burial - but regulations don't allow for that unless a body has been identified.

Inspector Ngubane will now ask his commander to close inquest docket 1772/06/07 - a request likely to be granted as the trail of clues has ended.

In the first five months of this year Gauteng mortuaries recorded 607 unclaimed bodies.

The year before that had 1 584.

Week after week various undertakers take truck-loads of paupers from morgues and hospitals to cemeteries. Week after week Mlangeni reads from her Bible and raises her hands to the empty hills.

And that's how the story ends.

The nameless vagrant has now taken on a new and final number:

Grave No 4153.