A Trojan Affair

by Michael Smorenburg

  “That’s ridiculous, Dara.”

  She knew the look he was giving her now; fresh from winning the battle at the clinic, his jaw was set and his eyes squinted with determination, ready to assert his rights again. In this mood, he would not cooperate, and she certainly didn’t wish him to dig his heels in among strangers.

  By now, the policeman in the doorway had half turned and was clearly talking about them to someone inside, alternately glancing back at them… nodding agreement to something either said to him or to his own thoughts.

  It unsettled Marsha and she restarted the engine.

  As she pulled away, the man’s penetrating stare locked onto Dara, the boulder that was the policeman’s head slowly swivelling to track them. His expression betrayed a process of actively filing that face in his police brain for future reference. It made Marsha check and recheck her rear-view mirror until they were well away.

  They passed through the town centre under the shadow of the forbidding NGK—Dutch Reformed Church—spire that dominated the landscape.

  “You shouldn’t have gone anywhere near talking about their God,” she advised.

  “Oh, come on…!” he exclaimed, exasperation in his voice. “They said that to you, too? Like I’m in in a parallel universe. Mum. Hello? Have you even been listening to me? I didn’t!”

  “These people…” Marsha said and gestured toward the spire. “They’re not exactly thrilled to have us here. We’re not just newcomers, Dara, we’re the enemy. That preacher’s incensed about the SKA.”

  “Now you tell me…” Dara said sarcastically. She could see him regaining his full confidence and it pleased her.

  “I didn’t know till now. The secretary just told me,” Marsha admitted.

  “What’s his problem?”

  “She said he’s angry that we’ve come here to search for the origins of the universe. He feels it’s a direct challenge to the Bible, to Genesis or something.”

  “That’s really pathetic,” Dara huffed. “Childish.”

  “Childish it may be, but they take it very seriously and that’s what I warned you about. I didn’t know they’re at fever pitch with it right now, but I warned you that they’re Calvinists, Old Testament obsessed. They’ve created an angry God who holds each of them responsible for everyone’s behaviour, and they enforce it with fists.”

  “I know that Mum, but….”

  “No, you’ve just learned it, Dara. I’m concerned that you still don’t understand. You like a good argument, but these are zealots and it’s a volatile situation, so I’m emphasizing it. You’re out of your depth.”

  They were silent a while, Dara contemplating her words.

  The town slid silently by and gave way to asphalt through scrubland and undulating hills with a smudge of mountains in the far distance beyond the haze. They turned onto the access road to the SKA staff compound, sited on a farm.

  Dara explored the lump at the back of his head and it hurt.

  For three days he lay indoors, immersed in satellite TV and fibre optic internet feed, his pride hurting more than his injury.

  Marsha called at regular intervals from work to quiz him, alert for signs of complications from the concussion.

  The house staff regularly checked on and fussed over him. From the questions they asked and the way they studied him, they were clearly under instructions to report any hint of symptoms to his mother.

  Outdoors, the heat remained relentless; indoors, a climate-controlled heaven.

  Slowly, as his morale strengthened, Dara ventured out to the swimming pool but the loneliness he’d aimed to avoid by attending the local school in the first place began to bite.

  Marsha was at work all day and often into the night.

  Dara was accustomed to sophisticated company; the house staff, friendly as they were, were simple country folk.

  The 250cc off-road motorbike the landlord, a farmer, had lent Dara became his saviour. It came with restrictions of course; he was several months shy of eighteen, the age limit on public roads for that engine capacity. Marsha reinforced this law with her own ban. With the unpleasantness of the town still so fresh in his mind, he had no intention of violating these rules. After all, he had the run of the vast farm, endless tracks leading through the scrub, up into the hills.

  Although Dara was naturally gregarious and preferred the company of friends of every stripe, he began to bury his feelings of isolation in the exhilaration of chasing around the vastness.

  Soon he knew every corner of the extensive farm. The region was arid and devoid of the large wildlife that most people presume proliferate in Africa. In the intricacies of the insects, birds and small animals, Dara found increasing fascination.

  His father’s career as an evolutionary anthropologist had infected him. He knew that the area was dotted with caves containing Bushmen paintings from centuries ago—the legacy of these hunter-gatherer people who had been driven by indigenous African and European invaders to the arid interior of Southern Africa.

  Dara’s world became exploration. He’d always done it through books but now it was hands-on, it was real. He’d been at it now for weeks and was already successful in his quest to find rock paintings, not knowing if he was the first to see them since their creation. Finding a fossil by chance, his horizons broadened. Now he spent hours intensively researching the prehistoric environment of the area.

  Over dinner each evening he’d enthusiastically recount the new discoveries of his day and lay out his plans for the morrow. Often, they’d spend time with others in the compound—Marsha’s colleagues and visitors—and Dara would be riveted by the many facets of the unfolding drama around the machine his mother had come to oversee.

  The prospect of living in a commune had been a foreign one to Dara but the longer he stayed, the more he became captivated by its advantages; so many great minds in one place to tap.

  Chapter 2

  It was weeks since the classroom incident and, with the initial shock of it over, Dara had derived some amusement from its retelling.

  He’d shared his story far and wide across social media but none of his friends could grasp what the fuss could be about.

  Confirmation that the corridor attack was a direct reprisal for Dara upsetting the preacher was all around town, returning to him from many angles. Even the house staff ventured an opinion. “Kleinbaas,” they called him. Small boss. “You can’t go saying things like that!”

  “Things like what?” he’d ask.

  “Things that make the Dominee angry… when the Dominee is angry we must all be angry,” they’d declared.

  And the Dominee was evidently angry; very, very angry. He’d been angry about the SKA development before but now its implementation had a face, the dark face of a devil child who did not know his place. An arrogant, strutting peacock of a boy who had come grinning into his class with his very white teeth and his very white eyes cast around on the very white girls. And that devil child had been so smug and proud to announce that the almighty Bible and Genesis were wrong.

  Word also had it that the preacher’s sermons in the town were, since the incident, about almost nothing but the SKA and the blasphemous stain it would put on his town.

  Dawie had verified all of these things to Dara, and that he remained the talk of the town.

  Since the initial furore had died down, Dawie had become a regular visitor at the compound, walking the hour it took from his own home. Sometimes he’d bring along the other boys Dara had met on the school’s playground, Detlief and Tjaardt; Tjaardt with the emerald eyes.

  The house staff weren’t finished with their opinions either. “It’s a skandaal kleinbaas—scandalous—to look at the white girls like you did,” they warned.

  Dawie upped the ante and the other boys nodded in solemn agreement. “They’re still out to get you. Vermaak wants to donner you.”

  “Donner me?”

  “Ja, man… to beat you up.”

  Neels Vermaak, with the granite
head, thought the situation more than scandalous—he was treating it like a blasphemy. His girlfriend, Dawie explained—the one with the striking blonde hair, the one who had tried to intervene at the attack—had been so disgusted by Neels’ assault that she’d broken off their long relationship.

  The only son of a wealthy farming family, Vermaak carried clout in the town. Dawie detailed his pedigree; he was the Dominee’s protégé, the youth leader in the NGK congregation and a star in sports, especially rugby, field. He had backup.

  By now, Dara had the whole scoop on the parched town—its people suffering from a crushed economy and desperately reeling from a prolonged drought. With the worst El Niño ever recorded amplifying the effects of climate change already in full force, rain hadn’t fallen in almost three years and the farms were in crisis. Beseeching prayers for rain at the local church had come to naught.

  Undeterred and oblivious to these matters, Dawie’s people were planning to gather soon to shuffle and dance and implore the ancestors to save the land from the ravages of man.

  Against the backdrop of these tough conditions, small human dramas were playing themselves out.

  Detlief was up from Cape Town, staying with extended family. The gang violence of his home suburb in the city had boiled over and drug-related killings in the slum streets there were a daily occurrence. His mother had shipped him out when he started moving with the wrong crowd. Given the depravations they lived in, he could hardly have avoided it.

  Tjaardt’s pedigree was now also cleared up—he’d detailed it with great pride so that there could be no confusion. These categories were important, he’d insisted, as they pegged each person into a hierarchy. The brief history lesson he extolled came with solemn nods of agreement from the other boys and house staff. He’d pigeonholed himself into his mother’s ethnic linage—he was a Baster, derived from the old Dutch word for bastard, an early ethnic mix between the original Dutch settlers and indigenous African population. Tjaardt seemed extremely proud to have the blood of the white travelling farmers of two centuries ago, the Trekboers, in his veins, even if their ancestors in the town and on the playground rejected any hint that he was any part of them.

  Tjaart’s uncle was the local Burgemeester or Mayor. His position was not a welcome one to the white community of the town. His affiliations to the ruling political party of the country, whom they hated, were bruised but still too strong for most to stomach. There was a general sense that he was an undeserving recipient of the position.

  When Dara thought small-town politics couldn’t be any more outrageous, on his latest visit, Dawie updated the threat to Defcon Level-1.

  “Vermaak says he’s going to kill you… and me.”

  “What for now?” Dara sighed, exhausted by the seemingly endless litany of escalating threats and hostility constantly rumbling toward him from the distant town. Were it not for Dawie’s obvious concern, it would have seemed farcical.

  “They know we’re friends and they know I come here. But mainly because of your mom.”

  “Because of my mum? Because of her work?”

  “Yes… but also because…” he hesitated, “…because your mother went to the police, and the Constable is an elder in the Church, so it went right back to Dominee van der Nest, and then to Neels.”

  “What? My mother went to the cops?” Dara was outraged, feeling betrayed but he knew that he couldn’t do anything until his mother returned home. At work, she was not to be disturbed by calls.

  “This is absurd…”

  His mind was suddenly a tangle of a thousand thoughts.

  Fragments of memories and tumbling images came vaulting through his thoughts, falling into place.

  More than once he’d seen a bakkie, a pickup truck, someone screened within it watching him intently from the national road as he rode his bike on an adjacent farm track.

  The previous week while shopping in the town with his mother, a passing car had jeered him.

  He’d thought little about these unconnected matters at the time, but with Dawie’s input connecting them, his predicament suddenly felt ominous. A trickle of ice seeped into his veins, the adrenaline of fear sending a cold sliver of dread to his every extremity.

  Something sinister slid within him, a foreboding.

  He pushed it out of his mind.

  In a few weeks his mother would take him down to Cape Town for a vacation. He’d enrol at boarding school there and remain away for months. All this madness would blow over and be long forgotten before he returned.

  Suddenly, he felt like he was in a race for survival until the date of their departure.

  I’ll keep a low profile, stay on the farm. I’m fine here, he consoled himself.

  “They call you Mister Prrrrretty boy,” Dawie reminded him, and the way he rolled those rrrrrrs struck like a tuning fork, resonating with that agitator’s shout-out in the town. The thing slid through Dara’s gut again and he shoved his hands into his pockets to quell any tremor and manufactured a scoff of laughter.

  When his mother arrived home that evening, he took her to task and it erupted into an unpleasant shouting match.

  He stormed to his room and slammed the door.

  Later his mother came knocking. He eventually relented and opened the door.

  He knew she was right, though; she had made a statement so that the incident at the school was on record. The black African sergeant who had recorded it already knew the details and name of the assailant before she even described him and battled to pronounce his name—Neels Vermaak.

  It was on the record—that was all she wanted.

  Chapter 3

  More weeks passed, but still the hoped, prayed, and danced-for rains remained stubbornly absent; the weather experts advised that the situation would persist indefinitely.

  Dara’s perch high above the escarpment should have provided a dazzling vista of bloom for which the Painted Desert, as the Namaqualand region was called, was rightly famous. Carnarvon lay at its boundary.

  The postcards on sale in the town commemorated the mesmerizing vista of colours that should be on display at this time of year, but the ancestors in their unfathomable wisdom seemed happy to ignore all pleading for rain, leaving the place dusty but still breath-taking in its rugged masculine beauty.

  Somewhere out there over the horizon, lay Verneukpan, famous for land speed records attempted at its salt track. Dara gazed in the general direction, knowing it was far too distant to spot. His father was a speed enthusiast and had promised to take him there when the next event was scheduled.

  Dara’s parents had been forced to live apart because of their careers for some years but the arrangement was purely practical. Contracts had taken them to different parts of the world so that clinging to the ideal for a relationship was more corrosive than allowing one another to be apart in mutual agreement. When they came back together, it was like nothing had changed for those all-too-brief periods.

  His father was currently in the United States promoting his fourth book, which popularized breakthrough science in his field. He was scheduled to visit South Africa later in the year to tour sites of early mankind. The entire region north and east of Carnarvon also bordered the enigmatically named Cradle of Humankind where a graveyard containing dozens of Homo naledi bones were found deep inside the impossibly tight and meandering Rising Star cave system. The announcement of the find had rocked the world of science, begging searching questions about the point in the hominid timeline when the evolving human species had developed a sense of self right here, in the harsh semi desert landscape.

  As Dara had begun to appreciate, this part of the world was a veritable treasure trove for learning. It was an irony, he thought, that the inhabitants so roundly rejected the evidence of these facts etched into nature so close at hand in favour of Calvinist dogma from so far away and long ago.

  His father had told him of the significance of the local peoples—the Bushmen as some of them preferred to be called, rather than the
more popular and politically driven term Khoisan—the living fossils of humanity’s prehistoric past.

  Those calling themselves Bushmen had explained to Dara that the word Khoisan refers to a specific clan or sect within the Bushman community. It was, Dara realized, similar to how McGregor would not do as a collective label for all Scotsmen.

  Worse yet, Dawie had explained, the origins of the names ‘Khoi’ and ‘San’ came not from the true hunter-gatherers, but rather from the first indigenous herders who had invaded the lands more than two thousand years before.

  Khoi had literally meant ‘owner’, owner of herds; while San had denoted the ‘thief’ in their society.

  The Khoisan name then represented the genesis of the strife heaped upon wrangle that had visited this land in waves.

  Dara had proudly explained as much to his father.

  Every day some new aspect of an ancient past was coming to life for Dara. The very earth of the place now held a magnetism for him, as if the DNA in his fibres recognized its ancestral home. And with it, each day, cultured, green rolling hilled England drifted ever further away from his yearning.

  The drama that had played out over these far away and barren lands reverberated deep inside of him. In the theatre of his mind, Dara visualized the scenes from a hundred thousand years ago. The roving bands of hunters stalking small game, sheltering in the caves that were now his playground. Families and generations under the infinity of stars and the Milky Way that had brought his mother here, a new kind of explorer.

  Rock caves inscribed with the lanky figures and their speared quarry captured in paint, their footprints found impressed into ancient petrified mud and the middens and bones they left as fossils—these were the things that would soon unite his parents and briefly make them a quasi-family unit. All in that great quest for knowledge that seemed to surge through the family genes, doctors and engineers on both sides of his lineage.