Keepers of the House

by JH Fletcher

  ‘Great copy!’ Tyler on the Sydney desk exulted. ‘Gone over great with our readers.’

  ‘You still say I don’t understand Africa?’ Mark asked Krystyna.

  ‘You understand nothing.’

  ‘Enough to know whose side I’m on.’

  Yet was troubled. As though he had sold Moses and his family to a gloating world to win a skirmish in a war concerned more with politics and power than with humanity and suffering.

  Then came the affair of the Pangaman, so-called after the heavy blade he used to dismember his victims.

  The Pangaman was Zulu. He murdered white people, breaking into houses at night and hacking the inhabitants to pieces. A lunatic — that was the most comfortable explanation.

  Mark had a feeling there was more to it than that. He dug deep, came up with a story of another of apartheid’s victims. An orphan, hounded unmercifully, deprived of work or a place to live, a man jailed for stealing food who, on his release, still without work, waged his own bloody war against the whites who had pilloried him.

  A fine story with plenty of blood and the requisite anti-apartheid twist. Tyler would love it. And yet …

  Something was missing. Mark couldn’t put his finger on it, but was sure it was there.

  He went to Krystyna for help. The Security Police were not concerned with ordinary crime, but she had contacts. A policeman, another Zulu, filled in the background and Mark found he had no story after all — or none that Australian readers would understand.

  The Pangaman had been an outcast not merely from white society but from his own. The cause lay seventy years earlier when his grandfather had first seduced, then run away with, his own cousin.

  ‘Only a dog would have done such a thing,’ the policeman said. ‘The AmaDhlozi were enraged.’

  ‘Who are they? The tribal elders?’

  ‘The spirits of the dead.’

  ‘But surely you don’t believe …?’

  ‘All Zulu believe. All the time those spirits live in our houses. They are as real to us as our own shadows.’

  ‘But what happened seventy years ago has nothing to do with him. It wasn’t so terrible, in any case.’

  ‘To a Zulu it is very terrible. To sleep with a woman of the same clan … The AmaDhlozi turn their wrath not only on the man and the woman, but on their descendants, too. All are cursed and driven out. Forever.’

  ‘And that’s what happened to the Pangaman?’

  ‘Oh yes.’

  The policeman clearly accepted the proposition that the Pangaman should be cursed because of what his grandfather had done seventy years earlier. ‘He is doomed. In the old days, he would never have known life at all. His father would have been strangled at birth. He knows this. The pain of knowing is what makes him kill.’

  ‘But he claims to be Christian,’ Mark protested.

  ‘Makes no difference. If you anger the shades, better you die.’

  As the Pangaman died, hanged in the Pretoria jail.

  ‘Good riddance,’ the Zulu policeman said.

  ‘You say you are a Christian, too. You think he has gone to hell for what he did?’

  ‘Hell can be no worse than what he knew in this life.’

  Enough to know whose side I’m on.

  Mark had told Krystyna that and believed it. Yet it was not always so easy. The story of the Pangaman had been bad enough; now, after yet another outburst of violence in Guguletu — the African township where he had gone with Anna and had so nearly been caught by the tsotsis — he interviewed an old lady whose family had suffered in the riots:

  My name is Fana Viyuseli. I am sixty-nine years old. I have borne five children. We are Zulu, from the country, although we have lived in the town for many years. In my time here I have seen many things. A year ago the boys in this place played football together. Now …

  My own granddaughters. I warn them. Stay away from this politics. It too dangerous. They not listen. Like all the kids in this street, they support Black Consciousness, hate supporters of the United Front.

  Last week Front men caught the younger one. They burned her alive. There, in the street.

  Listen, I do not like these people. Always they kill. They blow up a house in the next street. They break into homes, shoot people. Hundreds of people. Babies and grandmothers. Kill me, too, maybe, one of these days. They throw fire into houses, watch while all the people inside burn up.

  My other granddaughter frightened, run away. Cannot come home ever again. She only fifteen but if she come the police will put her in jail or the Front fighters will kill her. Whatever she do, she dead. These people, they kill everyone.

  ‘You call them Front fighters. But the leaders cannot know,’ Mark said.

  Fana, a Zulu who hated the Xhosa leaders of the Front, shook her head scornfully. ‘Who cares what they know? Their fighters killed my granddaughter!’

  Mark did not believe there was any question of the Front leadership being involved. No way; he did not even bother to report the story to Sydney. There would have been no point; Tyler would never have had a bar of it.

  The remains of thirty-two African women were recovered. They had been thrown alive into pits of flame. People were saying it was the biggest mass killing in South Africa’s history.

  Journalists, foreign correspondents in particular, were supposed to be hardened to horror. They could not hope to survive the constant trauma if they permitted themselves to feel too much. Mark subscribed to the view, had thought that after all he had seen he was proof against anything, but now images tormented him. Writhing, screaming bodies. Stench and smoke. The murderers, watching. Over seventy youths were arrested, all Front supporters. It could have been another frame-up by the police, of course. Mark hoped it was, but his contacts in the townships were strangely noncommittal. He remembered again what he had been told by the old woman Fana Viyuseli.

  If what she had told him were true, if reports of this latest massacre were also true, did it mean that the angels, too, were steeped in blood? Never. He refused, absolutely, to believe that the leadership could be in any way involved. It was unthinkable. Yet Krystyna was right. He did not understand this country. He would never understand.

  He phoned her. She had heard the news already.

  ‘Alive. They burned them alive …’

  He was choking, close to tears. He had believed he had known everything, now knew nothing. There were no certainties left.

  Krystyna was merciful. She came to him silently. Mark hoped she understood a little of what he felt. She held him. They grew still together.

  ‘Who can hope to understand this strange place?’

  Over and over he said it.

  ‘Hush, now. Hush.’

  He was not consoled. Even here, with her. A friend? A spy?

  ‘Hush, now. Hush.’

  He filed his report on the killings.

  Tyler said, ‘You say blacks did it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  A moment’s silence. Then, ‘Not the image we’re trying to project.’

  ‘It’s what happened.’

  ‘Can’t we say it was set up by the government?’

  ‘No!’

  ‘They’ve done it before. They’re still doing it.’

  ‘Not this time.’ Mark took a deep breath. ‘Phil, are you going to run it or not?’

  Tyler sounded surprised. ‘Of course.’

  And did. The bare facts, no more.

  ‘I’m taking some leave.’

  ‘Now? The whole place is liable to explode any day.’

  ‘I don’t think so. If it does, I’ll come back.’

  ‘Well …’ Doubtfully. ‘You were right last time, I suppose.’

  He went to the Natal coast, north of the tiny settlement called Chaka’s Rock. He went alone, stayed at a small hotel on the beach. Krystyna would probably have come, had he asked her, but he needed solitude like oxygen. Solitude to think, to feel, to be.

  He walked the beaches of yellow sand, so diff
erent from the white sands of the Cape. He watched the surf run landwards between the jutting teeth of headlands. He looked for fish in the weed-clad pools, ate shellfish at a restaurant he had discovered. Went to bed. In the morning, walked again.

  I have been at fault all this time, he thought. We have all been at fault. We have been choosing sides, the good against the bad, yet in truth there are no sides. There is only one people, one universality. Not only in South Africa; in the world. There is human aspiration and human suffering, no more.

  No more? He walked on, his feet in the sea’s sudsy fringe. Surely to God there was enough there to keep a writer busy all his life.

  The following morning he got up early and went to the bedroom window. For a long time he looked out at the sea, brilliant with early sunlight. He breathed the salt-rich air. He turned his back on it, went to the desk and began to write.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Cry from a Dark Continent summarised the South African situation more clearly and dispassionately than any account Anna had previously read. Mark had avoided the oversimplifications of those who, wedded to political correctness, attributed blame by race. He did not attribute blame at all, merely recorded facts. Appalling facts they were, indeed, yet his book was much more than a grim recital of murder and deprivation. Through each tale of brutality shone the humanity of the narrator, his passionate care for Africa and the human condition. For truth, also. Mark’s book brought horror, certainly, but also hope, the affirmation of his belief in humanity’s indestructible potential for goodness. From every page his voice rang out, awakening memories that were unbearably poignant. It moved Anna more deeply than she would have believed possible. She knew she had read a great book.

  Though she wept, she was also envious. Mark had found his path, the path that had so far eluded her. Perhaps, she thought, his book will help me there, too. It was certainly possible; after reading it, she saw, more clearly than ever, the direction in which she should go, yet the gulf between intention and performance remained.

  She had thought about it so much at one time, yet had somehow lost the path. Recently she had found it again, yet still had done nothing. It was not good enough. She had talents, too. She must use them, not simply to generate wealth but to employ that wealth as a power for good. Perhaps, with faith and persistence, she would be able to prove both to herself and others that Mark was not the only one who knew how to serve.

  A week later she attended a board meeting of United Minerals. United had put in an offer for Saturn Consolidated. Ever optimistic in the face of what their chairman called corporate rape, Saturn’s directors were trying to fight them off. Lawyers’ letters were flying to and fro; it was shaping up to a real bloodbath. Anna, competitive instincts honed by years of conflict, was as eager for battle as the rest of them.

  It was an all-day meeting, planning strategies, sharpening corporate knives. There was endless bickering, as always in such situations.

  Suddenly it happened. Anna’s mind was overwhelmed by the memory of Africa, the smell and drumbeat of Africa. By other images, too; she looked covertly at her colleagues, their jackal teeth shining, and wondered what they would think if they could see what her memory now recalled: herself, two weeks earlier, lying newborn naked on the grass under the Sydney stars.

  The feelings awakened by Mark’s book returned, flooding. Before she knew it, she had shoved back her chair and stood up, gasping for air. Harris Donnelly, the financial director, had been droning about extra funding; Anna’s movement dried the tongue in his mouth.

  Everyone looked at her.

  Somehow she managed a smile. ‘Excuse me a moment.’

  She walked out, steady on her high executive heels. In the Ladies Room, she leant on her hands and stared at her reflection in the mirror. She breathed deeply, waiting for the erratic thud of her heart to ease.

  Furiously she thought, I cannot permit this. There are things I have to do in my life, but it is the future, not the past, that matters. I will not be influenced by what is gone.

  Except that the past was not gone; it was her memories of it that had caused her to flee so precipitously from the meeting. She thought again of the woman whom Mark had mentioned, the Afrikaner who claimed that she was African, a white African, like all the Afrikaner people. If she were right it meant that, at least in part, Anna herself was African.

  Certainly Anneliese would have said so. Standing before the mirror, staring at her reflection, Anna remembered herself at fifteen, Anneliese summoning her to that hot room redolent of approaching death to lecture her yet again on how her farm in Africa must be reclaimed, how without it her spirit would never rest. How it was up to Anna to do something about it.

  She thought of the extraordinary story in Mark’s book, the Pangaman cursed forever by events that had taken place years before his birth. The AmaDhlozi, as real at the end of the twentieth century as in the days of Chaka the king, their vengeance accepted as fact by a modern policeman. It was a way of thinking so alien that to read about it was to enter a world where people flew, trees talked and the spirits destroyed living men. By the reckoning of both Anneliese and Mark’s friend, Afrikaners both, Anna was of that world, too.

  The Pangaman’s heritage had been death. Her own was less onerous, but real, nonetheless.

  Anneliese’s voice. My spirit will not rest …

  Dear God, Anna thought. What a burden the past places upon us.

  Again she stared at her reflection. A white African. In that light, the concerns of the boardroom were both bizarre and irrelevant. She had no place there. Yet, if not, where was her place? The boardrooms of the city, of all the other cities, had become her world. Despite her recent doubts, a major part of her still wanted nothing else.

  ‘Damn Mark Forrest!’

  Horrified, she realised she had spoken aloud.

  Enough. She splashed water on her face, touched up her make-up and returned to the boardroom with smiling apologies.

  In Anna’s world, even momentary weakness was dangerous. For the rest of the meeting, she was stiletto-sharp, pouncing on every flaw in the revised proposals they were planning to place before the Saturn shareholders. At one point Harris Donnelly tried to argue a point. It was obvious he was wrong; she should have let his proposal fail by default. She could not do it. Ruthlessly, she dismembered the argument, and the man.

  It was a way to make enemies but at that moment Anna did not care. She had to demonstrate that she was still in control. Only afterwards did it occur to her that she had been proving her point, not merely to the men around the table but to herself.

  A white African, indeed.

  Her walkabout caused talk.

  ‘You okay?’ Mostyn asked.

  ‘Of course. Why not?’

  ‘I hear you had a turn the other morning.’

  ‘Caught short.’ She smiled. ‘Happens to the best of us.’

  It had happened to Mostyn once; he had told her about it, making a joke out of what he would not have found funny at the time. He didn’t find it funny now. ‘As long as you’re not pregnant.’

  ‘Hardly likely, is it?’

  Any criticism, however oblique, raised his hackles. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘It takes two, you know. We haven’t been that matey in recent months, have we? Unless you think I’ve found a toy.’

  As rumour said he had, more than once. It was sad that she cared so little.

  Underneath his laughter, he was embarrassed. ‘What a way to talk.’

  Indeed. She remembered staring at her reflection in the Ladies, her mind filled with memories not only of Mark but of everything that had happened in Africa. Memories that once had fuelled her response to Mostyn himself.

  She had not thought of Adam for years. Anneliese Wolmarans and Adam Shongwe. How they would have fought had they ever met — the fighting evidence of their shared heritage. Mark somewhere between, both onlooker and chronicler; not African, yet with the talent and insight to capture the t
ruth of Africa.

  With her mind full of such notions, who was Anna to complain of Mostyn’s piffling infidelities? She remembered her friend Monica Talbot going on and on about the humiliation of catching her first husband with his hand up the wrong skirt, thought how humiliation seemed to mean different things to different people.

  Monica had taken him to the cleaners, the settlement making headlines in all the papers that published that sort of garbage. She had told Anna how, for weeks afterwards, her phone had never stopped ringing, hopefuls trying their luck with the latest, suddenly rich, ex. The story had delighted her, yet Anna would have found that humiliating, to trade her self-respect for cash.

  It was easier for her, of course; it was years since she had cared about Mostyn’s bimbos. The time she had run away to the Blue Mountains had been her last contribution to saving their marriage. When Mostyn had followed she had thought she’d won but in truth things had never come right between them. At bottom, they were incompatible, staying together out of habit and convenience. It worked as well as most marriages and if, from time to time, Anna felt she was missing something, what of it? She had her health, her work. She was good at what she did, was excited by the potential of what might be possible in the future. What she had to do was find a way to marry her present way of life to her instinct for social justice. In that, perhaps, she would find salvation.

  For the second time in as many weeks the past returned, this time in the form of a notice announcing a meeting organised by Australians Against Apartheid, a group of which she had been a member for years.

  The meeting would receive a report-back from the organising committee. It would also be addressed by a distinguished guest speaker, a member of the central committee of the African National Congress.

  Adam Shongwe was in Australia.

  Anna cancelled two appointments to be there. Deliberately, she sat near the back of the hall, planning to see rather than be seen. It was a forlorn hope, both hall and audience too small for anonymity.