by Deon Meyer
‘She worked at the resort.’
‘What was her name?’
‘Melanie,’ he said, the Afrikaans pronunciation, with a long ‘a’. With just a hint of disapproval in his voice. ‘Melanie Lottering.’
Emma wrote that down too.
Moller blinked and said with admiration, ‘You really believe that he’s your brother.’
Her voice was barely audible as she answered. ‘Yes.’
* * *
Emma picked up her bag and was ready to leave, but she hesitated and said very carefully: ‘Would you mind if I asked you one question about the reserve?’
He nodded. ‘You want to know why. You want to know what the point is if there are no tourism facilities.’
‘Oh dear, is that what everyone asks?’
‘Not everyone. Some. But I understand. It must be difficult to grasp when someone behaves differently. People expect you to spend money in order to make more. You develop a game reserve so other people will pay to see it. If you don’t do that people wonder what you’re hiding. It’s only natural.’
‘I didn’t mean it like that.’
‘I know you didn’t. But most people think like that. That’s one of the reasons I lock the gate at the entrance. They used to come in here and ask questions. Mostly, they didn’t understand my answers and went off shaking their heads. Or maybe they did understand, but didn’t like the answers. They wanted the right to see, to enjoy, to drive around in the reserve and show the animals to their children.’
Moller looked in the direction of the gate and said, with nostalgia, ‘Cobie understood.’ Then his gaze returned to Emma. ‘But let me explain to you, and you can make up your own mind.’
Blinking, he organised his thoughts. ‘Up till ten thousand years ago, we were hunter-gatherers. All of us. On every continent and island. We moved around in small groups in the search for food and water, depending on the availability. We were part of the balance of nature. We lived in harmony with the ecology, in the same rhythms. For a hundred thousand years. The principle of “make hay while the sun shines” was in our genes. When there was abundance, we enjoyed it, because we knew that the hungry years would come. That’s nothing unique, all animals are like that. Then we discovered how to domesticate cattle and goats and we learned to sow grass seed and after that everything changed. When we stopped moving on, we made villages. We multiplied and we sowed and our cattle and sheep and pigs grazed in one area. We lost the rhythms of nature. Are you following me so far?’
Emma nodded.
‘I’m not saying that what happened was wrong. It was inevitable, it was evolution. But it had enormous implications. The academics say the place we first began to farm was in the Middle East, the fertile crescent of Iraq in the East, through Syria and Israel to Turkey. Go and see what it looks like today and it’s hard to believe they call it the Fertile Crescent. It’s just desert. But ten thousand years ago it wasn’t desert. It was grassland and trees, a temperate climate, good soil. Most people believe that the climate changed and that’s why there’s nothing there today. Oddly, the climate is just about the same. It became desert because people and their agriculture exhausted the Middle East. Overgrazed, over-farmed and over-utilised. Because of that urge to utilise abundance fully, there might never be a tomorrow …’
Moller wasn’t the natural evangelical speaker that Donnie Branca was. His voice was softer, the tone infinitely courteous, but his belief in what he said was equally immovable. Emma sat transfixed.
‘We can’t change history. We can’t wish away all the technology and agriculture and we certainly can’t change human nature. The peacock with the longest, most colourful tail has the best chance to get a mate; whereas we rely on the number of cattle in our kraal, or the name of the car in our garage. That’s why money controls everything. People are not truly capable of conservation, though they make all the right noises. It’s just not in our nature. Whether we’re talking about pumping oil or chopping down trees for firewood, the environment will be the loser. The only way to keep a proper ecological balance today is to keep the people out. Completely. The entire concept of public game reserves is failing, regardless of whether they are national, provincial or private game parks. Do you know how many rhino have been shot for their horns in game parks this year?’
Emma shook her head.
‘Twenty-six. Twenty of them were in Kruger. They arrested two game rangers – the very people who are supposed to be protecting them. In KwaZulu two white men drove into the Umfolozi Game Reserve in broad daylight, shot two rhino, cut off the horns and drove out. Everybody knows there are rhino there. That’s why I lock my gates. The less they know, the greater the chance that my animals will survive.’
‘I understand.’
‘That’s why I don’t want tourists here. Once that starts, it gets harder to control. The accommodation in Kruger is insufficient, the demand continues to grow. Now they are going to build more. Where does it stop? Who decides? Certainly not the ecology, that’s for sure. The pressure is political and financial. Tourism has become the lifeblood of our country, a bigger industry than our gold mines. It creates jobs, brings in foreign currency, it’s become a monster that we must keep on feeding. That monster will consume us, one day. Only the places like Heuningklip will remain. But not for ever. Nothing can stand in the path of man.’
15
In the Aventura Badplaas holiday resort’s barbecue restaurant we waited for the manager to track down Melanie Lettering’s current place of work.
I ate a plate of vegetables and salad, which was all that I could tolerate after all the biltong I’d eaten at Moller’s. Emma ordered fish and salad. Halfway through our meal the manager returned with a scrap of paper in his hand.
‘She still works for Aventura at the Bela-Bela resort. They also have a spa.’ He gave the note to Emma. ‘She’s married now, her surname is Posthumus. These are the numbers.’
Emma thanked him.
‘She was very good with the guests. I was sorry to see her go.’
‘What sort of work did she do?’
‘Beauty therapist. You know, herbal baths, massage, thalasso treatments, full-body mud wraps …’
‘When did she leave?’
‘Jislaaik, let me think … about three years ago.’
‘How far away is Bela-Bela?’
‘Quite a way. Just over three hundred kilos. The shortest route is via Groblersdal and Marble Hall.’
‘Thanks a lot.’
He excused himself and Emma took out her cell phone and began to call Bela-Bela.
When we left it was already dark.
‘This is going to be a long day, Lemmer, I hope you don’t mind,’ said Emma. She sounded weary.
‘I don’t mind.’
‘I could drive if you like …’
‘That’s not necessary.’
‘We can sleep late tomorrow. There’s nothing more I can do.’
And then what? I wanted to ask her. Would she go back to Cape Town and wait until Cobie de Villiers came out of hiding? Did she hope someone like Wolhuter would keep her informed?
She switched on the roof light, took out the sheet of paper again and made notes. Then she turned the light off and leaned back in her seat. She sat silent for so long that I thought she was asleep. But then I saw that her eyes were open. She was staring out at the pitch-black night and the bright beam of the halogen lights ahead.
Melanie Posthumus sat on the couch of the staff house in the Bela-Bela resort with a child on her lap.
‘This is Jolanie. She’s two,’ she said happily when Emma enquired.
‘That’s an unusual name,’ said Emma.
‘We made an anagram with my hubby’s name and mine. His name is Johan; he’s got a function on tonight. He’s the catering manager and it’s that time of the year, you know. But we call her Jollie, she’s so full of sunshine, see.’
At first glance Melanie was pretty – black hair, blue eyes and a flawless compl
exion. The sweet Cupid’s bow of her red lips was like a constant invitation. She spoke in the accent of Johannesburg’s Afrikaans suburbia, with the exaggerated inflection that turned an ‘a’ into an ‘ô’. Her use of ‘anagram’ was not a good sign either.
‘I’ll make us something to drink in a sec. First I’ve got to get Jollie to sleep, she’s lekker tired and if it gets past her bedtime she gets her second wind and, as Johan always says, then it’s pyjama drill on the gravy yard shift.’
‘I know this isn’t a good time,’ said Emma.
‘No, don’t worry about that, you’ve come so far and I’m very curious. How do you know Cobie? I was very cross with him for ages, but you can’t stay cross for ever. You have to get closure and go on with your life, you must follow your destiny.’ She nodded at the sleepy-eyed child on her lap. ‘It’s like Brad and Angelina. They had to wait before they found each other.’
‘It’s a long story. I knew Cobie many years ago.’
‘Like in boyfriend and girlfriend?’
‘No, no, as in family.’
‘I was just about to say, not you too …’
‘I’m trying to trace him.’
‘Family? That’s funny, you know, he told me he was an orphan, that he didn’t have any family.’
‘Maybe it’s not the same Cobie that I knew. That’s what I’m trying to find out,’ Emma said with extreme patience. I wondered how disappointed she felt that her ‘brother’ might have been in love with this little bird of a woman.
‘Oh, OK, I was just saying …’
‘I’m trying to talk to everyone that knew him. I need to know for sure.’
‘Like closure.’ Melanie nodded her head sympathetically. ‘I understand completely.’
Suddenly Emma’s phone rang shrilly. The baby’s eyes opened and her face crumpled in dismay. ‘I’m so sorry,’ said Emma and pressed the button to turn it off.
Jollie-Jolanie’s eyes drooped slowly shut.
‘You got to know him when he was working at Heuningklip?’ Emma asked in a low voice as she replaced the cell phone in her bag.
‘Jo. That was serenity if there ever was. I was coming from Carolina way. I had a little white Volkswagen Golf, and its name was Dolfie. It never gave me any trouble. Never. So then I felt something wasn’t lekker and I stopped and it was a flat tyre. Man, I couldn’t even remember where the spare wheel was. Cobie came past, he’d been to the co-op to fetch some stuff with his pick-up and all he saw was this girl with her hands on her hips looking at the flat tyre, and he stopped. Now isn’t that serenity?’
Only when she used the word the second time did I realise she meant ‘serendipity’.
‘Yes it is,’ said Emma with a straight face.
‘So, we began to chat. Actually, you know, I’m a terrible chatterbox and this good-looking ou was so shy and quiet and then he took out the spare and it was flat too! So then we went in his pick-up to the BP beside the resort and I asked him where he worked and what he did and so on. When he said Heuningklip, I couldn’t stop asking questions, because everybody knows about Stef Moller. He’s this billionaire that bought all these farms and made them nice, but nobody knows where his money came from and he lives in this little old house and he doesn’t talk. And Cobie said Stef is this amazing person that just wants to heal the land so nature can balance and I said “how does that work?” and then Cobie began to explain. And that’s when I fell in love, when he talked about the veld and the animals and the economy and you could see the real Cobus, the one behind the shyness. I asked him what is his favourite animal and he said “the honey badger”. So I said why and we sat there in his pick-up on the road beside Dolfie and he told me stories about the honey badgers and he talked with his body like this, his eyes and hands and all.’
Melanie’s blue eyes shone and she looked at the baby on her lap with a tinge of guilt. The child’s eyes were shut and her mouth, a duplicate of her mother’s, was open.
Melanie’s voice dropped an octave when she saw that the child was asleep. She wiped the moisture out of her eyes. ‘That’s when I fell in love. And then he just went off. But I’ve got closure.’
‘How long did you see each other?’
‘Seven months.’
Emma encouraged her with a nod.
‘At first Cobie was so shy. I waited a whole week after the flat tyre, and when I heard nothing from him I took him a gift pack from the Badplaas chemist shop to say thank you. He was back in his shell again, so I said doesn’t a girl get coffee on this farm. I saw he didn’t have proper curtains even in his little house and I said I would make him some, but he said no, he didn’t need them. A woman just knows when an ou likes her and I could see him looking at me behind that shyness and so I knew I just needed to be patient. So I drove out there the next Saturday and measured the windows and went through to Nelspruit and bought some pretty yellow material that was nice and cheerful. The next weekend he helped me to hang it up and then I said, “You can say thank you now,” and when he held me his whole body was shaking. I think it was his first time.’
It was after eleven when we drove back to Mohlolobe, four hundred kilometres on the Nl via Polokwane and then right on the R71. For a long time Emma just sat staring. Before Tzaneen her head drooped slowly to her shoulder and she slept, too tired to do battle with all the ghosts.
I looked at her and felt the urge to pity her. I felt like running my hand over her short hair and saying with great sympathy and compassion, ‘Emma le Roux, you are the Don Quixote of the Cape, charging Lowveld windmills with pointless bravery, but now it’s time to go home.’
Melanie Posthumus had told us that Cobie de Villiers came from Swaziland. He told her his stories in fragments. He grew up in an orphanage in Mbabane after his parents had been killed during a robbery in their farm shop. He had no family. After school he worked as an assistant game ranger, later he got a job with the company contracted to repair the environmental damage caused by the Swazi’s old Bomvu Ridge iron mine. He told her wonderful stories – of how the archaeologists worked alongside them to investigate ancient history. ‘It’s the oldest mine in the world, you know,’ Melanie said with authority. ‘There were Africans taking stuff out of the ground in 40,000 DC She said ‘dee cee’ with undaunted self-confidence.
She said, ‘Cobie was an outlander, you know.’ The staff members at the Badplaas resort were an isolated group thrown on their own resources and they would frequently braai and dance and party together. But Cobie hadn’t liked to socialise at the resort, despite the stream of invitations. Instead he would take her to the veld when she had a day off and then the ‘real’ Cobie would surface. It was then that he lived, that the sun shone through him and his shyness evaporated. They slept under the stars, and beside a campfire in the veld he told her that he’d found his niche with Stef Moller; he’d like to stay there for ever, there were so many plans, so much work. Moller’s farms covered fifty thousand hectares. The goal was seventy thousand. That’s when they could reintroduce lions and wild dogs. But not all the neighbouring farmers wanted to sell.
She was the one that began to talk of marriage, ‘because Cobie was too shy’. Initially, he seemed not to hear her hints, later he began to say, ‘maybe, one day’. Melanie had an explanation for that. ‘He was just too used to being on his own, you know.’ She had helped him lose that habit. She let him know that she would come and live on the reserve with him, keep house for him, go to the veld with him, put no social pressure on him whatsoever. Eventually, he began to build up enthusiasm for the idea – in his own quiet way.
I had my own theories about her method of igniting that enthusiasm.
‘One night he came to the resort and he was too serious for words and he said before we can get married there was something he had to do. He would be away a week or two and then he would bring me a ring. I asked him what he was going to do and he said he couldn’t tell me, but he had to do the right thing and he would tell me about it one day.’
She never saw him again.
‘Can you remember the date?’
‘It was the twenty-second of August 1997.’
Emma had brought out her sheet of paper – and the photo of the young Jacobus le Roux. Without a word, she passed the picture across the coffee table. While Melanie Posthumus was looking at it, Emma had written something more on her sheet of paper. Melanie stared at the photo for a long time until she said, ‘I don’t know.’
Her husband, Johan Posthumus, arrived when we were on our way to the door. He was not much taller than his wife. He had protruding ears and a slight paunch. He treated Melanie as if he still couldn’t believe his luck.
As we drove off, they stood close together in the light of the veranda. He kept one hand on his wife’s shoulder, the other waved us goodbye. I read relief in the gesture.
When we turned on to the Nl at a quarter past eleven that night, Emma made a single notation and then put the pen and paper away and stared out of the window for a long time. I wondered what she was thinking. Would she, like me, ponder the glorious irony of Melanie Posthumus – intellectually challenged, but blessed with an instinctive ancient wisdom, knowing precisely how to use her sexy body and pretty face to snare the reluctant Cobie de Villiers? I’d sat there listening to Melanie, the breathless chatter, the childlike naivety, and wondered: why Cobus? As a spa therapist she must have had a constant supply of more well-to-do, better socially adjusted men. What was it about her self-image and genetic requirements that made her choose the ‘outlander’. (That mutation of ‘outsider’ was perhaps her most amusing misuse of the language. It said a lot about the emerging syndrome of quasi-intellectuals. Satellite television brought National Geographic, Discovery and the History Channel to the common crowd, so everyone was familiar with the jargon, although their terminology was frequently faulty.) Was it simply that Melanie wanted the one who didn’t immediately come drooling after her like Pavlov’s dog? Beautiful women do that, even those that aren’t brain surgeons, because the lovely exterior often hides a gnawing insecurity.
