Vultures in the Wind

by Peter Rimmer

  She was twenty-five and relied on Luke for every cent she grudgingly spent. The movement paid her rent and gave her a monthly allowance that would stop the moment they killed her Luke. When she went for the money, her deep fear was to be told there was nothing for her. Men went missing, and then the money stopped. Even had she wished to leave Luke, she had no money to pay for her flight. She was trapped, and now she was pregnant. She longed for her days in Villancoulos, for her days in London.

  After four months she was sure that Luke was dead, and at the end of the month she ran out of money. She would have to ask and then be told. Some times before now she had thought of writing to Matthew Gray, but now he was gone and probably dead. And, four months pregnant, no one else would look at her any longer.

  She waited another two days with her misery, and then walked the dusty blocks to the offices of the ANC.

  “Am I still on the list?”

  “No one said take it off.”

  “Thank God for that. I’m pregnant.”

  “Are you now? I am sure comrade Mbeki is overjoyed.”

  “He doesn’t know. Where is he? Will they talk to me in the office?”

  The girl looked at her with sympathy, but there was nothing she could do.

  “There’s a war on. When we win the glorious victory.”

  Struggling to control her hatred, Chelsea forced herself not to tell the girl to stop talking propaganda. Judging by the situation in Mozambique, she and the rest of the people would be a lot worse off when the victory came and Russia stopped funding the ANC. A few would prosper, but not her Luke. He fought because he believed in the struggle, not to get a position of power and wealth. He believed in the cause and justice for the people, and he was a damned fool.

  She kept back her tears until she was outside in the street. She had food for a month. She wiped her face dry. In Mozambique very few people had food for a month. And a month was a long time.

  Luke was not in the bush fighting the war, but back in Soweto, where cheap labour for the whites was supplied. Here the workers rose at five in the morning to fight their way on to the crowded trains that took them into the white man’s city and the menial jobs that kept them alive. Luke was back at the heart of his own revolution, spending weeks fermenting unrest among his people and keeping out of the hands of the police, never sleeping in the same house for longer than three days. The police wanted Luke Mbeki, he knew that, and their powers did not require a warrant or even a trial. If they found him, they would put him in jail and kill him slowly. He knew all about the South African police.

  The white people in South Africa were too powerful to be overthrown by a guerrilla army. The liberation movements were having enough trouble in Rhodesia with the white farmers and a white army that never exceeded three thousand in the field at any one time. And ZIPRA alone had committed ten thousand troops, deployed below Lake Kariba and around the Victoria Falls.

  There was a new strategy and it would work in South Africa among the sprawling black townships, among the filth and poverty created by apartheid. They would make the townships ungovernable. The new comrades would compel the people to force the government to commit such atrocities that the world would crush apartheid. The children were to boycott the schools, refusing to be taught in Afrikaans. In June, the children and students would barricade the streets of Soweto, burning tyres and throwing petrol bombs at the police. They would set Soweto on fire, burning any building owned by the government. They would rise victorious from the rubble if it took them fifty years. They would tear down apartheid brick by brick.

  One settler, one bullet. The great revolution was about to begin. Luke had not thought of Chelsea for over a month. There were other things on his mind.

  The Soweto riots were short, violent and deadly, the police acting exactly as Luke had intended. They shot children in the streets, putting a ring of steel around the township while they crushed the unrest. The ANC had enough martyrs to last them for years and at last the world community took notice and the noose of trade sanctions tightened, helping significantly to impoverish the country.

  The rage of hatred swept through the blacks of South Africa, and the ones that wanted to fight were channelled out of the country through Botswana to military training camps in Zambia, Tanzania, Russia, China and Cuba. Among the stench of burning tyres and burning flesh, Luke slipped out of the country. Black schooling had collapsed and two generations of children would find themselves without a proper education. Their elders in their wisdom and search for justice had impoverished them forever.

  At the time of the Soweto riots, Hector Fortescue-Smythe, the sleeper, warned Moscow that Armscor was about to explode an atomic device in the Namib Desert in South West Africa. The Russians let it be known in the United States Senate, a US spy satellite picked up a flash, and every newspaper in the world reported the explosion. The screws of sanctions, flamed by Soweto, turned quick revolutions. The white apartheid government was put on the run and Swapo guerrillas were infiltrated from southern Angola into northern South West Africa, into Ovamboland. A second front had been opened against the white racists of Southern Africa.

  When Chelsea opened the door to the flat, Luke was standing there well pleased with himself. He had been away for eight months.

  Luke put a hand to her belly. “It will be a boy. We need lots of men for the struggle.”

  Chelsea felt sick. All he ever thought about was the struggle. She was breeding fodder for the white man’s cannons and there was nothing she could do to stop it. This was the real world, a constant, bloody nightmare.

  “How long are you home for, Luke?”

  “Enough time to look after you and the baby.”

  “Are we going to be married?”

  “Why not? Every boy has to be certain of his father… We will have a big wedding to celebrate the start of the revolution. Invite all our friends. Comrade Nkomo will be our guest of honour. We will invite Comrade Tambo to come from London. You are so beautiful Chelsea. Let us go to our bed and make love.”

  “It won’t hurt the baby?”

  “I would never hurt my son.”

  Frikkie Swart was ushered into the office of the minister in charge of state security. To Frikkie, Minister Kloss appeared remarkably calm considering the political circumstances. The man looked as if he had just played a relaxed game of golf and that Soweto riots and atomic bombs never entered his head. He looked the perfect example of confidence, a man in control, a man enjoying his power.

  Since rising to the number three position in the South African embassy in London, Frikkie had served the ministry of foreign affairs in four countries before finding himself posted to the bureau of state security. He preferred diplomacy to spying, but a government employee did what he was told to do. He handed the file to the minister and stood to attention while it was read, needing the comfort of the door behind his back.

  “The sod’s been using me,” Frikkie said in Afrikaans. The minister looked away from the file and out of his window in the Union Building at the beautifully kept lawns and gardens three storeys down below. The sun was shining, the sky cloudless; it was a typical day on the highveld. “Have him arrested fast. I don’t care about his British passport.” The minister nodded his head and Frikkie made for the door.

  “Are you married?” the minister asked just before he disappeared from view.

  “No, sir.”

  “That’s a good thing.”

  When Frikkie shut the minister’s door carefully, he had no idea why his lack of a wife was a good thing. The fact was that he knew it was a disadvantage in his career, but women intimidated Frikkie Swart. He preferred a book of rules and the regulations to go by.

  Hector was a whole day ahead of his father-in-law, and when the police arrived at his nice house in Sandown (he had preferred living in Johannesburg rather than Pretoria) he was long gone, having crossed the Botswana border on his way to Gaborone and a plane to London, quite satisfied with a job well done. The missi
le and nuclear programme had been far too dangerous to allow it to come to fruition. He was looking forward to joining Andrew Porterstone in the anti-apartheid movement and had even thought of standing for parliament. He had some good friends in the British labour party, all of them reporting ultimately to Moscow.

  Helena’s baby-blue eyes were full of the tears of frustration. For fourteen years she was sure that she had been deceiving Hector, and all that time he had been using her. She required no prompting from her father, and instituted divorce proceedings immediately. She was going to screw him for every Smythe-Wilberforce penny he possessed and live the rest of her life in luxury without the interference of a husband. She hated him. She had always hated him. He had just made her affairs so much more convenient.

  Back in England and visiting the Cedars, a house his father had not visited for two years – which suited Hector as he disliked scenes with his father – Hector was totally relaxed for the first time since receiving his instructions from his controller in Green Park so many years earlier.

  “She won’t sue you for any money?” asked his mother.

  “It’ll cost her father his job.”

  “Never underestimate a scorned woman,” she warned him.

  “She was only using me.”

  “That is my point. Once the divorce is through, you had better find yourself a proper wife. I want some grandchildren.”

  “I’m nearly forty,” Hector replied with an air of resignation.

  “Then find yourself a young wife.”

  “Yes, mother.”

  “That’s my boy. Have a biscuit with your sherry.”

  The day after Helena instituted divorce proceedings, her father received a brown envelope containing photographs and a list that ran to eleven pages. Four of the men on the list were his friends and contemporaries. The list read like a who’s who in Pretoria.

  The girl’s appetite had been prodigious. Hector had clearly been only too well aware of his wife’s adultery. Looking at the photographs, Minister Kloss found his own daughter disgusting. She was an embarrassment to him and the country. He thought carefully for a moment.

  “Are you free for dinner, Mister Swart? Tonight at my house… I want you to meet my daughter. Her husband, as you know, has run away. A traitor to this country. You have not met Helena?”

  “I have not had the pleasure.”

  The unintentional double meaning that could have been inferred from Swart’s innocent response went unnoticed by the minister. “Then you shall tonight,” he replied. “She is deeply shocked by her husband’s desertion, you understand.”

  Half an hour later, the minister visited his daughter and showed her the photographs. Even she was surprised.

  “How the hell did he?…”

  “Your husband works for the Russians. You were had, Helena, in more ways than one. Now I want your word that a quiet divorce and a new marriage, this time arranged by me and not the communists, will lead to your complete discretion.” The minister spoke with grim determination, making it clear that his decision was not to be opposed.

  “Who is he?”

  “Come to dinner with your mother and me tonight. The man will do exactly as he is told. You are thirty-three years old. Have some children. Grow up, Helena, before you ruin your life.”

  “I hate Hector.”

  “So do I. So do I.”

  Archie Fletcher-Wood was so tired that he could scream. That morning there were twelve notes on the pad next to his bed, and each one represented a period of broken sleep. He had tried alcohol and sleeping pills, but both had made him feel worse the following day, and every day there were more and still more decisions to be made.

  He had begun to curse the day he had ever met Matthew Gray. He wished the damned Kruger rands of Lobengula had stayed in the jungle, lost for another seventy years. He was one year off fifty, and if he did not get off the spinning wheel he would die. Lucky had done the clever thing by refusing to go on the board, leaving him to train the sales force and come and go as he wished.

  Archie was finally at the end of his tether. This time Teddie Botha was not going to put him off with a holiday and assurances of how much he was needed. This time he was going to resign and find himself a place in the country. Get a housekeeper to look after him. And sleep. When he reached Teddie Botha’s office, there was no doubt in his mind.

  “Arch. You can’t; I’ve just been called up for three months. There’s shit in south west. The Cubans are pouring troops into Angola. You’ll be on your own again, I’m afraid. You look terrible. Why don’t you take the day off and go and have some sleep?”

  “Because I can’t sleep, Goddammit! This bloody job and this bloody company have got me so I can’t goddam sleep. No one makes any decisions on their bloody own. They bloody well wait for me or you.”

  “That’s my point. Go down to the cottage at Umhlanga Rocks till the end of the week. I have to report to my unit on Monday.”

  “Why the hell did Matt?…”

  “I don’t know. He was your friend, not mine. And don’t even think of doing a Matthew Gray. The staff and policyholders can’t have two directors leaving them in the lurch. If we want to own something, Archie, we have to be responsible. Ownership and position carry great responsibilities in this life. There is always a price to pay. For myself, I prefer to run things. And so do you… Why, you’re so good at it. And you are, Archie. You did a bloody good job for two years on your own, and together we run a first-class company. Our figures are second only to the Old Mutual. Look on the bright side.”

  “But I can’t sleep.”

  “Sea air and Umhlanga. That’ll do the trick. Now, are we or are we not going to expand the life company into Australia, despite not being allowed to own controlling interest?”

  “Keep out of Australia,” advised Archie, somewhat tartly. “Place is run by socialists. Socialists are only good at borrowing money. They leave someone else to pay it back.”

  “Are you serious? No to Australia?”

  “Totally bloody serious. Now can I go to sleep?”

  “I’m sorry about the army, Arch.”

  “Then stop laughing.” Teddie kept looking at him with a grin until Archie laughed.

  “I’ll look at what’s on your desk,” Teddie agreed.

  “Thanks, Teddie.”

  “And remember; there’s no pleasure without pain.”

  “My mother told me that ever since I was six.”

  “And she was right.”

  No one in the colony took Carel van Tonder seriously, which was exactly as he wanted. He was the buffoon, the butt of jokes, the poet who wrote crazy words in both official languages, whether they were read in English or Afrikaans it made no difference. The whole lot of them were gibberish. He was one of the first to move into the old huts that were meant to have been for tourists but in which even the hardened visitors who came down to fish the big Cape salmon refused to stay, as the roofs leaked when it rained, the water when it did actually flow through the rusty old taps was brown, and there was no electricity. The only advantage was the setting, up on the hills overlooking Second Beach, with a clear view down the sands to the Gap over the top of two deserted houses with roofs that had once been green.

  A black man had been sold the property with fourteen huts when Transkei received its independence, when people who were white in the Transkei were forced to sell their properties. What happened was that the apartheid government in Pretoria gave the white owner the market price for his property and gave it to the Transkei government for redistribution to black Transkeians at a fraction of the original price.

  It was grand apartheid at its best, as in exchange all blacks who were Xhosa, wherever they lived, were made citizens of the Transkei, could vote in the Transkei and own property there. It was the political way of getting them out of South Africa, while physically keeping their labour. It was one of man’s more twisted inventions, and it did not work from whichever angle it was viewed. Even the blacks w
ho received the white houses did not have enough income to maintain their political gifts, and the holiday houses of an earlier era fell into disrepair, which suited the purpose of Carel van Tonder.

  Carel encouraged the idea of an artists’ colony and urged the black man to rent his huts to down-and-out whites for very low monthly rentals that were still greater than the man was earning at a tourist camp for fishermen. The artists put some effort into restoring the huts and making them habitable, and when Mark arrived a water system was restored. It had been a puzzle to Carel how Mark knew from where to draw water when he and others had searched for a fresh water supply without success. Mark even found pipes that had been used before, and all within a week of moving into one of the huts. Carel was sure there was more to Mark than Mark was prepared to say. They were most likely both of them fugitives from the law.

  Carel owned the only motorised transport in the colony, an old bakkie with which he spent hours tinkering and which became the butt of a string of jokes. But what Mark and the rest of them did not know was that the engine was new, along with all the other working parts. Just the exhaust had been holed to sound terrible and there were stones in the hub caps. When he went off to write his great incomprehensible poems, everyone laughed again. He said he covered his costs by bringing back vegetables that he sold in the village to the stores, bringing back a few cabbages for the colony to eat.

  But it was not the cabbages that made Carel his money but the dagga hidden beneath. Carel was the centre of a sophisticated ring that slipped dagga out of the Transkei to the markets of the world. Seventeen kilometres past Third Beach, at the end of a goat track, stood a thatched hut, inhabited by an old, sleepy black man whose job it was, on the appointed night, to shine his torch out to sea. The Transkei coast was a darling for smugglers as the Transkei government did not own a navy. It had not crossed the mind of a single person in the colony of Port St Johns that Carel van Tonder was anything but a mildly eccentric fool.