Vultures in the Wind

by Peter Rimmer

  “The pity is that no one listens any more. Even many in the church are too busy with man’s politics. Some of the world’s great religions have given it a word. Fundamentalism. But now even that slogan has political connotations. We must read the Bible and live by God’s word, not by the words of man who too often has a hidden motive for his exhortations. Let us be good first and, when we are truly good, we will have earned the love of Christ and then, maybe, we will have the true faith for which I yearn.”

  Hector looked at the man for some time, the sun having gone down behind the elms. They had talked for a long time. It was a beautiful evening with the swallows flying high.

  “Would you join me for supper? I don’t want to be alone.”

  “That’s why I’m here,” smiled the Reverend Williams.

  “She died right there in your chair.”

  “I know.”

  “Who told you?”

  “No one. I just know. There are so many things we don’t understand and there is so little time to find out… Throughout my fifty years, I have found it easier to live by following Christ. He, you see, was a good man. It is that example that is the great comfort for my life, without which it would have no meaning. Maybe, just maybe, if I live long enough, I will be blessed with the truth of God. It is my hope and should be yours.”

  “Now you are selling me your religion.” But Hector was smiling.

  “Maybe just a little. Shall we be friends?”

  “I could do with a friend… A glass of wine with the cold beef?”

  “A game of chess?” suggested the minister.

  “Have you read Plato?”

  “All of him. He reads closely with Christ. Socrates was also a good man and they made him drink the hemlock.”

  Together they rose and went into the house. The parish priest left at one o’clock in the morning. Hector finally slept as the sun was rising in the east. The birds were singing. God’s overture to the new born day.

  Luke’s situation was impossible. The baby had been his to feed and look after for over a month, and twice he was forced to postpone a trip to Angola where the ANC were building up their military forces to help the South West African People’s Organisation force South Africa out of what they preferred to call Namibia. With Cuban air cover, military equipment and logistical troops from the Marxist MPLA, there was a good chance of forcing P W Botha into his first military defeat. And Luke wished to visit the war zone so that, when he asked for funds, his pleas for help were authentic and up to date.

  But he could not move from his flat with the baby. After Angola, he was scheduled to tour America as a guest of Jesse Jackson and there was a substantial amount of money to be gleaned from that source. But what could he do with the baby he asked himself. Even had he wished to put his son up for adoption, there were complications, as the child had not been born in England. And adoption for Luke was not an option. A son had a right to his real father, and how would he know what strangers would do for the boy?

  Luke’s mother and father were dead, the kraal behind Second Beach, Port St Johns, long eaten by the termites, and any relations he might have had were unknown to him. The party, quite rightly, just laughed. Told him to find a wife and give the boy to her to look after, and in the meantime get on with the job. There was a war to be fought and won, and the day of the great liberation was upon them, with half the black townships in South Africa ungovernable and sanctions forcing the white economy to crack. The black kids were boycotting school, no one was paying rent to the white controlled municipalities, garbage was not being collected and bombs going off in white supermarkets.

  South Africa was spiralling downwards towards chaos and revolution, when the only people who would be able to restore order, like Robert Mugabe’s Zanu in Zimbabwe, would be Mandela’s ANC. They were winning, and would Luke Mbeki please get on with the job, and fast, and stop worrying about a baby. There were a lot more babies in South Africa with a lot more problems than the one he was complaining about. When the struggle was won, they would all have time to worry about minor problems.

  “Don’t you have anyone you can trust to look after the boy?” His neighbour worked during the day and had her own children to look after, two of them in the same sized, one-roomed flat – ‘flat’ being the polite word for a hole in the wall.

  “Yes, there is, but he’s white.”

  “You revolutionaries make me laugh, babe,” chuckled the woman. “Make me laugh. All those people out there doing good and all you got’s a white to trust. Oh, I see, one of them commies. Don’t go for commies. Had a friend from Cuba and she didn’t talk too well about commies. If you ask me, best you can do is give up this revolution and use that degree you have to get a job. English university, you say. Get a job, Luke. Revolutions never got nobody nowhere. You look at where I come from and mark my words. That Caribbean they’re always revolting about something. Don’t feed nobody. Where’s this white man live so we can get this little child a home while you throw bombs around?”

  “In South Africa.”

  “Now I’ve heard it all. You spend all your days finding ways to kick them whites clear out of Africa and you tell me that.”

  “We don’t want all the whites to go.”

  “Sounds like it to me and them. Ones who stay won’t be no good to you. Just the poor and lazy. No man worth a day’s pay stays in a place he ain’t wanted. Why should he? By the time you lot win your revolution, there won’t be a brain left in the country, black, or white, if you ask me.”

  “I hope you’re wrong.”

  “I’m never wrong, Luke Mbeki, which is why you got to do something about this child. I can’t help no more and you sure can’t. You got to do something, and fast.”

  The letter to Matthew Gray took a month to arrive, through the hands of the paramount chief. The cable was waiting under Luke’s door when he came back from the day care centre that looked after the boy during the day.

  MY WIFE AND I WILL ALWAYS HAVE A ROOM FOR A CHILD OF YOURS. HAVE BOY SIMILAR AGE. LIKE OLD TIMES. MATT

  When Luke Mbeki had read the cable, he sat down in the solitary chair and cried. Chelsea de La Cruz had refused to have anything to do with the boy. Matthew Gray had been the little boy’s last chance and, as Luke thought of the long beach and the wild bananas, the giant wild figs, the river with mullet, the gully and oysters and the green slopes rising from the Gap, he knew the boy would be safe for him when he finally went home, when the struggle was over and they could all live as men should live, in harmony, without oppression, without apartheid.

  The next day, Luke flew to Luanda with the child, and from Luanda in Angola the boy was taken to Botswana. From there he was smuggled into South Africa, wrapped in a blanket across the back of a black girl who was trained to place limpet mines in street dustbins and who would work out of Umtata in the Transkei.

  This was how Sipho Mbeki, named after his grandfather, came to the land of his forefathers, to the very place where they had lived for two centuries, and he howled his lungs out with delight. The boy was five months old and arrived just in time for Christmas.

  After touring Angola for a week, Luke knew the total onslaught being prepared for South Africa was real. Antonio van Perreira dos Santos Cassero had flown him from one MPLA stronghold to another, and within a year the push to remove Jonas Savimbi and his Unita movement from the face of Angola would begin. To ensure the South Africans were kept busy, there would be major incursions by SWAPO guerrillas, backed by the ANC, into Ovamboland in northern South West Africa. The Marxist MPLA were backed by Cuban troops and the Cuban air force, and in overall command was a Russian general.

  “By the end of this year,” said Antonio, “our forward base at Cuito Cuanavale will be ready and our MIG 23s will dominate the South African Mirages and Buccaneers. We will shoot them out of the sky and control the air space over northern South West Africa. On the ground, our T54 and T55 tanks will push the South African army into the sea. Then I will have a nice piece
of land and grow coffee in the land of my mother’s people. I will be home.”

  They were walking in part of a military complex, the Cubans wishing to impress the ANC with their power. Luke looked at the man and wondered why it always ended up the same way. You conquered a land under whatever pretext and took the land for yourself, the conquered working the land as serfs. A cold shiver ran through his body at a premonition of what was really going to happen to Africa when communism won the revolution. The agenda of the black nationalists, like himself, was very different from those of the communists, but each were using the other with the smug certainty that when the battle was won they could control the other party.

  It had never occurred to Luke that the Cubans intended to farm Angola. He had thought they were crusaders. Russia gave them five billion US dollars a year to prop up their economy and, in exchange, they fought the capitalists in Africa. There was a price for freedom. Would the ANC freedom be a communist dictatorship with an economy in tatters like Cuba, backed up by Russia and doing exactly what the Russians told them to do? Puppets of the Russians! Was he spending the best years of his life to replace the Boer with the Russian?

  Except for a very few blacks, would it make any difference? What they wanted to control would have gone. The great wealth of South Africa would have trickled away. He knew better than most that the most difficult quality to find was good management. Would they inherit the mines and the industries, only to find they had no one left to make them work? That a piece of economic sanctions that they heralded in the ANC as the big weapon for change would have changed so much that there was nothing worth having? What would the people do to those who made so many promises? The only freedom they would have would be the freedom to starve, and the predators like Colonel Cassero would own their land.

  Even his friend Matthew Gray had withdrawn his management, not interested in being labelled a white settler/exploiter. And the withdrawal of Matt’s skills was far more devastating than all his workers going on strike. Matt could survive wherever he went, but could the workers survive without jobs?

  “How are you going to get land?” Luke asked innocently.

  “These people will need someone to organise them. They won’t do it alone. They’ll be only too pleased to give me land to provide employment. It’s a beautiful country. I’m so very excited. What you do when we win, hey, Luke?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “They make you minister. Then you get rich, hey. Ministers always get rich. Me, I grow coffee and get rich. Big house on the hill. Sell the coffee to the Russians. You come and visit.”

  “It wasn’t what I had in mind.”

  “What then? What it all about? You think it all about a new philosophy? Poof! It all about money. You see, Minister Mbeki. You get rich. We drink beer together.”

  3

  Teddie Botha was harassed. Security Lion in England was launching a retirement annuity product for ‘top-hat’ executives. The new Security Life building in which he sat, on the twenty-second floor, was only seventy per cent let. Lucky Kuchinski, the best general sales manager a CEO could have, was drinking too much and would listen to not one word of advice, and Archie Fletcher-Wood was spending half his day on the luncheon circuit, which was not helping the running of a company that controlled seven billion rand in assets and had to find a weekly home for thirty million rand that came into the company through corporate pension funds, single premiums, and everybody and his dog paying fifty rand a month for thirty years.

  The company was saturated with other people’s money and the only place to put it each week was on the stock exchange, as the rate of inflation was running higher than the short or long-term interest rates. To attract potential customers and satisfy the old who looked to the Security group for their pension money, the company had to show a growth in their investment funds in excess of the rate of inflation.

  Money could not legally be transferred outside South Africa, and the British and South African companies were kept at arm’s length for fear of breaching the stringent South African exchange control regulations. Anybody with money wanted it outside the country, as sanctions bit and overseas companies disinvested under pressure from the ANC. Local money caught in the trap chased itself in a spiral, pushing up the share prices but doing nothing else for the economy or the people. And, to add to his troubles, he was due to report to the army in four days’ time to run around the arid north of South West Africa to demonstrate to the Russians that, if their tanks came any nearer to the border, the South Africans would go in to knock them out, using hot pursuit of Swapo and ANC guerrillas as the excuse.

  And then there was Tilda, a charming girl who had every right to desire marriage – but how could he ever find the time to consider the consequences of a wife and children when half the day was spent trying to find ten minutes to have a crap? Tilda was twenty-three, very pretty, and made him think of her far too frequently when he had other matters that required his concentration.

  The predators in the corporate world were snapping at his door, looking for the first mistake, and while everything was going well he kept them away. Every year the actuaries analysed the company’s commitments to its policyholders and told him his solvency rate. The drop in the property and share market in England in 1973 had caused two big life insurance companies to collapse through very little fault of their own, and as it had been shortly after he had joined the company and then been forced to do his two years’ national service before returning to find out what running a company was all about, the memory of their fate had stuck in his mind. Archie had done a fairly adequate job in his absence, but the man preferred to implement business policies personally rather than calculate what had to be done and give instructions to others.

  Tilda had moved into his penthouse in Sandown piece by piece. First a toothbrush, followed by a set of clean underwear, then an evening dress, and something to wear in the morning. Then she cancelled the rent on her own flat and moved in with him. In some ways, this arrangement did have its advantages, as it saved the travelling time required to pick up a date and take her home after dinner. Never once had Teddie thought of living with Tilda, but he had insufficient energy to fight the reality when it had taken place. He wondered what she did during his trips round the branches and overseas but, when he asked, she said that she merely watched television and waited for him to come home. She was very pretty, so Teddie left the matter as it was and proceeded with the mammoth task of running his business.

  When he returned home with the army call-up phone call still ringing in his ear, she was already in bed, tucked up and looking smug.

  “I’m pregnant,” she informed him.

  Teddie looked at her, then at the door, then at the window.

  “My mother thinks it’s wonderful,” she continued, patting the soft cover of the bed. “Edward, aren’t you pleased? I mean, we do live together, which is almost the same as being married. How was your day?”

  “I’m in the army, Monday,” Teddie replied flatly.

  “What do you think about the baby?”

  “I have a lot more pressing problems at the moment.”

  “You should be pleased. I’m pleased.”

  “Is there any food?”

  “There’s cold chicken in the fridge… Mother wants to meet you.”

  While Teddie was in Johannesburg, wondering how sure he could ever be that he was indeed the father of the child, a storm was raging along the Wild Coast a thousand kilometres to the southeast. Winds rushing at one hundred and sixty kilometres an hour were thrashing huge waves onto the shore and the fronds were being torn from the wild banana trees all along the coast. The August storms were the same each year and the colony’s fishing boat had been hauled well out of the way of the sea, driftwood had been stored for weeks, and wooden shutters placed firmly across the face of the hut on the hill. Giant sprays from the Gap threw salt water over the thatch and dripped it down the shutters when the wind finally stopped throwing it farthe
r up the hill.

  Inside the big rondavel, a fire warmed the hearth and a large fish stew bubbled in its three-legged pot in one corner of the fireplace over its own small pile of coals. The minstrel boy was playing to himself with his back to the stone wall next to the bookshelves, his bare feet towards the warmth of the fire. He had been watching the food for some time while he sang. At the side away from the fire, Raleen snuggled against his hip and smiled at the words of the old English ballad that sang of a farmer’s boy who to the wars had gone. Sophie and Charles Farquhar were at opposite ends of the room, and Jonathan Holland, as high as a kite on dagga was watching Raleen, watching the minstrel boy.

  Stretched out on a rush carpet in front of the fire, oblivious to the storm raging across the ocean outside, Matthew Gray was fast asleep, his length quite remarkable at full stretch. Lorna stirred the iron pot with a piece of driftwood and waggled her finger at Peace, who was about to tickle her father’s bare foot with a chicken feather. Robert Gray, one and a half years old, lay flat on his back on a mattress and, like his father, was fast asleep. Next to him, the year old Sipho Mbeki had just had his nappy changed and was watching the flames rise and fall from the fire, his coal black eyes accentuated by the pure whites of the surrounds.

  In front of the fire, Carel van Tonder was whittling a piece of wood to make a hand line for fishing. In front of Sophia, a pile of children’s homework was being read and corrected, her school now teaching fifteen pupils, ranging from six and a half year old Peace to a Xhosa man of nineteen who wanted to learn how to read. Charles Farquhar was resigned to Sophia’s rejection of him, having discovered the reason, and was giving thought to his next move. Matt had completed eleven paintings, all of which had found their way to Bernard Strover and thence to the man in London or the Everard Read gallery in Johannesburg.