Vultures in the Wind

by Peter Rimmer

  “You’re wrong, Lucky. You’re wrong.”

  “I’m glad, Teddie,” Lucky responded, after taking a moment to grasp what Teddie was talking about. “Hope you’re not mad at me.”

  “Better to know now than think later. Have a cigar.”

  “Your son’s not born yet, Teddie.”

  “But he will be. That’s the point.”

  “Congratulations.”

  When Lucky replaced the receiver he looked at the phone for a long time. Then he shook his head.

  “Some of them just get lucky,” he said to himself. He was certain a lot more had gone into that pregnancy than met the eye.

  The wedding was a wild affair. Not wishing to have the newspapers involved, they used the garden of Archie Fletcher-Woods’s house, erecting a marquee for two hundred guests. The magistrate came to the house as Teddie had not been able to tell the minister that his wife-to-be was three and a half months pregnant. The Dutch Reformed Church, which believed so strongly that God made the Afrikaners his chosen people who should never mix their blood with the blacks, thought just as strongly about marrying pregnant brides. Each was a sin before God.

  Teddie had met the mother in his euphoria at becoming a prospective father and found her charming. Before the ceremony, Theo avoided Lucky but when the deed was done and signed, she feigned suddenly to recognise his presence. The bride’s mother was more blooming than the bride.

  “Well, if it isn’t Lucky Kuchinski!”

  “Dear old Theo. You really must be whooping with joy.”

  “Why you’ve lost most of that lovely Polish accent. Just a little still maybe. What are you doing these days?”

  Lucky just looked at her and shook his head but when she walked away to find the bride and groom, his eyes followed her through the milling crowd. Then the band started to play and Lucky felt every one of his fifty-four years.

  “What’s the matter, Lucky; you seen a ghost?” asked Archie, coming up to chat.

  “You could say that, Arch.”

  “Matt didn’t come.”

  “Did you think he would?”

  “Not really. You know,” Archie said, turning to his live-in lover, “maybe we should get married.”

  “Yes, dear,” Sunny, clinging to Archie’s arm, as usual agreed with whatever he said, as within ten minutes she knew he would change his mind.

  She had cried at the wedding ceremony, as much for herself as for Tilda Botha. She had been living with Archie for four years, which was better than working as a middle-aged secretary. At forty-four, life could have been worse, even if Archie did threaten to kick her out every six months. The man had more moods than hours in the day, and the wound in his leg gave him hell every time it rained. But they did have their softer moments; not many, but some. All through the day she had hoped Matt would come to the wedding. The older… She became, the fewer of her hopes ever came to fruition. She had learnt to live from day to day and her life had started off with such promise. She was day dreaming again.

  “It’s going to rain later, dear,” she said.

  “I can feel it in my leg.”

  “Tell me when you want to go.”

  The day after the wedding, Teddie put on his uniform. They had postponed his call-up for three weeks, the expected incursions by SWAPO into the white farming area south of Ovamboland not having happened at the end of the dry season. Teddie looked in the mirror and shook his head.

  “What’s the matter darling?” asked Tilda.

  “It’s going to be hot in Ovamboland. Just before the rains “

  “You will be careful.”

  “Only the Cubans can give us any real trouble, and they’re hundreds of kilometres further north. We’ll go down to Cape Town when I get back.”

  When she kissed him goodbye downstairs and watched him drive away she really did hope the child in her womb would be a boy and that the boy’s father was indeed Teddie Botha. He had been so thrilled at the idea of fatherhood.

  Her only fear was that her husband would discover that she had not slept on her own every night he was away. She had slept away from the penthouse, but Johannesburg was still a mining camp and everyone talked. She should be able to know when the baby was born; know for herself. She had told no one, least of all her mother. Teddie’s chances of being the father were one against four. Every time Tilda Blaze had had a few too many drinks, she had never been able to say no. She smiled wanly to herself as the car disappeared. She wondered how many people really knew who their fathers were. She for one did not know hers.

  She turned back to the block of flats and rode up in the lift to the penthouse. Nothing mattered, provided that Teddie Botha never found out she had slept with other men after she had spent the weekend with him in her flat. Deliberately and firmly, she put the problem out of her mind; it was Teddie’s baby and she was going to make sure of that. Then she laughed out loud and sat down on the big couch that looked out through the French doors to the patio and the small plunge swimming pool.

  “Got the best and richest and still don’t know what I want,” she said out loud to herself. Everything bad happened so quickly.

  The following Sunday, while Teddie was suffering forty-five degree heat and thinking through his role as father, Archie rang the door-bell of the flat Lucky had occupied for seven years, and was surprised to find Lucky on his own. It was twelve o’clock in the morning and already thunder clouds were building, along with the humidity.

  “Where’s Sunny?” asked Lucky, letting in his friend of so many years.

  “I left her alone.”

  “Want a beer?”

  “Sure. Why not… You and I see each other in the office most days, but ever since Sunny moved in we never seem to talk.”

  Lucky went to the fridge and came back with two cans of beer, the frost dripping softly down the sides. They ‘kissed’ open the cans in unison and drank. Neither of them ever used a glass for beer.

  “You’re a married man, Arch. Life changes between bachelors when one of them marries or lives with a chick… Let’s sit on the stoep. Should be cooler. What’s the occasion, Arch?”

  They sat down on the swing couch and looked out over the blocks of flats. Rosebank was overcrowded like so much else of Johannesburg.

  “You ever hear from Aldo?” said Archie.

  “Not for years.”

  “I did… He’s married. Running his safari camp again. Mugabe seems to have that country under control. Tourists coming back. AIdo’s a father twice over.”

  “Who’d he marry?”

  “Didn’t say… You think we’ve been right? No real wives and no kids?”

  “You got to add it all together. Could have got a safe job in London all those years ago. You could, anyway. We didn’t, Arch. Kept on running. There’s a price for everything. But add it all up and we’re okay. You and I did a lot of living. Just now we feel old. Happens to everyone. You see, Arch, it’s all coming to an end. Few more years. I try to put a brave face on it. But we’re rich. Wouldn’t like to be old and poor. No regrets. Better to regret what you haven’t done than what you have.”

  “What I mean is we missed out on a family.”

  “Can you think of any of the women you should have married?” asked Lucky.

  “None, really.”

  “That’s the point. You and I married women in the plural.”

  “You think we’ll get lonely as we get older?”

  “Probably… But would it be any better with a wife? Kids pushed off. You know many married at our age who’d do the same again? Half are too scared to argue with their wives.”

  “Matt’s happy,” said Archie.

  “Matt’s always been happy. Only all-together man I ever met. You think I should take out Theo again?”

  “Why are you asking me?”

  “She’s well over forty.”

  “You think me and Sunny… Maybe. You sick of young girls, Lucky?”

  “You know, Arch, I just can’t be bothered to cha
se any more… You want another beer?”

  “Whisky, man, whisky. This is serious. Jo’burg’s oldest teenager has gone senile… Fact is, I was thinking of marrying Sunny. Make her happy. Poor kid’s helluva insecure.”

  “Shit, Arch, I’d better join you with the Scotch.”

  “We’ve known each other so long, me and Sunny. That means a lot. Memories together. We know the same people. We can sit for hours without talking. Maybe that’s all it’s about at our age. You don’t want to have to get up and start performing.”

  “Good to see you, you old bugger.”

  “Likewise, Lucky. We’ve come a long way together and friends are important. Most important of all, I should think. If I marry Sunny, would you be my best man?”

  “Be an honour, Archie.”

  Except in very bad weather, Matt never closed both stable doors to his rondavel, the top part always being left open on the catch. The cats and dogs could get in and out, and if anyone wished to steal anything badly enough they were welcome. The rafters were used as clothes hangers for the few clothes owned by the family, and without a refrigerator there was little food in the house apart from bottles of pickles, dried fish or pumpkins on the roof of the small shed that had been built to serve the growing family and which housed an interesting adaption of Mr Crapper’s ingenious invention.

  The three young black children had appeared on the beach a week earlier but they were shyer than a duiker from the forest. They lived in a small cave on the other side of the Gap, which Matt knew to be dangerous when the seas were high and the crashing waves inundated the cove. No one had been able to get near enough to warn them of the danger. They were living off raw mussels and anything else washed up on the shore, and it was quickly clear that they did not belong on the Wild Coast. The black families who lived in the fresh clearings behind the colony were as much in the dark as Matt. Even a word through to the paramount chief threw no light on where the children were from and what they were doing scavenging on the beach. They were too young to be known to the police in South Africa or the Transkei. All three were thin and badly fed.

  Lorna became certain that, whenever they left the rondavel unattended, some of the bread that Raleen brought to them every morning, fresh from the oven, was gone when they returned. Not all the bread, but some; and it was the first time anything had gone missing, as waifs and strays who drifted into Second Beach were fed anyway and, if they stayed, found something productive to do that would pay for their board and lodging. The path from the rondavel led down to the beach in full sight of everyone and, as the big hut had its back to the rock on the slope of the steep hill, it was not possible to approach from any other direction.

  The Heath Robinson affair that Matt had set up to slam shut the top half of the stable door was a masterpiece of unconventional invention, but it worked; and when the door shut, it could not be opened from the inside.

  Leaving for the full morning after the bread was delivered to ensure that the trap worked properly, Matt was not surprised to find that, when he opened the door, a child of ten was looking at him with coal-black, terrified eyes. His thin arms were clutched across his bare chest and his tatty trousers that had once reached all the way down to the ground were at half-mast and just about to fall off completely.

  Very politely Matt wished him good morning in Xhosa but, to stop the lad dashing for an uncertain freedom, he shut the stable doors, knowing that Lorna would let them out when he had got to the bottom of the situation. Moving across to the area they used as a kitchen, past the big canvas he was almost ready to say was complete, Matt found a breakfast fish that had only been half-eaten and offered it to the terrified child.

  “You eat that,” he said, again in Xhosa, “and then we talk.” He noticed that the piece of bread that had been detached from the morning’s loaf had not been eaten. The child was foraging for his friends. Matt sat on his home-made wooden chair with the single-shaft wooden back that was surprisingly comfortable when tried out by visitors, and kept his eyes on the waif who was holding the food, too scared to eat.

  “Eat it,” commanded Matt in a very loud voice, which did the trick.

  The story that came out was far worse than anything Matt could have imagined. He had been a long time living on his island in the sun, and what the child told him brought Soweto with all its cruelty and hardships into his home, a cold wind of agonising horror that Matt found impossible to imagine had been inflicted by man. It was a story of greed, double standards and the stupendous heights of manipulation by man in his struggle for power to have and to take, to hold or to rip out of the hands of those holding. It was blind, terminal self-destruction, a whole nation killing itself. There was no past or future, only the blind fury of the disembowelling moment.

  Ever since the earliest days of the white colonialism of Africa, which pre-dated the slave trade, a colour bar had been created to keep the whites from mingling their blood with the blacks. The situation had been little different in the East where the brown people were looked down upon as inferior.

  The manifestation of man’s self-importance had reached its pinnacle when the National Party came to power in South Africa in 1948 and enacted by parliamentary law, the separation of the races. As the years of their total power progressed, they became ever more fanatical in their determination to keep the white tribe of Africa, the Afrikaner of Dutch, German and French origin, pure. They even created a new race out of their policy: the coloured, those who had been mingled, the tangible result of the sins of their forefathers. They made laws which forbade any social contact between black, white or coloured. They created areas for each of them to live apart from each other and forced pockets of the black and the coloured peoples to move out from among the whites to places far from the homes of their fathers.

  They created homelands for the blacks which represented a tiny portion of the land of South Africa and, even if the black lived and worked outside his designated homeland, a place he had mostly never seen or heard of, he was a citizen of the homeland with no rights in white South Africa, other than to work for the white man with minimal education and no trade unions. Trade unions were banned, along with anyone who disagreed with the apartheid system. The minority white English population talked liberalism, voted for the progressive party or whatever name it had at the moment, and secretly thanked their lucky stars for the National Party which maintained their privilege and wealth.

  But power corrupted, and absolute power finally corrupted absolutely. The progressively more regressive national governments became totally unaccountable to anyone, even to the whites-only parliament. The communist onslaught was their manna from heaven, and they used it to justify their total oppression of the black and coloured peoples of the country. Jail without trial, deaths in custody, forced removals, banning and jailing of any opposition, political murder, stirring up the opposition in neighbouring states: the litany continued, with the civilised world howling with frustration, but frightened of the real power of the South African defence force.

  America, in its blind and deadly fight with its own total onslaught from the ‘evil empire’, did not know what physically to do with South Africa, so it chose to talk tough and do very little. But what it did agree to do, along with the rest of the United Nations, was to impoverish the whites with trade sanctions, something they could do without getting hurt: though cynically they did make exceptions of strategic minerals that they could not buy elsewhere. Like small boys at school, they sent South Africa to Coventry, stopping sport, culture and carefully selected trade. Probably, without an armed invasion, there was nothing else for them to have done. And black opposition leaders from exile or jail could only call down the wrath of sanctions on the heads of the white government, hoping it would force it to change. But, like the white man with his separate development, his apartheid which prevented blacks from gaining a proper education or wealth, the body that made up South Africa was one, and the pain inflicted on the white bank account was felt far more
painfully in the black man’s belly. The nation was inseparably joined by an in severable umbilical cord. Apartheid threw the baby out with the bath-water, and so did sanctions. Everyone suffered, but a rich man lowering his standard of living was nothing compared to a poor man going without food.

  The children’s story told of fathers with no jobs, shacks being bulldozed by the whites for being where they should not be, according to the apartheid law, and of the black nationalists’ determination to make the townships ungovernable and bring the people in their desperate poverty to open revolution, which would ultimately bring Nelson Mandela to power.

  The boycott syndrome prevailed. Rents were not paid for housing owned by the white government. Schools were boycotted, by pupils and teachers. White shops were boycotted, even though black shops charged more than white. Comrades roamed the black townships in the name of the banned ANC, and were infiltrated by self-seeking thugs. To add to the misery, the world refused to buy South African, and many of those who had had jobs were retrenched.

  A whole generation of schoolchildren were not receiving an education. Some ran away to Botswana to join the ANC and to be trained in military skills, and three boys ran away to Second Beach to get away from the anarchy, poverty and constant fear for their lives. They told Matt that anything would be better than the slums of Soweto. All three children said their fathers were in jail for contravening the pass laws, which stopped them moving elsewhere to look for a job. Their mothers had more children than they could afford to feed, each boy coming from a family where there were six or more brothers and sisters. They had been trapped without food, schooling or shelter and, if they died of starvation on the coast, at least they had escaped. The country, Matt’s country, was dying for lack of hope.

  The day the children were found a hut to live in, given daily food and told to go and spend their days with Sophia in her school, a storm arose that battered the inside of the children’s cave and would have drowned them without trace, sending their bodies to feed the sharks and the barracudas that scavenged the waters of the Indian Ocean. The colony returned to normal, except for the powerful images that remained in Matt’s and Lorna’s minds. It was the first chill wind that suggested their sanctuary was vulnerable after all.