by Tony Park
‘Me?’ She was surprised. ‘But I was just a lawyer. I saw some people who’d been wounded and some bodies, but I wasn’t a doctor or a nurse or a soldier. I didn’t really see the suffering.’
‘Maybe not,’ the doctor, a man with kind eyes, assured her, ‘but you carry guilt for what happened. You didn’t see the killing and you didn’t write the rules of engagement for that operation, but you were stuck in the middle of it. You had to tell men they couldn’t protect innocent women and children. You had to advise your commander to sit on his hands and watch genocide take place. It’s no wonder you’re drinking to try to forget all that.’
The whispering and sniggering continued when word got out that Carmel would be leaving the army with a compensation payout for PTSD. She knew what the others at headquarters would be saying, because she’d said the same things to herself. How come she, a legal officer, could get a compensation payment for PTSD when she’d never seen someone put a gun to an unarmed African’s head and pull the trigger; when she had never had to lift a half-rotten corpse and feel the skin of the hands come off in hers like black gloves; when she’d never had to unblock the blood and hair and skin from the toilets inside the Kigali hospital which Tutsis had been held over while their throats had been slit. She felt a fraud and a failure as she marched out of Lavarack Barracks in Townsville for the last time.
Her parents did a fair to middling job of hiding their disappointment when she moved back into their house in the Brisbane suburb of Redcliff. They hadn’t expected her to stay in the army forever – and would have been happy to see her leave to take up a position in a civilian law firm sooner, but they were tight-lipped at her announcement that she’d left without another job to go to. Carmel caught up and partied with some old friends from school, most of whom were married with children. On a night when four of the girls had been able to escape their babies and husbands, Carmel ended up passed out on the floor of a nightclub toilet. Her friends found her and poured her into a taxi home. When she woke up she realised it wasn’t just the booze that was making her head throb. She had smashed her forehead on the tiles and been left with an ugly bruise and abrasion. That morning she fronted a job interview with a Brisbane firm specialising in local government work. The partner grilling her clearly didn’t buy the ‘walking into a door’ excuse, but as he flicked through her résumé, he planted an idea in her mind.
‘I see you were in Rwanda with the army. I’ve got a friend who’s off to Arusha in Tanzania soon to work as a prosecutor on the genocide tribunal crimes.’
Carmel had left without the job but with a new resolve to do something about her life. She had gone to her first AA meeting that night.
The passengers beside her on the flight to Livingstone, a pair of Germans in matching khaki safari outfits, were craning across her to see out the window. Carmel leaned back to give them a better view. The pilot had banked left and was taking his time, tracking along the Zambezi River, heading upstream. Carmel looked down and saw a shadow moving across an open patch of ground. She suddenly realised it was a giraffe, in the Zambezi National Park, on the Zimbabwean side. It made her feel good for a few moments, thinking about a gentle creature happy and, hopefully, safe in its element. It was, she thought, a good omen.
It had been hard and confronting work coming to terms with the demons in her life, and she’d learned to take comfort in whatever it was that cheered her. Seeing animals in the wild was one of the things that gave her pleasure. On an early trip to Rwanda, Carmel and some of the other lawyers on the team had taken time out to travel to Ruhengeri in the north of the country to see the mountain gorillas made famous by the American researcher Dian Fossey. Carmel had seen the gorillas during her tour of Rwanda with the army, but the second visit had been more memorable. Ironically, she’d learned more about the depravities of the genocide as a prosecutor combing files long after the events of 1994 than she had when she had been on the ground in the country. Contrasting what she knew of the daily litany of crimes against humanity – murders, torture, rape and mutilation – with the gentle actions and serene stares of these huge but generally harmless primate cousins of man had soothed her jagged soul.
She had rebuilt her life, finding strength in the courage of the survivors of the genocide and, though the ICTR trials were drawn-out affairs, in moments of justice when a key génocidaire was finally convicted. The media in Australia had taken an interest when her name appeared in wire-service copy about the Arusha trials, and her parents, who saved every profile article about their prosecutor daughter, were once again proud of her.
The pilot banked to the right and right again, crossing the river and heading downstream, towards Livingstone and the falls themselves. The Zambezi River was a peaceful grey green, its surface broken into eddies and channels by small islands of granite. Somewhere below her, she guessed, was Henri’s house. He’d described it as being upriver of the falls. She wondered what it would be like to live on the edge of one of the world’s most beautiful rivers. She’d canoed the Lower Zambezi from a camp below the dam wall at Kariba, and had visited Victoria Falls once before on the Zimbabwean side, but she’d never had the chance to go upriver. She was looking forward to it, and to seeing Henri’s collection of rescued animals and birds.
As the aircraft’s wheels squeaked on the tarmac Carmel noticed a movement in the grass bordering the runway. A troop of baboons was running alongside them. It made her sigh with contentment; at last she felt like she was truly back in Africa.
*
Liesl turned off the N1 at Polokwane and followed the bypass to the R71 towards Magoebaskloof. That would take her on to Tzaneen and the road to the only place in the world she had ever felt truly safe: her parents’ home. But she wasn’t looking forward to visiting them.
Sleep had come hard after the attempted carjacking, and Sannette’s kids had been up early making a racket. Liesl reckoned she’d had no more than three or four hours’ rest. She had dosed herself with coffee, ignored Sannette’s pleas for her to stay another day, and got into her borrowed BMW four-wheel drive and set off for the Lowveld. She had been glad when at last she’d broken free of the morning commuter traffic and passed Pretoria, but her mind was still churning.
Liesl had stopped at the Total Petroport twenty kilometres north of the capital city and ordered a cheeseburger at the Steers restaurant located in the bridge over the dual carriageway. While waiting for her burger she’d checked her emails on her iPhone. She’d scrolled back through the last few days’ messages and found the summons to appear before the International Criminal Tribunal in Rwanda. As Liesl had reread it the restaurant manager had had to ask her twice if everything was all right with her order. She’d looked up and mumbled that everything was fine.
As she barrelled along the R71 through the open countryside Liesl’s phone rang in the console. It was the shrill, stuttering chirp of a woodland kingfisher. She checked in her rear-view mirror for traffic cops then picked it up. ‘Liesl, hello?’
‘Howzit, Liesl,’ said Sarah, the telephone receptionist from Escape!.
Liesl considered responding with news of the attempt on her life and the summons to travel to Tanzania to testify in a war crimes court about things that had scared her so bad that she still woke up sometimes with tears rolling down her cheeks. But instead, she said, ‘Fine, and you?’
‘Ja, you know, same as always here. Sorry to bother you but there’s been this oke pestering me all morning trying to get your cellphone number. I told him to send you an email, but he said he needs to speak to you personally. He sounded really agitated, like some kind of stalker.’
‘Really? I could use a stalker. My love life is kak these days,’ Liesl said. Sarah laughed. She was twenty-two, blonde and skinny. She could afford to laugh.
‘He says he’s a doctor, so he could be a good catch.’
‘Really? What’s his name?’
‘Doctor Richard Dunlop.’
Liesl wondered if she would have remembered him
so clearly, so immediately, if it hadn’t been for Ioannou and the follow-up email from the ICTR.
‘Are you still there, Liesl?’
Not really, she thought. She was in a shower in Rwanda seventeen years earlier. ‘Ja. Do me a favour and SMS me his number please.’
When the phone beeped a few seconds later Liesl scrolled to the message and selected the number. She pressed send without slowing her car down from a hundred and thirty kilometres an hour. She was exceeding the speed limit, but that was nothing new for her.
‘Doctor Dunlop,’ the voice said, as deep as she remembered.
‘It’s Liesl Nel here. How are you?’
‘Someone tried to kill me last night.’ Asking someone how they were came naturally to her, ingrained by her parents and reinforced a million times since during her travels throughout Africa. It was the height of rudeness in African culture to come straight to the point, to say what was really on your mind, and they hadn’t spoken in years. Richard was an Englishman so his bluntness shouldn’t have surprised her, but it rankled. ‘Are you still there?’ he asked her.
‘Yes. Me too,’ she said.
‘You too? Someone tried to kill you as well?’
‘Yes. This is weird, Richard. Did you get a summons from the Rwandan criminal tribunal as well?’
‘Yes. An email a few days ago, but I only saw it last night.’
A Mercedes with dark tinted windows was looming in her mirror. Normally she would have geared down and planted her foot. She didn’t like people tailgating or passing her. Uncharacteristically she touched her foot to the brake pedal and moved into the yellow lane on the left, allowing the car to pass her. As it did, she peered through the dark glass, suddenly afraid she might see the barrel of a gun pointing at her. The driver didn’t even glance at her. She exhaled. ‘Do you think it’s related?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe,’ he replied. ‘Where are you now?’
‘I’m on my way to my mom and dad’s place. It’s a farm in a little place called Letsitele, about an hour from Phalaborwa, but you probably don’t know –’
‘I know where Phalaborwa is,’ he interrupted.
‘OK. I know from your phone number you’re in South Africa. Where are you and what are you doing in this country?’
‘I’m working in the Kruger National Park and the rest is a long story. We need to meet.’
She pursed her lips. Liesl wasn’t used to people telling her what to do, but in this case she was thinking along the same lines as Richard. But, God, it had been so long. The last time they’d seen each other had been bizarre.
‘Ja,’ she said. ‘I only have a day, then I have to drive to Botswana on a job.’
‘I’ll come to you. A man visited my house and tried to put several bullets from a silenced rifle into me. All of a sudden I have an urge to see more of Africa.’
She didn’t laugh. Instead, she told him briefly about the attempted carjacking, adding that the man who had tried to kill her had also used a silenced weapon.
‘Is that normal for a Joburg carjacker – to use a silencer?’ Richard asked.
‘I don’t know. But I do know he seemed more intent on killing me than taking my friend’s vrot old people mover.’
Liesl gave Richard directions to her parents’ farm and told him to call her when he got close. They ended the call and she thought again of the crazy circumstances that had brought them together the first time. It felt almost the same this time around.
*
Richard hadn’t studied psychiatry, but he’d read somewhere there was a term for what he and Liesl had done all those years ago – survivor sex. The problem was that there had been collateral damage from this acting out of their frustrations and fears. He sat at the kitchen table in his house in the Skukuza staff village and thought about how his deployment to Rwanda had changed his life.
Carmel had said nothing to him on the drive back to headquarters and it hardly seemed appropriate to discuss his love life back home in England in front of the padre. Richard had been on a Canadian C-130 out of Kigali the next morning and had caught a British Airways flight from Nairobi to London.
His tour in Rwanda would have finished a month after he received the news and his attachment to the Australian field hospital would have ended two weeks after that. When he returned to the UK the British Army decided it wasn’t worth the cost of an airfare to send him back to Africa or Australia for just a few weeks. He’d written a letter to Carmel, trying to explain things, but she hadn’t replied. Seventeen years later, Richard still felt guilty.
He wasn’t due to go into the surgery, as he had already told Helen to clear his calendar for the day so he would be available to the police investigating the shooting. As he drank a lukewarm cup of coffee his maid delicately picked shards of glass off the floor and put them into a plastic bucket.
Richard went to his bedroom and pulled out a slightly mildewed green canvas travel bag from the top of his wardrobe and put it on the bed. Gulping down the last of the bitter coffee, he took four shirts from their hangers, a pair of khaki trousers, two pairs of shorts, two T-shirts and two pairs of socks and dumped them in the bag without folding any of them. He was wearing trousers, a short-sleeved shirt and leather hiking boots. Raiding the bathroom for necessities, he dropped the lot into a camping toiletry bag. In the top drawer of the bedside table was his passport and an envelope containing two thousand US dollars. There was also an unopened blue plastic packet of condoms with a red ribbon logo on them – freebies that were available throughout the national park in a bid to get the staff to practise safe sex. He pocketed all three, zipped the bag up and had a quick look around the bedroom. There was nothing else he would need or miss. He travelled light in life, always had.
‘Bye, Flora,’ he said to the maid. He took her hand and palmed over a thousand rand which he’d taken from his wallet.
She looked down at the notes and her eyes widened in surprise. ‘Goodbye, sir. When are you coming back?’
‘Probably never.’
*
Vite felt warm and safe nestled against the breast of the woman. She carried him on her hip and he wrapped his arms around her neck. On her head she balanced a basket of small black-spotted bananas as she walked along the muddy verge of the rain-slicked potholed road.
The whining engines and belching smoke of passing motor vehicles had scared him at first, but the woman had murmured to him and that, and her body heat, had soothed him. He shrieked when the woman suddenly broke into a jog – not easy with her burdens – and turned his head into her armpit when she climbed into the back of an open pickup truck.
Two children on board laughed and squealed at the sight of Vite and they poked and prodded him, making him shriek as well, adding to the cacophony. The woman cuddled him closer and kept him away from them. Vite peeked at the children. The vehicle lurched off into a cratered road and he was scared all over again.
The noises around him grew louder as more and more vehicles began passing them. The woman took out a spare igitenge, one of the colourful printed wraps worn by women, and swaddled him in it, so he couldn’t see out. Vite didn’t know whether to be relieved or even more terrified now that he couldn’t see what was going on. He whimpered and she said to him, ‘Hush.’
At last the vehicle stopped and the woman climbed down out of the truck. Her bananas were passed back to her and she arranged them on her head while Vite cowered under the wrap. Through a gap in the material, as the woman walked, Vite glimpsed more humans than he had seen in his entire life. They were everywhere.
Vite felt humans brushing against him as the woman squeezed her way into a crowded market. He heard her voice and that of a man. Their talk was rapid, back and forth. At last she moved the coloured veil that was hiding Vite’s face. He was inside a room whose darkness and fetid smell was made closer and hotter by the outside sun superheating the corrugated-iron roof and walls. Flies buzzed around them. Vite saw the wide eyes of a man and he blinked back at hi
m. The man reached for him, grabbing Vite under his arms, and Vite shrieked and bared his teeth.
The woman said nothing as the man took Vite. Vite kicked and screamed and wriggled, but he was small and the man’s black hands were big and strong and sticky. He was held, but not lovingly or with care, as the woman had for these past few days. Vite cried for his mother.
‘Il s’appelle Vite,’ the woman said. She didn’t reach for him or touch him, or try to soothe him. Instead, she took the wad of grimy notes the man had taken from his pocket and tucked them into her blouse.
As his eyes adjusted to the gloom, Vite recognised the shapes and forms around him. On a crude timber shelf nailed to the wooden supports of the hut was the gigantic head of a mountain gorilla. The silverback’s massive severed hands were next to him. Hanging from a hook, attracting the flies and draining red blood into a cut-down drum, was a dead chimpanzee.
Vite shrieked.
9
Henri Bousson could have sent his driver to pick up Carmel Shang from the airport, but he was looking forward to meeting her too much.
He waited for her among the throng of tour operators and drivers in the arrivals area of the grandly named but underwhelming Livingstone International Airport. A trickle of passengers from the Comair flight started appearing, but Henri knew, from personal experience, that people travelling on non-Southern Africa Development Community passports would be queuing for a visa and that there would, most likely, be only one immigration officer assigned to the lengthy process of accepting payment, receipting, entering and stamping those visas. He’d lived in Africa all his life so he couldn’t be surprised or annoyed that Zambia was any more or less bureaucratic and inefficient than anywhere else on the continent.
She looked attractive in the pictures he had seen of her on her Facebook page and the news media features he’d found about her online, which was another reason why he had made the decision to come to collect her in person. There had been a portrait shot, professionally taken and used to announce her employment by the ICTR, but the more flattering images came from an article about her work in an Australian women’s magazine. The photos showed her in tourist khaki, kneeling in the midst of a troop of mountain gorillas in Rwanda; in a prosecutor’s black robe outside the Rwandan criminal tribunal in Arusha; and, his favourite shot, her sitting on a white leather lounge in her apartment in Brisbane, in a white T-shirt and denim shorts, with her legs tucked up under her while she sipped a cup of tea. The idea was to capture the sum of the subject in words and images – crusader for justice, friend of wildlife, and attractive, self-assured independent woman. Only the eyes in the at-home picture – uncertain, nervous, perhaps unsure of the merits of embarking on a PR exercise, and alarmed at the impending glare of the camera’s flash – betrayed the truth about Carmel Shang.
