by Tony Park
‘Did you? Remember?’
Richard shrugged. ‘A bit. It was of three guys – two black, in uniforms, and one white guy in safari get-up. They were holding what looked like an RPG – a rocket-propelled grenade launcher.’
Liesl closed her eyes. ‘Ja. I sort of remember that too. It certainly wasn’t of his wife and kids. He was really agitated, too, hey?’
‘He was. Ioannou asked me to recall what he said. All I can remember was the guy saying something like, “This is important.” Ioannou asked me what happened to the picture and I told him it had been ground into the blood and shit and mud in Kibeho by some soldier’s boot, and that I’d had more important things to do than retrieve it. He asked if I could give a more detailed description of the picture and I said I couldn’t, but I told him that I was pretty sure you had zoomed in closer on the picture and snapped a couple of frames of it. I’m sorry, Liesl.’
‘Ag, no matter. He would have tracked me down and asked me anyway,’ she said. ‘I told him when he called me that I did remember zooming in on the picture because I thought it might have been important to the story – that we could have used it as well as the image of him holding it out. But when I developed the negatives I saw it was just a bunch of guys standing around, so it didn’t fit the story of the day.’
They both sat in silence for a few moments.
‘I’ve tried hard over the years to forget that day,’ Liesl said eventually.
He didn’t reply to that, but he knew what she meant. He’d tried everything. Booze, sex, drugs, coming back to Africa – nothing had worked.
‘Can I ask,’ Richard said, ‘why you were so sure the attack on you in Johannesburg was related to all this, and not random?’
‘I just got an email, from that lawyer woman. Your old girlfriend, Carmel. She told me she was taking over from the other guy, Ioannou, and that I should be very careful. She said I should pay particular attention to my personal safety and be wary of strangers.’
‘Funny, she didn’t send me a warning.’
Liesl shrugged. ‘Perhaps it slipped her mind.’
‘Yes, perhaps. So, have you found the picture?’ Richard asked.
‘Yes.’
‘After all these years? That’s impressive. I can’t find a matching pair of socks.’
‘You’re a man, and I’m guessing single, right?’
He nodded.
‘I’m a woman. All of my negatives, from when I still used film, are filed and archived in date-ordered boxes. Also, that set was particularly important for me – it was the first time I’d had my work used around the world, and the first magazine cover I’d had.’
‘Newsweek. Not a bad debut.’
‘I printed it. It’s drying now. We can scan the negative later and that will give us an electronic copy, but I wanted to see a print as well.’
Richard was surprised by her calm. ‘Someone possibly tried to kill you for this picture, so you came home to your parents’ place, found the negative, printed it, hung it out to dry and then went and played a game of tennis?’
Liesl shrugged and stood up. ‘I already know what’s in the picture – three guys and a rocket launcher. I saw it on the enlarger while I was printing it. Waiting for it to dry isn’t going to tell me anything. Shall we go take a look at it anyway?’
He followed her inside and carefully set the cup and saucer down on a table as he entered the house. He could hear Tokkie and Elize talking in the lounge room, in Afrikaans. He couldn’t help but wonder if he was the subject. He hadn’t made a good impression but, then, he hadn’t been trying to. Elize might have been impressed when Liesl told her she was inviting a doctor around for tea, but any initial kudos his job brought with him disappeared fast once people learned of his history. He followed Liesl down a corridor he hadn’t seen earlier and slowed as he noticed the row of framed prints on both sides.
‘Yours?’
‘Ja.’ She waved a dismissive hand without looking back at him. ‘My folks framed all of them.’
Richard paused. ‘I recognise some of these, and not just the Rwanda ones. They’re very good.’
He moved past the Rwanda images quickly. He tried not to notice the image of the RPA man about to execute the unarmed Hutu woman. That moment would be with him for as long as he lived. He hoped there wasn’t an afterlife, because he didn’t want to relive that moment forever. It was an odd choice of picture, he thought, for a mother to hang in the family home, but on the other hand it had been her daughter’s crowning moment.
As Richard took in the rest of the gallery he saw a continuing theme. Misery. There was the other picture, which he’d seen in a half-dozen UK newspapers, of the Afghan man holding the body of his child, killed in a coalition airstrike, arms outstretched towards Liesl’s lens. The agony and confusion on his face was palpable. Likewise, the frame of the British Army medic holding up a saline drip in one hand and calling for assistance with the other captured a moment of heart-wrenching hopelessness.
Towards the end of the display the subject matter and the mood changed. The final frame from what could be described as Liesl’s ‘war period’ was a front-page clipping from the South African broadsheet, the Sunday Times. BRAVE SNAPPER KEEPS ON SHOOTING AFTER BOMB BLAST, screamed the headline. Below it was a series of graphic shots of US soldiers treating wounded comrades against a backdrop of smoke and fire. The last shot, taken by someone with a less steady hand, showed Liesl, her face and left arm covered in blood, her clothing singed, still holding her Nikon in her right hand, pointing out towards the photographer as she kneeled on a roadside, a Humvee blazing behind her. Her eyes and mouth, the position of her camera hand, seemed to echo the beseeching of some of her other subjects. Although wounded herself, Liesl was still trying to capture something before she went. Richard remembered the story, and how gutsy he had thought she’d been.
After that, the pictures were of wildlife: magnificent shots of the big five – lion, leopard, elephant, buffalo and rhino – as well as cheetah and wild dog, and whales off the South African coast. There were also four covers of Escape! magazine framed, and Richard assumed the cover pictures were Liesl’s.
‘Coming or not?’
‘Coming,’ he said.
At the end of the hallway Liesl opened a door and Richard smelled flowers and talc. There was a single bed and a poster of Duran Duran on the wall. ‘This is my room. My mom never changed it after I left home. It is almost like I died and she’s one of those crazy old tannies who set up a shrine to her lost daughter, don’t you think?’
‘That’s one way of looking at it, though your mother doesn’t seem like the mad aunty type to me.’
‘The darkroom’s through here.’
They went into what Richard presumed was once an en-suite.
‘I was photography crazy when I was a teenager,’ Liesl explained. ‘My parents were very indulgent, so they said they would turn the ensuite into a darkroom if I was happy to use another bathroom. We have five, so it wasn’t exactly a hardship.’
Liesl switched on the light, reached up and started pulling down a series of prints. Richard couldn’t help but notice that the first half-dozen or so were pictures of him, at work on victims of the Kibeho massacre. Liesl placed them face down on a bench and then took down the close-up of the photo the man had been holding out to her.
She turned to him, but lowered her eyes. ‘I just wanted to remind myself what you looked like.’
‘I recognised you as soon as I saw you,’ he said. ‘But then I had seen your picture in the magazine.’
She shrugged. ‘Well, here it is.’
He took the print from her and walked back out into her bedroom. Richard stared at the black man whose face was visible, and the one white. Even with the recent reading he’d done online about the war crimes tribunal, and the books he’d read about the massacres, he recognised neither of the men, and the third had his back to the camera. He looked at the weapon the white man was holding. He’d thought it wa
s an RPG, but now he saw it wasn’t.
Tokkie Nel walked into his daughter’s room, his eyes taking them in, and the neatly made single bed. He gave a little nod as if reassuring himself all was above board. ‘Everything all right?’
‘Ja, Poppa, of course.’
Tokkie took a pair of reading glasses out of the pocket of his shirt. ‘This is the picture you were looking for?’
‘Ja.’
Richard handed the print to Liesl’s father.
Tokkie studied the picture. ‘Is this taken in that awful place?’
‘Yes, Poppa.’
‘I didn’t think they were that sophisticated up there with their military.’
‘What do you mean?’ Richard asked.
Tokkie held the picture out and pointed to the white man. ‘Why’s this oke holding a SA-7 surface-to-air missile?’
12
Henri’s guide, Elvis, started the outboard motor and reversed away from the Zambian bank of the Zambezi River. Henri’s house looked even more impressive from the water, Carmel thought.
The afternoon clouds had cleared and sunlight glittered on the wide, green, fast-flowing waters. As Elvis turned and headed out into the current, a cormorant took flight from a polished red granite rock, rippling the surface.
‘The birdlife is fantastic here,’ Henri said over the noise of the outboard. The seats on the boat were wide enough for two people, with three down each side, but Henri was seated across the narrow centre aisle from Carmel. The boat itself was flat bottomed and aluminium, with an awning made from green ripstop canvas. Henri reached for the cooler box. ‘We have gin and tonic, white wine, rosé or beer and some soft drinks.’
‘Just a Sprite, please. I don’t drink.’
Henri popped a can and poured lemonade for both of them into pewter wine goblets. ‘To Africa.’
She raised her glass and clinked with him. ‘To Africa. Thank you so much for showing me your home.’
He took in the river with a sweep of his hand. ‘This is where I feel truly at home.’
‘But you’re from Rwanda, originally, yes?’
He looked out towards the far bank for a moment. ‘Yes. It was my home, but I think that if Africa is in your blood, then where you live, inside which borders, doesn’t really matter. It’s interesting that you raise the subject, though, because I wanted to ask you about your work. It sounds fascinating from what little you’ve told me of it.’
Carmel shrugged. She didn’t want to sound boastful, or to bore Henri, but she was proud of what she’d achieved, of the criminals she’d put behind bars, of the justice she had served. ‘A lot of it is fairly mundane, sorting through papers and witness accounts.’
‘Oui, but the stories in those papers must be so horrific. How do you cope?’
It was a question often asked, to which she hadn’t yet found a proper answer. She felt at ease, though, with this stranger, and she answered honestly. ‘I think I need it.’
He had an animated face and when he raised his eyebrows high and fast, the comicality of it disarmed her, and made her feel safe to continue. ‘It does sound funny, I suppose. I was there, as a legal officer with the Australian Army, when some of the follow-on massacres took place at Kibeho. I saw dead bodies but I didn’t actually see any killing myself; though I heard plenty of stories. I think I need to be reminded, constantly, of how completely and utterly these people were failed by the government, by the UN and by their neighbours. It helps keep me strong. Does that make sense?’
‘Perfectly,’ he said with such empathy that she couldn’t regret her sudden revelation.
It was true, she thought as she looked for the hippo Elvis claimed had just submerged off to port, she had become hardened to the gruesomeness of the witness statements, but that hardening had not made her callous – it had forged her like a samurai’s blade. Her heart had been melted and hammered and cooled time after time until she felt as though she could fight through any plea for clemency, dispatch any argument about following orders. She needed the horror to keep her focused on her mission.
‘There!’
She followed Henri’s finger and saw the wriggling ears and snorting snout break water in their wake, not fifteen metres behind them. ‘That must have been close,’ Carmel said.
‘Elvis has lived on the river all his life. He knows what he’s doing.’ The guide gave her a thumbs-up.
Carmel felt a buzz from a combination of jet lag, sun and the soporific effect of being on the water that was almost like being tipsy again. It felt good.
‘What are you working on at the moment?’ Henri asked her.
‘Quite a few cases.’ She didn’t really want to talk about work now. She didn’t exactly regret opening up to him, but she didn’t want to reveal any more. It made her feel vulnerable. It was normally her asking the questions when she met a man for the first time.
‘But surely all the big men of the genocide are behind bars now? After all, it’s been seventeen years, yes?’
Carmel felt her hackles begin to rise. There had been too much criticism from uninformed ‘experts’ about the pace of prosecutions and the fact that the tribunal should have wound up years earlier. ‘People just don’t understand the magnitude of what happened. There are thousands of people still waiting to be tried. Many have been dealt with by the Gacaca.’
‘What’s that? To tell you the truth, I left Rwanda fifteen years ago and have not followed events there for a long time.’
Carmel explained that defendants judged to have been foot soldiers in the massacres, as opposed to those who had given the orders and organised the Interahamwe and other citizens to rise up against their fellow Rwandans, had been sent before local village courts, Gacaca, which usually sat in the place where the defendant was from, or where the crimes had been committed. The Gacaca, which meant ‘Justice on the Grass’, was made up of a panel of people from the area who more often than not knew the accused personally or had lost relatives to them.
‘In many cases the accused are given sentences involving community work. It’s often hard labour, such as digging wells or clearing land for farming or building a road, but it’s nation-building as well. Sometimes the work gangs include both Tutsi and Hutu, but the feedback I’ve seen is that the work gives the men an outlet, and a chance to think about what they’ve done, and to atone.’
‘And the big fish?’ Henri asked again.
‘Well, more than eighty have been tried by the ICTR, but we’re still looking for several others. I’m afraid many were able to get out of Rwanda soon after the massacres took place. One of the first UN interventions was by French troops who gave protection to thousands of Hutus who fled Rwanda because they feared reprisals from the returning Tutsis. Among the legitimate refugees, there were also some of the organisers of the genocide.’
‘That’s shameful,’ Henri said.
Carmel shrugged. ‘The tribunal recently called on several African countries, including Zambia, to take a more active role in helping track down the perpetrators of the killings. Interjurisdictional cooperation between African countries is a nightmare.’
‘I see. So who is your big priority right now – your white whale? There must be someone you want more than all the others?’
Carmel bit her lower lip. Much of her work, by its nature, had to be kept under wraps, especially while a case was being prepared or an investigation carried out. ‘It’s not so much a person as a group of people.’
‘Really? Are they Hutu or Tutsi? I do know that the tribunal has tried to be seen to be fair by prosecuting Tutsis as well as Hutus, even though the Tutsi are now back in control of the government.’
It was a simplified summation, but accurate enough. ‘To tell you the truth, we don’t know what tribe or even what country they’re all from. They’re a bit of a mystery, this small gang of three that I’m looking for at the moment.’
‘Why these three?’ Henri asked.
‘I’m not exactly sure. I don’t even know their na
mes.’
His expressive face creased. ‘You’re searching for phantoms?’
‘They may as well be at this stage.’ Carmel felt uncomfortable about saying any more about the investigation she had inherited from Mike Ioannou. That was another death she was having trouble coming to terms with.
Henri seemed to be waiting for her to say more, so she took her binoculars from her daypack and scanned the far bank. ‘I am sorry if I seemed like I was prying. I imagine you cannot talk too much about your work,’ he said.
She lowered the binoculars. ‘No, it’s fine, Henri. There’s really not much more that I could tell you if I wanted to. All I know is that a man . . . a colleague of mine who put a lot of work into identifying these men is no longer on the case and now I’ve been given the job of finding them. It’s a bit daunting.’
‘I can only imagine. Look!’
Carmel raised her binoculars again and swung to where Henri was pointing. ‘Elephants!’
‘Oui. How many do you think, Elvis?’
‘Ah, five, I think, boss.’
‘Yes, the same herd I saw two days ago. They have a small calf with them. Can you see it, Carmel?’
She focused and tried to peer through the thick riverine bush. ‘Yes. Got it! Oh, my. Isn’t it tiny. It’s beautiful.’
Elvis cut the engine and let the boat drift with the current.
This was what she craved, what she had come to Zambia for. She knew that one of the few things that could make her forget about her work, and the terrible things human beings did to each other, was to lose herself in Africa’s wildlife. True, this sometimes involved her witnessing more killing, but there was something pure and honest about a cheetah killing an impala to feed her cubs. There was a sense of purpose to death on the plains and in the bush, a feeling of balance in nature that was missing from the madness of human slaughter.
‘I will never tire of watching these creatures,’ Henri said.
‘I know what you mean.’
‘They may come to us tonight,’ he said.
‘Really?’
