Swimming with Horses

by Oakland Ross

  Now her companion returns to the table with two bottles of Manica, both sweating with condensation. He settles back into his chair, stretches out his long legs.

  They spank the heels of the bottles together, raise the rims to their lips, swallow the rising foam. She is happy and she knows it — happy not in spite of the wars and the dangers but because of them. Conflict rages all around: the struggle against apartheid in South Africa; the bush war here in Mozambique; the fire burning just inland, in Rhodesia; the battlefields of Angola. Everywhere you look, men are killing each other, which is terrible, a sickening waste. But it is necessary, too. Nothing is going to change without a fight. A luta continua! Almost everywhere you cast your gaze, armed liberation outfits are bristling, in nearly all the frontline states. They are fighting against white oppression and for black freedom — Frelimo, SWAPO, ZANU, ZAPU, MPLA, ANC. She sounds the abbreviations in her mind, thrilling at the muscular impression they make.

  The waitress shuffles over in flip-flops, a halter top, and a short black skirt. They both order prawns — huge Mozambican prawns with piri piri sauce, accompanied by hot, salted chips.

  “Duas mais cervejas,” she says.

  “Sem.” The waitress turns and heads back to the kitchen.

  He winks at her, and she knows he means her Portuguese. After only two years’ practice, he now speaks the language almost as though it were his mother tongue. Meanwhile, she struggles to order a beer or to ask directions in the street. She finds she can get by, more or less, in English.

  Later they share a final round of beers and a third plate of prawns, and only then do they totter out into the parking lot. Behind the wheel, he guides the car along the mostly empty streets that tunnel beneath the arching branches of the jacaranda trees. Before long, he pulls up to the gate at their home, on a high spit of land with a view of Delagoa Bay.

  As usual, she climbs out of the car first so that she can unlock the wrought-iron gate. Now she swings it open and stands back as he manoeuvres the car inside, onto the small cobblestone pad with its flimsy shelter of corrugated zinc. She steps through the gate, pulls it shut, fastens the padlock. He slides out of the car, quickly checking to make sure all the doors are locked. They both stroll past the small yard in front, surrounded by tall brick walls and sheltered by a Bauhinia tree, its ivory flowers glimmering in the murky garden light. They trace the flagstone walkway around to the side entrance.

  The house is a low, whitewashed bungalow built in the Cape Dutch style, protected by iron bars at every point of ingress or egress. The bars cover each window, each door. Once you are inside the house, it is a job to get back out. If a fire were to strike, good luck to you. The precautions are a nuisance — everyone agrees about that — but it is taken for granted that robbery is the greater threat, robbery or worse. They have learned the hard way that it really is better to be safe, never mind the retrograde politics of it. A fortress mentality, it is called. You deal with it as best you can.

  She opens the iron grate, followed by the sturdy wooden side door. She steps inside and, almost immediately, she stops.

  “Love,” she says.

  “Yes, pet?”

  “Look.” She nods toward the wooden counter that forms a border between the kitchen and the dining room. Someone has placed a large poinsettia atop the counter. It squats upon a china plate.

  “Where did that come from?”

  He reaches back and switches on the overhead electric light. She winces in the sudden glare and then refocuses her gaze. The countertop. The unexplained poinsettia. She walks over to inspect the plant more closely, to see if there is a card. She probes the branches but turns up nothing.

  “Where did it come from?”

  “I don’t know,” he says. “It must have been João.”

  True enough. It must have been João. He is the houseboy — an absurd misnomer, considering the man is fifty years old at least. Anyway, there is no other explanation for the plant. João must have put it here. But why?

  “We’ll sort it out in the morning,” he says. “I’m sure there’s a good explanation.” He hesitates. “Or maybe it was Lisa. Lisa and Ham.”

  He means Lisa and Hamilton Bennett, a couple of Americans they know, both employed by a research-and-documentation centre that promotes women’s rights and social justice. The four of them have been good friends for a year or so, pretty good friends. Maybe they dropped by, unannounced, bearing a gift. Maybe they left it with João.

  “Okay,” she says. “All right.”

  The poinsettia makes her think. It reminds her of something she read one time, a tale of horrible customs in a country ruled by generals. In that land, dissidence was not tolerated, and death squads were dispatched in the night to silence those who spoke out. It was an evil business, but one with an odd quirk. Before launching a lethal mission, those same death squads first observed an unlikely drill, almost genteel in its way. They arranged for daffodils to be delivered to the targeted address, along with a card inscribed with a single chilling remark: Flowers in the desert die. Fair warning, it was called. If you received those flowers and that card, you knew what you had to do. You had to flee the country — Guatemala, was it? Otherwise, you were dead.

  Funny. Why has this strange, unexplained poinsettia made her think of that eerie ritual in some faraway land? Who put the poinsettia here? Surely there is some harmless explanation, yet she wonders, A poinsettia? Why a poinsettia? From somewhere in her memory, she feels a long-forgotten stab of fear.

  “Come,” she says. “We’ll ask João in the morning. Now let’s go to bed.”

  That night she sleeps poorly, which probably explains why she hears the thump, a muffled impact of some kind. If she’d been asleep, she never would have noticed it, but she wasn’t and now she has. She remains where she is, peering up at the tin ceiling tiles, barely discernible in the darkness. She tells herself it was nothing, the sound she heard — or not nothing. Anything. It could have been anything. She decides to ignore it, but just as quickly she realizes she will never fall asleep now, not with this doubt in her mind. She thinks of waking him, but he is dead to the world, his breathing slow and rhythmic. Leave the poor man alone.

  She climbs from the bed and glides out into the hallway barefoot, dressed only in a slip. She crosses the hall and steps into the living room, thinking that the sound came from here or maybe just outside, beyond the window, where the car is parked. Just then she sees something strange — a faint illumination, visible through the window. As quickly as it appeared, it vanishes. She takes a step closer to the window.

  Seconds later, she sees it again — a pale glow inside their car. What is it? Not a torch. Nothing so bright as that. The light flickers and goes out, but she is certain she’s seen it and just as certain she’s seen something else, too. A man’s face, hey. The outline of a man’s face. She waits for the light to reappear, and so it does, first flaring, then fading. It is a match, the thin light of a match. This time, she can make out the silhouettes of at least three faces — three men’s faces in the car beside the house.

  Her heart pounds, but she realizes at once what they are. Radio thieves. They have broken into the car using a blanket of some kind to dull the sound of the window as it crumbled beneath the blow of a brick or a rock. Then they climbed inside. This has happened before, twice before. A bloody nuisance is what it is, but not surprising, not when you consider the poverty and unemployment here. Regarded in that way, it is a wonder their car isn’t vandalized every single night.

  The break-in is an aggravation, of course, but it isn’t the end of the world. The thieves will steal the radio, nothing more, leaving an empty slot in the dashboard along with a dangling cable, and off they will go. There is nothing she can do about it now, nothing that he could do, either. It is like a mugging in the street — better just to let it happen, to suffer through. You never know where a confrontation might lead. She waits and watches. Before long the men creep out of the car. There are three of the
m, just as she thought. They trot back toward the yard, three ghostly shapes, doubled over. She crosses the living room so she can watch as, one by one, they vault over the front wall. It seems they’ve put down blankets to counter the broken shards of glass embedded there. In a flash, they are gone.

  She wonders once again whether she ought to wake him but decides against it. There is nothing to be done now. In the mor-n-ing, there will be a broken car window needing replacement, not to mention a radio. But that is tomorrow’s concern. Now she will simply return to bed. She will tell him in the morning, tell him what she has seen.

  Several hours later, right on schedule, the sun explodes over Maputo, and the two of them bustle about, showering, dressing, preparing breakfast. The poinsettia still rests on the countertop. Dear God, what is it doing there? When João turns up, dressed in his customary beige work clothes, she asks him, “Where in God’s name did this come from?”

  He shrugs. Speaking in his broken English, he says it is a mystery to him. He found it on the concrete stoop the evening before, on his return from some errands at the shops. No card. No nothing. Just a plant. He wonders how it got past the gate. Whoever brought it must have found a way.

  “All right,” she says. “That’s fine. We’ll sort it all out in due course. Still, it is curious. Right bloody curious.”

  Just now, it is time to be off, she to the travel agency that she runs, located in a small unit at a commercial mall downtown. From there, he will take the car to the garage, see to the window and the radio. On second thought, maybe it would be better to dispense with the radio, once and for all. It is an invitation to thieves.

  She struggles with the clasp of her brown-leather briefcase, stuffed to overflowing with tickets and brochures, memos and bills. Why a poinsettia? Why that, of all flowering plants? He waits as she fusses, then holds the door open for her. Meanwhile, João trots out to the front gate, releases the padlock, pushes the barrier open, and stands there waiting, shoulders thrust back, like a soldier on parade.

  Once she is settled in the passenger seat, he closes the door and strides around the bonnet to the driver’s side. He gets in.

  “Beautiful day,” he says.

  And she smiles. It is a joke between them. In Maputo, the days are almost uniformly beautiful. It isn’t really necessary to remark upon the weather.

  “Perfect,” she says and watches as he slides the key into the ignition and starts to turn the switch. She has a sudden terrible thought. “Wait —!   ”

  She catches the sound of her own voice but hears nothing after that. Neither of them does. They say you never do.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  SWIMMING WITH HORSES is a work of fiction, and all of the events and characters described in its pages are either wholly imaginary or else recruited from the real world to serve imaginary but credible purposes. For example, the novel includes a cameo appearance by Nelson Mandela himself, a turn that some readers might find somewhat disconcerting, for it is at this point that Mandela issues Hilary and Muletsi a Russian-made Makarov pistol and gives the go-ahead for Muletsi to assassinate Jack Tanner. This scene is an invention, of course, but it is not out of sync with the real world as it was at that time. Mandela, who died in 2013 at age ninety-five, is now all but universally regarded as having been a beacon of peaceful struggle in the long campaign against apartheid in South Africa. But that is not the whole story.

  Certainly, in his later years, Mandela was a champion of nonviolent protest, but it wasn’t always so. As a leader of the African National Congress’s youth wing in the late 1950s, he advocated far more aggressive tactics than those favoured by the organization’s sclerotic old guard. In the wake of the infamous Sharpeville massacre in March 1960, Mandela concluded that the struggle could no longer be waged by peaceful means alone. The following year he became the founding commander of Umkhonto we Sizwe — or Spear of the Nation — the ANC’s military wing. Unfortunately, he was captured roughly a year later. Following the Rivonia Trial, he was sentenced to life in prison; in fact, his incarceration lasted twenty-seven years. As a result, it is difficult to say for certain which forms of violence he might have endorsed had he remained at large. Still, I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to think he might have approved the assassination of a villain as toxic as Jack Tanner, had the occasion arisen at any time, whether before or during Mandela’s imprisonment. Prior to his capture, Mandela himself sometimes carried a gun — the very same Makarov pistol that is put to murderous, if fictional, use in the pages of this book. That weapon was real, a gift presented by Haile Selassie, the Emperor of Ethiopia. The gun probably still exists, possibly buried under a house in a suburb of Johannesburg, as one version has it. I have given the pistol a different fate.

  The same goes for another possibly unexpected element of the plot — the tale of the two huge howitzer cannons that Hilary and Sam discover when they venture onto the Quinton Vasco lands one afternoon in late summer. I have taken several liberties here, but the essential ingredients of my made-up account are derived from the true story of one Gerald Bull, a Canadian arms inventor who is the model for the fictional Quinton Vasco. The real-life Bull developed a hyper-accurate, long-range cannon called the GC-45 while heading a company called Space Research Corporation, which operated a testing range along the Quebec-Vermont border. The weapons were eventually sold to South Africa and played a prominent and deadly role in the war against Cuban and government forces in Angola in the 1970s and 1980s. Not unlike Quinton Vasco, his fictional avatar, Bull came to a violent end, shot to death outside his Brussels apartment in 1990. Some say he was gunned down by an Iraqi assassin. Others insist he was dispatched by an agent of Mossad, the Israeli foreign intelligence service. Nearly thirty years after his death, the truth remains a mystery.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  DURING THE WRITING OF this novel, I received invaluable advice and encouragement from friends and colleagues who include Don Gillmor, Adrienne Kerr, and Jackie Kaiser, my agent, each of whom read the manuscript multiple times and had plenty to say, not all of it positive by any means but all of it helpful. Either way, they kept my spirits alive. Cynthia Villegas provided an island of support during some disheartening stretches that finally ended on an otherwise dreary November afternoon when an email hopped into view on my computer screen. It was from Scott Fraser, acquisitions editor at Dundurn Press, and it began with the magic words: “I want to make an offer …” My thanks to him and to all the devoted literati at Dundurn, including Kathryn Bassett, Michelle Melski, Kathryn Lane, Jenny McWha, and Tabassum Siddiqui. Freelance editor (and violinist) Kate Unrau turned the dreaded editing process into a collaboration of pure pleasure, while David Drummond conjured the stunning cover literally out of the blue. My thanks to them both.

  Meanwhile, Sandy Mattison of Cape Town generously addressed many of my questions about South African expressions in English.

  In a less bookish vein, I want to express my gratitude to all the grown-ups — many long gone — who made the lives of their children a paradise on horseback during the fresh springs, sun-dazed summers, and crisp autumns of my youth. Finally, here’s a shout-out in memoriam to my quadruped soulmates of long ago, the indispensable Sheba, the gracious Woody, the unstoppable Fred. They swam with humans.

  OF RELATED INTEREST

  This Shall Be a House of Peace

  Phil Halton

  Chaos reigns in the wake of the collapse of Afghanistan’s Soviet-backed government. In the rural, warlord-ruled south, a student is badly beaten at a checkpoint run by bandits. His teacher, who leads a madrassa for orphans left behind by Afghanistan’s civil war, leads his students back to the checkpoint and forces the bandits out. His actions set in motion a chain of events that will change the balance of power in his country and send shock waves through history.

  Amid villagers seeking protection and warlords seeking power, the Mullah’s influence grows. Against the backdrop of anarchy dominated by armed factions, he devotes himself
to building a house of peace with his students — or, as they are called in Pashto, taliban. Part intrigue, part war narrative, and part historical drama, This Shall Be a House of Peace charts their breathtaking ambition, transformation, and rise to power.

  BOOK CREDITS

  Project Editor: Jenny McWha

  Editor: Kate Unrau

  Proofreader: Ashley Hisson

  Cover Designer: David Drummond

  Interior Designer: Jennifer Gallinger

  Publicists: Michelle Melski and Tabassum Siddiqui

  DUNDURN

  Publisher: J. Kirk Howard

  Vice-President: Carl A. Brand

  Editorial Director: Kathryn Lane

  Artistic Director: Laura Boyle

  Production Manager: Rudi Garcia

  Publicity Manager: Michelle Melski

  Manager, Accounting and Technical Services: Livio Copetti

  Editorial: Allison Hirst, Dominic Farrell, Jenny McWha,

  Rachel Spence, Elena Radic, Melissa Kawaguchi

  Marketing and Publicity: Kendra Martin, Kathryn Bassett,

  Elham Ali, Tabassum Siddiqui, Heather McLeod

  Design and Production: Sophie Paas-Lang