Far Horizon

by Tony Park

  ‘Namibia, Rwanda, now Mozambique.’ He shook his head slowly as he read. ‘You love this shithole of a continent, don’t you?’

  Mike could tell the other man didn’t share his feelings, so he said nothing.

  ‘Well, it’s caught up with you now, hasn’t it? Take the rest of your time here as leave and go back to Australia as soon as the investigations are complete. I’ll fix it up with your superiors here and at LHQ. That’s my advice and I suggest you take it.’

  ‘I quit,’ Mike said.

  The lieutenant colonel looked up, startled. ‘I beg your pardon, Major?’

  ‘I quit, sir.’

  ‘Don’t play smart with me, Williams. What do you mean, you quit?’

  ‘My twenty’s up and I’m not signing on for the last five,’ he explained. He knew what the lieutenant colonel was thinking. Most people who stay for the long haul in the army put in twenty-five years because the pension benefits are markedly better than for twenty, but Mike had better things in mind for the coming five years.

  ‘Look, I know you’ve had a rough time, but think it over,’ he said.

  The man’s mood was conciliatory now; probably, Mike guessed, because he could see more paperwork looming on his desk if Mike wanted to resign his commission immediately.

  ‘Don’t worry, sir. I’ll take the leave offer and sort things out once I’m back in Australia,’ Mike explained.

  ‘What’ll you do then, after the army?’ he asked. The question that every soldier asks himself. ‘Security guard?’ His tone was mocking.

  ‘I’m coming back here, to Africa.’ He was coming back to Isabella and where they went from there didn’t matter, as long as they were together.

  ‘You’re fucking crazy,’ the lieutenant colonel said, shaking his head and closing Mike’s folder.

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  Crazy? Maybe I am crazy, Mike thought to himself.

  Crazy in love with Isabella? For sure. He realised after his conversation with the military attaché just how much he was in love with her, although he had yet to tell Isabella outright that he would leave his job for her. As he packed the last of the uniforms into his green canvas kitbag in the bedroom of the flat in Maputo, he gazed at a framed picture of the two of them on the beach at Inhambane. She wore a white one-piece swimsuit that accentuated her breasts and was pouting theatrically at the warrant officer behind the camera, looking as sexy as hell, as always.

  Was he crazy for being in love with Africa? Definitely. That’s what the lieutenant colonel had guessed, and he was dead right. Crazy for joining the army in the first place? Maybe, maybe not. He had seen a sizeable chunk of the world outside Australia and, until a couple of days before, had never been shot at or had to shoot at anybody. Who knows, he told himself, maybe he had even done some good and saved a few lives and limbs by clearing up some of the nasty buried legacies of other people’s wars.

  Mike had joined the army when he was nineteen. In his own words, he had been an unemployed, long-haired layabout. He grew up with no father, just a mother and a sister, in an outer western suburb of Sydney. There were a couple of run-ins with the cops – under-age drinking for him, and shoplifting for his sister – but nothing too serious. Her conviction was never recorded and she was a lawyer now. They still laughed about that one when they got together every couple of years.

  The only male influence of any note in his early life was an uncle who had served as a conscript infantry soldier in Vietnam. Stan was a motor mechanic and he would let young Michael hang around his workshop during school holidays.

  ‘You’re a fool,’ was all Stan said when Mike showed him his enlistment papers. Mike thought that was a bit unfair, since he was largely to blame.

  But the army and recruit Michael Williams hit it off immediately. Now it was nearly all over he thought back to the exciting, raucous days of his youth. He was surrounded by a bunch of other nineteen and twenty year olds whose prime enthusiasms were cars, drinking and girls. And you could even smoke indoors in those days. These had always seemed to Mike to have been the best days of his life, but for the first time in a long while he had a reason to look forward instead of back.

  After recruit training, Mike was posted – a funny but appropriate military term for bundling people off like packages and sending them to their next address – to the Royal Australian Engineers. An army careers adviser summed up his future employment prospects succinctly and accurately: ‘You’ll be building things and blowing things up. You’ll love it.’

  By the time he was twenty-five he had, despite a couple of brushes with authority, reached the rank of corporal and was posted as an instructor at the School of Military Engineering at Holsworthy, in south-western Sydney. At the time, Holsworthy was a booming barracks town with all of the problems that inevitably entails. Too many young men, too few pubs and too many lonely, neglected wives – like his.

  Thinking about what he planned to say to Isabella forced Mike to remember his first marriage. He had just returned from three weeks of jungle training at Canungra, in Queensland, and had a pocketful of cash and way too much testosterone. He met Janice at a Friday night disco at a club in Liverpool, the closest major town to the barracks. They dated a few times, and before he knew it, a girl he hardly knew was pregnant with his child.

  They were married in a registry office, a week after she broke the news. Janice was attractive, a local girl who worked as a hairdresser, but he realised now they were never, in any way, soul mates. He’d proposed because he believed it was the right thing to do, and because he didn’t want their child to grow up in the same sort of household that he had. Also, Janice would not hear of an abortion and the idea had left Mike cold as well. He had assumed they would grow to love each other in time. He was wrong.

  In truth, he thought as he stuffed his army boots into the kitbag, he had loved the army more then than he could ever have loved Janice. Despite barely scraping through school, in the military environment he’d discovered that he had the capacity to learn and, what’s more, that he loved learning. He had spent long nights studying for his Higher School Certificate, the senior qualification he had missed by leaving school too early, and weeks away from the dilapidated fibre-cement ‘married quarter’, as their house was termed in military parlance, on various army courses.

  Janice miscarried while he was on the Mine Warfare Instructors’ Course. Mike went out and got drunk. He was sad for her and himself and for the little baby. He knew that he had been using his work to stay away from home, but as each day passed he had found himself growing more and more attached to the idea of fatherhood. If I had worked harder on getting to know my wife, he told himself now, things might have turned out differently and maybe we would have tried for another child.

  But, as often happens in the closed community of an army base there was another man, a former friend of his, Bill Rogerson, who liked Janice more than he ever would. His love for her was not unrequited. Mike had come home early from the end of his drivers’ course and found Janice and Bill on the corduroy-covered army-issue sofa. They hadn’t made it to the bedroom.

  ‘Christ!’ Bill had yelped.

  ‘Not quite, but I’m a fucking angel compared to you two,’ Mike replied. He’d strode across the living room, one fist raised. Bill had rolled to the floor, stumbling as he tried to pull up his trousers and evade the blow he’d expected from Mike. Looking back on it now, Mike could even smile. He hadn’t laughed at the time, though. He had started to say something to Janice, but the words wouldn’t come.

  ‘What? What is it, Mike? What do you want me to say, what do you want to tell me?’ She had been calm. Neither ashamed nor accusatory, she smoothed down her skirt and buttoned her blouse.

  Mike hadn’t known what he wanted to say back then, and couldn’t have put his feelings into words now. That was the problem with his first marriage. Not enough words and, even at the end, not enough passion to sustain the righteous indignation he had felt on first seeing Janice and Bi
ll making love.

  ‘Don’t hate me, Mike,’ Janice had said as Bill, crimson-faced, had shuffled around Mike and out the front door.

  ‘I don’t hate you, Janice,’ he had said, standing still in the middle of the room, unsure of where he should be.

  ‘You don’t love me, either, do you?’

  Mike was hungover and crashing on the living room carpet at a friend’s place when the Military Police found him the following afternoon. Word had already spread of his cuckolding, in the way it always does in the army, and it certainly wasn’t the first time this sort of thing had happened.

  His commanding officer, a major, was not unsympathetic. He was on his second marriage and Mike imagined the man’s first had ended in similar circumstances to his own.

  ‘Look, you’re doing a good job as an instructor here,’ he said.

  Mike had sensed there was a ‘but’ about to come.

  ‘But you’ve fucked up. Absent without leave won’t look good on your record,’ the major said sternly.

  ‘I’m going to get a divorce, sir,’ Mike had said, hoping that would be the end of his troubles.

  ‘I think it might be best if you took further action. I’m going to suggest that you apply for a transfer.’

  Mike had almost started to protest. He felt like he was being punished for Bill and Janice’s deceit; he had known he deserved a kick in the backside, but not a transfer. He held his tongue and heard the major out.

  ‘Word’s just come down from Land Headquarters that we’re sending an engineer squadron oversees, to Namibia, as part of a United Nations peacekeeping force,’ he said, looking up from his desk while Mike stood, at ease, in front of him.

  ‘Where’s Namibia, sir?’ Mike asked.

  ‘Africa. Used to sort of belong to South Africa. They had a war there – the black people won. You may have seen something about it in the newspapers,’ he said with a smile.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Mike lied.

  ‘There’ll be a scramble for places. First unit deployment overseas since Vietnam. We’re sending 17th Construction Squadron – ‘the Bears’ – and they’re looking to fill some gaps. I can get you transferred next week if you want it.’

  Mike hadn’t needed to think about it. Africa sounded OK. If he’d stayed he would have had to move back into barracks and continue working with a man who was fucking his soon-to-be ex-wife. Hard choice.

  ‘Count me in, boss. There’s nothing left for me here.’

  In Namibia, during the short periods of leave they received, he explored as much of the country as he could: unearthly red sand dunes in the Namib Desert that looked like the surface of another planet; the barren desert shores and icy waters of the Skeleton Coast; the wildlife paradise of Etosha National Park.

  Namibia, he knew, was where his addiction started.

  He’d been mesmerised by the sight of herds of zebra and gemsbok grazing on golden dry grass on the edge of the huge Etosha saltpan. Small families of giraffe, their heads breathing the sweet air above the talcum-powder dust of the saltpan, swayed regally into the blazing red sunset. The white dust coated everything, even the elephant, which looked like lumbering ghosts. The lions he remembered from Namibia were huge, muscled beasts, capable of bringing down a young elephant.

  The Royal Australian Engineers had worked hard in the dry heat, building roads and clinics, clearing landmines and the other debris of war, and generally trying to help the country get back on its feet. At night they drank cold German-style beer, a legacy of the country’s brief period of European colonial rule, under a desert sky ablaze with stars.

  Many of the white South Africans they met during the country’s transition to independence resented the presence of foreign soldiers in their former colony. Some hated the United Nations for interfering in what they saw as their sovereign affairs. Many in their army who Mike met were conscripts, doing mandatory national service after leaving school. One young man assigned temporarily to the Australian unit as a guide, Rian de Witt, became a friend.

  Rian did not want to be in Namibia, or ‘South West Africa’ as he still called it. He had deferred his military obligation by studying zoology at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, but now the system had caught up with him. He was not happy about it.

  Mike had wanted to learn more about Africa and its wildlife. Rian was a willing teacher. At night, after work and over a beer at their base at Rundu, near the Angolan border, Rian opened the Australian’s eyes to the Africa beyond the minefields and carnage of man’s wars.

  ‘I grew up in the desert, in our Kalahari Gemsbok National Park, on the Botswana border. My dad’s a National Parks ranger,’ Rian had explained.

  Mike found it surprising that a tall, blond, blue-eyed Afrikaner would talk for ages with what seemed like a mixture of love and awe for the original inhabitants of his harsh homeland. ‘The San people – we whites still wrongly call them “the Bushmen of the Kalahari” – they can teach you more about game and land management than any university. In parts of the desert they’re still free to live as they have for thousands of years. Just them and the wildlife. I could live like that for the rest of my life.’

  ‘I’d give it a year or two,’ Mike had joked.

  ‘Ja, but there’s no cold boxes or fridges out there, we probably wouldn’t last a week,’ Rian had laughed as he fetched two more beers. Mike had watched the last glowing ember of the sun fall behind the trees and wondered what it really would be like to live in Africa. The seed had been planted.

  The South African Defence Force had cultivated the San in South West Africa, now Namibia, as allies in its fight against the South West African People’s Organisation, the nationalists fighting under Sam Nujoma. The South Africans were capitalising on interracial animosity, which predated the arrival of the white man. Because he could speak the local language, Rian acted as a go-between and translator for the Australians when they encountered San communities in their seemingly endless work of rebuilding.

  ‘One day,’ Rian said as he crushed his empty can, ‘I want to be able to travel the length of Africa, then tell the rest of the world about what we have here.’

  ‘What’s stopping you?’ Mike had asked naively.

  ‘My passport. No one wants us, not here, not anywhere in Africa. But it will change eventually. We can’t go on as we do in South Africa.’

  ‘I hope you’re right,’ Mike said. It was 1989 and the end of white rule in South Africa appeared a forlorn hope, certainly in their lifetime.

  ‘Maybe you’ll come back one day and we can go exploring together, hey?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  The chance of another posting to Africa had seemed to Mike as unlikely as Australia ever going to war again, and he had set himself to making the best he could of life in a peacetime army.

  Back in Australia, he found himself going out less at weekends and cutting down on booze and the pursuit of a future wife. He had, he reflected, learned his lesson well, and besides, all his old cronies were by then getting married and having children. He’d earned a reputation for spending more time indoors with his books than with those few boys who were still single. Inspired by Rian, with whom he kept in touch by mail, he had started a degree course of his own, in zoology, through Sydney’s Macquarie University.

  A few years later he treated himself to a field trip, returning to Namibia, where he met up with Rian, who, once his compulsory military service had ended, had become a South African National Parks ranger, as his father had been. They had revisited all the old places, Etosha, Sesriem and the Skeleton Coast, and detoured way off the beaten track in the arid wastes of Kaokoveldt, where they tracked a herd of the elusive desert elephants, ancient survivors of their inhospitable environment and man’s wars. By now Rian was married to a woman named Susie, and they had a three-year-old son, Jan, who came along on the trip and gurgled at the elephants.

  ‘Rian’s talked about you and his days here in Namibia often, you know,’ Susie confided to Mike as
her husband and son shared a canvas bucket shower behind a tree near their bush campsite.

  ‘This was where I fell in love with Africa,’ Mike replied. Susie was a raven-haired schoolteacher, with dark, sparkling eyes and an infectious smile. Mike had yet to encounter a child as placid and cheerful as little Jan. He envied her and Rian their happiness – still did – and they had envied him his country. By then, the writing was on the wall for their South Africa, white South Africa, and no one was sure whether the change to majority rule would be peaceful or a bloodbath.

  ‘Sometimes we talk about moving to Australia, but we haven’t the money.’

  ‘Rian could never leave the bush, surely?’ To Mike, Australia seemed safe, bland, even boring, compared with Africa.

  ‘You’re right. But he’s restless. He wants to travel, to see more of Africa, and whatever happens here I guess it would still be hard to leave, even if we did have the cash.’

  ‘Another thing we have in common – restlessness,’ Mike said.

  ‘Ach, you should be marrying, settling down, having children. You’re past thirty, surely it’s time for you to re-marry?’

  Mike smiled at her typically South African candour. ‘You don’t have a sister, do you?’

  ‘Hey, no flirting, you sneaky Aussie bastard,’ Rian called, towelling his hair dry.

  ‘Truth is, I think I may have stopped looking,’ Mike said to Susie as Rian carried Jan into the family tent.

  ‘Then you should do all the women of South Africa a favour and lock yourself in a monastery. Don’t advertise what’s not for sale!’

  ‘I’m not quite ready to go that far, but with my job I move around every couple of years, and the money’s nothing to write home about. Not much to offer a girl.’

  ‘Don’t sell yourself short. In the meantime I’ll keep an eye out for you, and you’re always welcome in our home.’

  ‘Thanks, Suze, but I’ve no idea when I’ll get back to Africa.’

  In 1994, again as part of a multinational United Nations force, Australia sent a medical detachment, an infantry company and a few other specialists into a tiny eastern African country that few Australians would have been able to locate on a map. The country was Rwanda and Mike, newly promoted to sergeant, knew he should have followed that tried-and-true adage that all soldiers swear by: never volunteer for anything. The first thing he had seen as he walked down the ramp of the Hercules transport aircraft at Kigali airport was a dog trotting along the runway carrying a human head in its mouth. Things got worse after that.