Heart of the Hunter

by Deon Meyer

  Thank goodness. She keyed in the numbers and waited, her brown eyes following the man and woman up Wale Street.

  “Hullo, Allison, it’s Rassie. Good articles this morning, well done. Phone me, there are some interesting things. Bye.”

  To save this message, press nine. To delete it, press seven. To return a call, press three. To save it

  She hurriedly pressed seven.

  Next message:

  “Allison, Nic here. I just want to I want to see you, Allison. I don'’t want to wait till the weekend. Please. I miss you. Phone me, please. I know I’m a pain. I talk too much. I’m available tonight. Oh, good work in the paper today. Phone me.”

  To save this message

  Irritated, she pressed seven.

  End of new messages. To listen to your

  Why didn’'t Van Heerden call?

  The white woman and the black man were disappearing up the street, and on impulse she followed them. It was something to occupy her mind. She walked fast, the wind at her back. She pushed the cell phone into her handbag and tried to catch up, her eyes searching until she saw the woman turn in at a building. Someone called her name. It was the Somali at the cigarette stand. “Hi, Allison, not buying today?”

  “Not today,” she said.

  “don'’t work too hard.”

  “I won’t.”

  She walked fast to the place where the woman had turned in, eventually looking up at the name above the big double doors.

  WALE STREET CHAMBERS.

  Just a simple call.

  Hi, Allison, how’s it going?

  How much would that take? Was that too much to ask?

  Some of the information from the interview with Ismail Mohammed was surprisingly accurate. He stated that:

  i. Inkululeko was a more recent source than generally believed.

  ii. There was no evidence that Inkululeko had a direct Zulu connection and that the contrary should be explored.

  iii. Inkululeko was not a member of Parliament or the ANC leadership (which the constant rumors had indicated over the years).

  iv. Inkululeko was most definitely part of the current SA intelligence setup and held a senior position within the intelligence community.

  v. The Muslim structures (unspecified) were getting closer to identifying Inkululeko, and it was only a matter of time before full identification would be made.

  It is significant to note that Mohammed referred to Inkululeko as “he” and “him” during several interviews, indicating the level of true knowledge, despite the accuracy of the above statements.

  The major question, of course, is how the SA Muslim structures acquired this knowledge.

  According to Mohammed, they have been feeding disinformation regarding international Muslim activities, operations, and networks into the SA governmental and intelligence systems through a deliberate and well-planned process, with checks and balances on the other side to try and determine which chunks of disinformation got through to the CIA.

  One such instance that we know of is the warning this office passed on to Langley in July of 2001 of a pending attack on the U.S. embassy in Lagos, Nigeria. The tip-off was received from Inkululeko, and additional U.S. Marines were deployed in and around the Lagos embassy at the time. As you know, the attack never materialized, but the intensified security measures should have been easy to monitor by Muslim extremists in Nigeria.

  Fortunately for us, Inkululeko received the report on the Mohammed interview directly and was understandably disturbed by the contents. After giving the matter some thought, she put a proposal to this office.

  41.

  O

  n the road between Francistown and Nata a strange thing happened. He seemed to withdraw into a cocoon, the pain melted away, the overpowering heat in him and around him dissipated, he seemed to leave the discomfort of his body behind and float above the motorbike, distanced from reality, and though he could not understand how it had happened, he was awed by the wonder of it.

  He was still aware of Africa around him, the grass shoulder to shoulder in khaki green and red-brown columns marching across the open plains beside the black ribbon of tarmac. Here and there acacias hunched in scrums and rucks and mauls. The sky was a dome of azure without limits, and the birds accompanied him, hornbills shooting across his field of vision, swallows diving and dodging, a bateleur tumbling out of the heavens, vultures riding the thermals far to the west in a spiral endlessly reaching upward. For a moment he was with them, one of them, his wings spanned tight, as wires registered every shuddering turbulence, and then he was back down there, and all the time the sun shone, hot and yellow and angry, as if it would sterilize the landscape, as if it could burn clean the evil sores of the continent with steadfast light and searing fire.

  Why was the heat no longer in him, why did the shI'ver of intense cold run through his body like the frontal gusts of a storm?

  It freed thoughts, like the chunks of a melting ice sheet, mixed up, jumbled, floating in his heart, things he had forgotten, wanted to forget. And right at the back of his mind a monotonous refrain of whispers.

  Gone missing.

  His father in the pulpit with pearls of perspiration beading his forehead in the summer heat, one hand stretched out over the congregation, the other palm down, resting on the snow-white pages of the big Bible before him. A tall man in a somber black toga, his voice thundering with disapproval and reproach. “What ye sow shall ye reap. It is in the Book. God’s Word. And what do we sow, my brothers and sisters, what do we sow? Envy. Jealousy. And hate. Violence. We sow, every day in the fields of our lives, and then we cannot understand when it comes back to us. We say, Lord, why? As if it was He that poured the bitter cup for us, we are dismayed. So easily we forget. But it is what we have sown.”

  In Amsterdam the air was heavy and somber as his mood. He wandered through the busy streets, with his thick gray coat wrapped around him, Christmas carols spilling out from the doors along with the heat and eddying over the sidewalk, children in bright colors with red cheeks laughing like bells. He cast a long shadow in all this light. The assassination in Munich lay a week behind him, but he could not shake off the shame of it, it clung to him: this was not war. At a little shop on a corner opposite the canal, he spotted the ostrich eggs first, a heap in a grass basket, fake Bushman paintings on the oval, creamy white orbs; CURIOS FROM AFRICA, cried the display window. He saw wood carvings, the familiar mother and child figures and the tidy row of small carved ivory hippopotamuses and elephants, Africa in a nutshell for the continental drawing room, sanitized and tamed, the dark wound bound up with a white capitalistic bandage, peoples and tongues and cultures packaged in a few wooden masks with horrible expressions and tiny white ivory figurines.

  Then he spotted the assegai and the oxhide shield, dusty and half forgotten, and he pushed open the door and went in. The bell tinkled. He picked up the weapon, turning it in his hands. The wooden shaft was smooth, the metal tip very long. He tested the shiny blade that was speckled with flecks of rust.

  It was expensive, but he bought it and carried it off, an awkward parcel gift-wrapped in colorful ethnic paper.

  He had sawed off the shaft in the shower of his hotel room, and the smell of the wood crept up his nose and the sawdust powdered the white tiles like snow and he remembered. He and his uncle Senzeni on the undulating Eastern Cape hill, the town down below in the hollow of the land as if God’s hand were folded protectively over it. “This is exactly where Nxele stood.” He laid out the history of his forefathers, broadly painted the battle of Grahamstown: this was where the soldiers had broken off the shafts of the long assegais, where the stabbing spear was born, not in Shaka’s land, that was a European myth, just another way to rob the Xhosa. Even our history was plundered, Thobela.

  That was the day that Senzeni had said, “You have the blood of Nqoma, Thobela, but you have the soul of Nxele. I see it in you. You must give it life.”

  He had laid the sawed-off assegai at the feet of his Stasi masters a
nd said from now on this is how he would wage war, he would look his opponents in the eye, he would feel their breath on his face, they could take it or leave it.

  “Very well,” they agreed with vague amusement behind the understanding frowns, but he did not care. He had made the scabbard himself so that the weapon could lie against his body, behind the great muscles and the spine, so he could feel it where it lay ready for his hand.

  Gone missing,

  sang the male voice choir in his head, and a road sign next to his path said Makgadikgadi and he found the rhythm in the name, the music of syllables.

  “The sins of the fathers shall be visited upon the children even unto the third and fourth generation,” said his father in the pulpit.

  Makgadikgadikgadikgadi,

  gone missing, gone missing, gone missing

  “We are our genes, we are the accidental sum of each of our forefathers, we are the product of the fall of the dice and the double helix. We cannot change that,” said Van Heerden with joy, finding excitement in that.

  In Chicago he was awed by the unbelievable architecture and the color of the river, by the plenty and the streets that were impossibly clean. He walked self-consciously through the South Side and shook his head at their definition of a slum and wondered how many people of the Transkei would give their lives to let their children grow up here. Once he called out a greeting in Xhosa instinctively, as they were all black as he was, but their throats had ages since outgrown the feel of African sounds and he knew himself a stranger. He waited for the young Czech diplomat below the rumbling of the El, the elevated railway in the deep night shadows of the city. When the man came, he stood before him and said his name and saw only fear in the rodent eyes, a tiny scavenger. When his blade did the work, there was no honor in the blood, and Phalo and Rharhabe and all the other links in his genetic chain drooped their heads in shame.

  Gone missing.

  One day his victims would return, one day the deeds of his past would visit him in the present, the dead would reach out long, cold fingers and touch him, repayment for his cowardice, for the misuse of his heritage, for breaking the code of the warrior, because with the exception of the last, they were all pale plump civil servants, not fighters at all.

  He thought the assegai, the direct confrontation, would make a difference. But to press the cold steel in the heart of pen pushers betrayed everything that he was; to hear the last breath of gray, unworthy opponents in your ears was a portent, a self-made prophecy, a definition of your future— somewhere one day, it will come back to you.

  Gone missing.

  Were the same words used for the people he had killed? Some were fathers, at least somebody’s son, although they were men, although they were part of the game, although they were every one a traitor to the conflict. And where was that conflict now, that useless chess game? Where were the ghosts of the Cold War? All that remained were memories and consequences, his personal inheritance.

  The emptiness in him had grown; merely the nuances had changed with each city where he found himself, with the nature of the hotel room. The moments of pleasure were on the journey to the next one, when he could search for meaning anew at the next stop, search for something to fill the great hole, something to feed the monster growing inside.

  The praise songs of his masters grew more hollow as time passed. At first, it was salve to his soul. The appreciation that rolled so smoothly off their tongues had stroked the shame away. “Look what your people say” and they showed him letters from the ANC in London that praised his service in flowery language.

  This is my role,

  he told himself.

  This is my contribution to the freedom fight,

  but he could not escape, not in the moments when he turned off the light and laid down his head and listened to the hiss of the hotel air-conditioning. Then he would hear his uncle Senzeni’s voice and he longed to be one of Nxele’s warriors who stood shoulder to shoulder, who broke the spear with a crack over his knee.

  NATA , read the road sign, but he scarcely saw it. He and the machine were a tiny shadow on the plateau— they were one, grown together on a journey, every kilometer closer to completion, to fulfillment, engine and wind combining to a deep thrumming, a rhythmic swell like the breaking of waves. “Your friend was looking for you early today,” the petrol jockey in Francistown had said. He knew, he knew it was Mazibuko, the voice of hate. He had not only heard the hate, he had recognized it, felt the resonance and knew that here was another traveler— this was himself ten or fifteen years ago, empty and searching and hating and frustrated, before the insight had come, before the calm of Miriam and Pakamile.

  He was in the hospital, he and Van Heerden, when it happened. When he saw himself for the first time. Afterward, not a day would pass that he did not think of it, that he did not try to unpick the knot of destiny.

  He was shuffling down the hospital passage late one evening, his body still broken from the thing that he and Van Heerden had been in. He stood in a doorway to catch his breath, that was all. No deliberate purpose, just a moment of rest, and he glanced into the four-bed ward and there beside the bed of a young white boy a doctor was standing.

  A black doctor. A Xhosa as tall as he was. Round about his fortieth year, gray hinting at the temples.

  “What are you going to become one day, Thobela?” His father, the same man who Sunday after Sunday hurled God’s threats so terrifyingly from the pulpit with a condemning finger and a voice of reproach, was soft and gentle now to chase away the fear of an eight-year-old of the dark.

  “A doctor,” he had said.

  “Why, Thobela?”

  “Because I want to make people better.”

  “That is good, Thobela.” That year he had had the fever and the white doctor had driven through from Alice and come into the room with strange smells around him and compassion in his eyes. He had laid cool, hairy hands on the little black body, pressed the stethoscope here and there, had shaken out the thermometer.

  You are a very sick boy, Thobela,

  speaking Xhosa to him,

  but we will make you better.

  The miracle had happened, that night he broke through the white-hot wall of fever into the cool, clear pool on the other side where his world was still familiar and normal, and that’s when he knew what he wanted to be, a healer, a maker of miracles.

  Where he stood watching the white boy and the black doctor in the doorway, he relived the scene, heard his own words to his father, and felt his knees weaken at the years that had been lost in the quicksand. He saw his life from another angle, saw the possibilities of other choices. He sagged slowly down against the wall, the weight too much to bear, all the brokenness, all the hatred, the violence and death, and the consuming deep craving to be free of it swallowed him up. Oh Lord, to be born again without it; he sank to his knees and stayed like that, head on his chest and deep, dry sobs tearing through his chest, opening up more memories until everything lay open before him, everything.

  He had felt the black doctor’s hand on his shoulder and later was conscious that the man was holding him, that he was leaning on the shoulder of the white coat, and slowly he calmed down. The man helped him up, supporting him, laid him down on his bed, and pulled the sheets up to his chin.

  You are a very sick boy but we will make you better.

  He had slept and awoken and he had fought again, barefisted, honestly and honorably against the self-justification and rationalization. Out of the bloodied bodies of the dead rose a desire— he would be a farmer, a nurturer. He could not undo what had happened, he could not blot out who he had been, but he could determine where and how he would go from here. It would not be easy, step-by-step, a lifetime task, and that night he had eaten a full plate of food and thought through the night. The next morning before six he went to Van Heerden’s room and woke him up and said he was finished, and Van Heerden had looked at him with great wisdom, so he had asked with astonishment at the way he was underestimated: “You don'’t
believe I can change?”

  Van Heerden had known. Known what he had discovered last night under a bridge in the Free State.

  He was Umzingeli.

  Twenty kilometers south of Mpandamatenga, through the fever and hallucinations, he became aware of movement to the left of him. Between the trees and grass he saw three giraffes moving like wraiths against the sun, cantering stately as if to escort him on his journey, heads dipping to the rhythm in his head. And then he was floating alongside them, one of them, and he felt a freedom, an exuberance, and then he was rising higher and looking down on the three magnificent animals thundering on; he surged up higher and turned south and caught the wind in his wings, and it sang. It swept him along, and all was small and unimportant down there, a scrambling after nothing; he flew over borders, rolling kopjes and bright rivers and deep valleys that cut the continent, and far off he saw the ocean, and the song of the wind became the crash of the breakers where he stood looking out from the rocky point. Sets of seven, always sets of seven. He folded his wings and waited for the oasis of calm between the thunder, the moment of perfect silence that waited for him.