Sacrificed

by Chanette Paul

  No one would even notice she was gone. Except Catya. She would take Catya to the local kennel. They took in cats as well. How the poor thing would cope didn’t bear thinking about. The cat was used to her freedom. Catching mice, moles, once even a snake. Luckily just a slug-eater. Birds too, of course, to Caz’s dismay. The other day, even a sugarbird had come short. If only Catya would grab the bloody Cape robin that ate her pellets and then shat all over the house, but don’t you believe it. The two probably had a treaty of some kind.

  At the Orchards farmstall Caz made a pee stop and bought an olive ciabatta. She felt she couldn’t use the nice clean bathroom without buying something. Besides, they made delicious ciabattas.

  The traffic had thinned by the time she hit the road again and three quarters of an hour later she drove through her gate. It was always lovely to spot the green tin roof through the trees. To know her sanctuary was waiting, the pillow for her head.

  As she came driving around the big wild olive and the front of the house came in view, Caz slammed on the brakes. She forgot about the clutch and the car jolted to a halt. Her hand flew to her mouth.

  Ammie

  Leuven

  “You’re hiding something from me, Lieve.” Ammie felt good today. The fine weather helped. But Lieve had been scuttling about all day long, and it worked on her nerves. You’d swear they were expecting visitors.

  “Oh, it’s such a lovely day, I just feel like working, Miss Ammie.”

  Ammie grunted but said nothing. Lieve was a wonderful carer, but domestic chores were not her strong suit. Neither was lying. And the humming did not occur often either. Fortunately not. Lieve’s singing voice was not her strong point either.

  The women in Elisabethville’s cité indigène used to harmonize so beautifully. Ammie saw a completely different side of them in the weeks she spent in Tabia’s slum-dwelling, recovering from the assault by César and his henchman. For the first time she saw them as people, women, instead of mere domestic workers. She tried to understand them better. Even learned to say a few indigenous words, though she could never distinguish between the various languages.

  Her sojourn in the cité indigène made her focus more on the similarities between them, rather than the differences. Pain and treachery were pain and treachery, irrespective of skin color and culture; women were women.

  The woman with the decorative scarification on her body said her Swahili name was Tabia and that it meant something like “magic spell.” She did not disclose her Tetela name.

  Maybe Tabia could do magic, because Ammie made a complete recovery from her injuries: the broken ribs, even the broken ring finger, which Tabia had set and put in splints while Ammie had been in an herb-induced trance.

  The only thing Tabia was unable to cure with her magic was Ammie’s hatred for César. Maybe it was because she and Tabia shared that hatred and thus multiplied it.

  Caz

  Overberg

  At least there was some advantage to living in a rural area. The police arrived barely fifteen minutes after her phone call. Yet they were long, scary minutes to sit and wait.

  Going up the veranda steps in the company of the two policemen, Caz felt dazed. Potted plants lay overturned. The wind chimes she had crafted herself lay in heaps. A clay bowl shaped by her own hands lay shattered. Chairs stood haphazardly all over the place. The precious red-and-blue stained glass panels of the Victorian front door had been smashed.

  Inside even greater chaos reigned. Everything that could possibly be overturned lay on its side. Drawers were open, the contents spilling out. Cupboard doors dangled from their hinges. More than one window had been broken. It looked like an act of pure vandalism.

  “Can you see whether anything is missing, ma’am?”

  Caz looked around the living room and nodded. “My TV and DVD player. The music centre.” She groaned and ran to the study. Her desk was empty.

  “The bastards!” She gave a muted scream and slammed her fist on the wooden desktop. Pain shot through her hand.

  “Your laptop as well?” a constable asked behind her.

  She didn’t bother to reply. In the drawer she found the external hard drive. Everything was on it except the previous day’s work. That she had managed to save her data was more important than the computer. Still, an entire very productive day’s work had been lost. She had been so tired the night before she had forgotten about the bloody backup.

  “It’s the tikkoppe, ma’am. They’ll sell anything for tik.”

  “Well, catch them, damn it!” She rubbed her aching hand and tried to swallow her helpless tears.

  The policeman shrugged. “Their numbers grow daily, ma’am, and there are many people who will buy stolen goods. Not just fencers, ordinary people looking for a bargain too. The perpetrators are usually minors. Even if we catch them, they’re soon back on the streets. It’s a sad state of affairs. You’ll have to get in touch with someone who can replace the windows as soon as possible. It’s Friday afternoon.”

  She nodded but made no effort to look up a number or call. “The alarm. Why wasn’t it triggered?” She looked at the constable. “Do tikkoppe know how to deactivate alarms?”

  “Not usually. They smash and grab. Are you sure you set the alarm?”

  Could she have forgotten? It had happened before, but today of all days? The very day the tikkoppe decided to target her place, five kilometers out of town? It was possible.

  “You should get a dog. Or several. It’s better than an alarm.”

  “My cat!” she remembered. “Catya?” She shouted so loudly that the constable jumped. “Catya?” She ran out on the veranda. “Kittykittykitty!”

  Nothing.

  “Catya! Food!”

  A thin mewing made her look up in the wild olive. High up. She knew at once her ladder wouldn’t reach.

  Bloody thieves. Bloody drugs. Bloody New South Africa that was over twenty years old and not all that new.

  Maybe she wouldn’t use the return leg of her air ticket. Stay over there, even if it was as an illegal immigrant. It could only be better there. Even in prison. At least she would escape from a country where people had to build and pay for their own bloody prisons in an effort to keep the criminals out.

  Yes, what she needed, what she craved, was a country where law and order was respected. As far away as possible from all the crime and crap.

  Luc

  Ghent

  The traffic out of Ghent was a nightmare. It usually took him less than an hour to Damme. He should have taken the E40 instead of the N9. He hadn’t thought about it being Friday. Nor that the good weather and the weekend would make everyone converge on Knokke. Despite the fact that the ocean was gray and docile, it still drew people from the cities.

  Luc regretted going in to the university that morning, but he had to get his affairs in order for the official opening of the academic year on September 19. He had already spent an hour in this traffic jam, and the turnoff to Damme was still some distance ahead. He supposed he could’ve switched on his Tom-Tom, but the woman’s voice drove him up the wall. Or turned on the radio, but he wasn’t keen on getting an earful of current affairs and traffic incidents.

  Nothing special was waiting for him at the ancient house he had inherited from a spinster aunt on his father’s side a little more than two years earlier, but he enjoyed living there.

  Like all old houses, it had its quirks, but it was cozy and full of character. He especially enjoyed spending time in the back garden, the size of a postage stamp. The narrow flowerbeds bordering the fences, the potted herbs on the patio and the small greenhouse where he grew hydroponic vegetables for personal use were his pride and joy. It kept him busy in the evenings and over weekends, especially during the planting and growing seasons.

  In winter he listened to music, read more than usual, watched DVDs or reread the pages he ha
d written over time, in the probably vain belief that they might one day become part of a historical novel.

  Now and again, when the weather was favorable, he spent a weekend at Zandbergen, where his houseboat lay at anchor. The green meadows, swift flow of the Dender River and brisk walks in the forest made a pleasant change.

  But this weekend his routine had been completely upset. He regretted it more by the minute that he had allowed himself to be persuaded by Lieve Luykens to undertake the hour-and-a-half-long drive to Leuven. And he had no idea how he would be received.

  No, he would much rather have stayed at home. He had bought the latest Luc Deflo novel the previous day. His namesake certainly knew how to entertain.

  Reading crime novels provided an escape from his boring life. While he was reading, Luc DeReu became Dirk Deleu. Or Lee Child’s Jack Reacher. Connelly’s Hieronymus Bosch. Rankin’s Rebus. Or whoever the hero might be in the books of a specific author.

  His life was uneventful but it was peaceful. He could do with a warm female body, but the accompanying complications would probably not be worth it.

  Perhaps he would have been a more exciting person if he had stayed on in South Africa. Now there was a country that made the blood course through a man’s veins. The people use every possible opportunity to get out of doors. They climb mountains in shorts and sneakers. They swim in a sea that isn’t just an enormous lake with barely an attitude; it does its best to swallow you. They fish, the most prized catch being a galjoen. They dive for crayfish and the large periwinkles they call alikreukels. Barbecuing, known locally as a braai, is almost a national sport. It was probably all the vitamin D that made them live such effervescent lives.

  But his year-long contract had not been renewed. Possibly because he was never able to elicit much more than stifled and less stifled yawns from his students.

  Maybe they were numbed by the crime in the country. And the country’s history. The so-called white guilt. Maybe that was why a class with mainly white students, as was then still the case, showed hardly any interest in the affairs of the rest of colonial and postcolonial Africa—past or present.

  He had been in Stellenbosch just long enough to begin to understand these white South Africans’ dry sense of humor and their obsession with rugby. Just long enough to want to see more of the sunny country in all its diversity.

  Of course he had noticed that people buried their heads in the sand. Endured what would never be tolerated in Belgium: the almost relentless, almost casual violence that all too often went unpunished by law. But then, South Africans were from Africa, not Europe, their mindset far removed from what he knew and understood as part of his daily life.

  Who was he to criticize? He had not been born a white child in Pretoria or Bloemfontein. Or a colored child in Mitchells Plain. Or a black child in Soweto or Gugulethu.

  He often wondered who or what he might have been if he had been born and raised in Africa. He also wondered what his life would have been like if he had stayed on in Stellenbosch for another year or so. But such speculation was an exercise in futility.

  In the end you are the victim of your own comfort zone until you are forcefully jolted out of it. And even then, you hang on to what is familiar until there are no other options left.

  At least in Belgium he wouldn’t be hijacked. Or bashed over the head for his cellphone. Or get his block knocked off because he happened to be shouting for the wrong team, or had made an error of judgment in traffic. It was a consolation. So was living an unchallenging, comfortable life in a country where you don’t have to feel guilty because you are white and speak your mother tongue.

  Right now he had to concentrate on getting Sunday’s trip over and done with. Getting past the ripple Ammie was temporarily casting on the tranquil waters of his boring life.

  Ammie

  Leuven

  Ammie was relieved when Lieve left. The apartment sparkled and smelled fresh, but the bustle had exhausted her. Usually Lieve came for a few hours in the mornings, and returned in the late afternoons to fix Ammie’s supper and get her ready for bed. Today Lieve had been here almost all day. It was exhausting.

  Ammie knew something was afoot, but Lieve refused to say what she was planning. Worrying about it exhausted Ammie, though she had felt much better all day, more lucid, as if she had a renewed grasp on the principle of cause and effect and could distinguish between what is and what was.

  She hoped Lieve wasn’t bringing someone from the church round again. Surely not. Lieve had been thoroughly embarrassed when Ammie had unceremoniously got rid of the previous one.

  The only person she had ever voluntarily discussed religion with had been Elijah. It was the one thing they had never agreed on.

  Elijah, who grew up at a mission station. Whose hand was never far from the Bible. Yet neither the Bible nor his unshakable faith could put an end to the love between them.

  “If a clever man like Solomon could not fathom the ways of love, who am I to try?” That was what Elijah said to her the first time she lay in his arms after they had finally surrendered to their feelings. It had happened so unexpectedly, that first time. So unplanned. But it had been so right. Or so they believed.

  She had known she belonged with him the day, almost a year earlier, when she had looked into his wise greenish-brown eyes and had seen a reflection of herself. Not only her likeness, but also her soul.

  In the background, Patrice Lumumba was shaking hands with people who had come to hear his views on the future of an independent Congo. Nobody could have predicted then that the honor and responsibility of the position of prime minister would be bestowed on Patrice barely a year later, only to be taken away from him in a matter of months. Neither that he would be murdered only a few months later.

  In that moment, however, Patrice was forgotten. The future of the Congo faded into insignificance in the presence of the lightning bolt that had simultaneously struck both her and Elijah.

  It was as if their love had existed even before they themselves had seen the light of day. As if they only had to find each other to confirm it.

  Two months after they had lost the battle against the inevitable consummation of their love she realized she was pregnant. She feared the child might be César’s but when it was born, the paternity was clear. Only the midwife was with her and she bribed the woman to tell César it had been a stillbirth. And to find a wet nurse.

  She was heartbroken when she placed her son in the arms of another young mother, saw the little mouth search for the plum-colored nipple and hungrily begin to suck at the full breast. At least Elijah could keep an eye on the child at the children’s home he helped run at the mission. About that they agreed. Their child would grow up with other children who had been orphaned by hatred and emotional callousness—just as Elijah as a child had been orphaned due to prejudice and intolerance.

  Ammie understood that she had made a liar out of a man who irrefutably believed in truth, honesty and integrity. Denied him his fatherhood. But there had been no other way. She knew César would destroy them, and there was more at stake than love.

  There was the battle Elijah was fighting, along with Patrice Lumumba, in the MNC, the Mouvement National Congolais. The time was October 1959. Patrice was arrested after an anticolonial riot in Stanleyville in which thirty people died. The date for the conference in Brussels to finalize the future of the Congo had been set for mid-January 1960.

  In the streets, the Congolese were insisting on their independence with sporadic chanting: “Dependa! Dependa! Dependa!”

  At that point the fight to throw off the colonial yoke, but especially to replace it with something workable, had been more important than personal happiness.

  César had stood on the political sideline, had trimmed his sails to the wind. He didn’t give a damn about the Congo’s independence. In his arrogance, he believed it wouldn’t make the least diff
erence to his life. The wealth of the Congo still lay there for the taking and, as a businessman, he was in a position to make use of it.

  How he had managed to remain in Moise Tshombe’s good books was unclear, but Ammie knew César could get at Elijah by stirring up Tshombe’s hatred of Patrice Lumumba and the Lumumbists. Whether for personal or political reasons, they could under no circumstances afford for César to find out about her and Elijah.

  He didn’t find out. At least not until a little more than a year later.

  She had sacrificed her son and the chance to find happiness with Elijah in vain.

  In June 1960 the Congo was declared independent. The MNC won a convincing victory. Kasavubu became president and Patrice Lumumba prime minister—only to be kicked out by Colonel Joseph Mobutu a few months later and flung in jail.

  In the second week of February 1961, she and Tabia heard that Patrice Lumumba and two of his faithful supporters, Maurice Mpolo and Joseph Okito, had been murdered by the residents of a small settlement a few days after their escape from the military prison in Thysville.

  Of course everyone suspected that the story wasn’t true. What Ammie and Tabia didn’t know was that Patrice and his two confidants had been gruesomely put to death the same night as Elijah and not too far away from the place where Elijah had died.

  César had planned his revenge very carefully, knowing that the atrocities committed that night and in that vicinity would be kept a secret at all cost.

  It would be decades before the particulars of Patrice’s murder were disclosed. Elijah’s death was never mentioned. He was just one of thousands who lost their lives at the time.