Tabia waited until they had disappeared in the direction of Elisabethville before going to Ammie’s aid. When she saw Ammie was still alive, she wanted to seek help at a nearby villa. A young boy stopped her when she was still some distance away. He told her terrible things had happened in the house that evening. Tabia talked him into helping her get Ammie to the nearest populated area. Somehow she persuaded a resident to help her. She left Ammie there and went home where she had again found someone to help her get Ammie to her dwelling.
All for Elijah’s sake, Ammie had learned from Tabia. Elijah, who helped Tabia after she was raped by a Belgian soldier and almost bled to death. Elijah who stopped her from taking revenge. Tried to teach her about forgiveness and the liberation it brought.
Tabia did not go in search of her rapist to stab him in the heart as had been her plan, but forgiveness was too much to ask. Though she was considered beautiful, and her lineage was pure, no Tetela man would ever look at her again. Not after she had been violated by a white man. So there would be no dowry for her family. That was why she had come to Elisabethville to become a white man’s whore. To stay alive and send money to her family. Until her pregnancy began to show a few months earlier and the man no longer wanted her. It was the end of her meager income.
All these things Tabia had told Ammie over the past weeks. Without visible emotion, her eyes pitch black and unreadable. But she did not tell Ammie how she had happened to be there on the savanna that fateful evening. Or why she had been trailing César.
Tabia was entitled to her secrets, Ammie had decided at first, but now she wondered anew. Tabia was right about one thing, however. Ammie couldn’t stay and bring her child into the world there.
She’d never thought she could be more terrified than the night Elijah was murdered. Now she knew that her terror of what lay ahead was even greater. Fear of the unknown is worse than fear of death. It’s an immeasurable fear, precisely because the outcome is unknown.
But even this corrosive apprehension did not overshadow her other worry. Whose child was she carrying? Elijah’s or César’s?
Six
Wednesday, September 17
Caz
Cape Town
Caz stared in disbelief at the scale on which she had placed her lilac suitcase and its much smaller companion. She raised her eyes to meet the unsympathetic gaze of the KLM ground stewardess. “You can’t be serious.”
It was clear that the woman was dead serious. “I’m sorry, ma’am, it’s clearly stated on the e-ticket. Only one piece of luggage in the hold. Maximum twenty-three kilograms. Hand luggage no more than nine kilos. You can take the vanity case as hand luggage, but I’ll have to weigh all the pieces together. Please remove the vanity case from the scale.”
Despondently Caz obeyed. The e-ticket had been on her stolen laptop, and she hadn’t made a printout. She’d had no idea there was a single-piece-of-luggage rule.
She already had so much to carry. How would she manage yet another item? Lilah could read Afrikaans books on her Kindle, but no, she insisted on the real McCoy. To touch and to treasure.
“Your case alone weighs more than twenty-three kilograms,” the stewardess announced. “It will be a hundred dollars for the excess weight.”
“A hundred dollars?”
“Ma’am, if you don’t want to pay the hundred dollars, I suggest you take your luggage to the empty scale over there and re-pack. There’s a long line behind you. By the look of things, you’ll have to do something about your hand luggage as well.”
The “things” being looked at consisted of a bulky coat, a backpack containing her new laptop, a handbag, and a bag of books. If she added the vanity case, she would make a pack mule smile.
Caz sighed, dragged her bag off the scale onto a trolley and headed for the empty scale. How did people manage to travel so light? Take that stylish young woman taking photos with her cellphone, for example. One medium-sized suitcase and a handbag.
But then she probably didn’t have to pack for a month. And she almost certainly didn’t have a daughter who was desperate for Afrikaans books, and Ricoffy, and Mrs. Ball’s, and a bottle of jerepigo. One who had left her favorite platform boots in South Africa during her last visit and simply had to have them back.
Caz gritted her teeth when the cellphone was swung in her direction to take a photo. It would probably be posted on Facebook with a comment like “What was this woman thinking when she packed for her trip?” Or was someone confusing her with Antoinette Kellerman again? It was the hair.
A woman had recently tapped her on the shoulder in Hermanus. Her broad smile faded the moment Caz turned.
“I’m sorry, I thought you were Antoinette,” she muttered, embarrassed.
Caz must have looked slightly bemused .
“Antoinette Kellerman ... the actress? Hannah in Song vir Katryn. From the back, your hair looks just like Antoinette’s. All silver and curly. But your face is younger. Different. Sorry.”
Blushing, the woman turned away. Caz didn’t know how to make her feel less awkward.
Miss Traveling-light who had just taken another photo would also soon discover her mistake.
By the time Caz had placed all her belongings beside the empty scale, she was dripping with sweat. She took a deep breath. Time to be practical. The plane was leaving at five to twelve and it was only nine.
Her best option would be to phone the company where her car was being stored while she was gone and pay them extra to come and fetch her excess baggage. What a bloody schlepp.
Caz gritted her teeth again. If that damn woman pointed that cellphone in her direction one more time she was going to slap her bloody face.
Luc
Damme
What was it about humans that made them find the unknown so much more interesting than the known? Or rather, why did they want to ferret out things that had nothing to do with them?
Luc could not explain his behavior. He only knew that he had been upset by his conversation with Ammie. That he wanted to know more, to understand.
He had enough self-discipline to open the email from South Africa only after he had washed the few supper dishes.
Exactly how much time Ammie had spent in South Africa after fleeing the Congo he didn’t know. But from her stories when he was a boy he knew she had been there. At least South Africa was an easier place to start than the DRC.
A short note explained that the attached document was all they had been able to find on one Annemie Pauwels who had entered South Africa as a refugee in 1961.
The “attached document” was a jpeg copy of a sworn statement by Annemie Pauwels, declaring that she’d had to flee the Congo hastily during a state of emergency without being in possession of the necessary travel documents, which she suspected were destroyed in a fire. She had been smuggled across the borders of more than one country, faced many ordeals, and lost the baby she was expecting. She implored the embassy to help her travel to Belgium. She was traumatized and wanted to be reunited with her family. She appealed to them on humanitarian grounds. As soon as she was back in Belgium, her family would help her get the necessary documents. The handwritten date was illegible but the year was 1961.
It was hard to believe that the embassy had complied, but she seemed to have had her wish granted. Perhaps the authorities were more obliging fifty-three years ago than they were today.
Ammie hadn’t spoken much about her personal life in the Congo, but she often spoke about what it had been like to live there. The political and social chaos. The hot weather. The tropical rains. The multicolored butterflies. The shrieking monkeys in the trees. The verdant vegetation, sweet-smelling flowers with sweet-sounding names, like frangipani. A place where bananas hung in huge bunches on the trees, and coconuts and avocados were plentiful. A place where people boiled and ate poisonous roots. Manioc, or cassava. When Luc asked how it was p
ossible to eat poisonous things, she laughed and pointed out that he loved tapioca. It was from the same plant, she said, and only poisonous in its raw form.
After that, he had never eaten tapioca again. But he was keen to find out more and Ammie readily obliged. Her stories made him wonder how people from a civilized country could move to a place where there was chaos. Yet it sounded incredibly exotic.
Once Ammie spent a lot of money on an avocado just so that he could taste it. Another time she added tinned coconut milk to an unfamiliar dish. Luc’s eyes had watered and he was afraid his mouth would burst into flame, but he tasted another world. Far from Leuven and Antwerp and Knokke—the only three places he’d known as a child.
Ammie had also spoken about the ways the Congo was different from South Africa, and yet there were similarities. She spoke of mountain ranges vanishing over the blue horizon. Soutpansberg. Magaliesberg. And of the blue, blue sky and the harsh sun, even in winter. Of a city swathed in a lilac haze in October, when the pavements were carpeted in lilac and jacaranda blossoms burst under the soles of your shoes. Jacaranda—the very word had a lilac sound to it.
Luc deliberately detached himself from the memories. Last week’s visit to Antwerp had left him with more questions than answers. From the copies he had made at the archives and elsewhere—under the pretense of doing research for an article he was writing for a genealogical magazine—it was clear that something was amiss.
The name Annemie Pauwels was not in the register of births and deaths in Antwerp where, he had always understood, she was born. He remembered her saying she had lived in Antwerp until she was five before moving with her parents to the Congo.
He could only assume her birth certificate had been issued under another name. But he couldn’t find any proof that she had legally altered her name to Annemie Pauwels. The South African document confirmed she had entered the country under that name.
Even if her first husband were dead, her marriage to Jacq would still have been illegal because she had used an assumed name. His father would never have forgiven Ammie for that. For eighteen years he had lived with her, under the impression that they were married. Even though he had been oblivious of the fact that the marriage was invalid, in his Catholic eyes it would still make him a whoremonger.
Luc couldn’t even begin to imagine his father’s reaction to the possibility of bigamy as well.
Obviously Ammie must have got hold of some kind of identity document, but he knew she didn’t have a passport. She had always refused to accompany his father to foreign countries. It was probably too risky for her to apply for travel documents.
But there had to be documents somewhere, from the time before she began to use the false name.
Luc took out his handkerchief and polished the lenses of his new glasses. Presumably Ammie hadn’t lied about her date of birth. He put the spectacles on and turned to the printout he had made of all the births and deaths from 1930 to 1939. He hadn’t read it yet, except to search in vain for Annemie Pauwels’s name.
Ammie had laughed when he’d pointed out that she had been born on the day of the Reichstag fire. “A young historian, just like your father,” she had said.
February 27, 1933.
According to the official document, four babies were born in Antwerp that day. Three boys and a girl. The girl was named Amelie de Pauw.
He felt himself getting excited until he read on. Date of death: January 16, 1961, at Elisabethville, Congo.
Still. Annemie, Amelie. Pauwels, De Pauw. Aside from the date of death, there were just too many correspondences pointing toward Ammie having been Amelie de Pauw in an earlier life. If she had been Amelie de Pauw, what on earth had happened? Why was she declared dead? Had Ammie done something terrible and made sure that she was thought to be dead?
Potverdorie! He should never have gone to see her. Instead of finding a satisfactory answer to a single question, he now felt as if he had stuck his head into a hornet’s nest.
He threw the list aside. He needed to switch off his thoughts.
A book wouldn’t do the trick. A movie perhaps. Yes, one of his trusted Jean-Claude van Damme standbys.
He definitely didn’t want his students or anyone else to find out he was a fan of the Belgian movie star—not because of his acting talent but because of his karate skills. And he especially wouldn’t like anybody to know that he immersed himself in Van Damme’s heroes to such an extent that, after watching one of his movies, he felt as sure-footed and strong as Jean-Claude himself.
Pathetic, but that was how it was.
Caz
Cape Town
By the time Caz had dealt with the luggage fiasco, she felt as if she had run a marathon. Worst of all was the mortification she felt at her own stupidity. She wondered how many people had been watching her frantic scurrying.
But at last she was on her way with a case that had weighed in at exactly twenty-three kilograms. She had scored an aisle seat to boot. The check-in attendant must have felt sorry for her. There was still half an hour before she had to board. Just enough time for an ice-cold draft. To hell with the midnight hour.
She was on her way to the country with the largest variety of beers in the world, after all.
The past ten days had been crazy. Fighting with the insurance company, a spat with the police because they hadn’t taken fingerprints. Catya demonstrating odd behavior, like peeing inside. Hopefully she had calmed down by now after the wails and moans the night before when Caz had taken her to the kennel.
But nothing in the chaos of the past two weeks had been more disruptive than the loss of her laptop. Besides a day’s work, she had lost all her emails and recent email addresses as well.
To crown it all, she’d had to upgrade to a new Word program. What a doozy!
Thank goodness she could convince the publisher to give her a month’s respite for the translation. Annika understood that the circumstances were exceptional. Hopefully she would figure out the new program while she was in Ghent. She might even get a little work done.
But first she had to get there. She wasn’t looking forward to the flight. She didn’t know what was waiting on the other side, or how she would be received. Tieneke had written to give her directions from Amsterdam to Ghent, adding only that Josefien’s condition was rapidly deteriorating.
Still, Caz was relieved to get away. She hadn’t had a proper night’s sleep since the burglary, and she was permanently on edge by day.
Luckily there had been no further signs of intruders on her property. Ellen considered it an isolated incident.
“There are plenty of naughty kids in the township, but this doesn’t look like their work. Maybe it was just a few skollies passing by,” she said.
Ellen had promised to check on her home twice a week and water the garden and the plants on the veranda. Dear, dear Ellen.
Chill. That was what she had to do now to be ready for tomorrow. The train trip from Schiphol to Ghent-Dampoort was a prospect she certainly wasn’t looking forward to. Facing Tieneke and Fien even less.
Erevu
Antwerp
To: Jela
Photos received, thanks. Quality good enough. Will be able to identify CC.
From: Jela
To: Erevu
Just learned of an enquiry at the embassy in SA about a refugee from Congo, 1961. Annemie Pauwels.
No record of Annemie Pauwels in Be though the enquiry came from Be. Person enquiring a professor writing article for genealogical journal.
Will try to find out more about him.
Old lady’s alias? Could mean she’s not dead. If not, she must be in her eighties.
The network Jela had built up over the years was at last yielding dividends. It was good that Dove was here. It meant they could be in two places at the same time.
The professor might be a problem, but th
e possibility of the old woman being alive overshadowed all else. He hadn’t managed to track her down anywhere, so he’d assumed she was dead. That was why he was following the Colijn route. But if the old woman could be found, it would simplify matters. If anyone knew where the nkísi were, she was the one.
Seven
Thursday, September 18
Caz
Schiphol
Of course the bloody lilac suitcase was the last one to emerge from the jaws of the baggage carousel. Apart from the obvious link with Lilah, she had specifically chosen lilac in the hope that it would make the bag easy to spot. She had just been proved wrong. About five other lilac travel cases had already rolled past.
The thought of Lilah reminded her to switch on her phone. She had put it on roaming in Cape Town. A few messages about the roaming procedure came through. She sent Lilah a short message, telling her she was at Schiphol. Lilah replied almost at once that she was flying to Miami in an hour.
Timing sucks, but see you soon, MaCaz.
Five kisses ended the message.
Pushing her luggage trolley, Caz aimed for the green exit. Surely Mrs. Ball’s didn’t have to be declared.
Her hand luggage was a nightmare. By the time she found the trolley, the bag of books had numbed her fingers. Her coat kept dragging on the floor and the strap of her handbag kept slipping off her shoulder. Only the backpack was manageable, though it seemed to be getting heavier by the minute.
The arrivals hall was a huge moving, waving, greeting throng. Schiphol was even bigger than Caz had imagined. And much bigger than she remembered Charles de Gaulle.
She knew Fien was on her last legs, but hell! Couldn’t Tieneke have made an effort to meet her? It would have been so much easier. It’s only two hours by car, after all: the same distance as Cape Town International from Stanford.
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