The Soldier who Said No

by Chris Marnewick

  Auckland

  Tuesday 25 December 2007 9

  The wind had blown strongly during the night and long boats of cloud had sailed past the full moon. De Villiers had spent an hour on the veranda of his hospital room – one of the luxuries of a private room at Brightside – looking at the moon and the stars. The night had been warm, no colder than 17˚C, and the wind cool, not cold. The Southern Cross was more prominent, higher in the southern sky above these islands than it had been in Africa.

  After the surgeon’s morning round – the hospital functioned as if there were no holiday – De Villiers manoeuvred himself into the shower and washed with his right hand. His left hand still had the morphine tube and the drip was still in the crook of his elbow. Drying himself with one hand was not so easy, but shaving presented no problems.

  Emma and Zoë were due with a picnic basket and Christmas presents.

  They arrived at noon. The weather still held, but the forecast had been disappointing for Christmas Day, predicting gusting winds and rain from the early afternoon.

  It was difficult to get to the hospital garden. De Villiers called for a nurse to give him a hand with the drip-stand and the procession set off from his room. Zoë led the way, carrying the presents, followed closely by Emma with the picnic basket. He followed, shuffling along slowly, holding the plastic bag with the drainage receptacles in his right hand. The nurse walked on his left, with her right hand under his arm, steadying him, and pulling the drip-stand behind her. They reached the front entrance foyer without incident and turned sharp left towards the garden. A narrow cement path ran along the front of the building about thirty yards, all downhill.

  De Villiers grimaced. The level areas were bad enough, but the downhill stretch was going to test his bruised abdominal muscles. He took the first step holding his breath. His wife looked back, an unspoken question in her eyes: Is this worth it? Zoë skipped ahead playing an imaginary game of hopscotch. De Villiers gritted his teeth and took another step. He had to get the timing right, holding his breath and tensing his stomach muscles no more than absolutely necessary. He made slow progress. After what felt like a quarter of an hour, but was in fact no more than a minute or so, the procession reached the driveway on the side of the building. They made another turn to the left. Their route took them further downhill and a visiting consultant had to stop his sports car to allow them to cross in front of him. De Villiers carefully stepped over a galvanised iron grid over a water drain, his breathing shallow, and took a turn to the right to a staircase down into the summer garden. The steps were surprisingly easy to negotiate with the nurse taking some of his weight.

  They helped him sit on a wooden bench. De Villiers closed his eyes and turned his face to the sun. It was a bit breezy and he turned to face the sun more directly.

  From the corner of his eye, he watched as his wife laid out the picnic. Zoë was unusually quiet. She must have had a lecture on the way to the hospital. She stood in front of De Villiers and looked with concern at his closed eyes. She held the basket with the presents in both hands, swinging it to and fro in front of her legs, tempting him with its prominence.

  ‘Are you sleeping, Dad?’

  De Villiers opened an eye and pulled a face. ‘Just resting.’

  ‘Is it sore?’ Zoë asked.

  ‘No,’ he lied, ‘it’s much better now. The sun feels good.’

  De Villiers teased his daughter by pretending to be asleep. He faked a snore.

  Zoë put the basket down and slowly crept up to him. He played along as his daughter opened one eyelid with clumsy fingers. She jumped when he pinched her bottom.

  ‘Shame on you!’ she screamed with delight. ‘You were faking!’

  ‘Come give me a hug,’ he said.

  ‘Be gentle, Zoë, be gentle,’ Emma cautioned.

  Emma de Villiers watched as Zoë took a seat on the bench to the left of her father and put her arms around him. De Villiers put his arm around the girl and pulled her tightly against his side.

  ‘Do you think your mother will give me a hug too, if I asked nicely?’ he asked, looking over Zoë’s head to Emma.

  They sat close together, basking in the warmth that came as much from inside as from the sun, until Zoë asked, ‘Can we open the presents now?’

  Emma put on the Santa hat and read the name on the card. The box had been elaborately wrapped in fine paper and was tied with a pink bow.

  ‘With love, from Dad to Zoë.’ The layers of paper revealed a small xylophone with brightly coloured keys.

  ‘With extra love, from Zoë to Dad.’ It was a copy of Jake White’s book In Black and White. De Villiers gave his daughter a hug.

  ‘From Dad to Mum.’ It was a silver filigree pendant on a delicate chain. Emma kissed his cheek.

  ‘From Zoë to Mum.’ Emma unwrapped a crude drawing of a family of three, in bright blues, reds and yellows, next to a brown house. Zoë’s school project had already been framed. A little girl with pigtails stood between her parents. They were holding hands.

  Pierre and Emma de Villiers sat in silence next to each other while Zoë tapped the keys of the xylophone in random order. ‘We’ll be okay,’ Emma said, still wearing the Santa hat, and squeezed his hand.

  The bench was hard, and De Villiers asked if it was time to eat.

  The nurse came round and showed Zoë which keys to strike for ‘London Bridge is falling down’.

  They had cuts of cold meats, turkey, ham and smoked chicken. There were lots of greens, of which De Villiers took very small helpings, and trifle, of which he had seconds. Emma had brought grape juice, not wine, and they finished the meal with chocolates.

  De Villiers surreptitiously studied the two women in his life. Zoë was a copy of Emma, a younger and lighter version, with dark eyes and thick black hair, kept long in braids. Yet, where Emma was calm and soft-spoken, Zoë was loud and opinionated. In her first year of school, she couldn’t wait to get out of the house in the morning. When she had to be fetched from school, there was always some game that had to be finished first. He realised that Emma had been studying him from under her eyelashes.

  ‘What are you thinking?’ she asked.

  De Villiers didn’t know what to say. He’d been thinking that it was his job to look after them, but here they were, looking after him.

  Without warning his eyes lost their focus and Emma’s dark features became a haze. Emma got up and took his plate from him. She fussed about and tried to persuade him to lie down. De Villiers insisted that he was alright.

  ‘You should listen to your wife,’ a voice said behind him. He looked up. The hospital’s security officers stood at the top of the steps. De Villiers had engaged in small talk with them when he had encountered Senior Security Officer Te ’O and Security Officer Leauanae during his shuffling walks in the corridors.

  They were on their rounds. De Villiers was dragging his drip-stand behind him. ‘You’re a cop,’ Leauanae had said. De Villiers had nodded. ‘We’re in law enforcement too,’ Leauanae had added with a glint in his eye.

  ‘Whose law?’ De Villiers had demanded.

  ‘The head sister’s,’ Te ’O had said. ‘We carry out her orders.’

  Much like me, De Villiers had thought.

  De Villiers now squinted against the light behind them. ‘Don’t you two have better things to do than to terrorise the patients?’ he teased.

  They laughed and Emma intervened. ‘Would you like to share our Christmas picnic with us?’ she asked. ‘We’ve packed far too much for the three of us.’

  ‘It would be a pleasure,’ Te ’O said and took a seat on the park bench. ‘May we say grace first?’ They held hands as he offered a short prayer. ‘Lord, we thank you for this special day and ask for your blessings on this family. Amen.’

  De Villiers found his own appetite as he watched them eat. Between the three of them, they finished what was left of the food and drink. Emma played the gracious hostess and drew the security men into discussing their fa
milies. They learnt that both Te ’O and Leauanae were from Samoa, and had come to New Zealand as schoolboys to live with family. They were sending the bulk of their earnings to their parents ‘back home’, as they put it, every month.

  Te ’O looked at his watch and stood up. ‘We’re on duty. Thanks for the lunch, Ma’am,’ he said. ‘If you need help to get him back to his bed, just give us a shout.’

  De Villiers played to their mood. ‘I can get there myself,’ he said. ‘And what could you do to force me, anyway?’ he teased.

  ‘You’d be surprised how easy it is to carry a little fellow like you,’ Leauanae said, ‘across the shoulder or under one arm.’ He flexed his biceps.

  ‘Okay, okay,’ De Villiers said. ‘I’ll do as I’m told!’

  When the picnic basket had been repacked, De Villiers lay on his back and looked up at the sky. Clouds were racing across it. It would rain soon, but for the moment it was a beautiful day. There was a jacaranda tree in full bloom, with an equally tall pohutakawa thirty metres away. Under the pohutakawa’s heavy blanket of dark green foliage the soil was moist, covered with moss and lichen, with several species of ferns and lilies in deep shadow. The jacaranda was behind De Villiers in the dry, rocky area of the garden, with very little by way of leaves and sparse growth in the sun-baked soil beneath it. The oily sweet smell of the jacaranda’s lilac flowers made a good change from the antiseptic smell of the hospital gown. It reminded him of spring in Pretoria.

  The nurse came down and insisted that De Villiers return to his bed. They made the journey back with meticulous care, a solemn procession crawling like a centipede around the side of the building. At the main entrance Te ’O came to his side and held De Villiers’s arm. They passed the reception desk under the gaze of Sister Appollus’s disapproving eye.

  The sheets were cool and De Villiers fell asleep immediately.

  Southern Angola

  May 1985 10

  When he was sure everyone had left, De Villiers got up quickly, discarding his disguise. He toyed with the idea of scavenging for the buried ration packs. Troops assured of a regular supply seldom finish the entire contents in one sitting, but he knew that it would take time and that it might give away his position should the patrol return.

  De Villiers planned his actions before he moved. He would make his way north at a brisk pace, in the tracks of his pursuers, heading towards Vila Nova Armada. This time he would not bother to hide his tracks. Speed was more important than stealth now. He consulted his map – it had taken some water damage but was still usable. The town was just below the confluence of the Cuito and Longa Rivers. In reality, the town was no more than a collection of decrepit, bulletridden buildings, but the map showed boats next to its name. From their briefing, De Villiers knew that the town had a dock where the Portuguese kept their patrol boats during the rainy season when they could patrol the Cuito River as far north as Cuito Cuanavale. A military base, but one with a naval purpose. The soldiers would have been marines, he postulated.

  He had to find water and something to eat. De Villiers knew that if he did not find water soon, he might as well surrender to the first enemy patrol that came along. He sat down and opened his map. It was a military map with fine topocadastral lines and gave the detailed positions of rivers and streams. After studying the map for some minutes, De Villiers calculated that he was no more than ten kilometres from Vila Nova Armada, the Cuito River about three kilometres to the east of his position. He considered his situation carefully. Should he head for the river first and replenish his water, or continue to follow the tracks leading back towards Vila Nova Armada?

  In the bush you have to improvise, as De Villiers’s training had emphasised. He recalled an uncle regaling them as children with the feats of a notorious goat thief who had roamed across parts of the Transvaal and Botswana in the sixties. The legend had it that he could open a pair of police handcuffs behind his back with a matchstick and that no police cell could hold him long enough for the Periodical Court Magistrate to try him. De Villiers’s uncle had laughed as he shook his head. ‘You know,’ he had said, ‘that man had more tricks in him than the leader of a troop of baboons. He could walk for miles on the fences between farms and the bloodhounds would be lost, unable to follow a spoor on the ground. He tied his shoes to his feet back-to-front, so the trackers would be following his spoor in one direction, while he was making good his escape in the opposite direction.’

  De Villiers obliterated the signs of his presence before he sat down where the radio operator had been. He removed his boots – they were similar to those worn by the 32 Battalion soldiers, khaki canvas laceup boots, with a series of eyelets. It took him a while to tie his boots to his feet back-to-front. When he tried to walk on them, he saw that he had tied the boots to the wrong feet. The right boot would have to go on the left foot. The second time was easier, and after wiping away the spoor left by his mismatched boots, he was ready for the journey.

  De Villiers carefully took his bearings and folded the map away before he started walking, his eyes scanning the tracks from side to side. He made his way slowly, carefully walking in the tracks left by the captain and his men, hiding his footprints within the broad swath they had cut while tracking him.

  Two hours later, De Villiers approached the evacuation zone with extreme caution.

  ‘I smell you,’ a voice said in Afrikaans. It was weak and came from somewhere to the front and left, near a clump of tall trees.

  ‘Who are you?’ De Villiers asked cautiously.

  ‘They killed me.’ The voice was weak.

  ‘But you’re speaking to me,’ De Villiers said as he edged closer.

  ‘I’m hungry.’

  By now De Villiers had closed in on the man. ‘I greet you,’ he said.

  It was a Bushman. He was hanging upside down from the branches of a mopane tree, a carpet of bronze leaves under his head. He was wearing army fatigues, the khaki brown trousers and shirt, but was barefoot and hatless.

  De Villiers studied the scene from a distance. He skirted the tree carefully, looking for a trap. There was none. Whoever had done this had not expected anyone to come looking for the Bushman. The man had been beaten severely and there was a pool of dried blood directly under his head amongst the dead leaves and twigs.

  ‘Are you alright?’ De Villiers asked, approaching the Bushman. He angled his head to examine the man’s face more closely. There was blood in every crease of the wrinkled face.

  ‘I’m alive again, friend.’ The voice was weary but firm.

  ‘I’ll help you get down.’

  The man’s hands had been tied behind his back. De Villiers stooped to remove the Leatherman from its sheath and quickly cut through the polyester chord. The Bushman rubbed his wrists as De Villiers contemplated ways to cut the rope to free his legs. The Bushman was suspended so that his head was nearly two metres above the ground, just high enough for a lion or leopard to get hold of this unexpected bounty, but too high for De Villiers to cut through the rope without having to climb the tree. The trunk was rough and straight, with the first bifurcation at least four metres off the ground.

  He contemplated giving the man the knife, but the Bushman’s hands appeared to be lifeless and clumsy.

  ‘I’m going to jump and cut the rope and you’re going to fall down.’

  ‘Please cut me,’ he pleaded.

  De Villiers sat down and untied his shoes and put them on properly, lacing the bootstraps up tightly. When he raised his arm holding the knife as high as he could, the knife reached only as high as the Bushman’s thighs. De Villiers thought he would have to make a jump of about a metre to be able to cut the rope. He made a practice jump, reaching as high as the ankles. A second jump brought a grunt from his throat, but reached no higher. He improvised by cutting a length of sapling from a shrub and tied the Leatherman to its end, extending his reach. The rope parted quickly under the blade and the Bushman fell to the ground in a heap of dust and mopane leaves.

/>   The Bushman coughed before he spoke, ‘Eh, the lion has to send his women to find his meat. He’s not going to dine on !Xau tonight!’ His name sounded like Teekau. It started with a click of the tongue at the back of throat, like a cork popping out of a champagne bottle.

  De Villiers studied the Bushman. He was small, with a wrinkled face and yellowish-brown skin. His eyes were drawn to slits, his teeth yellow, and his hair caked with dust. It was impossible to gauge his age, but De Villiers guessed that !Xau was somewhere between forty and fifty years old, perhaps older.

  ‘Who did this?’ he asked.

  ‘Soldiers,’ the Bushman said. He rolled over and tried to get to his feet, but his hands and feet would not cooperate. He ended up on his knees and elbows.

  When De Villiers bent over him, the Bushman touched his camouflage shirt, rubbing the cotton material between his fingers. ‘Soldiers,’ !Xau said a second time.

  De Villiers took the Bushman’s small yellow-brown hands, scarred by hard living, into his own. The hands were cold. He rubbed some warmth into them. Then he started on the feet. Starved of blood during the ordeal, the feet were slow to recover.

  ‘Were you tracking for them?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why did they do this to you?’ De Villiers pointed at the remnants of the rope hanging from the tree.

  ‘I wanted to go back to 31.’ De Villiers knew that the Bushmen trackers were attached to 31 Battalion, not 32, and concluded that they must have brought !Xau in for a special operation.

  ‘What did they say?’ he asked.

  ‘They said we had to find you quickly.’

  ‘Why?’

  The Bushman swallowed. ‘They said you were SWAPO. And they showed us the body of another one there at the river.’ The Bushman pointed in the direction of the river behind him.

  ‘Was he dead?’

  ‘Yes. They threw the body in the river.’

  The Bushman was slow to recover and unsteady on his feet. De Villiers knew they had to get going.

  ‘Are you well enough to go?’ he asked.