The Soldier who Said No

by Chris Marnewick

  ‘And another thing, whether you’re on suspension or not, you’re going to have to learn to obey orders,’ he said over his shoulder.

  ‘I keep my promises,’ De Villiers said, and released another arrow. Neither Henderson nor Kupenga was watching as the arrow went wide of the target. ‘And I expect you to keep yours,’ De Villiers called after them, but their car was already around the first bend in the narrow road.

  Henderson was not used to being spoken to with such blatant disrespect by a subordinate. He made a mental note to include De Villiers’s refusal to accompany them back to Auckland in the disciplinary charges to be brought against him. But it was Kupenga who brought a sharper point to the matter.

  ‘He’s quite handy with a bow and arrow, isn’t he?’

  The Honeymoon Delight proved to be massage therapy for couples. De Villiers baulked at the idea at first, but Emma had made special arrangements for a minder for Zoë and had paid for the massage in advance. De Villiers was not convinced, but Emma insisted.

  They were ushered into an anteroom from the reception desk at the Spa. There were forms to fill in. Are you on any medication? Have you recently had surgery? Is there anything we should know about your medical condition? He ticked the boxes. Yes, to all of the above. Provide details. De Villiers looked at Emma.

  ‘My husband has had surgery,’ she said.

  ‘That’s fine,’ the receptionist said, ‘we’ll keep the area covered and I’ll tell the therapist to avoid it.’

  They were escorted to separate dressing rooms and told to leave their clothes in the lockers provided. De Villiers opened the first locker. There was a white robe, a pair of soft slippers, still wrapped in plastic, and a pair of disposable underpants. He undressed and looked at himself in the mirror. Blond hair yellowing a bit, tanned face, blue eyes a little bloodshot. There were grey hairs on his chest. His torso was not as lean as it used to be. A strip of surgical tape covered the operation scar below his navel.

  De Villiers struggled into the paper underpants. They were ridiculously small. He locked his clothes and shoes in the locker and emerged from the change room with the robe tied tightly at his waist. Emma stood chatting to two women, who introduced themselves as Katherine and Olivia and said they would be taking care of them.

  The therapists led them into the Couples’ Room. A very large tub was half-filled with water, a thick layer of white foam on top. The mirror was steamed up. There was a couch covered with cushions in a floral pattern, two adjustable massage beds and a couple of small bedside tables. A jug of ice-cold water and two glasses completed the picture. There was a smell of jasmine.

  Olivia explained what was going to happen. ‘First, we’re going to leave you for ten minutes or so to soak in the tub. Take your time. The idea is to relax as much as possible so that you’ll be more receptive to the oils and aromas we’ll be using during the massage. Drink lots of water. That will also help to prepare your body for the massage. When you’ve finished, please hang your robes on the pegs behind the door and lie face down between the towels on the massage beds. Ring the bell for us and we’ll come in and start the therapy.’

  ‘Is there anything else you may want to ask before we leave?’ Olivia asked.

  De Villiers shook his head.

  ‘No, thank you,’ Emma said. ‘We’ll be fine.’

  Katherine and Olivia left the room and pulled the doors shut. De Villiers turned to look out the windows but the wooden blinds had been closed. He opened them and saw that they had a hundredand-eighty-degree view of the vineyards. As far as the eye could see, everything was green or sky blue. The serenity outside matched the ambience in the room.

  ‘Come, get into the tub,’ Emma said behind him.

  She stood with one foot in the tub, the other still in the slipper on the wooden floor. She was naked. She had let her hair fall to her shoulders. Pierre de Villiers watched as she leaned across to turn the tap to let in more cold water. She was a beautiful woman, fifteen years younger than he, uninhibited and at ease with her body. De Villiers watched as she slipped into the water.

  ‘Come on in,’ she said. ‘It’s wonderful.’

  De Villiers gingerly entered the tub at the other end. The temperature was just right. Emma slid across and sat astride him. Not even the soft touch of her hands brought any discernable response. De Villiers wondered whether he was going to be impotent for life. Emma gave no hint of concern.

  Afterwards they dried themselves and Emma changed his wound dressings.

  Katherine and Olivia came in and the massage therapy started in earnest.

  De Villiers drifted into a daydream as Olivia oiled his frame. She started at the hairline in his neck, working the balm into his scalp and hair before descending to his shoulders. She stopped at the starshaped scar at the top of the left shoulder blade, the keloid tissue hard and dark.

  ‘I feel scar tissue here, deep below the surface.’ Olivia spoke in soothing tones in a distant, dreamy voice.

  She worked the area. ‘What’s this?’

  ‘A bullet,’ De Villiers admitted.

  Her hands came off him. ‘Someone shot you here?’ She touched it with a finger.

  ‘No, that’s where it came out.’

  The rest of his back went smoothly, first the long muscles running the length of his spine, then the laterals, anchoring the spinal cord like the rigging of a mast, and finally the leg muscles, from the heavy thighs and hamstrings down to the calves and Achilles tendon. Then she asked De Villiers to turn over. She modestly held the towel between them as he turned onto his back. Her hand immediately went to the entrance wound above his heart, a neat puncture wound the size of a small coin.

  ‘It went in here and out the back? You were lucky.’

  I was careless, too trusting, De Villiers thought. But I won’t make that mistake again.

  She again started at his head. She found facial muscles De Villiers had been unaware of. It felt good. The pectorals were next and she went down to his navel. She skipped the lower abdomen and continued down the legs, stopping at the bullet wound on the shin.

  ‘Here’s another one,’ she said.

  When she put her finger to the scar, it sank in deeper than she had anticipated.

  De Villiers feigned sleep and she massaged his feet.

  The session ended when the therapists removed the towels from their faces.

  ‘How was that?’ Emma asked.

  ‘Wonderful,’ he answered truthfully. ‘Relaxing, just what I needed.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Olivia said.

  Still in their robes and slippers, they were served lunch in a secluded dining area. There was juice and cold water. De Villiers fetched herbal tea from the adjoining rest area.

  De Villiers headed for the change room when they had finished, but Emma held him back. She steered him to a lounger. ‘Sit back,’ she ordered. ‘I’ll get you some more tea.’ He watched her as she walked away from him and heard the cups rattling in the saucers as she poured the tea. He thought he knew what was coming and he was right.

  ‘Tell me about the bullets,’ she said and put the cup on the side table next to his lounger. ‘You never talk about it.’

  De Villiers looked at his watch. ‘It’s okay,’ Emma said. ‘We have another half hour before the time is up and we have to fetch Zoë.’

  ‘They shot my wife and children. I’ve told you that from the beginning. And they shot me too.’ He winced.

  ‘Are you hurting?’ Emma asked. She came over to him and knelt next to the lounger. She placed her hand over the operation scar. ‘Are you hurting?’

  He sat up. ‘No,’ he said.

  Emma put her hand on the wound above his heart. ‘And here?’

  ‘Not any more,’ he lied.

  ‘What’s going to happen to us?’ he asked.

  He was surprised to hear Emma crying. She wasn’t the crying type. ‘We’ll be fine,’ she said and sniffed. ‘We’ll always have each other.’ On the way back to their chalet, E
mma asked, ‘What happened to the men who shot you?’

  ‘They were sent to prison,’ he said. ‘Otherwise I would have killed them long ago.’ The words were out before De Villiers could stop himself.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me about this before?’ she asked.

  De Villiers stopped and turned his wife to face him. ‘Because it’s not your problem, Emma. It’s over. It’s the past. I don’t want to think about it, and I don’t want to talk about it.’

  Emma raised her hands in mock surrender. ‘All right, all right. I understand.’

  It’s not all right, De Villiers said to himself, and you don’t understand.

  Auckland

  Monday 31 December 2007 15

  The beach at Browns Bay was packed. The sky was cloudless and the temperature in the mid-twenties. It was the day on which the South African immigrant community came together and partied. Relatives had flown in from South Africa to see how the emigrants had settled. Many others had come to establish contacts, to look for the jobs that would guarantee them a working visa prior to emigrating.

  It looked like a typical beach day at Margate or Plettenberg Bay, with adolescent boys eyeing girls in bikinis, parents running after toddlers, the elderly sitting on beach chairs under umbrellas. Although there were darker faces in the crowd, the gathering around one of the fires was exclusive, white middle-aged men only. There were about seven of them.

  They talked in hushed tones and frequently glanced over their shoulders. The commander described the operation. ‘The next intake comes in the first weekend in January. We need to intensify our efforts. We also need to do the specialist training for the last class. We need someone, possibly two men from the Recces, to do the survival training and the bush craft. Does anyone have any ideas? Do we know anybody who is free to do it?’

  The men around him pondered the question for a while. They shook their heads.

  The commander was disappointed. ‘Well, the other side is keeping their word so far, and we’d better show a serious commitment to the next phase of the training. We simply have to find someone. Think about it.’

  ‘Why don’t we advertise for the job, Captain?’ The man who had made the suggestion was younger than the others, perhaps in his middle thirties. When he saw the sceptical look on the commander’s face, he argued, ‘Well, why not?’

  ‘Because this is a covert operation, that’s why,’ was the response.

  ‘The advertisement doesn’t have to call for an ex-South African Recce to give us a hand to train guerrillas in the forest.’

  The men around the fire laughed.

  The young man was undeterred. ‘We can simply advertise a gettogether of men who have been in the military back home. Then we can find out who’s got the right qualifications and experience. We all know that there are quite a few Recces here. One even owns a chain of motels, for God’s sake!’

  ‘This is so stupid,’ one of the men exclaimed as the laughter continued unabated, ‘that it might just work!’

  ‘An advertisement on the SANZA website, perhaps,’ the commander agreed. ‘I’ll talk to the editor about it.’

  ‘If we’ve finished with that business, I have something to report,’ the communications officer said. ‘We have a shipment coming in on a yacht and we need a couple of men to meet them offshore. I’ll need a boat and two or three men to go out at night for the rendezvous.’

  The commander pointed at one of the men. ‘Hennie, you’ve done this before. Could you pick two men to go with you? We’ll charter a boat. Get one from one of the outside yacht basins on the Pacific side and make sure that you pay in cash. There should be no link with us. Clyde,’ he pointed at the communications officer, ‘will tell you exactly where and when. The less the rest of us know the better.’

  The men around the fire had no reason to discuss the nature of the shipment. They knew that in their training cycle the time had come for real rifles and live ammunition, and they had all agreed that the AK47 would be the best for their purposes. They had contacts in South Africa who were able to procure large quantities of these weapons. Those they had fought in the war, terrorists they called them then, were now in charge of the State arsenals and there was a brisk trade in illegal weapons. Their prices were unbeatable. The AK47s provided by their Eastern Bloc allies during the struggle against apartheid were now for sale for a mere R1500 a piece, about NZ$300, an extremely competitive price when you considered that each rifle came with two full clips of ammunition, while another $100 secured a few thousand rounds of ammunition. The price negotiated with the intermediaries had been $1000 per AK, $50 for a spare clip and $5 for a dozen cartridges. And they paid in cash. The deal allowed for a healthy profit.

  While the men around the fire at Browns Bay were making their plans, De Villiers was taking a final sunbath on the veranda of their chalet. Then they packed up to go home.

  Emma drove. They took the long way home. The scenery was spectacular.

  Travelling through rural New Zealand invigorated De Villiers. He immersed himself in the surroundings as Emma drove on good roads which separated unspoilt beaches from pristine tropical forests past many small agricultural units, farms small enough for a single family to work, but large enough to make a living. De Villiers marvelled at the orderliness of the countryside: every road was marked, every fence whole, every paddock grazed in clear patterns of rotation, all hedges clipped and the dams full of water. Even the animals looked content, sheep and cows and horses. Chickens, ducks and turkeys ranged about farmyards.

  Despite the graffiti on the road signs and on the farmers’ water tanks and fences, everything was clean, green and working.

  But the countryside was strangely devoid of wildlife. Even the windscreen was clear of insect roadkill. The birds they encountered could hardly be called indigenous. The sparrows were from Europe and the turtle doves from Africa.

  They passed an honesty box on a table with honey in jars and tomatoes in small pallets, an empty ice cream container serving as the repository for the buyer’s money. Dead possums littered the road, stupid, nocturnal animals introduced into New Zealand in a misguided attempt to found another industry, immigrants of a sort that damaged the forests and froze in the headlights. The descent to Kaiaua brought the village into view, forests and mountains on the left, sea and boats on the right. The fishermen were out in force. Emma slowly drove up the coast, through more seaside villages, following the road inland from Matingarahi.

  De Villiers’s mood was as variable as the hills and the valleys of the landscape, and went left and right with the sharp turns of the scenic route through several reserves. When the surgeon had phoned with the results of the biopsy, he had said, ‘There is cancer in three of the samples, but it is curable.’ From that moment De Villiers had lost his faith in his own body. Isn’t cancer an illness where a body tries to kill itself with maverick cells multiplying out of control and refusing to die? And is cancer ever curable? What about the cancer of the mind, the doubts indelibly implanted there about the manner and time of one’s death? Death, like the sun, is ever-present, and not to be faced directly, although one may be compelled to look when the time is right.

  After the operation De Villiers had asked the surgeon whether he had removed any lymph glands and the surgeon had said no, but had added a rider. ‘We’re going to have to monitor your PSA very carefully from now on.’ What’s to monitor? De Villiers had asked himself. If the cancer has been removed, the PSA must be zero.

  But the devil now whispered in his ear from its perch on his shoulder: unless the cancer has spread. De Villiers felt an almost irresistible urge to scream: It’s inside me! I can feel it inside me!

  He found it hard to come to terms with the idea that his own body had tried to kill him. That’s how the surgeon had put it.

  Cyclists made their way through the passes in ones and twos, some coming perilously close to the car. The car glided in and out of the shadows, tropical trees and ferns touching overhead in a tunnel
of nature’s making across narrow bridges and winding sections, emerging into clear sunlight between small farms with sheep grazing on the hillsides, until the next scenic reserve.

  I know what the cause of death is going to be on my death certificate, De Villiers thought. I, Pierre de Villiers, soldier by profession, can tell you in advance. I’m going to die of cancer. And here I sit, with bullet wounds, and there I was, in a war with both sides hunting me and trying to kill me, and I’m going to die of cancer in this strange but beautiful country.

  Emma stopped the car at Kawakawa Bay and they bought fish and chips to eat on a grassy knoll near the water. The sea was calm as a pond. They watched as recreational fishermen launched their small boats.

  At three o’clock in the morning De Villiers got up for the by now customary visit to the bathroom. Emma was snoring softly. He turned her gently onto her side and the snoring subsided in a contented sigh. De Villiers was about to ease back into bed when he heard a car with a modified exhaust stop in front of the house. He heard the engine cut out and doors opening and closing. De Villiers stood at the window and watched as two boys bent over their work against the electrical substation at the top of Macleans Reserve. Each had a spray canister and they were hard at work. De Villiers prodded Emma in the ribs and asked her to phone the police.

  ‘Tell them that I’m a police officer and that I need assistance.’

  De Villiers slipped out of his front door. He was barefoot and still in his pyjamas, but carried a knobkierie, a heavy piece he kept behind the front door, tamboti, hard, smelly and heavy, tough as one of Shaka’s indunas.

  The boys were unaware of his presence until he removed the key from the ignition of the Subaru and pounded on the roof of the car with his fist.

  ‘What the fuck do you think you’re doing? Get away from my car!’ one of the boys shouted in a voice that had not yet broken.

  De Villiers straightened and casually held the knobkierie as if it were a walking stick.

  ‘Put the paint on the ground and stand against the car with your hands on the roof,’ he ordered. He spoke firmly but softly, not to wake the neighbours.