The Soldier who Said No
Page 21
This time there was no comment as the photograph was passed from hand to hand. De Villiers sensed the question in Heloïse’s eyes – How come we’ve never seen a photo of your wife and child before? – but looked away.
Yolandi broke the ice. ‘But how can you cope without servants?’
De Villiers collected his photographs and pocketed them. ‘We have laundry services that fetch and deliver the washing and we have gardening services for the garden,’ he explained.
‘But what about the housework?’ they chorused.
‘We all chip in,’ he said. ‘We make our own beds. And we take an hour or so every Saturday morning to vacuum the whole house before we go out for breakfast.’
De Villiers sensed that they didn’t believe him. ‘Well, once a month we do a big clean-up. We move all the furniture away from the walls so we can vacuum behind them, we wipe all the flat surfaces down with an anti-bacterial spray cleaner and we clean the windows on the inside. We get a man with a sprayer and a ladder to do the outside once a month.
‘And that’s about it,’ he concluded, even as his memory of the constant battle against the wet and the mould and the mud gave his conscience a jolt. I’m being economical with the truth here, he scolded himself, but they would find it hard to visualise a situation where you had to run three dehumidifiers simultaneously at various points in the house just to keep it warm and dry, and where you had to take your muddy shoes off at the door when you visited someone. In fact, they wouldn’t even know what a dehumidifier looks like.
He must have smiled because Heloïse asked, ‘What’s so funny?’
‘No, that’s about it,’ De Villiers said.
‘Do you help with the housework?’ Heloïse asked. ‘You never did that here.’
‘Of course,’ he said. ‘I do the vacuuming and the windows. Emma does the wiping and washing and Zoë does the dishwasher, the loading after every meal and the packing away when it’s done.’
‘Jeez,’ Heloïse said. ‘Yolandi, you should go to New Zealand and find a husband there, otherwise you’re going to get one of those.’ She nodded towards the television lounge where the men had gathered to watch the rugby. ‘Slobs who sit on the couch and drink beer and comment on the rugby and politics and other things they know nothing about.’
The women’s laughter evoked a response from the lounge. ‘What’s going on there?’ James shouted. ‘Isn’t it time for coffee?’
Yolandi stuck her head into the lounge. ‘Hold up your hands those who want coffee.’
De Villiers couldn’t see into the television lounge, but Yolandi’s reaction said it all. ‘See, there’s nothing wrong with your hands,’ she said. ‘You can make your own coffee, and while you’re at it, you can vacuum behind the couch and wash the windows as well.’
The women’s laughter rose to near hysteria, waking the baby who started crying. She needed a nappy change. De Villiers took that as his cue to return to the men.
He spotted his brother emerging from the toilet.
‘André, I need to ask you something, please.’
‘Sure, go ahead, as long as it’s not money,’ André joked.
‘No, it’s about a place. A place called Swartwater,’ De Villiers said. ‘What I need to know is whether there is such a place and whether there is a shooting range with a baobab tree there.’
‘Oh, that’s easy,’ André replied. ‘I know the place. It’s about five kilometres from the Botswana border. Come. Let me show you on the map.’
De Villiers followed his brother out to a German 4×4. André pulled a road atlas from the leather clad glove box. ‘Here,’ he pointed at the name on page 42 of the atlas. ‘It’s almost exactly halfway between Maasstroom and Tom Burke. Martin and I go hunting in the area every winter. He has a game farm up there.’
‘Would you know if there’s an army camp within the grounds of a school?’ De Villiers asked.
‘I’ll have to call someone to ask,’ Andé de Villiers said. ‘Why do you need to know this?’ he asked.
‘It’s nothing,’ De Villiers lied. ‘It’s just a vague memory I have.’
‘I’ll make a phone call and let you know,’ André said. He looked at his watch. ‘Let’s go for a run. The game is about to start and I’ve set my machine to record it. We lose so often that I’d rather watch the game afterwards when I know the result.’
‘May I borrow this for a moment?’ De Villiers pointed at the road atlas.
‘Sure. Here, take it. Are you coming?’
De Villiers stood next to his brother. He was a head taller than his younger sibling. André was in his running shorts already. De Villiers wondered why he hadn’t noticed earlier. Perhaps a younger brother will always be a little brother, a boy in shorts. He suddenly recalled that they used to run together for a club, and that André had even entered the Comrades Marathon a few times.
‘Where are you going?’ he asked.
‘Once around the golf course, about six or seven kays.’
‘No, I’m too tired. Jet lagged.’
‘You look troubled,’ André observed.
‘I am.’
‘You’ve had this worried look for twenty years,’ André insisted. ‘The bush war fucked with your head.’
‘No,’ De Villiers insisted. ‘It wasn’t the bush. It’s what happened afterwards.’
André raised his voice. ‘I’d have killed those fuckers.’
De Villiers realised his brother was talking about the murder of Annelise, Marcel and Jeandré, but that wasn’t how De Villiers saw it. The messing with his mind had happened long before the murder of his wife and children, and Swartwater had been at the beginning of that.
‘Go and run,’ he said to his brother. ‘We can talk later.’
De Villiers went back into the house. He studied the road atlas while the men were exhorting their players and shouting at the referee. He turned the pages to look at southern Angola and scanned the page for Vila Nova Armada. His eye found familiar names.
Okavango.
Rundu was clearly marked, and across the river a short distance away was Calai, a small village with an airstrip. He and !Xau had avoided Calai for fear of capture by FAPLA.
To the east, where he and !Xau had crossed the river, his finger found Dirico. Protected Public Reserve of Mucusso. Protected Public Reserve of Luengué.
De Villiers forced his eyes upwards, north, but didn’t recognise the names.
Rito he remembered, but he’d never been to that town. His recollection was that he had skirted Rito.
He held his breath as his eyes sought Vila Nova Armada just below the confluence of the Longa and Cuito Rivers.
Nankova.
He looked again. There was a place called Nankova where Vila Nova Armada ought to have been.
After two months and daily meetings with Professor Nienaber, De Villiers was finally discharged from Weskoppies.
They stuffed his backpack into his hands and gave him an envelope with a prescription for more of Professor Nienaber’s drugs and a list of appointments with the professor. When he checked the contents of his backpack, !Xau’s Best was in one of the side pockets and the staves of his bow were safely ensconced in the straps. The overall they had given him at Rundu was there. What De Villiers saw in his hands was at odds with the memory he now had. When he arrived at home – with someone he now knew to be his wife and was beginning to recognise – he put the backpack in a cupboard and forgot about its existence. His mind was like a jigsaw puzzle with half the pieces missing.
The recovery of his memory took time and came in leaps rather than small steps, leaving him confused for weeks and even months at a time. De Villiers tried his best to make sense of everything by asking guarded questions, observing from a quiet corner during family gatherings or visits to friends, and taking in the sounds and smells of places that once must have been familiar to him. Smells found the quickest route to the gaps in his memory and restored it bit by bit. The smell of boerewors at a braai, th
e pungency of a dirty nappy, the cleaning oil for his pistol. Once, during a visit to the living quarters at Donkergat to retrieve his gear, the smells of the Atlantic Ocean and the steel deck of a naval strike craft had combined to settle large sections of his memory of training exercises and the men who accompanied him on them. When he had cleared his room, he felt compelled to look into the one across the passage and was strangely disappointed when there was no sign that it had ever been occupied. He turned away, not knowing why he had looked into that particular room.
The process would take years, and he would never again take any memory for granted, always looking for corroboration. Every second week Professor Nienaber would probe and make suggestions, keeping a close watch on his patient for his masters and making sure that De Villiers would not recover those events which could embarrass the men of the third force.
It had been Professor Nienaber who suggested that De Villiers receive equal amounts of physio-and psychotherapy. The psychotherapy the professor provided during the sessions at his university rooms and included hypnotherapy and the administration of psychotropic drugs. The physiotherapy was combined with a fitness programme of which road running was the main component. De Villiers joined a club and ran six kilometres four times a week.
The running helped to clear his mind. He was convinced of that.
De Villiers was slowly reintegrated into his family and social life. He spent the next six years on sick leave, with full pay, moping around at home when he was not seeing Nienaber or out on the road running. When he thought he was fit again, he volunteered for operations. They gave him simple tasks, scouting enemy safe houses in neighbouring countries or escorting strike units to their targets, but he soon sensed that his superiors no longer trusted him, especially after one operation had gone badly wrong and they bombed the wrong house.
When he refused to obey yet another order, this time during a naval operation in Durban, his unit stopped communicating with him.
He became a soldier without a unit.
Pretoria to Durban
April 2008 27
At half-time André de Villiers arrived back from his run and stood sweating on the veranda. De Villiers could see his brother pacing as he spoke on his cellphone. He looked up in anticipation when André came into the lounge.
‘Yes, there’s a shooting range and there’s a large baobab tree at the one end. But there’s no army camp at the school.’ When André de Villiers noticed the disappointment on his brother’s face, he added, ‘But the guy I spoke to said that there used to be an encampment of soldiers at the school in the eighties.’
De Villiers nodded his thanks, not trusting his voice.
‘I want to show you something,’ André said.
De Villiers followed him to his car. André opened the tailgate of the 4×4. ‘Come and have a look.’
There was a large machine on a wooden sled in the back of the 4×4. The back seats had been folded down to make way for it. ‘What is it?’ De Villiers asked.
‘It’s a power generator,’ André said. ‘It cost me fifteen thousand.’
The generator looked rather large for André’s annual trips to the game reserves in Botswana and De Villiers had to ask, ‘What are you going to do with it?’
His brother sighed. ‘I was at a seminar last week and one of the chaps there said he had heard that Eskom was going to start rationing electricity next month because they had run out of capacity. So the idea is to get a generator before the prices go up.’
It didn’t make sense to De Villiers. The last he had heard, Eskom was supplying electricity to countries as far as the equator. Before he could comment, the men called André back to the lounge. ‘The second half has started!’
‘Even Eskom workers are buying generators now, Pierre,’ André said over his shoulder as he made his way back to the lounge.
Pierre de Villiers stayed on the veranda.
The match ended and De Villiers gravitated back to the men in the television lounge. The post-match interviews analysed individual performances and the coach’s tactics. The whingeing rose in tone and so did the level of swearing when the team’s position on the Super 14 log came up on the screen.
De Villiers slipped away to the lounge and sat next to his mother. Her eyes were closed, but he wasn’t sure that she was asleep. She had been very quiet when she had come to visit him at 1 Mil all those years ago.
‘He’s dead,’ she had said, looking at the tubes connecting him to the machines behind him. Against the wall the bellows of the ventilator rose and fell, and pulse, blood-pressure, oxygen saturation and the respiratory pattern read-outs appeared on a computer screen. ‘My son is dead,’ she had said as she turned away from his bed.
Now, holding her hand as he sat next to her on the couch, De Villiers had to wonder if the seeds of revenge had not been planted in his subconscious on that occasion already by the distress in his mother’s voice.
I was helpless then, he said to himself. But not any more.
The next morning De Villiers rose well before seven. The house was quiet. He made coffee in the kitchen. The sun was up and the air outside crisp but cold. There was a light breeze from the south. He noticed it in the lean of the tall grass on the rough of the sixteenth fairway. He decided to walk around the golf course and set off, hands in his pockets. An SAA flight came in from the north, probably from London, he surmised, gliding almost noiselessly towards the airport.
There were very few golfers around at the start of his walk, but he crossed the sixteenth fairway quickly anyway. Guinea fowl huddled together under a thorn tree to catch the first warming rays of the sun. He stood looking at them for a while, stupid birds chasing each other in circles, and returned to the house for his camera. Zoë would never believe him unless he produced proof. He started again and walked up the hillside, following the cement path laid alongside the fairways. He crossed the Apies River. There was a light layer of dust on the leaves and fresh dew on the grass. Crowned plovers hovered near the path and screamed at him. De Villiers suspected that their nest was nearby. He took a photograph and walked on. Smaller birds twittered their way through the small branches of trees and shrubs. The place was slowly coming to life.
De Villiers strode purposefully up the hill. The golf course was immaculate. There were out-of-bounds take-a-drop indigenous areas designated as such, at the direction of the town planners he assumed. Even the roughs were not really rough. It would be hard to lose a ball here.
The higher De Villiers ventured into the estate, the larger the houses appeared to be. At the top of the hill, where the golf course petered out, there were palaces on either side of the road, some four storeys high with garages set well back for a minimum of four cars, and in some for as many as six with parking for double that number in the forecourts. He started counting houses but gave up when he saw they were all numbered. House 1103 was a brown stucco house like his own in New Zealand. De Villiers estimated that the footprint of his house and garden was no larger than that of the garage of house 1103. In the fable of the three little piggies, the house on Macleans Road was made of straw, while these houses were made of stone. Many were wrapped in the additional protection of two-metre-high concrete walls. With the security at the gate, a three-metre-high wall with another metre of electric fencing on top, this was a fortress of formidable proportions, enough to give De Villiers claustrophobia. Here keeping up with the Joneses seemed obligatory. In the midst of this wealth, the owners of the ostentatious palaces still fast asleep, De Villiers continued his hike through their domain.
On the way down the hill, De Villiers encountered the first gardeners. ‘Morning, Boss,’ one said politely. Water sprinklers sprayed water on lush lawns and flowerbeds. English roses and African aloes and protea stood side by side along the boundaries of adjoining properties that also fielded many different indigenous trees. Paperbark acacia, sweet thorn acacia, yellow fever acacia, white thorn, river bushwillow, wild olive, water berry, white stinkwood.
The geese announced the flight of a red-tailed Virgin aircraft across the clear blue sky. In the last rocky outcrop before his sister’s house, De Villiers found that the reptiles had also come out to sun themselves on the rocks. There were several varieties of lizard and against the sunny side of a thorn tree a blue-headed agama shuffled towards the safe side of the trunk as it warily eyed De Villiers’s efforts to take a photo.
When he neared the tee for the first hole, De Villiers was forced to stop to allow a foursome to play their tee shot. A clutch of caddies formed the advance party and one joined De Villiers on the path next to the fairway.
‘Re a lotša,’ De Villiers heard himself say in Sepedi, the language of his childhood friends. I greet you.
‘Le kae?’ came the response, a little surprised. How are you?
‘Ke gona, lena le kae?’ De Villiers confirmed. It’s going well. How are you?
‘Re tsogile,’ the caddie answered. I have risen.
The caddie rushed off to locate a ball sent into the rough by a stray drive and De Villiers crossed the river. He stopped in front of the house and reviewed the photographs he had taken before he went in for more coffee. The walk had done him good. His muscles felt smooth and he had not thought about his cancer once.