The Soldier who Said No

by Chris Marnewick

  Liesl nodded. ‘There’s only one way of finding out.’

  ‘And that is?’

  ‘We’re going to have to go to Schmidtsdrift to ask him.’

  De Villiers smiled. It would have to be a blitz visit because he couldn’t interrupt the treatment.

  Liesl had more for him. She pulled a sheet from the printer. ‘Show this to those clever people at the oncology centre.’

  De Villiers scanned the page. It was an article from a Canadian medical journal. It said that one of the effects of radiation therapy, the desired effect in fact, is that dividing cancer cells, and even dividing healthy cells, die, and when they die, they give off uric acid. And uric acid build-up in the body causes gout.

  ‘I’m not just a pretty face, you know,’ Liesl said when he looked up.

  There was some good news in the gout after all. The cancer cells were dying.

  They planned the trip to Schmidtsdrift during their walks along the beachfront at Umhlanga Rocks. Eskom did its bit by turning off the power. The radiation machine broke down as a result and De Villiers was given a week’s reprieve from his treatment. Through an old friend of Johann Weber, an attorney in Cape Town who came from the farming community near Eshowe, De Villiers and Liesl managed to do some research. Johann had told them, during one of their enforced candlelit dinners, about Albertyn, who used to deal with labour-law matters in Durban before he moved to Cape Town. Albertyn had been involved in litigation on two fronts on behalf of the San people. One case had been a class action for the intellectual property rights of the San people in the medicinal plants they had been using for centuries. In the other case he had made land claims on their behalf. The Batswana people had made a land claim to Schmidtsdrift and the government had given it to them. The San were landless again.

  Weber had referred to the Bushmen as San people, but De Villiers could clearly remember !Xau referring to his people as !Xun Bushmen. On hearing that the Bushmen had been displaced yet again, De Villiers and Liesl exchanged a disappointed look. That meant their search for !Xau would be so much more difficult.

  Yet their luck turned when Albertyn told them that most members of the San community at Schmidtsdrift had not yet been removed from the area and were staying pending the outcome of their own land claim. New houses had been built for them at Platfontein, houses with running water and electricity, but the Bushmen had refused to move. Not even the luxuries provided in a house in town with all the usual amenities could tempt the Bushmen from the Kalahari. ‘It was my advice too,’ Albertyn had said over the phone, ‘that they should stay in Schmidtsdrift until their land claim had been finalised. What other leverage do you think these poor people have?’

  ‘Mr Albertyn,’ Liesl had pleaded, ‘you don’t by any chance have a list of the plaintiffs on whose behalf you are making the land claim?’

  ‘But of course I do,’ Albertyn said. ‘How else could I issue court papers in their names?’

  After a further five minutes of discussion, most of which consisted of contorted explanations by Liesl which did not disclose their true mission, Liesl’s call was transferred to Albertyn’s secretary, who quickly confirmed that, yes, one of the plaintiffs was an old Bushman by the name of Yiceu, but there was no address for him except Care of Post Office, Schmidtsdrift, Northern Cape Province.

  ‘So how can we get in touch with him?’ Liesl asked.

  ‘Through the Post Office. They go to the Post Office to collect their pensions every month.’

  Liesl was profuse in her thanks and put the phone down.

  A week later they had not yet heard from the postmaster. No one answered the telephone and there had been no response to a telegram.

  ‘Be careful,’ Johann Weber had said when he stopped at the Departures drop-off zone. ‘Others may take an interest in your enquiries.’ It was a working day and Johann Weber had to look after a client’s affairs while Liesl and De Villiers went on their expedition without him.

  Weber’s comment stayed with De Villiers as he sat with Liesl Weber in the business class lounge waiting for their flight to be called.

  ‘What’s the real reason you and Johann never talk about politics?’ De Villiers asked over the din of an aircraft landing and activating reverse thrust.

  ‘That’s all everyone does these days,’ Liesl explained. ‘They talk politics all the time and all they achieve is to talk each other into a state of depression, and for those already depressed, into a state of even deeper depression.’

  ‘I can’t see how you can avoid it,’ De Villiers argued. ‘It’s all over, on the news and in the papers. Everywhere I go everyone wants to talk politics, even at the oncology centre. You have all these sick people. Some look like they’re about to keel over, and still they talk politics. Some of them have even asked me to help them get into New Zealand. There was one old guy on a permanent drip and he wants to go to New Zealand!’

  Their flight was called and they made their way down the steps to the Departure gate. There was a long queue. A trainee struggled with the computer and after an animated discussion in Zulu with her supervisor waved De Villiers through. He felt their eyes on his back. De Villiers wondered whether the use of his New Zealand passport had triggered an alarm somewhere.

  ‘We’ve given up hope,’ Liesl said on the apron at the foot of the steps.

  When she didn’t elaborate, De Villiers had to ask, ‘Don’t you think it’s going to come right then?’

  ‘No, it’s not that.’

  ‘What then?’

  There was a long pause in the conversation as they climbed the steps into the aircraft and strapped themselves into their seats.

  ‘We don’t care any more. That’s what. We just don’t care any more.’

  The stewardess interrupted, offering an orange juice or sparkling wine. They both declined. De Villiers watched the stewardess retreating to the cabin at the front, her hair plaited in neat cornrows.

  Liesl stared out of the window.

  ‘This is Africa, and everything we believe in seems to mean something slightly, just ever so slightly, different to what we understood it to be.’

  ‘Like what?’ De Villiers asked.

  ‘Like democracy. Here it is just a means of grabbing power and then holding on to it. Ag, there are too many examples, like corruption, public service …’

  ‘Is that what Johann says?’ De Villiers interrupted her.

  ‘No, Johann is such a cynic. He says the apartheid government was also a bunch of crooks, incompetents who couldn’t run a school or a farm, failed lawyers and dominees.’ She laughed. ‘He says it is their just desserts that they are now being paid their pensions in a currency they themselves have made worthless.’

  A tractor pushed the aircraft back towards the runway.

  They flew in relative silence for a while. When De Villiers leaned across Liesl’s seat to look through the window, the countryside below looked peaceful and organised. There were numerous small farms with well-marked fields and irrigation circles. There were dams and streams and sheds with labourers’ cottages set well away from the farmhouses. They were too high for him to be able to discern any activity below, but he knew that on every farm the farmer and his labourers would be toiling in the cold air of the Free State winter.

  !Xau

  June 2008 32

  Bloemfontein Airport was small and quiet, too unimportant to have a politician’s name attached to it. De Villiers and Liesl Weber collected an Avis car. He drove to Schmidtsdrift while Liesl gave directions from the roadmap. They reached the town three hours later, having had to pass through Kimberley first to find the road out again to Schmidtsdrift. De Villiers became progressively quieter as they neared their destination. Between Kimberley and Schmidtsdrift the landscape changed to Kalahari – not pristine Kalahari as De Villiers had encountered in southern Angola during his flight with !Xau. It was desolate, overgrazed Kalahari with hardly any vegetation and no signs of water.

  They crossed the bridge over a
broad span of grey-brown water, the Vaal River. There was no sign on either river bank that any attempt was being made to grow irrigated crops or to pump water. The land appeared barren, as if poisoned and unfit for human habitation. The tar road curved to the left and the turn-off to Schmidtsdrift appeared suddenly on the right, a dusty, nondescript dirt road taking De Villiers and Liesl towards the town.

  Schmidtsdrift was as bad a place as an uncaring bureaucracy could possibly create for an unwanted people. The Bushmen had been persecuted and treated like vermin by all who had come after them to southern Africa, first by the physically and numerically superior Bantu tribes moving south, then by the better-equipped colonial Dutch and British and Germans and Portuguese. Now the democratically elected government of South Africa was following suit, the oppressed having become oppressors.

  Schmidtsdrift was hardly more than a village, certainly not a town in the conventional sense. The village appeared to consist of a few ramshackle buildings randomly placed around a central area where a large number of equally dishevelled people were hanging about, no one having any apparent purpose, stray dogs and sullen donkeys completing the picture. Like Vila Nova Armada, the dusty village of Schmidtsdrift used to belong to the military. And like the Vila Nova Armada, which he had scanned from side to side in the telescopic sights of his sniper’s rifle more than two decades earlier, De Villiers could see that this village had long ago served its military purpose and had been abandoned, the town and its people left to fend for themselves.

  There were no street names. De Villiers steered the rental car down one dusty potholed street after the other looking for the number of a house.

  They found the old man under a tree next to a house built of corrugated-iron roof sheets. It must have added ten degrees to an already overly hot environment, and it was bound to be freezing inside the house in winter. The house was little more than a shack and an approximately equal number of white pumpkins and black rocks had been placed on the roof to hold the battered sheets in place. The house was in the far north-western corner of a township laid out in a grid with military precision, with five unpaved streets running a few degrees to the left of true north and three equally dusty streets crossing at right angles to form eight blocks.

  The old man had given no sign that he was aware of their approach. De Villiers stopped a couple of paces away and studied the old man’s face. It was a Bushman, but his face was so old and wrinkled that De Villiers was unsure. He looked at least eighty years old, but with a Bushman one could never be sure and he could have been anything between fifty and a hundred. It was more than twenty years since he had last seen !Xau. Dear God, he asked himself, why does it have to be so difficult to identify a person of another race? He took a step closer and bent his head to the side to look at the old man from another angle. He felt Liesl’s hand on his arm and realised that he was shaking. Behind De Villiers the Kalahari stretched as far as the eye could see, and the old man’s face was turned in that direction, unseeing eyes gazing at a horizon that faded into invisibility in the haze.

  ‘!Xau,’ De Villiers said tentatively, and when there was no response, a little louder, ‘!Xau!’

  It looked as if the old man was dead, mummified in the dry air. De Villiers raised his hand to touch him, but a young woman came out of the house and shouted, ‘Los hom uit!’Leave him alone.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ De Villiers mumbled, his hand still extended towards the old man. ‘I’m looking for an old friend, a companion from a long time ago.’

  He waited for the young woman to complete her approach. She placed herself between De Villiers and the old man. ‘What do you want?’ she demanded.

  De Villiers studied her features and posture. She was small, like all true Bushmen, and she had the same features as the old man, but without the creases that the harsh living conditions would soon add to her smooth skin. He estimated her age at about sixteen.

  ‘I’m looking for my friend, !Xau,’ he said.

  ‘Grandfather’s name is !Xau,’ she pronounced the name correctly, ‘but how can he be your friend?’

  ‘We were friends in Angola,’ De Villiers said.

  The girl pondered the situation for a while. ‘Grandfather used to talk of the war,’ she said softly. ‘But now he doesn’t talk any more because he’s blind and he can’t hear.’

  De Villiers decided to play his last card. ‘I’ve brought him a present. Will you please wake him up so I can give it to him?’

  ‘He’s not asleep. He knows you are here,’ she said.

  De Villiers looked past her at the old man again. He still hadn’t moved. ‘How does he know that we’re here if he can’t see and can’t hear?’ he asked.

  ‘He hears with his feet,’ she stated as if that was the usual way of things. De Villiers remembered !Xau’s uncanny ability to receive communications from the natural world, how he could predict which way a wounded animal would turn, and where he could find tubers underground.

  De Villiers lowered his eyes to the old man’s feet. They were bare and the toes were moving, the feet toying with the soil beneath their calloused soles.

  ‘Please give him this,’ De Villiers said. He put his hand in his trouser pocket and produced a rusty pocket knife. ‘Please give him this,’ he said a second time and handed her the Best.

  The girl gently touched the old man’s shoulder and moved her hand down his arm until she held his hand, palm up, in hers. She gently placed the Best in the old man’s hand and closed it over the knife.

  They stood in the shade of the tree, Liesl with her hand on De Villiers’s shoulder and the Bushman girl with her hand on her grandfather’s. Three pairs of seeing eyes watched the old man intently.

  At first the old man manipulated the knife in his right hand, kneading it between his fingers and his palm, then brought his left hand to aid in the exploration. The three onlookers watched as he opened the blade with shaking fingers and felt the sharpness of the blade. When he brought the Best to his nose as if to smell it, he started mumbling incoherently with a lot of clicking sounds, but De Villiers was sure that he had heard his own name in the midst of the muttering. The old man kept repeating one phrase, like a mantra, and the girl set off for the house at pace. When she returned, she told De Villiers, ‘He has a gift for you too,’ and pressed a bow and a quiver of arrows on him.

  De Villiers dropped to his knees and put his hand on the old man’s knee. ‘!Xau, is it you?’

  But the old man didn’t respond.

  The girl answered instead. ‘Grandfather says he no longer has any need for his bow and arrows, but you’ll need them to hunt for meat so that you won’t go hungry again. He says that it is your turn to find the meat.’

  Tears welled up in De Villiers’s eyes and he sat down next to !Xau and put his arm around the old man. The tears blinded him. With his free hand he waved the two women away.

  De Villiers asked !Xau if he remembered their trek across the Luengué and the Mucusso, but the only response for !Xau was a humming sound, a low-pitched groan which sounded as if it came from the soil below their feet. De Villiers pressed !Xau about Verster’s death in the Cuito River, but the humming merely continued.

  Eventually he had to give up.

  ‘What can I do to make your grandfather more comfortable?’ he asked the girl.

  She shook her head. ‘He’s happy as he is.’ She waved her arm in an arc, taking in the landscape across the street. Here at least the Kalahari appeared to be untouched, perhaps a consequence of the land having been in the possession of the military for many decades. It was difficult to envision the girl with her smooth yellow-brown skin and wide eyes after another thirty years, after a life of hardship and despair. De Villiers wondered whether there was any future for her in this place.

  The parting was painful, but they had to leave to catch their flight.

  De Villiers started the engine and looked back towards the old man under the tree. !Xau was swaying to and fro in a trance-like state, the Best
clutched in his hands.

  De Villiers didn’t speak once during the drive back to Bloemfontein and Liesl left him in peace with his memories.

  ‘Thank you for coming with me,’ De Villiers said to Liesl. They had missed the afternoon flight to Durban and were re-routed through Johannesburg.

  ‘It’s been my pleasure,’ Liesl responded. ‘So you’re not mad after all. We had our suspicions, but now we can be sure.’ She squeezed his hand as she made a joke of it.

  On the fifteen-minute news-loop on the television screen behind Liesl a mob stormed towards a cameraman, shouting and waving their weapons: sticks, sharpened steel rods and knobkieries. The cameraman retreated at pace to keep the mob in his viewfinder and to capture the mood, and if he were lucky, an actual killing, a scene that could be broadcast around the world.

  ‘Well, thank you anyway. It’s going to be a long day though.’ De Villiers looked around to see if there was someone who could change the television channel, but in vain. The mob struck out left and right, some hamming it up for the camera, shouting ‘Makwerekwere!’ – foreigners – and putting on threatening faces. The scene shifted to a bloodied man wearing crude bandages around his head. ‘The Zulus are killing us here and say we must go back to Zimbabwe, but if we go back to Zimbabwe, Mugabe will kill us and there is no food. Now there is no food here too because they have burned our houses and taken all our things. What can we do?’

  The camera shifted its focus to another man, his face bruised and bloodied. ‘And in Zimbabwe Mugabe did the same to us, burning our houses and beating us and destroying everything. We have nothing. All we want is a job and a place to stay so we can look after our women and children. We don’t need the government’s houses. These people,’ the camera followed his arm and stopped to focus on the angry crowd being held back by the police, ‘these people are too lazy to work and they want the government to give them houses and money and everything. Now they want to stop us from doing the work they are too lazy to do.’