Reconciliation for the Dead

by Paul E. Hardisty

  Clay said nothing.

  Crowbar stood, replaced his beret and adjusted its rake across his brow. ‘I’ll be back in three days. Just remember what I told you. You know what to say. Every one of your brothers is counting on you. I’m counting on you, Corporal. So are Barstow and de Koch and Cooper.’ And then he turned smartly and strode out of the ward.

  Commissioner Ksole: So, you lied to the military tribunal?

  Witness: Yes, sir.

  Commissioner Ksole: The report I have in front of me indicates that over fifty civilians were killed that day – a whole village wiped out. It also says that most of those killed were old men, women and children. Is this true, Mister Straker?

  Witness: Yes.

  Commissioner Ksole: And were you responsible, Mister Straker, for what happened that day?

  Witness: I … I don’t know how to answer that, sir. I was there. I … (Coughs).

  Commissioner Barbour: The Provost General’s report into the massacre, based on the inquest in which you and members of Valk 5 testified, found that your platoon was not responsible for the murder of the civilians in the village. Based on the testimony of the Bosbok pilots who overflew the village the day after, and of the members of Valk 5 themselves, the inquest found that FAPLA carried out the slaughter in reprisal for the loss of their own men.

  Witness: Yes, sir.

  Commissioner Ksole: So you falsified your testimony to the Provost General’s enquiry of 1981?

  Commissioner Barbour: Think carefully before you answer, son.

  Witness: Yes, sir. I lied. That’s why I’ve come back. To set it right.

  Commissioner Lacy: That is why we are all here, Mister Straker. For the truth.

  Witness: Thank you, ma’am.

  Commissioner Barbour: It sounds to me as if you engaged the enemy. How can you be sure that FAPLA themselves didn’t kill the villagers, or that they weren’t simply caught in the crossfire? The way you describe it, it seems to me, that … ah, well, that is the most likely interpretation. Did you actually see any of your own men killing civilians?

  Witness: No, sir. No, I didn’t.

  Commissioner Barbour: And did you, to your knowledge, aim your weapon at a civilian, with the intent to kill?

  Witness: No, sir. No, I didn’t, as far as I can remember it. Except for the boy. I did that.

  Commissioner Rotzenburg: But isn’t that exactly the issue, Mister Straker? That you can’t remember. You now dispute the official version of events, to which you yourself originally contributed, and now you are unsure about what you actually saw.

  Witness: I am trying to tell you that I didn’t see anyone kill civilians. We were in the middle of a firefight. Both sides were shooting. It was all a blur.

  Commissioner Rotzenburg: So, it is entirely possible that the official version of events is correct, as my colleague suggests?

  Witness: I can’t remember it clearly. I don’t remember killing civilians, but I am sure I did. That we all did.

  Commissioner Lacy: How can you be so sure?

  Witness: Because the village we destroyed, that we were sent to destroy – ordered to destroy – was Zulaika’s village. The woman I saw with the back of her head shot off, that was her. It was her.

  Commissioner Barbour: Jesus wept.

  Witness: It wasn’t an accident. Not a crime of passion. It was planned. They wanted her dead. We were sent there to kill her and everyone she knew.

  22

  Drowning

  Seeing the boys from the platoon again had been nothing like he’d expected. He’d only been away a month and by now was one of the veterans of the unit, but there was already a distance there, an unspoken separation. They were going back to the fight, and he was not. It put aeons between them. He knew it and so did they. Only Crowbar, who’d been in long enough to see hundreds come and go, seemed unchanged.

  After the enquiry, Crowbar delivered him back to the hospital, wheeled him back to his bed. They shook hands.

  ‘Please, sir,’ said Clay. ‘Don’t forget.’

  Crowbar nodded. ‘Your personal effects. No worries, Straker.’

  ‘Under my bunk. It’s important, Koevoet.’ He knew he was taking a chance, but there was no other way.

  Crowbar stiffened a moment. ‘Anything else, Straker? Fokken breakfast in bed, perhaps?’

  Clay smiled. ‘I get that already.’

  Just an inflection of the brow. ‘Ja, ja, fokken smart arse.’

  ‘Dankie, Koevoet.’

  ‘Oh, and I thought you might want to know,’ said Crowbar, straightening his beret. ‘That black scout of ours, Brigade. He’s missing in action. Didn’t come back from a long-range recon patrol about a week ago. I know you liked him.’

  Clay looked deep into his commander’s hard blue eyes and nodded, another little void opening inside him.

  ‘Look after yourself, seun,’ said Crowbar. ‘And don’t do anything stupid.’ He handed Clay a paper shopping bag, and leaned in close. ‘Get out, Straker. Leave South Africa. Do it fast. I don’t expect to see you again.’ Then he straightened up, saluted, turned about face and walked away before Clay could say another word.

  After everyone had gone and the ward was quiet, Clay opened up the bag. Inside, a dog-eared copy of Catch-22, a copy of the previous day’s Sunday Times, and at the bottom, a loaded Beretta 92 with a spare mag. There was also a small muslin pouch held closed with a drawstring. Clay snatched a shallow breath, opened the pouch and tipped the contents into his palm: a single stone a little bigger than one of the seven hundred steel balls packed inside an M18 Claymore mine.

  Clay’s stomach bottomed out. A diamond, uncut.

  Clay turned the stone over in his fingers. Was it one of his – one of Mbdele’s? It was a particularly unremarkable example, tinged brown from defects in the tetrahedral bonded lattice. He couldn’t tell. Just minutes ago, Crowbar had stood right there next to Clay’s bed and told him that he would send on his effects when he could. Had he lied? Had Crowbar somehow managed to get back to Ondangwa, retrieve the bag from under the floorboards in Clay’s tent, and then get back to Pretoria in time for the inquest? And if so, where were the other diamonds – the big pink one? Why would Crowbar have picked out just one stone and kept the rest? For the money? He couldn’t imagine Crowbar doing something so dishonourable. And what about the notebook they’d taken from O Medico de Morte’s assistant? Clay had buried it with the diamonds. Surely if Crowbar had dug out Clay’s ‘personal effects’, as he’d called them – Clay hadn’t specified what was in the bag – he would have seen the notebook, looked inside, realised its significance. And if he had, what had he done with it? The very existence of those documents was proof that Clay had committed murder. And if this stone in his hand wasn’t one of the diamonds he’d buried under his bunk, then where the hell did Crowbar get it? Was he, as Clay had begun to suspect, more involved in this thing than he was admitting? Clay’s mind raced through the possibilities, but there was no way to disentangle them, no way to know.

  Clay slipped the diamond back into its pouch and set it on his bedside table. One thing was sure: Crowbar had told Clay to get out and given him the means to do it.

  Days passed. He still needed morphine – would reach for the little bell on his side table that brought the nurse and her gift of bliss. But he was healing. He could feel it. Breathing was a little bit easier every day. He slept for big parts of the day: long periods of prescribed hallucination that left him reeling at the vivid insanity of the images conjured up by his brain. Periods of lucidity were there, too, and terror walked through them.

  Then one day, Sara came.

  She sat beside him. He could tell she’d been crying. Her eyes and the tip of her nose were pink and inflamed. She wore the same dress she’d worn that day she’d met him at the airport, when he’d come back home on leave after his parents died in the car crash. She looked heavier than he remembered her.

  She smiled at him and placed a bouquet of flowers on his bedsi
de table. ‘I didn’t know what else to bring,’ she said, staring at the bandage on his face.

  ‘Sara,’ he said, not looking at the flowers. ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘Oh, Clay,’ she whispered. ‘They told me that you’d been wounded, that you were here. I wanted to come and see you.’

  Clay said nothing.

  Sara fiddled with her hair. ‘Are you alright, Clay?’

  ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Mother said I should come down. That perhaps we could talk about plans for the wedding.’

  ‘Wedding?’

  ‘We never set a date, Clay. Mother says we should start making arrangements, booking a church, thinking about the guest list.’

  An emptiness blew through him, cold and come over a great distance. He couldn’t quite believe that he was even having this conversation.

  ‘We’re all so proud of you, Clay. We read about your medal in the newspaper. It’s wonderful what you are doing, keeping us all safe from the communists.’

  Clay looked away.

  ‘Just think, it will be so grand. You in your uniform with your medals, me in my dress. I have something picked out already.’ She rummaged in her handbag, withdrew a piece of paper. ‘What do you think?’

  Clay looked back at her. She was holding up a page from a bridal catalogue – a pretty model in a demure, high-necked white gown.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said.

  ‘There are loads of styles,’ she said. ‘I know it’s bad luck for you to see the dress before the wedding, but there’s no harm in you seeing pictures.’ She pulled out a magazine. ‘I wanted something sexier, low cut, but mother…’ She flipped through the pages, found what she was looking for, put it in front of him. ‘Something like this?’

  Clay stared at the picture. ‘I don’t know.’

  Sara looked up at him. Her face had crumpled, her smile gone. ‘Don’t know what, Clay? Are you alright? Should I call the nurse?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Sara was silent. Clay matched her.

  After a while, she said: ‘Don’t you want me here?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I don’t want you here.’

  Shock in her face, surprise. ‘What are you saying, Clay?’

  ‘Get out, Sara.’

  And that was it.

  Many years later he’d replay it all in his head, and the guilt would come, raw still despite the scarring. She’d be sitting there, tears flowing across her face, not saying a word, and it would last a long time. Twice more he would tell her to get out. Like this: Get out, Sara. I don’t want you here. I don’t want to talk about weddings or medals or anything. I just want to be alone. And then she’d be standing next to his bed and he would know he’d hurt her in the most fundamental and unforgiveable way, and ever since that day he’d never found the courage to call her or write her to tell her he was sorry, that he wasn’t the man she thought he was; that he’d thought he was.

  She stood and walked out.

  Later a nurse came and gave him an envelope. Inside was the ring they’d bought her while he was on leave; the little, flawed diamond, solitary in its abandoned gold band.

  The doctor came by to check on him at least once a day, but she seemed distracted and distant. One night she gave him a copy of Crime and Punishment, told him it belonged to her husband.

  ‘What does he fly?’

  She said nothing, just sat staring into the darkness of the ward.

  ‘Doctor?’

  She looked up at the ceiling, took a few shallow breaths. ‘Mirage,’ she said.

  Clay nodded. ‘Those Vlammy pilots, they keep us alive, you know.’

  Her eyes brimmed a moment then flashed as she turned her face away. ‘Stupid fucking war,’ she hissed.

  She checked his chart. He could see that her hand was shaking. She stared down at the clipboard, the shadows glancing from the pale panels of her uniform, stretching across the polished floor and warping over the ranks of parallel beds. Then she hooked the chart to the end of his bed and walked away.

  The next day she was silent, withdrawn, went about her work with grim efficiency. She checked his pulse and blood pressure, examined the place where she’d cut open his body and then closed it back up again, all without a word. She wrote something on his chart and made to leave.

  Clay reached for her arm. ‘Please,’ he said. ‘I have something to tell you.’

  She glanced along the length of the ward.

  ‘You asked me about Operation COAST,’ he whispered. ‘That’s the message you sent me, wasn’t it? In the book? The cipher?’

  She looked both ways, nodded and leaned close.

  ‘The guy I killed, out in the dunes,’ said Clay, whispering close into her ear. ‘The one who was helping to administer the injections to those poor bastards…’ Clay tailed off, the memory wrapping its hands around his throat.

  ‘Go on,’ she whispered.

  ‘He was carrying some documents. They mentioned Operation COAST.’

  Her mouth opened, a small, perfect oval, as if she were about to blow out candles on a birthday cake.

  ‘It was a list of chemicals and their effects on human test subjects,’ he said.

  Clay watched her eyes widen and a deep frown crease her forehead.

  ‘Do you have the documents?’

  ‘I did. I tried to get them for you. I don’t know what’s happened to them.’

  Can you remember any of the details?’ she whispered.

  He started to speak.

  She shook her head, rearranged the papers on her clip board and handed him a pencil from her breast pocket. ‘Write it for me,’ she said. ‘As much as you can remember.’

  Clay scribbled out the contents of formulations 13B and 14C, the accompanying clinical observations, and handed her back the clipboard.

  She stood reading. ‘Are you sure this is correct?’ she whispered. ‘It’s very detailed.’

  ‘I think so,’ he said. ‘I have a good memory for things like this. I’m better with numbers, but I’m pretty sure it’s right.’

  She pulled the paper from the clipboard, folded it and slid it into her pocket.

  ‘What are you going to do?’ he asked.

  ‘I’m not sure yet. Don’t tell anyone about this.’ She squeezed his hand. ‘Try to rest. I’ll speak to you tomorrow. I must go.’ She hurried away.

  Unable to sleep, having again refused morphine, Clay read deep into the night. The ward was dark, Dostoevsky’s words semi-obscure in the dim moonlight, shrouded in veils of pain. The story took on the rhythms of the hurt flowing through him, paragraphs rising up to crest and break into foamy troughs of half-relief and partial understanding, only for the turbulence to gather again and rise so that at each peak he could see across an endless sea of breaking waves. And in each of these cyclings he searched for some meaning, for answers to his questions. But there were only glimpses of land on a shifting horizon, distant coastlines obscured by shoals of low cloud.

  Around midnight a nurse came and asked if he wanted morphine. He took a small dose. Clay read on as the drugs took effect, his mind wandering now, rereading the same paragraph three times, something about two kinds of men – those that want to be controlled and those that transgress the law because they can. Raskolnikov was hurtling towards self-destruction. Clay closed the book and shut his eyes.

  He’d just drifted to the edge of a dream when something shunted him back. Someone was standing next to his bed, fumbling with his IV. Clay opened his eyes. It was a doctor. He was holding a syringe, preparing to inject something into the IV line. The doctor turned and smiled under his facemask, the white cotton bunching up under his nose.

  ‘Straker,’ the doctor said, his voice grating like rusty hinge. ‘Good. You are awake.’

  ‘What are you doing?’ said Clay, groggy from the morphine.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ the doctor said. ‘It will all be over soon.’
He smiled with dark, seemingly depthless eyes and inserted the needle.

  Those eyes. That voice. ‘I don’t want morphine.’

  A strangled laugh emerged from the doctor’s mouth. ‘Don’t worry. It’s not morphine.’ He started depressing the plunger.

  Clay shook his head. A thick vapour had now flooded the ward, wisped around the doctor’s head. ‘What…?’ he gasped. Something was wrong. Very wrong. ‘Who are you?’

  ‘What did I tell you in Angola? Do you remember?’

  ‘Angola? You were in Angola?’ Clay tried to push back the chloroform shroud collapsing in on him. He could feel the peripheries of his consciousness dissolving. None of what was happening made sense. Was it another dream?

  The man’s mouth moved underneath the mask, the dark eyes narrowed. ‘You are a traitor, Straker, to your country and your race.’

  Clay’s heart lurched from rest to terror as realisation hit. Adrenaline flooded his system. He threw out his arm, reached for the bell. A bolt of pain pierced his ribcage. The man grabbed his arm, wrenching it outward. Clay grunted as the whole of his injured side lit up like fire, despite the anaesthetic. The bell hit the floor with a loud clang. The man cursed, lost his hold on the syringe as the IV stand crashed to the floor. He reached to right it but by now lights had come on at the end of the ward. Without another word, he sprinted to the other end of the room and disappeared through the double doors.

  The effect on Clay’s body was almost instantaneous. He grappled for the catheter in his arm, but it was as if his hands were made of foam rubber, the fingers thick and spongy. He was vaguely aware of someone rushing towards him, of voices raised. Spasms racked his body. His arms fell limp, then his legs. He felt as if he was drowning. And then she was there, looking down at him. He tried to scream, but nothing came.

  Part IV

  23

  Straight to the Heart