Reconciliation for the Dead

by Paul E. Hardisty

  By now, Clay knew that the wound in his side had opened up again. He could feel the blood spreading cold and wet down his side. With every step the pain worsened. He clamped his elbow down hard against his ribs and tried to keep up, but Brigade was setting a determined pace. As Clay fell back, the hyenas, emboldened, got closer. He could hear them, close behind now, moving through the bush, chattering, sniffing the air, tracking him. Again he stopped, turned to face them, brandished the Beretta as if this would have some meaning for them, that they might associate this small black object with danger. They were close, ten metres away, half a dozen of them, spread in a loose semi-circle, hunched low, close enough that he could see their cold eyes, the hunger, the anticipation, the complete lack of fear. Coarse hair bristled across their muscled shoulders. Moonlight glinted from big, exposed canines and bone-crushing carnassials. Tongues lolled. Noses twitched. Clay charged at them, shouting, waving the gun. They bolted into the night.

  Brigade appeared. ‘What are you doing?’ he whispered. ‘You must be quiet.’

  ‘Hyenas,’ Clay said. Moonlight drifted over them.

  Brigade glanced at Clay’s side. ‘You are hurt.’

  Clay said nothing.

  Brigade inspected the ragged bandages then pulled Clay’s shirt back down. ‘Why did you not say?’

  ‘Would it have changed anything?’

  Brigade shook his head. ‘We must keep going while it is dark.’

  Clay nodded.

  They continued on. Brigade slowed his pace now, stayed with Clay.

  It wasn’t long before the hyenas were back, wary of Brigade, standing off, circling.

  ‘They can smell the blood,’ said Brigade. ‘Kom ons gaan.’ Let’s go.

  The hyenas were still with them as the moon rose and the sky cleared. And then, sometime deep into the night, they broke off and did not return, and for a while they were alone, sliding like upright phantoms through the pale and darkened bushland. And in the pale light of the constellations and the wan brightness of the moon, there was no dissemblance between them.

  They kept to the open country when they could. The thicker bush made slow going. Thorns tore at their clothes and skin. Dry branches caught at their limbs and raked their faces. Above, the stars turned. And as had happened sometimes on the long night patrols he’d done in Angola, particularly during his second tour, a feeling came to him that this wilderness that he travelled through was a place of prehistory, a relic, at odds with the new reality of human ascendency, of wars and politics and the manifold machines of death. To him the wild had always been a place of dreams, of a past when humans were few and their hold on life precarious, when time was ruled still by the seasons and the rains, the triggers that launched the great continental migrations, when the herds were not constrained or channelled by fences but wandered a timeless Africa. But it was also a dream of his childhood, of long days spent wandering the bushland behind his uncle’s summer house in Cape Province, of the rocks and trees and all of the creatures of that place, of walking with his parents in the rock-strewn alpine of the Cedarburg mountains, the dark crags of the Draakensburg. But all of these things were gone now, existing only within that elusive and unreliable dimension of memory.

  Sometime during the night they turned north, crossed the Olifants River and the main east-west park road that followed it and then swung east towards the Lembobo Mountains, the long, rifted volcanic margin that marked the border with Mozambique. Brigade kept a painted dog’s unrelenting pace, which Clay struggled to match, his body unused to the exertion after weeks of convalescence, the pain in his side growing. With every step he could feel his strength draining away. He put his head down, bit into the pain and kept walking.

  As the sky lightened from starlit black to deep-ocean blue, shallowing over sand as the first hint of dawn touched the horizon, the mountains rose up dark and jagged before them. By the time they reached the base of the first broad talus slope, it was morning. The steep cliffs threw kilometre-long shadows across the slope and the bushveldt beyond. They found a cleft in the boulders, shaded by a clutch of acacia, where they could rest out of sight.

  Brigade removed Clay’s blood-soaked dressing and inspected his wound.

  ‘At Rito?’ he said, as he poured water across the place where the FAPLA shrapnel had torn through Clay’s side.

  Clay grunted an affirmative.

  ‘Some of the stitches have come out,’ said Brigade. ‘Not all.’

  ‘Do you have a needle?’

  Brigade shook his head. ‘Only this.’ He held up a military field compress.

  ‘Put it on and tie it tight,’ said Clay.

  After Brigade has applied the bandage, Clay stood, ran his hand along his side. The bleeding seemed to have stopped, for now. ‘Let’s ontrek,’ he said. And then, looking into Brigade’s eyes: ‘Thank you.’

  It took them more than two hours to reach the cliffs. Still in shadow, they stopped to rest and drink. They were almost out of water. Clay looked back the way they had come. All of the veldt lay below him, the mountain’s black shadow retreating over the parched shrubland as the sun rose. And away past the farthest western horizon, still in darkness, the Okavango, the Caprivi Strip, and Angola, where the war was.

  Monkeys watched them from rocky crags and the branches of ancient trees rooted into dark clefts in the cliffside. A Verreaux’s Eagle, messenger of the Shona ancestors, circled high in the distance. And then, coming on the wind, the faint drone of an aircraft. They searched the sky. There, to the west, a speck on the horizon, a Bosbok spotter plane. They watched it for a while, then turned east and kept going.

  The climbing was difficult. Clay sweated over blocky volcanic tuffs and sharp cuesta ridges, working from one handhold to the next, from ledge to rock face, up splayed gullies, climbing steadily despite the pain that pulsed through him each time he stretched or twisted his torso. And yet, he was alive. Without Vivian’s efforts, he would have died. A graveside emptiness swept through him. Ice shivered through his vertebrae, skull to tail. Vivian.

  A couple of hours later they stood at the apex of a rocky ridge. Half a kilometre below, Africa spread away flat and blue and hazy.

  Brigade pulled the pack from his shoulder, handed it to Clay. ‘The border,’ he said, scuffing the ground with his boot heel. ‘No fence. No line you can see. But it is here. You are in Mozambique.’

  Clay looked out along the ridge.

  Brigade reached into the pocket of his trousers and handed Clay an American twenty-dollar bill.

  ‘What’s this?’ said Clay.

  ‘All I could get.’

  Clay shook his head, not understanding.

  ‘I leave you here,’ said Brigade.

  Clay swallowed. He’d assumed Brigade would stay with him, that they would escape to Mozambique together. ‘Where will you go?’ he said.

  ‘I will try to free those people. And then, if I am lucky, I will go back to my family.’

  Clay caught his breath, wiped the sweat from his eyes, looked into Brigade’s dark retinae. He towered over the other man, outweighed him by at least thirty kilos, but he felt suddenly very small in his presence. ‘I run, you fight,’ he said. He felt like a coward.

  ‘No,’ said Brigade. ‘Now, our fighting is different. Please, take the money.’

  Clay pushed the bill away. ‘Keep it, broer,’ he said.

  Brigade resisted a moment, then relented, pocketed the note.

  ‘They will be looking for you,’ said Clay.

  Brigade smiled, ran his hand across the coiled stubble of his chin. ‘I have a disguise,’ he said.

  ‘I should go back with you,’ Clay said. Part of him believed it.

  ‘No,’ said Brigade. ‘You must tell the British and Americans what is happening here. If they know, they must do something.’

  ‘Do you think they will?’

  Brigade reached into his pocket and placed something in Clay’s palm. It was an undeveloped canister of 35 mm film. ‘From Doct
or Vivian’s camera,’ he said. ‘You must go. And you must put it in the newspapers.’

  He wanted to tell Brigade how inadequate he felt for this task. Instead he nodded, closed his fist around the canister.

  ‘You will do it?’ Brigade said. ‘You will tell them?’

  ‘I will try,’ said Clay, looking out over the rumpled green ridges to the darker blue of the Limpopo plain. He had never felt so alone.

  ‘Take the shotgun,’ said Brigade.

  Clay pushed the weapon away. ‘Keep it,’ he said. ‘You’ll need it.’

  ‘You must go to Maputo,’ said Brigade, swinging the shotgun over his shoulder. ‘There is a British Embassy there.’

  Clay nodded.

  Brigade put his hand on Clay’s shoulder. ‘Be careful. They will be hunting you. Even there.’

  Clay looked into Brigade’s eyes and offered his hand. Brigade took it, held it a long time. And then, without another word, Brigade turned away and started back down the mountain.

  Clay stood and watched him move away through the steep ridged country, picking his way through the rocks, descending quickly. Soon he was gone, disappeared into the bush. After a while Clay caught sight of him again, farther down, very small now as he traversed another ridge, but soon he vanished again, this time for ever.

  And he realised that it had been two days since he’d thought of this man as anything other than a fellow human being.

  36

  That Periphery of Darkness

  He was far too young to understand.

  Everything he had been taught to hold true lay shattered and broken as the rock beneath his feet. All those black-and-white certainties that had underpinned his life lay dead. Colour, crazed rainbows of uncertainty, flooded his cortex. He had nothing. No home, no country, no one to stand by.

  The breeze was warm, blowing in from the east now, from Mozambique and the dark volcanic plain. There was ocean in it, too, humidity and faint whiffs of salt and iodine and the spice of the trade winds. He filled his lungs with it, let all of this provenance flow into him as if to replace all that he had lost.

  Despite everything, he had survived. How many deaths had he witnessed? Kingfisher and Cooper, the piles of FAPLA dead at the airstrip, the poor unfortunates dosed and dying on the cargo deck of the Hercules, Vivian’s face slowly vanishing behind that veil of red earth. And how many had he slain? Murdered with his own hands? Faces and moments he would never forget, was destined to replay in his dreams for the rest of his life. Sin enough to drown in.

  Jesus, help me.

  His heart was pounding. The ground shifted under his feet, knocking him off balance. Clouds spun into cruel vortices. His throat tightened. He fought for breath, dropped to his knees, dug his fingers into the riven, degraded rock of this new country, sank his forehead to the ground. Sobs shook his body, shivered through those places in him that had been rent open and then, somehow, miraculously repaired.

  For what seemed a long time he remained there, a supplicant prostrated before infinity, terrified of looking up into that blue-and-white depth. Tears streamed down his face, permeated the rock.

  Slowly, his breathing eased. Panic receded. He stood, looked out across the folded rift to the forest stretching blue and unbroken to the eastern horizon. The sun glowed warm on his face. He was alive. And suddenly, it was beautiful. All of it. The dry and burning bushland, the blue horizon of an unknown country, the African sky spread above him like the promise of a different future, the as-yet invisible path down the mountain and across the plain to the coast and all that life might yet bring. He was young, and the world entire lay there, ahead of him.

  It took him the rest of the day to leave the mountains behind and cross the dry bed of an un-named river to move into the flat, open mopane country north of Lake Massingir. He kept away from roads and major tracks, skirting any signs of human settlement or travail. This was a country at war. FRELIMO, the Marxist and ANC-leaning ruling party who’d taken over after the defeat of the Portuguese in 1972, were now fighting guerrilla opposition of their own, the supposedly South African-backed RENAMO. A civil war he wanted no part of. He was done with fighting. He would make his way east as far as the Rio Singuedeze and then strike south, skirting the eastern edge of the lake, and then south to the dam at Massingir. He estimated a little over a hundred and fifty kilometres by foot through the wilderness, allowing for the meanderings of the country. His knowledge of the geography of this new place was limited to what he remembered from school and Brigade’s crude directions. From Massingir, there was a paved road all the way to Maputo. If he couldn’t find some kind of transport, he’d walk. Once in the capital, he’d go straight to the British Embassy, quit Africa as soon as he could, leave the war behind, get to the UK. Maybe in London he might find some peace, learn a trade. In school he’d always been good at maths and physics, had thought he might be an engineer one day, like his father. Fix things. Build things rather than tear them down. Maybe. Maybe one day.

  With the sun low in the sky behind him, he stopped under a sprawling mopane and pulled up his shirt. Blood slicked his side. He loosened the compress and inspected the wound. A gash about three centimetres in length had opened up at the lower end of the scar. The rest looked to be holding, but blood was seeping from the open part of the wound. It still looked clean, and there was no sign of infection. A few stitches, however crude, would close it up. Even a roll of tape, wound tight around his torso, would do. But he had no implements for the task, nothing to stop the slow loss of blood.

  Clay waved away the flies, tightened the compress down onto the wound and kept going.

  Shadows lengthened.

  As the sun set he moved into more heavily wooded country. Mosquitoes came, ravenous squadrons of them. Waving them away put even more strain on his side, so he trudged on, tried to ignore them. With the sun’s disc edging the treetops, he came upon a family of leopards, three of them draped in the limbs of a sprawling fire-blushed jackalberry. The pink and bone-white carcass of a zebra hung lifeless nearby, carried up in powerful jaws and slung hoofs-down across a branch. The cats watched him pass, eyes narrowed in watchful repose. He was so close he swore he could hear them purring. In school he’d been taught that leopards and the other big cats couldn’t purr. So much for school.

  Darkness came fast.

  Clay gathered some wood, a few dry twigs, and using the matches from Brigade’s pack, started a small fire. He huddled to the warmth, took stock. Bedsides the Beretta and half a clip of ammunition, he had the matches, a bush knife, the diamond, the notebook and the film. There was half a bottle of water, but no food, and he was bleeding again. He guessed he’d covered twenty kilometres since parting with Brigade at the border. If he could cover forty kilometres a day, he was still at least three days from Massingir. Normally, that pace wouldn’t have been a problem. But weakened from loss of blood and with the danger of infection looming, it would be a tough go.

  In the firelight, he searched inside the pack, checked the pockets for anything that might have been of use, found nothing. He pulled off his shirt, unstrapped the sodden compress and dropped it into the fire. It hissed and steamed in the flames. Using the knife, he cut strips from the hem of his shirt and used them to bind his side. It was crude, but by cinching down hard he was able to staunch the leakage of blood. He threaded what was left of the shirt over his shoulders and huddled up to the fire.

  The sky was clear. Stars appeared. He knew he should keep going. Find water. Kill something for food. Make progress towards his destination. The stars were there, a multitude, so bright now, pointing the way. East, then south. Away from this place, this doomed continent. But exhaustion beckoned, bid him stay. All he needed was a few more minutes. A little more rest. A few moments more to warm himself, then he would go.

  He lay panting by the fire, fighting back the dark edge of sleep. And that periphery of darkness was the forest itself, the collapsing cocoon of firelight that defined his world. Eyes peered in at him, a
double semicircle of flashing, glinting faces. And then the laughing came, that mocking, hysterical bark.

  Clay reached for the Beretta, chambered a round, pushed himself up to one knee, tried to stand. The first hyena burst towards him. Off balance, he fired.

  Commissioner Ksole: What are these, Mister Straker?

  Witness: These are prints of the documents we photographed at the Roodeplaat laboratory.

  Commissioner Ksole: The quality of some of these prints is very poor.

  Witness: Yes, sir. By the time I had the film developed, it was badly degraded.

  Commissioner Barbour: But some of them are quite clear.

  Commissioner Ksole: Tell us, Mister Straker, in your own words. Tell us what these photographs show.

  Witness: The first photo is of a document. It is dated 5th March 1981. 7th Medical Battalion, SAMS. Operation COAST. Experimental Suite GR7-B. Objective: Development of a genetically specific targeted sterilisation agent to control and reduce the black population of South Africa and neighbouring territories. Chemical and biological options to be investigated.

  Commissioner Ksole: Go on, Mister Straker.

  Witness: SAMS is authorised to use whatever means needed to acquire necessary chemical and biological agents and other required technology overseas.

  Commissioner Rotzenburg: How do we know these so-called photographs are not elaborate fakes? It would not be difficult to create such documents.

  Witness: If the commission would formally investigate COAST and its operations, these photos could be compared to actual documents. You would see that they are authentic.