by Deon Meyer
Something was bothering Pa. Something was making him feel very tense.
A jackal called, just this side, against one of the slopes.
I wanted to turn back. I wanted to go to the Volvo, I wanted to drive away. The oppression, the humidity, that dark heavy feeling from yesterday stirred in me like a monster in dark waters.
I unslung the rifle from my shoulder.
Pa bent forward slightly, as if he wanted to make himself smaller. He began to walk again, more slowly this time. Every now and then he would stop. A hundred and fifty metres from the House of Light. An owl called from the veld, above the quiet hum of insects.
We just came to scout, why did he keep on walking?
At about a hundred metres from the house a hare flew out of the shrubs to our left. The shock made me gasp. Out loud. Pa just froze, looked slowly at me. I wanted to say, I’m sorry, but he squeezed my shoulder, to say he understood.
He turned to me, pressed his mouth against my ear. Very quietly he said, ‘See that rock?’ and he pointed to the right. A rock as big as a fridge had rolled down the hill, and lay on the pavement.
I nodded.
‘Wait there beside it. I’m going a little way ahead.’
When I hesitated, he said, ‘You’ll be able to see me at all times.’
I nodded.
He waited. I went over to the rock, looking carefully where I stepped when I left the tar. The rock was as high as my chest. I put my rifle down on it, so that I could look through the telescope if necessary. I lay against the rock. It felt cold.
Pa took a step forward. Stood still. Another step, halt. Step, stand. The glow of the house stretched all the way here. I could see Pa in its light, his body a little bowed, his hair long and bedraggled.
He took a step forward, stood, listened and looked. Step, stand, listen, look. Further and further onwards, away from me. Why so slow and cautious? There was no movement, no sound, nothing, except the bright fort ahead. He would easily see a fishing line this close to the light. Maybe the Jeep people and the abused woman were long gone, maybe they forgot to turn everything off, maybe the flares were just a trick, a practical joke. It felt like an eternity, time standing still; he was ten paces away, then fifteen, twenty. I saw his back, ever smaller; we only came to recce, Pa, we’ve seen enough, that lady isn’t here any more, let’s go back, let’s leave; twenty-five paces, Pa was a long way off, closer to the pool of light, he looked so small.
I didn’t want to see Pa like that, I didn’t want to be here now, it didn’t feel right, something was eating me from the inside.
‘Hey,’ said a voice, and Pa jumped, and swung round to his left. I saw the man standing there. Muscles. He had the big revolver in his hand, and he was lifting it. He sounded surprised.
Pa had the rifle ready. He didn’t shoot.
Muscles raised the revolver.
Still my father didn’t shoot.
A shot boomed, reverberated. Pa fell.
Chapter 10
Pa fell. The universe stood still.
My whole body shivered, the echoes of the heavy revolver shot thundered over me and the rock, it shook free the heaviness in my head and at that moment I knew what I had experienced yesterday, that anxiety attack, the fury. I wasn’t angry at the dogs and their treachery, I wasn’t ashamed because I had called for my mother. I was angry with my father. I was angry with him because he had looked so small and afraid and lost at the fuel station, with the snarling dogs surrounding him. I was angry because, at that moment, he had needed me to help him, and I wasn’t ready for that. I was angry because I saw him differently, the morning after the dogs, when Pa climbed out of the Volvo cab so carefully, with the .300 CZ hunting rifle over his shoulder and a Beretta in his hand. He walked through the dog carcasses with tentative steps, his body stiff and sore after the attack and the night of poor sleep. That was when I saw something, from the vantage of the truck, but I didn’t want to see it.
Pa was smaller. Diminished.
Three nights ago, when he pressed my mouth shut at the last minute and the pistol shook in his hand, and the Jeep men were outside, I felt it, but I didn’t want to feel it.
I was angry with Pa for being sick. For being weak. Now I was angry at him for falling in the darkness. His rifle was ready, he had seen that Muscles meant to shoot, but Pa couldn’t shoot a human being. He just couldn’t.
Three days ago, when he’d woken up so frantic, I knew, I understood then, but I didn’t want to know.
All this fanned the flames of my anger. It made me want to stand up behind that rock and walk over to Pa where he lay on the tar in the pool of light cast by the house on the ridge. I wanted to scold him, though at that moment I did not have the full understanding and the capacity and the words to understand why. Years later it would make sense: that night, 24 March in the Year of the Dog, was the moment of the second great loss. The first was my mother and my life as I knew it. The dogs and their germs and the Jeep men and Pa’s fever had robbed me again. They robbed me of the image of Willem Storm as the infallible protector, the all-knowing guide through life. They had robbed me of my father as a heroic figure.
Before the night in Koffiefontein he was big and strong and wise. Infallible. For the last time.
I lay against that rock, and looked at Pa where he had fallen. I saw his matted hair in the glow of the House of Light, and for the first time I saw my father as he truly was: a skinny man of average height. Fragile. Brittle. Fearful. Breakable. Mortal.
I shot Muscles. I could see him to the left of Pa in the untidy, overgrown garden of one of the other houses. He was etched against the light; time seemed to stop, his tall shadow seemed to move in slow motion, the big revolver still thrust out in front of him. I swung the scope on him, and I shot him, as I had practised, on tins and stones beside the road over the past five or six weeks. I shot him through the head, and I took my eye off the scope, looked at Pa, and saw another movement behind Muscles, deeper in the shadows. The man with long hair. He was coming towards the pavement. I swung the rifle, and I aimed and shot him with the Tikka .222. I shot him above his right eye, in the forehead, the blood making a dark spray against the light as he dropped.
It was the rage that made me shoot. The terrible rage.
I ran down the road to Pa. I nearly tripped over the low-strung fishing line. A flare hissed up into the air, and burst in a shower of light high in the heavens. Here below the shadows took on strange slow-motion life – trees, lampposts, houses, bushes, my father who lay there in the road. And then moved.
Pa staggered to his feet unsteadily. He held a hand to his neck. Blood was seeping through his fingers. It looked black.
‘Pa,’ I said. My voice sounded strange. To him too, I could see it in his gaze.
I was thirteen years old when I shot two people. Out of sheer rage. At the world and at my father.
That night I realised: from now on, I will have to protect my father. That would be my role.
Chapter 11
Pa
(As I sit here writing, reliving that night, memories overwhelm me. They are jumbled, haphazard, the chronology confused. Chronology. I can’t use that word without hearing my father’s voice: ‘Chronos is Greek for “time”, logos is derived from legō, which in ancient Greek means “I speak”, which evolved to logia, the study of something. It’s where we get the word and idea of “logic”, for example . . .’ And then he started to elaborate passionately on the Greeks and their civilisation, culminating with a sigh of deep regret: ‘We were capable of so much, and so much, we lost.’
It’s an odd thing, reopening the old doors, letting the winds of those past days blow in. Nostalgia and longing, pain and joy. Amazement: this is my life. This is how I was made and shaped. And the other great dilemma of this memoir: how to provide a readable framework for my narrative, despite the tricks of memory, and the complex navigation through the reefs of this emotional ocean.)
My father. Willem Storm. ‘That damn pol
ymath’, as Nero Dlamini would often call him when Pa wasn’t within earshot. My father was sensitive and gentle. He was a clever man. And wise. His qualifications as geographer and jurist – in that perverse order – were the official, academic indicators of his restless intellect, but they didn’t tell the whole story. In practice, his interests and insight were much broader. He was half-historian, semi-philosopher, quasi-scientist. He had a huge appetite for knowledge, he was ever searching, constantly reading, and always questioning, completely buoyed up by, and totally in love with every aspect of this world. Not for him the narrow focus of a searchlight, but a brilliant lamp that illuminated everything around him. His perspective was always broad; it never excluded people, especially not me. Empathy was his core quality, that rare ability to see through others’ eyes.
‘What makes you like this, Willem?’ Nero asked, shortly before my father’s death, one evening in the Orphanage sitting room, each one nursing a glass of brandy.
‘Like what?’
‘You still look at the world wide-eyed, as if it’s magical, everything and everyone. You live in wonderment, almost like a child, if you’ll forgive me for saying so.’
Pa laughed, and he asked, ‘Do you know the origin of the word “magical”?’
‘You’re not going to avoid the question.’
‘Did you know the word “machine” has the same source as “magical”?’
‘Why are you like this?’
‘Because the world and life are magical, Nero. In a way. Because we can plan all we like, but the universe is indifferent to our schemes.’
‘What made you this way?’
So Pa thought about it, and he replied that it came from growing up in a little town, the very last generation of children before the Internet. Oudtshoorn was big enough to have a good high school, yet still small enough and far enough from the city for country values to be preserved. At first Pa wanted to be a teacher, inspired by the good people who taught him. That was why he started off studying geography. But his roommate at university was a law student, and he began reading his textbooks, and Pa discovered another world that fascinated him. And in his third year he fell in love with Amelia Foord, and then he realised he would have to make something more of himself.
Chapter 12
24 March
‘My God, Nico,’ said Pa. He moved his hand from the back of his neck, and looked in amazement at the blood on his fingers. His knees sagged. He sat down. ‘I’ll be all right in a minute,’ he said apologetically.
I inspected his wound. In the light of the house on the hill I could see the tiny white tip of a neck vertebra, before the blood seeped over it. My father had been incredibly lucky. The bullet had grazed the back of his head, ripping through thin skin and soft flesh just below his skull. Millimetres from his brain stem.
‘You’re just badly wounded, Pa,’ I said.
He nodded.
I could see Muscles lying on the pavement, his eyes wide, the back of his head a pulverised mess. The sight made me weak at the knees too. I stepped away from Pa. He looked at me with concern. I vomited, on to the tar road. Again and again.
Pa got up from his knees, and came to hold me. Looking back, I feel it was more a gesture of gratitude than comfort.
We smelled the liquor emanating from Muscles and Long Hair as we walked past them. That must have been the reason why Muscles missed.
The House of Light had merely been the bait. They were living in another house altogether, to the left of the street, the one they had come out from when Pa tripped a barely visible wire, and turned on a light inside.
The house smelled sour. There were empty bottles, tins and cartons and paper rubbish everywhere. Dirty clothes, dirty plates, dirty glasses.
Pa called out to the woman. No answer. We heard her whimper. Pa went ahead, he stopped at the threshold of the bedroom. ‘Wait, Nico,’ he said, ‘the lady has no clothes.’ I waited in the passage and could hear Pa talking quietly and gently to her in the room. She didn’t reply. When they emerged, Pa had wrapped her in a sheet. Her body trembled just perceptibly. Her head hung low, but I could make out the purple and blue bruises on her face. Her hair was lank and greasy, and she smelled terrible.
Pa led her out, and down the street. We set off all the tripwire alarms on the way back, but we just didn’t care any more.
Chapter 13
The first woman
24 March
Pa offered the woman food, first in Afrikaans. She didn’t hear, or she didn’t understand. Pa tried English, then the smattering of French or German he could scrape together. That too produced no result. She just slumped on the couch cocooned in the dirty sheet, shivering and looking down at the carpet.
We warmed water for her in a big pot on the gas stove, and carried it to the bathroom, where we filled the bath. Pa led her to it and closed the door behind him when he came out.
An hour later he went back to check on her. When he came back out he said, ‘She’s still just sitting there, on the floor.’ His voice was filled with pity.
We heated water again. Pa went in and bathed her, I waited in the kitchen. He helped her to dress in clothes that he found in a wardrobe in the master bedroom. Then he led her to the smaller bedroom. The clothes were a size too large. He tucked her into bed.
She still said not a word.
25 March
For many months it had been just the two of us travelling together. It felt strange now, knowing the woman was there.
Pa and I ate breakfast. The woman didn’t move.
Pa was wrapped up like a mummy. The wound on the back of his neck was in an awkward place, and the bandage had to be wrapped around his forehead. And there were more bandages and plasters on the dog bites on his arms, back and shoulder.
I washed the dishes, Pa checked on the woman. ‘She’s asleep,’ he whispered when he emerged.
We didn’t talk about the previous night. Pa was changed. He discussed his plans with me. Before, he would have gone to bury Muscles and Long Hair on his own, to spare me the trauma. But this morning he took me along to help. It was a task that took hours, as the ground on the Vanderkloof hills was hard and very stony.
I threw up again when we dragged the bodies to the graves and covered them. Pa just said, ‘Never mind, Nico. Never mind.’
We went back to the house, dripping with perspiration, dirty and nauseous. She was still asleep.
Pa took food to her in the bedroom. He woke her up. I stood at the door and watched. He had to feed her with a spoon while she stared at the wall with empty eyes, opening her mouth and swallowing, opening her mouth and swallowing.
Late in the afternoon we explored the town. We found a huge cobra in the OK Value supermarket. Pa said it must be after the rats and mice that were eating the meal and flour. The snake glided into the corner of the shop and then rose up with its hood spread. ‘Sjoe, what a beautiful animal,’ said Pa. We walked warily back to the front door.
Pa couldn’t kill snakes.
The shelves in the OK Value were pretty bare. Muscles and Long Hair must have carted most of the canned goods away.
The Alpha Pharm pharmacy was locked, the Renosterberg bottle store was almost empty, with the musty smell of stale, spilled beer left behind, and thousands of glass shards from broken bottles. ‘There’s a story here,’ said Pa. ‘I just can’t decipher it.’
The post office was open, stacked with piles of undelivered letters and parcels. The police station windows were smashed and pigeons had made themselves at home inside.
On the corner the Midas spares and filling station was undamaged. We found a second desiccated corpse in the rear office. A man, his beanie still on his head. Pa said he posed no health risk to us, we would bury him another day.
Outside, on the pavement, he indicated I should sit beside him on the kerbstone. I watched him searching for words. Pa was almost never at a loss for words. I saw him quickly wipe his eyes. He said, ‘I’m sorry. About last night. I . . .’
‘It’s okay, Pa.’
‘I wanted to spare you that much longer.’
Pa took my hand. It was the last time in his life that he held my hand as if I were a child. He enclosed it between both of his, and pressed it against his cheek and just sat there like that. It made me uncomfortable, but I didn’t move.
Pa dropped my hand again.
‘The world now is . . . We’ll fix it, Nico. We’ll make it whole. You and me.’
‘Yes, Pa.’
We stood up and went back to the house.
‘I don’t want us to stay in this house,’ I told Pa and pointed at the place where we slept. Because it was here that he had been sick and weak.
The woman was still lying in the room. She didn’t speak. Pa took her food. She only ate a little, but this time without his help.
In the night she started screaming. Eventually Pa managed to calm her down.
26 March
Pa was still in his room and I was brewing the morning coffee, around half past six. I think the aroma must have roused her. She came out of the bedroom and went to the bathroom and after a few minutes she came back. She sat down in the lounge area, sitting bolt upright, on the edge of the chair. She didn’t look at me.
‘Ma’am, would you like some coffee?’
She nodded.
I hid my surprise. ‘With sugar?’
‘And Cremora?’
She looked up at me. Her eyes were dark green, the bruises around them no better. She wasn’t a pretty lady: she had a long face that made me think a little bit of a horse. I couldn’t help it. She nodded a second time, and looked down.
‘One day we’ll taste fresh milk again.’ I used my father’s mantra, but she didn’t respond.
I made her coffee and put it down in front of her. She looked at me again. I think it was her way of saying thank you.
Pa came in. He said, ‘Morning, everyone,’ breezily, as if everything were completely normal. He picked up his coffee, sat down with his back to her, and said, ‘This morning we’re cutting hair, Nico Storm, you look like a werewolf.’
