by Deon Meyer
They heard it first, around three o’clock, further west. They tried to spot it, but it was too far away. And then, some time after four, it might have been half past four already, they heard it again, and when they looked up they saw it flying. High, and far to the west, but they saw it. Three of our people, all three reliable and honest, they were absolutely certain they had seen the helicopter.
Chapter 109
The investigation of my father’s murder: VI
Sofia Bergman
Boy, there’s so much I have to say about that morning, not just about what happened, but how I felt as well.
But the biggest thing that happened that morning was that I fell in love with Nico Storm.
Just like that.
One moment there was nothing, and the next moment I was in love.
It was a very strange morning. Nico always says, nothing happens and then everything happens at once, just when you least expect it.
That’s the way things were that morning.
We were sitting in the Orphanage sitting room, side by side on the couch. The morning was cool, the autumn sun shining through the window. I was so dreadfully tired, my hand hurt, my thoughts were consumed by the story of Domingo and the murders he had committed. The murders that I understood, the murders I wanted to forgive him for, if that was the whole story. I wanted to ask Birdy if Domingo had been a member of a prison gang. I wanted to ask her if he and Number One had been involved. I had a thousand questions.
Then Beryl came in and holding her hand was Okkie, and they both looked scared. He saw me and said, ‘Where is Pappa, Nico?’
Beryl said, ‘I don’t know what to do. I’m sorry, Nico, he keeps asking me where his father is.’
‘Where is Pappa?’
I stood up, and held out my arms to him. He approached me warily. He knew something was wrong. He could see it in my and Birdy and Beryl’s faces, and because Pa was not there. Pa was always there.
I picked him up and squeezed him tight and said, ‘Pappa isn’t here any more, Okkie.’
Then he cried for the first time.
Sofia Bergman
Nero Dlamini still teases me about it, how I fell in love with Nico in that instant. He said he would love to know what Freud would have had to say.
Sarge X and I walked into the Orphanage, and there was Nico on the couch, and he was holding Okkie, and he and Okkie were weeping, they cried like little children, that sort of crying you can’t find consolation for, there is nothing you can do, you have to wait until it’s finished.
That is when I fell in love with Nico.
Weird, hey?
I cried, and in a way I knew it was a good thing.
I cried for everything that I hadn’t cried for before. And there was so much.
I saw Sofia come in with Sarge X, I saw they had something important to say. I knew I should listen, but I had to finish crying first.
It took so long. So long that Sicelo Kula came in. Along with Nero Dlamini.
Sicelo Kula. They called him Thula Kula. The Quiet One. I barely knew him.
Everything happens at once, just when you least expect it.
Sicelo Kula was one of the West Coasters.
He was sixteen. He was in school. He lived in the Groendakkies, where Sofia used to. He worked at the stables, because he had a feel for horses. He was very quiet and shy. Introverted, said some people. A bit strange. They speculated that he was like that because he was one of the polygamists, the Bushmans Kloofers, the hippies, the gypsies. He was one of them.
Nero Dlamini had been treating Sicelo over the past months because he exhibited the symptoms of post-traumatic stress. Sicelo trusted Nero.
That morning Sicelo walked down from Groendakkies to the stables. He saw Sarge X’s pick-up and, lying on the back, the man in a uniform that looked familiar. He went closer to have a look.
Sicelo recognised the dead man in the grey uniform. He didn’t know what to do. He wavered, and then went to find Nero Dlamini. When he had told Nero, they came to the sitting room of the Orphanage.
By that time I had done my crying.
Okkie clung to me. His sobs were quiet, his head pressed to my chest.
Sarge X cleared his throat politely. ‘There have been some very strange events,’ he said. ‘We believe a helicopter brought the men who killed Willem and Domingo.’
Sicelo Kula couldn’t contain the information any longer: ‘I know that man,’ he said
‘What man?’ asked Sarge X.
‘The dead man on your pick-up.’
Nero Dlamini made him sit down, and helped him to tell the whole story, because Sicelo wasn’t fluent in English.
Sicelo Kula’s parents were working on a farm near Citrusdal when the Fever came. He attended the little farm school.
He was the only one who didn’t fall ill. He was twelve years old. He survived for eighteen months on food from the town and farmhouses and the orchards. When he saw people he hid.
Then it grew quiet, the stream of refugees from the Cape suddenly stopped.
He thought he might never see other people again. But one day he saw Jan Swartz’s sheep truck. Jan Swartz, of whom the West Coaster Yvonne Pekeur had said: Old Jan Swartz and company were five people who travelled together, they had a sheep lorry that they stripped, and they had eight pretty horses that pulled the truck. He was the big rooibos tea pedlar, and they also sold furniture, but pretty stuff, you could see they were antiques.
For two weeks Jan Swartz searched for trade goods in Citrusdal. Sicelo Kula hid, but watched Jan Swartz and his four assistants closely. He realised they were harmless, looking for food and goods to trade. On the eighth day he found the courage to show himself, he was tired of being so alone. It wasn’t easy: Jan and his helpers were Afrikaans, Sicelo was Xhosa, and nobody’s English was that good. But by the eleventh day Jan recognised how well Sicelo worked with the horses, he indicated he was now one of the team. The care of the horses quickly became his responsibility.
They drifted on, and Sicelo enjoyed that life. From January to March they cut rooibos tea around Citrusdal and Clanwilliam, over the mountain and through the Botterkloof, to beyond Nieuwoudtville. They sweated and fermented the tea and trampled it underfoot until it was ready. Through the winter months they peddled it to the communities at Lamberts Bay and Sutherland, and once to Bushmans Kloof.
Jan Swartz was strict, but he was fair. He liked to tell stories and sing around the campfire. Sicelo didn’t always understand the stories, but he enjoyed the songs. He sang along and taught the rest of them his Xhosa songs.
Every August they went to Wupperthal. Because that was the month of poverty and hunger, the whole tea supply had long been bartered for food, the West Coast was battered by wind and rain, the veld food would only be edible by September.
Wupperthal was a secret place.
They trekked with the horse lorry, a difficult journey to Wupperthal. There were other pedlars there too, with their own transport. In the first two years Jan Swartz told Sicelo: ‘You stay here. Look after our stuff. I don’t trust these other rascals.’ Then Jan and the others would go with the other traders, and they would follow the track. Then they came back, two days, sometimes three days later, with the donkeys, now laden with boxes of stuff to barter. Food, mostly food. Rice and pasta, tins with the sweetest fruit. Boxes of long-life custard. Good stuff. They would divide it among each other.
Then, three years ago, the pedlars stopped going over the mountain. They waited there, and other people came with the donkeys and the goods. Strange people, but it looked like Jan Swartz knew some of them.
And then, the last year, they waited there, the pedlars, at Wupperthal for the donkeys and the smugglers to come. But this man, this dead man on the back of Sarge’s pick-up, he was the boss of the grey uniforms, a whole bunch of them, all in the same uniforms and black boots. They came suddenly at night, in the dark, over the mountain and they shot the pedlars with automatic rifles, they shot Jan Swart
z and his people, and all the other traders, they shot them all dead.
Sicelo was with the horses. At Wupperthal there was always booze, some of the pedlars distilled their own witblits brandy from citrus fruit, and there was a lot of drunkenness around the fire. Sicelo never liked that, so he would go and sleep with the horses. It saved his life, that night.
The grey men shot everyone, and they burned all the lorry wagons. Some of the buildings too, where the pedlars would sleep. Everything burned, the fire lit everything up. That’s why Sicelo thought the man would see him.
The horses were in the building to one side that they used as stables.
Sicelo was terrified, and hid among the animals; they were wild and restless, pushing against the poles across the door. Four grey men approached. They held up their rifles, Sicelo was sure they were going to shoot him and the horses. But this one who was now lying dead on the back of Sarge’s pick-up was in charge of the four, because he said, ‘Wait.’
Then the boss of the grey men came closer and closer, with his rifle ready to shoot, so that he could see into the darkness of the stables. And Sicelo saw him in the light of the big fires burning around them. He saw the man had leaves on his neck.
‘Tattoos,’ Nero Dlamini interpreted. ‘The dead guy outside, he has these Maori tattoos on his neck.’
Sicelo nodded. He said that’s right, they looked like leaves. He looked at the grey boss man for a long time, he was sure it was the same man. And then the grey boss man said, ‘Let the horses out.’ And Sicelo clung to the side of a horse as they ran out.
And when they were at a safe distance, he sat up properly on the horse’s back and rode away.
That was how he ended up with the Bushman Kloofers. He was never really one of them.
When he had finished, Beryl said, ‘Wupperthal . . .’
‘Yes,’ said Nero Dlamini. ‘I know what you’re thinking.’
‘What?’ I asked.
‘The recordings . . . Your father talked to the West Coasters, they also mentioned Wupperthal, more than one of them.’
‘Where are the recordings?’ I asked.
‘Nico,’ said Sarge X, ‘I think you need to listen to Sofia first.’
Chapter 110
The investigation of my father’s murder: VII
I listened to Sofia Bergman. Her voice was soft, full of compassion and loss and exhaustion, yet still musical. Her skin glowed in the morning light of the sitting room, her pretty, delicate hands talked along, and the gestures that she used were just as beautiful as the sound of her voice. With the help of Sarge X she reconstructed the murder scene. She said she had interpreted the spoor to the best of her ability. Here is what she thought; this was what possibly might have happened.
Pa was in the farmhouse busy drawing up his irrigation plan. Then he heard the helicopter. He must have run outside, the first helicopter in more than five years, so soon after the West Coasters’ stories of choppers, he had to see it. Maybe he did, the area was very flat around there. But we’ll never know. The helicopter landed nearly three kilometres away.
Four people jumped out of the helicopter. All four rows of tracks showed the same kind of boots, so one could guess that all four were in the same grey uniforms.
Pa’s single set of prints showed that he had walked quickly in the direction where the helicopter had landed. Perhaps it was then that he gave his emergency call over the radio? He must have been worried, said Beryl, because the West Coasters’ chopper stories were full of violence and destruction.
Sofia thought Pa must have seen the four grey men coming. His tracks showed that he suddenly stopped and turned back. He ran back to the farmhouse. She said the tracks could only tell a part of what happened next; she thought Pa must have locked himself in the house. The four grey men reached the yard and hid behind the trees around the house. It looked like they spent some time waiting behind the trees. Then they broke open a window and a door, and there were signs that there was a struggle with Pa in the house.
There was no blood spilled there.
They hauled Pa outside, and dragged him along with them in the direction from which they’d come.
Then Domingo arrived.
She thought they must have held a gun to Pa’s head. On the edge of the nearest irrigation land Domingo stopped, and so did the four with Pa. For quite some time. A hostage drama?
And then someone fired.
We knew that right there Domingo shot one of them between the eyes.
Pa fought back against them. The footprints sketched the lines of struggle.
Pa was shot there.
Domingo as well.
That is what the blood and bullet casings showed.
Two of the grey men carried Pa and Domingo to the salt pan. The other one waited with their own dead man. Then all three ran north. The deeper prints of one of the men showed he was carrying their fallen comrade.
She deduced that Domingo hadn’t died immediately. She believed Domingo took his R4 and aimed, and he shot another one of them. Five hundred metres away. An astonishing shot, because Domingo himself was very seriously wounded. But he got one last shot in.
Then the grey men had a problem. They were burdened by their dead, and they had another wounded man as well. So they pushed the dead man’s body under the bushes in the ditch.
She wondered why the helicopter didn’t come closer?
Why were they in such a hurry?
The three, one of them wounded and bleeding, went to the helicopter. And the helicopter flew away first west, and then south-west.
In the direction of Wupperthal, I thought.
‘That’s all we know, Nico,’ said Sarge X.
I showered in the Orphanage. They gave me food. They said I should get some sleep.
I declined. I wanted to listen to Pa’s history recordings first. I wanted to know about Wupperthal.
Birdy, Beryl and Nero spoke to me. They said sleep was the best medicine now. I said I wouldn’t be able to sleep until I knew.
Beryl went to fetch my father’s laptop, showed me how to locate the files with the sound recordings of the West Coast interviews.
I lay on the couch with earphones on and listened. My hand throbbed, my face and ribs as well. But I lost myself in the stories. I heard Pa’s questions and the people’s answers, as if they were sitting with me talking.
The longing for him returned, acutely painful. I stopped the audio.
I pictured Pa in the farmhouse drawing up his plans. I saw him at a table with a pencil in his hand.
I believe he was tired of being in charge, tired of leading, tired of responsibility. I think he just wanted to bury himself in the simplicity of potato farming. Potatoes don’t betray you. I think he wanted to be alone. He had fitted out that farmhouse so he wouldn’t have to share an entire orphanage with other people, so that for the first time in so many years he could spend a bit of time on his own.
And even that was denied him.
I was going to get the people who took that from him. I would find them and kill them.
I switched the recording on again.
Somewhere along the line I fell asleep. Beryl came to wake me in the evening and led me to a bedroom, where I slept some more, through the night, deeply and soundly.
I woke the next morning at five knowing instantly that I must go to Wupperthal.
They said no.
They said ‘no, you can’t’, and ‘no, not now’, and ‘no, not on your own’.
I told them they couldn’t stop me. I was going as the son of my deceased father, not as a member of the Spotters.
Ravi Pillay, the oldest member of the Cabinet, came to have a good long chat with me. He said, rest, recover, get over it first. Think it through.
I said it would make no difference.
‘It will, Nico,’ he said. ‘You’re emotional now. That’s not good for making decisions.’
I told him the decision to go and find answers would never change.
/> He asked then why not wait for a week or two?
I stammered, searching my mind for reasons, I wanted to try to explain that they deserved it, these good people, my father’s supporters and friends. Eventually I simply told him what I felt, because it was my only truth. I said, ‘Ravi, there’s nothing else I can do. If I don’t go now, I’ll explode. I’ll burn up inside. I won’t sleep, I won’t breathe. I’ll die slowly. I have to go. Now. So please, just let me go.’
It took them two days. Then Beryl, Birdy, Nero and Sarge X, my colleagues Sergeants Taljaard and Masinga, Sofia Bergman and Hennie Fly, they all came to see me. Birdy was the one doing the talking.
‘Nico, here’s the deal. Hennie Fly is going to take you as far as Calvinia in the Cessna. You and Sofia Bergman. No, shut up and listen. This is not negotiable. Taljaard and Masinga are here, ’cause why, if you don’t agree to all our terms, they’ll take you to the brig. And they’ll lock you up until you grow ears to listen. Understand?’
‘Yes.’
‘Okay. Sofia’s going with you, ’cause, we talked to Sicelo Kula again, and he said that Jan Swartz said loud and clear ‘‘at Wupperthal, you just follow the tracks’’. So she is going with you to follow the tracks, and to be your back-up. We would send more troops with you, but Hennie says it would be too much for the Cessna with the weight, he only has room for two. We’re scared to fly you further than Calvinia, we know too little about those people with the helicopters. And Calvinia is the nearest decent airport to Wupperthal that should work. The West Coasters say from what they remember, everything looks okay there. So what do you say? Okay?’
‘Okay.’
‘It’s about a hundred and fifty kilometers from Calvinia to Wupperthal. Taljaard said three days’ slow march. Three days to there. Then we give you three days to search. And then three days back. Nine days, then Hennie will go back to Calvinia. Okay?’
‘Okay.’
‘If the weather’s good, you fly tomorrow morning, just before dawn.’
I didn’t get a chance to thank them.
