Shelter Rock

by MP Miles

  Ralph wondered about the seventy-five per cent. He’d seen no real Africans at all.

  “Where do they all live?” he asked.

  The soldier looked at his shiny boots.

  “Who?” he asked.

  Ralph, embarrassed and uncomfortable, looked at the soldier’s boots as well.

  The other man unscrewed the top of his rum bottle and spoke quietly into his paper bag.

  “They have their own places,” the soldier said. “We live apart from each other, that’s all, separate.”

  Ralph wanted to believe in the soldier’s utopia of happy African peoples but suspected it wasn’t as beautiful as he’d described. He had the suspicion the soldier was reciting a memorised propaganda leaflet given to him in week one of training, with a title like ‘What to Say to Foreigners Asking Awkward Questions’.

  “Some homelands are really good,” said the man with the bottle. “They even have titty bars.”

  Ralph smiled self-consciously, wondering how he could change the conversation. He thought he’d talk about something less provocative, like sport, rugby or cricket maybe, but the soldier saved him by sharing with them his thoughts on biltong. It wasn’t a short conversation.

  The train crossed a brown river with muddy islands in the middle that looked as if they flooded. Rows of scrubby trees had been planted in straight lines to prevent it all washing away downstream.

  “The Orange River,” the soldier said with reverence.

  Ralph imagined it had a symbolic significance or a history that he should know about. He tried to find the Orange River in his old School Atlas of the World, Africa covering two whole pages. Interesting detail on temperature, rainfall and mineral resources filled the margins. Although already hot in the cabin, Ralph assumed it would soon be getting hotter. His atlas showed the Karoo as a brown desert.

  The train rumbled over the vast interior plateau of South Africa until a rim of rugged hills appeared through the haze and a narrow coastal plain ran to the blue South Atlantic.

  *

  The single loud call of a roosting ibis, or a gunshot, woke Elanza Swart from a dream. It was the usual dream, the dream about the day her father sold the farm and everything changed. She lay still, listening to the calming suburban night sounds of Johannesburg’s Hyde Park, Africa’s richest square mile, and then moved across the bed, her mouth sticky and dry. A man sprawled beside her and grunted as she leant over him to look for something to drink. She would have apologised but she couldn’t remember his name. She swore as she knocked over a glass of water and took a handful of pills from a plastic bag, swallowing them with harsh green Chardonnay.

  Three

  Ralph had spent two weeks in Worcester being mothered by his cousin before he tired of drinking, braais and Christmas pool parties in the English Cape community. He had been well cared for and grateful for it but he wanted to see Africa.

  He didn’t get very far, just three and a half hours away on a three-stop train that meandered around the Boland of Western Cape Province and ended by the sea at Cape Town. Ralph rented a smelly room in a city apartment from two drama students, Frieda and Lettie, who casually smoked joints as others might have a cocktail, while their high, gay, male friends tried to pick him up. A slang had developed in Cape Town to allow gay men to converse in public without drawing attention, usually based on girls’ names. The girls had unwittingly contributed, Ralph imagined appropriately. To be ‘frieda’ and a ‘lettie’ had come to mean, to the veiled, furtive, South African gay community, ‘sexually frustrated’ and ‘lesbian’. Ralph had walked away from Frieda and Lettie’s house in the quiet dawn of New Year’s Day, walked away from Cape Town, wondering why he hadn’t fitted in with anybody he’d met and craving the open dramatic vistas of Africa.

  He’d taken a month then, hiking the coast from Cape Town towards East London before loneliness finally made him accept a ride from an Austrian printer called Franz travelling to Durban and Johannesburg.

  “I got fed up with Cape Town,” Franz told him.

  “Me too,” Ralph said.

  *

  At Port Shepstone, where the road to Durban rejoined the Indian Ocean, Franz allowed an enigmatic hairy hitch-hiker to join them. He had leonine hair with a dark mane, bearded, with a huge flat skull and broad nostrils. He introduced himself as Zac.

  In a bar one evening a bulky staggering drunk started shadow-boxing. Zac, generally inactive during the day but social with bursts of activity at dusk, became brave and unconcerned, mimicking him, until Ralph wondered if they would get out alive.

  Determined to find out where Zac came from, Ralph sat with him on the beach munching through his inexhaustible supply of little chocolate cakes. Ralph only established that Zac, mysterious and nomadic, intended on travelling with them all the way to Johannesburg. A company called Gasol needed pipefitters. They provided three weeks’ training at three hundred rand a month and then paid six hundred, food and accommodation provided. Zac chatted enthusiastically. Six hundred rand a month beer money. Ralph should join him.

  Feeling the need for more than cake, Zac persuaded them to stop at a hotel for a fixed price buffet breakfast. Not content with eating as much as he could, Zac scavenged stealthily, filling his pockets with bacon and cold fried eggs. Ralph hadn’t enjoyed his time in South Africa. The airport hotel had unnerved him, as had the confusing sights and unfamiliar people he’d met in Johannesburg. The two men on the train to Cape Town had puzzled and frightened him. His sheltered West Country upbringing hadn’t prepared him for Cape Town’s predatory gay men and stoned lesbians. Ralph watched Zac deftly slip a plate of sausages into his day pack with experienced hands and laughed for the first time since he’d arrived.

  From a palm tree fringed beach at Durban, the road to Johannesburg climbed towards the dry and cool upland savannah around Pietermaritzburg. As they shivered on park benches in the town, a pack of a dozen enormous Rhodesian ridgebacks towed a small woman down the main street towards them, the dogs stopping to snuffle curiously at Zac’s pockets.

  They rested again at Winterton, a farm town fifty kilometres south-west of Ladysmith. Wide irrigation booms rotated in an uncoordinated dance, making circular green fields at the base of the Drakensberg Mountains. The highest peak in South Africa, Mafadi, towered just south of the town on the border with Lesotho. Ralph couldn’t remember who made the decision to spend four days climbing it. They had no tent and no food except for the furry contents of Zac’s pockets and a bag full of cakes.

  On the first day, striding cheerily from a campsite, the route initially followed the Njesuthi River, giving plenty of opportunities for water stops to wash down the chocolate cake. Ralph felt lightheaded. It must have been the altitude. After six kilometres they left the river and followed a steep path over open grassland directly to a hut. Ralph and Franz stopped and watched elands while Zac stalked them like a great whiskery feline. They couldn’t see the hut until the last hundred metres. At one time there had been mattresses on wooden bunks, and fresh water had been piped in but now they found it basic, bare and vandalised. They had covered ten kilometres and climbed only seven hundred metres. It had taken all day and they could look forward to dry cake for dinner. Bush fires lit the night sky and blazed all around, seemingly at times inside the hut.

  The next day they had to climb from the hut to a cave, a path following a contour clearly seen but steep-going. It eased, and after two kilometres and several bends in the trail they reached Corner Pass, an ideal opportunity for lunch. It became the start of a rocky climb. Ralph attempted scampering up grassy slopes but repeatedly slipped back down, eventually realising that the easiest way appeared to be straight up through a rocky gully, stepping carefully from one flat rock to another. In sections the gully narrowed and the walls rose vertically. Only by pushing and pulling each other could they make it up without a rope, the rock falling precipitously away below them. They
arrived at the next camp at sunset, a cave cut into the rock, with paintings by Bushmen on the walls. They stood staring at the pictures from the light of a burning branch, open-mouthed, and eating cake.

  “Jumbo Cameron would love this,” said Zac.

  “Jumbo?”

  “My boss. Where’s your camera?” Zac asked. “Take some pictures.”

  Ralph tried to remember.

  “It’s in the car with all my film.”

  Zac nodded.

  “The film is in pots?”

  “Yeah. Everything marked up on the lids saying where they were taken.”

  The third day the sun rose above a blanket of cloud below them and lit the entrance to the cave. They summited Mafadi Peak at 3,450 metres, the top of South Africa, and stood precariously on the lip of Leslie’s Pass. A clear path led down to rock boulders in a river, the Marble Baths, and under stars they bathed naked in river pools and finished the last of the cakes.

  In the morning Ralph felt ill during the short walk down the Njesuthi valley to their base camp, baboons following them as if they would make interesting and unusual prey. Zac bolted for the bottom, a hunted look on his face. When Ralph and Franz got there, Zac had been into the car already and retrieved his green bergen. They waited but never saw him again. Ralph hoped he would soon be welding pipes, making money and baking. They’d been high on his hash cakes for four days.

  At Ladysmith they discovered a note from Zac tucked into an old money belt under the seat where Franz’s Austrian passport and five hundred dollars should have been. Franz said that Zac, probably ex-Rhodesian and of a breed Ralph would see more of, typified many youths displaced by independence: from Zimbabwe, English-speaking third-generation Rhodesians with insufficient ties to the United Kingdom to get a British passport; from Mozambique, descendants of Portuguese settlers unable to get to Lisbon; in Kenya, Italians dreaming of living in Milan. All of them young and homeless, roaming Africa, voluntarily stateless. Zac’s note hoped that Franz wouldn’t need to report his passport stolen until he’d had a chance to use it to get to Europe. Both agreed that Zac would need a shave and a haircut first. Ralph’s camera bag had been searched, the blue passport he had hidden inside still there, entreating all those whom it may concern to allow the bearer to pass freely without let or hindrance but apparently, and fortunately for Ralph, with a little more hindrance than the bearer of an Austrian passport.

  They walked deep in thought around the town. In late 1899 and early 1900, two years after Ralph’s grandfather was born, Boer forces surrounded Ladysmith, and three thousand British soldiers died after a siege lasting some 118 days. It seemed relatively recent.

  *

  In the transport aircraft they were at action stations, skimming the tops of the trees at two hundred feet, the younger men vomiting from the evasive manoeuvres and the tension and fear, until just a minute and a half from the jump the aeroplane pitched up violently and climbed to the drop height. Mushroom-like clouds of dust billowed towards them.

  Angel looked around at nervous schoolboy faces, the red strap of the static jump line draped over their shoulders like a hangman’s noose, and watched an old corporal carefully stroke a waxy black finger in wide zebra stripes across his white face before examining himself in a small mirror, like a secretary on her way to the office. The man noticed Angel and with a grin offered him a small tin of boot polish.

  “Black is beautiful.”

  Angel smiled and shook his head.

  The green-to-go light came late. Their commander had wanted the pilots to determine the release point visually from a bend in the river as they made the final run in. The chief of the Army had overruled him. He’d insisted they take their cue from a side marker. Dust and smoke from the bombing run had obscured the side marker, and the pilot, never under fire before, became mesmerised by the scene unfolding on the ground. It was only a few seconds, but it was late.

  The drop zone, despite all the planning, now appeared too small, as if the air-photo interpreters had provided the wrong scale to the planners. Parachutes were landing everywhere, some of them two or three kilometres from the target, some on the other side of the river or in tall trees and maize crops, some in the water.

  Angel noticed the wind. A strong wind had taken him south-west of where had been intended and he had come under fire as he descended. They were supposed to be a few hundred metres north of the new tented camp, to regroup, and then attack it. In fact, he had landed right in the camp on top of the tents, a lot of them flattened and ripped by a Mirage’s cannon. Angel lifted the flap of a still standing tent and looked inside. It was full of children, on display as if in a butcher’s shop window.

  Angel moved away quickly and took up a position with others on high ground along the riverbank, a constant stream of people attempting to cross the river and escape from Cassinga, men and women in green combat uniform, civilians, teenagers, children. Angel found it impossible to differentiate targets, and he and his platoon brought fire to bear on all of them.

  From their vantage point they could see that the town buildings were now being attacked. Ammunition stores exploded violently. Angel noticed a company of men had come down at least five hundred metres too far south among tall trees and brush. One paratrooper had hit a tree and with a severe concussion wandered as if drunk. They were coming under RPG fire as they sought to unravel the confusion.

  C Company had come upon a two-hundred-metre-long escape trench. They were shooting at people moving inside. Angel couldn’t see who they were shooting at.

  Two companies and a mortar platoon were spread out along both banks of the river, some in the water, others trying to carry equipment up a steep bank. A platoon seemed to be attacking a building that Angel remembered from the plan housed Cuban officers. One of their own jets released rockets at the building just as they entered. Angel yawned. He felt tired and checked his watch: 10.10. He’d been on the ground two hours but it felt like a week.

  The town was only just starting to come under attack as his own people recovered their positions from the inaccurate drop. There was so much confusion among the enemy from the shock of the air strikes that Angel’s men weren’t encountering significant resistance. There were some snipers in the trees but the houses appeared to be cleared without much opposition. People would run from the buildings towards the river and Angel shot at them as they ran away. He could see a toddler, maybe eighteen months old, wandering among the corpses of the earlier bombing, searching for its mother. Three little girls cowered under an old bed, calling to it.

  The situation changed as some organisation came back into the enemy. They had anti-aircraft weapons and started using them in a ground role. It stopped Angel’s platoon dead. Their commander ordered them to move and attack a line of trenches to the west of Cassinga town and work up towards the anti-aircraft guns. A large group of civilians were clustered together and they fled into the bushes as the soldiers approached.

  There were about twenty in Angel’s platoon. Two entered the trenches with rifles and grenades, while Angel and the rest stayed on either side looking in. There were a lot of civilians in the trench and there was no question of being selective with their fire. Someone lobbed a grenade into the next leg of the zig-zag trench. A woman’s body, clad in green fatigues, blew right out of the trench onto the parapet, the front of her bloodied uniform tattered and in shreds from the explosion. She hadn’t been running away. She’d been protecting four children, now dead in the bottom of the trench.

  It was a savage noisy close-quarters struggle, complete disarray. Women and children who had taken shelter were screaming among the fiercely resisting guerrillas. The howl of gunfire coming from the bush, mortar bombs dropping around the anti-aircraft guns, smoke, dust, cordite fumes, shouting and screaming interspersed with hand grenade explosions, and the stutter of the anti-aircraft guns battered the quiet African town. When it was over, Angel count
ed ninety-five dead in the trench. They were the ones in uniform. He didn’t count the others.

  The battalion second-in-command established a headquarters and aid post in the hospital building. Snipers were shooting at them so he forced the civilian women and children sheltering there to go outside and form a human shield. Cassinga had not yet been secured and numerous firefights were erupting all over the town but since the fall of the anti-aircraft guns the worst seemed to be over.

  Angel was sent to collect documents and prisoners for extraction and herded bleary men like shadows into a house. The first wave of helicopters started landing, two hours overdue. The plan had been for the prisoners to be extracted first but at the last minute the plan was changed and critically injured paratroopers replaced them on the first helicopters to leave.

  Through the shattered window of the house, Angel saw paratroopers burning every hut and tent that still stood. An ammunition dump and underground bunker exploded. A young girl with her friends pleaded to be taken away in the helicopter as it loaded. She was roughly pushed aside.

  A grisly pile of debris had formed by the door to the house, tiny legs protruding. Angel went over to it. He pulled some of the bodies aside with his hands and found a baby girl underneath, alive, unhurt.

  A stocky square man from Military Intelligence came from one of the helicopters and entered the house. He had no insignia, no rank badges.