The Cuban

by Paul Eksteen

  Papillon was French for butterfly and to me it was the ideal name for a panel beating shop. A customer will hand you an ugly worm which you will turn into a beautiful butterfly.

  As a teenager, spending much of my time alone in a room in a hostel far away from our farm, I spent a lot of time devouring adventure stories written by South African writers such as Leon Rossouw, Topsy Smith, Cor Dirks and many more. These adventures livened up my tedious hostel life by imagining myself accompanying the heroes of these books on their thrilling adventures.

  Then there was my grandmother who inspired me to read war stories. Her choice of literature was mostly about the Anglo Boer War. She expected me to read these historic books and even accompanied me to some of the Boer War sites, in and around Polokwane.

  We would visit the concentration camp churchyard in Polokwane and Elim hospital, the site of Fort Edward, and many other Anglo Boer War sites.

  After retiring from the military, my interest in reading moved to the life stories of heroes such as Carlos Hathcock, Simo Hayha, Roza Shanina, Chris Kyle and the likes. They were all people who had similar careers as mine, and I learned a lot from their autobiographies. I never stopped reading, and never stopped learning.

  Kwinzee was not a reader, but had the ability that when seeing a spoor, it would stick to his memory forever. Something I could not do nor explain.

  “Kwinz, a friend of mine has been murdered.”

  “I know DC, your sister phoned me numerous times yesterday, looking for you.”

  I explained to him what it was all about. “Grab a car at the shop and leave for Vivo immediately. Call me when you get there.”

  Kwinzee phoned me two hours later. In the meantime, I had arranged for Hendrik to meet with Kwinzee and to take him to the crime scene.

  Kwinzee found two sets of footprints at the crime scene. Due to the fact that only Jan’s hunting rifle was taken from the bakkie, and his watch and binoculars were left behind, it seemed like a hate crime.

  Kwinzee followed the spoor all the way to the tar road. The murderers walked a few hundred metres next to the road in a westerly direction where they were collected by a car driving from Vivo.

  Kwinzee ascertained that the two sets of footprints were from tekkies and not from NTK boots. The NTK boots were the type of boot that the farmers buy at the co-operative at Vivo to issue to their farm workers. The murderers were probably not local farm workers.

  He also read from the tracks that the two murderers had waited for Jan behind the dam since the previous afternoon and even slept there. They must have been watching Jan’s workers, and waited for them to complete their reparations to the wind pump before positioning themselves behind the dam. Kwinzee found a heap of cigarette butts and an empty two-litre Coke bottle behind the dam, where they were hiding from view.

  The cigarette butts were also a giveaway. The local workers would roll their cigarettes with newspaper and tobacco as it was much cheaper, and rarely smoked pre-fabricated cigarettes. The cigarettes were of Zimbabwean origin.

  Jan always had his little fox terrier, Stoffel, with him, but on the fateful day, his son Dirk and the little terrier went hunting for guinea fowl on foot and Jan drove to the cattle post on his own.

  ***

  My gaze went to the front of the church where Mercia — Jan Steyn’s widow — sat dressed in black with her other son and daughter. My daughter, Danielle, Karlien and her daughter, Corlea, filled the aisle on her left side.

  Mercia’s parents were sitting on her right and I could see her mother sobbing. Mercia certainly looked like a woman who’d just lost her husband. Her skin was unnaturally pale, her eyes were red, and her hair in disarray. She held a crumpled tissue in one hand and clutched the hand of her six-year-old daughter in the other.

  Jan’s parents were sitting in the next row with his sister, their faces pale and stiff. Her husband was also one of the coffin bearers. They had left their children with friends in Pretoria for the weekend.

  Jan’s mother was holding a handkerchief in her hand and kept dabbing at her eyes while Jan’s father had his left arm around her shoulders. They moved away from the farm two years ago and now live close to Jan’s sister in Pretoria in a retirement village.

  It was seven years since Antoinette’s death and just over a year since I started dating Karlien.

  I would never have gathered the energy for another relationship, was it not for Kwinzee. Just more than two years ago he took me to a pub one Friday afternoon and fed me a few beers.

  He then told me what a cold, callous and cynical person I had become. I denied it initially and then became angry, but Kwinzee had known me for far too long. He convinced me that I was indeed capable of emotions and feelings and that was why I was so miserable. He then told me that for the sake of Danielle I had to pull myself together.

  A few months later, I went on my first date in ages. After a school play which Danielle and Corlea performed in, Karlien invited us to supper and I accepted. I had been invited a few times before and had always declined. I suspected that Kwinzee had put in a word but could not be sure.

  ***

  At last Dirk arrived with the hearse. The funeral was a heart wrenching affair with Hendrik, Jan’s brother-in-law, me, Dirk, Jan’s father and one other local farmer carrying the coffin into church. It was not often that it happened that a father had to bury his own son.

  Dirk had the look of someone innocently accused of a wrongdoing on his face. He was the one who found his father and he was doing his best not to show his feelings in front of his mother and little brother and sister. He was sixteen years old and already very strong headed.

  I would have to make time to talk to the boy and get him to take his mind away from the murder scene and rather focus on the immediate needs of his family. I decided to wait another week for him to process most of what had happened, and then to have a quiet chat.

  The minister spoke in an impromptu manner, talking of death and resurrection. He tried his best to turn the situation into something that was the Will of God, and that God would punish the wrongdoers. He then spoke about Jan, whom he’d known personally.

  One thing that I hated about funerals was preachers who pretended. This one, though, spoke from the heart.

  “Ek sien ’n nuwe hemel kom,

  ‘n aarde nuut en vry.

  Die see en al wat skei, verdwyn,

  God self kom by ons bly.”

  We buried Jan on the farm in the family cemetery six kilometres out of town and, afterwards, moved back to the church in Vivo for a light lunch in the church hall. Travelling to the farm took more than an hour with the horse-driven hearse in front and about sixty vehicles crawling behind it.

  The hall slowly filled up with local farmers and their families. You could hear the screams and laughter of children playing outside. Some fat children were wallowing in and out of the hall, their hands and mouths filled with frikadelle and koeksisters. Every year there seem to be more fat children, and they seemed to be noisier.

  I looked around at the farming community and inwardly smiled at the BBB fashion of the affluent families.

  The boys in their late teens would go to professional hunting school for a career in big game hunting after finishing high school education.

  After completion of the PH course, there would follow trips to international hunting fairs in Europe and the United States to book hunters. On their return they would book hunting concessions with other local farmers for trophy animals to be hunted with their clients.

  Of course, these young aspiring hunters have to be dressed up for the occasion — armed with a huge Bullbar on the Toyota Land Cruiser bakkie, copper and elephant tail-hair bangles on their arms and heap of bullshit hunting tales to impress their international clients.

  The forty to fifty-year-old mothers of these hunters could easily be identified by their silicone boobs, bleached teeth and Botoxed faces.

  The wives were very different from the farm girls from when I
was growing up..

  An hour later most of the men were sitting in the local pub, drinking a beer or a brandy with Coke light. In a small town like Vivo, the church and the bar are never far apart.

  Danielle, Karlien, Corlea and I were staying over on our family farm with Hendrik, Retha and their children. Karlien was a broker in Polokwane and had driven from Polokwane earlier that day with her daughter to attend the funeral. They were going to sleep over on Saturday night and would drive back to Polokwane on Sunday.

  ***

  Later that night, Hendrik and I were sitting on the stoep, sipping on a well-earned brandy with ice.

  “What is happening to this country, Tom?” Hendrik was staring into the night.

  “We are still at war, Hendrik.”

  “What do you mean, Tom?”

  “It’s just that the war never stopped in 1994. If you look at all this violent crime against the white farmers, you must realise that the site of battle, the tactics, the soldiers and even the weapons might have changed, but the same old enemy is still out there, fighting the same old war. Envy is the root of all evil.”

  Hendrik seems to be thinking this over, taking a sip of his brandy and getting his pipe going again.

  “You know, Tom,” he started after a few drags. “We are all born in the RSA. This is our country. I can understand if they want to kick foreigners out. But they are not. The Zimbabweans have no future in Zimbabwe, and they are streaming over the border. Here at Indermark there are more Zimbos than locals. Sometime something is gonna go boom.”

  Indermark was a rural black settlement five kilometres to the west of the farm.

  “And this thing about the commandos being disbanded. Now we have to start our own farm watches with our own funds. The Soutpansberg Agricultural Union is doing its best, but the start-up costs are enormous.”

  The Soutpansberg is a range of mountains in far northern South Africa and stretches from west to east over a distance of hundred and seventy kilometres. It is named after the salt pan located at its western end, near Vivo.

  The name Vivo was derived from the hills of the Soutpansberg Mountains directly behind the town which would spell the name ‘Vivo’ in the dry months when the vegetation was sparse.

  Farm watches sprung up in recent years in an attempt to fill the void left by the disbanding of the commando system, the former voluntary, part-time arm of the military, for which the government provided weapons, vehicles and infrastructure. The commandos were phased out between 2003 and 2008. The new farm watch system received no government funding.

  The closest police station to the farm was Mara police station, which was fifteen kilometres to the east of town, in the direction of Louis Trichardt.

  “Kwinzee told me that he thinks the murder was not locally motivated, Hendrik,” I remarked.

  “I don’t know, Tom. This is the first farm murder in this area, and it might not be isolated. Normally these cowards would target old people. Easy victims.”

  Hendrik was dragging on his pipe again, deep in thought.

  “I will send Kwinzee next week to ask around a bit. He might stumble upon something. You and I will get nowhere on our own. And you know what to expect from the police service. Just tell the other farmers to hold back a little.”

  “I will try my best, Tom. This pipe is dead. I’m going to bed.”

  I sat on the stoep, thinking about the carefree old days on the farm.

  As school children, we would drive to Vivo with our donkey cart to attend primary school. We would unharness the donkeys in the schoolyard and attend school until half past twelve. Then we would catch our donkeys and ride back to the farm for lunch.

  In the afternoons we would do an hour’s homework and then play in the veldt with the farm workers’ children. My father had bought a black and white television set in the late seventies and, on this television, we would watch the Friday night cowboy series. I recall my heroes from Shane, Bonanza and High Chapparal who turned me into the local gunslinger with my kettie and pellet gun.

  Later, when in the secondary school in Pietersburg, I would bring friends over to the farm for weekends and the ritual would still be the same. We had an experienced tracker, James, working on the farm and he would teach us teenagers the science of tracking and capturing small animals in the wild.

  I would perfect my doggie paddle in one of the cement reservoirs on the farm whilst the dorpsjapies would show off their perfect crawl and breaststroke styles.

  Saturday night would be braaivleis with the neighbours and Sunday morning church in Vivo followed by a feast of grilled chicken and a leg of lamb with all the trimmings for lunch. The pudding would be a baked Jan Ellis brown pudding with caramel custard.

  Siesta would follow until half past three when it was time for coffee and cake. After coffee, one of the farmers would drive us back to Pietersburg just in time for the six p.m. church service.

  How different times had become!

  CHAPTER 11

  Papillon — Monday, 9 March

  It was Monday morning as I walked into Papillon, my panel beating shop, greeting Johanella the receptionist with a tired smile. Johanella got her name from her parents combining her grandparents’ names: Johannes and Petronella. It was the latest craze in name giving in the new South Africa.

  She had the odd characteristics of being able to be the sharpest tool in the shed, or to be as stupid as a hat full of hair. You never knew which side of her would hit you when she arrived for work on a Monday morning. I was also not taking any chances of finding out, so I rushed through reception to the workshop area to look for Kwinzee.

  Kwinzee and two of the staff members were busy with the rebuilding of a cash-in-transit van which was shot to pieces.

  One of the latest moves of the robbers was to walk up to the driver’s side of the van and shoot the driver from below his seat through the wheel arch. We were repairing vans and were also putting steel plates under the driver’s seats to stop them from being shot.

  Kwinzee was a master inventor and spent a lot of time creating all sorts of gadgets which he dreamed of patenting at some stage and hit the jackpot.

  One of his early inventions was a remote-controlled spotlight on a magnetic base. Only after spending six months on fine-tuning his design, he realised that someone else had already patented the idea a few years earlier.

  His latest invention was a set of trailer lights which would work via Blue Tooth from a base unit in the car. No cables or irritating trailer plugs would be necessary, and as the unit was mobile, you would be able to move the unit from your trailer to your caravan when needed.

  When Kwinzee saw me, he dropped his tools and walked over. “BJ, carry on. I will come back to check the armour plate in half an hour.”

  BJ was christened in the old Dutch Reformed tradition as Benjamin Issachar Naphtali van Staden. Benjamin soon became Benjan, and eventually BJ. He was the workshop foreman and in charge when Kwinzee was away from the office.

  After the September 11 bombings in America, some of the staff started calling him BIN Staden after his initials, but Kwinzee soon put a stop to it.

  “Let’s go to the office, DC. Pearl, bring us some brew.”

  Pearl was the tea lady and would do anything for Kwinzee. I normally let him handle all the wage negotiations and staff issues.

  Once served with a pot of fresh tea and behind the closed office door, Kwinzee’s expression changed to a serious one. “I have to go back to Vivo, DC. The vibe there is not good. More people might be in danger.”

  Kwinzee had visited Vivo over the weekend and had chats with most of the farm workers on Jan and Hendrik’s farms.

  Most of the workers had worked on the farms for their whole lives and were also upset about Jan’s murder. The older people were very loyal to the farmers and were worried about retaliation from the farmers.

  These old workers were born and lived on the farms. Their children went to school at a nearby farm school which the white farmers
in the district provided. And over weekends, their children could work on the farms for a wage.

  But when the children grew up in post 1994 South Africa, they all left for the cities. In the cities they were promised big wages. Much more than what they would earn working on a farm.

  But the cities were tough. It was much tougher than they expected. And there were not jobs for everyone. Now they had come back to the farms. They were full of new ideas but had no money. So, they sponged off the old people.

  They were thirty-odd-year-old children. They wandered between the cities and the countryside but belonged nowhere.

  “We have got some other issues to sort out as well, “Kwinz,” I said. “That money that I paid over for the government tender is still not accounted for.

  “When I met with Detective Warrant Officer Manakhe last Wednesday, he said that the docket will be ‘escalated’ to the SAPS fraud department in Gauteng. I am sure the docket is still in Limpopo, but I will call Manakhe and enquire anyway.”

  The only thing that had come to light so far was that the money was used by the scamsters to purchase forex at Johannesburg International airport the day after it was deposited into the fraudulent bank account.

  The bank was shrugging off all responsibility and the SAPS felt that it is a case of stolen identity and not worthwhile pursuing.

  “These are both difficult cases DC,” Kwinzee remarked. “You will not be able to infiltrate the rural settlements around Vivo, and I will lose my temper with the banks and the police. Let me go back to Vivo when there is a gap in the workload here, and you sort out the fraud case. Vivo is not a job for DC.”

  I tended to agree with Kwinzee. He would get much better results than me in Vivo. I wasn’t so sure about the bank though. I had already decided to again pay the tender amount (into the correct account this time), and to get the vehicles into the shop to try and recover some of the losses.