Vultures in the Wind

by Peter Rimmer

  “Found the reef, Mark. Found the reef. We’re going to dance on the beach all night.” Mark or Matt; it made no difference. They did not care about his past. All that mattered was the moment, the excitement, the abundance of fish. What anybody did to them afterwards was outside their control. For the moment there was peace on earth and joy to all men. He was happy and so were his friends.

  Major Antonio van Perreira dos Santos Cassero of the Cuban Air Force paradoxically believed in God, Castro and socialism, and he had arrived in Angola to spread the word of communism to his black brothers. He was a dedicated revolutionary who would use any means and justify them in his pursuit of world communism.

  Without Castro and communism, he would have been nothing. He would still have been in the slums of Havana without an education and the skill to fly the most sophisticated aircraft in the world. He was the product of equal opportunity, the proof that a boy could be taken from Third World poverty and propelled in a few years into the First. Greed and capitalism had no place in his life, only dedication and gratitude. He was as high as a kite on the dreams of Utopia, the belief that man could at last be saved, turned from an animal of self-destruction to an altruist who enjoyed the happiness of his fellow men and would not constantly be demanding something in return.

  A swift wind and a predilection for coloured women had seen his grandfather lose his sugar estate and his son. Antonio’s father had been left with no means of fending for himself in the slime left by Batista, the dictator who had broadened the gap between rich and poor to the point where most of Cuba would have been better off not having been born. To add to his woes under Batista, Antonio’s father had married a black woman, the descendant of a man torn from the highveld of Monomatapa, the kingdom of Zimbabwe, by an Arab who sold him to an American slaver, who sold him to a mean son-of-a-bitch Spaniard who enjoyed inflicting the pain of slavery.

  Antonio had been born of both worlds, and his job in Angola was to create an air force that was powerful enough to terminate the air superiority of the Ian Smith government of Rhodesia and the apartheid government in South Africa. There was more than aircraft and pilots to be procured. A whole infrastructure of airfields, ground staff and missile protection had to be placed across Angola to challenge the white, racist capitalists. It was going to take him many years.

  Luke Mbeki knocked on the door in Lisbon. The two stood looking at each other in silence, the years of their lives shared together flowing between them. There was no sign of his son.

  “How did you find me, Luke?”

  “You can find anyone if you look long enough… I have to go to London. They tracked our flat, and I thought of you there and I cried, Chelsea.

  “You cried!” She opened the door wide.

  “They bombed the lounge and machine-gunned the bedroom.”

  “Where were you?”

  “On the roof.”

  “And you’re going to ask me to go back with you to Lusaka!”

  “Where is he?” asked Luke, looking past her inside the house.

  “Asleep.”

  “You don’t have a lover?”

  “Not just now.”

  “I love you, Chelsea.” She shut the door carefully so as not to wake the child, and crushed herself against his body. They were both crying and kissing. Laughter and tears mingled, and flowed down their faces.

  Down river from Chirundu, all was quiet in the Zambezi Valley. Jonathan had not crossed enemy spoor since the air force paralysed Lusaka.

  The midwinter sun was hot but pleasant, and with the cold at night the flies were not breeding, giving respite from tsetse and mosquitoes. The river was clean and cool, and they had camped above a bend in the river where the water was calm. There were beers cooling in old orange bags in the water. The fire was smokeless, ready for the meat, and the men were smoking under the great spread of an acacia tree.

  They had been in the valley for a week, following ten days’ leave. His mother had bought a small house in Avondale, putting in a swimming pool and starting a rose garden among the cannas and agapanthus. She had been troubled. She could not shake from her mind the thought that, if Jonathan’s driver had been faster, her son would have been buried in the grave where they had placed James Bell so far from the roots of his life.

  She pleaded with her son. “Africa is beautiful but deadly. Why don’t we go home? If you don’t want to go into insurance, we can buy you a business. Sell those shares Matthew made worth so much. I can’t live with the thought of you in danger. I don’t have a lot since your father died, and what I have is all wrapped up in you. Why can’t we go back to England where you can meet a nice girl and settle down?”

  “I’m alive in Africa. In England it’s all the same. There has to be excitement to make life worth living. Jim was yelling his head off when he hit that mine. He had life. Short, but a life. He didn’t dribble it out year after year, going up to the city and sitting behind a desk. You have to do something with your life. I don’t want to reach the end of it and look back on a boring job, a boring house and a boring wife who’s worried about the neighbours. I don’t want to compete in the popularity stakes. I want to live. Have space. Breathe clean air. Feel the brush of danger. Then I feel alive, and life is great, wonderful, exciting.

  “Ma, look what Jim and I have done. Could we ever have done that in England? ‘I say, old chap. Are you really in the empty bottle business? I mean, really.’ Dear mother. Relax. I’m not going to get myself hurt. Only the good die young and I was told at school day after day that I wasn’t any damn good. When we win the war, I’m going to buy a tobacco farm and put on a manager so I don’t get caught up in the boring parts. I’m going to start a safari company like Aldo, to entertain rich Americans. I’m going to learn to fly. There’s so much out here to do, it boggles the mind. And you want to go back to England. Sorry, mother, not me. I don’t think I’m ever going to live back in England. I just can’t see what for.”

  An hour later, the patrol came back from farther down river. “Come on, guys. Put out the fire. We’re back in business. The terrs have crossed the river eleven kilometres downstream.”

  They had just finished lunch.

  The balmy sky revealed the ghostly silhouettes of trees, the fingers of the wild fig above the banana fronds. The Gap became visible, the shoreline, the smooth sea-washed beach and the rolling waves. The sky paled more, and the colourless light moved into the shadows of the trees, looking for life on earth, trying to rouse the birds to wake the world. Colour bleached the sky above the distant sea, far away across the ocean, bringing to earth the clouds while turning out the stars and banishing the moon.

  Slowly, the sun reached up from the sea, blood-red, full of fire, shooting rays to herald day and spread the real dawn across the white tipped waves, pure, fleecy white, un-dirtied by an older day, reaching for the shore and the beach, the untouched, wave washed sand pure from the footprints of man or beast or the lighter touch of bird. The sun reached the tops of the trees with the wild fig, the wild banana fronds, waving back at the distant sun, alive and coloured by the ray of sun. Now it was reaching lower, down to the bottom of the trees, running back down the hills to the shadowed beach and yellowing the sand, picking out lines of flotsam on the shore and the first brave sandpiper in the morning. And then the birds began to sing, the fingers of the wild fig pointing the birds to song. God’s symphony of life.

  A shaft of pure sunlight crept through the open window of the hut, searching slowly down the wall, flooding the room with light and taking focus on the painting on its stand. The bright colours were smiling, reflecting the warmth of the sun, the sea, the rolling waves, the gulls circling a shoal of fish, the clouds of morning under-touched, blood-red, with the shooting rays of the sunrise red and warming, giving the signs of hope and danger, the strength and warming of the universe.

  The light touched Matthew Gray awake, the delicious slow awakening from a well-slept night. He watched the sun reach the face of Lorna sleeping gentl
y next to him, and then the sun found Peace, the small pure face asleep below her mother’s on the pillow where she slept between the lives that gave her life reflecting their own, and giving the future for them all. Here in the morning sun was peace and Peace; and he smiled softly, soft blue eyes surrounded by warmth of laughter lines. Lorna’s eyes flickered, bathed in sunlight, opened, snuggled and woke and smiled back at him in dawning knowledge of the day and sun.

  “Good morning, my darling.” The baby’s eyes came open at the sound and the tiny mouth pursed out a yawn. Matt took the fingers of the child in his own.

  “It’s a beautiful day.” He spoke again, gently, so as not to chase away the magic of the sun. They lay still, smiling at each other, enjoying their closeness and the child, rare human harmony.

  “Let’s go down and swim.”

  Naked, they rose from their bed and let the warmth of the sun enjoy their flesh, the tall, bearded, still-lithe body of Matt and the smooth arms of Lorna, her breasts proud and pointing at the day. Matt took up the gurgling child and woke the dog. Outside he stopped to breathe the fresh salt air and look across the ocean to the new-born sun. Below, the rocks were throwing long shadows on the beach and the waves were beating on the shore, spreading a pure white lacework, broken by pools of blue, dark blue, almost green.

  They went down to the sea. Putting Peace on the sand with the dog sitting on its haunches, they ran across the wet sand and into the waves, going deeper, feeling the tingling salt high up between their legs, washing them clean. Matt dived a big wave; Lorna lunged and fell headlong on the water, spreading her long hair. The dog barked from the dry sand, and she turned on her back to check on her baby, found her foot on the sand and pushed back into the wave. The Mozambique current had reached right to the shore and the water was salt-soft and warm. When they came out of the sea, they ran up the beach, Matt lifting Peace above his head, squealing, the dog barking, and raced up the path.

  “The coals are still hot.” Ignoring the chill while the water clinging to his body evaporated, Matt boiled water over the fire, sitting on his haunches with the dog, feeding lemon-grass into the open kettle. Behind the hut a bantam hen cackled, and from the top of the green roof, right across the beach a peacock called, the wild descendant of the birds brought down by David Todd. With the remains of last night’s fish, they breakfasted with the dawn, Peace chewing on a flake of fish and drinking the warm, lemon-grass-tainted water. There was no hurry for anything.

  Low tide was four and a quarter hours after sunrise, and Matt strapped on his catch bag over his loin cloth and walked down to the beach. The sea was just calm enough to take black mussels off the rocks but the water in the gully was churned by the running sea. Lorna watched him stride away across the beach, a tall man in the prime of his life. They had weeded the vegetable garden and planted the new tomato seedlings, nurtured from pips dried in the sun. The fruit would be small but sweet.

  The header tank from which they had watered the garden by gravity was empty and, while Matt walked out on to the black, wet rocks, pounded on one side by the waves, she went to the hand pump and pushed the wooden handle from side to side, drawing the stored rainwater from the reservoir Matt had cut out of the natural rock under the house, up to the high tank, roofed with wooden planks he had saved from the sea. Their water supply was an epitaph for a drowned sailor, his teak-built yacht smashed on the shores of the Wild Coast in a winter storm. From the header tank, scrounged plastic pipes led the water into the kitchen and the outside ‘throne’. The storms that lashed the Transkei coast gushed water down the roof into the big gutters and down the side pipes into the reservoir.

  When the header tank slopped over, she sat Peace in the kitchen and began cutting the fruit for the tomato to join the rhubarb chutney, the pickled onions and the pickled fish in her store cupboard. On the thatched roof, pumpkins were stored, and salted meat from a wild boar lay out in strips to dry, away from the dog. Beside the hut on an old plough disc, plugged to be leak-proof, was evaporating sea water to leave the sediment of salt, which was used to cover the meat and strips of fish that hung like a tethered line of washing under the tall beams of the hut.

  Next to the pickle jars were bunches of dried herbs and dried pine-ring mushrooms from the forest. Jars of dried fruit, banana, apricot and wild fig took up three of Lorna’s shelves, and hanging on strings among the rows were clusters of chillies, rich reds and yellows. Today and for the three days of the spring tide, they would pickle mussels in the cheap vinegar for which Matt had walked seven kilometres back from the store in Port St Johns, giving the storekeeper a painting of hers to sell to the tourists in exchange. She liked to watch him stride back, his curved pipe, long since out, clenched in his mouth, carrying fifty kilograms on his shoulders like a bag of feathers, his blue eyes smiling with pleasure. His other life was so far away, picked over by the vultures.

  He had smiled at her when he said, “I prefer the name Matt. Mark was just in case. After a few years, the press gave up. I’ll have the paramount chief change our marriage certificate to Gray. For Peace. That much I still remember of the outside world.”

  “Lorna Gray. It sounds so nice.”

  “I’m glad you like it.” She smiled as she worked. Teddie was more wrong than he ever knew. She had no more wish for the new world than Matt. Her mother and father refused to visit them. She had married a goy. To them she was dead. Gone forever. Never to be mentioned. She wondered how her father would react if he knew she was married to the man who was once Matthew Gray, man of business, man of property, wealthy to the extreme of their wildest dreams. “One day in Jerusalem. Mazel tov.”

  Anyway, she would teach the child her religion. If God had found her so much happiness, it was fitting for her to be grateful, to praise her God with joy and faith, without which there could never have been existence. What else was man? For Lorna it was simple. They were the children of God.

  3

  Jonathan Holland woke regularly during the night, checking the silhouette of his sentry and listening to the night sounds of Africa. Without a fire, the danger from wild animals was greater than that from the terrorists. There were six terrorists, whose spoor they had been following for three days, but there were more lions, leopards, hyenas, wild dogs, jackals, hippopotamuses, crocodiles, snakes, elephant and buffalo. The men slept strapped into trees; they were young, healthy men who had followed the spoor all day and now slept through exhaustion, alongside their hard rations, water that they carried and their FN rifles.

  The rains had not broken, and away from the river the water-holes had dried up. In late October, it was debatable whether terrorists could cross the Zambezi Valley and climb up the escarpment into the highveld to the farms and water. The night before, the path of the terrorists had begun to curve. When the Southern Cross had become visible at three fifteen in the morning, a cloud base, the prelude to the rains, having hitherto obscured the heavens, Jonathan was able to climb down from his tree and take a true south position. The terrs were going back to the big river. Their water supply was low and they had probably cut an old track from his section’s earlier patrol.

  The dawn, the prelude to the heat and humidity, woke him in his tree, his eyes full of the grit of spasmodic sleep. There was not enough water to wash them out and, as soon as the light was good enough to see the spoor, the hunt continued. At eleven o’clock, when the power of the sun was taking water from their bodies as fast as they put it back from their water bottles, Jonathan found the spoor obliterated by the pounding hooves of buffalo. Something had gone wrong for the buffalo to stampede.

  An hour later, they found the body of the first terrorist. The lion was still at the kill, with two lionesses back in the grass waiting for the male to finish feeding. The lion was crouched on the ground with its head burrowed into the man’s entrails, its tufted tail twitching. Three hundred metres away in the thorn thickets below the kopje, three jackals waited their turn and, in the lone tree on the kopje with a full view of the
kill, sat the vultures, hunched and shaggy, nursing their patience. The hyenas would wait until nightfall.

  “Poor sod,” said Clem Bartley. “No water, no food. That lion hasn’t eaten properly for weeks.” Jonathan was staring at the kill. The man’s AK47 was next to him with the remnants of his pack.

  “Are we going to bury him?”

  “His friends ran.” Jonathan’s eyes were drawn to the tail of a lioness, twitching in the grass. “She hasn’t eaten for a week. If we shoot the lions, the terrs will hear. Try and chase him. Get the terr’s rifle.”

  “You’re the lieutenant. All yours, sir.”

  Jonathan walked across the open ground, the grass brushing his thighs just below his shorts, his lightweight canvas boots making no sound on the earth, and his FN rifle ready on automatic. He was upwind of the lion, but the animal took no notice. The need for food was greater than the need for caution.

  “Look out, Jon,” called Clem. Two females and three cubs had stood up in the grass and, if they moved forward, they would cut off his retreat. Jonathan stopped in his tracks and turned to look into the eyes of the nearest lioness. There was no fear, or even concern. An impala would have made her react in the same way. She stood still and watched, only her tail twitching erratically, signalling the danger of a pointed gun. The lion did not remove its head from searching the dead man’s belly for food and moisture. Slowly, watching the lion and its family, Jonathan pulled back from the kill, abandoning the AK47, and led his men away, to split up and look for the direction of the spoor.