by Peter Rimmer
“Why don’t you go back?” Duncan asked him.
“She married her old boyfriend.” The jaw had set again, the frivolity gone. “I’ll just have to stay with selling paintings to the mothers. I do have some fun. Just watching them is quite a laugh. Well, I suppose it’s a laugh, I’m not sure any more where Western society has taken us. Too far from the soil. Too far from the truth. It’s a very false life, Mister Fox.”
“They don’t think so, Charles. They think having money is all you need. Why, people fight over money! They think it the most important thing on earth: comfort, security, culture. The arts. The products of civilisation. If man had wanted to live in a cave, he would have stayed in the one he came from instead of constantly striving to better his uncomfortable lot on earth. People like clean sheets and running water, heat at the press of a switch, transport at the turn of a key. People like to be comfortable. I don’t understand this Gray. Maybe it’s the artist in him that goes against the grain all the time. Maybe he sees more than me.”
“He says people have lost sight of how little they need to live comfortably,” said Charles. “That there’s too much effort required to live well in the formal sector. He says that somewhere fairly soon the graph of happiness is crossed by the graph of wealth, and thereafter the quality of life decreases with the responsibility. He says there are too many freeloaders demanding the right to take money from those who have done the work. He prefers to use his strength and intellect to look after people he knows, not the masses who demand because they are in the majority and have the majority vote. They said he was exploiting; he said he was providing. Look what happened when he went back to help! They destroyed him. He says the social democratic system, like the communist system, will eat out its own stomach and die. He says in life you can’t go on taking and putting nothing back, as in the end the treasure chest is empty.
“Everyone in this urban society is marking up the price. Soon the price of the ordinary things will be too much, and down will come the stock exchange and the monetary systems and everything will collapse. You can’t grow too much food on the forty-seventh floor of a Manhattan high-rise, and how do you get down when someone switches off the electricity? People here are too busy pushing around book entries and paying with pieces of paper. Everything will be fine until someone breaks the chain of confidence and asks to be paid in real money, which is a bag of grain or a kilogramme of sugar. Matt says we are living in a fool’s paradise and that his paradise on Second Beach is the only one that is real. Who knows? Man’s been trying to find out the answer ever since he learnt to think. All civilisations eventually fall. The question is how long will this one last?”
Jonathan Holland had found the arms cache three months before the security police, having followed the footsteps of the minstrel boy into the cave of the ancient mariners, and it had jolted him back to life. However much he tried, war followed him. There was no escaping in a cloud of dagga smoke. War hunted him just as he had hunted the terrs in Rhodesia.
He had gone out down the coast by himself, Raleen having long left him under the wild fig tree to blow his mind out on his own. She was back baking bread and providing a vital link in the chain for the colony. The withdrawal was worse than anything else he had experienced in his life, but he had stayed with the guns and the rockets for three weeks, swimming in the sea and living off mussels, oysters and crayfish.
As the drug dwindled in his bloodstream his hunger increased to a craving and he climbed a wild fig tree to eat what the birds had left. It was the fruit of the wild fig, the small berry that countered the craving of the dagga and slowly freed his body from the drug. He knew it had eaten some of his brain and would have killed him in the end but, when he walked back to Second Beach and knocked on Carel van Tonder’s door, he was sane and in full control of his faculties. His hair was lank down his back and he stank from washing in salt water, but his eyes were clear and he remembered where he went to school and the name of his mother, and had stopped talking to Ding-dong Bell as if his friend were alive and next to him. He had been a long time in the wilderness.
Together they had returned to the cave, taking the sea route in the ski-boat, and carefully carried out to the beach a selection of arms that would protect the colony and the surrounding black village against the total breakdown of law and order that had become endemic in most of sub-Saharan Africa. Carefully, they had buried their own cache of arms, and told no one.
“If he catches up with me again, I want to be ready,” said Jonathan. “Ding- dong always said you had to look after number one. You think I can help out on the ski-boat and catch fish?”
“Why not, man? Maybe those guns have done some good. You had a good shock, man; I thought you were gone.”
Then Carel shook his head. He had been trying hard with Raleen. It just wasn’t meant for him to have a wife. “You want to stay here with me? Maybe drink beer. No pot. That stuff stinks. I should know. How l made my big living. No, man, can’t do that without hurting other people, see. Never thought the time would come when old van Tonder would share a hut with an Englishman. Fishing’s a good life. A man’s job. Just got to make sure we don’t go out when there’s big holes in the sea. This is a wild coast, man.”
When the agreement between Russia, America and South Africa over the independence of Namibia began to work, Hector Fortescue-Smythe knew his life’s work had come to nothing. Ostensibly, a Marxist state would come into being in the old South West Africa, but the quid pro quo was the removal of all Cuban forces from Angola, leaving the real power in the hands of the anti-communists. With Afghanistan, the Russians were in full retreat, and the prophecy of Hector’s handler, his warning, had come about with the speed of panic. At the age of fifty-two, Hector found himself with nothing to show for his life; his only reward was a claw hand and the memory of a girl he might have loved.
The lilacs were blooming in the garden of the country estate, the birds were chirping in the hedgerows, his Sussex cows calved down and the bulls were sold for beef, and nature went on all around as if nothing had ever changed.
There were April showers, as there always had been in all the years the island had been set in its silver sea. Young lovers went about their business in the country lanes and the day-trippers from London marvelled at the beauty of the country spring, but it was all over for Hector, alone in his mansion on the hill, his only companion, once a week, the local parson for a game of chess. He felt too old and too dejected to go and look for anything else. He had had his life.
The housekeeper kept out of his way and through the winter had laid the fire and cleaned it out in the morning, often finding Hector asleep in the chair in front of the dead fire, his claw band on the carpet. If the rain had passed over, he would tramp out into his fields and visit his bull, the father of all the Sussex calves, and he would stroke the animal’s nose, his two spaniels keeping their distance. If it was raining, he would just look out of the window and wonder what it had all been about.
No one in the movement came anywhere near him anymore, not even Luke, who had now seen his future and the future of his country move further away from Moscow. There was going to be a reward for Luke, and Hector had been glad for him as he watched so many of the others get off the communist train that they had used as much as the party intended using them in turn.
It was all part of the process of living, history changing the guard, shifting the limited wealth from one privileged group to another, often the same people dressed in different clothes, though the idea of joining the conservative party left a hollow, lonely ring that made him wonder whether all the philosophy he had attributed to his communist beliefs was no more than a blink in man’s unsuccessful struggle to govern himself. A hollow dream? He wondered, isolated in his country estate. He was of the conclusion that he knew nothing any more.
The news that spread through the ANC’s London office sent them all into smiles and laughter. The arrogance of the apartheid wall had split and the gap was th
ere for all the world to see. The National Party government, the creator and the perpetrator of separate development, was talking to Nelson Mandela in his prison.
It was the beginning of the end, and all the exiles turned their minds to home and the possibility of returning to the land of their birth. The sport boycotts, the trade sanctions, the wars in Namibia and Rhodesia where the ANC had fought alongside their liberation brothers, had all been worth the pain. One man, one vote was going to be a reality in South Africa.
Luke, sitting at his desk and thinking of all the lost years of sacrifice, began to cry silently. It had all taken too long; so much of his life was now spent. And then through his tears he smiled, and rose to join the others in celebrating the historic news. For a brief moment, his mind had let him walk down the beach at Port St Johns. There would be sons for him coming home, for his old age, for his future, and his sons would be free in the land of his father’s ancestors.
When the weather was good, they sat Matt on his wooden chair outside the rondavel so he could look out over the sea and feel the heat of the sun, the sun which they hoped would heal the terrible shocks his body had taken on the fourth floor of John Vorster Square. When her work was done, Lorna sat next to Matt, holding his hand and feeling the trembling.
He had begun to feed himself, albeit badly, which was all the encouragement the family needed. The old black man, whom the paramount chief had sent, had boiled barks and herbs and made him drink, and shown Lorna what to do when he returned to his kraal. It was the black man’s muti that was bringing him round, along with the love from his family.
Six months had fled with the African winter since they had brought him home, and he could talk and smile with his eyes. When the sun was too hot, Lorna moved him beneath the fronds of the wild banana trees where he listened to the birds, the sea and the chattering of the vervet monkeys from the coastal forest behind, and tried with all his strength to bring his spirit down from the clouds, where he flew with the hawks and the eagles, back to his body.
But each time he lost his concentration and floated up again, to drift in the thermals and look down on the beach and watch his children playing in the surf, and see all around from his birds-eye view the colony at its work – the ski-boat going out, the leather work being crafted, the potter’s wares out in the sun from the furnace to paint, the jewellery of the bangle man glinting in the sun, hot bread from the bakery hut, the painters painting, the gardeners’ tending the vegetable patches, the family of tame pigs in the forest, geese, chickens, pumpkins, yellow-red on the roofs of the huts, clothes being embroidered with beads, sandals in the making, men carving driftwood, the sculptors facing the tower of marble from the old quarry, men with headbands, women in kaftans, children naked in the sun. From between the floating softness of the clouds, never once was there a shout of anger.
Matt enjoyed flying with the hawks and the eagles, and never really wanted to come down; he would willingly have stayed, floating close to heaven, were it not for Lorna and Peace, Robert and Sipho, who so much wanted him to come down and join them on the beach.
Antonio van Perreira dos Santos Cassero had not left Angola with the Cuban air force. He had exchanged his peaked cap for an old straw sombrero that kept the harsh African sun from his eyes. He had forsaken Castro and socialism, but not his God, and God had surely led him back to Africa, to the land of his mother’s ancestors.
With his gratuity and the money he had saved as a colonel in the air force, there was money to buy an old tractor with all its implements and coffee seedlings from the only nursery left in Angola. They had let him take over the old plantation, no one being really interested in whether he did or not. The only money available was in Luanda, donated by aid programmes, the royalties the American and French oil companies paid the MPLA and diamonds, although most of the stones were smuggled out of the country. Growing coffee in the bush was definitely not the reason the MPLA elite clung to power.
No one had given Antonio title to the land, but everyone he spoke to in government said he would be welcome to the derelict farm as no one else wanted the place, and it was best he took a gun in case the UNITA rebels wanted whatever he was able to grow. They looked at the thin, gaunt man, not nearly so impressive without his uniform and his MIG23, and their look was one of puzzled curiosity as to why a man would voluntarily wish to go live in the bush, a man who could fly the best Russian jets.
Two of them had suggested he was better off joining the Angolan air force if he wished to stay. They had laughed and said there would always be pay for soldiers in Africa… He had gone anyway; he had had enough of killing people and being paid to destroy. Antonio wished to build, to own a lush estate like his Spanish ancestors, and he was going into the bush to dig a farm that his children and his children’s children would inherit. He would be the founder of a new dynasty that would last a thousand years.
He had seen the old coffee estate from the air, situated in the heart of Angola in Huambo province, a hundred and sixty kilometres from the town of Huambo where there were still some supplies and also a railway to take his coffee to the coast in seven years’ time. The old colonial house had half fallen down, which had saved it from the war, as there was nothing of value left on the plantation.
He drove in the tractor on the back of an army five-tonne truck that had belonged to the Cuban air force and which had been ‘lost’, along with its spares, on its way back to Cuba. Antonio had rationalised that there had to be some perks for a Cuban colonel. In the truck were many tools and engines and a generator, the foundation of his workshop that would force the old plantation back to life. Three Angolan members of his staff had agreed to help and had journeyed with him, two of them bringing their families. The war was over, they hoped, and a new life beckoned, which was better than nothing in Luanda. Only a few of the elite could milk the aid programmes and divert the oil revenues.
The first task was the vegetable garden, down by the crocodile-infested river, with a purloined diesel pump pulling water from the river to irrigate the parched red soil that groaned under the heat of the sun. While flying, Antonio had given a lot of thought to his project, imagining the problems of each task that would have to be completed to make his dream come true.
He had planned well, and the truck disgorged the means that would fight the bush. The seedlings had quickly been placed under eighty per cent shade cloth and watered twice a day. Part of the roof in the house had been repaired and three of the outbuildings made liveable for his staff. He was going to live alone as the planter right from the start, creating the chain of command he understood from the military. Inside the planter’s clothes, under the straw sombrero, he was still the colonel, and a colonel demanded respect.
The termites had destroyed the old coffee plants, but at the end of the first year he had planted thirty hectares of new coffee, and they were pumping enough water from the river to irrigate in the dry season, though diesel fuel was difficult to buy in Huambo. Antonio bought three windmills and built a reservoir on the high ground above his lands so that he could open the tap and flood-irrigate his small coffee trees. It was the breakthrough that was going to make his plantation viable while the politicians kept fighting each other. UNITA without South Africa and America would be as strong as the MPLA without Cuba and Russia. The politicians had all talked peace and gone on killing each other, but the news for Antonio was spasmodic in his splendid isolation where he had turned the old bungalow on the hill overlooking the river into a liveable house.
The staff had grown, and Antonio was the only one without a wife. The sound of children was music to his ears, and he was happy with himself and the slow solid steps of progress. The war and Cuba were a long way away, and he thanked his God every night for his salvation and promised to build a chapel on his land the following year.
The plantation, even without a coffee crop, was self-sufficient. The days ran into nights and the weeks into months, and the small trees grew with gentle care and adequate water. Th
e weeds and termites were kept out, along with the small buck and the wild pigs. Antonio van Perreira dos Santos Cassero was happy with his life, and so were the people around him.
When John de La Cruz turned thirteen he was sent to boarding school, and the separation nearly broke his mother’s heart, the boy having been Chelsea’s sole companion for so many years. Understanding that English would be the language of European business, she had used all her savings to send him to an English public school, having kept up his English at home, despite her having told Luke that he would have to speak Portuguese to the boy if he wished to be understood. Chelsea knew what it had been like to be poor and to live in constant fear of her life in Lusaka, and her John was going to be so much part of the European establishment that nothing would ever throw him down into the pits of poverty. The winter term at Cranleigh School in the Surrey countryside was not the best time for a boy born out of Africa who lived in Lisbon to face his first English winter, but he was quite happy to be among boys of his own age and out of his female dominated environment.
Luke’s son was very dark, with thick curly black hair, but the surprise was the chiselled European features of his Nordic ancestors under the black skin. He was not the only black boy at Cranleigh, and the days of bullying new boys and freezing them in heatless dormitories were over. Chelsea had chosen Cranleigh as the boy had taken to playing the piano at an early age, and it was the music scholarship that he won which earned him entry to the school and helped Chelsea pay for the fees. John was a very tall boy for his age, taking after his father in this regard, and the first rude remark about his colour had the boys calling him Cassius Clay. After the fight behind the fives courts, he settled down to receive an education his mother knew would take him on to university. What his mother did not know was that, when he arrived at Cranleigh School, he told everyone his name was John Mbeki.