Vultures in the Wind

by Peter Rimmer

  “We’re from the SACP. The party has been unbanned.” The two men, one on the steps, were trying to look into the caravan. “We need your help. Money. You promised us money when the time came to take over South Africa.”

  “I don’t have any money. Can’t you see? Call the prime minister and please shut the door… My God, you let the dogs out! Where are the dogs? It’s your move, vicar.”

  “It’s yours, Hector.”

  “Oh, dear… Tell those fools to go away. Communism’s dead. The dead dream. Gone with Perestroika. Gone with Gorbachev. Go away… Dogs, where are the dogs? Vicar, it’s your move.”

  The vicar kindly took the men by the shoulders and eased them away from the caravan towards the tree and the brown, dead bracken.

  “Gentlemen, your journey is wasted. He has withdrawn from the world. Maybe he is mad. Maybe not but, whichever way, he will not be rational under any circumstances. His London solicitors have applied to the court to administer his estate. Ask them for money if you will. Anyway, I wish you luck. Now, where are those dogs? … I wish he’d put a heater in his caravan and I wish he’d make the next move. Dogs!… Where are those dogs?”

  The Port St Johns municipality tried to fill in the potholes down the main street and gave up, instead commissioning a large banner that they draped across from the Needles Hotel to a tree on the other side of the road. Lopsided but articulate, the banner proclaimed that the town was welcoming back the prodigal son.

  WELCOME HOME LUKE MBEKI

  Farther into the three street town, old bunting hung from decaying buildings and ANC flags waved from some of the windows. No one was quite sure which day the great freedom fighter was returning, but they were not going to miss their moment of glory, reflected in the greatness of their prodigal son. It was Africa time. Comrade Mbeki was coming home, and nothing else mattered. The day of salvation was upon them, and all the poverty would be made to disappear.

  The town waited a week and then ten days, the banner being put back in the tree three times, the last time smudged by muddy tyre marks when it had fallen down on a rainy night. The excitement of expectation was dampened by the weather and, when Luke stepped off the bus that had brought him from Umtata, no one knew who he was. The sign so early in the morning was on the ground and most of the bunting had blown off in the wind. The town looked its shabby old wonderful self, and Luke felt as excited as a young boy, picking up his small grip to start the long walk to Second Beach and his younger son and oldest friend, and the kraal in the forest where he was born on the same day as Matthew Gray.

  Idly, he stepped over the mud-spattered banner and saw what it said. Ten brass bands could not have meant more; the tears came swiftly down his face and there was a small pain prickling behind his eyes. He was home. After twenty-nine years in exile, he was home.

  By the time he reached the Cape Hermes Hotel to walk the short cut to Second Beach, the sun was shining. What had once been a grand hotel was empty of people, the road in front falling into the sea. It had been the same in Umtata, the capital of the Transkei, and the soil erosion on either side of the road down made him question more seriously their chances of turning the tides of poverty.

  The population had exploded, with huts on every hill and goats chewing the grass down to below the roots, leaving the land barren. The images from his youth of lush grazing and fat sleek cattle were replaced by grinding poverty and dirt. The homeland had been independent for fourteen years, run by his own people, and the results were a disaster. The only new things he had seen in Umtata were the houses of the government ministers and the university, whose degrees were recognised by no one of importance in the world. The work to be done was prodigious.

  He walked on, cutting across the tarred road, where he turned left and followed the coastline, his mind running ahead. They would have the magistrate marry them; Matt would give away the bride and their son would be the best man. With Matt’s help, they would build a house in the kraal, and whenever he could be away from his work he would come back to his home and family to sit in the sun and drink beer, telling them the wonderful tales of all their success, watching them being happy and his sons growing, and no one would be lonely any more.

  She had said she would come, and their son had said they would all have a home together and watch South Africa grow from the ashes of apartheid into a prosperous, free, social democracy that would give everyone housing, free health care, free schooling and jobs that would pay them salaries to let them live in dignity, free of the shanty towns and the shacks and the flooding when it rained. With the aid of his family, he was going to help South Africa throw off the last vestiges of colonial bondage and join the real world and the good life they took for granted in America and Europe, took as their right, as his people would take as their right. And only then would the struggle have been fulfilled.

  Matt saw his friend walk down the path through the milkwood trees and emerge on to the beach, a very tall, grey-haired black man, carrying a small grip in one hand and a long staff in the other. The big man hesitated, trying to get his bearings, and Matt grinned with pleasure. He stood up slowly from his seat outside the rondavel on the hill above the sea and walked to the edge, where he waved at the distant figure. There was no mistaking the height of Matthew Gray and Luke waved back and quickened his pace across the soft, white sand to the path that would take him to the hut that he had never seen.

  “Better go to him, Chelsea,” Matt called softly. “Luke’s down on the beach,” and he waved again.

  Luke strode along the beach, his back as straight as an arrow, the long staff he had found on the side of the road touching the sand rhythmically. A woman ran out of the hut behind Matt and came tumbling down the path. In a moment they were running towards each other, and he had her in his arms.

  All the pain was gone, as Matt watched from his height on the hill and Lorna came out, holding Sipho by one hand and Robert by the other. Out to sea, Peace waved from her surfboard, and Carel van Tonder came out on to the beach, followed by Raleen Urbach and Jonathan Holland, hand in hand, and Martin with the black beard. The word spread back to the kraal, and the people came running onto the beach, toy-toying and laughing and shouting, with Matt smiling down on all of them, forgetting the pain in his groin as he watched his beautiful daughter paddle in to shore to join the mayhem on the beach.

  They made the fires on the beach that night after Carel came back in the boat with two, good sized copper steenbras. A pig was roasted with the fish; beer and wine were drunk, and the music played as the great night sky, free of pollution, showed them the three layers of heaven and the moon stayed hidden deep in the sea. Sipho met his father for the first time in his memory, and the boys went off to catch themselves a freshwater crab from the old, broken bridge over the lagoon. Chelsea knew she had done the right thing, and laughed as she had not been able to laugh in years.

  “Luke, I’m so happy,” she said.

  “Not as happy as when I get you into the bushes.”

  “You wouldn’t?”

  “I would.”

  “Luke Mbeki, you’re depraved”

  “That’s what makes it so much fun.” Chelsea ran away from the light of the fire, and Luke chased her across the beach and into the darkness.

  “Where’s my dad gone?” asked Sipho, having decided the tall black man would do quite well as his second father.

  “Questions like that you don’t ask, young man,” said Lorna, and Peace giggled from the other side of the fire.

  A week later, John de La Cruz, or John Mbeki as he preferred to call himself, arrived at Second Beach to join his parents, and Luke and Chelsea’s happiness was complete.

  “We want you to join us, Matt,” said Luke at the end of his second week, two days after the magistrate had married Luke and Chelsea in a simple ceremony on the beach, with everyone quiet and solemn and deeply impressed by the importance of what they were witnessing, a marriage that would have taken place years before were it not for the str
uggle.

  “What do you mean, old friend?”

  “The African National Congress. We need all the financial expertise we can garner.”

  “I’m a painter, Luke. Every time I have put my head above the parapet, someone has taken a shot, and the last one nearly killed me. I am more than content with my life as it is, and I have promised Lorna we will never again leave Second Beach.”

  “Will you support us?” pleaded Luke.

  “Not if you are going to nationalise the mines, the banks and industry. Are not the communists in charge of the ANC? The Russian-style command economy has been a disaster in every country where it has been tried.”

  “We want a two-tier system. Leave most industry where it is and redistribute the country’s wealth.”

  “If you want to win anything in this competitive world, you have to have only one strategy, and certainly not two that totally oppose each other. How are you going to redistribute industrial wealth and encourage it to grow, and create jobs at the same time? Let the men of the business conduct the nation’s business, and you provide law and order and the legislation which promotes fair, competitive free trade with a social safety net only as wide as the country can afford. And that’s my last word on politics, Luke Mbeki,”

  “What are you going to do with your trust money?”

  “An education trust. We learnt a lot with our little school.”

  “Who’s going to run it?” Luke wanted to know.

  “Sunny Tupper.”

  “When’s it going to start?”

  “When the country settles down with a freely-elected government. I have not been well. There were many times when my mind did not wish to return to my body. First I will paint, and then I will consider my other responsibilities.”

  “In the future, will you talk over my problems with me?”

  “Whenever you come to Second Beach.”

  Matt’s eyes strayed out to sea. “I wondered how soon it would take Peace to have your John on a surfboard… He’s a natural athlete. Look at that! He’s surfing the wave kneeling on the board. She’ll have him standing before he goes to school.”

  Frikkie Swart was returned to South Africa on the same day that Luke Mbeki took up his post in the new ANC offices in Johannesburg, his son John having been put into a secondary school in the black township of Soweto.

  Frikkie was one of the numbers of political prisoners from all political spectrums to be released as negotiations between the de Klerk government and the ANC began its long, often acrimonious journey to find a solution to governing a country of tribes of peoples more diverse than all the tribes of Europe. The meeting of First and Third World, white and black, was taking place in South Africa as it was unable to do in the city centres of black America or the financial institutions of the world. South Africa, after years of sanctions and the work of the worldwide anti-apartheid movement, was the token gesture of a struggling new world order.

  As the exiles and political prisoners returned to normal life, the financial wealth of South Africa bled through the torn cracks of exchange control. And, for every returned exile, a young, well-educated white South African slipped out of the country, taking his bloodline and genes back to the countries that had spawned them in the first place. Europe, America, Canada and Australia welcomed the new immigrants with their skills paid for by apartheid. And, being wise with their immigration policies, they only accepted the best.

  Minister Kloss, late of the bureau of state security, was cleaning out his desk in his office of the Union Building in Pretoria when Frikkie Swart was announced.

  “Which Mister Swart?” he said in Afrikaans.

  “The one who was married to your daughter,” said his secretary through the intercom.

  “Have him wait.” The minister had been whistling all morning as he put his retirement plans into operation. The new South Africa was not for him. They had done many things during the total onslaught that others might consider unethical, but if a man was a terrorist you must kill him first, by any means. No, he was going to Paraguay, and there were a lot of his friends farming there already. Why, they had even called a small village Johannesburg. He soon forgot the man outside who had killed his daughter.

  “Mister Swart, Mister Kloss,” spoke the intercom.

  “Oh, well, better show him in. What does he want?”

  Outside Frikkie Swart was allowing his mind to broaden with dreams of sweet revenge and, when the girl showed him into the minister’s office, he was shocked to see the cardboard boxes and the signs of departure.

  “You’ll have to stand; chairs full. What do you want, Swart?” He had hoped the man would die in the ANC camp, but people like Swart had a habit of surviving.

  “You leaving, minister?” said Frikkie sweetly, covering up his surprise.

  “Not staying for the roof to fall on my head. What are you doing here? Should have enough sense to join your stolen money.”

  “Which is exactly what you are doing.” He gave the minister a hooded, pained, don’t-tell-me-I-don’t-know-all-about-you look. “I have a plan. One that will turn this disaster into saving the volk for another hundred years.

  “They are all coming into the open, every one of their sleepers, ANC, PAC, APLA, MK. All their structures. The perfect targets. Let them settle in for a while, and then we kill their leaders. We will use black men to do the killing. There were many bitter black men where I have just come from, men accused of working for us, tortured to confess. A few hit squads and we destabilise this country so the blacks will go on their knees for us to restore law and order. What I have in mind will set them at each other’s throats and make life hell in the townships. And the first one we are going to take out is that bloody commie, Luke Mbeki. He’s back, and the idiot doesn’t even have a bodyguard.”

  It was hot in the Zambezi Valley, and Archie Fletcher-Wood was dying from a new strain of malaria. Aldo Calucci’s Land Rover had broken down for lack of spare parts that were unobtainable in Zimbabwe. The safari camp on the banks of the Zambezi River was empty of paying customers, the new violence in South Africa chasing the foreign tourists out of the whole of Southern Africa. With a bottle of whisky, Lucky Kuchinski was sitting in a canvas chair next to his friend.

  “I’m dying, Lucky,” gasped Archie trying unsuccessfully to raise himself to a sitting position. His friend said nothing. “Remember the Congo? Getting lost? … You leapt out of cars without opening doors… Can you put on another blanket, Lucky? Africa got me in the end. I’m sixty-four. It was letting down Matt… You think he understands? I was never like him. And Sunny. Took her for granted. You tell them how sorry I am… Maybe dying’s a good thing. What have I got? Exile at the end of my life… Let down my friends.

  “Matt bailed us out. You tried to help and sent Swart to hell… What did I do! Stayed in the house. Scared. A failure… He came right into the Congo for us. He made me all my money and, when he needed me, I failed. You think he’d still be my friend, if I told him how sorry I am? Lucky, take off the blankets. The fever’s coming. If I don’t make it this time, thanks old buddy. Maybe two good friends were all I was meant to have. Maybe it was enough… If only I hadn’t let him down.”

  The big river flowed on, carrying the summer rains, and at dusk a small herd of buffalo came down to the river to drink. Lucky was drunk and lonely, not knowing what to do with the rest of his life. His best friend was dead and in the morning he would have to bury him.

  2

  When the Russian empire collapsed, it disintegrated in days making the swift decline of the British Empire look slow. One minute the world was faced with a menacing superpower, and within a week it was gone. The ripples of repercussion spread in all directions, catching the South African communist party and their ANC partners without financial or ideological support.

  In England, in the caravan in the woods where the buds of spring had turned to summer leaves, Hector Fortescue-Smythe had lost all touch with reality.

  “A new world
, vicar. One government order. Gone. Anarchy will stay a thousand years. Your move, vicar. I told the prime minister to join the communists. He was a good man. A true socialist. Would have done. Your move, vicar. Helena was her name. A whore, vicar. To love a whore. They can have the stinking world, but for God’s sake make a move, vicar!”

  The two spaniels looked up from the caravan floor where the mess was horrible. The vicar had not visited for a month.

  Charles Farquhar, art expert and the manager of the Salvadori art gallery in London, twelfth earl of Lothianmore and one time member of the Second Beach colony at Port St Johns, was married in the small chapel of Lochlothian Castle on the same day that Ben Munroe, American journalist, landed in Johannesburg with his cameraman to cover the mayhem in South Africa’s black townships.

  The new countess of Lothianmore had paid the government the estate death duties, purchased four hundred hectares surrounding the castle and a ten thousand hectare grouse moor where she intended to entertain the finest in the land. She was rightly of the belief that within five years no one in the right circles would remember that her money came from her daddy out of pop music, that she had been born in a council house and her husband was ten years younger than his wife. It was a marriage of convenience, each giving the other what he or she wanted, and a marriage founded upon a promise more likely to last than the fickle torments of love. Charles, it appeared, was gradually losing his eccentric ways and unexpectedly beginning to fit almost into the mould of a Scottish country squire.

  When Sophia van Hoek returned to Second Beach to come to terms with Charles Farquhar, her own marriage to her doctor having failed, she found she was too late. She was thirty-one. The only person happy that Charles was a long way off was Carel van Tonder and, when Sophia went back to the school to teach, Carel set about waiting once again. He had more to offer all of them than they realised, his stash of ANC weapons known only to himself and Jonathan Holland, weapons they would use to defend the colony in the rising tide of South African violence. “We’re going to need them one day,” he said to Jonathan.