He pauses and looks for a moment into the sparkling fire. The scar on his jaw glistens against the dark skin like broken glass.
“It didn’t take me long to realize what trouble I had put myself in,” he says. “Discipline was inflexible. To enforce it, Breytenbach would even fire on us. On a couple of occasions, he did. His recipe was simple: obsessive training and blind obedience.”
Zoe watches Sam’s hands, his nimble fingers, the way he deftly adjusts the thin rice paper into a creased, open chute. They don’t look like soldiers’ hands.
Out there, in the distance, the men’s ecstatic dance thumping and the women’s rhythmic singing intensifies.
Daniel emerges from his silence: “Most of the soldiers were black, right?”
“Ja, mostly Angolans though,” Sam replies finally lighting up his zol. “Breytenbach had developed a novel approach to guerrilla warfare. Most of the black combatants were captured insurgents who’d been given two options: life imprisonment or medical care, pay and training in return for fighting the MPLA.”
“That’s what I heard at the time,” Daniel says.
“But the devilish genius of that man rests on something else,” Sam says as he exhales slowly, letting the smoke out.
Daniel leans forward, his head slightly tilted down, showing the utmost attention.
“While on operations, fighters would use only captured enemy weaponry, wear only enemy military uniforms and boots, consume only enemy rations. Breytenbach wanted us to be utterly untraceable and irrationally feared. And it worked, man.”
“So, how come you ended up in that unit?” Daniel asks revealing a hint of doubt in his voice.
“Me and a few other Zulus were odd exceptions. I don’t even know why they accepted me in the first place; perhaps because my grandpa and dad had both served in the military. Dad had died in combat.”
Zoe watches him again as he draws in the smoke and blows it from his nostrils. In an almost automatic gesture, Sam passes her the smoke and she, for once, doesn’t refuse.
“It’s the first time I talk about this with Whites, you know,” he says looking at her.
She nods, feeling awkward.
Daniel keeps pressing him: “I was told the 32nd didn’t follow apartheid rules; is that so?”
“True. Breytenbach was a soldier, a great soldier. He knew that in battle one needs to trust his comrades and commanders blindly. Our commanders were all white, but we ate our rations at the same table, used the same latrines, slept in the same barracks. Pretoria didn’t like it, and hard pressed the Colonel to change all that. He never budged, not an inch.”
While the smoke of the dagga slowly rises into the night, the rhythm of the women’s clapping begins to accelerate. Zoe sees the two men listening intently to that far-away call. Tongues of fire light up their rapt faces, throwing hallucinatory shadows against the bush curtain.
After a while Sam resumes his story in a deeper, grimmer tone: “The fear of death morphs you into a different being, you know. All sense of morality goes down the drain.”
“But ...” Zoe starts and then falls silent again; what she is about to say has no relevance at all, it’s just a clumsy attempt at mitigating the bluntness of Sam’s admission. He doesn’t even take note. As he talks he keeps rubbing with his left thumb the scar on his jaw — a tic she is by now familiar with.
“You slowly fall prey to a sick frenzy. You develop a lust for blood. You even begin to enjoy killing.”
Sam has become unstoppable, as if he too were in a trance. “One day, on our way back to the base camp in the Caprivi Strip after one of our raids into Angola, we showed up at the Namibian border post with the enemy bodies hanging from our combat vehicles.” As he speaks he rocks back and forth, his body following the rhythm of his dry, almost hypnotic sentences. “Horrified, the border guards refused to let us pass. Our officer stepped off the reconnaissance tank and put the gun to one of the guards’ head, his finger on the trigger: ‘Let us through.’ I could see the whites of his crazed eyes flash in the dimming light. I was sure that if the guard hadn’t caved in, he’d be dead. We passed. Two days later, we passed again. And again. Each time with our load of fresh death.”
In the distance, the wild stamping of the dancing men coupled with the rattling of the dry cocoons tied to their calves augments the rhythm of the women’s clapping. The healing trance is reaching its peak.
Sam’s voice has bewitched her and Zoe wants to hear it again. It’s not merely a question of listening to someone who has been in no man’s land and has come back. It’s something murkier: a subtle lust to learn about the atrocities humans can inflict on one another, to peep into the abyss of violence and see what one can become — what they all might become if they ever fell into it. To keep him talking, she comes up with the silliest of questions: “Did you ever go back home?”
“As little as possible,” Sam replies quickly, as if he expected that kind of question to go on with his story. “It was almost worse than being in the bush. When I was there, my mother seemed to cry all the time. She saw what I had become: an animal — less than an animal. I’d lie in bed all day, with the shutters shut, drinking beer. If she tried to draw me out of my lethargic state, I’d start screaming. I acted ominously, without restraint; I felt as if something was eating me from the inside out.”
Sam pauses, draws in the smoke and slowly blows it towards the black sky, his eyes shut. Then he resumes his story: “I was screaming even in my sleep, reliving gruesome flashbacks over and over. One, in particular, came to me almost every night — the charge of a dead man walking. A zombie. A spectre. A huge Angolan whose belly had been torn by shrapnel; he kept running towards me, shooting at me, with his guts hanging out of his stomach. At times, I wasn’t even sure he had ever existed.”
Zoe pokes into the embers releasing glimmering red sparks into the night, as if trying to exorcise a hallucination.
“How long did you stay with the 32nd?” Daniel asks.
“Three years. Until one day I tripped over that invisible red line none of us ever mentioned. I broke down, fell apart. I was a total wreck; I cried uncontrollably. I was ashamed of myself. Now they call it PTSD, it sounds less scary. Anyway, they decided to let me go and discharged me from service, but it was too late. I knew I couldn’t go home — I’d make everyone miserable. I was suicidal. No one would understand. Plus, I don’t like shrinks. I simply don’t like them. Instead of going back to South Africa, I followed one of our San trackers to his kraal in the Kavango, one hundred fifty kilometres north-east of here. I stayed with his clan for over two years.”
“And they cured you,” Daniel says.
“That’s right.”
“How did they do it?” Zoe asks.
“I can’t say. Every so often, whenever they felt it was about time, they’d set up a healing dance. Just like that, without notice. They said I had to release the ‘arrows of the disease’ — that’s what they said. Sometimes, between one healing dance and the other, months might pass by. From time to time I would leave to work on a farm near Grootfontein and raise some money to help them out, buy some staple food. Invariably, I would go back to them.”
“When did you feel healed?” she asks again, having lost any inhibition by now.
“When the nightmares stopped; when I stopped keeping a loaded .357 next to my pillow; when I realized I no longer woke up in the middle of the night screaming at my soul.”
Sam draws from his joint, but it’s gone off by now. He takes his time to light it again.
“Don’t get me wrong,” he says. “Those three years remain an open wound. I still feel anxious in crowds; I still startle at the popping of a toy balloon. But at least now I can cope with it.”
The story is over. The three of them keep quiet for a long time, listening to the distant clapping, which has gradually slowed to a subdued, gentle lullaby — as if, musically, the healers and the healed had left the stormy rapids and reached a placid bend in the river. Zoe’s
mind, instead, is running wildly, looking for ways out, in search of light. When she finally reaches her cot, she struggles to fall asleep.
She thinks of Africa. She was born here, like her ancestors, who lived and died on this continent. It’s part of her destiny, she guesses: to be African without wanting to, without knowing how to be African. She loves this land, yet she has closed herself off from the violence in this land. Moreover, the whiteness of her culture — much more than her skin colour — has isolated her from its context. Yes, she was raised as a bush girl, but her head is soaked in Western literature, music, art, science.
During her student years, in that moment of hopeful enchantment allowed by youth, she discovered the sweet seduction of living in Spain, France, Italy. She took part in the research on Neanderthals at the prehistoric Lascaux caves and on Palaeolithic skulls at Monte Circeo. She drank directly at the source from which civil liberties, philosophy and science sprang. Europe lured her with its web of highly cultured, highly sophisticated, highly civilized microworlds. How distant Africa had seemed to her, then.
“Yet, you came back,” Dario once remarked as they were having coffee on the terrace of her house, their voices floating on the bluish heat haze of the Highveld. Invariably, each round of thoughts brings her back to him. Dario was right, he was always right in reading her unspoken truths. Eventually, her life roots had drawn her back. As the saying goes, you cannot be sown in wildness and settle among daffodils. “In Europe you seemed to have found what you were looking for. What was missing, then?” Dario eventually asked her.
She remembers taking her time before answering, plunging her eyes into the cloudless, limitless eastern plateau beyond the city skyline. “I left my soul at the foot of the Table Mountain. I want it back,” she had just heard a returning South African writer tell his interviewee on the morning radio program. She too had yearned for the heart of the land, the immense skies, men pacing over parched plains, the slow passage of time. And the silence — that silence that says it all. She too had romanticized this place. Her place. She too had wanted to feel at one with life — its pulse, its magic. Instead, turning towards him, she said something else: “I was short of breath, up there.”
And if they asked her what she misses most about Europe, now, what would she reply? Art, without hesitation. Its intentionality. The processing of the soul. Imagination in motion. But it might not be entirely accurate. Perhaps, even more than that, she misses people intent on questioning life, incessantly scorching and scouring their minds. That’s it. Two opposite and fascinating worlds have been playing their existential games on her. Attracted to both, she has sought the key to reconcile them without losing anything along the way. But after what happened to Dario, her house of cards has collapsed. Africa, she feels, has betrayed her. Yet only Africa, she knows, can redeem her.
Her life is no different from that of many other whiteborn children of this continent: She invaded Africa, grew in her womb, was raised by her and learned to love her as if she were her real mother, no matter how dysfunctional the womb might turn to be.
A blue moon looms high up over her — large, pale, mysterious. Zoe remembers how, on one of her first nights at the camp, she found it there, so close, so clean and clear. Eyes wide open in the dark, she followed its slow progress, thinking of all those city people who no longer get to sleep under its silver veil.
From the bush comes the hoarse, rasping cough of a leopard. “It’s the only feline that kills for pleasure,” Daniel told her during one of their reunions around the campfire. “And if caught in a trap will gnaw off its leg just to be free.”
18
A SHATTERED LIFE
“EET! TRY IT!”
Walking briskly ahead of the women’s group, Namkwa has found a tsamma melon. She has split it in two with her panga and is now offering Zoe its white pulp. She hesitantly takes some of it and puts it in her mouth. The bitterness is sickening. Ignoring Zoe’s grimace of distaste, the old woman takes a handful of pulp, tilts her head upwards and, holding her hands up over her head, squeezes hard, letting the juice trickle from her skinny fingers into her throat. Taste comes second if you need to quench your thirst in the Kalahari.
For a change, Zoe has joined Namkwa and the women of Narro’s clan on a foraging foray into the bush. She follows them into a maze of shrubs having a hard time to keep up with their fast pace. Minute and bare-footed, the San women seem to slide easily through sharp grass and thorn scrub following the invisible paths left by ancient rivers sunk deep into the ground. Some of them have babies tied on their hips, others carry a karos on their shoulder, which they rapidly fill with what they collect.
They chat eagerly and hardly stop in their march. If they do, it’s to bend and extract from the earth an edible root, a tuber or onion to be cooked in the coals. They accomplish the task with a quick gesture, using a sharp stick or their bare hands. They gather their veld food with the self-assurance of an inveterate city shopper, as if they were briskly walking along the aisles of a supermarket, picking what they need, comparing, selecting; fully at ease with their surroundings; finding fulfilment and quietude even in the harshness of their unforgiving land; showing a modern female scientist in their midst what “evolutionary adaptation” de facto means beyond the levity of academic parlance.
Another month slides away. Life in the field may be slow paced, but she makes sure no one — she in the first place — slips into idleness. Day in day out, she has been working with the men at the bottom of a wash. When she stays behind at the camp, she keeps herself busy scraping fossil bones with the three-inch blade of her Swiss Army knife; paying regular visits to the village; studying Dario’s notes; writing reports for Kuyper; driving to Tsumkwe with Sam to buy fresh produce, make a few phone calls and have a cup of roiboos with Daniel. Every evening she writes in her field journal. Today, though, she feels ready to make a pause and pick up Aunt Claire’s diary again.
Franschhoek, March 30, 1947
No one in the family would tell me anything about Charlotte. “She went down a bad path,” they’d just say. “It was so long ago.” I felt I needed to speak with Longman, the lawyer; perhaps he would know, perhaps he would tell me the truth. Yesterday I skipped my university classes and went to see him in Cape Town at the address I found on the parcel he had sent me. As I rang the bell at number 22 Kloof Street, just a few blocks away from the courthouse, I didn’t get the impression of visiting a law office: The place looked more like a private home, which indeed it was. Mr. Longman, a thin and stooped gentleman well past his sixties, opened the door himself. I didn’t expect him to be that old! With his shoulders hunched and his head lolling lamely over his bow tie, he looked more like a beaten dog than an attorney. He had a gaunt, pale face and wore a flannel suit jacket which hung on him as a burlap sack. I introduced myself. He stood in the doorway for a while, visibly puzzled, watching me without saying a word as his face became even paler if that was possible. “You look so much like her,” he finally said. He took my hands in his, squeezed them warmly and invited me to come in and have a cup of tea.
After the maid poured our tea and left us alone he told me that, after Aunt Charlotte died fifteen years ago, upon her request he kept the parcel addressed to me until I would come of age. “How did she die?” I asked. It seemed an obvious question, but he looked genuinely bewildered: “Don’t you know?” I replied that my family never spoke about my aunt. As for her, she stopped writing in her diary when her betrothed fell from his horse and died. I told him that I wanted to know what happened to her after the incident. He stiffened in his armchair, saying that my family must have had good reasons for behaving the way they did. It was not up to him to reveal certain details about Charlotte’s life. He called her by her first name and this led me to believe he knew her very well.
I didn’t give up so easily. I argued I had a right to know what happened to my aunt, especially after she had bequeathed me her precious things — including the diary she wrote when she was
young, which I considered a very personal gift, something that intimately bound me to her.
Longman looked extremely uncomfortable. He tried to buy time by sipping from his cup of tea. At last he blathered something about finding it hard to talk dispassionately about my aunt. He said that “Miss Charlotte” (this time he added the “Miss” bit) was a very special person (“a wonderful woman, as beautiful as she was intelligent”: These were his exact words). I must have looked puzzled. If my aunt was such a special and commendable person why had she been banished from our family? He anticipated my question and embarked on a long explanation about how, considering her station in life, my aunt had made a highly problematic and radically unconventional choice for which he had never fully understood the reason. He then remarked that in those days we, the Du Plessis family, were among the wealthiest and most respected families in the Cape. He kept beating about the bush and I asked him bluntly to get to the point. His answer came as a shock: “Your aunt was a prostitute.” He spoke these words looking gently, but firmly, into my eyes, as if in this way — I now assume in retrospective — he could protect her from harsh judgment. I was left speechless. I bet no one dared talk about Aunt Charlotte! In hindsight, this revelation explained many things. I asked him whether he meant my aunt lived in a brothel and he nodded. But he quickly added: “Mind you, she remained a lady. Her clients were carefully selected.” I supposed he too was one of the chosen few, and that’s what I dared ask him. I had never been so brash, almost impudent. Longman’s face, creased with tension, reminded me of curdled milk. He said nothing. I took his silence for a “yes.”
Suddenly, I felt anger flushing my cheeks, my neck burning. This woman felt family to me and, in her own way, had tried to help me. Yet, the whole family hid her existence, what she had been. And this man seemed so patronizing. “Why are you all so hypocritical?” I blurted out, unable to contain my frustration. The old man kept quiet for a long while — to give me time to regain my composure, I now suppose. “Yes, I was one of them,” he somehow fumbled. Once he recovered his countenance, he told me the whole story. That he was madly in love with her and wanted to be the only one. That him being a widower (he was nearly fifty, she nine years younger) they could have devoted the rest of their days to each other.
The Afrikaner Page 11