The Afrikaner

by Arianna Dagnino

  “What about my aunt? Did she love you?” I asked him. He was clearly overwhelmed. He mumbled something about being sure of her love for him. “What happened then?” I pressed him. I had to extract from him each single word. “She refused to meet me, even talk to me,” he admitted. He started to write her long letters, hoping she would reply. She never did, except once. The day she killed herself, he got a note handdelivered by an errand boy. In it she expressed her love for him, but also her fear that her love would be his downfall. Along with the note, she sent the little jewellery box, the ingots and the letter for me. He then told me they had found Aunt Charlotte in her bedroom, bent over her dressing table: She had fired a contact shot to her right temple. Tears ran down his cheeks by this time. I felt moved at the sight of this wrinkled, dignified man whom — now I knew — my aunt had loved so preciously that she wouldn’t dare risk his life. He looked like an abandoned puppy, holding to the chain of his pocket watch as if it were a loose leash.

  19

  THE CLASH

  NO LUCK. THEY keep digging for six months with no luck. At the end of every day Zoe and her team return to the base camp with their shirts drenched in sweat, their hair white from the dust of the salt flats, their nails encrusted with earth. Fatigue is getting the better of me, of us all. Three months ago the workers took a break, but she skipped that opportunity, sticking to her original plan. It was a mistake. Piet had warned her and was right: Six months in a row up here are madness. Now that she too is about to leave, Zoe has to admit to herself she has had enough of the Kalahari. Even going back to the ghosts of her past seems more bearable than having to stand another day in the sweat and the dust.

  Keeping her promise to Narro, Zoe has set tight water-use restrictions at the camp, which she too abides by. Each of them is allowed a basin of water for the morning and evening ablutions and, once a week, a short shower. When it’s their turn to take it, the men wash behind the bakkie, using an electric pump which sucks water from twenty-five-litre tanks. She, instead, prefers to take the Land Rover and reach the borehole from where the village women pump water manually.

  This Friday afternoon she goes off just before sunset, knowing no one else will be there at that time. She lets the hosepipe slip into the borehole and operates the portable motor pump plugged into the vehicle battery.

  While she is rinsing her hair, she has a distinct feeling of being watched. Alarmed, she turns abruptly and sees standing in front of her, less than twenty metres away, the most beautiful creature: a mighty male gemsbok, his sabreshaped antlers shimmering in the sunset’s glow. His silhouette stands out against the orange canvas of a sunset sky, making the scene even more striking.

  Leaning towards the car through the open door, she manages to turn off the pump motor. She stands there, naked and soapy, watching this marvellous creature, hoping he won’t go away too soon. For a long moment, they share the stillness of the desert. Two worlds — the human and the animal — look at each other as if time had been suspended over the horizon. Until the gemsbok lowers his head in a kind of bow, looks at her for the last time and disappears.

  She makes her way back to the camp, her hair still wet, dripping water onto her clean shirt, thinking of the sublime and sly ways in which Africa hooks you. Just when you are about to give up, she reveals herself abruptly, majestically, bewitching you once again.

  Back at the camp, Zoe finds out the men haven’t gone to the shebeen in Tsumkwe, as they usually do on the weekend. “When they are due back home they try to save drink money,” Moses tells her. “They’d rather spend their bucks with friends.” Tonight, however, she senses an unusual tension among them. Lately she has felt, almost undetected, an insidious uneasiness running through the camp. Now, suddenly, that menacing mood is coming to the surface. The younger men, in particular, stir restlessly, with jerky movements, like juvenile lions hungry for meat.

  The fatigue, the boredom, the isolation in the wilderness: All this has contributed to a dangerous build-up of pressure. She too feels exhausted, easily irritated, frustrated by the sense of failure of her mission — of her entire life, actually. What did she expect to find up here apart from a bag of bones: a new reason to keep living? How have these men kept going all these months? — she now asks to herself — What does failure mean to them?

  She too can’t wait to get on a bush plane and be shipped, albeit temporarily, home.

  Ill at ease, Zoe retires into her tent, avoiding the men’s eyes. But she cannot block out their angry voices, which have started lashing mercilessly at each other.

  “Fokkin Zulu! I’m not your servant.” Wally’s burst of anger is evidently directed at Sam. Zoe stiffens as she imagines the cook’s nostrils flare in the darkness, his eyes no longer smiling and docile, but enraged, like those of a charging buffalo. He has a point: Lately Sam has been assuming a condescending attitude towards the younger team members. She hasn’t stepped in quickly enough.

  “You and your ilk! Always licking white asses!” Lionel breaks in, his voice hollow and strained.

  It isn’t just a question of age, power and self-conceit. Sam has made it look like he is on more familiar terms with Zoe and Daniel and this has triggered resentment towards him. Besides, he is a Zulu. In the eyes of many black South Africans Zulus have been too keen to come to terms with the white regime. Their joining in high numbers the police ranks during apartheid only added to this conviction, even though this circumstance was mostly the outcome of the “divide and rule” approach the Boers leveraged on the several peoples they conquered. Now Zoe imagines Sam’s mocking grimace as he takes in those accusations. Still sitting on her cot inside the tent, she freezes, waiting for the inevitable reaction. The Zulu’s reply comes like a stab: “Is that what you said to your black brothers as you pushed them into a tire and put them on fire?”

  The necklacing. Sam deliberately rubs in their faces one of the most sickening chapters of the black resistance to apartheid: the mob execution of those suspected of being township informants and collaborators of Pretoria’s regime.

  There is more yelling in Tsotsitaal, the creole mix of Sesotho, Zulu, Tswana and Afrikaans spoken in the townships. Zoe can’t understand the words being spat loudly at each other, but the sound of what comes next is far too clear: the hoarse, strangulated breathing of men fighting, the mutter of curses, the crashing of crockery, the knocking down of the kitchen stove with its pots and pans. Though terrified, now Zoe runs out of the tent, without the slightest idea of how she could stop the fight. Moses is already beside her. In his right hand, he holds the double-barrelled hunting gun that he always carries with him.

  “Leave it to me, Mejuffrou.”

  He fires a single shot upward. And the bush suddenly falls quiet.

  Through the halo of the smouldering campfire, Zoe sees Wally thrown down flat on his back and Lionel massaging his jaw.

  Sam looks unscathed. “Just like young bulls,” he says, regaining his amused demeanour as Zoe wrings her hands at the scene. “They don’t know their place yet.”

  It’s my mistake, she thinks looking at him without smiling. She has been oblivious to what has been happening around her, offending her workers’ ethnic pride by showing the weakness of a preference. As if Afrikaners hadn’t learned it the hard way. For too long they prayed to a primitive God prone to fomenting divisions among humans by sanctioning racial inequality — besotted, as he allegedly was, with his “chosen” white tribe.

  20

  KOMA’S PROMISE

  THE MORNING AFTER the fight, cotton-wool clouds fill the blue sky, swaying along, dropping curtseys like damsels in white gowns, as if the landscape itself had decided to make amends for men’s insanity.

  “We’re all tired and ready for a break,” Zoe says addressing her team, skipping any preamble. Moses is by her side, rock-solid. “What happened last night should have never happened and must not happen again. It’s time to go home, take our well-deserved rest and cool our spirits.”

  At
these words, Sam grins at the congregation, adjusting his wool cap over his ears in his habitual fashion.

  She looks sternly at him. “Sam has agreed to stay behind to watch the camp while we’re away,” she says. “He’ll take his break when everyone is back.” She pauses. She should reiterate that the success of the whole expedition depends on how well they work together, especially in such a harsh environment. Instead, she says: “We’re a good team. You all know that.”

  The men nod in agreement.

  “Nothing of that sort will happen again, Professor Du Plessis,” Moses says. “You don’t have to worry.”

  Zoe smiles at her foreman. “I trust your word.”

  She tries to convey a sense of self-confidence and a hint of poised leadership while, inside, she is still shaking with discomfort.

  Later that day, after she finished updating her field journal, Zoe crouches close to Koma outside his hut, by the fireside. Spending time in the open bush with him has taught her many things. Not a day goes by that this old man, wrapped in his wrinkly skin, doesn’t give proof of his being at one with his surroundings. What most intrigues her, though, are his powers as a shaman — a healer.

  “Oom, what does it mean when they say a black shadow is walking behind a person?”

  She has meant to ask him this question for some time now, but she has been stalling. The next day she’ll be leaving for Johannesburg with the rest of the crew and, before she leaves, she wants to know.

  “It means the soul of this person is starving.”

  “At the village, they think a black spirit is following me. That’s what Sam heard. Is that so?”

  Koma looks into the dusk, as the last light of day drains from the sky.

  “I can see it too. It was already with you in Schmidtsdrift.”

  “You never told me about it.”

  “There’s a time when words come out by themselves. We must wait for it.”

  Zoe falls silent, poking at the small fire in front of them. Does this mean Koma knew about the curse all along? Then she realizes the absurdity of her thoughts.

  She watches the shaman’s face glow in the fire’s halo for a little longer then she ventures to ask: “Do you think you can cure me, Oom?”

  “Only the sky can tell.”

  She closes her eyes, breathes in the night air and holds it in for a long time, imitating the San’s way of smoking their pipes. When she opens her eyes again she meets the old man’s gaze.

  “Once you’re back, we’ll try,” Koma says.

  It’s a promise.

  21

  BACK HOME

  THE BUSH PLANE takes off from the dirt track on the outskirts of Tsumkwe. Instinctively, Zoe turns towards the small window. She lets her view drift away, afloat the sea of sun-burned grass. The ashen light pours down on hundreds of termite mounds, rising from the earth like fingers pointed against the gods. She keeps staring out till the scene outside recedes faster and faster into the distance. Then she looks down to examine her hands, scratched by the thorny bushes, and fingernails, cracked and still lined with dirt. She is going to the Department empty-handed. What’s worse, her physical exhaustion hasn’t eased the pain in her heart. The void left by Dario can’t be traded in.

  She runs her fingers through her hair and feels its roughness. Her throat tightens in self-commiseration. She is about to cry, find temporary relief in her tears. But no, she won’t. She swallows hard and looks once again out of the small window. All this emptiness. She thinks of her diggers, who will soon go back with her into this desert, and of Sam, still out there. “You’ll find the camp spick-and-span when you’re back, Mejuffrou,” he said while driving them to the landing strip that morning.

  The bush plane left Zoe and her team at the airport in Windhoek. There, they’ve taken an international flight to Johannesburg. The plane approaches the city flying over the treeless squalor of Alexandra, a dirty mess of zinc sheeting and coal-fire smog. Past the black township, there come the ostentatious towers of Sandton City and the leafy streets of the northern white suburbs. From the window Zoe makes out villas and cottages plunged in the greenery of gardens and lawns surrounded by high walls and electric fences. The blue reflections of hundreds of swimming pools punctuate the scene: Dario once listed them among “the conspicuous markers in the geography of privilege.” Here she is, then, back to eGoli, its rapacious nature. But after the stark desolation of the Kalahari even this place of greed and misery seems, by contrast, to wreathe in glory.

  Upon landing, the city glistens neat and formal in the sun after a sudden shower. It takes the taxi twenty minutes to take Zoe from the airport to Melville, her suburb: a place straddling white and black, rich and poor, order and chaos. “A snapshot from South Africa’s future,” as Dario once described it. She has never thought of it this way, but indeed it’s a border area, a frontier in the frontier zone.

  Zoe steps out of the taxi and stands for a while in front of her house, looking at it as if she’s seeing it for the first time. It’s a modest, single-storey bungalow with a corrugated tin roof like the local farmsteads. She grabs her backpack and climbs the steps to the stoep. The hibiscus shrub near the entrance door is overgrown, hiding most of the nearby window; she stops to watch its scarlet flowers flutter in the light breeze, dancing away with sad sweetness.

  Once inside, Zoe wanders through the house finding traces of a life sunk away. She feels like an intruder there, peeping into the privacy of someone else’s life. She enters the master bedroom. The objects on the dressing table might as well be samples in a private museum: a pair of horn combs, half-spent hair lotions, a small bottle of clove fragrance. From the window, the skyscrapers of the CBD loom into the shimmering light like giant baobabs, steely and unmoved. Only the shrill cries of the hadedas break the silence.

  She undresses, steps into the bathroom and takes a long, hot bath. Before quickly blow-drying her hair she turns on the heater. It’s a mild mid-winter day yet she can’t dispel the shivers running through her body. The fridge is empty. She finds a frozen pizza in the freezer and heats it up in the microwave oven, then switches on the kettle to make coffee. In this urban silence, the buzz of electric appliances has an almost comforting effect.

  A few hours later, as she’s dozing off on the sofa, the phone rings.

  It’s her brother.

  “At last! I’ve been trying to get in touch with you all morning. At the Department, they told me you were on your way. When will you be here?”

  “What?” she asks, slightly annoyed. She just got home, dead tired, and doesn’t get the point of her brother’s rushed questioning.

  “Oh, come on! You forgot!”

  “Forgot what?”

  “The grand reception to celebrate the Finistère’s tricentennial. It’s tomorrow night!”

  “Ach!”

  “Can’t believe that. Zoe, I even sent you a reminder about it in my last letter!”

  “Ja, but I didn’t realize ...”

  Zoe senses her brother’s irritation and, under it, his anxiety.

  “Listen,” he says. “You got to be here. In the invitations we sent out you appear as the godmother of the evening. We spoke about it the last time you called me from Tsumkwe, remember?”

  “Did I really agree to that? Honestly, André, you know I’m not cut out for this kind of thing.”

  “It’s only a question of shaking hands with some VIPs,” he says, the irritation in his voice giving way to a mellow tone. “Just a few words, no more than the ones you’d share with your Bushmen friends. You wouldn’t have time to do more in any case. There’ll be four hundred guests.”

  “Oh gosh!”

  “You can’t let me down, ousus,” he says, his voice now down to a whisper.

  He has a point. He’s managed the family’s business for years while she devoted herself to her studies, her useless research. I can’t let him down.

  “Well, then,” she finally says, “I’ll take a flight in the morning. I hope I’l
l still find a seat.”

  She hears him release a deep breath and then laugh.

  “Ah! I knew I had to stay ahead of the game! It’s all set. Your ticket is waiting for you at the SAA counter. You’re on the 9:05 a.m. flight.”

  André’s sigh of relief is unequivocal. She can picture his jubilant smile on the other end as he leans back and lights a cigarette.

  “You just need to buy yourself the most gorgeous evening dress. Splash the cash: It’s on me. I know how stingy you are when it comes to shopping for clothes.”

  “No need. And, by the way, shops will be closing soon. I’ll look into mum’s wardrobe.”

  “If I’m not mistaken, mum’s dresses never fit you.”

  “This time they will. Courtesy of the Kalahari.”

  22

  THE GREEN DRESS

  AS THE PLANE descends towards Cape Town, the sun and the western coastline of South Africa rise roughly in tandem from the passenger windows. As usual, the pilot heads to the south of the airport before turning back to land, so that, as he approaches the coastline again, the incoming tourists are granted a view of one of the world’s most stunning intersections of land and water. There is nothing quite like the sight of Table Mountain emerging from a bed of clouds, with the city spreading at its feet until it finds the ocean.