by Tony Park
*
Twenty-two-year-old Private Aston Mutale took off his blue Kevlar helmet and wiped the sweat from his brow. He had been lifting dead bodies, along with Private Chinamasa, all morning, but it was only now, as Chinamasa went to relieve himself and Aston pulled his cigarettes from his pocket, that he had the opportunity to really look at one.
It was a woman. Young. Not attractive, but someone had seen fit to impregnate her. Her stomach was heavy with the baby, but a vicious blow from a panga had nearly severed her head and had ended her life – and presumably the child’s moments later. Aston wondered how long it would have taken the baby to die. She had been dead some time – days, perhaps, but he had now seen enough corpses to tell the difference between a stomach bloated with foul gases and a pregnant belly.
Aston had joined the army of the Republic of Zambia to escape the poverty of his life in Livingstone, and hopefully to save enough money to set himself up as an Inyanga. Aston’s father and his father before him had been traditional healers. His father had wanted him to go to university and study white man’s medicine, as well as the old ways, but Aston’s marks had not been good enough. And so he had found himself in the army, in the strange African country of Rwanda. Aston didn’t really understand the reasons behind the slaughter, but he knew for certain that the inhabitants of this country were all mad. Possessed, perhaps.
The other soldiers in his platoon knew of Aston’s background, and that he had been studying the preparation of medicines, talismans and curses. They came to him for advice and treatment, and for protection against the evil that lived in every street and building and tree and heart in Rwanda. Aston couldn’t charge his fellow soldiers too much – their pay was as bad as his – but all the same he had amassed a tidy sum allaying the coughs and colds and sexually transmitted diseases and fears of his comrades in the ‘Zambatt’, the Zambian Army battalion attached to UNAMIR, the United Nations Mission in Rwanda.
Aston’s father had counselled Aston from an early age that it was wrong to dabble in the darker side of traditional healing.
‘Yes, but how will I know which muti is right and which is wrong?’ he had asked his father.
His father had placed a hand on Aston’s shoulder and said, ‘All men know the difference between right and wrong, Aston. It is up to them to make the choice.’ His father was a healer, but he was also a devout Christian who went to church every Sunday. Aston had been raised in the same way.
He knew, of course, that it would be wrong to kill or hurt another person, or to dig up a freshly buried body to harvest its eyes and organs to make muti, but his grandfather had muttered occasionally, much to the chagrin of Aston’s father, that these were sometimes the only ingredients that would truly cure or protect someone with serious ailments or problems.
In the distance was the sound of gunfire, like the crackle of dried grass burning. Aston had been scared at first, when the RPA had begun the killing of the Hutu refugees, but he’d soon become numbed to the sounds, sights and smells of death. He knelt down beside the dead woman.
Her hands were raised, as if grasping at her assailant, or for her god. Rigor mortis had captured the terror and pain of her death. Her eyes were wide open, though virtually invisible behind the mass of crawling flies. Aston noticed that the pale skin of her right palm had been laid open and three fingers of her left hand had been lopped off. These, he knew, were what the doctors and medics called defensive wounds. He’d seen many such wounds. The woman had raised her hand to ward off the first blows of the panga and the instinctive, though futile, gesture had ensured she had died in even more pain, watching her own blood flow as her attacker delivered the killing blow to her neck.
Aston reached behind his back and felt for the bayonet that fitted to his FN self-loading rifle. He slid it from its sheath while he looked left and right again. No one was watching him, save for the eyes of a dead child, a girl of maybe eight or nine who had been killed by her own kind, friends and family perhaps; crushed to death under the feet of thousands of Hutus who had surged up to the Zambatt perimeter when the Tutsi soldiers had begun firing. Many such innocents had been trampled and others had been wounded or killed when they had been pushed into the compound fence and slashed by its razor wire.
Aston turned from the eyes. He ran his thumb along the bayonet’s edge. He had never used it in action, only against straw-stuffed dummies during training. All the same, he kept the blade finely honed. A healer had many uses for a good knife. Aston reached for the woman’s blouse. He pulled it open and stared for a moment at her swollen breasts. He laid the tip of the bayonet between them and lightly drew it down over her skin until he felt the bone of her sternum drop away, at the top of her distended belly.
He glanced up and down the line. His fellow soldiers were engaged in a score of different vignettes of horror. Private Chinamasa had been dragged off by a sergeant to help another man carry a wounded man to the Australian medical team. Aston knew he had to be quick. He drew a deep breath and slid the bayonet into the dead woman.
A gush of foul-smelling air hissed from the woman’s stomach and Aston turned his face from the stench. He’d been expecting it, and although he was now well accustomed to the odour of death, there seemed something particularly horrible about this. Perhaps it was the dead child’s spirit leaving. Aston drew the blade down towards her groin, opening her, until he could see the lifeless foetus curled in the womb.
The rush Aston felt as he dropped the bayonet and reached in and scooped the dead child from its mother was incredible. Even from his limited training he knew of many illnesses and ailments that could be cured with the by-products of this unborn child. Healers spoke of these things, but how many ever actually got their hands, literally, on such a tiny body? Aston knew he had to be quick. He set the baby – he saw now it was a boy – back into the cavity that had once sustained it, and used his bayonet to free the nearly full-formed child from the umbilical cord. He looked around him, at the litter and corpses, and saw a square zip-up bag made of thin, cheap PVC. He undid it and tipped out its contents. Aston scooped the foetus out of the mother again and gently lowered it into the bag and zipped it up.
As he walked back to the compound carrying his grizzly souvenir, the words of his father came to him. ‘All men know the difference between right and wrong, Aston . . .’
He knew what he had just done was wrong, but all the same it excited him and he felt a power he had never known in his young life. His grandfather would probably understand how he felt right now. He had looked into the old man’s eyes and seen a strength he’d never found in his religious father. He knew the old man had the courage and the power to do what needed to be done.
The light was fading and the flicker of fires silhouetted the few remaining ramshackle structures still standing. This country had gone to hell, which made what Aston had just done somehow less shocking in his mind. He had not killed the child or its mother, and although he knew his father would have been appalled at the way Aston had defiled the woman’s body, he consoled himself with the knowledge that the muti made from the unborn child would benefit many people in need. For himself, he had taken a step in a new direction on his path to becoming a fully-fledged healer. He could not turn back now. He had felt the power. He had liked it.
‘Aston!’
He turned and saw Private Chinamasa running towards him, high-stepping over the body of an old man, still to be recovered.
‘Did you hear the news, Aston?’
Aston shook his head, and slowly moved the zippered bag behind him, out of Chinamasa’s sight. ‘We are leaving tonight.’ Chinamasa said. ‘The platoon commander just told me. We are being relieved.’
‘That is good,’ Aston said, quickly turning his thoughts to the transportation of his prize. There was a sergeant back in Kigali whom Aston had helped with a treatment for the sores that had returned to the man’s spear. The sergeant worked in air movements and logistics, loading and unloading the C-130 Hercules ai
rcraft that shuttled from Lusaka to Kigali, bringing in the Zambatt’s supplies. ‘I can get anything into this country – and out of it,’ the sergeant had boasted.
Later that night, when the tired Zambian contingent finally made it back to Kigali, Aston went to the mess hall in the military academy barracks.
‘Hey, you know we have no food at this time of night. You are not allowed in here,’ said one of the cooks, a middle-aged corporal dressed in camouflage trousers and a stained white singlet. The man was the shape of a football. Aston doubted there was such a thing as a thin cook in any army.
He held up his bag. ‘I need to put something in the freezer.’
The cook planted his meaty hands on his indiscernible hips. ‘You cannot put whatever you wish in my freezer. Get out of here, soldier.’
Aston walked up to the fat man. Leaving aside the fact that Aston felt this bloated Idi Amin impersonator had no right to tell him what to do – Aston had, after all, been out on the line dodging bullets and collecting dead and dying Rwandans all day – he felt emboldened by the power the item in the bag had given him. He felt indestructible. Aston stopped a pace from the corporal and stared into his eyes.
‘You’re the so-called Inyanga, aren’t you?’ the corporal cook asked. The man was trying to be brave, but Aston noted his blinking eyes, and the tongue darting out to moisten fat lips. The cook reached for a small gold crucifix hanging around his neck. ‘I don’t believe in your mumbo jumbo, you know. The others might, but I’m not afraid of you.’
Aston leaned in closer, until his nose was just millimetres from the cook’s. ‘Open your freezer.’
The cook tried to hold Aston’s gaze but blinked again, turned his face and took a step back. ‘All right. But what is it you have in your bag?’
Aston set the bag down and unzipped it. From it he took a package wrapped in newspaper and tied up inside a plastic shopping bag. He held it up to the cook. ‘Do you want to see?’
The cook shook his head.
‘It’s just meat. But it’s mine. Touch it and you won’t live to regret it.’
The cook regained some courage and squared up again, puffing out his chest. ‘Are you threatening me?’
‘Yes.’ Aston walked out the door.
When Aston went to the kitchen the next day to retrieve his frozen parcel it was there, but it was plain as soon as he looked inside the bag that the newspaper around the foetus had been unwrapped and clumsily replaced.
‘Where is the cook?’ Aston asked a private standing behind a counter, sharpening a carving knife on a steel.
The man shrugged. ‘I don’t know. He said he was feeling ill this morning, not long after reporting for duty.’
Aston’s heart began to beat faster and he felt the dread rising inside him. If the cook went to the commanding officer, Aston would be finished. ‘Thanks,’ he murmured to his fellow soldier. He stuffed the package back in the bag and walked briskly outside. He walked past the old Rwandan officers’ candidate dormitories to the transport compound, where the quartermaster’s store was located. Soldiers in T-shirts and camouflage trousers were hosing down army trucks, cleaning away the filth of this decaying country in preparation for the vehicles to be sent back to Zambia.
‘Sergeant.’
‘Hello Aston,’ the noncommissioned officer said from behind his desk, smiling but not rising. The quartermaster sergeant was Aston’s business partner, but he was also his superior.
‘I have a parcel – frozen goods – that needs to get onto this afternoon’s flight to Zambia please.’
The sergeant rocked back in his chair. They were alone, so he had no need to lower his voice. ‘Space is at a premium now we’re packing up. The aircraft is full already.’
Aston lifted the bag. ‘It is small. I thought we could find a small cooler box and seal it inside.’
‘I haven’t seen a decent cut of meat in this entire godforsaken country,’ the sergeant said, ‘so I won’t ask what it is. Who’s going to collect it at Lusaka?’
‘My grandfather, Sergeant.’
The sergeant frowned. ‘But I thought your family lived in Livingstone. That’s about five hundred kilometres.’
‘It will be worth the journey for him, Sergeant.’
‘Really? And how much will it be worth for me?’
Aston wasn’t completely sure what the cargo would go for, though he imagined that his grandfather would be able to command top dollar for the tiny body parts, whether he used them for himself or on-sold all or part of the child to other healers. ‘A hundred US dollars.’
The sergeant gave a low whistle, then sat up straight and fixed Aston with a cold stare. ‘A hundred and fifty.’
Aston shrugged. ‘It’s not that important.’ He turned to leave the quartermaster’s office.
‘Hey, hey . . . all right. Don’t go.’
Aston looked back. ‘Yes?’
‘OK. A hundred and twenty-five. Yes?’
Aston pretended to think for a few seconds. The sergeant would have been a terrible gambler. ‘Yes, all right. And one more thing, Sergeant. Would you like to make an extra hundred dollars?’
The sergeant leaned back in his chair again, feigning nonchalance. ‘I suppose so.’
‘You’re in charge of the medical supplies, right?’
*
Aston clicked on the internet browser icon of the laptop in his surgery and typed in, Johannesburg to Kigali flights.
While he waited for the results to come up he thought about the cook. It had been many years ago, but it had been another step along the path that had led him to where he was now. Taking the baby from the dead woman’s womb had been one thing, but up until then Aston had never killed a human being before.
The newspapers in Zambia reported the tragedy a few days later, of how a corporal, so traumatised by what he had seen in Rwanda (even though the fat cook had rarely set foot outside the compound in Kigali) had sought refuge in drugs – morphine carried by the Zambatt’s medics – and apparently accidentally overdosed.
Through the transport sergeant Aston had also met a white man in Rwanda – a man with hair so pale and eyes so blue he could almost have been an albino. The mzungu was also in the import-export business. It was said he moved weapons into the country and shipped out live animals to other foreigners who paid a fortune for such things. The three had gone into business, and Aston had worked with him ever since. The white man was the boss – not because of some outdated colonial legacy but because he was a man to be feared.
16
Liesl’s father had arranged for a driver to be waiting for her and Richard at the grandly titled Wonderboom National Airport outside the old three-storey red-brick terminal building.
‘Do you want to hole up in Pretoria?’ Liesl asked as she waved goodbye to her brother, who was waiting for the helicopter to be refuelled before flying it back to Letsitele.
Richard shook his head. ‘I was thinking OR Tambo International Airport.’
‘Ja. Me too.’ Liesl gave the order to the driver as he loaded their meagre luggage into the boot of the Mercedes.
They slid into the back of the black limousine and for Richard the soft leather seats and the air conditioning were a godsend after the vibration of the helicopter and the Highveld sun streaming in through its perspex windows.
‘Are you all right for money for airfares?’ Liesl asked.
‘What?’ Richard was already losing himself in thoughts of planning the next leg of his trip, and in that sense Liesl had read his mind. ‘Oh. Yes. I’ve got plenty of credit on my card.’
Liesl had taken her netbook out of her daypack and opened it on her lap as the driver headed south towards Johannesburg. She tapped away at the keys. ‘I can’t see a direct flight but there’s Kenyan Airways to Nairobi and then a connection with them to Kigali. How does that sound?’
‘Fine,’ he said.
‘All right, I’m going to book. Do you want me to book for you too? You can pay me later.’
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‘No thanks,’ Richard said. ‘But if I can use your computer I’ll do mine straight after.’
‘OK,’ she said.
Richard stared out the window and watched the latest crop of walled residential estates whizzing by. More and more of Johannesburg’s residents were moving further out of the city in a bid to escape the crime and congestion, but all they were doing was taking the problem with them. In between each new estate a new ‘informal settlement’, as people called shantytowns these days, had sprouted. Every new home needed a maid and a gardener or two, and these were more often than not illegal immigrants – Zimbabweans, Mozambicans and Malawians who set up their tin and cardboard shacks as fast as the developers could squeeze out their faux Tuscan villas. There was no running away from poverty, Richard thought.
‘I’ve booked,’ Liesl said, ‘and I checked availability. There’s room for you as well.’ She handed him the netbook.
‘Thanks.’
Liesl rested her head against the seat and closed her eyes. Richard looked at her. She was as beautiful as she’d been in her twenties – probably more so now she’d matured into the prime of womanhood. He wondered if he should have pursued her, both back then and now.
However, he realised it was too late.
He tapped away at the computer and managed to extricate his wallet from his back pocket without disturbing her and entered his credit card details to pay for the airfare. The cost was extortionate and would eat up most of his savings, but as he was paying for an international fare at such short notice it was only to be expected. ‘What the hell,’ he muttered as he selected a business-class multi-leg fare. That would wipe out all his savings, but he was feeling fairly fatalistic. He pushed the confirm button and imagined his money disappearing into the ether.
Liesl’s lips were parted and her breaths were deep and audible. She was fast asleep, so Richard took the opportunity to open his Gmail account and begin composing a new message. Fortunately his address book was stored as it had been years since he’d emailed Jason and Denise Clemenger and he wouldn’t have remembered their address otherwise.