by Tony Park
‘Hello, my girl. It’s been a long time.’
She turned away from him and again she felt the urge to flee from his touch.
‘Sonja, wait, let’s—’
She changed her mind and turned back to face him. Putting every ounce of her weight into the swing, she slammed her fist into the left side of his jaw.
He staggered, reaching out with his right hand to steady himself, but recovered from the blow and straightened himself up again. He worked his jaw from side to side and placed his fingers gently against the left side of his face.
The soldiers behind him stopped their chatter and a couple had the temerity to laugh.
‘SHUT UP YOU BASTARDS.’ He didn’t look back at them, but his words were enough to silence and disperse the troops. He stared at her.
‘Hello, Papa.’ She turned on her foot and walked away from him, towards a brown canvas army tent into which the general had just disappeared.
‘Sonja?’
She ignored him.
She opened the flap of the tent and a soldier seated at a fold-out table with a tactical radio set on it stood up. ‘Hey!’ He reached for a pistol in a holster on his belt.
‘Relax, Mishak. We are expecting this woman,’ said the older man.
‘I take it you’re in charge here,’ she said to the man without preamble.
‘I am. Leave us, Mishak.’ The young soldier looked at Sonja, fastened the flap on his holster, and walked out. ‘And if you have come to serve in the Caprivi Liberation Army, Ms Kurtz, in whatever capacity, you will please address us as “sir”.’
When he’d said ‘we’ were expecting her she had thought the general was referring to his entire force. She could see now he favoured the royal ‘we’. Not a good first impression. ‘I haven’t come to serve anyone or anything. I was on my way to meet my employer, Martin Steele, when your men kidnapped me.’
‘Kidnapped?’ He sat down behind another folding desk and motioned for her to take a seat in a canvas-covered director’s chair.
She shook her head. ‘I don’t intend on staying long. Where is Steele?’
‘Major Steele is on his way here now. Respect for rank is important, Ms Kurtz. We did not give orders to kidnap you, Ms Kurtz, we gave orders to protect you.’
‘From what?’
‘You were involved in a gunfight with three men who were trying to kill you near Divundu. After that, you were tailed all the way along the Caprivi Strip by two men in a Nissan Patrol.’
That was news to her. The road had been pretty empty and she was sure she would have spotted a tail. ‘How do you know all this?’
‘The Caprivi is our homeland, Ms Kurtz. We have eyes and ears everywhere. Nothing happens there that we do not know about.’
Sonja wondered how, then, ‘our’ troops were able to walk into an ambush at the dam construction site that left scores of the general’s soldiers dead, wounded or captured, but she resisted the urge to inject the barb.
‘We were told,’ he continued, ‘that you were a professional, Ms Kurtz, whom we could learn from. Personally, I doubt our men could gain much from the experiences of … of one so young, but Major Steele was very persuasive. I wonder now, however, if you will bring us trouble.’
She didn’t need to take this tinpot Idi Amin’s abuse, though she was concerned if she was being followed. ‘Who was tailing me?’
‘That,’ he reached into the pocket of his starched fatigue shirt for a packet of cigarettes, ‘we shall know soon, Ms Kurtz.’
She heard footsteps behind her and turned. Her father was standing at the entrance to the command tent. He stepped across the threshold and saluted. The general sat upright, with his clenched fists on his table top. ‘Enter, Major Kurtz.’
‘Thank you, sir.’
Sonja rolled her eyes at this parody of military discipline.
‘Begging the general’s pardon, sir …’
‘Ah, you wish to spend time with your daughter. I understand, Major. Please do so, and appraise us of her intentions at your convenience.’
Sonja turned and brushed past her father, not bothering to indulge the general’s Napoleon complex any further.
‘Sonja … wait.’
She strode across the clearing, looking for the man who had brought her here, or Gideon … anyone who could get her out of this place of madness. She felt his cool, rough skin on her arm and she rounded on him, dropping her hand to the butt of the Glock sticking out of her shorts.
He stood there, mouth open. He blinked. ‘You would raise a gun to your father?’
‘To stop you hitting me, or any other woman again. Yes.’
He looked at the ground. ‘It’s what I wanted to talk to you about. For so long. I’ve changed, Sonja.’
She turned again and started walking away.
Walking towards her, gingerly stepping around the line of MAG 58 machine-guns that rested on their bipods on the ground, was an African woman with an elaborately braided hairdo piled on the top of her head. In her arms she carried a toddler, a little boy whose skin was several shades lighter than hers. The woman looked at Sonja as she came alongside her.
‘Don’t you at least want to say hello to your half-brother?’
Sonja stopped in her tracks and looked back. The woman with the child had moved to her father’s side and Hans Kurtz put his arm around her.
Sonja was speechless.
Her father took the little coloured boy from his mother’s arms and kissed him. ‘Hello my boy.’ He set the child down. ‘This is your big sister, Sonja. Say hello to her, Frederick.’
She opened her mouth to speak, but the words wouldn’t come. It was as if she’d been struck dumb. There was so much to be said, but she’d been happy a second ago to leave it unsaid and walk away from him forever.
The woman walked towards her and extended her hand. ‘Hello, Sonja. My name is Miriam. Your father has told me much about you.’
Sonja looked down at the woman’s hand, but didn’t take it. She could never tell with African women, but she thought this one, this Miriam was no older than she – perhaps even a few years younger. Miriam lowered her arm and clasped her hands in front of her. ‘I understand …’ she began.
‘You understand nothing.’ Sonja glared at her father, ignoring the woman, and thought of the lost years when he had drunk his way out of her life. She thought of the wasted time she had spent living with him, when her mother, who knew better, stayed in the UK. She remembered the biting sting of his palm across her face and how she’d vowed no man would ever touch her like that again.
Something brushed her leg and she looked down. It was the child. He had moved, unseen, between Sonja and his mother. He reached up and patted her on the thigh, where the sticky plaster dressing covered the wound that was almost healed.
‘Ouch,’ the little boy said.
She stared down at his upturned coffee-coloured face.
‘Your father told me of the bad things he did to you, and your mother, Sonja,’ Miriam said quietly, as Sonja looked into the wide green eyes of the little boy. ‘He told me about his drinking, and the violence towards you. He no longer drinks alcohol.’
She tore her eyes from the child and looked at the withered man with the bushy white beard. He had the sense not to say anything, but simply nodded.
‘And he has never raised a hand to me.’
‘No,’ Sonja rounded back on the mother. ‘Only me and my mom.’
‘And I have seen him, heard him, pray for forgiveness for those acts many times.’
She couldn’t recall her father ever setting a foot inside a church, except for funerals. Also, as she looked at him, trying to see through his eyes, she heard the countless, repetitive, objectionable words he’d had for black people. Kaffir, coon, wood-head, munt, nigger… and so many more. The racist jokes; the way he’d make fun of his farm workers without them realising it; the things he’d said he would do, when he thought she was out of earshot, to the terrorists who had raided the f
arm in his absence.
And he’d done it. They were not idle threats.
She’d met a white Namibian, an ex-Koevoet man, working as a contractor in Iraq. He’d told her he’d served with her father and had been full of praise for the old drunkard. ‘You know, hey, that we caught those terrs that raided your farm and tried to kill you and your mom?’ the man had asked her.
She didn’t know. She heard his words now, spoken with admiration. ‘It was about a year later, after your dad had transferred to us in Koevoet. Our Bushman trackers led us to a SWAPO camp. We slotted four of them and took one alive. Your dad decides to interrogate him, in the field, if you know what I mean.’ She could only guess. ‘So your pa finds out where this gang has been operating and whatnot, and it turns out this terr was on the raid on your farm. This young oke, he was full of spite. A real nasty piece of work. When your pa asks him what kind of men are sent to kill defenceless women and children, he points out that you, when you were a little girl, winged one of his comrades. He said you were hardly defenceless. Your old man, he actually smiled at that and we had a bit of a chuckle, us and this terr. Then the oke turns nasty again and says, “But white man, we were not only sent there to kill them, we were told to rape them first.” Your father beat him to death. It took a long time.’
Miriam placed a hand on her arm, gently, breaking into her thoughts. ‘Your father also told me what he did in the war, and he prays for forgiveness for those many acts, as well.’
‘Hello,’ said the little boy at her feet. He seemed miffed at being left out of the conversation.
Sonja put a hand on his springy hair. It was soft. She ran her fingers through it. ‘Hello.’ He smiled up at her. She removed her hand.
So what? He had found God and fallen for a black woman, but he had abused and hurt her and her mother and driven them out of his life, and away from Africa. What right did he have to expect he could now come back into her life and think that all would be forgiven?
‘Steele told me you have a daughter,’ her father said.
She snapped her head around. ‘That’s none of your business.’
He shrugged. ‘No, but I would like it to be. How is your mother?’
It was easy now, to see clearly again. ‘Dead. But what would you care?’
‘Sonja, please … don’t talk like that. I’m sorry about your—’
‘Don’t you fucking tell me how to talk. I don’t care if you’ve changed your life. You pissed our life away up against a wall. I wish you well, second time around,’ she added, not bothering to hide her sarcasm, ‘even though Mom and I never got a second chance.’
Sonja strode away from them, even though she had no idea where she was going. She saw the mekoro she had arrived on and headed for that. Something else the old man had just said popped back into her mind. ‘Steele told me you have a daughter.’ How long, she wondered, had Martin Steele known her father was tied up with this band of rebels? The manipulative bastard was always looking for ways to control her life. He knew she would have refused to have anything to do with the CLA if she’d found out her father was serving with them. She imagined his gloating. He’d think that now there would be some tearful reconciliation with the old killer who had found God and become a born-again lover of black people. Well, the Kumbaya Rainbow Nation bullshit wasn’t going to work with her.
Hans followed her. ‘I tried to contact your mother plenty of times. She never returned a single letter.’
‘Was that before or after you found your new girlfriend?’ she asked without looking back.
‘Come, Frederick,’ Miriam said softly. She took the confused little boy’s hand and led him away. Sonja had hoped for a rise from her. She wondered where and how his father had met her. Had he ended up drinking in African shebeens?
‘Shame,’ the ex-Koevoet man had told her in Baghdad, ‘an old army buddy of mine who works as a professional hunter in Bots these days told me he’d seen your dad begging on the streets of Maun a few years back. It’s terrible when a white man has to do that, hey?’
It was terrible when anyone had to do it – black or white – but the news hadn’t softened her feelings for Hans then, any more than his alleged transformation did now.
Sonja had the manners to wait until Miriam was out of earshot before she broke the silence. ‘When did you decide the only good black wasn’t a dead one?’
He shook his head and brought his hands together, fingers interlocked, like he was about to start praying. Instead, he began wringing his hands. ‘We … I, Sonja, was responsible for so much evil during the war. I had to live with that – still do – but I should have sought help sooner. I kept you and your mom in the war, living it in my mind and my dreams every day, every night. I thought the booze would make it go away, but it made things worse, as you know.’
She nodded. But her mother wasn’t stupid. She knew it was the ghosts from the war days that were tormenting him and driving him to the bottle. She’d pleaded with her husband to go to AA, or a doctor, or a psychiatrist, but he’d brushed her concerns aside like an empty bottle.
‘After you and your mom left, and I lost the job at Xakanaxa, I tried to pull myself together. I wanted to come after you, but when the dreams came the bottle was always there. I had a couple more jobs, as a guide, and then in Maun, at a taxidermy place, but I crashed the company Land Cruiser when I was drunk. No one would employ me. They stopped serving me booze at the Sports Bar, same at Trackers. I got into fights and they banned me. I ended up drinking in the shebeens.’
It was cold comfort to Sonja to see how she’d guessed his downfall. ‘Is that where you met Miriam?’
His eyes flared; it was eerie, like looking into her own eyes. ‘Say what you like about me,’ he hissed, ‘but she is a good woman from a good, upstanding family. If you must know, her father was a Methodist pastor. He took me in, when he found me lying, bashed, in the gutter in Maun outside a bar one Sunday morning on his way to Church. Through the booze and my pain I can recall seeing at least three lots of whites drive past me that morning. I swore abuse at them as they drove past me, and I swore at Miriam’s father when he stopped for me. I told him to keep his mother-fucking shit-eating filthy kaffir hands off me as he was loading me into his car and asking me if I needed food. That man … that man …’
Sonja looked away when she saw the tears welling in his eyes and the way he wiped them away angrily with the back of his hand. He took another step towards her and she took one back.
‘He locked me in a garage – more a cage – behind his home in Maun, and he kept me there until I dried out. Miriam brought me food and she washed me and cleaned me while the demons tried to kill me in that bladdy room. You don’t ever want to go through that hell, Sonja, believe me. They’re Lozi, from the Caprivi, and we talked, a lot, about the past, and what had happened to our tribes.’
‘Tribes?’
He nodded. ‘It’s all about tribalism, Sonja. He, the pastor, helped me see that. It wasn’t about black versus white. He helped me understand that in one way we could never understand or explain why it is that one tribe treats another so badly. He said the Lozi had been screwed by the Ovambo the same way the Afrikaners and the Germans in South-West had been screwed by the British in the old days. Anyway, he told me about the politics of the Caprivi Strip and how the CLA and the UDP had done a deal with SWAPO and Sam Nujoma that guaranteed that the people of the Caprivi would be able to vote for self-rule after independence.’
He was talking animatedly, like a born-again Christian who feels the need to convert every lapsed believer he encounters. ‘I saw it then, Sonja. We – the white settlers in Namibia,’ she had never heard him refer to the country as anything other than South-West Africa in the past, ‘had our turn at power and we abused it and we blew it. We had ourselves to blame for the war, because of the way the South Africans imposed their apartheid regime on us, and we lost and we got screwed. But the Lozi – the people of the Caprivi – they had nothing before the struggle;
they got nothing out of the struggle; and now they continue to get screwed to this day.’
‘I’ve heard it all before.’ She did not want to get into any kind of a debate with him. She just wanted to be gone from this place.
‘Miriam’s father was a man of peace, opposed to military action to take back the Caprivi Strip, but she was secretly in contact with the CLA. She knew of my background and she told me that God had sent me to her people to train the CLA for war.’
‘Do you know how lame that sounds? What are you now, “God’s instrument”? His shield, His sword?’
He waved his hand across his face. ‘I didn’t say I believed it, but I knew there was only one thing I was ever any good at in my life, Sonja. I was kak at farming – we were nearly broke before we moved off; I was useless as a lodge manager and safari guide – I drank the profits and mostly I hated the clients. The only time I was ever good at anything was in the military, and in Koevoet.’
‘I’m leaving.’
She started to turn and she felt his hand on her arm. She shrugged it off but didn’t look back at him.
‘You know what I’m saying, don’t you, Sonja?’
She shook her head, not wanting to meet his eyes.
‘Look at me.’
She refused.
‘Steele told me about your time in the British Army, in Northern Ireland, then Sierra Leone, Indonesia, Iraq … Afghanistan.’
‘No.’
‘Yes. You know the irony of this whole bladdy life I made for us? If I hadn’t wasted so many years at the bottom of a whisky bottle I probably would have ended up working with you, alongside you, in all those places.’
‘No.’
‘Yes. Look at me when I’m talking to you, girl.’
She turned and glared at him. ‘You gave up the right to tell me what to do the day you hit me in the face. I came back for you. I knew you were having problems because of the war and I left my mother in England to come back to help you and you repaid me by calling me a “fucking bitch” and punching me. Go back to your freedom fighter wife, your cause and your child. And don’t you fucking dare try to say you have something in common with me.’