Cathedral of the Wild

by Boyd Varty

  Finally the baboon came to a decision and flung himself straight at me, his long canines bared. I barely had time to duck and let out an embarrassing Minnie Mouse scream as he flew over my head, hit the white bedspread with a final galvanic splatter, then shot out the door and hurdled over the high balcony.

  Suddenly all was quiet, and I took in the room. It looked like Picasso’s studio after they shot scenes for The Texas Chainsaw Massacre in it. My radio crackled. “Boyd, one minute to room.”

  “Stall him! Stall him!” I screamed. Months of planning had been undone by a metrosexual baboon with a love of moisturizer.

  We couldn’t move the king out of this suite for security reasons that we didn’t understand. In minutes, Bronwyn arrived, armed with a large pair of yellow rubber gloves and an army of housekeepers. She surveyed the room. “Jesus, Boyd, this is a train wreck. Come on, ladies, let’s get to work.”

  The royal party had been stalled by a snack on the deck and an obliging hippo, which had uncharacteristically strolled out onto the flat rocks in front of the camp in broad daylight. A scene straight out of Fawlty Towers started to play out.

  Hailey, the operations manager, had begun the awkward delaying tactics. Although her glacier-blue eyes bought her a bit of extra time, it was an uphill battle. The king, despite having flown on his own jumbo jet, was tired and unused to waiting for anything. He never expressed any irritation—he had people who did that for him—but his personal assistant shot Hailey death stares anytime the king looked away.

  “Some more snacks, Your Excellency?” Hailey inquired.

  “No, thank you.”

  “Some wine maybe? Our South African wines are quite renowned.”

  “No, I would simply like to go to my room.”

  “Perhaps a tour of the park first, a quick game drive?”

  “No.”

  “Would you like to see the Shangaan dancers? It’s a remarkable cultural experience.”

  “No, take me to my room now.”

  “Certainly. We’re just checking the path for deadly adders—oh my God, is that an elephant?”

  There was a complex relay system between the staff doing the stalling and the staff cleaning the room, which now included guides, the general manager, a chef, four maintenance men, the housekeepers, and a mechanic. No one knew how the mechanic came to be there.

  A runner between the room and the front deck passed us frantic messages:

  “Bronwyn says that you should ask them if they would just like a full lunch now.”

  “Tell Bronwyn that’s not an option; the group organizer just told me he wants me fired,” Hailey relayed back. My job at this point was to make Bronwyn’s job easier, so when she screamed for more bleach, I ran off to get it. Bron was fully committed to the old family maxim that volume helps solve a problem.

  Eventually we could stall no more, and the procession to the room began. I ran back to escort the king. The royal party draped in silks made their way down the path in single file, followed by a herd of armed gunmen with rifles sticking in the air like quills. An exasperated Hailey led the way, sure that she would find a hazardous waste site. As the king stepped into the entranceway to his suite, Bronwyn and her crew, their hair frosted with baboon shit, slipped out the bathroom’s sliding door. She led the team—buckets, mops, and all—into the bush, where all dove facedown into the tall grass as if dodging incoming mortar fire.

  The king strode out onto his large front deck. A band of wood hoopoes flew by, piercing the calm with their raucous cackles. Then the stillness of the day descended. The king looked around, gave a satisfied sigh, and headed back into his room. As the door closed behind him, sixteen people arose from the bush with a wild look in their eyes and hotfooted it for the staff village.

  “Bloody baboon!” Bron huffed to me as I caught up with her on the path. “What a royal cock-up.”

  The uncertainty of life in the bush was ever present, but encounters with animals were never malicious, even if they were sometimes bothersome. Looking back years later, I would miss a time when a baboon was the worst of my problems.

  SIXTEEN

  IN BATTALIONS

  WHEN I WAS ABOUT eleven years old, the family took a trip through Zimbabwe. Dad signed us up for a white-water rafting experience on the Zambezi River. This was surely the most hostile commercially available rafting experience money could buy. The river down in the deep gorge literally roars at you, its thunderous call bouncing off the steep sides of the valley in continuous threading echoes.

  Bron and I were too young to officially be going down the river, yet Dad had somehow negotiated for us to be allowed in. He hadn’t wanted to be piled into a ten-man raft with generic overland tourists—he referred to such people as “Inge and Lars from Sweden”—so in classic Dad style, he’d decided unilaterally that it would simply be the four Vartys, two of them wildly underage, taking on the rapids with a guide.

  Bronwyn was terrified. “I hate this sort of thing,” she whispered to me. But the decision was made; down the river we would go.

  In renting his own boat, Dad had overlooked one of the critical aspects of river rafting: weight makes a difference. When a towering wave comes at you, the idea is to dive headlong at it, so that as you meet white water, your weight holds the boat down.

  Throwing slender Shan Varty at a Zambezi rapid is very similar to throwing a Ping-Pong ball at a tidal wave. Needless to say, when we hit the first rapid of the morning—called something like Death Trap—we capsized.

  Dad came very close to dying. He told us later that it felt like a million invisible hands were pulling him down to the bottom of the river. By the time the current released him, he was low on air. When he finally scrambled back to the surface, he found himself trapped under the boat and still had to swim clear before he could catch a breath. Eventually all of us except the guide were able to reboard the boat, which had spun the wrong way around in the water but was still floating. This is the perfect metaphor for my family: count on us to be on the wrong side of a boat with no guide, going backward through a massive rapid.

  Midway through the cascade of rapids, there was a single place where you could disembark. Bron got out immediately, but I stayed on. I liked the excitement, and I wanted to stay with my father.

  That night back at the campsite, Dad described how his life jacket had gotten him trapped under the boat’s hull. “All that was running through my mind,” he told us, “was ‘Jesus, I hope Bronwyn’s okay.’ ”

  “Well, thanks for worrying about me,” I said.

  “Aah, I knew you would be fine; you’re always fine.”

  These words were mostly true; like my uncle, I had a way of getting through things, an instinct for how to slip danger.

  The safari business is all about solutions. If you do it long enough, your whole psyche becomes about solving problems, solving problems, solving problems.

  In Dad’s world, you just get on with things. If there’s a problem, you fix it. If you’re underwater, just fight your way to the surface again.

  “We Vartys, we’re unshakable,” my dad always says.

  I didn’t know it yet, but the truth was that we were very shakable.

  “When sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in battalions,” Dad told me once, quoting Shakespeare. That’s exactly how they happened with our family in the next few years, in wave after wave. There were physical attacks—catalysts that forced change upon us. There were the deaths of beloved family members—one we could anticipate, one we could not, and both of which gutted us. And then the death of a stranger—an abrupt horror that undid me in a completely different way. All of these assaults were, at least, well defined. We knew how to deal with them, if imperfectly. And then along came a different kind of attack: vague, featureless, never-ending. And that was the one that pulled all of us under because we simply didn’t know how to fight it.

  When you’re young, death is a faraway mountain at the culmination of a very long journey. I w
as faintly aware of it, miles out in the haze. And then I nearly died a few times and watched the people I loved come under serious attack. I don’t think I was overly naïve, but in the space of a few short years, my rose-tinted glasses got yanked right off.

  Over and over during that time, I went back to that boy on the termite mound with the black mamba sliding over his calves. If only I could stay still, even if I shook inside, the snake would crawl all over me but not harm me. “Don’t move, Dad, don’t move.” I would be in some way in control of the outcome.

  Over and over, I returned to the dry riverbed with the elephant in front of me, the wind of his breath on my face. Phineas was watching the elephant’s every move; tracking his body language allowed an element of the predictable in what otherwise looked to be an unpredictable situation. Never panic in the bush. If you act correctly, you’ll be fine.

  The jungle of men does not have the same rules as the jungle of animals.

  Here is the most complicated of simple challenges: to choose healing or bitterness, life or death, faith or dismay. My family and I ran that gauntlet for ten years. Ironically, while this kind of test takes your innocence from you, that sense of being bulletproof, it can also really teach you how to live.

  SEVENTEEN

  GUNPOINT

  “MONEY,” HE SAID. “I will kill you.”

  It was March 25, 2001. That night, Kate, Mom, Bron, and I were staying at our house in Johannesburg. I’d fallen asleep in my bedroom. Then, for some reason, I’d woken and gotten out of bed to put on a pair of shorts before falling back asleep. There are so many moments to which you can attribute meaning in hindsight; had part of me known what was about to happen?

  Before that night, cricket, friends, and young love were the things that filled my mind while I finished up my schooling as a teenager. My parents had bought a small home in the outskirts of Johannesburg to ease the burden of constant commuting for business. Bronwyn had finished high school and was working at the Londolozi reservation office in Joburg. I was in my final year of high school, which I was completing from Londolozi through correspondence with a school in the city. Occasionally I would go into Joburg to get a new curriculum and take practical exams. The situation plucked me from my sheltered village life and put me smack in the middle of Johannesburg, where I could no longer remain ignorant of the aftermath of the long nightmare of apartheid in racist South Africa.

  Growing up at Londolozi, Bron and I had been immersed in village life. Working side by side with people of all races, we had been largely sheltered from the truly horrific reality that had long since shattered the innocence of our country.

  South Africa was a war zone in the early 1990s, particularly in the lead-up to our first democratic elections, in 1994. The elections had been a success; much to my family’s delight, South Africa was finally a society—by law, at least—free from racial segregation. In reality, the divide between the haves and the have-nots remained.

  After democracy defeated apartheid, a spree of violent crime gripped the country for ten years. The war in Johannesburg was largely an invisible one, taking place in the outlying townships of the city. In my parents’ neighborhood, everything looked normal, all blue skies and denial. But cross over into the poor black townships, and people were getting “neck-laced” with tires filled with petrol and set on fire, sliced to pieces with pangas. There was, literally, tribal warfare: Zulus against Xhosas, Afrikaners against English, black against white. The result was post-traumatic stress among a traumatized people. Even though we’d never officially been to war, the psychology of subjection to violence was there. People were dying, but for a great long time, I knew almost nothing of it. The journalists in the thick of it knew what was going on, but reportage to the general population was suppressed. All we’d hear back in our richer, mostly white suburbs would be a terse summary: “Another night of rioting in Soweto.” We had no idea of the level of violence. It would be years before reporters from the Bang Bang Club broke the full story.

  Every morning on the drive to school, at every social gathering in Joburg, Bron and I would overhear whispered talk among the adults about the number of deaths in places the whites never went. Speculation was endless: How soon before we’d be overrun and killed? Mothers walked their kids in the street during daylight but retreated behind ever-higher security walls as the sun set. Even in my teenage self-obsession, I had to face the cold fact that we’d become a fortressed society.

  Whenever we were in Johannesburg, my family would expect trouble at night. We were always on high alert for Dad’s “danger voice,” which brooked no questions. Bron and I knew and respected that voice out in the bush, where the threat of lions and mambas loomed; it was so odd to hear it in “civilization.” Dad would always circle the drive before pulling in toward our house, the headlights sweeping the grounds. He never drove directly through the gate; he rolled past it first, then quickly doubled back in case a would-be hijacker was waiting in the nearby foliage. Although Mom and Dad kept it secret from us at the time, hijackings, kidnappings, robbery, and murder were omnipresent threats. If Dad had to leave on a business trip, he’d always tell me, “Remember, you’re the man of the house, Boyd. It’s your job to look after your mother and sister.”

  My naïveté concerning the harsh realities of life in post-apartheid South Africa ended on that night in March. I woke up to find Bron sitting on me. She did this in an attempt to restrain my reaction when I saw that her hands were tied. Then the handgun appeared from behind the door, followed by the face of a young black man whose cold expression and flinty eyes suggested a life of violence and desolation. I could see it in his casual, threatening demeanor; I could feel his volatility and willingness to escalate. The air disappeared as if one collective breath had stolen all the oxygen.

  As that man and two others walked in, I felt the most primal fear I have ever experienced. There was no shadow of a doubt that this was the worst moment of my life. I wasn’t dealing with a familiar, measured risk with a set of principles and rules governing the dangers of the wild. These were humans, desperate humans. They weren’t following any rule book I understood. I couldn’t read their body language. I couldn’t read anything. My body was shaking; I could barely breathe as I saw cocked handguns pointed at my sister’s face.

  I went back to my bush education. I was terrified, but I forced myself to remain calm.

  I later learned that the invaders had already been in the house for two hours while I’d slept. Mom, Bron, and Kate had all been downstairs watching a movie. Dad was out of town. The assailants had found the women first and tied them up with their own shoelaces, the fine cords cutting into their hands and ankles so deeply that the limbs turned purple and the bruising remained for weeks after. They’d separated Mom from Bron and Kate, out of their sight, forcing her facedown on the rug. Bron heard her mother’s whimpers and believed she was being raped. She was about to struggle to her feet—which could easily have earned her a pistol strike across the head or worse—when Kate threw her body across Bron’s. “You are not going to move,” Kate whispered to her. “Your mother is fine.” Bron swallowed her scream.

  Later the invaders untied the women’s ankles and forced them upstairs so they could rifle through drawers for money and jewelry, which they took outside along with anything else they could lay hands on: linens, pots and pans, appliances, alcohol. Their English was limited but crystal clear. “Money. Money. We’ll kill you.” One of the men led our dog, Tatty, off to another room because she was barking madly. Suddenly, silence. The women were terrified that she’d been killed, and they all lost heart, thinking, “If they’ve killed the dog, they’ll kill us.” Bron told me later, “I accepted death completely. There were times when I knew this was now it.”

  After I was woken up, the robbers herded me and Bron upstairs into the living room and onto the couch, where my mother and Kate were sitting with their hands tied. The ringleader glared at me. “Guns. Where are guns?” I opened my mouth to reply
, but Mom stomped down hard on my foot. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said. “We haven’t got any guns.” In fact, our one handgun was locked inside a gun cabinet in an obvious place. I was terrified that they would find it, realize that we’d been lying, and take their revenge. From my room downstairs I’d heard them going through the upstairs cupboards. I’d counted the bangs as each door swung shut—one, two, three. The gun was in the fourth cabinet, right at eye level. But they never found it.

  Stress does remarkable things to the senses; smell, sight, and hearing become so acute. I realized that the four of us had become aware of each other’s thoughts. Whenever the robbers were in the room with us, we couldn’t speak out loud, but somehow we were all on the same wavelength, able to understand each other perfectly. If their backs were turned, we’d also pantomime. Mom decided that she was going to kick the assailants down the stairs; while they were distracted, ransacking some drawers, she pumped her leg furiously and mouthed instructions, getting ready for a practice run, before Kate and Bron stopped her with slicing motions across their necks.

  A dance began as we tried to seek out threads of humanity, appealing to all manner of decency and stereotype. Mom tried cowering like a traditional Shangaan woman, whimpering, “Please don’t hurt us.” Then she tried being aggressive: “There’s no money around here. Get out of here!” She assumed the mantle of an elder matriarch, a position revered among Africans, ordering, “No, just stop that. You can’t do that.” She collapsed into exasperation: “I’m telling you. We don’t have anything.” Bron tried misdirection, urging, “No, no, don’t take that. Take this; it’s much more valuable.” “Mfowethu” I called them. “Brother.”