by Tony Park
In the absence of any mines to clear or ammunition to dispose of, the army engineers, like the doctors, nurses and infantrymen they worked alongside, set to the grim business of cleaning out the hospital at Kigali which the Australian contingent was tasked with reopening. Now the UN badge on one of the shirts in his kitbag caught Mike’s eye and he remembered the criticism that had been levelled against the organisation – that it had gone in too late, despite ample warning of the bloodbath that ensued.
The hospital, that place of mercy and healing, had been used by one tribe as a place to slaughter another tribe. Standing outside the gutted building, chain-smoking to try to remove the stench of death in his nostrils, Mike and a couple of other Australians had listened to a French missionary describe what had happened.
‘These were people, oui, people like you and me, comprenez, understand? They herded their former friends and neighbours and workmates, employees and employers, into lines at gunpoint and marched them to the hospital.’ The grey-haired priest cast his eyes to the sky, then blinked a couple of times before continuing.
‘They did not want to waste the bullets, understand? They used machetes. The victims were made to kneel over a toilet bowl where they were decapitated or had their throats slit. The theory was that the blood could be flushed away.’
The theory didn’t hold up, as Mike and the other soldiers discovered. Every toilet in the hospital was choked with blood and flesh and hair and Christ alone knew what else. It was their job to clean them out.
He recalled how the missionary had anticipated their questions before they had a chance to ask them.
‘You are asking yourself why the people waiting in the lines for extermination didn’t run, charge their armed guards or do anything else to escape the slaughter, non?’
Mike had nodded.
‘The answer is simple. A witness, a boy who hid over there in the bushes, explained it to me. The killers hacked off the feet of those waiting in the lines so they couldn’t run. Some bled to death where they lay, others were dragged into the toilet blocks where they were finished off.’
Mike recalled that up until then his Africa had been one of sweeping plains, magnificent wildlife and, what they called in the army, low-intensity conflict. In Namibia, the black population had overthrown the white population. There had been killings and atrocities on both sides – that happened in any war – but what he had seen in Rwanda was genocide. One race wiping out another race.
Once the hospital was up and running again, they were kept busy with a host of other projects. The Australians built or repaired orphanages and churches, scraped away more dried blood and tried to restore some order to a shattered country. Who, he had wondered, would ever really want to return to it? It had the smell of a slaughterhouse mixed with that of a freshly burnt-down building. Woodsmoke from thousands of campfires hung over the refugee camps and the towns like a suffocating funeral shroud.
When Mike got home to Australia he realised yet again that he didn’t have a home, except for the army. He had started to wonder if he had got it all wrong. After eight years of part-time study he had finally finished his degree, interrupted by sojourns to various war zones, which had never ceased to impress his tutors. But of what use, he asked himself time and again, was a degree in zoology to a soldier?
Rian had left his job-for-life in the National Parks Service, resigned to the fact that he would no longer be entitled to the best posts and pay because of the colour of his skin. However, he had transferred his knowledge of the African bush to his country’s fastest growing industry – tourism.
He began by running tours from South Africa into Zimbabwe and Namibia in a second-hand Volkswagen Kombi. After a couple of years he sank the money he had so far saved into two old ex-army Bedford trucks. Like a dozen or more other entrepreneurs with the same idea, he planned to offer overland tours for foreign backpackers, travelling from Cape Town or Jo’burg to as far afield as Nairobi or, civil wars in intervening counties permitting, Cairo.
Mike had visited South Africa on holiday and Rian had proudly showed off his tour vehicles.
‘Jesus, mate, you couldn’t pay me enough to ride to Nairobi in the back of one of these heaps,’ Mike had chided him.
‘You may laugh, man, but the English, Germans, Danes, you Aussies, and Kiwis are happy to pay for the privilege of riding in Nelson and Susie,’ he said, giving Nelson, who was named after Mandela, an affectionate pat on its bright yellow bonnet. Susie de Witt had mixed feelings about having a stubby, rusting, smoke-belching ex-army truck named in her honour, but accepted the compliment graciously and dutifully christened her with a bottle of Stellenbosch sparkling wine over her bullbar.
Rian could only spend a few days with Mike because he had other work to do. As well as running his own business he occasionally instructed safari-guide courses and, on the spur of the moment, he invited Mike to come along as a student.
‘There’s been a cancellation,’ he explained.
‘What, you want me to spend my holiday being ordered about the bush by a South African?’ Mike laughed.
‘You might learn something. There’ll be no favouritism.’
‘You mean you won’t shoot if I get charged by a lion?’
‘It’ll be good for you,’ Rian said, his tone suddenly less flippant.
Rian was right, and Mike knew it from the first day of the course. Rian taught his students tracking, bird and plant identification, and new and fascinating information about Africa’s big game that Mike had never found in any textbook. They also learned how to safely shepherd city-bred tourists through some of the most dangerous country in the world.
After the course, on the drive back to his home, Rian had seemed relieved to again be able to talk to Mike as a close friend.
‘You did well. I mean it. A lot of these kids are trying to become guides because they see it as a way of getting rich, which it isn’t, or as a fast ticket out of the townships. You’re doing it because you love the bush and you love the wildlife. I can’t teach them that,’ he said.
‘But what good is it going to do me?’ Mike had asked.
‘That’s your problem, my friend. But there is work here for good guides and work further north, in Botswana, Zambia and Tanzania. You’ll find South African-trained guides in all those countries, and not all of them are South Africans.’
It was a tempting thought. A life in the African bush, impressing rich foreign tourists, some of them no doubt female and attractive, sounded appealing to Mike. He had shelved the idea as a nice dream, however, and promised Rian he would one day return to Africa.
Six months later he was back, once more at the expense of the Australian taxpayer. Mike had known about Operation Coracle, his army’s contribution to the mine-clearing effort in Mozambique, for several years, and had made no secret of his ambitions to be part of it.
His army career had progressed steadily, if not meteorically, and he had made the jump from warrant officer to the commissioned ranks, as a captain, by virtue of his years of experience. He was promoted to major after ticking the boxes in a series of boring desk jobs and, after much persistence, finally landed what had seemed like his dream posting – Mozambique.
Now the dream had turned into a nightmare, with the deaths of Carlos and Fernando, but he knew things would be OK if he could wake up next to Isabella every day for the rest of his life.
Mike looked around his Maputo flat once more to make sure he hadn’t forgotten anything. He took the framed picture of Isabella and him at the beach from the wall and placed it on top of the clothes in his kitbag.
3
The next morning, Monday, Mike headed back to the UN offices on Avenida da Angola, all his senses as usual assaulted by daily life in Maputo. African women in bright blouses and tight skirts on their way to work gingerly stepped around piles of rotting garbage. Blue-black exhaust smoke belched from cars that wouldn’t be allowed on the road in a western country, and pedestrians dodged speeding chapas, sma
ll vans converted to taxis, driven by apparently suicidal young men with booming car radios turned up as far as the volume dial would go. The sun was already strong, but any relief from the heat offered by shady trees on the sidewalk was countered by the stench of stale urine at the base of their trunks. The stormwater drain by the side of the road smelled of untreated sewage.
Mike pushed open the heavy wooden door that led to the UN offices and waved hello to the guardo, the security guard employed by the construction company that owned the building. He pushed a button and the electric door lock buzzed, allowing Mike to enter.
He nodded good morning to one of the Finns working on the ground floor. The man was seated at his desk behind a glass partition and looked to Mike like a hairy blond fish in a bowl. He headed upstairs to the mezzanine level, where he and most of the other UN officers worked.
Jake’s office had a sign, ‘Chief Technical Adviser’, stuck to the glass partition. Mike walked in without knocking. Now that he had made the decision to leave the army he wanted to sever his ties to it, and the world of mine clearance, as quickly as possible.
‘Goodbye, Jake. I’m leaving the army. It’s been nice knowing you.’
‘Not so fast, you’ve still got some explaining to do,’ Jake said. ‘You can’t just ride off into the sunset like that.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘We haven’t seen the end of this . . . incident. The higher-ups want to know what you and Carlos were doing digging around in the dirt in the first place. You’re a technical adviser, not a mine clearer.’
Mike bridled at the comment, but he had no real quarrel with Jake. ‘You wanted us to find a place to take a bunch of glorified tourists, including the press. Carlos spotted a mine virtually on the cleared path. If he hadn’t got his hands dirty and lifted it you would have ended up with a dead dignitary – or worse, a dead reporter – on your hands.’
‘And now I’m short one technical adviser,’ Jake said.
‘He had a name. Carlos. And no, you’re short two technical advisers. I told you, I’m taking my leave and I’m getting out of the army as soon as I get back to Australia.’
‘Then what?’
‘I’m planning on coming back.’
‘I’ll get you a job as a civilian contractor,’ Jake offered, his tone conciliatory now.
‘Thanks, but no thanks. Anyway, what I do will depend on someone else.’
‘Who?’
‘A woman.’
‘Ah, I see. Been holding out on us, have you? Local girl?’
Mike shrugged.
‘Anyway,’ Jake continued, ‘you’re going nowhere just yet. You’ve got to go back to the scene of the crime, and it’s not me, or the UN, that says so. It’s the cops. There’s some South African detective in town who wants to find out what happened to the elephant.’
‘The elephant? For fuck’s sake, why?’
‘He is, or was, a South African elephant. Something of a national treasure, or so I’m led to believe. One of the big tuskers of the Kruger park and there are some seriously pissed people over the border,’ Jake said, consulting a fax flimsy on his desk.
‘What’s that got to do with me?’ Mike asked, annoyed. He wanted to get to the hospital in Maputo where Isabella worked. He had missed the chance to see her at Mapai at the weekend, even though they had only been a few dozen kilometres apart, but there was no phone at the clinic and no way for him to get a message to her, despite several calls to her hospital. He had called her home, a small apartment in the nicer part of town, that morning, but there was no answer. He assumed she was on her way to work.
‘You hit that elephant with a round from an AK-47, unless my recollection of your statement is incorrect,’ Jake said.
‘That round probably ricocheted off his skull, Jake. I might as well have been spitting at him for the harm it did him. And anyway, he was trying to kill me.’
‘I know, I know. Take it easy. And I’ve already heard from your colonel that you’re bailing out. Anyway, you’re not leaving the country until you come and tell your story to the South African Police.’
‘I’ve got more important things to do first, Jake. I’ll call you later.’
He turned and walked out of Jake’s office and down the stairs. Outside, he hailed a battered Peugeot cab in the street and told the driver he wanted to go to the hospital.
His first meeting with Isabella, not long after he arrived in Mozambique, was far from romantic. It was due to an ingrown toenail. He was a little embarrassed about the injury, but it was giving him hell and had flared up badly in the African heat.
Before he had left Australia, a warrant officer who had just completed a tour with the mine-clearing detachment had given him some good advice about health care in Mozambique: ‘Don’t get sick.’ But Mike couldn’t put off dealing with his problem any longer. It was too tricky for the UN team’s own medic and not serious enough to warrant shipping him across the border to a nice clean hospital in South Africa.
Like most of Maputo, the hospital was built by the Portuguese during their colonial rule and it looked like it had gone to pot in the twenty-five years or so since they had left. Jake’s assistant had made an appointment for Mike to see a doctor, apparently Portuguese and allegedly competent. When he arrived at the hospital he had mentioned the name to a bored-looking woman picking her nose behind a cigarette-burned laminate counter. She pointed down a corridor of yellowed linoleum where a fluorescent light buzzed and flickered on and off.
Half-a-dozen African patients were sitting on a collection of battered kitchen chairs and cheap vinyl-covered lounges oozing foam stuffing from knife wounds. Two of the patients, a heavily pregnant woman and a painfully thin man with a blood-soaked bandage on his arm, had eyed him coldly. As he set off down the corridor into the guttering light, the soles of his boots stuck to the cracked tiles every now and then. The place smelled like it had last been cleaned with bleach diluted with urine and spew. He had thought, briefly, of Kigali hospital in Rwanda, then forced the image from his head.
At last, he had found a door with a handwritten cardboard nameplate stuck to it. He knocked, and an African woman in a fraying blue nurse’s uniform opened the door. She seemed to be expecting him, which he took as a positive sign. She told him that Dr Nunes – she pronounced it Noon-ez – would see him shortly. He pictured an overweight, drink-ravaged, ageing Latin quack, debauched by a life of exile in a former colony, not game to show himself in his homeland ever again.
There was just enough room for a wheeled examination bed, covered in a sheet which, like the nurse, was crisp but a little tatty, a small metal writing desk and a hard chair made of welded steel tubing. On the wall was a poster with Portuguese writing which featured two attractive Africans, one male and one female, and a pink condom with a smiley face. He hoped they would all be very happy together. There was a kidney-shaped dish on the table covered with a white cloth and he didn’t particularly want to know what was in it. The floor tiles were cleaner here than in the corridor, but he noted a tiny pile of pellet-like droppings in one corner. Fortunately there was a window and outside he could hear birds singing. He waited fifteen minutes and was contemplating chickening out when the door scraped open again.
She was, quite simply, beautiful. Her skin was the colour of dark honey, her brown eyes sparkling as she smiled her first greeting. Her tight white T-shirt and shortish denim skirt accentuated her lithe figure. Her hair was cut in a bob, and she had a pair of wraparound sunglasses with amber-coloured lenses perched on the top of her head.
‘Is hot, no?’ She had smiled, fanning herself with a clipboard. ‘Major, eh? Big man, no? I am Dr Nunes. Sorry to keep you.’
Mike had coughed, his throat suddenly dry. Here was the most attractive woman he’d so far seen in Mozambique making small talk with him and he couldn’t even speak.
‘Sore toe, no? Not sore throat as well!’ she laughed.
He had thought she must have known the effect she had on men, p
articularly expatriate men far from home.
She was younger than he was – in her early thirties, he guessed. There was no wedding band on her finger and for a moment he feared she might be a nun, a member of some modern order that allowed its sisters to shave their legs and wear designer sunglasses. No way, he had told himself. God could be unfair, but not that cruel.
‘What are you doing here? In Mozambique, I mean.’
He coughed again. ‘Clearing mines.’
‘Ah, good for you. I treat too many landmine victims and it makes me hate soldiers.’
‘Hey, we’re clearing landmines, not laying them,’ he said defensively.
‘You are an army engineer, no?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then you were trained to lay these things as well as clear them, no?’
‘Yes. But I never have.’
‘Good for you. The work you do is worthwhile, but I think it will never be finished,’ she said. As she spoke she prodded Mike’s painfully swollen big toe with various implements that looked to him like they had been designed and manufactured during the Spanish Inquisition.
She bit her lower lip as she concentrated. ‘Big, strong man like you does not need anaesthetic, I think. Better we save it for the injured little children, no?’ Mike realised, as he winced in pain, that her question was rhetorical.
‘Not even a bullet to bite on?’ he gasped.
She shook her head.
His adventure in pain finally over, he had found he was still tongue-tied as she bandaged his throbbing toe, but he was saved by a bird.