Look to Grace. I’ll find you, Gracie, I’ll find you.
And then Boubacar was shaking me awake. “Someone’s coming,” he said as I struggled to stand up, disorientated and dizzy from the too-short sleep and the now-pounding headache. I heard the truck barreling toward us before I saw it appear through the glare of the afternoon sun, dust billowing behind it. Brakes squeaked, and more dust rained down on us.
A white man leaned out the window. “You want work?”
Boubacar stood up. “Yes, but—”
“You want to work, you get in the back of the truck, otherwise I leave you here,” he said, revving the engine.
Deo and Innocent hopped aboard, and with Boubacar’s strong hands, they hauled me over the side. I had lost all my strength and felt weak and feverish. Stumpy roared at me with angry spikes for disturbing him; blood and pus seeped through the dressing.
Boubacar took a seat leaning against the cab and laid my crutches beside me.
“Are you all right, Patson?” he asked. “You don’t look good.”
“My leg is bleeding,” I said quietly. “I need to change the dressing.”
Above me, Deo and Innocent found room on top of the wooden boxes.
“Don’t sit on the bloody boxes!” the white man shouted, turning the truck around and driving away, as the dust rose into the air behind us and I flinched at every painful bump along the dirt track and wondered why I was so cold.
Flying Tomato Farm
South Africa
16 April
I met Boubacar under a huge baobab tree in the middle of the forest. He was the ugliest man I had ever seen, and Grace was afraid of him. He took us around Elephant Skull mountain, through a dangerous, dark forest, and delivered us safely to Marange. He helped me get a fortune from the Baron. He drove me into the mountains so that I could heal. He taught me what it means to be a man. He hid me in a burrow, dragged me across a river, carried me away from lions, and once we made it into South Africa, he found a cow doctor to take my fever away.
But most important of all, he is helping me find my sister, the only person I have left in the world.
Now Boubacar is no longer ugly to me. The scars on his cheeks are stripes of courage, his broken nose a mark of determination, and his bloodshot eyes are the kindest I have ever known. But there is one thing I don’t understand. Why? Why is he doing this? Why is he so determined to help me?
GRACE
The first morning I woke up at the Flying Tomato Farm, I was hot and sweating one moment, then cold and shivering the next. My stump was swollen; the skin was red and tender, and pus oozed from the wound. Obviously this was Stumpy’s revenge for dousing him in the muddy Limpopo River and dragging him through the game reserve. For the next two days I drifted in and out of fever-sleep, thankful for the bed, the plates of freshly sliced and salted tomatoes, and the jugs of clean, cool water that Boubacar forced me to drink. I don’t remember much about the Flying Tomato Farm, except that at one point I woke up to find a white woman with blue eyes and blond hair staring down at me. She looked both concerned and sympathetic as she cleaned my wound and rebandaged it, all the while mumbling something about sepsis. Then I felt a sharp prick in my arm and fell back to sleep.
Stumpy must have liked her attention, as the next day he stopped complaining and his swelling subsided. Later, Boubacar explained that she was actually a veterinarian called to the farm to attend to a cow in labor, and the shot in my arm had been an intramuscular antibiotic; the best she had to offer. She’d also given him five days’ worth of antibiotic pills, but warned that gangrene could still happen if I didn’t get to a proper hospital soon.
Gerber, the burly, well-tanned foreman of the Flying Tomato Farm, was less helpful. “I’m running a business, not a hospital,” he said, stopping just inside the doorway to the workers’ dormitory. “Benjamin,” he called out to the old white-haired black man who managed all the farm’s refugee workers. “I want these two gone, first thing tomorrow morning. Understood?”
“Yes, boss,” Benjamin replied, and then turned to Boubacar as Gerber left the dormitory. “I’m sorry. You will have to go. These beds are for people who work here. Tomorrow more will come.”
“We understand, madala,” said Boubacar, using the respectful name for the older man. “You’ll get no trouble from us.”
Benjamin nodded, lifted his hands in apology, and left.
“You feeling better, Patson?”
“A little, and at least Stumpy’s not so swollen.”
“We have to leave tomorrow, Patson. I think early is best. My Congolese friends will pick us up and drive us to Johannesburg. The journey will take maybe six or seven hours.”
“I’ll be ready,” I said, showing him Grace’s latest Mxit.
Tues 4/15/08 3.16pm
Where r u BB?!!! I’m in Alexandra township now. Det left me with old man in a shack. Tried to escape but nowhere to go. Det found me. Come soon. xxx
Wed 4/16/08 10.01am
Det took my money. He wants me to work for him when we get to Cape Town. What do I do? Plzzzz come!! xxx
“Tell her we’ll be in Joburg tomorrow afternoon. Get an address. We’re close now, Patson,” he said, laying his hand on my shoulder.
I sent Grace the message, then turned to my last diary entry. “I wrote something, Boubacar. About you. Would you like to hear?”
“About me?” he said with an embarrassed chuckle. “You have me curious now. So what did you write about this fellow Boubacar?”
I opened my diary and started reading the passage I had written about him. When I had finished, Boubacar reached for the diary and flicked through its pages. “But she was at least a pretty cow doctor, yes?” he said with a smile. “Are all the words written here as good as those you just read to me?”
“Not all of them.” I shrugged. “But why, Boubacar? I don’t understand why you are helping me.”
He ran his hand over his face and dropped his head to his chest, avoiding my eyes. Then he clasped his large hands, weaving his fingers together, and I watched them pulse in and out, in and out, like a beating heart beneath his chin.
“Boubacar?”
He shook his head, and, without looking at me, raised his hand, as if he were trying to work out a puzzle. I waited, and when he finally spoke, his voice was strained as he searched for words to explain what I could not understand.
“There is a war in my country. They may call the DRC the Democratic Republic of Congo, but it is not so democratic. Many people are being killed there. Rebel soldiers fight the government. They came to my village when I was fourteen and made me into a soldier. There were other boys who had been stolen from their families, but I went into the bush with the rebels because I hated the government. They had taken my father away and killed him. So I left my sister and my little brother with my mother and joined Reverend Lubango’s Army of Assurance. It was a time of madness. Drugs, alcohol, and words. Dangerous words.
“The Reverend taught us how to fight and kill people. We would sit and smoke marijuana, drink, smoke some more, and listen to his words driven into our heads. We had rifles and bullets and became firing machines fueled by narcotics. We followed every order just to keep the drugs coming. The things I did… terrible things, Patson, I can never tell you. And I was a good soldier. Too good. They made me a leader and gave me my own boys so that I could turn them into soldiers as good as me.
“One day we were ordered to attack a village. It was always the same—words, alcohol, drugs, and more words until we were ready to kill. That night we hid in the bushes waiting for the storm to break. I led the way through the dark rain, firing and running, running and firing at anything that moved. The villagers stood no chance. We cut them down but then, as the sun rose, that village of dead people seemed strangely familiar to me.
“I recognized the tree my brother and I had climbed, the hut where my mother lived, and the toys my sister played with. When I found my family, they looked no different fr
om the other dead bodies. I started crying only because I felt nothing. I was dead inside. After that day, my need for drugs, alcohol, and words to keep my life bearable, died.
“Somehow I found a way to stop taking the drugs. To only pretend to drink and later to understand that Reverend Lubango’s words were lies. Slowly I found a way back to myself. And when I looked at the boys who followed me so blindly, I wanted to save them. One by one I got them off the drugs, and together we found the strength to resist Reverend Lubango’s words. I led seven of them out of the forest until the UN soldiers found us and took us in. They changed my life except that I had nothing left to live for.”
Boubacar paused to catch his breath while I tried to grasp the enormity of what he had told me, ashamed, too, at how selfishly I had been wrapped up only in my own story. When he finally looked up his face was streaked with tears.
“When you came to me in the forest, Patson, holding your sister’s hand, I saw my own little brother and sister coming back to me.” He paused, struggling to catch his breath. “You see, Patson, my sister’s name was also Grace.”
His shoulders started to shake then, as he gave way to his tears, and I leaned forward to clumsily embrace him.
“We will find her, Boubacar, I know we will,” were the only words I could manage.
7.40 AM
Early the next morning we stood outside the Flying Tomato Farm, searching the dust road for the minibus that would take us to Johannesburg. My head buzzed with a headache and, despite the warm sunshine, I shivered in another fever chill. I had taken one of the vet’s pills, but it had made me nauseous and woozy. So much for her horse medicine, I thought, and threw the remaining pills away. We both knew I was not ready to travel, but Foreman Gerber’s orders and the late-night Mxit message I got from Grace left us no choice: Determine had bought their Joburg to Cape Town tickets; they were leaving on the three o’clock train this afternoon. If all went well, Boubacar thought that we could be at the train station by two o’clock, and still be in good time to intercept them before they boarded for Cape Town. There was no time for me to recover; we had to keep moving.
While we waited, I looked across field after field of tomato bushes stretched out toward the faraway mountains. Boubacar explained that the white plastic tents were protecting the young bushes, and I was amazed at the gleaming tractors, the cultivating machines, and the trucks coming and going with boxes all stamped with a red tomato with angel wings. I had never seen any Zimbabwean farm like this, and Boubacar remarked that here in South Africa, there were many farms that were even bigger than this one. How was it possible that across the Limpopo River, people were without work and starving, and yet here there was such wealth and opportunity? It was no wonder thousands of people were leaving Zimbabwe and risking their lives to get here.
In a nearby field, I saw Innocent’s lanky frame moving up and down the bushes, picking tomatoes. He spotted me and waved furiously. I waved back, sorry not to have said good-bye properly to him and Deo. I had never met anyone quite like Innocent, so accepting, so kind, and yet in a world of his own. He was so convinced that I would run again one day that it was hard not to believe him.
“Here he comes,” said Boubacar as a cloud of dust appeared over the horizon, but the vehicle that came into sight was a police van. As it approached the gate the van drove past us slowly, and a black policeman in the passenger seat glanced our way as they went by.
The brake lights flashed red; the van reversed and both doors flew open simultaneously. Two hefty officers got out and walked toward us. The white man was Sergeant Brandt, according to the brass badge pinned to the pocket above his huge stomach, which his belt could hardly contain. His partner, the owner of a pair of tree-trunk thighs, hitched up his trousers as he looked us up and down. Boubacar stepped in front of me, his hand slowly slipping into his backpack.
“ID,” demanded the white man.
“Good day, Sergeant Brandt,” said Boubacar pleasantly. “I’m afraid we do not have our passports with us at present. We were visiting friends here and—”
“You’re from the Congo, aren’t you, Frenchie?” Boubacar barely nodded. “And you, boy, you’re from Zimbabwe, right?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Get in the back of the van.”
“You’re both illegals. Let’s go,” shouted the black policeman, making a move toward me.
“Please, Corporal Mashau, there is no need to shout,” soothed Boubacar. “We’re all intelligent men. Perhaps we might come to some arrangement.”
“We’ve already made our arrangement,” said Mashau, chuckling.
Neither of them knew the danger they were in. Boubacar’s beguiling French accent had lulled them into believing he was harmless, but the tension in his muscles and the softness of his words told me that at any moment he might pull his knife, and these overweight policemen wouldn’t stand a chance.
“No, Boubacar,” I said, hobbling between them. “Please, sir, my sister has been kidnapped and we have to find her.” I attempted my most affecting voice, playing the cripple card as best I could, but, obviously hardened by the never-ending hard-luck stories of refugees, the policeman only shrugged.
“Yah, that’s at least a new one. Now get in,” ordered Brandt as he opened the back of the van. With only a slight hesitation, Boubacar freed his hand from his bag to help me into the van.
Mashau was laughing as he padlocked the rear door and walked back to the front. “Well, that was the easiest ten grand I ever made,” he said.
“All in a day’s work,” grunted Brandt, heaving himself into the van, which dipped under his weight. We heard the doors slam, and felt the vehicle maneuver a three-point turn and barrel down the dirt road back the way they had come. Boubacar took out his cell phone and spoke rapidly in French as I tried to hold on while the van hurtled along the road.
“Please, sir, my sister has been kidnapped,” I yelled through the hatch into the front seat. “We have to be at the train station in Johannesburg by two o’clock. Please. A bad man is taking her to Cape Town. She’s only nine years old.” The only thing I heard was Brandt talking on his cell phone, before Mashau slammed the dividing window shut.
I turned back to Boubacar, who stared grimly out the small window in the van’s rear door. “Once we get to the police station, we can explain everything. I can show them Grace’s Mxit messages—”
“Patson, they’re not taking us to any police station.”
9.30 AM
The drive to Musina took almost two hours. We passed several men on the sides of the road, most of them looking like refugees, but we sped by them in a cloud of dust. Outside the town, more people, burdened with luggage, plastic containers, pots, children on their backs, were trying to get through the front gates into a large area beneath the sign: MUSINA SHOWGROUND.
“There’s nowhere else to put the thousands of people coming over the border,” explained Boubacar, and in the fields beyond I saw hundreds of makeshift shelters packed tightly together. On the pavement outside the Showground, families were camped out in the open, their clothes, blankets, and bags piled around them and hanging from the Showground fence. Women were cooking food on the pavement, and small children were being washed in open buckets. Grace had seen all this too. No wonder she was afraid in Musina.
Farther along we were stopped at an intersection where an army troop carrier and two police vans were parked. Out our small window I could see a large billboard:
WE KNOW WHY YOU ARE IN SOUTH AFRICA:
LIFE IN ZIMBABWE IS MURDER
BUT PLEASE GO BACK TO VOTE. WE CAN ALL BE FREE.
Two men were on a ladder scraping off the sign. Across the street a small crowd was shouting at them to leave it alone. They held placards with slogans: FREE ZIMBABWE, ARREST WAR CRIMINAL MUGABE, and WE WANT FREE ELECTIONS. The South African soldiers stood silently watching, their rifles pointing casually to the ground.
Boubacar’s cell phone buzzed, and he answered in rapid French. T
hen he nudged me aside to peer out through the window. “Come on, come on,” he muttered.
“What is it?”
“My Congolese brothers,” he said as our van picked up speed and swung around a corner. I lost my balance, and fell hard to the floor. “Hey!” shouted Boubacar, smacking his fist into the side of the van. “Be careful. You have a sick boy here!”
His protest made no difference. Brandt switched on the siren and we raced down the main road and drove right past the Musina Police Station. Boubacar was right: Sergeant Brandt and Corporal Mashau had another destination in mind for us. On the way to Musina, Boubacar had described the network that existed between the Zimbabwean military and rogue members of the South African police open to bribery. Political refugees crossing the border were easily identified by spies in their midst, picked up by the South African police, and, for a substantial fee, were handed straight back into the arms of the officers of the Zimbabwean Central Intelligence Organisation.
“That’s why I did not want us to come anywhere near Musina,” he had said. “There are many spies working for Mugabe’s soldiers.”
Commander Jesus must have alerted his contacts on this side of the border, and we had been so easy to find. Now even the dangers of the fast-flowing river and the game reserve seemed preferable to being trapped in this hot metal box bulleting through Musina with its sirens blaring, to an unknown destination where Commander Jesus would surely be waiting for us. I could hardly think straight. I was sweating and thirsty and my head felt as if it would burst. Escape seemed impossible; our journey had ended in the back of a police van. All I wanted to do was to lie down and give over to my exhaustion. This time Commander Jesus would never let me go, and I would never know what happened to Grace.
Diamond Boy Page 23