De Villiers swallowed heavily.
‘You’ve suffered a brain injury. You’ve been in a coma for months. We must expect there to be some deficit in your memory, in what you can remember and in the way your memory reconstructs the things you do remember.’
De Villiers didn’t understand.
‘It is not possible,’ he insisted. ‘FAPLA is a crude fighting force. They just don’t have this kind of finesse.’
Nienaber nodded, but it was not a nod of concurrence. ‘I’m talking of the Soviets, Pierre, not FAPLA. They are very skilled at mindaltering and have very advanced techniques for that. They’re miles ahead of the West in that.’
De Villiers shook his head. ‘And, Pierre,’ Nienaber said, ‘the clarity of your memory actually supports my assessment. You see, Pierre, the brain makes up fantastic stories to make sense of things it doesn’t understand, and it clings to them afterwards with a desperation born out of necessity. Otherwise you would lose your mind. You see, the mind protects itself by going into denial.’
Everything I say is turned against me, De Villiers thought, everything. ‘I’m tired,’ he said suddenly. ‘I feel faint.’
‘Okay, get some rest. We can talk again tomorrow when you feel better,’ Nienaber said and pressed the buzzer for the nurse.
‘But Pierre, I want you to think about this: there’s no General van den Bergh in the SADF. Not in Military Intelligence and no one by that name in the regular army. We have published lists of all the senior officers, in fact, of every member of the SADF, and I can tell you there’s no such general. Please think about that, because it undermines your whole story. And there’s never been anyone called Jacques Verster in the army either.’
It dawned on De Villiers that Nienaber must have been briefed by the military, probably General van den Bergh or the major. This man is not trying to help me remember. He’s trying to make me forget. I’m not saying another word to these people, De Villiers said to himself. Not a single fucking word.
But Professor Nienaber hadn’t finished with him and it would get worse before it got better. De Villiers suffered several petit mal seizures during the night and when they took him to see Professor Nienaber the next morning, he was weak and his limbs felt heavy.
‘Have you given any thought to what I explained to you yesterday?’ Nienaber started.
De Villiers nodded. ‘Yes.’
‘Well?’
De Villiers pushed his hands though his hair. ‘But I remember everything so clearly.’
Nienaber smiled and put his hand over De Villiers’s. ‘That’s precisely the point, Pierre. After everything you’ve been through, you could not possibly have a clear memory. Even the drugs we had to give you to clear the infection and to keep you alive would have an effect. It is nothing to be ashamed about.’
De Villiers licked his lips but his tongue was dry. ‘Could I have some water, please?’
Nienaber pressed the bell for the nurse. She came in and returned a minute later with a carafe and two glasses on a tray. There was ice in a small silver beaker.
De Villiers drank deeply from his glass and poured a second.
When he looked up he found Nienaber studying him. ‘You were never on such a mission, Pierre. They tell me there’s no such weapon either. Just listen to yourself. A weapon with a 2300 metre range when the next best can reach no further than 1600? I don’t think so.’
De Villiers shook his head. He had test-fired the weapon at Swartwater and he had carried half of it in a special backpack, listening to Verster’s groans as he struggled with the other half. He knew what he knew.
Nienaber held eye contact with him and reached under the desk.
‘Here,’ he announced, ‘we have your backpack, the one you used on that last mission.’
De Villiers strained to see behind the desk as Nienaber lifted a standard issue backpack onto his lap. ‘Isn’t this your backpack?’ he asked.
It can’t be, De Villiers thought, but the backpack was there on the desk.
A range of doubts raced through De Villiers’s mind as he watched Nienaber undoing the aluminium buckles one by one. The realisation that it was indeed his backpack was punctuated by the clatter when its contents were unceremoniously dumped on the desk, like a witchdoctor’s bones.
Amongst the scattered items was !Xau’s Best and a few mottled wing feathers of a guinea fowl.
De Villiers stood up and took a step backwards. Professor Nienaber smiled the smile of the knowing. De Villiers’s eyes travelled from the backpack’s contents to the backpack and back again.
This is messing with my mind, he thought.
But it wasn’t the backpack he had carried on his mission with Verster, and the Best didn’t belong with the backpack on the desk.
He found Professor Nienaber’s eyes again.
‘See,’ Professor Nienaber said. ‘We even have your knife.’ He pushed the Best towards De Villiers.
De Villiers opened his mouth to speak, to argue, to deny and to explain, but decided that it would serve no purpose.
‘I can see you don’t believe me,’ Nienaber said. ‘Let’s do a little test.’
He opened his briefcase and pulled a photo album from it. He turned the pages slowly until he found the image he was looking for.
‘Look at this photograph,’ he said and turned the album around. He pointed at a photograph of a woman holding a baby. ‘Do you know who that is?’ he asked.
De Villiers shook his head. He felt the bitter taste of almonds rising in his throat and closed his eyes. He breathed slowly, as they had taught him to do, to ward off another petit mal.
Nienaber waited, and when De Villiers opened his eyes again, he said, ‘Go on. Page through the album and tell me when you recognise someone.’
De Villiers slowly turned the pages. He was in several photographs with the woman and the baby. There were many other people in the photographs and sometimes he was in them too, but he didn’t recognise anyone other than himself.
Exasperated, he eventually looked up at Professor Nienaber. ‘What does this mean?’
‘It means, Pierre, that it may be a while before you’ll be back to normal again.’
De Villiers looked at the knife and the feathers for a long time. ‘What am I going to do?’
Nienaber again placed his hand over De Villiers’s ‘Don’t worry. I’ll look after you. You will be my special project.’
De Villiers took a deep breath. ‘Thank you,’ he whispered.
When the nurse came to take De Villiers back to his room, Nienaber had the last word. ‘Just stop talking about Mugabe and a gun that can kill at over two kilometres and walking through Angola with a Bushman and all that.’
‘!Xau,’ De Villiers said to the nurse when they were at his room. ‘His name is !Xau.’
The upgrade of the airport for the 2010 World Cup was incomplete but had already changed the airport beyond his recognition. De Villiers slowly made his way through the throngs of people towards the Arrivals Hall. He had last been here when he left the country in 1992. He saw his sister Heloïse waving at him from the back of the crowd. She hugged him and held onto him for a long time.
‘Hello stranger,’ she said. Her daughter Yolandi was standing behind her. When De Villiers had last seen Yolandi, she had been a toddler in nappies.
Yolandi drove. De Villiers sat in the passenger seat. Heloïse sat knitting in the back seat. The two women talked continuously. They asked numerous questions about Emma and Zoë and New Zealand. Many of their friends had left for New Zealand, they told him. De Villiers couldn’t keep up with the answers and explanations. Yolandi’s cellphone rang and she answered, providing a short respite from the barrage of questions. He watched anxiously as his niece held the phone to her ear with her left hand while trying to open a chocolate bar with her right, steering the car with her knee. He looked at the speedometer – it showed 140 – and other cars were overtaking them.
The changes were obvious in everything De Vi
lliers saw around him: the personnel at the airport, the extent of the building operations in and around the airport building and the spiderweb of roads leading into and out of the airport. The name of the airport had been changed – OR Tambo International, the signs said. At the Rigel Avenue glide-off a road sign read CAUTION! HIJACKING HOT SPOT!
Yolandi slowed down for the traffic light. ‘Lock your door, please,’ she asked him. De Villiers complied mechanically. The lack of sleep was beginning to tell.
The area around the sign looked well used, crumpled newspapers and empty beer cans lying around. De Villiers recognised the general area, but it had changed. There were entire suburbs with shopping centres where previously there had been veld, wide dual carriageways where there used to be narrow dirt roads between small-holdings. There were houses in walled estates everywhere, wall-to-wall housing, as Heloïse’s husband would later call it.
When they arrived at the golf estate where Heloïse lived, there was a complete office housing security men at the entrance with a queue of visitors waiting to sign in. Yolandi took the line for residents and swiped a button across the face of an electronic scanner. The boom lifted for them to pass. ‘We have very strict security here,’ Heloïse explained when she caught De Villiers looking back at the queue of cleaners and gardeners who had to sign out at the exit and open their bags for inspection.
A three-metre-high concrete wall with an electric fence on top enclosed the whole estate and ran for miles up and down the hilly suburb.
Inside the walls De Villiers found huge mansions placed right up against one another. A well-manicured golf course and paved paths for golf carts wound between the rows of houses. The prevailing style appeared to be Tuscan – Tos Afrikaans, his irreverent brother-in-law would later tell him, was the description given to it by a Pretoria University architecture professor. De Villiers had never seen such wealth concentrated in such a small area.
‘Wait till you see Sandton,’ Heloïse said. ‘There the houses are three times as large and the plots so big that they can keep horses.’
De Villiers wondered about the security. Houses of this size must require a large workforce to keep them going, as the queue at the exit had hinted, but inside the estate he found even more workers, domestics pushing prams or walking the owners’ dogs, men working the golf course with specialised machines, supervisors overseeing everything. Men in overalls pushed wheelbarrows at building sites and others stood on scaffolding to lay bricks, plaster, paint. Heloïse employed a woman to do the cooking and another to do the housework.
After thirty-two hours of travelling, De Villiers was in dire need of sleep. He had taken only a few short naps during the long flight from Sydney. He needed a shower, a meal and a soft bed in a dark room. But first he had to see the graves.
The Garsfontein Cemetery was less than a kilometre from his sister’s home and Heloïse kept her promise to accompany him. They left immediately after they had carried his luggage upstairs. In the dusty tranquillity of the cemetery, they stood together looking at the graves. There were three headstones on a common gravesite three metres wide.
ANNELISE DE VILLIERS 12.10.1962–16.9.1992
MARCEL DE VILLIERS 31.3.1985–16.9.1992
JEANDRÉ DE VILLIERS 14.5.1986–16.9.1992
De Villiers felt his sister’s hand on his shoulder. He was shivering. He looked at the empty space where he had booked his own place all those years ago. He didn’t want to be buried in this place any more.
‘I don’t know how you’ve managed to cope with this,’ Heloïse said. ‘If someone were to hurt my children, I wouldn’t know what to do. I’d go crazy.’
The shadows were lengthening in the late afternoon sun. It was hot and De Villiers was perspiring freely. The cemetery had been extended in every direction from the time De Villiers had first come here to visit the graves. He had been in a coma in hospital when the funeral took place, his own life hanging by a thread. He had wished many times since that day that he had died with Annelise and their children.
‘Revenge,’ De Villiers said. ‘The thought of revenge sustains you. You dream of it every night.’
‘Is that why you came back then, to kill them?’ Heloïse asked in a whisper, even though the cemetery was deserted but for the two of them.
De Villiers shook his head. ‘No,’ he lied. ‘How could I get to them while they’re in prison?’
Heloïse looked up into his eyes. ‘But we’ve seen in the paper that they’ve been released. President Mbeki has given them a free pardon, wiping out their convictions.’
De Villiers faced his sister but looked through her. ‘I thought you knew and that’s why you came back,’ she said. ‘You always said you’d kill anyone who hurt your children.’
He lied again when they were in the car. ‘I didn’t.’
Heloïse misinterpreted his answer and said, ‘Good. We have to put the past behind us. We must make an effort to fit into the new environment. And I don’t want you to get into trouble again.’
On the way back De Villiers did a set of Florette Appollus’s exercises with renewed vigour. He also resolved to stop shaving in case he had the opportunity to conduct an operation.
De Villiers slept fitfully, his body clock completely out of synch with the light and sounds outside his room. The dull ache behind his eyes told him it was midnight, but outside the sun was shining against his window and he could hear golf clubs striking balls and golfers shouting fore! He had lain awake most of the night listening to the urban sounds of the area, dogs barking at all hours of the night and the sirens of police cars and ambulances.
The voices downstairs obliged him to rise. He stood under a piping hot shower but couldn’t shake off the weariness in his shoulders. When he came down from the first floor, he found his mother at the foot of the stairs. She cried when she saw him. He sat down on the couch with her. She held his hand tightly and spoke of distant times when De Villiers had been a small boy, but she fell silent when the conversation turned to more recent events.
More relatives arrived in the afternoon, De Villiers’s brother from Pietersburg and his younger sister and her husband from Randburg. They brought drinks and braai packs. De Villiers caught Heloïse’s eye and she shrugged as if to say, ‘What could I do? They’re family.’
The braai was a strain on De Villiers’s nerves. Heloïse, a pre-primary school teacher, treated everyone around her as if they were children to be corrected at every turn and prodded into line from time to time. Her house was a chaotic place where you had to follow orders, Heloïse’s orders. She ordered De Villiers to join the men outside. He obeyed, although he would have preferred to remain seated on the couch with his mother and to drift off to sleep with her. He slowly slipped his hand out from under hers. She didn’t wake up.
The men around the fire were talking about the rugby – their team was having an abysmal Super 14 season after winning the trophy in extra time in the final the year before. De Villiers’s arrival at the fire prompted a change of topic.
‘What do you think of the mess the ANC has made running the country?’ James asked. Heloïse’s husband was a tall fellow with a loud voice, the heart and soul of every family gathering.
When De Villiers hesitated, not wanting to admit that for years he had deliberately closed his eyes and ears to any news from South Africa, James answered for him.
‘They’ve made a mess of everything, just look what they have done with Eskom and the SABC and municipal government and everything. We have seven million illegal immigrants from all over Africa living off crime or welfare, and we have to pay for everything.’ James’s voice had risen an octave by the end of his speech.
‘Crime is the problem,’ Martin said. Martin was a brother-in-law who lived in Randburg and was a multi-millionaire businessman. ‘Without the crime, this country would be paradise.’
The conversation went on and on and De Villiers found that he had surprisingly little to contribute, and even more surprising, that he didn’t
care. He waited for the opportunity to escape. When it came, he slipped away and joined the women in the kitchen. They were cooing around the latest addition to the family, a newborn girl.
‘What’s New Zealand like?’ Heloïse asked to draw him into the conversation. She had asked the same question in the car on the way from the airport.
De Villiers gave the same answer, choosing his words carefully. ‘Quiet,’ he said.
When he saw them looking at him, he relented. ‘It’s nice,’ he said.
He dug in his pocket and took three photographs from his wallet. The first showed Auckland from the north. It had been taken from the ferry dock at Stanley Bay. The women handed the photograph around with the comments coming thick and fast. Beautiful. What’s that tall tower? Is this a river? Wow, it’s so wide.
‘No,’ De Villiers explained. ‘That’s part of the ocean. It reaches quite far in and the bridge over there links the North Shore to the main part of the city. What you see here is the Waitemata Harbour. We have a lot of Maori names for places, especially rivers and mountains.’
He handed the second photograph around. It was a view across Macleans Reserve towards the Tamaki Strait with Motuihe Island in the background. There were small yachts with white sails on the water. It had been taken on a day of clear skies.
‘That’s the view from our house,’ De Villiers said.
‘It looks like Plett, just like the view from our house in Plett,’ Heloïse said.
‘I thought it always rains there,’ Yolandi said before De Villiers could answer.
De Villiers became defensive and held the third photograph under his hand. ‘It’s not as bad as that. The Auckland weather is no worse than that of Cape Town, although it does get a bit colder.’
Heloïse snorted. ‘You could never do that here.’ She pointed at women with strollers on the cycle path in a park and some boys flying a kite. ‘You’d have to take a man or a very large dog with you. Haven’t you got a photograph of Emma and Zoë?’
De Villiers handed Heloïse the third photograph. It had been taken on Bucklands Beach. He remembered the day well. It was about a year earlier and they had gone for a picnic of fish and chips on a Friday afternoon. He had asked someone to take a photograph of the three of them. They stood laughing at the camera, De Villiers having pinched Zoë’s bottom. Zoë was missing some front teeth. De Villiers had his arm around Emma.
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