The Soldier who Said No

by Chris Marnewick

  McKerron was businesslike. ‘I want you to know from the outset that your life is not in danger. If anything, the fact that a sliver of prostate has been left behind is good news compared to the situation we would have had if there had been PSA without it, because that would have meant that the cancer had spread.’

  ‘How long do I need to stay?’ De Villiers asked. ‘I was planning to go home next week.’

  McKerron shook his head. ‘I don’t think that’s going to be possible, unless we do the diagnosis here and you go back there for the treatment.’

  ‘What treatment do you have in mind?’

  McKerron spoke slowly, in pace with the notes he made in the file.

  First, colorectal MRI to check where prostate tissue and possible

  cancer cells are

  Then bone density scan – to make sure cancer hasn’t spread –

  this type of cancer spreads to bones

  Blood results will be available tomorrow

  Full assessment of all the results by a team – Dr MacDonald,

  the radiologist and McKerron – then decide

  If there are cancer cells – probably radiation therapy as

  prescribed by Dr MacDonald – 7 to 8 weeks

  Surgery not an option

  McKerron walked De Villiers back to the reception desk. De Villiers gave the receptionist his army medical aid number.

  It was a depressing drive back to Weber’s chambers. De Villiers waited at Reception for him to emerge from his consultation. They spoke little at lunch in a coffee shop at the Royal Hotel after De Villiers had told him the details of the morning’s meetings with the doctors.

  ‘There’s going to be no argument about this,’ Weber said. ‘You’re going to stay with us for the duration. Besides, Liesl will excommunicate me if I don’t invite you to stay with us,’ Weber added, sealing the offer.

  This time the medical profession turned some serious heat on the cancer cells in De Villiers’s body.

  First they sent De Villiers for a colorectal scan. He endured the hour-long ordeal with stoic calm which belied the turmoil he felt while the magnetic pulses coursed through every cell in range of the machine’s magnets. The machine rearranged the alignment of the cells and a computer did the rest, marking the cancer cells in red. Red is for danger. Red was where the cancer was.

  When De Villiers came out of the room, he was sweating. He wasn’t claustrophobic, but the MRI scanner had frightened him with its groaning. Under strict instructions not to move, he had had to make a very deliberate effort not to slide out of the machine and call for his clothes. He kept wondering why, if the machine was as harmless as they had said, there was no one in the room with him. He had been told he would be in the machine for half an hour, but it had felt much longer, and when they eventually came in to release him, he could see on their clock that it had been more than an hour. In the room next to the machine, they showed him on the computer screen where the cancer cells were, near the base of the bladder on the left-hand side.

  De Villiers was about to ask if he could leave but they told him to put on his clothes and wait in another room for the next batch of tests.

  He tried not to think of the consequences of the spots on the computer screen and fell asleep while they were doing a full-body bone scan.

  They woke him up to tell him that there was no sign of cancer in his bones. Good news for Pierre de Villiers, but bad news for the cancer. It meant that the cancer was confined to a small area, the size of a pea, they explained. De Villiers had spent the hour in the MRI scanner hatching plans.

  Even in his sleep he was planning his revenge.

  But there was a lot of work to do. He had to find the owner of the arrow.

  At the oncology centre they assigned a radiographer who looked no older than eighteen to see him through all his treatments. ‘Hello, I’m Marissa,’ she introduced herself. ‘I’m afraid you are going to have to take off all your clothes and lie face up on the gurney.’ She closed the door behind her and handed De Villiers a flimsy hospital gown.

  Marissa made small talk while De Villiers undressed. ‘Is that your car?’ she asked.

  ‘No,’ De Villiers mumbled, his back turned to her. ‘It’s my brotherin-law’s.’

  ‘I’d like to look at the engine when we’ve finished, if you don’t mind,’ Marissa said.

  ‘What do you want to see?’ De Villiers asked as he turned around, holding the gown in front of his torso.

  Completely unabashed and with no lip service to preserve his modesty, Marissa took the gown from him and draped it around his shoulders. ‘Face up, please.’ She pointed at the gurney.

  ‘I’ve always wondered what a Porsche engine looks like,’ she chatted as she smoothed the sheet. ‘All my life my father and my brother have been building Beach Buggies and they always say a Porsche is just a souped-up VW. So I want to see.’

  De Villiers hesitated at the gurney. ‘Feet this side,’ she ordered.

  Marissa studied his chart and placed it on the gurney next to De Villiers. ‘I think we can cover you up to here,’ she said and drew a sheet up to his pubic bone. ‘I need to draw the lines where the radiation machine will direct the rays and then I have to prepare a shield so that the rays don’t stray outside that area.’

  De Villiers couldn’t think of anything to say.

  Marissa fiddled with the machinery against the wall and inserted what looked like a large photographic plate into a slot. She turned to the gurney and turned the machine on. An image appeared on De Villiers’s lower abdomen. ‘I’m going to put indelible markings here and here so that every day when you come in we can aim the machine right on the spot,’ she said, tracing the lines with a fingernail.

  She scuttled between the controls against the wall and the gurney. De Villiers thought of !Xau while her light fingers drew the lines in indelible violet. ‘The machine is going to burn this hair off,’ Marissa added. ‘But you don’t need to worry about that.’

  He felt able to look Marissa in the eye again when he was dressed and they were standing at the reception desk. ‘I’ll take a morning slot,’ he said when she showed him the daily schedule.

  ‘Okay, nine-fifteen every morning, starting Monday.’ She wrote his name against the time slot on the chart. ‘I’ll walk with you to the car.’

  The Porsche stood right in front of the steps. De Villiers unlocked the car but couldn’t work out how to open the engine compartment. ‘How do I open it?’ he asked Marissa.

  ‘There’s got to be a bonnet release somewhere.’ She leaned into the car but came out shaking her head. ‘Maybe there’s something on the other side. They build these for left-hand drive and don’t always convert everything for right-hand drive.’

  She found the release mechanism in the passenger door wall on the left side of the car. The hood at the rear popped open. They stood looking at the engine. None of what De Villiers could see made any sense to him. The whole engine appeared to be hidden from view by an assortment of air intakes and manifolds.

  ‘Just as they said,’ Marissa said. ‘Just a souped-up Volkswagen.’

  De Villiers had no idea what she meant or how she could see.

  ‘Thanks, see you Monday,’ she said from the steps.

  The power under his right foot told De Villiers that she was wrong. This car was no Volkswagen.

  In the second week of treatment the middle fingers on both De Villiers’s hands swelled up and were so painful that he had had trouble dressing. The drive to the oncology centre was an ordeal. The Porsche might be a nice car, but its six-speed gearbox was stiff and the urban traffic required frequent gearshifts. When he asked if the radiation therapy might be responsible for the gout, Marissa called the senior radiographer who told him that it was impossible and offered him a prescription for anti-inflammatories.

  Liesl found him on a cast-aluminium bench in the garden, a picture of dejection, his elbows on his knees, his face cupped in his hands, his middle fingers held proud of
the others. She sat down next to him and put her arm around him.

  ‘Oh, Pierre,’ she said. ‘I’m so sorry. You can talk to me. You don’t have to do this on your own, you know.’ She stood up. ‘I’m going to make some tea and then I want you to come in and talk to me. You haven’t said anything about yourself from the time you arrived.’

  De Villiers watched as she walked back to the house and wondered how much he could tell her. He had been taught to be self-reliant, but now he felt helpless, with no idea what to do or what to believe. He didn’t know whether talking would help, but when he heard the whistle of the kettle, he joined Liesl in the kitchen.

  A troop of monkeys arrived and sat on the garden wall, waiting for an opportunity to steal something.

  ‘Rooibos, black, one sugar,’ Liesl Weber said as she picked up the tray. ‘Let’s go back to the garden. It’s much nicer there,’ she suggested.

  De Villiers thought of offering to take the tray from her, but he remembered his hands. Liesl was using her best china with silver spoons and cake forks. He followed as she carried the tray out into the garden.

  ‘Start at the beginning,’ she ordered as she poured the tea. She held his cup out to him, but De Villiers was unable to take it from her.

  ‘Look at my fingers,’ he said. ‘I’ve never had gout before.’ He left unsaid the thought that he was disintegrating physically, had endured years of doubt about his memory, and that soon he would be an invalid unable to take care of himself.

  She put the cup back on the tray and gently took his hand in hers. ‘How did this happen?’ she asked. ‘It’s not as if you’ve been drinking with Johann. All that cabernet can’t be good for anyone.’

  ‘No,’ De Villiers protested. ‘I haven’t touched the stuff since I started the radiation.’

  He held his hand for her to see.

  ‘Is it that bad?’ she asked. Not waiting for an answer she asked, ‘What do they say at the oncology centre?’

  ‘They say it can’t be their machine. I must have a predisposition. It could run in my family, they say.’

  ‘Well, it wasn’t my cooking, for sure,’ Liesl said with a smile. ‘Too many people have eaten my food and none of them came down with gout, I can tell you.’

  De Villiers smiled with her.

  ‘Tell you what,’ she said. ‘I have some shopping to do at Gateway. Come with me and we could ask the pharmacist there to give you something that is gout specific.’

  He nodded.

  ‘Drink your tea,’ she ordered. ‘But don’t drop the cup, eh!’

  De Villiers managed to hold the cup between his palms.

  ‘Now tell me what’s really troubling you.’ Liesl was relentless.

  De Villiers wondered how much he could tell her. Previously he had not told anybody other than the psychiatrist assigned to him for fear of being labelled paranoid, but that was nearly twenty years ago. He hadn’t told Emma. Even a sanitised version of his actions in Angola could put a strain on their relationship.

  When he started talking, it came out in a flood, as it would on a psychiatrist’s couch, a steady stream of information, things that had dwelt on the borderline between his conscious and unconscious mind. Some parts, he suspected, were memories of dreams; others he was sure were true.

  ‘It started with an operation in Angola in 1985.’

  De Villiers travelled back and forth through time as he recounted the events. ‘I need to know, one way or the other, whether what I believe happened to me is true or not,’ he concluded. ‘Then I would know how to look at myself and what to do in the future when I have these thoughts and dreams.’

  They sat looking at each other for a while before Liesl stood up abruptly and started putting the cups onto the tray. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘We still have to get to Gateway.’

  In the car she made De Villiers an offer. ‘I’ll tell you what,’ she began. ‘I‘ve been thinking. I’ll help you look for the Bushman …’

  ‘!Xau,’ De Villiers said with slow and deliberate pronunciation. He clicked his tongue against the roof of his palate, right at the back. Tko-au.

  ‘Tko-au,’ she echoed. ‘It might not be as difficult to find him as you might think.’

  De Villiers had his doubts, but didn’t know quite what to say. They walked into the shopping centre side by side but in silence.

  The pharmacist agreed with Liesl’s assessment that anti-inflammatories would be of no use and gave De Villiers a small container with colchicine tablets the size of a match-head. De Villiers started revising his opinion of her. He was unsure how Liesl could help, but he was tired of fighting the lone battle which had overshadowed more than twenty years of his life

  Liesl’s methods were to bear fruit within a week. The gout receded fast, although they had to return for more colchicine. But she had also taken De Villiers to a small specialist bookshop in Gateway selling Africana and other indigenous books.

  Voices of the San provided a clue of sorts.

  After a week in the Weber household, the patterns of the family had become clear. Johann Weber left for work late, usually towards the end of rush-hour traffic, and returned home late only to go to work in his study immediately after dinner. Liesl went for a run or a walk on the beach every morning. It had been her idea that De Villiers should accompany her on her early-morning walks. For a woman in her fifties, she was very active. Weber had decided that his son Michael’s car was not roadworthy after all and so De Villiers was designated the task of driving Weber to work in the morning. De Villiers then made his way to the oncology centre and returned to the city to fetch Weber in the afternoons.

  It gave De Villiers something to do.

  Liesl had hauled De Villiers out of bed on the first day of his radiation therapy. ‘Come on, you need to get ready and you might as well get up with me and have some exercise before you go for the radiation. It will do you good, I promise. Walking is good for the soul.’

  It became their morning ritual: a drive to the parking lot above the beach, five rand to the car guard, a brisk walk along the promenade or a jog on the beach. Mercifully, there were public toilets a few hundred metres past the lighthouse and De Villiers could make his stop there, leaving Liesl to maintain her stride ahead of him.

  ‘Where do you work?’ De Villiers had asked, slightly out of breath one morning as they jogged side by side on the soft sand.

  ‘I don’t have a job. Johann says it will just complicate his tax return.’

  ‘But where do you go every day? I thought you were working.’

  Liesl had smiled. ‘I organise food parcels for the pre-school children at the municipal flats in Umbilo three days a week and the other two days I work at an AIDS clinic in KwaMashu.’

  ‘Why?’

  Liesl became defensive. ‘I have to do something. What else could I do? And if we didn’t do it, who would help these people?’

  De Villiers remembered that there was no television in the Webers’ house. The dinners thus far had been subdued affairs with discussions about family matters and small talk.

  They stopped at the turning-around point and looked up at the houses lining the pristine beach. Not quite as large as the ones that lined the golf course in Pretoria, they were nevertheless in a league of their own as far as Umhlanga Rocks was concerned, built on several levels to make the most of the view of the Indian Ocean with lush natural vegetation cut back to allow the houses space to breathe.

  De Villiers considered the situation. ‘But you don’t watch television,’ he probed.

  Without breaking her stride, Liesl explained the Weber philosophy. ‘We don’t watch television and we don’t read the newspapers. There is nothing new in the news. It’s the same every day. Zimbabwe. AIDS. Corruption. Israel and the Palestinians. Crime. And there’s nothing we can do about any of it. So we don’t watch and we don’t read. We just carry on with our lives.’

  Johann Weber played tennis on Saturday afternoons, and once a month the members of his tennis school ca
me over for dinner afterwards. De Villiers met a number of Weber’s colleagues and their wives. Adversaries in court, they appeared to be the best of friends out of it. Several times the Webers dragged him along when the Saturday-night dinner or braai was at someone else’s house. Everywhere they went, he was obliged to answer the many questions everyone seemed to have about New Zealand. Once he stopped in mid-sentence when he remembered that, in all the years he had been in the International Crime Section of the police, he had never been invited to the home of any of his colleagues, not once, yet here the Webers’ best friends were their colleagues. There was a vague memory at the back of De Villiers’s mind of a party at a colleague’s house soon after he had arrived from England with Emma. But it had been a Chinese detective, an immigrant from Hong Kong.

  Auckland

  April 2008 29

  The weather in April is usually good in Auckland. It’s one of the better months on the North Island. This day was windy, with the sun breaking through the fast-moving clouds over the city.

  The Prime Minister was oblivious to the general state of happiness good weather always brings to New Zealand. The polls were getting worse. It was almost as if there was a momentum to the swing against her party.

  There had been more criticism of Labour and its policies and ministers in newspapers over the weekend. Even the staunch leftist Matt McCarten had declared Labour unelectable in the coming elections. A secret Cabinet memo had brought news so bad that, if the electorate found out, the government might as well resign immediately. A number of New Zealand’s largest financial institutions were, for practical purposes, bankrupt. On top of that, Finance Minister Michael Cullen had reported to her that a shortfall of up to one billion dollars could be expected in the Accident Compensation Fund, or was it the Health Services? She had been too upset at the news to concentrate on the details. Wait till National finds out about that, she thought. We are already twenty points behind them in the weekend poll.

  She asked for an update on the assassination attempt and the Deputy Commissioner had to accompany Henderson and Kupenga to her house again.