That Cobra was dead, shot by Brigade, by now covered over in a shallow grave somewhere in the township, was of no consolation. But there was synchronicity there, a measure of justice.
After a while, Brigade slowed the car and turned onto an unpaved road. A few kilometres in he stopped the car and turned out the lights.
‘We have to leave her,’ he said, opening the door and stepping out into the night.
By now, the effects of the CS had largely worn off. Clay’s throat still burned, and it felt as if he’d sucked a cup of bleach up through his nose, but his head was clear and he could see. Standing next to Brigade, he looked out over the flat darkness of the veldt. Stars filled the sky so that there was no part of the firmament left unoccupied by some wavelength, some dead or dying history. He shivered. But the cold air felt good flowing over his cornea, across the scored flesh of his throat.
Brigade handed him a shovel.
They carried her away from the road, laid her on the ground and started digging.
When they lowered her into the grave, they did it gently, laid her face up. They stood a moment looking down at the shape of her, the starlight just touching the pale angle of her jaw, the rest of her in shadow. The first few shovelfuls were the hardest, the dirt a violation against the once-warm flesh, covering the pale skin, a crime being done. Once the body was covered, it got easier. Just more digging. Soldiers did a lot of that.
But he wasn’t a soldier anymore.
Now, he wasn’t anything.
When the job was done he leaned against his shovel and looked up at the stars. There was the proof. The irrefutable evidence of his utter insignificance, of hers. The scale of it, the futility, shocked him. He looked down at the mound of fresh soil. One of so many similar mounds scattered across Africa, a continent committing suicide.
‘You heard what she said, before she died, about genocide?’
Brigade nodded.
‘I never would have believed it.’
‘The devil’s work.’
‘I didn’t know. None of us did.’
‘Some did,’ said Brigade, standing there with one foot on the blade’s shoulder, the shovel’s shaft balancing against his upper arm. ‘Many.’
‘Do you believe me?’
Brigade looked hard into Clay’s eyes. ‘If I did not think it,’ he said, ‘I would not be here.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Clay.
‘So am I.’
Clay glanced at the grave. ‘She fought.’
‘Yes.’
‘Not much of a place.’
‘We had to do it.’
‘I know.’
‘If they stop us.’
‘I know.’
Soon they were back in the car, heading north-east.
‘We must try to reach the park before dawn,’ said Brigade, staring straight ahead into the tunnel of light angling from the tarmac. ‘We will keep to the small roads. It will take longer. But it is safer.’
‘Mozambique,’ said Clay.
‘Yes. Through Kruger to the border.’
‘Botha will have the word out. They’ll be watching for us. We can’t go into the park by road.’
‘We will walk in.’
Clay nodded. They were still at least six hours away from the park. Between them and that twenty-thousand-square kilometre wilderness were hundreds of miles of farm and scrubland, villages and police stations, prying eyes and citizens eager to help the patriotic cause of white South Africa. Who knew what resources Botha might now deploy to hunt them down? Roadblocks? Spotter planes? Helicopters? Once the sun came up, they would be in trouble.
As they drove, hesitantly at first, Brigade related what had happened to him since they’d last seen each other.
After Clay and Eben had secreted themselves onto the C-130 that night at the makeshift airstrip, Brigade had left Zulaika to return to her village and he’d exfiled back to 32-Bat’s Caprivi base on foot. He could only assume that Clay and Eben were dead. He’d reported what he’d seen to his Battalion Commander, as ordered, who passed on the report to Wade. Not long after, he’d heard that Wade had been killed. That was when they realised that the Broederbond was going to make sure they went back to the village near Rito to take out everyone who knew what was going on. Brigade had been sent, with two others, to warn the villagers to clear out before the parabats arrived. But his team was ambushed by UNITA before they were thirty kilometres inside Angola. They’d been waiting for them, knew exactly where they’d be and when. The Broederbond had people everywhere. His two companions were killed and he was captured. UNITA marched him around for a few days, and then one night he was drugged and flown south, eventually ending up at the Roodeplaat facility. ‘I prayed for someone to come,’ he said.
‘I was trying to tell you,’ he continued. ‘The one I killed in the township tonight, he was there, at the laboratory, many times.’
‘Cobra.’
‘Yes,’ said Brigade pointing to his own bicep. ‘The snake.’
‘I heard him speaking to the other one, the doctor. They were testing chemicals to make the women not able to have babies. Different ways of sterilising them. I heard them.’
‘Jesus,’ said Clay.
‘I tried to tell you.’
Clay put his head in his hands. ‘I’m sorry, Brigade. I thought…’ But there was no point. It was done.
‘It was good to kill him,’ said Brigade.
When the sun rose over Mozambique, they were still an hour from the park boundary.
South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission Transcripts.
Johannesburg, 16th September 1996
Commissioner Barbour: Mister Straker, your service records, which we have here before us, say that you were dishonourably discharged.
Witness: Yes, sir.
Commissioner Barbour: And are you aware of the accusations that accompanied this discharge?
Witness: I am now, sir.
Commissioner Barbour: Have you seen the records?
Witness: No, sir.
Commissioner Barbour: Then how can you know what they say?
Witness: A friend told me.
Commissioner Barbour: I am not sure you were told everything, Mister Straker.
Witness: I’m not sure what you mean, sir.
Commissioner Rotzenburg: He means, Mister Straker, that if you did know what was contained in those records, you would not have come back.
Witness does not answer.
Commissioner Rotzenburg: In your earlier testimony, you implied that Operation COAST was conducting experiments on human beings. Did you see such experiments occurring in the laboratory?
Witness: What was in my record, sir?
Commissioner Rotzenburg: The witness will answer the question. Did you see such experiments occurring?
Witness: Please, sir. You chose to bring up the issue of my record. Surely you can tell me what it says.
Commissioner Barbour: You were accused of war crimes, murder, and crimes against humanity.
Witness: Sir?
Commissioner Barbour: Of course, those charges were never brought to trial or proven, but they appear on your record. They formed the basis for your dishonourable discharge. There is the massacre near Rito, which you have testified about, and the murder in the dunes. There are also accusations that you assisted in conducting illegal medical experiments on prisoners of war.
Witness: That is total _____.
Commissioner Rotzenburg: So I ask you again, Mister Straker. Did you see such experiments occurring in the lab?
Witness: I don’t know who made those accusations, but I had no part in it. I was trying to stop it.
Commissioner Rotzenburg: How do you know that what you claim transpired in that laboratory, actually did?
Witness: Brigade was there. He told me. It was clear what they were doing. The samples we saw, the men and women held in cages.
Commissioner Rotzenburg: I did not ask for your medical opinion on what might have
been happening. I asked you if you had seen such experiments occurring. We are not here to deal in conjecture. The witness must understand this.
Witness: I already told you about the experiments I saw, that night at the airstrip in Angola. Dozens of them.
Commissioner Ksole: This colleague of yours, the one who you say was held in the facility, did he witness such experiments occurring within the facility?
Witness: I don’t know if he actually saw them occurring. But he heard them talking about it.
Commissioner Rotzenburg: So it is entirely possible that these people you say you saw in the facility, were in fact simply prisoners, and that no tests occurred at all.
Witness: Why keep prisoners in a secure medical testing laboratory? It makes no sense.
Commissioner Rotzenburg: Or is it that these are simply the recollections of a deluded, unstable mind?
Witness: No, I … I remember it. It happened, God ___ it.
Commissioner Rotzenburg: You have already admitted to murder. Not only the South African citizen you killed in the dunes, but a member of the security team sent to bring you to justice in Soshanguve Township. This confirms what we know from your records. Does the witness believe that those murders were justified?
Witness: No, sir. Nothing can justify … What I mean is, it was wartime. I’ve already told you, they were trying to kill us, kill me. They killed Vivian.
Commissioner Barbour: Is that why the witness is here, testifying to this commission? To seek forgiveness for these murders?
Witness: Yes, sir. It is. For that, and for everything else. This country needs to know what happened, what our government did, the wrongs that were done, the terrible things. I am here for more than just reconciliation, or amnesty. I’m here to speak for those that can’t.
35
Anything Other Than a Human Being
‘Merda.’ Brigade pulled over to the side of the road and stopped the car behind an old baobab that had somehow survived all these years on the road verge.
‘Word got out fast,’ said Clay, slumping down in his seat.
About three hundred metres ahead, a small column of vehicles was drawn up at the outskirts of a smoky early-morning village. Uniformed policemen moved among the vehicles. A Buffel armoured car watched over the scene, its hulk protruding from behind a corrugated-iron shack. Whether the roadblock was for them, he had no way of knowing. It was wartime. South Africa was under attack. Terrorist infiltrators were everywhere. Roadside checkpoints and random inspections were common.
‘We can go around,’ said Brigade.
‘How far are we from the park?’
‘Ten kilometres, for a bird.’
‘We’re not birds.’
‘I don’t know the roads.’
‘We can’t chance the roadblock. We walk.’
Brigade nodded. ‘South first. We go around Phalabowra.’
Clay opened his door, stood in the red laterite of the roadside, this blood earth of his native land. He thought of Vivian lying cold in this same ground not so far from where he stood now. That same hollowness opened up inside him, and for a moment he stood staring into it and it was Vivian’s grave, the one he had dug and then refilled. So much easier to fill than dig.
The sound of the car boot opening, a hinged cry, and the grave was gone, closed over.
Brigade slung a canvas pack onto his shoulder, handed Clay a steel water bottle, shouldered the sawn-off shotgun and started into the bush. Clay scanned the road ahead and back a moment then crouched, unfastened the car’s rear registration plate and pulled it off. Then he removed the front plate and followed Brigade into the bush.
A hundred and fifty kilometres to the border, through some of the world’s wildest country. No head start. A canteen, a handgun with nine rounds, a single diamond. Evidence that would rock the nation to its foundations. And if they did manage to reach Mozambique, then what? He had no passport, no identification, no money. By all accounts, the country was a shambles, riven by civil war. The usual scenario: one side supported by the Russians, the other by South Africa, and until just a couple of years ago, Rhodesia. He’d heard the stories of draft dodgers and deserters seeking refuge in Mozambique, they all had. Whether they were just stories, he had no idea. But he had no doubt that BOSS would pursue him wherever he went. One thing was sure: whatever happened, he would have to disappear, for a long time. Crowbar had been right.
They moved through the day, taking it in turns to carry the pack Brigade had managed to assemble before leaving the township. It contained some food, a couple of water bottles, a machete, and half a box of shells for the shotgun. Keeping to the footpaths and bush trails, they skirted villages and avoided roads, guided by Brigade’s unerring sense of direction. By early afternoon they were striking resolutely east, the main Phalabowra corridor far enough to the north now, through a country of low scrub bushwillow and copper-leafed mopane, the long grasses dry and brittle here, the occasional jackalberry towering over them, its branches reaching arms of shade across the landscape, summer nearing its end, the promise of the first rains in the air, the smell of woodsmoke drifting on the breeze, the twittering of birds. And in this walking he was for a time detached, transported. Long minutes passed when he did not think of Eben or Vivian or the war or any of it. But then a sound would jar him from his reverie – a distant cry, a dog’s bark – and he was back on patrol, and each footstep was a descent into uncertainty, and he longed for the familiar weight of his R4, the turgid potency of its long, curved magazine, that feeling that, with this instrument, he was, for the first and only time in his life, somehow in control.
Sometime later, when the sun had reached its zenith and started its slow decline towards another meridian, the distant buzz of an aircraft engine sent them running for the cover of a thicket of buffalo thorn. They crouched at the base of one of the trees, looking up through the branches as the sound grew louder. And then there it was, close enough, perhaps a thousand feet up, a tiny single-engine plane, sideslipping across the high, blue, cloud-strewn African sky.
‘Bosbok,’ said Clay. ‘Military.’
Brigade nodded, watched the thing circle lazily and then disappear below the tree line.
They kept walking.
Later they skirted a small kraal. Three thatched rondavels clustered inside a circle of stacked thornbush. A woman with a baby at her breast stood watching them through an opening in the palisade. They nodded to her and moved on.
Evening came, the sun slanting long and yellow behind them, casting long shadows across the dry grass clearings, two ghosts warping over the landscape. As the light faded a herd of springbok emerged from the bush and crossed their path. They stopped and watched the animals pass, over a hundred and fifty of them, small and lithe, quick footed.
‘Hungry?’ said Brigade.
Clay nodded, took out his Z88 and downed one of the stragglers from thirty metres. The gun’s retort sent the herd scattering for the safety of the tree line. Soon they were alone again.
They stood over the carcass.
It was a beautiful animal, young, its fawn skin soft and supple. The bullet had blown open its neck. The flesh glistened in the evening sun. They carried it to the edge of the trees. Brigade worked with deft strokes of his bush knife, slicing out the choicest cuts of meat, skewering them on sharpened mopane sticks. Soon they had a fire going. Stars appeared, shining through the bare dry-season boughs of the trees like some distant reminder. They drank, checked their weapons; habit. The fire burned down to coals. They roasted the meat in silence, the lean flesh sizzling as night and all of its fiery beacons ascended around them.
The park boundary was close. Brigade reckoned a couple of kilometres at most. They would eat, catch a few hours of sleep, wait for the moon to rise, and then slip through the game fence soon after midnight. By the time the sun rose again they would be halfway to Mozambique.
Sleep came quickly.
But it did not last. The events of the past days, the revela
tions complete and partial, the unanswered questions, trampled through Clay’s mind. Pain gnawed at his side. He shifted on the cold ground, moving closer to the fire. As a boy, on the nights he could not sleep, he would lie in his bed under the eaves and listen to the wind rattle the casement windows and count to himself. He couldn’t remember ever getting past twenty. Innocence sleeps. Now, by one hundred and fifty he was still wide awake, covered in sweat.
Three hours later, Brigade’s boot sole rolled over Clay’s shoulder. As he turned and raised himself up, a sharp pain creased his side. He reached for his ribs. His hand came away wet.
‘Okay?’ came Brigade’s disembodied voice.
‘Lekker,’ said Clay, getting to his feet. There was no point inspecting the wound in the dark. They buried the coals and the car’s registration plates and moved off in silence.
Less than an hour later they reached the park boundary. A single three-metre wire fence ran compass straight for as far as they could see through in both directions. On each side of the fence the bush had been hacked away to create a firebreak. They waited a while, shivering in the cold, watching. But the country here was bereft of men. Brigade cut the wire with a pair of pliers and they slipped through into the park.
A three-quarter moon rising low and oversized above the trees sent living shadows skittering across the landscape. Gone were the colours of the day, the russets and sky blues, the waxed tawn of the grasses and the grey naked limbs of trees. They moved through the black and moon-silvered territory like cats, navigating by the stars and planets, aware that they had entered a different world, one where they were no longer the masters, despite the weapons they carried and the skills they’d learned. Predators watched them, moonlight glinting from their dilated pupils. Big cats circled, wary, then moved on. A group of spotted hyenas, bolder, more dogged, caught their scent and started tracking them. Clay could feel them, pacing behind, keeping distance, could smell their powerful soapy secretions. Every time he turned to face them they would halt, watching him, noses twitching, eyes aflame, only to continue their shadowing as soon as he turned away.
Reconciliation for the Dead Page 28