by Deon Meyer
It took me ten years to sort myself out, to quit my nonsense. To grow up, I suppose. Every year I had another job; for about eighteen months I was in Durban as well, trying to rep for Castrol. That didn’t stick either. Jannie Nel was one of the big farmers in Heidelberg. He gave a lot of people a second chance. So I went and asked him for a job. Three years before the Fever. I used to drive a sheep lorry to the abattoir for him. And when he saw I had stopped my nonsense, he made me assistant foreman, and later foreman, on one of the chicken farms. They called it ‘farm manager’.
Then I began to fix things with my children. Once a month, I drove to Pretoria, and I took them to the Spur restaurant. That was the beginning. I knew I had a long way to go with them. I began to fly again too, I tried to get enough hours to get my licence back.
Then the Fever came. How can you talk about the Fever? You can’t describe it.
It must have been the same as it was for everyone. You watch the news on TV, and you think, no, they will stop this thing before it gets here, but you wonder, and you are a little bit scared. Just like with Ebola, a couple of years before the Fever. But you think, we live in a time of science, they’ll do something, so you don’t worry too much. Until England and America and all of them began to cancel flights and impose states of emergency. Then you worry, because it’s never been this bad before. And then the virus was here, and you think, now they’d better do something fast, and for the first time you’re really scared. And then the power goes off, and no one comes to work, and I phone and phone my children, but they don’t answer their cellphones. And then the cellphone networks go down. I hid away on that chicken farm, I won’t lie to you. I think I’m still alive because I lived there, slept there, and went nowhere. Then the radio went quiet, everything was quiet, and I sat and watched the road, but there was nothing. Then I took the pick-up and drove. And I smelled Heidelberg, from four kilometres away I smelled all those dead people. And I knew.
There’s a time when you feel guilty for surviving, and you don’t know why you were so lucky, because you were such a bad person. But then you get used to it. It’s funny, hey?
I turned around and drove back to the farm, and I let all the chickens out of the batteries.
Chapter 18
For a week we didn’t see anyone.
We took the bypass around Bloemfontein, and went through Winburg and Senekal and Bethlehem; we pasted our pamphlets on stop signs and road signs and the doors of churches, we scattered them in the doorways of deathly quiet supermarkets and pharmacies. At every town library and school library we went in with empty boxes, and came out with boxes full of books. Half of the long sixteen-wheeler trailer was already full of books, the rest of the cargo was tinned food, coffee and medicine. ‘For our sanctuary, for our future,’ as Pa would say to spur me on to carry yet another heavy box out to the truck.
Near Bloemfontein we saw zebras grazing beside the freeway; they galloped off as we approached. I told Pa those were the animals we had freed.
Perhaps there were people in the towns, perhaps they hid away when we passed. We drove to Clocolan and Ladybrand and Wepener, Aliwal North and Adelaide. We didn’t see another living soul, but we scattered our pamphlets in bottle stores, and pasted them on the windows of filling stations.
Pa slept less comfortably these nights, because Melinda Swanevelder and I shared the bed, and he had to make do with reclining his seat as flat as it would go.
Melinda communicated very little with her voice. Mostly she used her eyes and face. She took over some of my duties. She made the coffee, and she wanted to do the dishes too, but Pa said no, I have to do something. By the time five days had passed, it felt as though she had always been with us.
4 April
In the early afternoon, on the other side of Fort Beaufort, a big Aberdeen Angus bull ran across the road in front of us. His black hide glistened with sweat, he was bleeding on his rump and flanks. Behind him, snarling around him, was a pack of dogs, the same lean type that had attacked me and Pa.
Pa slowed down, the bull ran through the barbed wire to the right of the road. The wire cut him, held him back a moment. And the dogs sprang on him.
Melinda Swanevelder drew in a sharp breath. Then she looked away, she didn’t want to witness it.
The bull shook off the dogs, he ran on, towards a dense thicket.
Then we were past, and we couldn’t see any more.
‘About twenty of them,’ said Pa. ‘Just like wild dogs. The same pack size.’
He was talking to himself, but he didn’t try to hide his concern.
We were a few kilometres before Grahamstown, driving slowly past the golf course on the left, barely forty kilometres an hour. That was always Pa’s way when we were near a town. He was looking out of his side window and Melinda lay sleeping in the back. I was the only one who saw the white vehicle approaching from the front – one of those little buses that have been converted into a caravan. Almost immediately it pulled off the road, and stopped.
‘Pa,’ I said excitedly, and pointed, sure that I was seeing the first signs of human life since Hennie Fly.
‘What?’
‘That bus thingy. It just stopped now.’
Pa braked. Behind us Melinda Swanevelder sat up.
‘It’s a camper,’ said Pa. The vehicle was immobile and Pa asked, ‘Are you sure?’ I had sounded a false alarm once or twice before out of wishful thinking.
‘I think so.’
Pa stopped the Volvo in the middle of the road. I passed him the binoculars without him having to ask. He had a look. The camper was parked on the gravel verge of the road, four hundred metres away, just before the long curve to the left.
‘Can you see anything, Pa?’ I was starting to doubt whether I had really seen the vehicle moving.
‘No, son . . .’
Pa passed the binoculars to me. I looked. There was no sign of life. I felt embarrassed; I realised I had made a mistake.
Pa said, ‘Let’s go a little closer, maybe he’s afraid of us, perhaps he’s lying flat . . .’ But I could hear that he was just trying to make me feel better. He pulled away, drove slowly closer.
We stopped beside the camper. On the door were the words Ibhayi Camper Hire. Down the side, near the back it said Discoverer 6. There was a Fiat emblem on the front grille. We looked down on the camper from the high Volvo horse. There was no one behind the steering wheel. The two windows of the living area were covered by curtains.
‘The tracks are fresh,’ said Pa quietly, and reached for his pistol in the door beside him, his left hand working the gear lever so that he was ready to pull away. ‘See, behind the tyres.’
Melinda lay down and pulled the blanket over her. I stared. Behind the camper, between the wheels and the tarmac, were clear tracks from the tyres.
‘What did you see, Nico?’
‘He was driving, and when he saw us, he stopped quickly.’
The curtain of the camper’s large middle window twitched a little, right in the middle, at the bottom.
‘Did you see that, Pa?’
‘Get your pistol,’ said Pa. He released the clutch, and drove slowly forward, lifting his firearm to hold it against his window; he wanted to make sure they saw it. I took mine out of the cubby-hole. I knew I would have to shoot, if there was shooting to be done.
The curtain moved again. For a second there was a tiny face at the window. ‘It’s a child,’ said Pa, and stopped again. He lowered his window. He called out, ‘Hello!’
Just the big diesel engine idling.
‘Hello, we come in peace, one man, one woman, one child here,’ Pa called out.
Dead still.
‘We have food and drink.’
The driver’s door opened. A woman sat up, she must have been lying flat. She climbed out. She held a shotgun in her hands, double-barrelled. She pointed it at Pa. ‘Let me see the child,’ she said.
I wriggled in beside Pa, and hung out of his window. ‘Hello, ma’am, we’
re good people.’
The woman was tall and brown, her hair was very short. She had a sturdy prominent chin, like someone with a very strong will. She wasn’t convinced. ‘And the woman?’
Pa looked back. Melinda still had her head under the blanket. ‘That’s not going to be so easy.’
The curtains in the camper drew wider apart. We could see more children inside, half a dozen or so of them. A few were a little older, six or seven.
‘How many children do you have in the back?’ Pa asked.
‘Let me see the woman first.’
Pa said Melinda’s name gently. She slowly emerged from under the blanket and I made space for her, so she could show her face.
‘Are these good people?’ the woman asked her.
I thought, please, Melinda, say something now.
‘Very good people,’ she said, barely more than a whisper.
The woman stood a while longer with the shotgun trained on Pa, and then lowered it. ‘My name’s Beryl Fortuin,’ she said. ‘Do you really have food?’
The children began to climb out behind her, a process that went on for a surprisingly long time: black, brown and white, until a large group of them stood in the road.
‘How many are there?’ Pa asked.
‘There are sixteen children,’ said Beryl.
We stood at the back of the Volvo’s trailer, the doors open wide, tinned food and cans of fruit juice, rusks and biltong spread out on a camping table. We added our own spoons to all the ones from the camper, and still there were not enough. The sixteen children had to take turns. They were all much younger than me. Eleven girls, of whom the oldest was six, and five boys, between three and four. Some were loud and boisterous, others clung timidly to Beryl’s legs. A little boy of three walked shyly up to Melinda Swanevelder and looked up at her, full of hope.
‘If you pick him up, another two will want the same,’ said Beryl Fortuin. I could see how muscular her arms were, for a woman.
Melinda nodded, and picked up the boy. He put his arms around her, hugged her tight. She closed her eyes.
Beryl Fortuin said it was impossible to keep them quiet, to keep them obedient; she saw us coming in the big truck, so she stopped and lay down behind the camper’s driving seat. She told them to be dead quiet, not to move. Then two of them peeped through the window. What could you do? And this after they had been robbed at the bridge over the Sundays River. Five men, or six, she couldn’t, and she didn’t really want to, remember. Men who used three children, those three – and she pointed them out, two black children and white-blond head – as bait, who made them stand beside the road and cry. So she stopped, and the men ran out and took the food and water she had. Food and water for the children. They wanted to do other things with her, if it hadn’t been for the children and the elephants. The elephants, which emerged from the bush, and the children, who began to shriek and cry when the men grabbed Beryl by the hair . . .
That was when Melinda Swanevelder began to cry again. For the second time.
She was standing with the little boy on her breast, his arms around her neck, one moment with her eyes still shut, but when Beryl began to describe the men grabbing her by the hair, Melinda pressed her face against the child, sank to her knees and wept.
The little boy and some of the children came to comfort her, their faces worried. Some shed tears with her.
Beryl looked at Pa questioningly while she tried to console the children.
Pa said, ‘Let her cry. There’re a lot of bad things she needs to get out.’ He went and stood beside Melinda and patted her awkwardly on the shoulder.
Only much later, when everyone had calmed down, Beryl said, ja, it was the elephants that saved her. The children’s shrill screams, and the elephants that walked out of the bush across the river at that moment, and splashed loudly through the water towards them. It was as though the children’s terrified screams had called the elephants. They must have escaped from the Addo Park. There had been a lot of rain in the area, the fences must have washed away. The men abandoned the three children with her too. Maybe that’s what the gods intended, for her to protect the children. She, who was on record saying she didn’t have time for children in the life she had planned.
‘Where are you headed?’ Pa asked.
She shrugged. ‘To the next town. Somewhere safe, where I can feed the children. Where I can get help.’ She stepped closer, speaking low so the children would not hear. ‘Nobody wants them. Everyone is too busy trying to survive.’ And then, more quietly, with a voice heavily burdened with guilt: ‘But there are too many for me.’
‘Come with us to Vanderkloof,’ said Pa.
Chapter 19
Pa and I drove in front. It was a couple of hours before sunset and we were on the lookout for a place where we could all safely spend the night. Melinda Swanevelder had switched to the front passenger seat of the camper and travelled with Beryl and the children.
On the road to Jansenville we saw the advertisement board for the Koedoeskop Game Ranch. We turned off, drove in. Blue wildebeest raised a cloud of dust as they dashed off. Further away a herd of springbok lifted their heads, and trotted lazily up a koppie, as if they at least remembered the harmless presence of tourists. Two warthogs occupied the veranda of the resort, reluctant to surrender the overgrown garden.
Pa said, ‘Bring the Tikka.’ He picked up his .300 CZ. We jumped out of the lorry. He jogged over to the women in the other vehicle. ‘Just wait a bit, we’re going to check the place out,’ he said.
We walked side by side. We were the men, we had to do men’s work: secure everything. I liked that. I mimicked Pa, and held my rifle in front of me. Cocked, finger on the trigger.
The buildings consisted of a pretty old farmstead that had been converted into a guest house. We opened the door. Pigeons flapped up suddenly in the reception area, startling us. They flew out through a broken skylight and we saw from the decor that it had been a luxury game farm. ‘Probably for international tourists,’ said Pa. There were hunting trophies on the walls: heads of kudu and buffalo and blue wildebeest, now soiled with pigeon droppings.
Everything was quiet, everything was safe.
Outside the back door, towards the lapa, we found a human skull and a few ribs scattered across the yard. The Fever had overtaken someone here. The animals had stripped the carcass and scattered the bones. We picked them up and threw them into the long grass.
We carried cartons of food to the kitchen. Pa stood and gazed out over the veld. He put a box down and said, ‘Come on, Nico. We’ve got a lot of mouths to feed. Let’s see if we can bring down a couple of springbok, then we can have a barbecue tonight.’
That was a first for the two of us.
We fetched the rifles and walked in silence in the direction that the buck had trotted off. The sun hunkered low on the horizon, the light soft, the colour of honey. The shrubs were overgrown and lush green in the late summer, the veld filled with the sound of birdsong and insects.
Pa stood still. He looked at the hills, the clouds, all the shades and textures. ‘Hell, Nico, it’s beautiful.’
I noticed something different about Pa. The people, Beryl and the children, seemed to have given him a purpose and a determination. I didn’t understand why.
Pa cocked his head to one side to listen, and said, ‘I think it must have been like this, before the Europeans came. You know, Africa.’
It took us twenty minutes to stalk the antelope. Pa gestured at me. I didn’t know what he was trying to tell me. ‘Take the shot,’ he whispered.
It was years before I realised that this was also a pivotal moment. He had brought his rifle along, but I don’t believe he ever intended to shoot. It was my job now. Later, around the fire, he took out a bottle of red wine and poured glasses only for himself and the two women. In spite of everything else, I wasn’t old enough for wine.
Our first meal as a little family was not at Vanderkloof.
Melinda Swanevelder made roos
terkoek dough with self-raising flour, sugar and sunflower oil from the game farm’s untouched pantry. We cooked the dough over the coals and ate the hot buns with apricot jam. Pa and I barbecued the crudely butchered meat. The children played all around the building and outside in the light of the gas lamp and the campfire. Their high-pitched voices were exuberant, the little bodies active after sitting still in the camper all day. We all ate together around the fire in the lapa, under the stars. It was a delight, after months of isolation, to hear the babble of children and women’s voices, the aroma of barbecued meat, and the taste of food that hadn’t come from a tin or a carton.
When the children were asleep in the resort’s spacious sitting room, sprawled higgledy-piggledy on sofas and easy chairs, and covered by blankets, I went back outside to sit with the adults, and Pa poured more wine and tossed some more logs on the fire. Then Beryl told her story.
She was a golf player, the resident female pro at the Pezula resort outside Knysna. She smiled wryly and confessed it was a profession that left her with absolutely no aptitude for a post-apocalyptic world, apart from fitness and some people skills.