Fever

by Deon Meyer

  Nostalgia encourages triviality, self-indulgence. Nostalgia whispers, ‘Tell them how Lizette Schoeman broke your heart when you were nearly sixteen.’ It was, as these things go, utterly unremarkable: I was walking from the water tower on a late Sunday afternoon in August, in the Year of the Jackal and I saw Lizette in an embrace with Charl Oosthuizen, a man in his thirties who had barely been in Amanzi for two months. I wanted to burst into tears, I wanted to scream, to fall down at her feet, I wanted to attack him, I wanted to run away, escape for ever. But I just kept walking towards the Orphanage, my heart broken, shattered, in pieces. (Scarcely two months later it would make a complete recovery!)

  They got married in the end, the two of them. Charl was a good man, he would go on to become a big sunflower farmer, and Lizette became our best honey producer. But I could only really start to like him once I’d also discovered the love of my life.

  For two long years I’d been intensely and hopelessly besotted with Lizette. Hopeless, because I was still a child, and she was not. Hopeless, because it was unrequited. A futile endeavour.

  Futile, as my infatuation meant that I missed out on the greatest love and lust bonanza of my era. Which was the result, first of all, of the phenomenon that Nero Dlamini called the ‘baby boom effect’, the evolutionary urge to drastically increase population growth after a bloody war – or a catastrophic viral epidemic.

  Second, it stemmed from the intense desire people have to be touched and held, to connect, to cherish and be cherished, in a world where the usual sources of affection have been wiped out – parents, family members and loved ones. Nero called it the John Bowlby Effect, and said among young people who had in addition been severely traumatised, it had an even greater influence.

  And third, there was the fact that teenagers – in any case the world’s randiest creatures – were statistically one of the largest groups in Amanzi. Because this cohort’s youth, adaptability and physical strength had helped them survive the dangers of the post-apocalyse somewhat better than the rest.

  That was the academic, Dlaminian explanation of the Sex Fest among young and old, but especially the young, and I missed out on it all, being so besotted with Lizette Schoeman. But not so Jacob Mahlangu. He took advantage of the excess on offer, yet never encouraged me to do the same. Years later he would confess: ‘I didn’t need the competition, Nico. I’m not stupid. If you knew how many girls had a crush on you . . . I had to console them.’ And then he laughed in that deep Mahlangu way that made his whole body vibrate.

  Jacob was my co-shepherd and my great comrade. Jacob was also my mole, my gossip link, my source of information about everything outside the Orphanage. As son of the chairman I had the advantage of inside knowledge during those early years: about Committee meetings and decisions, all the great questions facing our community, the undercurrents, the plans, the conflicts and the strategy. But the greatest disadvantage was that the people of Amanzi didn’t trust me with all the gossip and complaints. Nor with their constant criticisms of the chairman and the Committee and all its members, regardless of whether they made good or bad decisions.

  That was where Jacob played such a vital role. In many aspects we were opposites, and the perfect combination. Jacob was placid, patient, philosophical, easy in his own skin. I was none of those. Yet we both developed a love for reading, and an unquenchable thirst for juicy news.

  It was Jacob who drew me aside one morning at school and breathlessly told me, ‘Beryl and Nero are gay.’

  At fourteen I had a somewhat loose grasp of the term. ‘Gay? But they can’t be gay together?’

  ‘No, stupid, she likes women, and he likes men.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Miss Denise said so.’ Denise was a forty-year-old woman who had been here since Arrival Day, one of Amanzi’s biggest blabbermouths. ‘She says Beryl was a golf pro, and everybody knows women golf pros are all gay. And you can still see it, from Beryl’s muscles, and her butch ways.’

  I thought of Beryl, and, looking at it like that, it made sense.

  ‘And Nero?’

  ‘Has he shown any interest in any of the women?’

  ‘No . . .’

  ‘And the way he dresses. And speaks . . .’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘So, there . . .’

  I believed him.

  Sipho Jola was born on 26 December in the Year of the Dog, the first person to enter life as a member of the community of Amanzi.

  His name means ‘gift’.

  The Sex Fest would produce twenty-four babies in the next twelve months – the Year of the Crow.

  The Year of the Crow

  Chapter 34

  Thielert’s gearbox: I

  Cairistine ‘Birdy’ Canary

  As recorded by Willem Storm. The Amanzi History Project.

  Yes, causality can be a pain. I mean, the story about Hennie and the plane and the petrol, and Nico and Okkie and all the drama started by all those companies who genetically engineered seeds. It’s not as if they thought, hang on, what happens in case of a global catastrophe, what happens in a post-apocalyptic world? They modified their seeds so that you could only harvest once. Then you had to eat them, because you couldn’t plant the seed from the first crop, they were programmed to fail. You had to buy new seed. Beautiful business model, but then all those companies were gone with the wind, but the seeds remained.

  I told the Committee, that must be one of our primary objectives, if we were going to plan long term: develop a seed bank. Luckily we had Tony by then, Tony Mbalo, who had worked on a grain farm that belonged to the Premier of the Free State provincial government, back in the day, near Reitz. Tony was the farmer, as the Premier was almost never there. And Tony was a good farmer. When he came to us, he became the chief in charge of Amanzi’s grain farming.

  Tony and I talked a lot about the problem of the genetically modified seed. Tony told me he knew there were many Eastern Free State farmers who cultivated wheat for non-modified heritage seed. We should get hold of some of that seed.

  But it wasn’t a case of just going to collect some. At that stage the KTM controlled too many of the routes between the Lesotho mountains and Bloemfontein. If you wanted to pass through, you had to send an armed convoy, and we didn’t have the people or the vehicles, and couldn’t run the risk; there were too many other urgent necessities to see to before the next winter.

  Then Hennie Fly said he could load four hundred kilos of seed in the Cessna. Would that help?

  Hennie Fly

  As recorded by Willem Storm. The Amanzi History Project.

  I flew in from Bethlehem with the Cessna, on my own. I had over four hundred kilograms of seed wheat on board. It was seed that Amanzi sorely needed, and before winter, as they still needed to plough and plant. Now, four hundred kilograms is too much for the Cessna, if you take into consideration my weight and the odds and ends that I have to take along, and fuel as well. So I loaded the wheat, and then I pumped some of the fuel out of the tanks, to get the weight down. I left a good safety margin for the range that I could fly with the fuel, so I wasn’t too concerned. But I was still about forty kilograms too heavy, not too bad, but it does make you watch the vitals, the instruments, it’s like always in the back of your mind that you’re overweight, you’re flogging the old girl, so you have to keep an eye in case she starts to complain.

  I was at ten thousand feet . . . that’s about three thousand metres, it’s a good altitude for the 172. I was cruising, a hundred and twenty knots, or two-twenty kilometres per hour. Around ten o’clock in the morning, in January. You know the weather can build up, that time of the year in that part of the country. And this morning there were already a few clouds and a bit of turbulence, but I ought to get back home before one, the big thunderstorms only arrive in late afternoon.

  Anyway, I still had about seventy-five litres in the tank, enough for five hundred kilometres if I kept it nice and steady, and it was only four hundred back to Amanzi. Ever
ything was hunky-dory, or so I thought.

  Then it began to sputter. Out of the blue. At ten thousand feet.

  At first I thought the engine would cut out altogether, the first sputter was so severe, and then it came back, and struggled. It was as though the fuel was gone, but both tanks showed just over half full. Sputter, sputter, and I was losing power, and losing altitude, and I was overladen.

  I tried working the magnetos, that didn’t help, then I knew it had to be the plugs that were dirty. Now, if the plugs are dirty you make your fuel mixture leaner and you give maximum power to see if you can burn the dirt off the plugs. It helped, but only for about five minutes, then the sputtering returned, and you had to burn them again.

  I knew then, Hennie, you have to land, you have to clean those plugs.

  Now the route from Bethlehem to Amanzi, as the Cessna flew, takes you between Bloemfontein and Botshabelo. When the plane trouble began I was about thirty, thirty-five kilometres north-east of Botshabelo, and probably seventy east of Bloem. It’s all very well to say a 172 can land anywhere where the road is reasonably good and reasonably straight, but if you don’t know the area . . . The trouble is wires. Power lines and telephone wires. You can’t see them, and they are always beside the road and across the road, and you don’t see them and you fly into them, and then you’re in trouble. If you have time and lots of petrol, and not overloaded, you can take a good look for wires where you want to land. But if you don’t have that, then you look for an airstrip. Quickly.

  And the other thing is, at that moment I decided I definitely didn’t want to be found fiddling with the engine somewhere to hell and gone on a stretch of road that was rotten with the KTM. If I could, I had to make a plan.

  Before I take off, I look over the few maps I have collected to see where there are airfields. And the plan, the best plan I could come up with at that moment it began sputtering, was Thaba ’Nchu airport. Not the biggest in the world, it only had one runway, but it was good and long, and properly tarred. I remembered it was south of Botshabelo, but I didn’t know exactly where. The old lady was sputtering, and I was losing speed and altitude, my glide ratio was bad, too bad for the distance, and I had to study the map on my lap to see where the hell Thaba ’Nchu airport was. Then I had to set course, and keep burning the plugs every five minutes, and I had to keep a sharp eye out for beacons, or the airport. I tell you, I was in a proper sweat. I thought, if I crash here, Melinda will think I’ve run off, and I can’t do that to her. And Amanzi needs that seed badly. I prayed out loud, between burning off the plugs and checking my rate of descent.

  And then I spotted it, but it only made the sweat pour even more, because it seemed just too far, and the runway was north-west to south-east, which meant I had make a wide turn as well. Now you should know, Thaba ’Nchu’s airport was built under the old apartheid era, for the Bophuthatswana homeland, for the casino, really; back in those days it was quite a grand airport. But after apartheid the place went backwards. And now it was two years past the Fever, so there was no windsock, and I guessed the wind was blowing a bit north to south, so I turned to the south-eastern end of the runway, knowing full well that I might not make it, but if you don’t try, hey . . .

  There’s a little koppie, a hill that I had to get over, and I only just made it. I burned the plugs one last time and I opened up that engine, and made my last turn for final approach. Now I was . . . I don’t want to lie to you, but the ground was very close and the runway still too far; it was grassveld, long green summer grass, there could have been a buck hiding in that grass, and I realised, oh shoot, the wind was still from behind and I was coming in too fast. And then I saw the cows on the runway, far over on the northern end.

  I put her down, must have been a good hundred and twenty metres before the runway started, in the long green grass. If I had hit an anthill at that speed, or an aardvark hole, then I and the wheat and the 172 would have been in our glory, but she rolled towards the tarmac, and then onto the tar, but we were going too fast and the wind was strong behind us, and we were too heavy to stop in time. I sat and watched those cows come closer. Two were standing on the tarmac, maybe ten more in the grass on either side of the runway. Now I ask you, what was a cow doing on the tarmac, there’s nothing to eat, it’s just fate. I braked as hard as I could – you can’t overdo it, or you’ll tip her on her nose – and the cattle kept coming closer, and I braked, and sweated, and the cows kept coming.

  It’s one of those things that you’ll never forget. You think, I’ve just brought this aerie with four hundred kilos of wheat and a stuttering engine down safely, a huge achievement, if I have to say so myself. I’d sweated blood, but I was on the ground, and now I was going to crash into a cow. You could see her, up ahead, with that big fat stupid expression on her face and those long tart’s eyelashes, and it’s into this creature that you’re going to smash yourself to smithereens.

  Now that cow strolled out of the way, just at the very last split-second. I still believe it was because the noise of the engine was annoying her, and she wandered just far enough for me to swerve left, and I slid between the two cows, and stopped the Cessna and just sat there, my whole body shaking, my whole body, I’m telling you, but I just bent my head and said thank you, God, thank you. I had stopped at the end of the tarmac, the very end of the runway, and I could see there was an eroded gully just beyond the strip; I would have somersaulted her there if I hadn’t got her to stop. It was destiny.

  Little knowing the Lord and I still had a lot of work to do that day.

  Cairistine ‘Birdy’ Canary

  Petrol was made to burn easily. And that’s precisely the reason why it doesn’t keep for long. If you store it in a tank too long, some of the elements that burn most easily start to evaporate. And the other thing is, hydrocarbons in the petrol start reacting with the oxygen, and they change the chemical composition of the petrol. They contaminate the fuel; that is why Hennie Fly found that gummy stuff in his fuel system.

  Hennie Fly

  Standing on the end of the Thaba ’Nchu runway, I knew I had to do two things. I had to find out why the plugs were getting so dirty, and I had to clean them. The first part was the easiest – as soon as I began to look, when I ran some petrol out of the tanks, I immediately saw the petrol in the left wing was dirty, it had these little bits of gummy stuff in it. It had me seriously worried, and I ran fuel from the right wing tank, but that at least was clear.

  Now, those 172s had three settings for the flow of petrol. You could select the left tank, you could select the right tank, or you could set it to use both tanks at the same time. You always used the last setting when flying. But with the left tank dirty, I had to set it to use the right wing.

  The trouble with that was that it immediately halved my available fuel. I stood there thinking, how was I going to get home?

  I emptied all the bad fuel out of the left wing, to make the aerie as light as possible, and I thought, if I work smart, I can make it. With a bit of luck. And a tail wind. And by the grace of God.

  If the fuel does start to run out, I’ll land as close to Amanzi as I can, and then I’ll walk to get help from my people.

  You know, what else could I do?

  The clock was ticking, the clouds were building in the sky.

  But first I had to get the plugs cleaned, and that’s another story. A Cessna’s plugs, as you can imagine, aren’t just like a car’s plugs with wiring that you can simply pull off, the wires are screwed to those plugs. I had a mini-toolbox in the aerie, and I knew I had a plug spanner, and I knew I had a three-eighths spanner, but I also knew that I didn’t have a seven-sixteenths. And without a seven-sixteenths, I couldn’t get those plugs out to clean them.

  I looked around, and I spotted the airport Arrivals building; it was a ruin, everything broken. And there were several hangars, small ones, five or six in a row. I walked there, and saw the hangar doors were half open, and I knew then there was nothing in there. I was right, there w
ere no planes in those hangars. But I hoped and prayed as I searched through them, and in the last one there was still a workbench against the wall. It was filthy, covered in a thick layer of dust and rubbish, and there were rags and empty cans, and part of an engine, and a bunch of spanners and pliers and screws and stuff, really rusty, and I began to scratch around and blow away the dust, and I realised that some of these engine parts were from a 172. I began to feel hopeful, and I continued to search and would you know, there was a seven-sixteenths. Let me tell you, I shed a tear when I held that spanner in my hand.

  I began to remove the plugs and clean them – they were terribly dirty, but otherwise they were fine. Time passed, things always take longer than you think, and the thunderheads built up in the west. We’re talking about serious weather, you could feel it in the air, there’s that electricity, which means trouble.

  I worked as fast as I could. I put the plugs back, and chased the cows away as far as I could, then I threw a handful of grass in the air to check the wind. It was still blowing north, so I could just turn round and go, and I took off, the plugs were clean and I got her in the air and turned and climbed. So it was one eye on the weather and one eye on the fuel gauge, because I had about two hundred and thirty kilometres to go to Petrusville. By that time I had already cleared and repaired the Petrusville airfield runway, which was where I kept the Cessna, about twenty kilometres by road from Amanzi.

  Now I was flying, and it was going okay. With about a hundred kilometres to go, the wind turned. Now it was a head wind. I knew if it kept on blowing, the fuel I had would be just too little, and the clouds grew thicker and the turbulence worse and the wind blew harder from the front, but at least the engine was running smoothly. I did sums in my head, and I thought, higher or lower, faster or slower, what would be best? This was really going to be touch-and-go, hair-raising stuff. Very scary.

  The Cessna’s glide ratio was more or less fifteen kilometres for every two thousand metres altitude. Under normal circumstances. But this wasn’t normal. By then, the load was much lighter due to the fuel dumped and the fuel used, but the head wind blew stronger and stronger.