by Deon Meyer
That winter it only snowed once, lightly. But we had electricity, so nobody was cold at night.
That November it rained non-stop for nine days. Heavy rain. The river and the dam rose higher and higher, the water thundered over the dam wall in a spine-chilling, rolling, churning mass; you could hear the noise ten kilometres away. We were all afraid. Nobody really knew how to work the sluice gates.
Birdy said not to worry, she would work it out.
Pastor Nkosi said he and his growing congregation would pray that the dam would hold.
When the waters subsided and the dam wall still held, both the pastor and Birdy claimed credit for the success.
The rain wreaked havoc on the gravel and district roads. Everyone said it was a good thing; it would keep the KTM away. Domingo shook his head. He said the KTM had dual-purpose motorbikes. Nothing would keep them away.
You’re paranoid, said Birdy, Beryl and Pa, but in a sympathetic way.
Domingo said the KTM are animals. They would come. And he looked at me and smiled that smile of his.
The Year of the Jackal
Chapter 45
In the Year of the Jackal the pedlars came. And death. And war. And horror.
And Sofia Bergman.
Sofia Bergman
As recorded by Sofia Bergman. The Amanzi History Project, continued – in memory of Willem Storm.
In the Year of the Jackal I realised the end was near, early in that year, January, probably. The end of me, Meklein and Vytjie. His coughing fits had become much worse. And Vytjie was as thin as a reed; I was convinced she wouldn’t live long. She disappeared in the first week of the year, for ten long days. Meklein kept saying: ‘No, don’t worry, kinta, she does that, she’ll come back,’ but I had made peace with the idea that she . . . Remember, I was fifteen, and I had this imagination. I thought she loved Meklein so much, she couldn’t bear to see him suffer. Or she wanted to die in the veld, become one with nature, in the way of dust-to-dust. Now that I think back, I feel silly, that I would think that . . .
Ten days later, she returned with plants she had been looking for. Plants that she infused into tea for Meklein’s cough. All she said was that the plants were very scarce at this time of year, as if it were completely normal to be away for such a stretch.
The tea really helped for his cough. For a while.
Chapter 46
Sofia Bergman
I was born in Middelburg, in the Cape. I was the youngest of four children, my parents farmed between Middelburg and Nieu-Bethesda. I had two brothers and a sister. My oldest brother was Dawid Bergman, who won silver in the fifteen hundred metres at the Commonwealth Games. He and I were both born with silver-blond hair. We were all good at athletics, and we were all at school in Bloemfontein. My brothers were at Grey College, my sister was in Oranje Girls High. I was in the Oranje Junior School when the Fever came. We were all boarders in the hostels.
My father wasn’t your typical Karoo farmer. From the beginning he said his children would inherit equally, not in the traditional way where only the sons inherit the farms.
We were all raised equal. My brothers had to learn to cook, they had to help as much as we girls in the kitchen did. My sister and I learned to catch sheep and dip them, we drove tractors and pick-ups, rode horses and learned to shoot, from when we were little. Pa let us shoot, and I would sit with my back against the pick-up, and the rifle butt under my arm, the butt also pushed against the pick-up, because Pa said the kick of the rifle was too much for my shoulder. I learned to shoot like that, first with an open sight, later with a scope.
My sister was a sprinter, but I had Free State colours in cross-country, and in javelin when I was in Grade Six. And again in Grade Seven. That was the year the Fever came.
My sister was the first one in our family to get sick. In two days she was dead. Ma and Pa came to fetch us all from Bloemfontein, my sister in her coffin. They wanted to bury her on the farm and get us out of school and the city, so we wouldn’t catch the virus. But they all got sick . . .
Meklein and Vytjie were workers on the farm. They didn’t get sick.
2 January
The room that Pa and I shared in the Orphanage was big. He slept on the double bed, I slept on the single, and we each had our own wardrobe.
On the morning of 2 January, at breakfast, Pa said, ‘I think it’s time you got your own room.’
I wasn’t sure if he was serious. ‘Really, Pa?’
‘With Hennie Fly and Melinda getting married on Saturday, Hennie’s room will be available. And you’re turning sixteen this year . . .’
‘Amazing! Thanks, Pa.’
15 January
Sometimes Nero Dlamini and I would chat in his ‘office’ at the Orphanage, when I was in therapy with him for my post-traumatic stress after the attack on Okkie. But often he would say, let’s take a walk outside. Usually we would go down to the water and sit on a tree stump beside the dam.
On that day, 15 January, he said it was our final session for now.
‘So, I’m cured?’ I tried hard to hide the faint feeling of disappointment. The PTSD therapy was a bit of a status symbol and an extension of the hero worship of the Great Diesel Expedition.
‘No, you’re as nutty as a fruitcake, but sane is so boring, Nico.’ He knew how to work with teenagers.
‘Right.’
‘In a perfect world, I would have asked you to continue to see me. But people with greater damage keep arriving, so it’s a matter of priority. And it does seem that the fifteen-year-old psyche is quite robust, particularly when daily life is mostly a big adventure, and you have Okkie Storm as a little brother now.’
Okkie had played a big role in my recovery. Because Okkie Storm was my shadow. Okkie Storm worshipped the ground I walked on. Beryl said that from one o’clock every afternoon Okkie would ask her: ‘When is Nico coming?’ Okkie could not understand that every second week was a work week and I would only be back at the Orphanage late in the afternoon. On those afternoons he would sit by the gate of the Orphanage and wait for me, any time from four o’clock. And when he heard me coming in the spluttering, jerking dirty-petrol quadbike, he would jump up and run down the street.
I had to pick him up at the corner. His face would beam with excitement. ‘Go, Nico, go fast!’
Okkie had an irrepressible joie de vivre and an infectious laugh. Okkie also always managed to be the dirtiest child in the preschool class, even when they played in the shallow water of the dam.
Okkie would run into the Orphanage sitting room every night with a story book held in both hands, his piping voice ringing across the room: ‘Nico, Nico, read us a story.’
And then I would have to read, regardless of whether I was tired, or felt like it. Okkie and his band of followers would come and sit around me, on me, over me and I had to read. Domingo would watch us from where he sat on one side, and he would smile. No grimace. He really smiled.
Okkie wanted to know why he couldn’t sleep with me in my new single room. ‘There’s lots of room here . . .’
‘One day,’ I said. ‘When you’re big.’
Okkie adopted me and Pa. ‘Annexed’ is perhaps more accurate. One day when new arrivals asked him who he was he just began calling himself ‘Okkie Storm’.
A school-week summer’s day in my life in the Year of the Jackal: Pa would knock on my door, six o’clock. I would get up, dress, wash my face and brush my teeth. I would go to the kitchen to cook the oatmeal porridge. That was my morning chore: to cook porridge for all the orphans. It wasn’t hard, I knew exactly how much water, how much oatmeal and salt to put in the pot. I knew precisely how long it had to cook. I looked at my Rolex watch to time it right. We all had good, expensive watches. It was human nature for expeditions and travelling pedlars and foragers and fugitives to take the contents of jewellery shops – everything shiny – for themselves, or in the hope of trading. The concept of what was valuable stuck. I still have my Rolex today.
Part of my morning responsibi
lity was to dish up the oatmeal for the orphans and, lastly, for myself. I also had to wash the pot and put it away.
I ate my porridge with Domingo, because I wanted to, and with Okkie, because he insisted. I could eat breakfast and lunch where and with whom I wanted. Dinner I had to eat with my father and Okkie, because we were ‘a family’.
School started at eight o’clock. We studied geography, mathematics, biology, science and world history. And one ‘skill’. My skill subjects were sheep farming and shooting. I wasn’t all that interested in sheep farming, but you learned it outside, in the veld, you worked with the sheep. I don’t like being indoors.
Normal school was from eight to half past one, skills school was from two to four. Fridays were my best day, because it was when the chosen ones went shooting with Domingo.
Only Domingo could shoot better than I could.
Community tasks involved relieving Beryl and Melinda with the orphans. Jacob helped me with that. In the summer we would usually take them to the dam, or to go swimming, or shoot catapults, or float stick boats in the shallow water. Or we would take them to collect eggs from Hennie’s hens, or we would play with them on the lawns of the old bowling green – rotten egg or hide-and-seek. Okkie rode on my shoulders when we walked. He would not allow any other child to do that.
After six in the afternoon I would hang out with the other teenagers in front of the bakery, until just before seven. There were more than thirty of us between the ages of fifteen and eighteen. Jacob was actually my only close friend. To the others I was ‘the chairman’s son’, the one who lived in the Orphanage although he was no orphan, and not a small kid any more. I really hung out with the other teenagers late in the afternoon in the hope of seeing Lizette Schoeman. Lizette worked at crop farming. They came back from the fields between five and six, and she and some of her girlfriends would come to sit at the bakery and chat. Sometimes.
At seven I had to be at the Orphanage with clean washed hands to eat with Pa and Okkie and the rest of the Orphanage.
I was expected to clear two tables before I could go to my room. Usually I would fetch my homework and sit in the dining room or the sitting room while I listened to all the happenings. I had always been very inquisitive. It would be then that Okkie would commandeer me for reading duty.
27 January
Hennie Fly flew patrol twice a week, just after sunrise on Tuesdays and Fridays. On 27 January he saw a long procession, on the other side of Luckhoff on the old R48, just thirty kilometres from Amanzi. From the air, he said later, they looked like war refugees, a long, weary worm of humanity. Most of them on foot, just the oldest and the very young rode on the vehicles – battered pick-ups without engines and small trucks pulled by donkeys and horses. Five hundred and eighty-one people, most of them from Namibia, and a few who had joined the group in the Upington district.
Forty-two horses, thirty-six donkeys.
Along with practically every teenager, I was at the bus gate when they passed through. The refugees and their animals looked tired, hungry, thirsty and fearful. The people meekly relinquished their weapons to Domingo and his militia, as though they were relieved to do so. Practically the whole of Amanzi gathered around the Forum, to welcome them, to offer the arrivals food and water, to try to organise accommodation, but most of all to hear their stories.
The Namibians said that most of them were from Windhoek. For the past eighteen months they had tried to make a new life there. They had a good supply of dry food, they planted a little and there was a healthy flock of goats. And then the attacks began. Last September was the first: a group of approximately fifty men from the north. They were in pick-up trucks, they shot dead three of the Windhoek people and stole a lot of food.
The big attack came in mid-October. Maybe two hundred people, perhaps more, nobody really knew, it was at night, it was chaos, everything happened so fast. The attackers were in vehicles and on foot. A hundred and sixty residents were murdered. The entire goat flock was taken, weapons and supplies of food and drink were stolen.
They packed up and began their trek, south. Their city was indefensible, it was too big, and there were too few of them. At the Orange River they began to hear rumours of the Place of Light that you could see a hundred kilometres away, the only place in Africa with electricity. At the old Vanderkloof. Amanzi.
Us.
A hundred and two of them had died during the Great Thirstland Trek, from privation and hunger and fatigue, lions and snakes and disease and age. And the human animals that attacked them.
Chapter 47
The KTM come: I
Sofia Bergman
As recorded by Sofia Bergman. The Amanzi History Project, continued – in memory of Willem Storm.
Meklein, Vytjie and I took care of Pa and Ma, my two brothers and the other workers on the farm when they fell sick, and died. Today I’m glad I could do that. There were so many of the people at Amanzi who were far from their loved ones when the Fever took them. It was so painful to lose my family, but I could say goodbye to each of them. And I could bury them.
Of course I knew what was happening. The epidemic was on the Internet and the radio and television, it was all-consuming, it was everything. So I knew precisely what was going on.
Much later, Nero Dlamini and I talked a great deal about the influence of that sort of trauma on the psyche. I just believe a person has an instinctive primal ability to handle it one way or another, in the moment. To carry on. To survive.
My father was the last to die, he clung fiercely to life, fighting death because I suppose he felt responsible for us, wanted to protect us. Only then, after he was gone, did I realise that I wasn’t sick yet, and maybe I wasn’t going to die after all. And Meklein and Vytjie too. My own survival was the worst for me, the hardest to accept. It was as though I thought I would bury my family, and then Meklein would bury me, I would soon be with them . . . Nero Dlamini said it was typical survivor’s guilt. It was the thing I suffered from most, to be honest. I felt so awfully guilty that I was the one who survived. I deserved it least. I was thirteen. I was still nothing.
Meklein and Vytjie . . . It was one of the great mysteries of the universe that they survived the Fever together. A statistical impossibility. They were husband and wife. He was three-quarters Bushman, she was coloured. With Griqua blood, she always said. Meklein was my father’s right-hand man. Vytjie was a free spirit. She was the veld doctor for coloured people of the whole district. And us children too. She knew the medicinal properties of each plant in the veld.
Meklein rolled cigarettes from Boxer tobacco and newspaper. That’s what killed him in the end, those cigarettes.
I believe the Bushmen have a genetic resistance to the virus, if I look at how many we’ve run into over the past years, how many of them survived.
The simultaneous arrival of the five hundred and eighty Namibians had consequences.
The Committee had to plan well for the use of food, as we now had to feed many more people through the coming winter. The second consequence was that all of Amanzi’s available housing was suddenly full. To the brim. The Namibians took the last of the houses, even the smallest in the old township, the most decrepit in the main town, the few empty old shops and the last vacant rooms in houses.
Due to my banishment, and to my great chagrin, I could no longer listen to the great debate over the future expansion of Amanzi first hand. But the Committee gave public feedback in the Forum, and I drew my own conclusions. There were two schools of thought.
The first was to begin to develop and populate Petrusville. It was only fifteen kilometres from Amanzi, it was easy to connect the electricity grid, and only eight kilometres from the big irrigation scheme on the river. The great disadvantage was the town lay on the plain, with no natural defences.
The second school of thought was to immediately begin planning and working on the expansion of Amanzi itself – the development of a brick oven, the laying out of new roads, new plots of land for new
houses, and all the necessary infrastructure. It would be more difficult, because we didn’t have the knowledge or skills to do everything quickly, and it would take months of preparation before we could build houses.
In what Domingo called ‘a typical committee decision’, they decided to get both solutions under way in the meantime. Expeditions were asked to look for cement. Our young geologist who had arrived the previous year said no, if we really wanted, we could make our own. Or at least a basic, workable version of it. We would just have to fetch lime.
The third consequence of the Namibians’ arrival was that Domingo got fifty people for his army. The Committee were shocked by the arrivals’ tales of vicious attacks, and of course now there were just more people available to deploy.
They were all over forty, the oldest sixty-one. None had previous military experience. ‘A real Dad’s Army, for defence purposes only. I am sure the KTM are shaking in their boots,’ grumbled Domingo to me during target practice, when he was sure no one else could hear us.
I envied every one of our new soldiers.
The fourth – and best – consequence was the addition of valuable new skills: a nurse, four experienced stock farmers, a nature conservationist, a mechanic and a nearly qualified diesel mechanic.
The final consequence of the coming of the Namibians was that Jacob and I no longer rode the quadbike to the reserve. We were each allocated a horse for our shepherding work, animals that we had to learn to ride, and to care for. We helped to build the stables, just across the T-junction at Heide Street.
17 February
Domingo and his soldiers managed three roadblocks: one just south of Petrusville, one about fifteen kilometres west of Amanzi on the old R369, and one on the opposite bank at the old Havenga Bridge over the Orange River, about a kilometre downstream of the dam wall.
On 17 February the four day-shift guards at the Havenga Bridge heard the deep rumble of a diesel lorry, its hooter sounding out cheerfully. Then the big ERF lorry with a long white trailer came into view over the hill, clearly not one of Amanzi’s expedition vehicles. It stopped a hundred metres from the barricade – a safe distance.