by Deon Meyer
A man and a woman got out of the cab, stood in front of the truck and waved at the guards. The man approached on foot, the woman stayed by the truck. The man introduced himself as Thabo. He pointed at the woman and said she was Magriet. They were pedlars. They heard we had a growing, successful settlement, with electricity. They sold medicine for people, and medicine for animals. They also had rice, some pasta and electrical appliances – kitchen blenders, washing machines and tumble dryers, fridges and stoves, everything spotless, brand new.
The guards called Domingo over the radio. Domingo said he was on his way. He drove to the bridge, met the man and woman. They were good-humoured, harmless. He looked at the white trailer. On the side was painted a big red cross, and in clumsy letters the words: Medicine. For trade. We come in Peace. Followed by a large peace symbol in bright green.
Domingo searched the lorry. Three times. He found only boxes and crates, all filled with medicine, rice, pasta and electrical equipment, neatly packed and marked.
‘What do you sell these for?’ asked Domingo.
‘For whatever you have. We barter. We urgently need diesel. Vegetables and fruit are worth a lot to us, actually any fresh food. Meat as well, we have a fridge in the trailer.’
Domingo interrogated them for another fifteen minutes before he was satisfied. Then he gave the sign – the blockade gate swung open. Thabo and Magriet drove over the bridge, up the hill, and stopped in front of the old police station.
They were the first travelling traders since the Fever. Pa said it was the most encouraging sign yet of a normalising world.
That night in the Orphanage I hung on their lips as they recounted their story. They said they were both restless souls whose paths had crossed by accident.
Thabo Somyo was nearly fifty. He had always been in transit in some way, working in various places in South Africa. The few years before the Fever as a receiving clerk at the harbour in East London’s container terminal. When the epidemic and the ensuing chaos came, he hid out there, because he knew of the thousands of tons of imported grain in the harbour silos, of the shipping containers filled with exotic foods, including rice and noodles from the East, and pasta and tinned tomatoes from Italy. Eventually there were close to sixty people making a living in and around the harbour, but Thabo was ready to move on again.
Twenty-something Magriet van der Sandt was a pharmacist from Queenstown. She had been a backpacker when the world was still whole, and after the Fever she soon became frustrated by the constrictions of a life of mere survival. And she yearned for fresh vegetables and fruit. Eventually she packed a small truck full of medicine and set off. Everywhere she encountered people she traded medicine and medical advice for fuel, fresh food and security.
In East London she met Thabo Somyo. He asked why she was trading with such a small truck. She said that was all she could drive. He told her there were seven shipping containers full of medicines in the harbour. He said he would show her where they were, he would get them a big lorry, but he wanted to come along, and he wanted a full 50 per cent of the partnership.
The medicine in the containers was not just for people. Nearly half was dip and vaccines for sheep, cattle and pigs. They packed some of those in as well and left. That was four months ago. First they went to places like Port Alfred and Cradock, Mthatha and Port St Johns. Then further. To Durban. Pietermaritzburg, Manzini and Richards Bay. Then Nelspruit, Pretoria, Johannesburg, Polokwane, Gaborone, Vryburg, Kimberley and, eventually, Amanzi.
Yes, they had been shot at, some people had thrown stones at them in passing. They didn’t stop if it looked very dangerous. They had been stopped many times, often by people with weapons, people filled with aggression or fear, mostly people who were aggressive out of fear. But nearly all of those people were in need of medicine, or advice about medicine. Or someone in that group was sick or injured. Or people were just eager for news about what was going on elsewhere in the world. And then they would barter, and each time Thabo and Magriet were permitted to continue their journey.
They said the world was changing slowly, it was stabilising. People were joining forces in other places, just like us. Around Pinetown in KwaZulu-Natal there was a large settlement that survived on cattle farming and bananas and pineapples. They were making ethanol from sugar cane. There had been an ethanol plant before the Fever, which they got up and running again. Initially their production was small, and the quality varied, but it grew and improved weekly. At first they only produced enough fuel to run petrol generators, but now many of their vehicles were running on it.
In Nelspruit there was a peaceful, growing community who traded mangos, avocados and macadamia nuts for medicine.
In the north of Pretoria a cattle-farming town was developing, and in Johannesburg two dominant groups had arisen, the Easties from the Kempton Park area, and the Westies from Soweto and Randburg. They had no agriculture, they lived by plundering the city, house by house, for anything edible or usable. The tension between the two gangs was growing as the loot diminished. ‘There’ll be war,’ said Thabo Somyo. ‘We got out of there pretty fast.’
Amanzi’s reputation, they said, was widespread, as far as Johannesburg even. Communities spoke of ‘the place at the dam that has electricity’. That was why Thabo and Magriet began to trade their medicines for brand-new electrical wares, everywhere they stopped.
‘So you haven’t been to Bloemfontein?’ asked Domingo.
‘No,’ said Magriet. ‘We hear there are bikers who control that area, and they’re dangerous.’
29 March
Thabo and Magriet returned, this time from the south. They brought a whole load of rice. They came to trade it for bottled fruit, for bottled tomato and onion sauce; they said that was very popular, everywhere they went.
They said they came through the Langkloof and Oudtshoorn and Beaufort West, to avoid the bikers, the people we called the KTM.
They said their journey had been without incident.
Chapter 48
The KTM come: II
Sofia Bergman
I want to say something that will sound strange, but it would be dishonest . . . incomplete if I didn’t say it: those three years that Meklein and Vytjie and I lived on the farm, there was something sublime, something biblical, holy about it.
The farm was very remote, it lay deep in a river valley, in mountainous country, north of Nieu-Bethesda. The geography there strengthens your feeling of . . . loneliness is not the right word, because I was never lonely. Nor were the two of them, because they had each other, and they had me as a responsibility, a purpose, you understand what I mean? Nero said a reason to survive and keep living is a big influence on the lifespan of old people. I might have been that for them.
But I digress. The encircling mountains strengthen one’s feeling of isolation, they make it easier to believe this is the whole world, this is all that exists, even though you know it is not. Does that make sense?
We saw nobody else in those three years. Nobody. In the beginning, in those early months after we had buried all our people, we still had satellite TV, at night we could watch the world collapse into ruins little by little. But the transmissions suddenly stopped. One evening when we switched on, there was nothing. We still had the radio, for a few weeks. And then it was just us, and the graves of our loved ones, and our simple lifestyle. Now I have to laugh, because one romanticises so easily: the people of olden times definitely did not have a wind charger or solar panels for power. But nevertheless we had an uncomplicated existence, we were ruled by the sun and moon, and the seasons.
We had milk cows, sheep. Pigs and chickens. And the bottled fruit and curried beans and sweet and sour beans and beetroot salad in Ma’s pantry, and in the summer we planted again and harvested. Vytjie found edible food in the veld in winter, plants that I never even knew were edible. We always had more than enough to eat. And so there was time to listen to Meklein and Vytjie’s stories, and they could teach me things. Especially Meklein.
Vytjie couldn’t understand why I wasn’t as interested in her knowledge of the plants and medicines. I preferred to learn to hunt from Meklein. Naturally we had hunting rifles in the house, but between the five rifles there were only about two hundred and fifty rounds left, and from the beginning we decided to save them. For what I don’t know. But there was a crossbow. My elder brother bought it second-hand from someone, he had . . . You know how someone is interested in something for three, four months, and then . . . The crossbow was there, with exactly eleven bolts. I started shooting with the crossbow. I can’t remember why, I think it could have been boredom or curiosity, we really definitely didn’t need to think of self-defence or hunting.
When some of the bolts were damaged, Meklein said he could make them. He did, and he taught me how to do it too. He said that was how his forefathers hunted, with bow and arrow. And then he taught me what he knew. He taught me to stalk and track, to survive in the veld. And at night beside the fire he described how his people would run after a wounded buck for hours and hours, how that was real hunting, the animals always stood a chance.
So I began to hunt out of curiosity and boredom. Remember, I was a cross-country runner, it was intense fun for me to run for hours and kilometres.
2 June
I was in school that day. Winter, a cold morning with frost, but a perfect sunny day, not a cloud in the sky.
Amanzi was peaceful and hard-working, everyone busy with their daily tasks.
Thabo and Magriet and the ERF truck with the words Medicine. For trade. We come in Peace arrived in the morning between nine and ten at the barricade south of Petrusville.
Domingo was in the old police station, still his headquarters at that time. The roadblock guards asked him over the radio if they could allow the pedlars through.
‘Are they alone?’
‘Yes.’
‘Did you look in the back?’
‘Yes.’
‘Let them through.’
He knew Thabo and Magriet would have to stop at the bus gate as well, because the protocol was that all vehicles were searched there again. He notified the Committee members that the two traders were back, and would stop in Amanzi within the next half-hour. He walked from the police station across the street to our big new food store and bottling factory. It was where the old OK Value supermarket, the Ribbok restaurant and the Renosterberg bottle store used to be, but the Amanzi building team had converted it into one structure. It was reinforced and secured, with only one entrance. It was known among our people as the OK.
He went to tell the OK people that Thabo and Magriet were nearly here. Domingo walked back to the police station. Sixteen minutes later he heard the gunshots.
The bus gate is a kilometre and a half from the police station, behind a hill. But Amanzi was quiet, and automatic gunfire is a unique sound. Domingo knew his soldiers did not have target practice today. He knew it was something else, it was trouble, he knew it had something to do with Thabo and Magriet; he had his suspicions immediately, because that was how his mind worked.
Domingo grabbed his radio and his R4 and ran to his pick-up. He called over the radio for the bus gate to answer. All he heard was more gunshots in the distance.
He called his small garrison of twenty soldiers over the radio. They were the ones not manning the roadblocks today, they were busy with field exercises between the sewerage works and the dam. Domingo shouted into the mouthpiece that they must come to the police station. He jumped into the pick-up, turned on the engine,
Pa came running and asked what was going on.
‘Keep everyone inside,’ Domingo yelled. ‘Keep everyone inside the houses. And keep your radio on.’
Domingo raced to the bus gate. He tried to raise the guards on the radio again. They did not answer.
Just after Heide Street the main road out of Amanzi makes a wide turn to the left – the first stretch of the road makes a U-bend – and runs down the hill. Domingo saw the ERF truck – horse and trailer – approaching. It was still five hundred metres away. The shots, the radio silence of the bus gate guards, the lorry coming fast, he was deadly certain it meant big trouble. Domingo braked hard, so that the pick-up’s tyre skidded. He stopped across the middle of the road to prevent the lorry from passing. He jumped out and ran left of the road, up the slope. He fell flat behind a couple of rocks, looked through the scope of the R4. The truck was approaching fast, barely two hundred metres away. Neither Thabo nor Magriet was behind the wheel. There were two strange men in the cab. For a moment Domingo hesitated, and then he shot, four warning shots.
The truck did not stop.
Domingo shot again, single shots, aimed at the driver. The first one wounded the man, the truck swerved. It made Domingo’s second shot miss. It seemed as if the truck would run off the road, but then it straightened out, accelerated, the driver crouching low behind the instrument panel. The man beside him returned fire.
Domingo kept on aiming and shooting as the truck accelerated towards his pick-up, and hit the back at high speed with a thunderous crash of metal on metal and breaking glass; the pick-up rolled off the road, the truck reached Domingo, then passed.
He fired, grabbed his radio, jumped up and ran. He screamed into the radio for Pa to raise the alarm, the system of car hooters that Domingo had devised for an emergency. He screamed over the radio for his garrison of twenty men to put the defence plan into action from the police station. He ran back to town, uphill, about a kilometre, as fast as he could.
I was in school. I heard the gunfire, but thought it was Domingo’s soldiers practising in the quarry. I envied them.
I heard Domingo’s shots, closer, just over there, barely four hundred metres from the school. I jumped up. The teacher told me to sit down.
I stayed on my feet, I knew something was wrong, because I knew Domingo. He would never allow anyone to shoot so near the town’s houses and the Orphanage.
She told me again to sit down, in the sterner you-will-bear-the-consequences voice that all teachers use.
I sat down reluctantly.
The dull thud of metal on metal.
Some of the children drew in their breath. I stood up again and said, ‘Miss . . .’
She was listening too now, her expression worried.
Deathly silence in class.
The alarm sounded, the hooters that Domingo and his men had attached to the high pole at the Midas filling station. Everyone knew what to do when the alarm went off.
I said to Jacob, ‘Let’s go,’ and ran out of the classroom. I had to fetch my R4 DM and my R6, and Jacob and I had to get the horses and race up to the reserve, we had to defend the valley. That was our emergency task, as approved by the Committee, our part of Domingo’s defence plan. We were sent to the reserve because most likely nothing would happen there.
I ran across the veld, over the hill. My weapons were in my room in the Orphanage, just a hundred metres from the school.
I heard the big diesel engine, but didn’t know it was the ERF truck, because I couldn’t see it. I ran across the Orphanage lawn. The little ones were there, with Beryl and Melinda. Okkie saw me. He shouted, ‘Here I am, Nico!’
I ignored him, ran into my room, grabbed the rifles, the rucksack with the magazines and the radio. I raced out, hearing Okkie’s little voice behind me, some of the smallest kids screaming shrilly. I was out, running to the stables across Heide Street T-junction. I heard Domingo calling me, he was down on the corner, rifle in his hand: ‘Come here.’
I ran to him, he shouted and pointed: ‘Go and cover the tarmac road, the road to the bus gate.’
‘What about up top, what about the reserve?’
‘Go and cover the tarmac road. Now. And if you see a biker, you shoot him. Give me the R6.’ His voice was calm, as if he had everything under control.
I handed him the shorter assault rifle.
‘How many magazines do you have?’
‘Three for the R6, three for the DM.�
�
‘Give me the R6 magazines.’
I took them out hurriedly, dropped one.
Domingo picked it up, put a hand on my shoulder. ‘Stay calm, cover the tarmac road.’
He turned and ran towards the town centre, lifting his radio and talking into it.
I charged down Heide Street, and turned left, in the direction of the bus gate, I knew where I wanted to hide. I saw the pick-up, Domingo’s pick-up, on the other side of the road; the tail was bashed in. I wanted to hide on the opposite side, on the ridge that looked out over the approach road’s wide U.
Okkie’s voice behind me: ‘Wait for me, Nico, wait for me.’
I heard the sound of a motorcycle engine. I looked where the tarmac road came over the hill from the bus gate, about a kilometre away. I saw the first KTM rider. And the second and the third and the fourth.
Chapter 49
The KTM come: III
Down on the plain was the big traffic circle where four roads joined: the one from the dam wall, the one from the Havenga Bridge and the one to Petrusville.
The fourth road ran up the hill to Amanzi. First to the bus gate in the cleft of the two hills, four hundred metres from the circle.
Just after the bus gate the road turned right, and formed a big U across the plain, before the second rise that led up into the town.
From where I was lying, the furthest visible point of the U was about eight hundred metres away. I saw the motorbikes race into the first leg of the U, heard the high-pitched scream of their engines. It was too far, even if the target were dead still. I followed the first one with my telescope, waited until he reached the first turn of the U, then he would turn in my direction at an angle of about fifteen degrees. The best place to shoot them was when they reduced speed for the second turn of the U. It was just two hundred metres from me. The problem was that I could now count twelve KTM riders. If I missed one down there in the turn, and had to move the sights, and shoot faster, they might get past me.