Fever

by Deon Meyer

  I didn’t see Lizette.

  The Committee was a united group beside the old Tata truck. Jacob and I and our entourage of admirers stopped just a short distance away. Pa climbed onto the back of the Tata, which still served as the podium in the Forum. He spoke into a microphone, the sound system carrying his voice easily over the crowd. Practically the whole population of Amanzi was there to listen.

  Pa said we had bid goodbye to too many of our own last week. Today we must begin the process of making sure it would never happen again.

  The people applauded. Sombrely, still feeling the burden of loss.

  Pa said last night the Committee had decided to channel the full production of bricks from our brick ovens, stone from the stone quarry, and all the cement that our young geologist mixed and the expeditions brought home, towards a project to fortify Amanzi.

  The applause grew louder.

  Pa said the bus gate would become a firm fixture. The old, wheel-less vehicles that formed the gate would be replaced by thick brick walls and large, double, steel gates. Watchtowers would be built. The number of gate guards would be doubled. And Amanzi’s standing army would be reinforced as soon as possible to man the new defensive structures.

  ‘What about the KTM?’ someone shouted from the crowd.

  Pa said as soon as the main gate was built, work would begin on the Petrusville blockade, and the one at the Havenga Bridge below the dam wall.

  ‘What about hitting back?’ shouted someone else. ‘Attack the KTM.’ More voices rose in support. ‘Do what Domingo says.’

  When I heard that, I knew the news had spread: Domingo had told the Committee that the only way to eliminate the KTM threat was to attack them, to wipe them out. I wondered who had leaked this information from the Committee.

  Pa said, ‘The safety of this community is our first priority. We’re investigating all possible responses and strategies. I . . . The whole Committee share your rage, we share your urge for vengeance, to attack them—’

  ‘It’s war!’ someone shouted. The chorus of support intensified. ‘Attack!’

  ‘Yes,’ said Pa. ‘It’s war. And in war our first priority is to make sure our community is safe from an attack. We just ask for patience . . .’

  Pa paused, as Pastor Nkosi climbed up on the back of the Tata too and whispered something in Pa’s ear.

  ‘Pastor Nkosi wants to have a word.’ Pa took a step back from the microphone and the burly pastor slowly lifted a hand.

  ‘The Bible says, an eye for an eye,’ the pastor called out in his powerful preacher-voice that swept everyone along.

  A chorus of support rose up from the crowd.

  ‘The Bible says, a tooth for a tooth.’ The words rolled down the hill, and across the expanse of the dam.

  The chorus of approval grew more enthusiastic.

  I looked at Pa. He was standing right beside Nkosi. He was a head shorter and much leaner. I recognised the look on Pa’s face – he was bewildered, not grasping what the pastor was up to.

  ‘There is a time for war and a time for peace. And the time for war has come,’ the pastor’s voice thundered louder and higher. The crowd’s reaction followed. ‘Joel three verse nine says: “Proclaim this among the nations: Prepare for war! Rouse the warriors! Let all the fighting men draw near and attack.” ’

  I saw the concern on Pa’s face, watched him raise a hand to stop the pastor, attract his attention.

  The people of Amanzi cheered Nkosi on.

  ‘Jeremiah twenty: “The Lord is with me like a mighty warrior; so my persecutors will stumble and not prevail. They will fail and be thoroughly disgraced; their dishonour will never be forgotten.” ’

  The people cheered louder.

  ‘But if we want the Lord to be with us like a mighty warrior, my brothers and sisters, we have to allow God to rule this community. We must elect him our chairman. Because I am telling you today, God sent the KTM as a warning. Just like he sent the Fever. He sent the KTM and he sent the Fever because we did not make him our King. How much more must he send before we listen, my brothers and sisters? When are we going to listen?’

  Pa gripped Pastor Nkosi’s arm and I could see he was angry. Pa shouted something, but his voice was completely drowned out by the full-throated roar of the hundreds of bystanders. Nkosi shook his head emphatically; clearly he did not agree with Pa.

  Pa pushed in front of the pastor to reach the microphone. Nkosi, much sturdier, pushed him aside. ‘Do you want to listen to our chairman now?’ he asked the crowd. ‘Do you want to listen to the man who does not believe in God?’

  The noise was deafening, no one knew if it was ‘yes’ or ‘no’.

  ‘No, Willem, they don’t want to listen to you. They want to listen to God. They want an eye for an eye. They want to elect God as the chairman of Amanzi. I say, let’s have an election.’

  A great clamour, shouting from the people.

  ‘Yes. Let’s have an election. I hereby resign from the Committee. I am herewith creating the Mighty Warrior Party. I hereby nominate God for chairman. Are you with me? Are you ready for a holy war?’

  Deafening noise, everyone was shouting something.

  ‘Right! Let’s have an election. This week. This Friday. Let us get God on our side.’

  Voices, hands, arms, a heaving mass of reaction.

  And then the pastor stepped back and smiled at Pa. He walked to the side of the Tata, and jumped down.

  I wondered where Domingo was. I hadn’t seen him at all.

  It was quiet in the sitting room of the Orphanage. They sat defeated: Pa, Birdy, Ravi, Nero, Beryl.

  I sat close to Pa, my leg resting on another chair in front of me. The pain was bad in the evening. I saved my pills for the night.

  Eventually Nero stood up and fetched the brandy bottle and glasses. He poured a drink for each one, then said, ‘The pastor is an opportunist, like all good politicians and preachers. And this was the perfect opportunity. If we’d been paying attention, we would have seen this coming.’

  Beryl said the preacher was a backstabber. Ravi called him a traitor. Birdy clicked her tongue. ‘It’s not opportunism, it’s a disgrace. Exploiting people’s fear and pain.’ And then she shook her head. ‘Einstein said: “Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I’m not sure about the universe.” Now I understand what he meant.’

  ‘I’m a Muslim,’ said Ravi. ‘I’m the only Muslim in Amanzi. I’ll have a bit of a problem if Nkosi gets what he wants.’

  Pa sat motionless, waxen and distraught, as though he were suffering from shock. He let them vent. Then, in a quiet voice burdened with emotion, he said, ‘Two hundred thousand years. That’s how old our species is. That’s how long it took to produce a Benedict Spinoza . . .’ He saw it was just Nero who remembered what he meant. ‘Spinoza was the first man who wished to separate Church and state, the first man who said the basis for all politics should be personal freedom, and that democracy is the form of government that is most compatible with personal freedom. And then it took another three hundred years for that principle to take root in this land. And now . . . Surely we can’t regress, can we?’ It was like a plea.

  Nero tried to answer, but Pa was too lost in his concern and passion. ‘Do you know why I wrote that pamphlet back then? Why I wanted to make a new beginning here? I am not this great altruist, I must confess. I came here for Nico, so he could see . . . No, so he could be part of this new journey of two hundred thousand years, so that the interruptions would not . . . I . . . Aren’t you also amazed by what we’re capable of? Look at our journey, Homo sapiens’s journey, look at how incredibly far we’ve come, from savannah prey to a robot on Mars and the splitting of the atom and the decoding of DNA. And democracy, reason and rationalism. Science above superstition, facts above myth . . . The Fever, it’s horrible, the billions who died in the Fever, I know, it’s terrible, but I wonder if the greater harm wasn’t the interruption of what we were on the road to accomplishing. We
had such huge problems before the Fever. Political and social and ecological, but we were finding solutions, as we have always done. Technology, just in the last twenty years, the tremendous advancements and breakthroughs and discoveries, all to solve problems, to make the world a better place. That was the greater loss to me, that we never had the chance to continue all those developments, to use our ingenuity to solve all those problems. We would have, I know we would. I . . . I owe it to Nico. And Okkie. We owe it to all our children, all the people, to two hundred thousand years of struggle and strife, not to regress now. That’s what Nkosi will do. We . . . We must talk to the people, we must explain to them, we must inform them. Before Friday . . .’ And Pa was so swept up, so desperate, that he stood up from his chair, as though he meant we must start the campaign right away.

  ‘Ai, Willem,’ said Birdy. ‘They don’t want information. They’re scared. They want someone to take the fear away. Nkosi’s entire strategy is based on fear.’

  ‘We’re going to lose,’ said Nero Dlamini.

  ‘Unless you believe in miracles,’ said Beryl. And she laughed quietly. It broke the worst of the tension.

  Chapter 53

  Sofia Bergman

  I walked away from the farm in October. Quite early in October. I didn’t know what the exact date was, because I had long ago stopped following the calendar. I waited for the spring, for warmer nights.

  Rucksack, hiking boots, rifle and crossbow.

  My mother was a hiker. She had the big rucksack and the hiking boots, which she must have last used fifteen years before her death, but they were in the built-in wardrobe in their bedroom. I wore my mother’s and sister’s clothes, I had outgrown my own long before. I packed the rucksack with underwear, clothes and socks. A sleeping bag and food and water, matches, torch, Leatherman multi-tool. I took the rifle and ammunition, and the crossbow and bolts. And a cellphone, my father’s. Can you believe it? I actually thought it would work in Bloemfontein.

  I opened the pig sty and the chicken run, the stables and the gates of the camps.

  And one last time I visited the graves, and then I walked away, at dawn one morning in October in the Year of the Jackal.

  It was a curious journey. I walked along roads I hadn’t seen in three years, roads that hadn’t seen a vehicle or a person in three years. Everything looked just a bit different. The trees and bushes were bigger, the eroded dongas were deeper. In places the road had washed away. The farmhouses were deserted.

  There was only the sound of insects and birds, only the scents of nature.

  That first night, I dreamed I saw the helicopter.

  I walked to Nieu-Bethesda first, to get onto the Doornberg road. My mother’s boots were too big, and my feet hurt more and more as they bumped against the toes and rubbed around the ankles.

  There was nobody in Nieu-Bethesda. Only birds and beetles and one little klipspringer buck I startled as I passed. The empty town was spooky; two cars had just stopped in the middle of the street, and the olive groves and the quince hedges and irrigated lands that once had been so neat, they were all overgrown and neglected. It made me uneasy. I walked through quickly, even though I knew that was silly. I left the village, and about two hours later I turned right at the fork, on the Dassiesfontein road. That was the road my father loved the most. The Dassiesfontein road was a gravel road, which followed the river valley, twisting and turning, to the R398. There were at least ten farmyards beside the road, but I just walked past them, I didn’t want to think that they were all dead. Increasingly, all I thought about was my sore feet.

  Lunch beside the little river. The stream had stopped running. I stopped at a pool, saw the spoor of baboon, klipspringer and kudu. I pulled off the boots and stuffed some underwear inside to make them fit tighter. It helped.

  I set off again. I felt strange. Sort of feverish. Not sick feverish, just strange feverish. Distanced, one dimension separate from this desolate reality. The rucksack grew heavier, the straps chafed my shoulders, the sides of my breasts.

  In the late afternoon I was tired. I tried to calculate how far I had come. About sixty kilometres, quite a distance, but I knew I wasn’t going to make it to the R398. I would have to sleep over somewhere. The sun was behind me. I saw the dam to the left of the road, a farm’s storage dam; it looked pretty in the soft light. It was Welgelegen. Pa knew the farmer and his wife. The farmhouse was another kilometre away. I stopped walking, tired, very much alone; as the sun set it touched the mountains behind me. I found the farm buildings, five hundred metres from the gravel road, just before sunset. There were bats darting through the twilight. I couldn’t face the farmhouse. I shone the torch on the shed. Bales of lucern, small animals or snakes rustling through the hay. I would sleep on the veranda.

  Then I heard the sound, an unfamiliar one, and instinctively I looked up in the direction from where it came. I saw the stripe, the light, the fire, low over the dark eastern horizon, like a meteorite falling, but close, as if it were just nearby, above the ridge.

  It disappeared behind the mountain, and then it was quiet.

  I stood in amazement looking at the night sky. I listened, realised everything had gone quiet and now was waking up again, all the early evening noises that I knew. I stared at the eastern horizon, but there was nothing now, just the imagined smoke trail where the meteorite fell.

  I had to prepare for night.

  I went to inspect the big veranda of the house. I used the torch, found a rusty drum and firewood, and made a fire just to banish the loneliness, and the ghosts. The night sky was visible between the veranda wall and the roof. It was breathtaking, millions of stars twinkling. I ate and drank and wondered, what was it that I had seen and heard? And then I thought of all the satellites in space. And the space station! There were so many things that could fall to earth. I must have seen one of them.

  My first night without a mattress, the floor of the veranda was hard and cold. I slept badly, restless and uncomfortable.

  After four the noise woke me from a deep sleep with a start. It was a helicopter, I swear it was a helicopter. I jumped up, looked east, where the noise was coming from, the wap-wap-wap of a helicopter.

  I saw nothing, just the stars.

  The sound faded away behind the ridges.

  I couldn’t get back to sleep. I wondered if I had dreamed it. I wondered if I was here, if I still existed. I wondered, do we make our own reality? Do we see the same reality as other people? Does this world even exist?

  Were there any other people left in the world? What if I were the very last one?

  Chapter 54

  The coup: II

  My father. My beloved father. My idealistic, pathetic, clever, frustrating father.

  He came to me where I was lying in my room. He said, ‘I am so glad the wound isn’t serious.’

  I so wished he would ask me to tell him exactly how it had all happened. He never did. Never the slightest prompting to tell him the whole story. He just put a hand on my shoulder and said, ‘You’re your mother’s child.’ There was a new tone in his voice, admiration, a touch of respect perhaps, but also an edge, I recall.

  He never told me he was proud of my role in stopping the second invasion of the KTM. He looked on as people came to congratulate me. There was a benevolent smile on his face, that sort that said it was the right thing to do, to smile. But his heart wasn’t in it. He never once said he was proud of me.

  I was disappointed; I wanted very badly to hear him say it, but I wasn’t really angry with him about it. The praise and appreciation and respect of the community stroked my ego sufficiently.

  During Pastor Nkosi’s coup d’état in the Forum, I had watched Pa from my wheelchair, ashamed that he could be so easily overshadowed and pushed aside by the preacher and the crowd. Yet at the same time I felt an overwhelming love for him, and a strong protective urge. I wanted to spare him the pain and humiliation. I wanted to jump up and take on the pastor. That was why I had wondered at the moment
of Nkosi’s victory where Domingo was. Because I was wounded, impotent, and perhaps Domingo could help.

  That night in the Orphanage sitting room, as he talked about the human species’ journey of two hundred thousand years, I forgot my disappointment in his lack of praise for my heroic deed. I felt only pride and love for my father. And the need to protect him.

  And I wondered again, where was Domingo? He was nowhere to be found that night. The rumour was that he hardly slept, that he drove ceaselessly from gate to gate, to protect us.

  That same night they founded a political party in the Orphanage.

  The process of deciding on a name for their party was so tedious that I kept nodding off. I recall some of their suggestions were the Freedom Party and the Democrats, or variations on those themes, like the Amanzi Democrats or the Amanzi Freedom Party.

  Eventually they agreed on Free Amanzi. The founder members were Pa and Birdy, Nero, Beryl and Ravi. Pa nominated Birdy as chairman, she nominated Pa. They voted, and Pa was elected unanimously.

  They had six days before Friday’s election. There were just over one thousand eligible voters in Amanzi. Their strategy was for Pa to talk personally with every one of the voters. After all he was the founder of Amanzi, the man who had begun everything, the man who brought them through famine and snow, the man who commanded great respect from everyone. Pa’s approach, they agreed, must not attack Pastor Nkosi or his religion. Pa’s message must be simple, easy to grasp, pragmatic and unique. (‘Don’t give them a history lesson about Benedict Spinoza,’ said Nero Dlamini playfully, but not entirely joking, because he knew Pa.)

  Their chosen slogan was: Yes! To retribution – after thorough preparation. It was weak and lacking in imagination, but it was the best they could do. Later Domingo would shake his head and call it ‘creativity by committee’. In the election battle Pa and friends would remind the people that the storehouse was stocked for the winter, the power was on, and the first sunflowers for diesel production were drying.