by Deon Meyer
They worked harder in those six days than I had ever seen them work. Pa talked to everyone, every resident, even those too young to vote. He explained, he pleaded, he begged. He was received everywhere with courtesy and sympathy. Many people thanked him for all that he had done for the community.
And the majority of them said sorry, but they were going to vote for the preacher.
‘Your dad’s going to lose,’ Jacob came to tell me on the Tuesday afternoon after school. He was the source of most of my information. ‘The pastor just keeps telling people: “Twenty-six comrades are dead, go check the graves, that all happened on Willem Storm’s watch.” ’
That Wednesday evening Pa told me he had no hope. He said it with resignation, acceptance. As if he knew he had done everything in his power, had remained faithful to all he believed in.
Early Thursday morning I lay on my bed while the nurse cleaned the wound and put on new bandages. I saw Domingo hurry past down the passage. It was the first time since the funeral that he had been back in the Orphanage. I called out a greeting, but he didn’t answer.
As soon as the nurse had finished, I struggled up on my crutches and hobbled to the dining room. The door was closed. I heard voices inside. Pa’s. And Birdy and Domingo.
‘No, no, it’s not democracy,’ I heard Pa say passionately, the only words I could make out.
Shortly after that they came out, and I could see none of them were happy.
I shuffled back to my room.
Later Jacob came to ask whether I had heard: Domingo was going to address the people of Amanzi. Pastor Nkosi objected vigorously. But Domingo told him: ‘Stop me if you can.’
Jacob pushed me down to the Forum in the wheelchair. ‘An ill wind,’ he said. It was gusty, cold and ominous.
The people gathered. It was obvious no one liked this election, this schism. There was a muted atmosphere, a sense of reluctance in the air. But everyone came to hear Domingo speak, because he was the one who kept them safe.
At five Domingo climbed on the Tata. He looked weary. He carried an R4 over his shoulder. He switched on the microphone, tapped it to hear if it worked.
I saw the pastor and his large band of disciples to one side, hands in pockets, unhappy faces. I saw Pa and a handful of supporters, to the right of the Tata. Pa stood with his head bowed, as if he had already lost.
‘I’ll keep this simple,’ said Domingo, his words measured and crystal clear. ‘If Nkosi wins the election, I’ll be leaving Amanzi. You’ll have to go to war against the KTM without me. Thank you.’
He switched off the microphone, jumped down lightly down from the Tata and walked away.
The next day Pa would quote Voltaire and say about Domingo: ‘Clever tyrants are never punished.’
Chapter 55
Sofia Bergman
I dreamed on that veranda in the small hours, that unsettling part of the night just before the dawn, I dreamed wild dreams, disturbing dreams, dreams that cling, only let go of you slowly, even after you wake.
My feet hurt. I didn’t know how I was going to walk. But I would have to walk, I only had food for five days in the rucksack, I couldn’t waste a day.
I hadn’t brought plasters. There were plasters in the bathroom at home, I should have packed a few. The dreams and reality, knowing that something could so easily go wrong, that there might be more trouble and obstacles that I had not foreseen, gave me a hollow feeling in the pit of my stomach.
I ate a little and drank water. I picked up a stone in the overgrown garden of Welgelegen farm and broke a window. I went inside. There were always plasters in a farmhouse, I just had to find them. I felt very uncomfortable, being in someone else’s house like this. There was a desiccated corpse on the bed in the master bedroom. A woman. Three years dead, it smelled of nothing. She lay with her hands folded on her chest. I walked out fast, and sat down on the veranda, my legs shaking. I drank some more water. I could picture the woman’s story: she fell sick alone, her husband was in town, or in the veld when he collapsed. Maybe she didn’t have a husband, maybe she was a widow and her children were in Canada or New Zealand. She fell sick, alone in the house and when she lay down she knew she was going to die, she had been following the news of the Fever on the radio. But she wanted to die tidy, she wanted to die pretty. She put on her make-up, brushed her hair and put on her best clothes, and she lay down on her bed like that, the bed she had made up with the best linen, and she died.
I wept on the veranda of Welgelegen farm. It was the first time I cried. I cried like someone whose heart was torn in pieces, for more than an hour. And then something happened to me. I knew I had to finish and be done with crying, and I must decide: was I going to tidy myself up and was I going to lie down beside that woman and wait for death to come? Or did I want to live?
I decided I wanted to live.
It sounds like a small thing now that I’m telling it, but it was big, it was a very big decision for me, and it was as though, there on that veranda on Welgelegen, I woke up from a three-year sleep.
I got up then and went to look in the bathroom and the kitchen, and eventually found the plasters in a cupboard in the passage, along with ointment and Disprin. I bandaged my feet carefully. Then I had the idea that perhaps I wouldn’t need to walk. I searched the outbuildings, and it was odd, but now I was no longer afraid of the rustling and spider webs, the silence and the desolation.
I found a bicycle in the garage, an old one, without gears. The tyres were flat, but there was a hand pump. I inflated the wheels, and took the pump and my rucksack and rode down the farm road, just after ten that morning.
Every hour the bicycle wheels went flat. Then I would get off and pump them up again. At the steep hills I would push the bike up as it had no gears, and happily freewheel down the other side, hair blowing in the wind. I turned left on the eroded dirt road, the R398, and a kudu stood in the middle of it in broad daylight in and stared at me as I cycled up. Then it lazily trotted away. I was probably the first person it had seen in thirty-six months.
I turned right on the next farm road, to Hanover. This was another road my father loved, because he could see how the farmers’ veld looked, their dams and sheep. I rode that farm road in memory of my pa. I rode nearly fifty kilometres on the bicycle before the rear wheel wore through and the pump wouldn’t make the tyre hard again.
I picked a veld flower and stuck it in the bicycle bell and left it there leaning on the fence, and I walked on until my feet began to hurt again.
That night I slept in the veld, under the stars, without a fire.
Nothing fell from heaven, no dream-helicopters flew near me.
Chapter 56
The coup: III
My father and his Free Amanzi party won the election with a two-thirds majority, but no one celebrated it.
Pa consulted with his party management before they offered a place on the Committee to Pastor Nkosi. He said he would think about it. He didn’t think long. The Sunday evening after the election he came to the Orphanage. Beryl invited him in, said he must come in to the sitting room. I was reading Okkie stories. Domingo sat near us listening. The pastor was dressed in his formal church garb – black suit with the long frock coat. He saw Domingo. I looked up at the crucial moment, and I saw the loathing in the preacher’s face, and thought he was going to spit on Domingo in passing. But he just walked on, to Birdy, Pa and Nero. The men rose, shook Nkosi’s hand.
‘You know I would have won the election if it wasn’t for your devious and very undemocratic tactics, Willem,’ the pastor said.
‘You would have won, yes. But what Domingo did, he did on his own.’
‘That’s not true,’ said Nkosi. ‘I hear he came to talk to you before his little speech.’
‘I implored him not to do it,’ said Pa.
‘I don’t believe you.’
Domingo didn’t stand up. He spoke from his armchair: ‘He did. Now come and tell me I’m a liar, Padre. Come and tell me to my face.�
� His tone was laconic, as if he found it all faintly amusing.
Nkosi ignored him.
I knew Domingo understood that the pastor’s dignity was everything to him. That was why he allowed mockery and laughter into his tone: ‘You were the one to introduce scare tactics, Padre. I just gave them a variation on your theme,’ said Domingo.
‘I want two seats on the Committee,’ said Nkosi to Pa.
‘That’s a reasonable request,’ said Birdy.
‘And I want to build a church.’
‘We don’t have enough resources, Nkosi. You know we have to build the gates first.’
‘Security gates first, Pearly Gates second,’ said Domingo, taunting the pastor openly now.
Nkosi continued to ignore him. ‘The church is the very next priority?’
‘We cannot commit to that now,’ said Pa.
The pastor wavered. Pa realised the pastor had to gain a small victory. He said, ‘Nkosi, you’re a highly respected member of our community, and you have been a vital, wise and much valued part of this Committee from the start. I have the utmost respect for your beliefs, and the beliefs of the members of your congregation. I’m sure we can extend our invitation to two seats, and we can promise to put the building of a church on the agenda the very moment the gates are finished. I would also propose that you and I lead a subcommittee to write a constitution for Amanzi, now that we seem to have a party system. You and I both want to ensure religious freedom.’
Now Pa held out his hand for the pastor to shake.
Nkosi allowed the tension to build, surely to demonstrate that he could not be so easily talked round. Then he shook Pa’s hand. ‘In principle, I accept. But I want to pray over the matter. I will give you a final answer by tomorrow.’
Pastor Nkosi Sebego was on the way out when Domingo stood up. ‘While we have the new Intergalactic Council all together—’
‘Domingo,’ said Birdy. ‘Don’t. Please.’
‘There’re things you have to know, Birdy. Like that the KTM are wired. Like that the KTM run on ethanol.’
That silenced them for a second.
‘How do you know they run on ethanol?’ asked Birdy.
‘I took the bikes out on the road where Nico potted them. I wanted to know why they weren’t battling with bad petrol. I rode four of them, up and down, not a single misfire. And I smelled it, the exhaust was sort of sweet. And the petrol too. So I took it to our mechanics. They said there were definitely a few modifications made, they think it’s a mixture, fifty or sixty per cent ethanol to petrol.’
Pa said, ‘Trunkenpolz said he was an engineer . . .’
‘It’s more than that,’ said Birdy. ‘It means they have technology. Know-how. Facilities. And for that they need a base. And a base means some kind of community . . .’
‘No,’ said Domingo. ‘I grant you, this indicates a certain sophistication, and we will have to pay attention to the potential implications. But this trash doesn’t have a community or a significant base. Their economy is based on hunting and gathering, marauding really, but mostly robbery. If that’s your lifestyle, you can’t afford to have a base, ’cause why, you’re making a lot of enemies, and sooner or later those enemies are going to come looking for you. So you must do like Amanzi, invest heavily in defence, in human and other resources. Which is expensive for hunter-gatherer-robbers. They are not going to do that.’
Birdy nodded. ‘Okay. But it also means they don’t make the ethanol themselves, because you need a base for that too.’
‘That’s right,’ said Domingo. ‘And what will they use to distil ethanol anyway? They don’t plant. So here’s my theory: Thabo and Magriet said there are guys near Pinetown who make ethanol from sugar cane. I think those guys are exporting to the KTM. And the KTM hunt and gather and rob, and they exchange some of the proceeds for the Pinetown ethanol.’
Pa nodded, agreeing: ‘So what you’re saying is they will keep coming back, because they have to feed their economy.’
‘That’s right,’ said Domingo. ‘Unless we stop them. But it won’t be easy, because when your enemy uses guerrilla tactics, you have to fight an unconventional war. They are wired too, they all have CB radios built into the motorbikes, so they can chat to each other, they can talk to a controller a hundred kilometres away, if there is a base-station antenna somewhere. They’re becoming a bigger and bigger threat.’
Everyone seemed deep in thought.
‘So,’ said Domingo, ‘that’s why I thought, while we are all together discussing the grand future of Amanzi, I also want to table my demands.’
‘Your demands?’ asked Pastor Nkosi.
‘Padre, we’ve just listened to your demands. Why not mine too?’
Pa sighed. ‘Just tell us, Domingo.’
Angrily, Nkosi crossed his arms across his broad chest.
‘Thank you. I’ll keep it very simple. I’ll be the one who has to carry out everyone’s election promises once the gates are built. I’m the one who will have to take the war to the KTM. Unless, of course, you have someone else in mind for the job . . .’ And he waited, to see what they would say.
‘Carry on,’ said Pa.
‘Okay. Cool. Here’s what we’re going to need: three shifts of eight people for each gate. That’s twenty-four per gate, times three gates, is seventy-two people. Plus three shifts of eight people to permanently guard the Jeep track running up the back of the mountain, into the reserve.’
‘We never had gate guards in the reserve,’ said Pa.
‘True. But the KTM are not stupid. They know they tried a Trojan Horse strategy at our gates, and it failed. So what’s the next option? Find the soft underbelly. There are two soft underbellies: the dam, and the Jeep track up the valley. The dam is highly unlikely, unless they teach fifty guys to swim three kilometres with weapons and ammo, and I don’t think that’s going to happen. That leaves them with only one option . . .’
‘I see,’ said Pa.
‘Now, where was I? Oh, yes, that makes a total of ninety-six people. And that’s just the defence force. I also want two teams of twelve for our Special Ops Team, our attack force. Another twenty-four, for a grand total of a hundred and twenty souls. It’s not open to discussion or negotiation, those are the numbers. And my final demand: you don’t allocate people to me. I get to pick people, from the ranks of anybody and everybody who volunteers. Also not open to negotiation, take it or leave it.’
‘And if we leave it?’ asked Nero Dlamini.
‘Then I pack my bags, and I take two horses, and I head off. I wouldn’t mind seeing the ocean again . . .’
I want to forget the next morning, that Monday morning.
Till this day the memory is a hard thing inside here, a beast that gnaws at my heart with its jagged teeth. I wish I could turn back time, walk into the dining room and sit down beside my father, and then I would do it all differently, I would tell him I love him, admire him, that I can only dream of one day being the man he is.
But I can’t. The damage was done for good, and the pain can’t be erased.
Here is my rationalisation, my explanation, my mitigating circumstances: I was nearly sixteen. The age of idiocy.
I was angry at Pa, an anger that originated in the days when he had fever, when we had to hide in the house, the one on the corner of Aalwyn and Gansie Street, Vanderkloof, the house I still feel uneasy to walk past. An anger that came from the day when he stood, bewildered, outside the truck in Koffiefontein, so small and vulnerable. An anger that was inflamed by the fact that I was forced to shoot the Jeep men, that he never gave me recognition for the dogs that I stopped in the reserve, for the KTM that I stopped in the main road. That I saved Okkie, that I helped to fetch the diesel aeroplane. Anger that he neglected me, that he gave his time and his dedication to Amanzi, the time and attention that once had been all mine.
And I was ashamed of my father. I was ashamed that he was so easily overshadowed and pushed aside by Pastor Nkosi, that last night he had caved i
n to Nkosi and Domingo when they made their demands and set their ultimatums. I suppose I constantly compared Pa and Domingo with each other, and saw Pa as the weaker one. Pa wanted to compromise, to accommodate, Pa saw people as people, wonderful beings that were capable of being noble. In my sixteen-year-old mind Pa was a weakling.
That’s what I have to offer as an excuse. Here is what happened, that Monday morning.
I had to return to school, the wound had healed sufficiently for me to sit in class. But I was still excused from my Orphanage duties. So I dressed early, hobbled to the dining room on crutches, saw Pa and Okkie eating at a table.
I decided to inform Pa of my intentions now.
I sat down with them. Pa greeted me. I was so determined to have my say that I didn’t notice how heavily responsibility rested on him, how bloodshot his eyes were from lack of sleep. Okkie was buoyant and bubbly as usual, he wanted to talk, he also wanted crutches, asked if I really had to go to school, he had really liked it that I was trapped in the Orphanage with the injury.
I hushed him. I said, ‘Pa, I want to leave school in August. For the Special Ops Team.’
It was as though Pa had to come back from somewhere in order to understand what I was saying. He looked at me, then said, ‘No, Nico.’
‘Pa, you don’t have a choice. I’m sixteen in August.’ That was the age restriction that the Committee had set last night when they responded to Domingo’s demands.
‘No, Nico.’
Much later, when I think back to that conversation, I would realise that Pa wasn’t forbidding me with the ‘no, Nico’ he was shielding and pleading with me. I would realise he hadn’t set the age restriction the previous night because he knew that I would be the first to volunteer. He negotiated it as a broad principle, for the benefit of all. But all night I had lain in bed trying to anticipate each of Pa’s counter-arguments, preparing what I would say, and now the words burst out, with teenage selfishness and insensitivity, along with all the anger and shame I felt towards him: ‘That’s what I want to do, Pa, and you won’t stop me.’