Fever

by Deon Meyer

  I did not fall in love with him at that moment. Absolutely not. If I had been able to get free I would have shot him dead.

  Chapter 64

  The first KTM war: VI

  The blond girl and I walked back to Team Bravo and the battlefield. She carried the crossbow and her shoulders in a way that showed me she didn’t trust me, and she didn’t like me. Even though I kept trying to explain to her we were on the same side.

  The bolt was still lodged in my bullet-proof vest, the arrow point enmeshed in the material. I tried to pull it out, but it was stuck fast.

  My comrades looked at the bolt, and then at the girl with the crossbow. Then they burst out laughing. Uproariously, the post-adrenalin laughter of survival and relief.

  Domingo told us to ‘shut the fuck up’. He was furious. He called us pathetic. He said the only goal we had achieved was not letting any of the KTM escape. And that was only by accident. Where, he asked, was the KTM member we could interrogate? Where was the discipline, the control, the presence of mind that our repeated drills had tried so hard to establish?

  We stood with heads bowed. The girl stood gaping open-mouthed at it all.

  Domingo said we had failed miserably. To defeat a bunch of amateurs in a skirmish in such a chaotic fashion, when you had the advantage of total surprise, was nothing less than a disgrace.

  He said he was taking us back to base so he could train us from scratch again, because we were hopeless. So that he could fetch Team Alpha, hopefully they would be slightly better than our bunch of morons. So that Cele could see a doctor. So that we could get this ‘girlie’ – and he pointed at the blond girl, my future wife – out of harm’s way. ‘Or,’ said Domingo and glared angrily at the arrow lodged against my heart like an affront, ‘to get Storm out of harm’s way from a girlie with a crossbow.’

  ‘I’m not your girlie. I’m Sofia Bergman.’

  Domingo glared at her. We all thought for a moment that he would spontaneously combust. Or explode. But he shook his head, looked hard at us and ordered Esau and Masinga to take care of Cele and make him comfortable. The rest of us had to dig graves for the dead KTM members, in the rock-hard ground of Colesberg, out in the veld behind the Merino Inn Hotel. And we were to ride each of the motorcycles over the mountain east of town and hide them away at the water reservoir.

  While he sat in the shade and talked to Sofia Bergman.

  I wished I could have sat with her. I could think of nothing else besides that girl.

  Lizette Schoeman was already completely forgotten.

  Chapter 65

  What do you miss the least?

  Domingo

  As recorded by Willem Storm. The Amanzi History Project.

  There was nothing to like before the Fever. Nothing. It was a mad, bad world. Everyone hating everyone else. White and black, haves and have-nots, liberals and conservatives, Christian and Muslim, north and south, I scheme people were just looking for reasons to hate each other: you’re taller than me, so I hate you for it.

  So I don’t mind that that world is gone.

  Yeah, of course I hated too. Facebook most of all, if you have to know. Facebook. Hated it. For me that was the epitome of what was wrong with society. ’Cause why, you’ve got all these friends, but they’re not real friends, just people you can post photos for, of your breakfast and your lunch and your cute kitty. I ask you. Like they really cared. They only cared because they needed you as an audience. Facebook friends were an audience, that’s all. And it made me sick how they all needed an audience. Society got so impersonal, so don’t-care, till we had to validate ourselves on something like Facebook, to an audience of people who don’t give a flying . . . Let me just say, that’s sad. Tragic.

  But I’m not saying I’m glad about the Fever. I’m just saying I’ve got no nostalgia for the time before the Fever. Nothing. Nada.

  Cairistine Canary

  No, I can’t . . . Let’s just say . . . The beggars at the traffic lights in the morning. They were the worst part of the old world for me. And then you can extrapolate to inequality in general. I don’t miss that deep inequality, and the guilt. But this is a very philosophical question, and I don’t think you must compare the world before and after the Fever, I don’t think you should ask yourself what you miss the most or the least. Because somehow you end up thinking that the one is better or worse than the other. Comparisons can be misleading, and they can lead you to bad places. Every world was what it was. And it’s what we make of it, isn’t it?

  I guess that’s not much of a contribution to your history project, is it?

  Lizette Schoeman

  I think society was much more . . . like, in silos, if you understand what I mean. Like the way we are now in Amanzi, there’s a strong sense of community. Of ‘we depend on each other’. You understand? It’s probably also because here we all know each other, because our world has become so small, but I like it. Before the Fever you saw hundreds or thousands of people every day who you didn’t know, who you didn’t greet. You walked or drove past, you didn’t even look at them, there was no connection between you. Nothing. You might as well have been on different planets.

  That’s what was wrong with the old world. That’s what I don’t miss.

  Pastor Nkosi Sebego

  I don’t miss that world. Because it was a godless world. And that’s why I am working so hard to make sure that we don’t live in a godless world again.

  Before the Fever, our president, our government, our media and our businesses were all godless. But not only in our country. In every country, all over the world. Everybody just wanted one thing: money. To get rich. Even if you had to take it or steal it, even if you had to pull other people down to get it. We were in this vicious cycle, we were prisoners of the system. That’s why God sent the Fever. To break the shackles.

  Abraham Frost

  Just a few months before the Fever, I read an article about bananas. They said bananas as we know them are in danger of dying out. And it’s the second time.

  Apparently there was a species of banana called Gros Michel, a delicious, creamy, sweet banana. About 99 per cent of all the bananas that were grown in the world used to be Gros Michel. And then in the 1960s a fungal disease appeared, and decimated Gros Michel completely. The banana farmers of the world had to get another species; they found Cavendish, which wasn’t as delicious, but it was resistant to the fungus.

  And so Cavendish became the one that produced 99 per cent of the world’s bananas. And then a fungus appeared, a year or two before the Fever and began to wipe out Cavendish as well.

  What I’m trying to say, is that we as people created a world that was very unnatural. We created a big imbalance. And then exactly what happened to bananas, happened to us.

  That’s what I don’t miss about the old world. It just feels that now things are back in balance.

  Ravi Pillay

  I don’t miss the traffic jams. You had to see it to believe it. All that time lost, sitting in traffic. Time we could have spent with our loved ones. Or just being productive. We lived in this high-tech world where they put little robot cars on Mars, but they couldn’t sort out the traffic jams. They couldn’t fix bad driving either. There’s another thing I really, really don’t miss: those idiots who clog up the fast lane, and when you dare to flash your lights – which is absolutely within your rights to do – they give you the finger. That used to really . . . I was sure I was going to die in a road rage incident some day.

  Hennie (Fly) Laas

  No, like I said with your previous question: that world before the Fever was a bad one for me. If you ask me, Hennie, what I don’t miss, then I want to say: everything, Willem. I don’t miss any of it. I know it was all my own fault that I was unlucky in that world, I made my own bad luck. So I don’t blame anyone for it. I’m just saying, I’m happy now. And you know why? Because I feel I mean something now. I have worth. It’s funny, hey?

  Beryl Fortuin

  Life before
the Fever was like living in the city, and now it’s like living in a small town. Literally too, for sure. What I really mean is, there are pros and cons on both sides. I don’t miss the hectic lifestyle of that time. The rat race. The competition. I don’t miss the scattering of all the people that you love. I mean, you grow up with your people, your family, your community. And then, when you finish school, you have to leave. You have to go and study, or you have to work. Humansdorp was too small to support all of us, so everyone you love, everyone you know so well, scatters. And then you have to start from the beginning again to gather up people to love, but it’s never the same.

  I don’t miss that. I like this about Amanzi: we’re not going anywhere soon.

  Oh, and then there is the detox myth. I can’t tell you how glad I am that I won’t read anything about detox this and detox that in a women’s magazine or on the Internet again. Lies, damn lies, and detox. Legal fraud, that’s what that was.

  Nero Dlamini

  Interesting question. Okay, I’m going to . . . Just bear with me. There was this recurring theme in therapy that I found interesting . . . No, wait, let me just take one more step backwards, because I really want this to make sense:

  The world before the Fever was truly complicated. In the words of the great M. Scott Peck: ‘life was difficult.’ You could not believe the stress levels ordinary people had to cope with. Just for getting through the day, for navigating all the social and professional and relationship reefs. And then they worried about all the stuff that was happening in the country: politics, and poverty and the economy. And then they worried about all the things happening in the world: terrorism, and recession, and running out of fish to catch, and more plastic than fish in the sea and global warming . . .

  So, getting back to that recurring theme: a disturbing number of my patients had this wish, this fantasy, this urge for a new beginning. Just to walk away from their old lives, their old worlds and their old planets, and start over. Free from the worries.

  Now, here’s the interesting thing: Amanzi’s world is not stress-free. Just forget about the trauma of the Fever itself for a minute, and look at this environment right here where we are now. It’s not stress-free, we’ve got a lot to deal with. But I see a huge difference in the stress levels, in the type of stress. It’s as if people can cope better with the simple challenges of feeding themselves, keeping warm, dodging dogs . . .

  So, here’s my answer: it seems to me that all of us don’t miss those old complexities. And those fears about the world and the planet, those threats that we felt were too big for us to fix.

  Chapter 66

  In the Year of the Jackal I turned sixteen. Lizette Schoeman broke my heart, and Sofia Bergman made it whole again, for a while.

  In the Year of the Jackal my youth ended, and we fought back for the first time against the KTM.

  Okkie turned five. Or six. We will never know exactly.

  In December of the Year of the Jackal I began to have Sunday breakfast with Pa and Okkie. It gave me the opportunity to walk past the place where Sofia Bergman lived. That whole month long I didn’t see her at all. I cautiously asked other people if they knew where she was.

  They said she was mostly in her room on Sundays, reading a book. Apparently she was not a very social person.

  Breakfast with Pa and Okkie was uncomfortable. Pa and I had nothing to talk about. When I wanted to tell him about Team Bravo’s skirmish with the KTM, he shook his head. ‘Not in front of Okkie.’ But actually he was the one who didn’t want to hear it.

  In the Year of the Jackal we made diesel from sunflower oil, cheese from milk, and a bit of sugar from sugar beet for the first time. Our economy shifted more in the direction of capitalism when a bunch of the Namibians established their own irrigation farms further down the Orange River and started selling vegetables on the free market – beans, peas, broccoli, lettuce. Some of them even competed with Hennie Fly’s chicken farm by producing ducks and turkeys, and offering them at high prices on the farmers’ market that sprang up in the Forum.

  We had seventeen marriages, thirty-nine births, and our number grew by more than a thousand people who came to us from all across the subcontinent. The town was bursting out of its seams, and we built gates and fences and houses.

  Our first victory against the KTM was small in scale, but immense in what it did for the morale of Amanzi. We became a much more united community so that everyone, to a man (and woman), pagan and believer, big and small, all gathered in the Forum on Christmas Day to listen to the beautiful words of Pastor Nkosi’s sermon. Even though he claimed, much to Domingo’s exasperation, that it was just their prayers and the Divine Hand of the Lord that helped us win that first battle against the KTM without a single Amanzi loss.

  But then, in a much smaller church gathering of his congregation, beside the dam on New Year’s Eve, Nkosi preached about his dream of a land of Canaan for the first time, a settlement where no person ruled, only the Divine Hand. A purified community where only Christians would be allowed, that would stand in permanent penance for the sins that unleashed the Fever and the KTM. ‘So, let us pray, my brothers and sisters, that the war against the devil will end soon. So that I can lead you to a new beginning, a Promised Land.’

  That is how the Year of the Jackal ended.

  The Year of the Pig

  Chapter 67

  The first KTM war: VII

  1 February

  Team Alpha’s first battle was smaller, shorter and much less intense and dangerous, despite their best attempts to exaggerate and dramatise it with the retelling. But they – Domingo actually – got one thing right that we couldn’t.

  On 1 February they drove the Volvo into an ambush, at the place where the N10 winds through the mountains near Ludlow Station, just before the N9 junction between Noupoort and Middelburg.

  There were no KTM Scouts, there were no KTM Shepherds, just the sudden roadblock in front of them on the pass. Domingo kept them calm. When the driver in the Volvo cab said, ‘There’re KTM here,’ Domingo said in his commander’s voice, ‘Stay calm, stay calm, battle stations, they don’t know we’re in the back here, we still have the element of surprise.’

  Team Alpha made the same mistakes we did. They got just as carried away, they descended into the same chaos. They were up against only twelve KTM members, and they very nearly let one get away. A terrified young KTM rider saw near the end of the skirmish that the writing was on the wall. He managed to escape on his motorcycle, east, in the direction of the N9.

  Our Alpha mates told us Domingo saw it. He jumped on one the dead KTM men’s bike, and set off in pursuit. All that the Alpha members could do was to listen in the following silence to the high-pitched whine of the two engines echoing off the mountains, and then disappearing.

  They waited. They checked all the enemies’ bodies to make sure there were none still alive, they began to dig the graves and hid the other motorcycles in a dry streambed. Twenty minutes. Half an hour. They were worried, they considered sending out some of the team who could handle a motorbike. But then Domingo reappeared around the corner of the twisting road on the KTM bike, and he stopped and told the Volvo driver there was a prisoner of war about thirty-five kilometres away on the N10 on the far side of Middelburg. Fetch him, he’s alive, and he’ll talk.

  They found the prisoner there, tied to a road sign. The motorcycle stood on one side with a bullet through the radiator. The surviving member of the KTM was called Leon Calitz. He was twenty-two years old. He was tall and skinny, with a prominent Adam’s apple, sticking-out ears and a gap between his front teeth. He talked fast, incessantly, in wide-eyed amazement, describing how Domingo had put the bullet through his radiator, the two motorcycles side by side, at two hundred kilometres per hour. ‘I never saw a guy ride like that.’

  Domingo shook his head. He said it wasn’t that fast.

  It all became part of the legend.

  2 February

  Team Alpha paraded their KTM
prisoner and their victory through Amanzi. For that day they were our community’s heroes.

  Domingo and the Committee interrogated Leon Calitz on 2 February.

  Calitz was eager to tell his whole story, to switch his life as a highwayman for the safe haven of our community. He seemed relieved and grateful to escape the clutches of the bikers. With words tumbling out of him like a sigh of relief, he sketched the facts about the KTM. It wasn’t like any of us had imagined.

  We in the Special Ops Teams would hear it all afterwards: the KTM did not exist.

  What did exist was a loose network of plunderers. ‘Clans’, Calitz called them, with a respect in his voice, but Domingo said, ‘Crap. They’re a bunch of common gangs.’

  Most of these gangs were on motorbikes. There were others that used pick-up trucks, in the eastern parts of the country. Even horses. Or a combination of vehicles.

  These gangs robbed, stole and collected, using most of their edible loot themselves, and delivered the rest to a central buyer that – ironically it seems – was known as the ‘Sales Club’.

  Leon Calitz said he had been a member of a biker clan, the Marauders, for the past nineteen months – the gang that Team Alpha had practically wiped out near Ludlow Station on the N10 the previous day. Calitz came from Vereeniging, he had heard of the biker clans there, and had gone to look for them on his Honda CRF450; he wanted to be part of something exciting, something strong. The first bikers he encountered were the Marauders, on their way from Kroonstad to Cradock ‘after a Sales Conference was over’. The Marauders interrogated him, roughed him up for an hour and threatened him, then watched him suspiciously for two weeks before he was initiated in a ceremony involving enormous amounts of liquor. They promised him a bigger motorcycle, an automatic assault rifle, fraternity, food security and lots of ‘good times’ and adventures.

  There were other gangs, for example the Tribe, the Vikings, the Freedom Riders, the Death Squad. Some were big, up to thirty members, others considerably smaller, but none fewer than ten members. The Marauders usually had between ten and sixteen members. Some members deserted, some had accidents and were injured, died during robberies, or were lured to other, bigger gangs. Occasionally gangs amalgamated.