by Deon Meyer
Calitz screamed shrilly and in terror, ‘For Number One, they’re for Number One!’
Then Domingo shot him too, between the eyes.
The rest of us stood, turned to stone.
Domingo spun on his heel, walked away, came back, walked away again.
Domingo turned towards us, said to Brits, ‘Go and fetch the Volvo.’
Then to the others, ‘Get them out of there. Fetch food and water. See if there are clothes for them. And soap and water.’
There were seven women in the storeroom.
Actually three girls and four women.
The three young ones were the only ones with clothing on. The rest were naked. There was no water or toilet, they had been kept for weeks in the storeroom, they had been kicked and beaten, given only scraps of food, and were allowed to wash once a week, from a bucket.
We helped them out of the storeroom. They stood in the bright sunlight, blinking, huddling together, shrunken and forlorn. Beyond fear, they stood waiting for something, orders perhaps, or a blow to the head. They looked at the bodies of Loots and Calitz, which our troops were dragging away.
Domingo could not look at them, he walked away, towards the mountain. Jakes came out of the farmhouse with a pile of blankets and towels and some items of clothing and began draping them over the women.
They just stood there.
There were three girls between the ages of eleven and fifteen, and four women between nineteen and forty.
We led them to the farmhouse, gave them the food and water that we could find, and showed them the bathroom.
The older women began to weep first, then the others broke down too.
The oldest one told us later that they were kept like that because the Marauders couldn’t leave more men at the base to keep them captive in better conditions. The storeroom only needed one guard.
The captain of the Marauders told them it was only one more week till the Sales Conference. They must just stop whining, shut up till then.
We found two Nissan UD40 trucks in the shed. One was stacked with solar panels and batteries, the other contained drums of diesel and ethanol and leg shackles. We discovered a heap of empty booze bottles and over two hundred still full brandy bottles.
I found Domingo on the mountaintop behind the farmhouse, at the foot of the antenna we were going to dismantle to take back. He stood staring at the horizon.
‘Captain . . .’
He didn’t react, just kept staring into the distance.
I went up to him. Then he said, ‘So now you know, Nico. I have a bit of an anger management problem.’
Chapter 70
Team Bravo started digging graves for Calitz and the sparky. Domingo stopped us. ‘No. Leave them,’ he said, his lip curling with contempt.
I wondered how he could hate so purely.
We broke down the radio mast on the mountain. We took it, the radio equipment in the farmhouse, and the women and drove back to Amanzi.
In the back of the Volvo I kept an eye on Domingo. He sat dead straight, taut as a wire. He didn’t look at the seven women, he didn’t look at us.
On the other side of Petrusville I looked through my portside peephole. I saw our irrigation projects, the fields spreading out beside the river, the crops of sunflowers and maize, vegetables, I saw the people of Amanzi working in the fields, the gentle, good people. I saw the electric pumps, the tractors, a few pick-up trucks, a lorry, the technology that we had up and running again.
How could such different worlds exist? How could there be such barbarity, the viciousness of the men who had stabbed Okkie, and now the Marauders? While there was this oasis? That my father had created.
Were we even of the same species?
We erected the radio mast on the highest hill at Amanzi. Our engineer and his team connected it to the electronics of the shortwave, amateur radio. Domingo called it a ham radio. They turned it on, heard only hissing noise, though they searched through all the frequencies.
Domingo said, ‘You have to get it right. I’m looking for Number One. He’s mine.’
Birdy said, ‘Patience. We’ll figure it out.’
Between her, Hennie Fly, Domingo and the engineer they decided to concentrate on the forty-metre wavelength, which according to Leon Calitz was the frequency that the Marauders had to listen to.
The community took the seven women to its heart.
They were treated like family, nursed, nurtured, pampered and counselled with a dedication and focus that tried to show that we were different, that not all people were like the Marauders.
And their arrival and their experience and history changed something fundamental in the dynamics of Amanzi.
It was my father who noticed it, who put it in words, placed it in context. He shared it with me over a few Sundays, when I had lunch with him and Okkie. I think he was reaching out to me, very gently. I listened closely, encouraging him, because I wanted to restore our bond, and to lighten my burden of guilt.
Pa’s way was to talk through an inkling of a new intellectual insight or point of view, worrying at it like someone who knew there was a golden thread in a crow’s nest of wool, and then carefully plucking and tugging at it until he found and unravelled it. Sensing there was something precious there, though he wasn’t yet sure what.
He slowly came to the realisation that the presence of the Seven Women changed us. He realised that, despite our internal division, it began to bond us as an entity, as an idea: ‘the people of Amanzi’. Pa told me he suspected Leon Calitz’s description of the motorcycle gangs as a loose collection of wild, disorganised plunderers had deprived us – at least for a few days – of a single enemy, a simple embodiment of evil. And people united more readily when threatened by another unified force.
We could add the things that the Seven told us to Sofia Bergman’s brief experience of being captured, and catch a glimpse of a new, purer evil: an opposing entity that had descended to the barbaric level of human trafficking. Pastor Nkosi gave sermons about ‘The devil who locks children in cages’. Domingo as well. His naked hatred for Trunkenpolz and Mecky/Clarkson and Meyiwa/Number One and the Chair was contagious, and he had a big influence on public opinion. Pa said this was how we became more united. We were the polar opposite of the evil. We were the counterweight and the counterbalance that had to keep the scales of the universe in balance. We discovered our identity in our difference: we were the Place of Light, we could only be that when ‘they’ represented the Darkness.
Us and them. Now more purely formulated and defined.
Pa told me about the historian Yuval Noah Harari who wrote that all animals could only experience major behavioural shifts when their genetics changed.
All animals except humans.
Pa said that for hundreds of thousands of years humans were just one of the many species on the globe, our numbers varying according to drought and flood, famine and surfeit, but the numbers were always under control and in balance with nature.
But then, about twelve thousand years ago, it all altered dramatically. Humankind began to multiply exponentially. And it wasn’t a genetic change, it wasn’t a climatic shift. It came with our ability to tell stories.
Pa said we are the only organism whose behaviour can change dramatically because we create fiction. Fiction that is so great and powerful that it bound people in larger and larger groups, to accomplish greater and greater things. Yuval Noah Harari described these as imagined realities, social constructs and myths. These stories of ours, these social constructs, were ideas like nationalism among people of different tongues and cultures, or religions, or political ideologies. Communism. Capitalism. Democracy. Imagined realities, because they only arose in people’s minds, they had no scientific basis.
The French Revolution was a perfect example of a myth that changed human behaviour overnight: in 1789 a large number of the French rejected the myth of the divine right of kings to rule, and adopted the myth of the sovereignty of the people.
>
That fact, said Pa, this human ability to create a social construct, an imagined reality of myth, and believe in it, led directly to our ability to cooperate in our thousands and later in millions. As peoples, nations, as allies. Pa laughed and said that the one that was the funniest was the sports team. He said there were some of his colleagues at Stellenbosch who lived in Cape Town, but supported the Blue Bulls rugby team only because they had been at school in Pretoria. Or were Arsenal fans, even though they had no connection to Britain. Sports loyalty, Pa said, was the most inexplicable fiction and social construct of all.
But these constructs gave us cooperation, and cooperation made us the mightiest species on the planet.
‘Clever, hey?’ Pa said, as always ready to be awed by the inspiring world we lived in.
‘Yes,’ I said. At sixteen and a half I had perfected the art of hiding my enthusiasm.
Pa said he was still pondering how exactly it had happened, but the seven women had somehow changed Amanzi into a social construct. A myth. Before them there were two factions – the Free Amanzi Party and the Mighty Warrior Party – with a common, shared urge to survive. That was the reason we worked together.
Now there was a growing awareness of the myth of us as Amanzians. About who we were and what we stood for.
‘I think . . . it feels as though there’s momentum in this, Nico. It’s as though the momentum of Pastor Nkosi’s rhetoric is waning. His influence as well.’
Afterwards I wondered if it was just that Pa wished it so strongly, or whether it was really so. Then I saw the signs. And the momentum carried us into the winter.
It carried the Special Ops Team through intensive training, spurred more people to attempt selection for the unit, so that by July we were complete, two teams of twelve men each.
It sent us out on more missions, further, longer. We drove as far as Harrismith in the east, Willowmore and Beaufort West in the south, Williston, Brandvlei and Kimberley and Upington, on crumbling tarmac roads and increasingly impassable gravel roads. Alternating between Alpha and Bravo, every fortnight, slow days of frustration and boredom and lukewarm drinking water and bland food in the back of the truck, and the same old weak jokes and irritating personalities and comments and jibes until you felt like slapping your comrades, until you wanted to scream, until you learned to sleep sitting up and disappear into your thoughts to try to break the mindless routine.
Only twice was there an explosion of adrenalin when new gangs led us into an ambush, but they were the ones surprised by the ferocity of our response, as we destroyed them. We were more skilled and confident now, and blunted to the scenes and smells and sounds of battle and death.
The gangs were small and stupid. Neither of them had radios, neither had heard of Number One and the Chair.
It was as though the Sales Club had smelled a rat after the disappearance of the Road Rage Kings and the Marauders. We didn’t hear a peep from them on our ham radio, we saw not even a shadow on the highways.
The arrival of the Seven Women, the shock of their appearance and the inhumane treatment they had received from the Marauders, was probably the main reason we completely ignored the sparky’s babblings about ‘the chopper’.
Perhaps we just forgot to talk about it.
I didn’t know what Domingo thought in the weeks that followed. Perhaps he – like the majority of Team Bravo who had been present that day – imagined that the sparky had hoped to distract attention from the girls with his chopper talk. Perhaps Domingo thought it had something to do with the dope that we found in that farmhouse.
His reasoning might have been that we had no reasonable explanation for a helicopter and laser-vision-equipped soldiers there, with those ‘small-time yahoos’, and therefore it had probably never happened.
Nobody asked the Seven Women about it, no one asked them if they had heard the helicopter in the night. Maybe at first it was to spare them the trauma of remembering. And later . . . I don’t know. Perhaps we forgot.
That’s all I can say.
Sofia Bergman
I never heard the story of the women and the gang and the helicopter. I mean, not at the time.
Would I have said anything about my helicopter dream if someone had told me about the helicopter at Tarkastad?
I don’t know. I really believed mine was just a dream. And the events were separated by months and a few hundred kilometres.
And that year, my first year in Amanzi, wasn’t a good one for me. I didn’t like anybody. A couple of times I very seriously considered running away.
Chapter 71
3 July
We left at ten at night, Alpha and Bravo, in two separate lorries. Domingo drove with Team Alpha in the ERF, Brits was our commander in the Volvo. We drove through the night, keeping radio contact, five kilometres apart, via Koffiefontein and Petrusberg to avoid the N1. We were on our way to Bloemfontein, to stick our heads into the hornets’ nest.
Over and over in the deserted streets and through the crumbling houses of Luckhoff we had practised night manoeuvres and urban warfare. We were going on the offensive for the first time, without our Trojan Horse strategy. We were going on foot through the suburbs. It was an expedition of intelligence gathering, literally and figuratively a shot in the dark.
We knew there was life in Bloemfontein. We had heard from the migrants who had to pass through the city or close by it on their way to us. We didn’t know what form and structure that life was taking, because the stories of the travellers differed so much. They talked about a few frightened inhabitants living like hobos, but also of an organised group who lived in a settlement near the city centre, and shot at anything in the vicinity that moved.
We had avoided Bloemfontein so far. Domingo believed the risks were too great. He didn’t have enough information about the city, nor was he satisfied with our training, and nobody knew whether we would really benefit from a mission like this.
Until now.
Domingo now believed the radio silence of the Sales Club and the complete absence of bandits on the roads were part of a deliberate strategy, a portent of an invasion. He displayed no emotion, but we suspected that behind those dark glasses burned a white-hot hatred for Number One and the Chair. Hatred for Clarkson/Trunkenpolz, who had intended to shoot him in cold blood, and Mecky/Meyiwa, who said, ‘Don’t bother,’ as if she despised him as equally unimportant, dead or alive.
We thought we knew Domingo. We thought we knew what he felt. We thought that was one of the reasons we were driving to Bloemfontein in the freezing night of 3 July.
In the hour after midnight we stopped one street away from the N8, near the old Makro hypermarket outside the city. From there we walked in two patrols. Both teams walked from west to east, in separate streets, about half a kilometre apart.
It was nearly four years since I had last been in Bloemfontein. That had been only months after the Fever, when the infrastructure still looked normal.
The change was shocking, especially now in winter. Gardens and pavements were overgrown, the streets were cracked open by tree roots, dry grass and weeds, and storm water drains were blocked, which had caused flooding and erosion.
Some lampposts leaned askew, trees had lost branches in storm winds and they littered the streets collecting wind-blown leaves, dust and sand. Team Bravo’s route took us past the rugby field of the Jim Fouché High School, which now served as a pasture for a few sheep and cattle. Further down the street was a hockey field – the frames of the goals still standing – dug over into a summer vegetable garden, now stripped and deserted.
There were people here. They were somewhere in houses nearby, but they gave nothing away, everything was dark and silent.
We crept on through streets as silent as the grave.
Team Alpha smelled the smoke from a wood fire. We followed it slowly to the old Mangaung cricket oval, and we saw two men warming their hands at the fire beside a sky-high floodlight tower. Both were armed, both carried R4 rifles. On the
field where once international cricket matches were played, a motley little herd of dairy cows grazed.
The men chatted loudly in the darkness. We overpowered them with ease and confiscated a two-way radio from one of them.
They were shocked by our skill, weapons, military equipment; terrified by the pistol that Domingo pressed to the temple of one. They answered our questions willingly, telling us almost everything.
They were sentries. The floodlight pole was their lookout tower, they could see for kilometres from up there. But it was freezing cold on top, and the night was always uneventful, so they came down to light a fire, just for the darkest hours. They’d been standing guard. There were two other places with permanent guards, both on Naval Hill, all for the protection of the community at the Mall. The old Mimosa Mall was a settlement now, there were armoured vehicles and tanks at the entrances, and sandbags, with machine guns and guards; it was where ‘all the people sleep’. The community consisted of over one thousand people. During the day they came out and tended their sheep, cattle, goats and pigs. In the summer they planted crops in what used to be parks and sports fields. They had restored the water supply from the Welbedacht and Rustfontein dams, using a series of man-powered pumps – that was how they irrigated the crops. The only electricity was in the Mall, where they had hundreds of solar panels on the roof.
Where did they get the solar panels?
The first ones they collected here in the city. Later they purchased more, from the Sales Club.
Where was the Sales Club?
Nobody knew. The Sales Club called them over the radio. The radio was in the Mall. Only the Mayor listened to the radio. The Mayor was their great leader, who had started the Mall, and ruled with an iron fist.
How did they pay the Sales Club?
With food.
And what else?