by Deon Meyer
So about eleven that morning I dragged my feet back to base, kicking stones along the way.
At more or less the same time, twenty of our people were at the wind farm on Noblesfontein near Victoria West, led by the engineer and now Minister of Public Works Abraham Frost. By road it was over three hundred kilometres from Amanzi, and just a fraction over two hundred for Hennie Fly and Peace Pedi’s Cessna, who were supplying air cover and intelligence for the wind turbine expedition.
They had travelled in a truck and four pick-ups, on a mission to dismantle the first of the turbine towers, and at the same time try to work out how to transport the giant structures. The goal was to erect two or three in the mountains across the river at Amanzi, for a start.
All twenty men were gathered around the tower nearest to the substation of the wind farm, hard at work, arguing about the best methods and tools for the task. Each of them had brought an R4 along: no expedition left Amanzi without them. Some had radios on their belts. But their firearms were in the pick-ups and the truck, or leaning against them, as Hennie and Peace had assured them there was no human threat in the vicinity.
They were totally at ease. Until one of the men noticed movement on the ridge, two hundred metres from the tower. Later he would describe how he did a double-take, because the first impression was too bizarre to believe: two lionesses casually strolling towards them, neatly cutting them off from their vehicles. His second look confirmed his fears and he shouted out a warning to the rest.
There wasn’t much they could do. All twenty jammed through the steel door on the other side of the wind tower and sought refuge up the ladder leading to the top of the turbine.
The lionesses nonchalantly walked up to the door and peered inside. They sniffed the air. One lion sneezed, the sound echoing loudly in the hollow tower. She shook her head as though to rid her nostrils of a stench. Then the lionesses turned away and went to lie down a few metres away in the long shadow of the tower.
For years afterwards the men would still rib each other over who got the biggest fright, and whose was the fart that made the lion sneeze. But at the time, none of them were laughing. The Minister of Public Works Abraham Frost radioed Hennie Fly to inform him of their problem.
Peace Pedi joked over the radio: ‘Would you like us to make a bombing run, Mr Minister?’
And then, in the honoured tradition of everything happening at once, when you least expect it, Hennie Fly pointed at the horizon in the west. Thin lines of smoke drifted up into the blue sky, on the far side of Victoria West. Human activity where there should be none.
I stalked angrily back into base. My mates came rushing out in full battle dress on the way to the Volvo and ERF lorries.
‘Come on, Sergeant Storm,’ Taljaard yelled at me. ‘Enemy activity other side of Vic-West.’
I ran to get my gear. Other members of Alpha and Bravo came rushing past. They called out congratulations with a ‘hey, Sarge!’.
The news had spread.
On the day of my promotion I led my team to battle. It made me feel a little bit better.
Domingo sat up front beside the Volvo driver. He told us over the radio that Hennie and company had spotted a large group of people – it looked like more than three or four hundred – on the other side of Victoria West, barely sixty kilometres from the Noblesfontein wind farm. They were certain those people had not been there two days before when they scouted the area.
Hennie and Peace reported that they were wary of flying too low, in case they were shot at. From a safe altitude it was hard to see how heavily armed the group were.
We had to go and investigate.
It took us almost four hours to get there, because the roads were deteriorating fast. The summer rain had held back for most of the year, and came eventually in February in the form of three gigantic thunder- and hailstorms, cloud breaks and floods, which considerably worsened the condition of the crumbling roads. Domingo said we would stop in the tarmac road, the R63, and approach the suspect group from there on foot. According to Peace they were two kilometres into the veld, on a farm.
We stopped. I led my team out of the truck. There was a signboard reading Melton Wold. It looked like it had once been a holiday farm. We and Team Alpha jogged through the gate. There was a multitude of footprints on the overgrown farm ground track, here and there a hoof print. No vehicles. We spread out, through the veld, covering each other. We could hear the Cessna somewhere up above us, at high altitude.
It was strange to be back in action. The memories of the Battle of Sector 3 were fresh in my mind. The positions of fallen comrades in our formations were empty, other people ran in their places. I wondered how many would be dead by tonight, how many of these people – now under my command – would we bury tomorrow or the next day. Perhaps I would be one of them.
And yet, there was nowhere else I’d rather be.
Domingo’s radio voice in our ears; he was waiting in the truck, suppressing the frustration he must be feeling. He relayed Peace Pedi’s messages, telling us the enemy force was not showing any activity.
The dry bed of a stream ran beside the farm road, here and there pools of water remaining from the recent rain. We ran on the banks of the overgrown stream bed, the road to our right. We smelled the smoke of their fires, we smelled meat barbecuing on coals. We didn’t see any guards or lookout posts. It was strange. Was this an ambush? Over the radio I warned my team to stay alert, there was an avenue of big trees ahead. Taljaard called Alpha to a halt, I did the same with Bravo. He was the senior sergeant, he sent two scouts ahead. They crept between the green thorn bushes, then along the avenue of trees. They let us know we could follow. We jogged through the undergrowth and suddenly we were among them, men, women and children, gathered around the old farmyard. We startled them, children began wailing, women screamed. I halted my team, and made them kneel with rifles at the ready. The men put their hands in the air, mothers grabbed children and held them tight, shielding the little ones with their bodies.
The folk were dirty, thin and starved, their clothes in tatters. Their eyes were full of fear and their body language said they knew this was the end.
They were the West Coasters.
Sofia Bergman
Something changed inside me, that day among the West Coasters.
Just as I had come to the realisation on the night of 9 February in the Year of the Lion that I would never be a true soldier, that I had made a mistake becoming a Spotter, so I did with the West Coasters. It wasn’t quite a realisation, but it was a seed. A seed was planted, as I listened to them.
I’ll tell you what’s so interesting about life: we can make all the plans we want, but life does its own thing. Life with all its coincidences opens doors for you, and closes them. I mean, look at me. I was so absolutely sure I was a soldier. Because my father and brothers taught me to shoot, Meklein taught me to track, I could run like a gazelle, and I was angry at the world. Perfect recipe for a soldier, right?
Then came the Battle of Sector 3, and then the West Coasters.
There at Melton Wold we walked among those poor people, the West Coasters, and I helped, gave them water, encouraged them, and listened to their stories.
And it was the stories that moved me. That’s what happened to me. I was touched by their stories and I was captivated by fate. Life. The things that happen to us. Destiny, I suppose.
I must say that was before I knew about Willem Storm’s history project.
But today I believe he and I have this invisible bond. And you know what my greatest wish is? That he was alive still. Just for one day. And I want to spend that whole day just talking to him about why he recorded all the history. Was it for the same reasons?
I recently read this quotation from Cicero, the Roman statesman: ‘To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain for ever a child. For what is the value of a human life, unless it is woven into the life of our ancestors by the records of history?’
I s
o badly want to ask Willem Storm if he also agreed wholeheartedly with Cicero.
My continuation of Willem’s work began that day, there among the West Coasters. But on that day itself I didn’t know that.
The Minister of Public Works and his nineteen helpers were trapped on the ladder inside the wind tower for six hours while the lionesses rested outside. They grew hungry and thirsty, they sweated in the hot confinement of the tower, fingers aching from holding on, their bodies cramped and sore. But they had to wait, because Special Ops had gone to Melton Wold first, and the lionesses stayed.
By five in the afternoon, when we had established that the more than six hundred West Coasters – as they would for ever be known – were unarmed and harmless, and we could finally go and help the lion’s captives, the two lionesses got up lazily and wandered off in a southerly direction.
Later Pa would speculate they must have come from the old Karoo National Park. But not in any conversation with me. I would still be too angry to talk to him.
That’s why that year will be remembered as the Year of the Lion.
Chapter 91
The West Coasters: I
Joe Drake
As recorded by Willem Storm. The Amanzi History Project.
My name is Joseph Drake, I arrived here with the West Coast refugees. After the meltdown, I spent close to four years in Lamberts Bay. I was the first one who became suspicious about the origin of some of the groceries we were being offered for trade. You see, I used to be an assistant manager at the Spar in Table View, before the meltdown. And last year in January in Lamberts Bay, we had these travelling traders offering us fruit juice . . . Spar had its own label of fruit juices, the ‘nectars’ . . . Now keep in mind, those cartons of juice came to us more than three years after the meltdown, every supermarket, cafe, spaza shop and farm stall this side of the Cederberg had been ransacked over and over again, but we are offered Spar nectar fruit juice, with expiration dates roughly corresponding to the last goods distributed to supermarkets before the meltdown . . . Sorry, you guys refer to it as the Fever. I’m so used to talking about the meltdown, the nuclear meltdown; that was the thing that stuck in my mind.
The fact is, if you looked at all the evidence, there was only one place the juice could have come from.
And when I asked the traders, they said, ‘Oh, so you want to steal my contacts, my sources . . .’ They were very evasive.
Sewes Snijders
Yes, I’m one of the West Coasters. I actually come from Atlantis. My uncle got me a job on the boats and I’ve worked on the sea since I was sixteen, in Lamberts Bay. When the Fever came to town, I was twenty, and we were at sea on the boat, a trawler, that’s what we call it, anyway, and just heard on the radio about everyone who was so sick and all the people dying.
You must know, we were at sea, and we were all healthy, we weren’t on land when the virus came round; the skipper and two others of the crew, they heard over the radio that their wives and children had the Fever, and we knew that the virus was highly contagious. You could see the skipper was broken, ’cause he wanted to go to his family, but he had a responsibility to protect his crew as well. We told him, come, let’s go home, go be with your family, say goodbye, but he said, no, he’s the skipper, he had his responsibility, and it was to his crew. Until the night they told him over the radio, the skipper’s wife was on her last; we said now it’s mutiny, now we’re really going back.
So we did. And I did see the last of the Fever. The very worst part. And the whole crew caught the virus, and the skipper died, and all the crew died, except me, and in the whole town there were four people left. Then I wanted to go to Atlantis to my mom and dad. I was pretty certain they were dead, and we didn’t exactly have a good relationship, but in those times you want to be with your people. So I took a car and drove, and I hadn’t even reached Clanwilliam, when we found the refugees, the people running away from Cape Town, and they said it’s Koeberg, it’s the nuclear reactors. There weren’t any people to run it, it was in meltdown and everything burning, they said you could see the smoke, such a black smoke that never stopped. That smoke blew out over the sea one day, the next day over the Cape, just as the wind blew, and the people were getting nuclear disease or something, their skin peeling off their bodies, and the authorities said everyone who survives the Fever must get out, the radioactivity was going to fry the whole Cape.
Then I knew if the Fever didn’t get my family, the nuclear disease would, ’cause Atlantis is just a stone’s throw from Koeberg. So I turned back, and the refugees asked me, where are you going? And I said back to Lamberts Bay. And they asked what is there? And I said only the sea, but a person can survive. So they came along. And then more people came in the next two, three weeks. And the last ones said the Cape is a death zone now, and all the passes over the mountains are blocked, and the bridges over the Berg River as well, and there were big signs saying: Danger: Radioactivity. Do Not Enter.
So we made a life at Lamberts Bay. There were about three hundred of us to begin with.
It was a hard life, that first year. There were people who brought their old attitudes with them. I don’t want to be funny, but white people who thought we brown and black people should work for them, look after them, ’cause they used to be rich people in the Cape. There was this brother and sister, twins, can you believe it, from Constantia, they moved into the grandest house in Lamberts Bay, and they gave us orders, do this, do that, be quick. Most of us ignored them, but some people got angry, and they cornered those rich whiteys in their grand house and just wanted to kill them. But Missus Irene Papers stood up. She used to be a school principal in Morreesburg, one of the refugees, she got up, went in the front door of the house, and said, there’s been enough death. It’s going to stop now. The rich whites must go, they weren’t welcome in our community, they must pack their stuff and be gone before the next morning, but there will be no murder.
The next morning they were gone. I don’t know where, I don’t know happened to them.
But that’s how Missus Papers became the leader of the community, and we made a life in Lamberts Bay. Really we just lived off the sea, every year the fish and the crayfish numbers grew, you could watch the sea coming alive again, slowly, and the birds; that’s where you could see the Fever was actually good for the world. There are these blue gannets and cormorants on Bird Island at Lamberts Bay. And every year you could see there were more of them and their condition was better ’cause there was more fish for them to eat, ’cause there were fewer people to catch the fish.
Anyway, our numbers grew too, there in Lamberts Bay; people came from the north, and from Clanwilliam’s side, they came looking for seafood ’cause there was nothing else really, and they found us, and they stayed. We filled up that town, and there were people at Graafwater who had sheep and cattle, and we bartered, and there were other people who siphoned out diesel everywhere, then they came to barter for fish and crayfish. We needed the diesel for the trawlers, of course.
And then, then the funny stuff began.
First there was the ghost ship.
Last July, we went out with a trawler. There weren’t any weather reports any more of course, you had to go on your gut feeling, and what you remembered about the weather. And I remembered, after a cold front, there were often a few days of good weather. So there was this heavy cold front, and afterwards, looking out across the Atlantic the weather looked good, and we took a trawler out. I was the skipper now. Perfect sunshine, and we got snoek. I never in my life saw the snoek run like that, the water came alive in front of us. But I was the only fisherman now, the others were novices, and a snoek can hurt you badly, so I had my hands full catching them and teaching the others. I didn’t see the mist; when I looked up, the bank was close. West coast fog. It makes you blind. We had seen that the GPS didn’t work so well any more, it was giving funny readings in those days, so we couldn’t depend on it. And I was the skipper, and a skipper takes responsibility for his crew,
and I said, come on, let’s go home, ’cause you get mixed up with direction very fast on the open seas when that mist comes in.
We had hardly got going when one of the crew says, skipper, look there. And we saw the ghost ship. I’m not an expert in ships, but if you’ve lived on the sea, then you hear, and you know some stuff. And that was a frigate. A naval frigate, military ship, not the big guns, little ones, and there were missile tubes on deck. It was light grey, but we just saw it there coming out of the mist, into sunshine, and then back in the mist. I wonder if it was forty seconds. But I swear it was a naval frigate. We all saw it, and it sailed towards the Cape.
Then, in early August, there were two children who were sneakily collecting gannet eggs on the island. Missus Irene Papers had told us to leave the birds alone, but the kids, they like treats . . . And they came running to the grown-ups saying, come and see, come and see, there’s a whale in the water, and the people who got there first saw a submarine diving, just the last glimpse of the conning tower and the aerial or periscope or whatever. They were trustworthy people who saw the submarine, they had no reason to lie. Then you think, well, somewhere there must still be military people. Maybe in America, or Russia, maybe the virus didn’t kill so many in that Russian cold, you believe it must be people from another world.
Yvonne Pekeur
Near Graafwater the hills are like this, where the road goes through to Clanwilliam. There are two rows of hills. We lived between the two rows, in the farmhouse, six women and the three children who farmed with cattle, and we had a good herd; last November we had more than a hundred and twenty cattle. We just farmed for meat, some people in town were milking, but we just farmed beef. Now you see, we were just outside town, outside Graafwater, it was half an hour’s walk, ten minutes on horseback.