by Deon Meyer
I stopped in front of the Orphanage, when the eastern horizon was fiery red over the dam, and got out. The pain in my broken knuckle throbbed non-stop, and I wondered, had they told Okkie? Did Okkie know our father was dead?
I went inside where I could hear people already moving around in the kitchen. I didn’t want to face them, I just wanted to sit and wait for Birdy. I had to talk to Birdy. I walked into the sitting room and saw her standing at the window, she couldn’t sleep either.
She heard me enter and turned. She seemed old and tired. She looked at me with compassion, and then with concern. ‘What happened?’ she asked, seeing the blood on my cheek.
‘Was Domingo in prison before, Birdy?’ I asked, because the question weighed so heavily on me, and when it was out, when it was so irretrievably out, I realised how mean and selfish the question was.
Birdy stumbled. I reached her, held her up, she pushed towards a chair, sat down. Looked up at me.
She said, ‘Yes, Nico. He was.’
Sofia Bergman
Sarge X showed me where the bodies had been lying. I remember the softness of the light of the rising sun, the purple of the dried blood in the bone-white dust.
‘Domingo was here, Sofia,’ he said, ‘and Willem was right there.’ Old Sarge X was a small man, he must have been in his fifties by now, and when he stood pointing out to me, I wanted to hug him, because he looked so dazed, like he didn’t want to be there. As if he didn’t want to investigate this scene, would so much rather have them back. I was too young then and too upset and tired myself to realise how heavily the responsibility rested on him. He was the only one of the senior military men left.
He showed me that Domingo and Willem Storm had been lying only three metres apart.
He showed me the spatters of blood beside the tracks, and the two places they had been lying, and how there was surprisingly little blood.
I never liked that area. It was . . . I don’t know . . . Spooky. There were the pans, the dry, flat pans, as white as skeletons, and no good for planting, their soil sick and brackish, and then there was the canal flowing nearby, and the old centre-pivot irrigation circles; you could still make out the outlines. I . . . I always got goose bumps there. In any case, Willem Storm and Domingo had been lying in the pan, just a few steps from the edge, the edge of natural veld. And Domingo’s Jeep had been parked in the road, near the old farmhouse, probably three hundred metres away.
And then I asked Sarge who else had been here yesterday. He said just his patrol from Hopetown, and himself. And he called the two men from the patrol to come over. I checked their boots, and I looked at Sarge’s boots, and I asked if any of them knew what shoes Willem had been wearing. One of the patrol men fetched them and brought them to me: Domingo’s shoes, and Willem’s. They put them down in front of me. The empty shoes.
It was a very bad moment for me. I can’t explain it.
Cairistine ‘Birdy’ Canary
Yes, you see, that Christmas Eve, the last one before he died, Domingo took me to Otters Kloof. It was once a grand guest house and game farm across the river, and he’d cleaned the place on the quiet and made it beautiful, and when we arrived there was a little table set with a tablecloth, can you believe it, and wildflowers, and I laughed and said, who did that, it can’t be you. It’s so romantic. And he didn’t smile, he was terribly serious, and he said, Birdy, I want you, but first you must know who I am.
And he told me everything.
I think it was a release for Birdy to tell me the truth about Domingo that morning. I think carrying that knowledge alone had been a burden to her.
We sat side by side on the couch. She held both my hands. She was so focused that she didn’t register how swollen they were, the grazes and blood on my knuckles.
She told me about Domingo. His name was Ryan John Domingo. He grew up in Riverview in Worcester, where in summer the south-easter blew the stench of the sewerage works into their little house. His mother was a cleaner at the De la Bat School for the Deaf, his father was scum, a man who didn’t work, only stole, lied, cheated and boozed. A man who never held down any job longer than three months. A weak man, but outwardly strong, a big man, a man who had been physically abused as a child and who continued the tradition by beating his wife and six children with fists and belts, ropes and anything he could lay his hands on, whether he was sober or drunk. A man with a terrible temper.
His father’s names were also Ryan John.
Domingo was the oldest. He was always the first to feel the force of his father’s fury. Later he would stand up for his brothers and sisters, and for his mother. When he saw they were about to bear the brunt of his father’s rage, he intervened and took the thrashing in their place.
At high school he tried to fight back for the first time, and his father beat him so severely that he spent a week in hospital recovering. Nursing staff and a social worker asked him who had beaten him like that. He said he had fallen.
The social worker said he should know that he could put an end to the abuse. He just had to talk.
He thought about it, and he decided, yes, he could put an end to it. And so he planned the murder of his father.
He was in grade eleven. Sixteen years old. Some of his school friends’ fathers worked at the Brandvlei Prison. He had heard stories of how the prisoners killed each other there. One method involved a bicycle spoke.
Cairistine ‘Birdy’ Canary
Domingo may have been at the table talking to me, but really I could tell he was back in Worcester. You didn’t often see Domingo’s eyes, I think because he knew his eyes were windows to his soul. I saw his eyes were distant, and hurting. He said, Birdy, for weeks I sharpened that bicycle spoke, its tip was sharp. I wanted to kill him, but didn’t have the courage. I wanted to kill him, I pictured it in my mind, as he lay dead drunk, how I’d slip the spoke between his ribs, just like they did in Brandvlei Prison, but I didn’t have the courage. It’s a big step, to kill another human being. Even when you have the heart and the motivation. Even when it’s in self-defence. A very big step. For weeks I sat and listened to his drunkard’s tales, you know those stories, Birdy? They’re all the same, every time, over and over, long and rambling and all the same, until you want to throw up. Drunkard’s tales about what a hero my father was, all the things he had done, the guys he had beaten up, the bosses he had told just keep your stupid job, over and over, over and over. And then one night he hit my ma, and I tried to stop him and he hit me, he beat me black and blue, Birdy, and my little brother tried to stop him, and he hit my little brother, he was just eleven, he beat him to a pulp too. That night, Birdy, I shoved that bicycle spoke between my father’s ribs, and I killed him, in his bed.
Sofia Bergman
I told Sarge and his people to wait there and I began studying the tracks as Meklein had taught me. Remember, I had been training the Spotters to track for over a year, so it was all fresh in my mind. And I wanted to know what happened there, who had killed them. So I was focused.
The first thing I noticed was that there were four people whose tracks came from the north, from the canal. And not one of those four was Willem Storm or Domingo.
It seemed that later they had carried Willem and Domingo to that spot in the pan.
It made no sense.
Chapter 108
The investigation of my father’s murder: V
Birdy said Domingo had gone to school in mortal fear. And when the headmaster sent for him, and he saw the policemen waiting at the office door, he knew they had come to get him for the murder of his father.
But they just told him his father was dead. Died in bed. Heart attack. They were so sorry. The deepest sympathies. He could go home now.
He did go home, to console his mother and brothers and sisters.
He didn’t know why they hadn’t noticed the tiny wound. Maybe because they knew that Ryan John Domingo was drinking himself to death anyway? Maybe because the mark was so small? Maybe because they didn�
�t bother to do autopsies on coloureds from Riverview?
So they buried his father. And he was left wondering: how long before the body decomposed, and the evidence along with it?
Sofia Bergman
The tracks showed that they put Willem and Domingo down in the pan, and they joined up with the other one, and headed north. The third one was carrying something heavy. For over five hundred metres I tracked them – that was where the old irrigation circles were, in patches you could see the tracks clearly – and then there was a big bloodstain in the sand, and you could see that one guy had fallen.
Tracking is actually just very careful observation, and logic.
You check how close a man’s steps are to each other, then you know how fast he is walking or running. You check how deep his tracks are compared to the others, then you know if he’s carrying something. And drops of blood . . . Meklein taught me, when we tracked wounded buck, that each droplet tells its own story.
So I followed them, closer and closer to the canal. I saw how they ran, but not very fast. I saw one was bleeding, and the bleeding was getting worse.
There was no wind, just a light breeze, a morning breeze, and out of the corner of my eye I saw something that . . . It was out of place there, unnatural. I looked, almost reluctantly, because I only wanted to focus on the spoor, and the thing must have been five paces . . . No, ten paces away from the tracks, something fluttered, something white. I looked and I walked over to it, and it was a photo, of Willem and Nico, and a pretty woman, but Nico was still small. Father, mother and son. And I knew it must have been in Willem’s pocket. I picked it up and went back to tracking.
A ditch ran between the irrigation circles. I don’t know if they had pipes in the gully or what, but it was a deep one. And I saw there was somebody there. The ditch . . . Remember, it must have been six, seven years since people last . . . There were bushes in the ditch, weeds and thorn bushes, and the man lay half hidden under the bushes; it seemed as though he were hiding, and it gave me a fright, because I had nothing with me, my rifle was still in Sarge’s pick-up. Then I realised that the man was dead.
On the couch in the Orphanage Birdy held my hands tight and she told me that Domingo’s father stayed buried, nobody asked questions, nobody looked at Domingo suspiciously, and slowly he began to realise he had got away with murder. Weeks and months went by, and he was even more convinced it had been the right thing to do. He watched his mother heal. How his brothers and sisters recovered and blossomed. How they lifted their heads again.
He heard of young Correctional Services men who went to Britain to join the British Army. The Brits were at war in Afghanistan, and they were encouraging people in the Commonwealth to join their army. He heard they were making good money, sending large sums back home, to their mothers and fathers and grannies and grandpas and little brothers and sisters. He talked to his ma. At first she wouldn’t hear of it. She said finish school first. He said of course he would, but then he wanted to go. She said no. But he worked on her, over months, more than a year. Until she agreed.
In January after he had passed matric, he got his passport.
He saved and borrowed money for the plane ticket. Twelve months later, in the following January, he was in Afghanistan as a member of the Third Battalion of the British Parachute Regiment.
Sofia Bergman
The tracks showed that the other three had dragged the man into the ditch, and then they ran.
He was as dead as a doornail, shot between the eyes. And he was wearing a drab grey uniform, which looked like some sort of military uniform, and his boots were black.
I went to call Sarge X, and fetch my rifle, and I told Sarge I was going to run on the tracks of those three men, and if I saw anything I would shoot in the air. But he said, no, rather use the radio.
So I forgot about the photograph in my pocket. I followed the spoor at a trot, through the second irrigation circle, to the canal. There I saw the men had turned left, to the little bridge.
And I saw more blood spatter, more and more.
Every two hundred metres or so there was a footbridge over the canal, but some of the bridges were broken or washed away, and every kilometre or so there was a bridge for vehicles. I saw the men had crossed one of the footbridges over the canal and run across the next old ghost irrigation circle. The one who was bleeding was dragging his feet more, and the tracks came together as the other two helped him. I ran and ran, and suddenly their tracks disappeared.
I stopped and retraced my steps. I saw they had been running, and just before the tracks disappeared, they weren’t. They were walking.
And then their tracks disappeared entirely.
Ryan John Domingo of 3 Para was promoted to lance corporal and later corporal and after five years of service to sergeant. Every month he sent money to his mother, and came home once a year for two weeks – with gifts for his brothers and sisters – and then he flew back to Britain and Afghanistan.
He was a good soldier. He was awarded medals. He took care of his family. He neither drank nor smoked. In Riverview, Worcester, he was a legend, and when he came home, the girls would saunter slowly past the Domingo family home. Not surprisingly, as he had become a handsome, strong young man, a steady man and a good breadwinner.
On leave in his fifth year of service he went to a high school athletics event, where his sister was competing. He met a young teacher, Yolande Goedeman. She was a sensuous young woman, with voluptuous lips and body, her lively nature shining with the same light as her flawless complexion.
It was love at first sight; he phoned back to base to request an extra week’s leave, so he could strike while the iron was still hot with the fire of passion. They spent every possible moment together, they were the couple that everyone talked about, people said they were so lucky to have found each other.
He didn’t want to go back, he was afraid of losing her. She didn’t want him to go, because Afghanistan was the land of death. He promised her he would apply for a position with Correctional Services, they should give him credit for his military experience, and he ought to get a good rank.
He went back, first to Britain, and then to Helmand Province in southern Afghanistan for Operation Herrick, as part of 16 Air Assault Brigade. Fourteen of his comrades were killed, forty-five were wounded.
Domingo survived. He sent his letters to Correctional Services in South Africa to apply for work. Only to receive a letter from his oldest sister. ‘You must come home, Yolande Goedeman is mixed up with the wrong people.’
Sofia Bergman
Tracking is acute observation and logic, and if something doesn’t look right, if you can’t explain it, then you approach it from another angle.
I had tracked the spoor of the three guys as they ran away, but now I traced them as they arrived. I confirmed that there had first been four. And I saw more or less what had happened. Willem Storm was in the old farmhouse. I don’t mean that the farmhouse was actually old, it was just . . . It had been standing empty for a long time, and was neglected like all the farmyards of that time, but you could see that Willem had started to clean up. In the house we found papers on a table, and pencils, evidence that he was making a map of the area, and planning his irrigation system.
I believe he was occupied with that in the house when the four men arrived. And Domingo. There were lines and marks in the dust, windows and doors broken, there had been a struggle.
The four men . . . Their tracks were very strange, because they began in the middle of one of the centre pivot irrigation circles on the other side of the canal, probably three kilometres from Willem’s farmhouse. I couldn’t understand it, the tracks just started there.
While I was wondering how on earth that made any sense, the pick-up arrived, people from Ou Brug, looking for Sarge. Ou Brug is on the far side of Hopetown, where a quaint old bridge was built across the Orange River. Some of our people had planted sunflowers there, our furthest western outpost. And Sarge called me over the ra
dio, and said, ‘You had better come and hear this, Sofia.’
Domingo requested special leave from his unit. He said he had a family crisis at home. They were grateful for his bravery and service in the terrible months of Operation Herrick. They said take as much time as you need.
He flew from Kabul to Frankfurt, and from there to Cape Town. He travelled for twenty-one hours, arrived at night, rented a car and drove through to Worcester, dog-tired and jet-lagged and still full of the bitter battles and violent tension, the great loss of his comrades in Afghanistan. His sister told him Yolande Goedeman was involved with Martin Apollis. Big drug boss of the Breede River Valley, the one who drove around in a Mustang.
Domingo knew where Martin Apollis lived. He walked out of his mother’s house in the middle of the night. His sister tried to stop him, but he was unstoppable. He drove his hired car to Martin Apollis’s house, and he saw Yolande Goedeman’s little Toyota Tazz parked in front. He didn’t knock, he kicked open the front door and walked down the passage. Calling her name.
Apollis came down the passage, naked, pistol in his hand, furious. Who dared come into his house? He was Martin Apollis, you took your life in your hands barging in here.
Ryan John Domingo took the pistol from Apollis and shot him. Between the eyes. And he walked to the bedroom, and there Yolande Goedeman, with her ripe, full body, was lying naked in bed. And he shot her too.
Cairistine ‘Birdy’ Canary
He told me, ‘Birdy, I want you to know I have my father’s temper. I didn’t know that, Birdy, but that night, I discovered it.’
They sent Domingo to jail.
When the Fever came he was still in there, at Buffeljagsrivier. Then everyone got sick, the prisoners, the guards, everyone. But not Domingo.
Sofia Bergman
The people of Ou Brug told us they’d seen a helicopter the previous afternoon.