by Deon Meyer
The other grey man said, ‘We’re going to untie your hands. Please sit at the table.’
‘Where is Sofia?’
‘She is safe.’
‘Where is she?’
‘Please, sir, I need your word that you will sit down, and be civil.’
‘Civil?’
‘Yes, sir.’
I realised something when the floor moved again. ‘We’re on a ship,’ I said.
‘Yes, sir. Do I have your word?’
‘Yes.’
‘Cut him loose.’
The other one used a pair of pliers to cut the cable ties from my wrists. Immediately I lashed out at him. I caught him on the back of the head, as he turned away. The pain in my broken knuckle was so intense that for a moment I felt I would pass out. I swung at the other one, the talker. He shouted something and dived into me. Another three came through the door, their boots loud on the metal floor. They swore in English, pinned me down on the floor.
‘Where’s Sofia?’ I screamed in helpless rage.
The talker said, ‘Tie him up again.’
The one I had hit smacked me behind the head.
‘Don’t hurt him, you idiot,’ Talker said to him. ‘Just tie him to the chair.’
They dragged me to my feet, wrestled me into a chair. I did my best to break free, but there were too many of them and they were too skilled.
They tied me to the chair.
‘We tried,’ said Talker. ‘We really tried to be civil.’
‘Where’s Sofia?’ I demanded.
‘Sir, I said she is safe.’
Then they all walked out, and closed the heavy metal door behind them.
The sound of their boots disappeared down the passage and then it was quiet.
We could be in Saldanha. There was a harbour there. The only other harbour was in Cape Town, but that was very close to the nuclear reactor meltdown at the Koeberg. It would be impossible.
Saldanha. Trunkenpolz was in Saldanha. We hadn’t guessed that.
A new sound in the corridor. The tick-tack of shoes on metal floor. The tick-tack of a woman’s shoes.
Mecky, the Zulu princess?
The door opened. A grey man stood there. He poked his head inside. He nodded to someone outside my vision. He stood aside.
A woman came in.
She stood there for a moment.
We each made a sound, both of us. Her sound was high and emotional. Mine was different. I don’t know how to describe my sound. I will never know.
Because the woman in the doorway was my mother.
She started to cry.
She came walking across the floor to me and she was weeping, and she embraced me and I remembered my mother’s scent and her embrace, and I knew that none of this could be real.
‘Please cut him loose,’ she said and the grey man came and clipped the cable ties. I stood up and she hugged me and said, ‘You’re so big, you’re so big,’ and she wept.
She held me so tight. My hands hung by my side, because this was a dream, this wasn’t reality. The floor moved and this hallucination, they must have injected or dosed me with something, it wasn’t real. I wanted to get away from her, I had to recover consciousness, I had to get away, find Sofia. I pushed her away.
‘Nico, please,’ she said. ‘I’m so terribly sorry. I did everything I could to find you. I’m so dreadfully sorry about Papa. It was an accident, it all went horribly wrong. They were supposed to fetch you both . . . then the other man came and he shot at my men.’
‘Ma, your men?’ I moved further away from her.
She seemed to shrink, I could see she was hurting when she heard the rage and rejection in my voice. She grabbed a chair, pulled it away from the table. She looked at the grey man at the door and said, ‘Please leave us.’
He nodded and walked away. The door stood open. I stared at it.
‘Nico, sit down, please.’
I don’t know how long I stood like that.
Then I sat down.
Sofia Bergman
They kept me in a restaurant. It was completely empty, just a few people in the kitchen who brought me food. One even asked me, ‘Would you like some wine?’ I wasn’t tied up, or blindfolded, but I could see two grey men outside, at the door. The restaurant had windows, but it was dark outside, I couldn’t see where we were.
I thought I could hear the sea. Surf. But you must remember, it was years since I last heard the sea, and it was only at Hartenbos, where we went on holiday three times. So I wasn’t sure.
And they brought me fish and chips. With tomato sauce for the chips. And a Coke. Can you believe it? A Coke. When will I ever drink a Coke again?
I can’t remember the exact sequence of that night’s conversation. I can’t put her in these pages in her own voice. It’s all so mixed up in my mind, there was too much emotion when I needed to listen.
And I didn’t just listen. Sometimes I jumped up and walked to the door, slammed my palm against it until the metallic sound echoed through the ship. I asked questions. I cried. I screamed at her, out of pain and rage and inability to understand.
And she kept talking, explaining. She said, yes, hate me, Nico, but first hear my story.
Later they brought us food and drink. Neither of us touched it.
Her story was not a linear, chronological narrative at all. It was mixed up, mainly due to my interruptions and outbursts and my flood of questions. Some things I knew, back then, as a smaller child, and she refreshed the facts for me. Some I could vaguely remember, but just from my childhood perspective. But the bulk of it was new to me.
She had a way of talking that I had forgotten. There was a sort of pained but deliberate and total honesty about it – like someone who absolutely could not tell a lie, no matter what – and a sort of lack of social skills and consciousness. It was as though she didn’t really realise how her honesty made you feel, and that served as mitigation, as the reason why you could and wanted to forgive her for it. She told me, in the cabin of that ship, that she was going to tell me everything that was relevant. And actually everything is relevant, she said. Because we make our future with who we are and with what we do. ‘I want you to understand, and I want you to still love me. That’s all part of my agenda.’
And that was why, she said, she had to start at the beginning.
This is broadly what she said, in a way that will make sense, it’s what I remember.
Chapter 116
The investigation of my father’s murder: XIII
My mother was a mathematician. Her name was Amelia, her maiden name was Foord.
She was one of those children who took eight subjects in matric and got distinctions in all of them. She played good hockey. Behind her back on the hockey field they called her the Terminator. And it wasn’t a positive nickname.
She won a big bursary for university, where her favourite subject was applied mathematics; it was her sole academic passion. In her third year she met my father. He was everything that she was not. He wasn’t sporty and he was funny, he had a wide-ranging intelligence, and interests – a lamp to her searchlight. His personality was warmer, he was the proficient extrovert compared to her awkward misanthropy.
She was given to extremism, he was politically and economically moderate.
And she loved him. So she told me, over and over. ‘I loved you and Papa very much.’
In her second year at university she joined Greenpeace Africa and marched in protests against nuclear energy, fracking and global warming and for every possible ecological cause. In her studies, she shone – spectacularly. That was the main reason that the Centre for Complexity Studies at the University of Stellenbosch recruited her even before she graduated.
‘Come and do your honours in Complexity Theory,’ they invited her. It was a discipline wrestling with the great problems of Africa and the world, such as sustainability and combating pandemic poverty. There were biochemists, philosophers and economists and, if she joined, mathema
ticians. And that was just the beginning.
She thought it over, and then joined them. She also married Pa. And they had me. They were happy in their little house in Die Boord.
Within the first few years they realised she was the star, the genius with a growing international reputation, the one who was going to open doors for them for study and accommodation overseas, something they were very keen on doing. She was the academic racehorse compared to my father’s carthorse.
So she concentrated on her career, and Pa on us. On me.
‘Everything would have worked out, Nico.’
Her voice changed when she got to this. I don’t think she realised it. It was very subtle, but I suspect the fact that I had last seen her years before, and that there was distance between us, allowed me to recognise the change more easily. It reminded me a little of Pastor Nkosi Sebego when he was on the defensive, though believed he was treading the moral high ground in the Divine Light.
Just after I started prep school, she was invited to deliver a paper at an international congress in New York. With the approval of the Centre for Complexity Studies she chose her favourite subject: ‘Pandemic poverty and global warming: no future without a sustainable planet’. Her argument was that spending billions of dollars – mostly in vain – to lift Africa out of its cycle of poverty was merely rearranging the deckchairs on Planet Earth’s Titanic. If global warming was not halted and reversed, it was all futile.
Four people who were in the audience that night invited her to dinner. Four scientists, world-renowned for speaking out on global warming, but who were dismissed in conservative circles as alarmist and extreme. The four – three men and a woman – took her measure: her green militancy, her religious convictions, life and world view. My mother had never been afraid to state her views bluntly, and that evening she didn’t hold back. She believed she was among people who saw things her way, shared her viewpoint completely.
And yet the atmosphere was muted when she left, and they ignored her for the rest of the congress.
Up until a few hours before she was due to fly back to South Africa.
The female academic came to see her alone in her hotel room. And asked, ‘Do you really believe we will stop global warming?’
‘No,’ said my mother. ‘There are simply too many conflicting interests.’
‘Can you think of any other way?’
‘Oh, I can, but nothing that the world would find acceptable.’
‘And what is acceptable to you?’
‘Anything.’
‘Truly? Anything?’
‘Yes.’
‘Do you know what David Attenborough said of the human species?’ the woman asked her, with reference to the famous British presenter of nature television programmes.
‘Yes. He said the human species is a plague on the earth. And I feel that way too.’
‘Truly?’
‘Absolutely.’
‘And do you believe this plague should be controlled?’
That was when my mother realised there was something going on. This was another kind of test. An extension of the dinner, but more careful, more secretive, and with much more at stake.
‘Look,’ my mother replied to the woman, ‘if I could develop a virus tomorrow that could contain ninety per cent of that plague, I would do it.’
Sometimes I think back to that night, and that specific moment in the conversation, I rethink and relive it, then I wonder if the universe didn’t intend me to be seventeen when the tumblers of understanding dropped into place.
Seventeen is the perfect age for it, of course. Seventeen, with Domingo as mentor – Ryan John Domingo Junior, the man who hated his first names because they were his father’s. Domingo who bequeathed me his belief in, and rejection of humankind as animals. Which was tangibly and undeniably proven by the men in an aircraft hangar near Klerksdorp who stabbed little Okkie for absolutely no reason, by the Marauders who kept women caged, and by the Enemy who executed the good souls of our reservist force with cold-blooded shots to the head.
Cairistine ‘Birdy’ Canary
Domingo told me that in Worcester he believed only his father was an animal. In Afghanistan he thought many people were animals. In court, when they prosecuted him for the double murder, he believed he, too, was an animal. In prison, he saw things, things that people did, prisoners and guards, and then he knew we are all animals.
At seventeen I had a vague sort of understanding of my mother’s point of view.
Perhaps a younger me – or older, without the influence of Domingo – would have keened and mourned and torn my clothes when I had the first suspicion that the Fever was not an accident nor a chance natural phenomenon, that the story of the man under the mango tree might be partly or entirely a fabrication.
But that night I just sat there and felt the terrible weight of this knowledge pressing me down into the chair. In a way, I understood.
It made me think of my father’s words: You are your mother’s child. He had said that to me in the winter of the perfect storm when I gave my food to the little ones, and when I shot the KTM off their motorbikes in the Year of the Jackal.
You are your mother’s child.
And I was Domingo’s creation.
For a brief moment I evaded this revelation of the Fever, as one does when the knowing is too great a burden. I looked at my mother, and remembered her as she had been – the athletic, energetic, timelessly beautiful and intelligent woman of my childhood, my primary school years. The one just out of reach, the one whose embrace I longed for and occasionally found comfort in when it was available. The one for whom I called after the dog attack at Koffiefontein. And I realised she had aged. More rapidly than my late father. The lines on her face etched deeper, the grey in her hair more pronounced. The keeping of the Great Secret had taken its toll.
She was speaking rapidly now, as if to convince me quickly, before I rejected her and her choices. She told me of the state of the earth before the Fever. Of the pollution in the oceans, eight million tons of plastic that humanity dumped in the ocean every year, plastic in the sea that already weighed more than all the fish in it. Of deforestation, air pollution, carbon dioxide that was making our planet overheat. Of species that had already died out, large and small. And the hundreds of species on the brink of extinction – rhinos and elephants and vultures, orangutans and gorillas, wild dogs and whales, pandas, tortoises and tigers, not to mention the less photogenic species, the caterpillars and frogs and coral creatures and fish.
She asked me, with rousing passion, what right did we have, the plague species, the pestilence, to do this to all the others? What right did people have, as just another animal, to commit such mass murder? And with evangelical conviction she said, ‘Mankind can’t change, Nico, mankind can simply not change. Evolution programmed us to keep consuming, until everything is used up.’
Later on I realised it reminded me of Ravi Pillay’s story and his restaurant, where people always dished up more than they could eat. But while Ma was talking I said nothing. I sat across from her and tried to remember the times, in a house in Die Boord in Stellenbosch, when we three laughed together. And I couldn’t.
Less than a month later they came to talk to her. Three of them. One was a South African, a zoologist and owner of a rehabilitation centre for vultures in Limpopo. They told her about Gaia One, the organisation of people – scientists, business people, politicians, technologists, medics, even a few soldiers – who all shared her conservation sentiments. They invited her to join Gaia One, to work with them on what they called ‘Project Balance’.
She agreed. She promised them her loyalty, confidentiality and silence. They didn’t believe her, and they tested her, until they were certain. The closer she was allowed to the inner circle, the more she recognised that these people were serious and unrelenting. In the next few years two members of Gaia One got cold feet. They wanted to go to the press with their knowledge of Project Balance. Both died in unusu
al circumstances.
Yes, they were serious and unrelenting. But global warming was just as serious. And so was the threat to the planet, and the scale of the plague species’ damage.
In the end she decided to support it. As long as she could take her husband and her son with her to the new world after the Fever.
Chapter 117
The investigation of my father’s murder: XIV
The virus was developed in a laboratory. It was a select blend of corona viruses, as the media described it. But man-made. The vaccine came from the same laboratory, meant only for the chosen ones, the members of Gaia One and their nearest and dearest.
Preparations were made: the vaccine was distributed, and the deadly virus was taken to every corner of the world, so that it could be released according to a specific plan, to mimic natural spread. The survival centres’ preparations began. There were seven bases where Gaia One people would be protected and civilisation preserved. Places that were geographically isolated – like the Cape Peninsula with its encircling mountains – and with access to nuclear, sun or wind power to keep the lights, systems and technology going.
And the countdown began.
Ma injected us with the vaccine herself, three weeks before V-Day. She simply came home one evening and told Pa she had bought the flu vaccines at the chemist, because an academic colleague in Germany had warned her about the virulent flu spreading from Europe, a bad flu that was making people really sick. ‘Let me inject you, and then it’s done.’ First me, then Pa, and then herself, chatting all the while. ‘It might make you feel a bit off for a day or two, but nothing serious.’
That night, after I went to bed, she told Pa. She told him everything.
My father, my good, gentle, sensitive, people-loving father. He was angry that she’d kept the secret from him for so long. She had been expecting this and understood. He was angry because his entire philosophy was based on the idea that mankind had solved every problem time and again, and the dilemmas of infestation and species extinction and global warming would also be overcome, with intelligence and renewed thought and astounding technology. Ma had expected this and understood.