by Wilbur Smith
Constance stood up and switched off the television set, then sat down again and spooned a little more meat and beans into Gideon’s bowl.
‘It is like a soccer match,’ she said with a bitterness that Samson had never heard in her voice. ‘Each evening they give us the score. Terrorists – 2: security forces – 26; we should fill in the coupons for the pools.’ Samson saw that she was crying, and could think of nothing to say for her comfort.
‘They give us the names and ages of the white soldiers, how many children they leave, but the others are only “terrorists”, or “black civilians”. Yet they have mothers and fathers and wives and children also.’ She sniffed up her tears. ‘They are Matabele as we are, they are our people. Death has become so easy, so commonplace in this land, but the ones that do not die, those will come to us here – our people, with their legs torn from their bodies or their brains damaged so that they become drooling idiots.’
‘War is always crueller when the women and children are in it,’ Gideon said in his dusty old voice. ‘We kill their women, they kill ours.’
There was a soft scratching at the door, and Constance stood up and went quickly to it. She switched out the electric light before she opened it. Outside it was night, but Samson saw the silhouettes of two men in the darkened doorway. They slipped into the room, and there was the sound of the door closing. Then Constance switched on the light.
Two men stood against the wall. One glance was enough for Samson to know who they were. They were dressed in jeans and denim shirts, but there was an animal alertness about them, in the way they moved, in their quick bright restless eyes.
The elder of the two nodded at the other, who went quickly into the bedrooms, searched them swiftly and then came back to check the curtains over the windows, to make certain there was no chink between them. Then he nodded at the other man, and slipped out of the door again. The elder man sat down on the bench opposite Gideon Kumalo. He had finely boned features, with an Arab beakiness to his nose, but his skin was almost purple-black and his head was shaven bald.
‘My name is Comrade Tebe,’ he said quietly. ‘What is your name, old father?’
‘My name is Gideon Kumalo.’ The blind man looked past his shoulder, his head cocked slightly.
‘That is not the name your mother gave you, that is not how your father knew you.’
The old man began to tremble, and he tried three times to speak before the words came out.
‘Who are you?’ he whispered.
‘That is not important,’ the man said. ‘We are trying to find who you are. Tell me, old man, have you ever heard the name Tungata Zebiwe? The Seeker after what has been Stolen, the Seeker after Justice?’
Now the old man began to shake so that he knocked the bowl from the table and it rang in narrowing circles on the concrete floor at his feet.
‘How do you know that name?’ he whispered. ‘How do you know these things?’
‘I know everything, old father. I even know a song. We will sing it together, you and I.’
And the visitor began to sing in soft, but thrilling baritone:
‘Like a mole in the earth’s gut,
Bazo found the secret way—’
It was the ancient battle hymn of the ‘Moles’ impi, and the memories came crashing back upon Gideon Kumalo. In the way of very old men, he could remember in crystal detail the days of his childhood while the events of the previous week were already becoming hazy. He remembered a cave in the Matopos Hills and his father’s never-forgotten face in the firelight, and the words of the song came back to him:
‘The moles are beneath the earth.
“Are they dead?” asked the daughters of
Mashobane.’
Gideon sang in his scratchy old man’s voice, and as he sang, the tears welled up out of his milky blind eyes, and ran unheeded down his cheeks.
‘Listen pretty maids, do you not hear
Something stirring, in the darkness?’
When the song was ended, the visitor sat in silence while Gideon wiped away his tears. Then he said softly, ‘The spirits of your ancestors call you, Comrade Tungata Zebiwe.’
‘I am an old man, blind and feeble, I cannot respond to them.’
‘Then you must send somebody in your place,’ said the stranger. ‘Someone in whose veins runs the blood of Bazo the Axe, and Tanase the witch.’ Then the stranger turned slowly towards Samson Kumalo who sat at the head of the table, and he looked directly into Samson’s eyes.
Samson stared back at him flatly. He was angry. He had known instinctively why the stranger had come. There were few Matabele who were university graduates, or who had his other obvious gifts. He had known for a long time now how badly they wanted him, and it had taken all his ingenuity to avoid them. Now at last they had found him and he was angry at them and at Constance. She had led them to him. He had noticed the way she had kept glancing up at the door during the meal. He knew now that she had told them that he was here.
On top of his anger he felt a weight of weary resignation. He knew that he could no longer resist them. He knew the risks that it would involve, not for himself alone. These were hard men, tempered in blood to a cruelty that was hard to imagine. He understood why the stranger had spoken first to Gideon Kumalo. It was to mark him. If now Samson refused to bend to them, then the old man was in terrible peril.
‘You must send someone in your place.’
It was the age-old bargain, a life for a life. If Samson refused the bargain, he knew the old man’s life was forfeit, and that even then that would not end the affair. They wanted him, they would have him.
‘My name is Samson Kumalo,’ he said. ‘I am a Christian, and I abhor war and cruelty.’
‘We know who you are,’ said the stranger. ‘And we know that in these times there is no place for softness.’
The stranger broke off as the door was pushed open a slit, and the second stranger who had been on watch outside in the night put his head into the room and said urgently,
‘Kanka!’ Just the one word, ‘Jackals!’ and he was gone.
Swiftly the elder stranger stood up, drew a 7.62mm Tokarev pistol from the waistband of his jeans, and at the same time switched out the light. In the darkness he whispered close to Samson’s ear. ‘The Bulawayo bus station. Two days from today at eight o’clock in the morning.’
Then Samson heard the latch of the door click, and the three of them were alone. They waited in the darkness for five minutes before Constance said, ‘They have gone.’ She switched on the light and began collecting the dishes and balling up the newsprint that had served as a table-cloth.
‘Whatever alarmed the “boys” must have been a false alarm. The village is quiet. There is no sign of the security forces.’
Neither of the men answered and she made mugs of cocoa for them.
‘There is a film on television at nine o’clock, The Railway Children.’
‘I am tired,’ Samson said. He was still angry with her.
‘I am tired also,’ Gideon whispered, and Samson helped him towards the front bedroom. He looked back from the doorway and Constance gave him such a pathetically appealing glance that he felt his anger towards her falter.
He lay in the narrow iron bed across from the old man, and in the darkness listened to the small sounds from the kitchen as Constance cleaned up and set out the breakfast for the next morning. Then the door to her small back bedroom closed.
Samson waited until the old man began to snore before he rose silently. He draped the rough woollen blanket over his naked shoulders, left the bedroom and went to Constance’s room. The door was unlocked. It swung open to his touch and he heard her sit up quickly in the bed.
‘It is me,’ he said quietly.
‘Oh, I was so afraid you would not come.’
He reached out and touched her naked skin. It was cool and velvety soft. She took his fingers and drew him down towards her, and he felt the last vestige of his resentment shrivel away.
‘I am sorry,’ she whispered.
‘It does not matter,’ he said. ‘I could not have hidden for ever.’
‘You will go?’
‘If I do not then they will take my grandfather, and that will not satisfy them.’
‘That is not the reason you will go. You will go for the same reason that I did. Because I had to.’
The smooth length of her body was as naked as his own. When she moved, her breasts jostled against his chest, and he felt the heat beginning to flow through her.
‘Are they taking you into the bush?’ he asked.
‘No. Not yet. I am ordered to remain here. There is to be work for me here.’
‘I am glad.’ He brushed her throat with his lips. In the bush her chances would be very slim. The security forces were maintaining a kill-ratio of over thirty to one.
‘I heard Comrade Tebe give you an hour and a place. Do you think they will use you in the bush?’
‘I do not know. I think they will take me for training first.’
‘This may be our last night together for a long time,’ she whispered, and he did not reply but traced her spine in its valley of velvety pliant muscle down to the deep cleft of her buttocks.
‘I want you to place a son in my womb,’ she whispered. ‘I want you to give me something to cherish while we are apart.’
‘It is an offence against law and custom.’
‘There is no law in this land except the gun, there is no custom except that which we care to observe.’ Constance rolled under him and clasped him within her long hard limbs. ‘Yet in the midst of all this death we must preserve life. Give me your child, my heart, give him to me tonight, for there may be no other nights for us.’
Samson woke in a blaze of nightmare. Light flooded the tiny room, striking through the threadbare curtain over the single window and casting harsh moving shadows on the bare whitewashed wall. Constance clung to him. Her body still hot and moist from their loving, and her eyes soft with sleep. From outside a monstrous distorted voice blared orders.
‘This is the Rhodesian army. All people are to come out of their houses immediately. Do not run. Do not hide. No innocent person will be harmed. Come out of your houses immediately. Hold up your hands. Do not run. Do not attempt to hide.’
‘Get dressed,’ Samson told Constance. ‘Then help me with the old man.’
She staggered, still half-asleep, to the corner cupboard and pulled a plain pink cotton shift down over her nude body. Then, barefoot, she followed Samson to the front bedroom. He was dressed only in a pair of khaki shorts and he was helping Gideon to rise. Outside the cottage the loudhailers were screeching in their metallic stentorian voices.
‘Come out immediately. Innocent people will not be harmed. Do not run.’
Constance spread a woollen blanket over the old man’s shoulders, then between them they led him through the living-room to the front porch. Samson unlocked the door and stepped out, holding both hands high, palms forward, and the blinding white beam of a searchlight fixed on him, so that he was forced to protect his face with one hand.
‘Bring Grandfather.’
Constance led the old man out of the front door and the three of them stood close together in a pathetic huddle, blinded by the light and confused by the repeated bellow of the loudhailer.
‘Do not run. Do not attempt to hide.’
The row of staff cottages had been surrounded. The searchlights beamed out of the darkness and picked out the little family groups of the teachers and nursing staff and their families as they clung together for comfort, most of them covered only with flimsy night-clothes or hastily draped blankets.
From the impenetrable darkness behind the searchlight, figures emerged, moving like panthers, alert and predatory. One of them vaulted over the veranda railing and flattened against the wall, using Samson’s body to shield himself from the doorway and the windows.
‘Three of you. Is that all?’ he demanded in Sindebele. He was a lean, powerful-looking man in battle-smock and jungle hat. His face and hands were painted with night camouflage so it was impossible to tell whether he was black or white.
‘Only three,’ Samson replied.
The man had an FN rifle on his hip, the barrel swinging slightly to cover them all.
‘If there is anybody in the building, say so quickly, otherwise they will be killed.’
‘There is nobody.’
The soldier called an order and his troopers went in simultaneously through the back and front doors and side windows. They swept through the cottage in seconds, working as a skilled team, covering each other. Satisfied that it was clear, they scattered back into the darkness and left the three on the veranda.
‘Do not move,’ screeched the loudhailers. ‘Stay where you are.’
In the darkness under the spathodea trees Colonel Roland Ballantyne took the unit reports as they came in. With each negative show, his frustration increased. Their information had been good and the scent hot. It was a scent he had followed often before. Comrade Tebe was one of their prime targets. He was a ZIPRA commissar who had been operating within Matabeleland for almost seven months now. They had been as close to him as this on three other occasions. It always seemed to be the same. The tip from one of the informers or from a member of the Scouts operating under civilian cover. Tebe was in such and such a village. They would move up silently and surround it, methodically closing every bolt-hole. Then in the darkness and bleakest hour of the night they would go in and sweep. Once they had taken two of his lieutenants, but Tebe was not with them. The regimental sergeant-major of the Scouts, Esau Gondele, had questioned the two terrorists while Roland watched. By dawn neither of them were able to stand up any longer but they had not spoken.
‘Use the chopper,’ Roland ordered.
They hovered at two thousand feet while Sergeant-Major Gondele hung the most defiant terrorist from the belly hatch, holding him by the webbing belt looped under his armpits.
‘Tell me, my friend, where we will find your Comrade Tebe.’
The man twisted his head up sideways and tried to spit at Esau Gondele, but the down-draught of the spinning rotors had blown his spittle away. The sergeant-major had glanced at Roland, and when he nodded, opened his fist. The terrorist had fallen two thousand feet, turning slowly end over end. Perhaps he was past screaming or perhaps it was his final defiance, but he was utterly silent during the drop.
Sergeant-Major Gondele had reached for the second terrorist and looped a webbing under his armpits. As he lowered him out of the hatch, his bound feet dangling two thousand feet above the golden Matabele grasslands, the man had looked up and said, ‘I will tell you.’
However, they had held out for just thirty minutes too long. When the Scouts hit the safe house in Hillside Location, Comrade Tebe had moved again.
Roland Ballantyne’s frustration was corrosive. The week before, Comrade Tebe had left an explosive device in a supermarket chariot. It had killed seven people, all of them female, two of them under ten years of age. Roland wanted him very badly, so badly that when he realized that once again he had escaped, a kind of heavy black feeling closed down over half his mind.
‘Bring the informer,’ he ordered, and Esau Gondele spoke softly into the portable radio. Within minutes they heard the Land-Rover coming up the hill, and its headlights flickered through the trees of the forest.
‘All right, Sergeant-Major. Get these people lined up.’
There were sixty or so of them lined up along the verge of the road in front of the long row of staff cottages. The searchlights trapped them in a stark and merciless glare. Colonel Roland Ballantyne vaulted up onto the back of the Land-Rover and held the bull-horn to his lips. He spoke in perfect colloquial Sindebele.
‘The evil ones have been amongst you. They have left the stink of death on this village. They have come here to plan destruction, to kill and cripple you and your children. You should have come to us that we might protect you. Because you were
afraid to ask for our help, you have brought even greater hardship upon yourselves.’
The long line of black people, men and women and children still in their night-clothes, stood stolidly and stoically as cattle in the crush. They were caught between the millstones of the guerrillas on one side and the security forces on the other. They stood in the white searchlights and listened.
‘The government is your father. Like a good father it seeks to protect its children. However, there are stupid children amongst you. Those who conspire with the evil ones, those who feed them and give them news and warn them when we come. We know these things. We know who warned them.’
At Roland’s feet, sitting on the cross-bench of the Land-Rover was a human figure. It was draped from head to foot in a single sheet of cloth so that it was impossible to tell whether it was a man or a woman. There were eye-holes cut in the hood of the cloth.
‘We will now smell out the evil ones amongst you, those who give comfort to the death-bringers,’ Roland told them.
The Land-Rover rolled slowly along the line of villagers, and as it drew level with each man or woman, the soldier shone his flashlight into the person’s face at a range of only a few feet. In the open back of the vehicle, the mysteriously robed and masked figure stared out of the eye-holes in the sheet. The dark eyes gleamed in the reflected light of the flashlight as they examined each face.
The veiled informer sat unmovingly as the Land-Rover came on at a walking pace down towards where Samson and Constance supported the old man between them.
Without moving his lips, Samson asked her, ‘Is it safe, do they know you?’
‘I do not know,’ she answered him.
‘What can we do—’ but by that time the Land-Rover was drawing level with where they stood, and Constance did not have time to reply.
In the rear of the vehicle, the masked figure moved for the first time. A long black arm shot out from under the sheet, and pointed directly into Constance’s upturned face. Not a word was spoken, but two of the camouflaged Scouts stepped out of the darkness behind her and seized her arms.