by Wilbur Smith
‘The child,’ he started. ‘The child you bore me in the wilderness—’ For the first time he penetrated the armour of her composure.
‘You’ll not mention your bastard to me.’ She clasped one hand with the other to prevent them trembling. ‘That was our bargain.’
‘He’s our son. You cannot avoid that fact. Are you content to destroy him also?’
‘He’s your son,’ she denied. ‘I have no part of him. He does not affect me or my decision. Your factory is insolvent, hopelessly, irredeemably insolvent. I cannot expect to recover my investment, I can only hope to retrieve a part.’
Through the open window there came the sound of men’s voices, even at a distance they sounded excited and lustful, baying like hounds as they take the scent. Neither of them glanced in that direction; all their attention was concentrated on each other.
‘Give me a chance, Centaine.’ He heard the pleading timbre in his own voice and it disgusted him. He had never begged before, not with anybody, not once in his life, but now he could not bear the prospect of having to begin all over again. It would not be the first time. Twice before he had been rendered destitute, stripped of everything but pride and courage and determination by war and the fortunes of war. Always it had been the same enemy, the British and their aspirations of empire. Each time he had started again from the beginning and laboriously rebuilt his fortune.
This time the prospect appalled him. To be struck down by the mother of his child, the woman he had loved – and, God forgive him, the woman he loved still against all probabilities. He felt the exhaustion of his spirit and his body. He was forty-six years old; he no longer had a young man’s store of energy on which to draw, and he thought he glimpsed a softening in her eyes as though she was moved by his plea, wavering at the point of relenting.
‘Give me a week – just one week, Centaine, that’s all I ask,’ he abased himself, and immediately realized that he had misread her.
She did not alter her expression, but in her eyes he could see that what he had mistaken for compassion was instead the shine of deep satisfaction. He was where she had wanted him all these years.
‘I have told you never to use my Christian name,’ she said. ‘I told you that when I first learned that you had murdered two people whom I loved as dearly as I have ever loved anyone. I tell you that again.’
‘A week. Just one week.’
‘I have already given you two years.’
Now she turned her head towards the window, no longer able to ignore the sound of harsh voices, like the blood roar of a bullfight heard at a distance.
‘Another week will only get you deeper into my debt and force heavier loss on me.’ She shook her head, but he was staring out the window and now her voice sharpened. ‘What is happening down there on the jetty?’ She leaned her hands on the sill and peered down the beach.
He stepped up beside her. There was a dense knot of humanity halfway down the jetty, and from the factory all the idle packers were running down to join it.
‘Shasa!’ Centaine cried with an intuitive surge of maternal concern. ‘Where’s Shasa?’ Lothar vaulted lightly over the sill and raced for the jetty, overhauling the stragglers and then shouldering his way through the circle of yelling, howling trawlermen just as the two boys teetered on the edge of the jetty.
‘Manfred!’ he roared. ‘Stop that! Let him go!’
His son had the lighter boy in a vicious headlock, and he was swinging overhand punches at his trapped head. Lothar heard one crack against the bone of Shasa’s skull.
‘You fool!’ Lothar started towards them. They had not heard his voice above the din of the crowd, and Lothar felt a slide of dread, a real concern for the child and a realization of what Centaine’s reaction would be if he were injured.
‘Leave him!’ Before he could reach the wildly struggling pair, they reeled backwards and tumbled over the edge of the jetty. ‘Oh my God!’ He heard them hit the deck of the trawler below, and by the time he reached the side and looked down they were half buried in the deckload of glittering pilchards.
Lothar tried to reach the ladder head, impeded by the press of coloured trawlermen who crowded forward to the edge so as not to miss a moment of the contest. He struck out with both fists, clearing his way, shoving his men aside, and then clambered down to the deck of the trawler.
Manfred was lying on top of the other boy, forcing his head and shoulders beneath the mass of pilchards. His own face was contorted with rage, and lumped and discoloured with bruises. He was mouthing incoherent threats through blood-smeared and puffed lips, and Shasa was no longer struggling. His head and shoulders had disappeared but his trunk and his legs twitched and shuddered in the spontaneous nerveless movements of a man shot through the head.
Lothar seized his son by the shoulders and tried to drag him off. It was like trying to separate a pair of mastiffs and he had to use all his strength. He lifted Manfred bodily and threw him against the wheelhouse with a force that knocked the belligerence out of him and then grabbed Shasa’s legs and pulled him out of the engulfing quicksilver of dead pilchards. He came slithering free, wet and slippery. His eyes were open and rolled back into his skull exposing the whites.
‘You’ve killed him,’ Lothar snarled at his son, and the furious tide of blood receded from Manfred’s face leaving him white and shivering with shock.
‘I didn’t mean it, Pa. I didn’t—’
There was a dead fish jammed into Shasa’s slack mouth, choking him, and fish slime bubbled out of his nostrils.
‘You fool, you little fool!’ Lothar thrust his finger into the corners of the child’s slack mouth and prised the pilchard out.
‘I’m sorry, Pa. I didn’t mean it,’ Manfred whispered.
‘If you’ve killed him, you’ve committed a terrible offence in the sight of God.’ Lothar lifted Shasa’s limp body in his arms. ‘You’ll have killed your own—’ He did not say the fateful word, but bit down hard on it and turned to the ladder.
‘I haven’t killed him,’ Manfred pleaded for assurance. ‘He’s not dead. It will be all right, won’t it, Pa?’
‘No.’ Lothar shook his head grimly. ‘It won’t be all right – not ever.’ Carrying the unconscious boy, he climbed up onto the jetty.
The crowd opened silently for Lothar. Like Manfred, they were appalled and guilty, unable to meet his eyes as he shouldered past them.
‘Swart Hendrick,’ Lothar called over their heads to the tall black man. ‘You should have known better. You should have stopped them.’
Lothar strode away up the jetty, and none of them followed him.
Halfway up the beach path to the factory Centaine Courtney waited for him. Lothar stopped in front of her with the boy hanging limply in his arms.
‘He’s dead,’ Centaine whispered hopelessly.
‘No,’ Lothar denied with passion. It was too horrible to think about, and as though in response Shasa moaned and vomited from the corner of his mouth.
‘Quickly.’ Centaine stepped forward. ‘Turn him over your shoulder before he chokes on his own vomit.’
With Shasa hanging limply over his shoulder like a haversack, Lothar ran the last few yards to the office and Centaine swept the desktop clear.
‘Lay him here,’ she ordered, but Shasa was struggling weakly and trying to sit up. Centaine supported his shoulders and wiped his mouth and nostrils with the fine cloth of her sleeve.
‘It was your bastard.’ She glared across the desk at Lothar. ‘He did this to my son, didn’t he?’ And she saw the confirmation in his face before he looked away.
Shasa coughed and brought up another trickle of fish slime and yellow vomitus, and immediately he was stronger. His eyes focused and his breathing eased.
‘Get out of here.’ Centaine leaned protectively over Shasa’s body. ‘I’ll see you both in hell – you and your bastard. Now get out of my sight.’
The track from Walvis Bay ran through the convoluted valleys of the great orange dunes,
thirty kilometres to the railhead at Swakopmund. The dunes towered three and four hundred feet on either side. Mountains of sand with knife-edge crests and smooth slip faces, they trapped the desert heat in the canyons between them.
The track was merely a set of deep ruts in the sand, marked on each side by the sparkling glass of broken beer bottles. No traveller took this thirsty road without adequate supplies for the journey. At intervals the tracks had been obliterated by the efforts of other drivers, unskilled in the art of desert travel, to extract their vehicles from the clinging sands, leaving gaping traps for those who followed.
Centaine drove hard and fast, never allowing her engine revolutions to drop, keeping her momentum even through the churned-up areas and holes where the other vehicles had bogged down, directing the big yellow car with deft little touches of the wheel so that the tyres ran straight and the sand did not pile and block them.
She held the wheel in a racing driver’s grip, leaning back against the leather seat with straight arms ready for the kick of the wheel, watching the tracks far ahead and anticipating each contingency long before she reached it, sometimes snapping down through the gears and swinging out of the ruts to cut her own way around a bad stretch. She scorned even the elementary precaution of travelling with a pair of black servants in the back seat to push the Daimler out of a sand trap. Shasa had never known his mother to bog down, not even on the worst sections of the track out to the mine.
He sat up beside her on the front seat. He wore a suit of old but freshly laundered canvas overalls from the stores of the canning factory. His soiled clothing stinking of fish and speckled with vomit was in the boot of the Daimler.
His mother hadn’t spoken since they had driven away from the factory. Shasa glanced surreptitiously at her, dreading her pent-up wrath, not wanting to draw attention to himself, yet despite himself unable to keep his eyes from her face.
She had removed the cloche hat and her thick dark cap of hair, cut fashionably into a short Eton crop, rippled in the wind and shone like washed anthracite.
‘Who started it?’ she asked, without taking her eyes from the road.
Shasa thought about it. ‘I’m not sure. I hit him first, but—’ he paused. His throat was still painful.
‘Yes?’ she demanded.
‘It was as though it was arranged. We looked at each other and we knew we were going to fight.’ She said nothing and he finished lamely. ‘He called me a name.’
‘What name?’
‘I can’t tell you. It’s rude.’
‘I asked what name?’ Her voice was level and low, but he recognized that husky warning quality.
‘He called me a Soutpiel,’ he replied hastily. He dropped his voice and looked away in shame at the dreadful insult, so he did not see Centaine struggle to stifle the smile and turn her head slightly to hide the sparkle of amusement in her eyes.
‘I told you it was rude,’ he apologized.
‘So you hit him – and he’s younger than you.’
He had not known that he was the elder, but he was not surprised that she knew it. She knew everything.
‘He may be younger, but he’s a big Afrikaner ox, at least two inches taller than I am,’ he defended himself quickly.
She wanted to ask Shasa what her other son looked like. Was he blond and handsome as his father had been? What colour were his eyes? Instead she said, ‘And so he thrashed you.’
‘I nearly won.’ Shasa protested stoutly. ‘I closed his eyes and I bloodied him nicely. I nearly won.’
‘Nearly isn’t good enough,’ she said. ‘In our family we don’t nearly win – we simply win.’
He fidgeted uncomfortably and coughed to relieve the pain in his injured throat.
‘You can’t win, not when someone is bigger and stronger than you,’ he whispered miserably.
‘Then you don’t fight him with your fists,’ she told him. ‘You don’t rush in and let him stick a dead fish down your throat.’ He blushed painfully at the humiliation. ‘You wait your chance, and you fight him with your own weapons and on your own terms. You only fight when you are sure you can win.’
He considered that carefully, examining it from every angle. ‘That’s what you did to his father, didn’t you?’ he asked softly, and she was startled by his perception so that she stared at him and the Daimler bumped out of the ruts.
Quickly she caught and controlled the machine, and then she nodded. ‘Yes. That’s what I did. You see, we are Courtneys. We don’t have to fight with our fists. We fight with power and money and influence. Nobody can beat us on our own ground.’
He was silent again, digesting it carefully, and at last he smiled. He was so beautiful when he smiled, even more beautiful than his father had been, that she felt her heart squeezed by her love.
‘I’ll remember that,’ he said. ‘Next time I meet him, I’ll remember what you said.’
Neither of them doubted for a moment that the two boys would meet again – and that when they did, they would continue the conflict that had begun that day.
The breeze was onshore and the stink of rotting fish was so strong that it coated the back of Lothar De La Rey’s throat and sickened him to the gut.
The four trawlers still lay at their berths but their cargoes were no longer glittering silver. The fish had packed down and the top layer of pilchards had dried out in the sun and turned a dark, dirty grey, crawling with metallic green flies as big as wasps. The fish in the holds had squashed under their own weight, and the bilge pumps were pouring out steady streams of stinking brown blood and fish oil that discoloured the waters of the bay in a spreading cloud.
All day Lothar had sat at the window of the factory office while his coloured trawlermen and packers lined up to be paid. Lothar had sold his old Packard truck and the few sticks of furniture from the corrugated shack in which he and Manfred lived. These were the only assets that did not belong to the company and had not been attached. The second-hand dealer had come across from Swakopmund within hours, smelling disaster the way the vultures do, and he had paid Lothar a fraction of their real value.
‘There is a depression going on, Mr De La Rey, everybody is selling, nobody is buying. I’ll lose money, believe me.’
With the cash that Lothar had buried under the sandy floor of the shack there was enough to pay his people two shillings on each pound that he owed them for back wages. He did not have to pay them, of course, it was the company’s responsibility – but that did not occur to him, they were his people.
‘I’m sorry,’ he repeated to each one of them as they came to the pay window. ‘That’s all there is.’ And he avoided their eyes.
When it was all gone, and the last of his coloured people had wandered away in disconsolate little groups, Lothar locked the office door and handed the key to the deputy sheriff.
Then he and the boy had gone down to the jetty for the last time and sat together with their legs dangling over the end. The stink of dead fish was as heavy as their mood.
‘I don’t understand, Pa.’ Manfred spoke through his distorted mouth with the crusty red scab on the upper lip. ‘We caught good fish. We should be rich. What happened, Pa?’
‘We were cheated,’ Lothar said quietly. Until that moment there had been anger, no bitterness – just a feeling of numbness. Twice before he had been struck by a bullet. The .303 Lee Enfield bullet on the road to Omaruru when they were opposing Smuts’ invasion of German South West Africa, and then much later the Luger bullet fired by the boy’s mother. He touched his chest at the memory, and felt the rubbery puckered pit of the scar through the thin cotton of his khaki shirt.
It was the same thing, first the shock and the numbness and then only much later the pain and the anger. Now the anger came at him in black waves, and he did not try to resist. Rather he revelled in it, it helped to assuage the memory of abasing himself, pleading for time from the woman with the taunting smile in her dark eyes.
‘Can’t we stop them, Pa?’ the boy asked,
and neither of them had to define that ‘them’. They knew their enemy. They had grown to know them in three wars; in 1881 the first Boer War, then again in the Great Boer War of 1899 when Victoria called her khaki multitudes from across the oceans to crush them, and then in 1914 when the British puppet Jannie Smuts had carried out the orders of his imperial masters.
Lothar shook his head, unable to answer, choked by the strength of his anger.
‘There must be a way,’ the boy insisted. ‘We are strong.’ He recalled the feeling of Shasa’s body slowly weakening in his grip and he flexed his hands involuntarily. ‘It’s ours, Pa. This is our land. God gave it to us – it says so in the Bible.’ Like so many before him, the Afrikaner had interpreted that book in his own way. He saw his people as the children of Israel, and Southern Africa as the promised land flowing with milk and honey.
Lothar was silent and Manfred took his sleeve. ‘God did give it to us, didn’t he, Pa?’
‘Yes.’ Lothar nodded heavily.
‘Then they’ve stolen it from us: the land, the diamonds, and the gold and everything – and now they have taken our boats and our fish. There must be a way to stop them, to win back what belongs to us.’
‘It’s not as easy as that.’ Lothar hesitated how to explain it to the child. Did he truly understand it himself, how it had happened? They were squatters in the land that their fathers had wrested from the savages and the wilderness at the point of their long muzzle-loading guns.
‘When you grow up you’ll understand, Manie,’ he said.
‘When I grow up I’ll find a way to beat them.’ Manfred said it so forcefully that the scab on his lip cracked open and a droplet like a tiny ruby glowed upon it. ‘I’ll find a way to get it back from them. You’ll see if I don’t, Pa.’
‘Well, my son, perhaps you will.’ Lothar placed his arm around the boy’s shoulders.
‘Remember Grandpa’s oath, Pa? I’ll always remember. The war against the English will never end.’
They sat together until the sun touched the waters of the bay and turned them to molten copper, and then in the darkness they went up the jetty, out of the stench of decaying fish and along the edge of the dunes.