by Wilbur Smith
Sitting beside Centaine, the general clutched his hat and stared fixedly at the speedometer. ‘That can’t be right. It feels more like one hundred miles an hour.’
Centaine swung the Daimler between the elaborately gabled white main gates of the estate. The pediment above, depicting a party of dancing nymphs bearing bunches of grapes, had been designed by the famous sculptor Anton Anreith. The name of the estate was blazoned in raised letters above the sculpture:
WELTEVREDEN 1790
‘Well Satisfied’ was the translation from the Dutch, and Centaine had purchased it from the illustrious Cloete family exactly one year after she had pegged the claims to the H’ani Mine. Since then she had lavished money and care and love upon it.
She slowed the Daimler almost to walking pace. ‘I don’t want dust blowing over the grapes,’ she explained to General Smuts, and her face reflected such deep content as she looked out on the neatly pruned rows of trellised vines that he thought how the estate had been aptly named.
The coloured labourers straightened up from the vines and waved as they passed. Shasa leaned from the window and shouted the names of his favourites and they grinned with huge gratification at being singled out.
The road, lined with mature oaks, led up through two hundred acres of vines to the château. The lawns around the great house were bright green Kikuyu grass. General Smuts had brought shoots of the grass back from his East African campaign in 1917 and it had flourished all over the country. In the centre of the lawn stood the tall tower of the slave bell, still used to toll the beginning and end of the day’s labours. Beyond it rose the glacial white walls and massive Anreith gables of Weltevreden under its thatched roof.
Already the house servants were hurrying out to fuss around them as they spilled out of the big yellow machine.
‘Lunch will be at one-thirty,’ Centaine told them briskly. ‘Ou Baas, I know Sir Garry wants to read his latest chapter to you. Cyril and I have a full morning’s work ahead,’ she broke off. ‘Shasa, where do you think you are off to?’
The boy had sidled to the end of the stoep and was within an ace of escaping. Now he turned back with a sigh. ‘Jock and I were going to work out the new pony.’ The new polo pony had been Cyril’s Christmas present to Shasa.
‘Madame Claire will be waiting for you,’ Centaine pointed out. ‘We agreed that your mathematics needed attention, didn’t we?’
‘Oh Mater, it’s holiday time—’
‘Every day you spend idly, there is someone out there working. And when he meets you he is going to whip you hollow.’
‘Yes, Mater.’ Shasa had heard that prediction many times before, and he looked to his grandfather for support.
‘Oh, I’m sure your mother will allow you a few hours to yourself after your maths tuition,’ he came in dutifully. ‘As you pointed out, it is officially holiday time.’ He looked hopefully at Centaine.
‘Might I also enter a plea on my young client’s behalf?’ General Smuts backed him, and Centaine capitulated with a laugh.
‘You have such distinguished champions, but you will work with Madame Claire until elevenses.’
Shasa thrust his hands into his pockets and with slumped shoulders went to find his tutor. Anna disappeared into the house to chivy the servants and Garry led General Smuts away to discuss his new manuscript.
‘All right.’ Centaine jerked her head at Cyril. ‘Let’s get to work.’ He followed her through the double teak front doors down the long voorkamer, her heels clicking on the black and white marble floors, to her study at the far end.
Her male secretaries were waiting for her. Centaine could not abide the continual presence of other females. Her secretaries were both handsome young men. The study was filled with flowers. Every day the vases were refilled from the gardens of Weltevreden. Today it was blue hydrangeas and yellow roses.
She seated herself at the long Louis XIV table she used as a desk. The legs were in richly ornate ormolu and the top was expansive enough to hold the memorabilia she had assembled.
There were a dozen photographs of Shasa’s father in separate silver frames covering his life from schoolboy to dashing young airman in the RFC. The last photograph depicted him with the other pilots of his squadron standing in front of their single-seater scout planes. Hands thrust into his pockets, cap on the back of his head, Michael Courtney grinned at her, seemingly as certain of his immortality as he had been on the day that he died in the pyre of his burning aircraft. As she settled into her leather wingbacked chair, she touched the photograph, rearranging it slightly. The maid could never get it exactly right.
‘I’ve read through the contract,’ she told Cyril as he took the chair facing her. ‘There are just two clauses I am not happy with. The first is clause twenty-six.’ He turned to it obediently, and with her secretaries standing attentively on each side of her chair she began the day’s work.
Always it was the mine which occupied Centaine first. The H’ani Mine was the source, the spring from which it all flowed, and as she worked she felt her soul yearning towards the vastness of the Kalahari, towards those mystic blue hills and the secret valley which had concealed the treasures of the H’ani for countless aeons before she had stumbled upon them, dressed in skins and a last tattered remnant of cloth, great with the child in her womb and living like an animal of the desert herself.
The desert had captured part of her soul, and she felt joyous anticipation rising in her. ‘Tomorrow,’ she thought, ‘tomorrow Shasa and I will be going back.’ The lush vineyards of the Constantia Valley and the chateau of Weltevreden filled with beautiful things were part of her also, but when they cloyed she had to go back to the desert and have her soul burned clean and bright once more by the white Kalahari sun. As she signed the last of the documents and handed them to her senior secretary for witnessing and sealing, she stood and crossed to the open french doors.
Down in the paddock beyond the old slave quarters Shasa, released from his mathematics, was schooling his pony under Jock Murphy’s critical eye.
It was a big horse; the limitation on size had recently been dropped by the International Polo Association, but he moved well. Shasa turned him neatly at the end of the paddock and brought him back at a full gallop. Jock tossed a ball to his nearside and Shasa leaned out to take it on his backhand. He had a firm seat and a strong arm for one so young. He swung in a good full arc and the crisp click of the bamboo-root ball carried to where Centaine stood and she saw the white flash of its trajectory in the sunlight.
Shasa reined the pony down and swung him back. As he passed again Jock Murphy tossed another ball to his offside forehand. Shasa topped the shot and it bounced away sloppily.
‘Shame on you, Master Shasa,’ Jock called. ‘You are chopping again. Let the head of your stick take your shot through.’
Jock Murphy was one of Centaine’s finds. He was a stocky, muscular man with a short neck and perfectly bald head. He had done everything: Royal Marines, professional boxer, opium runner, master at arms to an Indian maharajah, race-horse trainer, bouncer in a Mayfair gambling club and now he was Shasa’s physical instructor. He was a champion shot with rifle, shotgun and pistol, a ten-goal polo player, deadly on the snooker table. He had killed a man in the ring, ridden in the Grand National, and he treated Shasa like his own son.
Once in every three months or so he went on the whisky and turned into a devil incarnate. Then Centaine would send someone down to the police station to pay the damages and bail Jock out. He would stand in front of her desk, his Derby hat held in front of his chest, shaky and hungover, his bald head shiny with shame, and apologize humbly.
‘It won’t happen again, missus. I don’t know what came over me. Give me another chance, missus, I won’t let you down.’
It was useful to know a man’s weakness: a leash to hold him and a lever to move him.
There was no work for them in Windhoek. When they arrived, having walked and begged lifts on trucks and wagons all the way from th
e coast, they moved into the hobo encampment near the railway tracks on the outskirts of the town.
By tacit agreement the hundred or so down-and-outers and drifters and out-of-workers were allowed to camp here with their families, but the local police kept a wary eye on them. The huts were of tarpaper and old corrugated iron sheets and rough thatch and in front of each squatted dejected clusters of men and women. Only the children, dusty and skinny and sun-browned, were noisy and almost defiantly rambunctious. The encampment smelled of wood smoke and the shallow pit latrines.
Somebody had erected a crudely lettered sign facing the railway tracks: ‘Vaal Hartz? Hell No!’ Anyone who applied for unemployment benefits was immediately sent by the government labour department to work on the huge Vaal Hartz river irrigation project for two shillings a day. Rumours of the conditions in the labour camps there had filtered back, and in the Transvaal there had been riots when the police had attempted forcibly to transport men to the scheme.
All the better spots in the encampment were already occupied, so they camped under a small camelthorn bush and hung scraps of tarpaper in the branches for shade. Swart Hendrick was squatting beside the fire, slowly trickling handfuls of white maize meal into a soot-blackened billy of boiling water. He looked up as Lothar came back from another unsuccessful job hunt in the town. When Lothar shook his head, Hendrick returned to his cookery.
‘Where is Manfred?’
Hendrick pointed with his chin at another shack near by. A dozen or so ragged men were sitting in a fascinated knot listening to a tall bearded man in their midst. He had the intense expression and fanatically dark eyes of a zealot.
‘Mal Willem,’ Hendrick muttered. ‘Crazy William,’ and Lothar grunted as he searched for Manfred and then recognized his son’s shining blond head amongst the others.
Satisfied that the boy was safe, Lothar took his pipe from his top pocket, blew through it and then filled it with Magaliesberg shag. The pipe stank, and the black tobacco was rank and harsh, but cheap. He longed for a cheroot as he lit the pipe with a twig from the fire. It tasted disgusting, but he felt the soothing effect almost immediately and he tossed the tobacco pouch to Hendrick and leaned back against the trunk of the thorn tree.
‘What did you find out?’
Hendrick had spent most of the night and morning in the coloured shanty town across the other side of Windhoek. If you want to know a man’s intimate secrets, ask the servants who wait at his table and make his bed.
‘I found out that you can’t get a drink on credit – and the Windhoek maids don’t do it for love alone.’ He grinned.
Lothar spat tobacco juice and glanced across at his son. It worried him a little that the boy avoided the camp urchins of his own age and sat with the men. Yet the men seemed to accept him.
‘What else?’ he asked Hendrick.
‘The man is called Fourie. He has been working at the mine for ten years. He comes in with four or five trucks every week and goes back loaded with stores.’ For a minute Hendrick concentrated on mixing the maize porridge, applying exactly the right heat from the fire.
‘Go on.’
‘Then, on the first Monday of every month, he comes in one small truck, the four other drivers with him riding in the back, all of them armed with shotguns and pistols. They go directly to the Standard Bank in Main Street. The manager and his staff come to the side door. Fourie and one of his drivers carry a small iron box from the truck into the bank. Afterwards Fourie and his men go down to the corner bar and drink until closing time. In the morning they go back to the mine.’
‘Once a month,’ Lothar whispered. ‘They bring in a whole month’s production at one time.’ Then he looked up at Hendrick. ‘You said the corner bar?’ And when the big black man nodded, ‘I’ll need at least ten shillings.’
‘What for?’ Hendrick was immediately suspicious.
‘One of us has to buy the barman a drink and they don’t serve blacks at the corner bar.’ Lothar smiled maliciously, then raised his voice. ‘Manfred!’
The boy had been so mesmerized by the speaker that he had not noticed his father’s return. He scrambled to his feet guiltily.
Hendrick dumped a lump of fluffy white maize porridge into the lid of the billy and poured maas, thick soured milk, over it before he handed it to Manfred where he squatted crosslegged beside his father.
‘Did you know that it’s all a plot by the Jewish owners of the gold mines in Johannesburg, Papa?’ Manfred asked, his eyes shining like a religious convert’s.
‘What is?’ Lothar grunted.
‘The Depression.’ Manfred used the word importantly, for he had just learned it. ‘It’s been arranged by the Jews and the English so that they will have all the men they want to work for them for nothing on their mines and in their factories.’
‘Is that so?’ Lothar smiled as he spooned up the maas and maize meal. ‘And did the Jews and the English arrange the drought as well?’ His hatred of the English did not extend beyond the borders of reason, though it could not have been more intense had the English indeed engineered the drought that had turned so many of his people’s farms into sandy wastelands, the topsoil blown away on the wind, and the livestock into desiccated mummies embalmed in their own plank-hard skins.
‘It’s so, Papa!’ Manfred cried. ‘Oom Willem explained it to us.’ He pulled a rolled sheet of newsprint from his back pocket and spread it across his knee. ‘Just look at this!’
The newspaper was Die Vaderland, an Afrikaans-language publication, ‘The Fatherland’, and the cartoon that Manfred was pointing out with a forefinger that trembled with indignation was in its typical style: ‘Look what the Jews are doing to us!’
The main character in the cartoon was ‘Hoggenheimer’, one of Die Vaderland’s creations, depicted as a gross creature in frock coat and spats, a huge diamond sparkling in his cravat, diamond rings on the fingers of both his hands, a top hat over his dark Semitic curls, a thick drooping lower lip and a great hooked beak of a nose the tip of which almost touched his chin. His pockets were stuffed with five-pound notes and he brandished a long whip as he drove a loaded wagon towards distant steel headgear towers labelled ‘gold mines’. In the traces of the wagon were human beings instead of trek-oxen. Lines of men and women, skeletal and starving, with huge tortured eyes as they toiled onwards under Hoggenheimer’s whip. The women wore the traditional voortrekker bonnets, and the men slouch hats, and so that there could be no mistake, the artist had labelled them Die Afrikaner Volk, ‘the Afrikaans people’, and the caption to the cartoon was ‘The New Great Trek’.
Lothar chuckled and handed the news-sheet back to his son. He knew very few Jews, and none who looked like Hoggenheimer. Most of them were as hardworking and ordinary as anyone else, and now were as poor and starving.
‘If life were as simple as that . . .’ He shook his head.
‘It is, Papa! All we have to do is get rid of the Jews, Oom Willem explained it.’
Lothar was about to reply when he realized that the smell of their food had attracted three of the camp’s children, who were standing at a polite distance watching each spoonful he raised to his mouth. The cartoon was no longer important.
There was one older girl, about twelve years of age. She was blonde, her long braids bleached as silver and fine as the Kalahari grass in winter. She was so thin that her face seemed all bone and eyes, prominent cheekbones and a high straight forehead. Her eyes were the light blue of the desert sky. Her dress was of old flour sacks sewn together, and her feet were bare.
Clinging to her skirts were two smaller children. A boy with a shaven head and large ears. His skinny brown legs stuck out of his patched khaki shorts. The small girl had a runny nose, and she sucked her thumb as she clung to her elder sister’s skirts with the other hand.
Lothar looked away but suddenly the food lost its flavour and he chewed with difficulty. He saw that Hendrick was not looking at the children either. Manfred had not noticed them and was still poring ov
er the news-sheet.
‘If we feed them, we’ll have every kid in the camp on our backs,’ Lothar murmured, and he made a resolution never to eat in public again.
‘We’ve got just enough left for tonight,’ Hendrick agreed. ‘We cannot share it.’
Lothar raised the spoon to his mouth, and then lowered it. He stared at the food on his tin plate for a moment and then beckoned the eldest girl.
She came forward shyly.
‘Take it,’ Lothar ordered gruffly.
‘Thank you, Uncle,’ she whispered. ‘Dankie, Oom.’
She whipped the plate under her skirt, hiding it from other eyes, and then dragged the two little ones away. They disappeared amongst the huts.
The girl returned an hour later. The plate and spoon had been polished until they shone. ‘Does Oom have a shirt or anything that I can wash for him,’ she asked.
Lothar opened his pack and handed over his and Manfred’s soiled clothing. She brought the laundry back at sunset, smelling faintly of carbolic soap and neatly folded.
‘Sorry, Oom, I didn’t have a smoothing iron.’
‘What is your name?’ Manfred asked her suddenly. She glanced around at him, blushed scarlet and looked at the ground.
‘Sarah,’ she whispered.
Lothar buttoned the clean shirt. ‘Give me the ten shillings,’ he ordered.
‘We’d have our throats cut if anybody knew that I have that much money,’ Hendrick grumbled.
‘You are wasting my time.’
‘Time is the only thing we have plenty of.’
Including the barman, there were only three men in the corner bar when Lothar pushed through the swing doors.
‘Quiet tonight,’ Lothar remarked as he ordered a beer, and the barman grunted. He was a nondescript little man with wispy grey hair and steel-framed spectacles.
‘Take a drink for yourself,’ Lothar offered, and the man’s expression changed.