Mona laughed at her story. The telling of Lindiwe’s tragedy had lightened her somehow.
The rain was still coming down hard. Khanyi and I were both drenched by the time we had squelched our way through the mud and climbed into my car. Khanyi opened the folded paper while I banged the dashboard in the hopes of getting the heater to work. She unfolded it carefully lest it might disintegrate upon exposure to the daylight.
“KwaZulu-Natal,” she said. “Near the Zulu battlefields, my homeland. Let’s get to the airport.”
“Shouldn’t you be getting back to the office?”
“Sometimes, Gabriel, you act as if you are the only person with a moral compass. You’re not.”
“What will Fehrson say about you disappearing?”
“I’ll tell him I’m with you.”
“He’ll say I’m corrupting your mind. Hasn’t he warned you off me? Told you I’m suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and have obsessive-compulsive tendencies?”
Khanyi laughed. “He would suspect something far worse.”
“What could be worse?”
Khanyi’s face darkened. She turned away from me to look into the haze of rain. “You know … a journey to the battlefields … a bit of time away.”
She turned back to me, and I realised she was blushing.
Twenty-Two
Our flight to Durban brought us in at the dying end of the day. If Cape Town had been miserable, Durban was suicidal. The thick bank of cloud that had tossed our plane around on final approach went all the way down to three hundred feet, and from there it spat at the earth with such force that I thought our hired car might not ford the river of water running in the channels beside the road. We turned onto the R33, heading into the old Zulu battlefields in the foothills of the Drakensberg mountains.
The address that Mona had given us was a three-hour drive from the airport, a tiny village in the heart of rural Zululand. The road approaching the village looked on the map as if it might be treacherous as it wound its way down the valley and across the Tugela River, particularly in bad weather. Two hours into the journey I spotted a temporary signpost that warned the road was closed for fear of flooding. We were only a few minutes outside the town of Dundee, so we turned back.
The old Central Hotel was a building that dated back almost to the famous battles of Isandlwana and Rorke’s Drift. In grand colonial style it had a wide veranda upon which sat a group of ancient locals surveying the comings and goings of the town. They watched us with interest as we dashed through the downpour, Khanyi in a bright orange raincoat that floated behind her like a superhero cape.
The receptionist explained that horse and cart tours around the town and guided tours of the battlefields would only be possible if the rain stopped by morning. I was more interested in the location of the bar and met Khanyi there an hour later, after she’d refreshed herself. She arrived looking sparkling and fresh, causing the old men on the veranda to lose their false teeth.
The bar was like an English country pub, with dark wood panelling and paintings of historical battles. I’d had the opportunity to go around the room twice and study the etchings from the early 1800s by the time Khanyi joined me.
“It was England’s most expensive war to date,” said Khanyi, “including the Second World War, the Falklands, Afghanistan … all of them. Did you know that?”
I admitted I hadn’t known it.
“They came here thinking they would quickly deal with the local native problem, but they hadn’t accounted for the Zulu warrior spirit.” Khanyi sipped at her sparkling mineral water and her eyes glistened with the warrior spirit. “Did you know the Zulus killed almost every member of the force at Isandlwana? It was a massacre.”
“I did know that,” I said, thinking of the conversation Robyn had with the Zulu waiter. “But the next day the British fought back and evened the score at Rorke’s Drift.”
“Yes,” said Khanyi regretfully. “Everyone knows the Rorke’s Drift story because the British won.” She peered at an etching of a man on a horse in a field of dead bodies. “That’s Lord Chelmsford, the British captain, coming back to his camp to find all his men dead.”
“Where had he been?”
“Chelmsford took half the British force out of the camp, chasing what he thought would be a disorganised scattering of Zulus. The Zulus spent the night running from hilltop to hilltop, lighting fires to give the idea that they were spread out, so Chelmsford took his men the next morning to go hunt them. They didn’t find a single Zulu. But back at the camp they heard gunfire from the lookouts and found a valley filled with over six thousand Zulus.”
“It must have been a nasty shock.”
“Even nastier for Chelmsford when he got back to the camp and found all his men dead and disembowelled.”
“Disembowelled?”
“It’s Zulu tradition. After you kill someone you disembowel them as a sign of respect. It releases their spirit.”
“Good to know,” I said, and drank a little whisky to keep the demons at bay.
“You judge Father too harshly,” said Khanyi, her eyes still on the figure of Chelmsford on his horse. “He’s a good man, he is genuinely concerned for the people he works with. Including you. He hasn’t warned me about you. In fact he’s encouraged me to keep you away from your merry band of thieves.”
“My merry band?”
“He’s convinced you’ve started down a spiral that you’ll never escape.”
“A spiral into?”
Khanyi shrugged. “A criminal life, I suppose. He’s not said it in as many words.”
A man and woman came into the bar. The man was in his forties, pock-marked skin, a scowl and an evening suit. He nodded his head in surly greeting. The lady had her hair pinned back and was wearing a flowing silk evening dress. Her greeting was a tight smile. The two of them sat at the bar and looked past each other as if they were watching the exits. There was something incongruous about them but I couldn’t put my finger on it.
“Father doesn’t approve of the way you got hold of that file,” said Khanyi.
“Sometimes,” I said, “you need to step outside of the law to achieve an outcome that is entirely legal.”
Khanyi smiled and raised her glass of mineral water as if making a toast.
“You see,” she said. “Now you’re justifying it.”
“At least we’re not still winding up clocks and denying we’ve heard of anyone called Lindiwe. If I remember correctly that was the official approach.”
“You’re so stuffy when you get angry,” said Khanyi. “I don’t mind if you want to go off and do criminal things.”
“I hope you’ll modernise the Department when they put you in charge.”
“In charge? Don’t be ridiculous.”
“It’s what everyone says will happen.”
“Everyone says?” said Khanyi, sipping her water. “What do you mean, everyone says?”
“What else do you think they’re all talking about when they stand around the water cooler?”
“Nonsense,” said Khanyi, and she blushed, sipping at the water to hide her fluster.
“It would be an awful mistake,” I said. “I’m sure it won’t happen.”
“You can be such a jerk, you know, Ben.”
“I know. It’s been pointed out to me before.”
Khanyi regarded me from beneath her heavy black lashes.
“What do you think would happen if we all stepped ‘outside the law’ as you put it?”
“Anarchy,” I said.
“That’s what you’d enjoy, I suppose?”
“I’ve spent most of my life fighting for it.”
Khanyi considered that for a moment and her eyes narrowed.
“I’m onto you,” she said. “You never say what you mean, do you, Gabriel? Most of what you say is the exact opposite of what you mean. It’s pathological.”
“It’s worked out alright for me so far,” I said.
“What d
o you really think about me heading up the Department?”
“Awful idea,” I said and treated her to a rare full-toothed smile.
But later that night, as I sneaked a cigarette on the small balcony of my room and looked out over the wet and bedraggled town of Dundee, I wondered about what she had said. The bit about the spiral. I thought of Chandler’s fall from grace. Special forces captain to confidence trickster and thief. He’d always told me I was too much of a rebel for the military, and I’d sometimes wondered if it took one to recognise one. I’d not allowed myself to think about it, but I couldn’t deny that what we’d done in the archives had felt … felt what?
It had felt right.
The time I’d spent with Chandler, Fat-Boy and Robyn had been like belonging again. And I hadn’t experienced that feeling since parachuting into the scene of a plane wreck in the North Kivu region of the Congo.
Twenty-Three
Dundee was given a brief reprieve by the rain in the morning. As we left for the village of Masotsheni, the couple I’d seen in the bar the night before were mounting the horse-drawn cart that would take them to all the places where the colonials had been most successful in killing the natives. I waved at them in greeting, and the man waved back.
“Good thing the rain’s stopped,” he called out in a strong American accent. “Doing a tour of the town, then out to the battlefields.”
“Should be a fine day for it,” I called back.
“If the weather holds,” he said with a doubtful look to the sky.
“You two have a lovely day,” added the woman. “Such a lovely place to honeymoon.”
“Honeymoon?” said Khanyi from the passenger seat. “Does she think we’re on a honeymoon?”
“And later we might take in the live re-enactments,” said the man as he climbed into the cart.
“I didn’t know they did that,” I said.
“Honeymoon?” said Khanyi again, her voice rising.
“Rubber spears, and the bullets are duds,” said the man regretfully. “But they say you get the feeling for being right there on the battlefield.” The driver of the cart opened a blanket with a flourish, like a magician about to make them vanish. The blanket settled on their laps, and he tucked in the edges to keep them warm.
“But without the fear of being disembowelled,” I said.
The man laughed. “Except by the wife,” he said and chuckled so much that it turned into a coughing fit.
We didn’t wait to see whether he survived that.
“Honeymoon?” said Khanyi again as we turned the corner.
“It’s a natural mistake, I wouldn’t get hot under the collar about it.”
“You should have put them straight,” said Khanyi.
“I was working around to it.”
“Except for the wife?” she said incredulously. “What sort of people does he think we are, that we would find that funny?”
I shrugged. “Just go with the flow, Khanyi. We can’t control what people say to us.”
“But we can control what we say back,” she said. “I’ve a mind to get you to turn back and tell him we don’t appreciate comments like that. That’s the problem today. Everybody assumes you think the way they do. And we don’t. Do we?”
“I’m sure we don’t,” I said.
The Ngwebeni valley is a piece of raw Africa dropped into the heart of modern-day South Africa. When you crest the Impati ridge, you are treated to its breathtaking beauty. And something else: a sense of the reality of life lived off the land. As we descended the hair-raising Noustrop pass, winding in and out of the folds of the Endumeni slopes, we gradually transitioned to the other side of life, leaving the guided tours and trappings of modern life behind. Khanyi kept holding her mobile phone up to ensure she still had a signal and gave disgruntled noises as it faded away.
The road was narrow, the surface broken and potholed. The edges crumbled away into nothing in some areas. As we descended the side of the mountain, there were places where the precipitous slope dropped away from the road so steeply that I had the sensation we were floating above a void. There was no fence or railing in parts, and an error of judgement on the tighter turns would have ended in disaster.
We reached the bottom of the valley and Khanyi spluttered with indignation at the fact that her phone had no signal. Here the road straightened itself out to build courage for crossing the Tugela River, which gushed through its narrow ravine with enthusiasm. The bridge was a rusted iron structure that looked as if it hadn’t been designed to last as long as it had. Two great big iron hoops spanned the hundred-metre gap, with spindly cables suspending the precarious platform across which we were expected to drive.
“Get some speed up,” advised Khanyi.
“What about the people?” I asked, for the bridge appeared to be a meeting place for the locals who were standing around chatting, a cluster of children showing off by climbing the suspension rods and hanging precariously over the rushing water.
“They’ll move,” said Khanyi with equanimity.
I chose instead to slow down, and we inched our way across the bridge, which made worrying sounds as the wooden planks that supported us shifted and groaned under the weight of the car.
“You’re sure this isn’t a pedestrian bridge?” asked Khanyi as the people she had been so confident would move showed no inclination to do so until the front bumper of the car nudged them out of the way.
On the other side of the river we picked our way between tumbledown buildings which formed the commercial centre of Tugela Ferry, then we broke out into open ground. I accelerated up the hill. Our destination was ten minutes ahead.
Khanyi turned to look across the valley, and gasped with surprise. On the precipitous slope beneath the road we had just travelled were the skeletal remains of a dozen cars. Most of them had been reduced by fire or time to their structural frames, but a few more recent ones were still solid, and gave the bizarre impression of vehicles trying to make their way down the slope, some of them on their wheels, others on their backs like beetles struggling to right themselves.
Another few minutes of jostling along the muddy surface of what should have been a road, and we arrived at Masotsheni. More of a hamlet than a village, it was a cluster of houses, small cubes built of brick with rusty iron roofs.
The address on our slip of paper was for a larger house which sat a little distance from the others, higher up the slope of the hill so it looked like a mother duck with a brood of chicks at her feet. It was by no means a grand establishment, but it must have been five times as big as the other houses and had a wide veranda which wrapped around three sides of the house. It had a touch of Cape Dutch style in the high gable and the dirty white of its walls.
On the veranda a figure was standing watching our car struggle along the path. Someone with short-cropped hair, so that from a distance they cut a slender, manly figure. We abandoned the car a hundred metres from the house and completed the journey on foot. As we approached, the high cheekbones and wide eyes became evident. She was an attractive woman in her early fifties.
At her feet were a trio of small girls, none more than five years old, and about the veranda were other children, some sitting on the dishevelled chairs, one in a homemade hammock, and one of them, the oldest, standing in a proprietorial way at the front door.
“We guessed you were coming for us,” said the woman as we approached. “Bongani has been watching your approach.” She indicated the older boy who nodded in confirmation of this and held a pair of binoculars up to demonstrate how it had been achieved.
“We are sorry to arrive unannounced,” said Khanyi. “We had no number.”
The woman laughed, an open-mouthed, friendly laugh. “You needn’t worry about that. I have no phone. Now come on children,” she clapped her hands. “You should all go inside and make us some lemonade. Our guests don’t want to be stared at, they’ve come to speak to me, not you rabble.”
The children moved off reluctant
ly, herded into the house by the older boy.
“How did you find me?” asked the woman when the last toddler had disappeared.
“Mona Mxolisi.” Khanyi said, with the soft ‘tsk’ click in the surname.
“Mona wrote to me and said someone was stirring the pot,” said the woman. “A journalist asking questions. I wrote back that she should send anyone else my way. I knew it was just a matter of time. Are you journalists too?”
“Not journalists,” said Khanyi. “We are civil servants. Government employees.”
The woman’s face flickered with a smile. “Government?” she said.
“We work for a small government department, under Don Fehrson,” said Khanyi.
“Ah, you’re that kind of civil servant.” She studied us calmly with her wide, gentle eyes. “How is my father?” she asked.
“He’s well,” said Khanyi. “Well enough.”
“He and Cindy are good people. They didn’t deserve any of this.”
A small gust of wind buffeted us as we stood in silence for a moment.
“Why don’t you sit down?” Lindiwe suggested. “The children will be ages making the lemonade.”
“All yours?” asked Khanyi, and we sat down on a lumpy piece of furniture that might once have been a couch.
“Goodness no. None of them are mine. They’re orphans. I have no children of my own.”
Lindiwe sat elegantly on the edge of an armchair, her hands clasped on her knees and her back straight like she was holding a yoga pose.
“Have you come to take me back?” asked Lindiwe. “Make me pay for my sins?”
“No,” said Khanyi with some confusion. “Not at all.”
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