“Of course,” I said. “Of course.”
While I practiced Dr. Bates’ exercises and read the little Bible, a thought flitted into my head. If it hadn’t been for that Vervet monkey, I wouldn’t have broken my glasses. And if it hadn’t been for President Mugabe closing the border to foreigners at that particular time, I would merely have bought new glasses from a Zimbabwean optician. Dr. Bates’ book would have continued gathering dust in my bookcase … and my father’s little Bible would have remained unopened.
As so often happened in the Nhamacoa, I had the feeling that I was taking part in a play that someone was writing for me to live out in my life, a someone who was setting the scenes but not giving ME the script for MY part. The fact that I was now reading the Bible, pointed a finger in only one direction.
God ...
The novel way God engineered situations, even using quite drastic measures to get my attention, impressed me. Although I knew that it hadn’t been God who had set up my intended murder, He had left it to the very last second to rescue me ... and then, even going to the lengths of breaking my glasses to get me to read His Word! He was showing me that He was serious about my getting to know Him and that I’d better not ignore Him.
At the end of February, we were in trouble again. Money had run out and we were forced to resort once again to our Arrojela travellers cheques. This time, however, when we went to the Bank of Mozambique that usually changed our cheques, we were in for another of those shocks Mozambique was throwing at us with such abandon.
At the counter, the teller pushed the cheque back at us and told us that new regulations had come through from Maputo. No more pound sterling traveller cheques were to be changed. Euro travellers cheques and U.S. dollar travellers cheques, yes - but not pounds!
Astonished by this news, O’D demanded to see the manager.
In his office, O’D, Caetano and I sat down and the manager repeated the story the teller had told us. Almost begging him to do what banks were damn well supposed to do, even Caetano, who was always optimistic no matter what happened, seemed beaten down by the never-ending battering we were being given on all fronts.
The bank manager was inflexible. “Take them to BIM at the airport in Beira,” he told us. “They’ll cash them there for you.”
This advice to make a 400 kilometre round trip to cash a travellers cheque soured our mood even further. Apart from the terrible waste of money, we didn’t even have enough fuel in the pickup to make the journey!
We left his office and trudged around to all the other banks in Chimoio. They all told us the same thing. Go to BIM in Beira.
Without even enough money to buy a Coke or a Lemon Twist at a café, we stood under the shade of a tree for a while, debating on what to do next. Then, the image of a bespectacled face almost hidden by a fuzz of white popped into my mind. “Perhaps Murray will be able to help,” I suggested. “Zimbabweans always want foreign currency.”
At the Chibuku factory, Murray’s new and spartan home that was furnished with a desk, a telephone and a camp bed, Murray opened his safe and revealed an enormous pile of meticais. We handed over our cheques and Murray gave us some of his meticais. He knew a Zimbabwean pilot, he told us, who often flew to London. He would give our Travellers Cheques to him.
We now had a new Head of Forestry in Chimoio. The Communist Ribeiro had gone and had been replaced by Cremildo Rungo.
Caetano got on well with Rungo and soon he had secured another cutting area for us, this time in Gondola and much nearer to home. Here, Caetano organised our workers and they set to work, felling panga panga. And things started looking up for us again.
CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE
THE TRIAL OF JAN WESTH
When he heard the news that the Dane, Jan Westh, was finally going to be brought to trial for stealing our pine at Tsetsserra, Caetano was jubilant. He had, after all, waited two long years for this. Justice – at last!
The only fly in the ointment was that the Judge trying the case would be - yes, just our luck! - the corrupt Judge we’d been warned about. The dreaded Judge Magaia.
The trial was scheduled for the morning of the 23rd April and so, when we saw Caetano’s white pickup jolting down the track towards us in the afternoon we thought it was all over.
One look at the expression on his face, however, when he swung his long legs out of the pickup, told us quite a different story.
“How did it go?” O’D asked, although he already knew something was wrong.
A torrent of indignation and outrage poured out of Caetano, so fast I couldn’t understand a word. Faster and faster he spoke, all his words running into each other and the pitch of his voice rising to heights I’d never heard before.
Something must be very wrong!
“What’s happened?” I asked. “What’s happened?”
O’D’s face was grim. “When Caetano arrived at the Court House this morning, he discovered the trial had been cancelled - because Westh left Mozambique for Denmark on the 19th April!”
“What!” I cried, my voice rising as high as Caetano’s had done. “How could they have let him leave! He committed a crime! And why didn’t Nelson, who is supposed to be Caetano’s legal aid, tell him about this four days ago?”
“Mozambican justice … just as I thought!” O’D said, furious at this evidence of sneaky manoeuvreing behind our backs by Westh and the Chimoio Judiciary. “Don’t worry, Caetano, even though Westh’s managed to skip the country, we’re not going to take this lying down!”
The next morning O’D met Caetano in town. When they spoke to Nelson about the Dane’s disappearance, he merely shrugged his shoulders. Apparently Westh’s father had suddenly fallen ill in Denmark and Judge Magaio had compassionately allowed him to fly back home.
“And if Westh doesn’t come back,” O’D asked Nelson, “what then? How are we going to get our timber or our money back from him?”
“Oh, he’ll come back,” Nelson answered carelessly.
Deciding to complain to Judge Sambo, the Judge President, about the irregular way in which our case against Westh was being handled, O’D and Caetano made an appointment with his secretary to see him the following day.
Their meeting with Judge Sambo was very satisfactory. He flew into a rage when he heard how Judge Magaio had allowed Westh to leave Mozambique without doing anything to ensure his return. He assured them he would investigate and heads would roll.
In the middle of May, Caetano brought us more news about Westh. News that totally surprised us. The Dane was back in town!
“Westh’s new trial date is set for June now,” Caetano told us. “The 10th June … that is, if he doesn’t disappear again!”
June arrived. In the sitting room, I turned the page on the Zimbabwean wildlife calendar I had hung on the wall and exchanged May’s photograph of an elephant for June’s photograph of a buffalo.
At first, the buffalo looked innocuous enough - a bit worn and moth-eaten, with patchy white marks on its horns - but it wasn’t long before I noticed something strange about it, something that gave me a distinctly uneasy feeling. During the day, the animal looked just like it was, a buffalo. At night, however, by the glow of paraffin light, it underwent a peculiar metamorphosis. It turned into a rather hideous and sinister horned man … a sort of devil creature ...
One evening, even O’D who wasn’t particularly observant about things like this, asked me if I had noticed the buffalo’s strangely altered appearance at night. Even he, it seemed, found the image disturbing ...
We weren’t the only ones who were feeling uneasy. In the weeks running up to the trial, Caetano became uncharacteristically more and more jittery. Although the evidence against Westh was solid and the Dane’s confession was on record at the Commercial Fraud Squad’s office, he was beginning to think that something fishy was afoot.
When Westh’s lawyer came searching for him and even visited his house one evening, Caetano hid himself away, refusing to see or talk to the man.
>
Then, when Caetano came down with a cold that turned chesty and gave him a persistent cough that no cough syrup would cure, his thoughts turned to witchcraft. Westh’s workers had caused his illness – he was sure of it!
“They’ll lose their jobs if Westh has to pay us back our six hundred million meticais,” Caetano told us. “They probably went to a feiticeiro to make me sick … to stop the trial. They probably took something of mine to the feiticeiro.”
“Like what, Caetano?” O’D asked, thinking how unlikely this was.
“It could be anything!” Caetano cried. “Maybe even the footprints I made in the sand outside Westh’s sawmill!”
Although Caetano’s fears seemed a bit far-fetched to us, especially the bit about Westh’s workers scooping up his sandy footprints, he became more and more nervous and turned to witchcraft himself for protection, employing a series of witch doctors, each one supposedly more powerful than the one before - and each one charging a more exorbitant fee than the one before.
At first, he paid them large sums of money to perform ceremonies around his house to protect himself and his family. And then, on the eve of Westh’s trial, he decided that O’D and I were also in danger and needed protection.
“I’m bringing an extremely powerful feiticeira this time,” Caetano told O’D. “A woman. She’s the sister of the one I went to see at Dombe. I’m going to bring her down to the sawmill this evening!”
Clouds blew up over the Nhamacoa in the afternoon and when Caetano arrived with the feiticeira, the normally blue winter sky had turned grey. A chilly wind blew and it began to drizzle.
The feiticeira was a disappointment. Caetano had described her as extremely powerful and so I had expected to see a woman who would look the part. But when she climbed out of the white pickup, she looked just like any other young African woman, with a baby tied onto her back with a sun-faded capulana. Several children of various ages jumped out of the open back of the pickup. These, Caetano told us, were also the feiticeira’s children.
This time, unwilling to have a witch doctor inside our house again, O’D brought three chairs out onto the verandah for us to sit on. The woman untied her capulana and gave her baby to one of the older children to hold. Opening a bundle she had brought with her, she pulled out the obligatory black cloth and spread it on the floor in front of her. Then, she settled down on the cloth and began to transform herself. A magnificent headdress of long green-black feathers emerged from her bundle to adorn her head. Strange objects dangling from a thin strip of leather were tied around her neck and waist. In a matter of minutes, the ordinary young woman had completely vanished and in her place sat a feiticeira.
The feiticeira turned to O’D. “Beer!” she demanded.
He handed her a large bottle of the locally made ‘Manica’ beer and, tilting her feathered head backwards, she raised the bottle to her lips and drained its entire gassy contents all in one go.
Then, when she finally put the bottle down, her body gave a sudden jerk. Loud and horrible grunting growling noises erupted up from her chest and exploded out of her mouth.
An enormous feeling of tiredness swept over me and something else that resembled boredom. Oh, for Heaven’s Sakes … surely not again! Was the woman now in the process of turning herself into some kind of wild animal … a jackal or perhaps a hyena … treating us to another demonic possession, like Nora Swete when she had paid us that visit? The thought was unbearable. I’d really had more than enough of all this African preoccupation with witchcraft. I made a move to stand up, to leave.
“She’s only belching,” O’D told me.
The feiticeira growled again and opened her mouth wide … and a great spray of Manica beer shot out of her and onto the verandah wall.
I leaned back again in my chair, annoyance replacing my boredom. Now Biasse would have to get busy with a bucket of soapy water and a scrubbing brush tomorrow morning. I really couldn’t have the beery contents of a witch doctor’s stomach all over my walls.
Having relieved herself of her heartburn, the feiticeira picked up a small pouch and scattered its contents onto the black cloth. Then, after spending some long minutes studying the small pebbles and bones that lay there, she gave us her verdict.
It seemed we were entering a time of danger … great danger … and needed protection from the dark forces swirling around us … but although we had enemies, we would be successful … if we protected ourselves …
Sitting next to me, Caetano spoke at length with the feiticeira. Shivering slightly and huddled in his chair with his arms wrapped around himself for protection against the chill wet wind, he talked and while he talked, he coughed.
At last it was over. All that was left to do now was to walk around and place the usual little bags of magic potion at all the entrances into the house and into our land to protect us from evil.
As Caetano stood up, his face pinched with cold, a powerful, terrible and dark feeling of foreboding knifed through me. Alarmed, I turned to O’D.
“Maybe we should try to get him to Mutare, to see a doctor before the trial.”
“Caetano’s going to be just fine,” O’D assured me with a smile. “He’s a big, fit, strong man. He’s only got a cold that’s hard to shake off.”
When the feiticeira, now looking like a young African woman with a baby on her back again, climbed into Caetano’s pickup, I watched them all drive off down the forest track until they vanished in the gloomy twilight. O’D was right, I assured myself. Caetano was a big, fit, strong man. No need to worry. No need at all.
In the kitchen, I lit a match to heat up Biasse’s vegetable soup on the gas cooker and while I waited for it to grow hot, I sat down on the sofa in the sitting room. As so often happened now in the evenings, my eyes were irresistibly drawn to the calendar on the wall opposite the sofa. Tonight, after the feiticeira’s visit and the terrible sense of foreboding I had felt about Caetano, there seemed to be something especially evil … especially menacing … about the image of the horned man.
Aaah … creepy! With a shudder of revulsion, I jumped up from the sofa and went over to the radio to search the wavebands. What we needed this evening to dispel the rather unpleasant vibrations the feiticeira had left behind was some music! Sadly, I was out of luck. Zimbabwe Radio One, which had sustained us for so long in our isolation, was gone, and never to return. Inexplicably destroyed by Jonathan Moyo, Mugabe’s Minister of Information.
There was nothing for it but to settle for the BBC.
Monday, the 10th June arrived and to our relief, Jan Westh’s trial did take place.
O’D and I didn’t go near the Court House but Caetano gleefully kept us up to date with the proceedings.
“I think Judge Sambo must have said something to Magaia,” Caetano reported back, “because when Magaia came into the courtroom, he glared at me and asked ‘Do you have a problem with me, Mr. Caetano?’ Before I could even open my mouth to answer him, he ordered me to be quiet by barking ‘Don’t speak! Don’t speak!’ at me.”
Over the next few days, as the trial progressed, Judge Magaia’s irritation with Caetano continued to show itself.
When Caetano stood up to give evidence and waved his arms excitedly in the air during his description as to how Westh had tricked our guard into allowing the Dane to cart all our pine away, the Judge gave him another baleful glare.
“Don’t gesticulate!” Magaia barked. “You are not allowed to gesticulate in my courtroom, Mr. Caetano, and if you gesticulate again, I will fine you!”
When it came to Jan Westh’s turn to speak, he explained to Judge Magaia that his action had not been one of theft but of preservation. He had noticed a large forest fire approaching and as we hadn’t bothered to protect our logs by pulling them into an estaleiro, he had taken them. If he hadn’t done this, they would have been burnt to a cinder.
Unfortunately for Westh, when his own cubicador was questioned, the man forgot which side he was on. He admitted that not only had our
logs been pulled into a well-cleared estaleiro but that they had not been in any danger at all of being consumed by fire.
At the end of everybody’s testimonies, the Judge appeared satisfied. “The case is clear,” he declared. “The Sentence of this Court will be read out on Friday, 14th.June.”
“Westh’s lawyer tried to bribe me - right there in the courtroom!” Caetano told us with a grin of satisfaction. “He offered me two hundred million meticais if I agreed to have the case against Westh dismissed.”
Scenting success, Caetano had turned down the bribe. His mood was upbeat and he was going in for the kill. He certainly wasn’t going to let Westh wriggle out of paying the six hundred million meticais he owed us. As Judge Magaia had stated … the Case was clear!
Friday the 14th dawned, warm and sunny.
At the Court House Caetano and Jan Westh sat waiting in the courtroom. They didn’t speak to each other and the silence in the room was only broken by Caetano’s persistent cough. Westh was clutching a bulging briefcase and the sight of it caused Caetano’s heart to thunder in his chest with excitement. The briefcase, he was sure, contained the six hundred million meticais Westh owed us for our stolen pine. We had won - and Westh knew it!
Caetano and Jan Westh sat for a long time, waiting for Judge Magaia to put in an appearance. Eventually, after being kept on hold for some hours, a clerk appeared with a message. Judge Magaia had fallen ill and the reading of the Sentence was cancelled until further notice.
His high hopes dashed, Caetano slowly stood up. Now that everything was at a standstill again, he might as well take the opportunity of going to see a doctor about his chest and his cough.
The Fatima Clinic was only a short distance away. New, spotlessly clean and built with local Indian money, it promised to give better medical service than Chimoio hospital and had had a well-trained doctor all the way from India to deal with patients.
At the Fatima, a Mozambican doctor examined Caetano and arranged some blood tests. Unfortunately, the well-trained Indian doctor had gone back to India, it seemed, and the clinic now used the services of the same doctors who worked at Chimoio Hospital.
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