Monkeys in My Garden

by Valerie Pixley

  “Stand up! Stand up!” Nelson hissed.

  We all rose to our feet.

  The Judge sat down and settled himself behind his desk.

  “Sit down! Sit down!” Nelson hissed.

  We all sat down again.

  There was silence as Judge Magaia surveyed our small group with a baleful glare. Then he barked some angry words at O’D and me. Unable to understand what he was shouting, we stared dumbly back at him.

  Jinho, who was sitting next to me, leaned over towards O’D on the other side of me. “Uncross your legs!” he whispered. “Quickly! He says you are not allowed to cross your legs in his court and he’s going to fine you if you don’t uncross them!”

  O’D and I hastily uncrossed our legs and planted our feet side by side on the floor.

  With a last warning glare at us, Judge Magaia began to speak.

  Careful not to let the Judge see me, I turned on my little tape recorder.

  A terrible clacking sound suddenly started up, filling the room and completely drowning out the Judge’s voice. The clerk who had handed Judge Magaia his black robe, was now sitting on a chair in front of an ancient black manual typewriter and pounding away to take down the words the Judge was uttering.

  Just our luck, I thought, and turned off the tape recorder.

  Judge Magaia turned to Nelson and the typewriter fell silent.

  The sentencing of Jan Westh was not going to take place today after all.

  The Chimoio Judiciary, it seemed, had neglected to tell the Danish criminal to put in an appearance!

  Judge Magaia stood up. The sentencing of Westh was now set for the 26th June, he told us, and swept out of the room.

  Downstairs, we stood next to the pickup preparing to go our separate ways. “I have a bad feeling about all of this,” I said to Jinho.

  He made no effort to reassure me. Crippled in one leg from polio since the age of two, Jinho had had dealings of his own with the Chimoio Judiciary.

  It had begun one day when he’d been innocently sitting under the umbrella of a small outdoor café and munching on a Mozambican type of hamburger. A waiter had approached him and had demanded payment.

  “Wait until I have finished,” Jinho had told the waiter, reluctant to dirty his hands with money while he was in the middle of eating his food.

  Then the owner of the café had appeared. He had made the same demand and when Jinho had refused to pay until he had finished eating, he had roughly pushed Jinho off his chair, throwing him onto the ground!

  Jinho had pulled himself to his feet, he had paid the café owner for his half-eaten hamburger now lying in the dirt and then he had gone off to take the café owner to court.

  Although he had won the case and the café owner had been sentenced to pay Jinho the sum of seven million meticais in damages, the man had never done so.

  Now Jinho merely said, “Let’s wait and see what happens on the 26th.”

  On the 26th June, we were back in the courtroom again for the third attempt to sentence Jan Westh. Strangely, the man who was the cause of the court case was still not present to hear the Court’s verdict. “Where’s Jan Westh?” I asked Nelson. How was it POSSIBLE that the Chimoio Judiciary could let the Dane get away with not attending his own sentencing?

  Nelson gave me a shrug and a rather mocking smile. “Perhaps he’s gone to Denmark again, to see his father.”

  A green-garbed figure swept plumply through the door. We all stood up. Judge Magaia donned the black robe and sat down behind his desk. We all sat down on our chairs again, O’D and I taking care not to cross our legs.

  The Judge eyed us with what appeared to be his habitual expression - the baleful glare - and, disappointed not to find anything to threaten us about, began to read out Jan Westh’s sentence. At once, the dreadful clacking sound began from the ancient typewriter and completely drowned out his voice.

  For what seemed like an eternity of excruciating boredom, we sat and watched the Judge mouthing five and half pages of words that we couldn’t hear. Eventually, he stopped speaking, the clacking typewriter fell silent and he gathered his papers together. When he swept out of the room, we were no wiser than when he had come in.

  Nelson walked over to O’D. “You won!” he told him. “Westh has to either return your pine or pay you the six hundred million by the 24th July. If he doesn’t, he will go to jail for two years.” He paused. “Now you have to take out another court case against Westh.”

  “What for?” O’D asked curtly. He’d had more than enough of Westh and the Chimoio Judiciary. “The Judge has sentenced Westh and that’s that.” He looked away from Nelson towards the door, eager to get out of the Court House.

  Contempt flitted across Nelson’s face as he looked at O’D and his lips curled up in a horrible sneer. Taken aback by the ugliness of Nelson’s expression, I wondered why on earth Caetano had chosen someone like him to deal with the court case.

  “But you must,” Nelson insisted.

  “No,” O’D said, oblivious of the look on Nelson’s face. “What I would like, though, is a copy of the Sentence.”

  “It’s not ready,” Nelson told him. “You’ll have to wait.”

  “How long?”

  Nelson shrugged carelessly. The contempt had now turned to insolence. “About two weeks,” he said and walked out of the room and disappeared.

  We were downstairs again and standing by the pickup when O’D remembered something. “There’s a clerk Caetano and I sometimes had dealings with,” he told us, “perhaps she’ll be able to make a copy of the Sentence for us.”

  For a small sum of money and the promise never to divulge her name, the clerk quickly made a copy of Jan Westh’s Sentence for us. This was just as well, because from that day onwards - if he hadn’t been before - Nelson became our enemy, obstructing us and lying to us at every turn.

  We saw little of Nelson while we waited for the deadline of the 24th July to arrive and at his sawmill, Westh carried on working as if he didn’t have a care in the world.

  Then, almost exactly a month after Caetano had died, Grumpy disappeared.

  He disappeared right after he had eaten his breakfast of boiled mackerel and rice and left us with no clues as to what might have happened to him.

  Although we loved all our animals, Grumpy was very special to us. For one thing, he had been given to us by Caetano and then, when we had seen what a detrimental effect Miss Sydney’s bullying had had on him psychologically, we had developed a very soft and protective spot for him.

  When evening came and Grumpy was still missing, we began to worry. This wasn’t a cat that wandered far from the house.

  The next morning we started a serious search for him in the bush and grass surrounding the house and the sawmill, calling his name and loudly shaking a box of Friskies, his favourite food. When we got no reply, we wondered fearfully if he’d been caught in a trap like Black Kitty … or … snatched by a worker or one of the local people like Mitzi had been snatched.

  As the days passed with still no sign of Grumpy, wild thoughts made their way into my head. Grumpy was pure white, one of the reasons Caetano had chosen him as a gift for us. A white cat for white people. Had he been taken by a witch doctor, to kill and to use as muti in some horrible spell against us?

  Although I had stopped talking to God since Caetano had died, I prayed a little prayer for Grumpy. “Oh, God,” I said, “if Grumpy’s still alive, please bring him back to us. Caetano gave him to us and he’s the only link we still have with Caetano.”

  On the fifth day of Grumpy’s disappearance, Fernand came to work drunk and obnoxious. O’D fired him on the spot and then, when Fernand threatened to kill him, sent a worker to call the local police. By the time Mario and another policeman arrived, riding down the track on the police motorbike, Fernand was long gone So after a brief conversation with O’D, the police drove off back to Macate.

  Fernand’s drunken behaviour, strange to tell, had some fortunate results. The unknown
people who had taken Grumpy must have mistakenly thought we had called the police to investigate our cat’s disappearance and lost their nerve because a mere half an hour after the police had gone, who should come walking unsteadily down the forest track but … Grumpy!

  Yellow eyes staring and filled with horror, as if he’d been in hell itself, he ran straight into the house, straight into the bathroom and hid under the bath.

  It took a long time for O’D to coax him to come out from his hiding place and when he eventually crept out fearfully, we saw that his white fur was a grayish colour and that there was some kind of black stuff like soot oozing out of the corners of his eyes, out of his nostrils and out of his ears.

  “What is it?” I asked O’D.

  “It looks like charcoal dust,” he told me. “I think whoever took him has been keeping him in a sack used for charcoal.”

  O’D’s guess turned out to be right. Poor Grumpy’s long sojourn in a charcoal sack had so choked him up with the black dust that it had affected his lungs. Unable to breathe properly, he wasn’t able to eat or drink either. If we didn’t get him to a Vet soon, he was going to die.

  Across the border, Dr. Mafara examined Grumpy and x-rayed his lungs. Yes, there were specks of charcoal and charcoal dust in them.

  “Is he going to live?” I asked.

  “Cats are tougher than we think they are,” he said. “Leave him with us. We’ll nebulise him and try to get as much of this stuff out of him as we can.”

  While Dr. Mafara, Blessing and Brenda nebulised and looked after Grumpy, another rather traumatic event occurred.

  One evening, while I was sitting on the sofa in the sitting room and waiting for O’D to return from Chimoio, I heard the sound of an approaching vehicle - a vehicle that didn’t sound like O’D’s red Toyota at all.

  Since Samsone Joao’s attack, I spent my evenings alone surrounded by an array of weapons to protect myself, just in case he came back as Biasse had suggested he might. While ten cats and a dog lay on the carpet to keep me company, a fiercesomely sharp panga lay on the sofa next to me. As well as the panga, there was also a heavy black torch that would give someone a painful whack on the head and a long stick made out of pau ferro. I had also invested in a new and powerful pepper spray.

  During these solitary evenings, I often thought about Samsone Joao and even found myself actually wishing that he would, indeed, come back. And this time, I promised myself grimly, I would be ready for him. Oh, how ready, to mete out some of the treatment he had given me. “Come,” I told him, “yes, come and see what’s going to happen to YOU!”

  The sound of the strange vehicle came nearer and then, all at once, there were two of them, racing down the forest track in the black night straight towards my house!

  My bravado evaporated in the face of reality and filled with fear, I leapt to my feet. Bandits! Not Samsone Joao, not one man … but several. Bandits! Infected by my fear, ten cats and a dog all leapt to their feet and milled around, growling. I looked around for my pepper spray. My spray … where was my spray? Oh, no! I had left it in the bedroom!

  Heart thudding with terror, I ran down the corridor, dog Bandit running close to me for her protection, not mine. In the bedroom, I grabbed the spraycan and ran towards the front door, Bandit still running close to me and getting under my feet. They needn’t think I was going to be a pushover, oh no, I was going to fight! I was going to blast them with pepper, blast their faces, and then hit them very very hard on their heads with the black torch!

  I ran outside and up to the vehicles. They were now parked outside my bedroom window. I was going to attack my attackers - surprise them by attacking them first! A man clambered out of the vehicle nearest to me ... a man with white hair, spectacles and a big fuzz of white enveloping his face.

  “Hello, Val.”

  I skidded to a halt. Relief flooded through me and suddenly the awful, terrible stress I hadn’t realised I was under took over and made me unravel in a totally bizarre way. “Fuck you, Murray!” I yelled. “Fuck you, Murray Dawson! I thought you were bandits … you know I was attacked … you know our partner’s just been killed … and you come in here, driving so fast …”

  Bursting into tears, I turned away from him and ran back into the house. At the table in the sitting room, I poured Ultra Mel into a tall glass and drank it all down in one go. I filled the glass again and then I sank down on the sofa and in between sobs and sniffs, sipped at the milk.

  Murray walked slowly into the sitting room. He was followed by his brother Rob, also white haired, bespectacled and with a face covered in white fuzz and Tim, a well-built and dark-haired young man who was Rob’s son. All three sat down and looked warily at me.

  “We’re sorry if we frightened you, Val,” Murray began, “but we had to come in the dark because we’re in trouble and we didn’t want anyone to see us coming here.”

  “Trouble,” I repeated and gulped down some more milk to steady my shattered nerves. “What kind of trouble?”

  “We’ve got our foreman with us outside. He’s been tortured by the CIO … he’s in a pretty bad way … he escaped across the border and now they’re looking for him.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “Well,” Murray went on, “we were sitting around, wracking our brains for a place where he could hide up safely until the heat’s off and then I hit on the idea of bringing him here to you and O’D. You’re the only people I know who’re living in the middle of nowhere, the back of beyond. They’ll never find him here.”

  The thought of giving refuge to a torture victim who was being hunted down by the dreaded Zimbabwean Central Intelligence Organisation was daunting, especially in view of all our own troubles piling up on us. What if the CIO picked up a clue and came down to the Nhamacoa? Killing people was nothing to them and their hideous tentacles stretched far across their border into neighbouring African countries with impunity. “I don’t know if we can help, Murray,” I said. “This has been such a terrible year for us, I don’t know if we can cope with the CIO on our backs as well.”

  “Please, Val,” Rob broke in. “If you help us out, we’ll owe you a big, big favour.”

  We hid Ian, the Dawson’s foreman, in the small laundry room under the house. He slept on one of our camp beds and ate the food Murray brought to him once a week and which Biasse, sworn to secrecy, cooked for him.

  The Zimbabweans had caught him when some of the farm equipment Murray was smuggling across the border into Mozambique had got stuck in the mud during some heavy rains. At the police station, they had tortured him for information about Murray, beating him on the soles of his feet. He had escaped across the border when Murray had paid a large amount of money to a certain policeman to look the other way … and now the CIO were hunting for him.

  While Murray’s foreman languished morosely in our small laundry room, reading old copies of ‘Fair Lady’ and ‘Femina’ to relieve his boredom and Grumpy languished in a small cage, being nebulised every now and then by Dr. Mafara at his Mutare surgery, the deadline set in Westh’s Sentence came and went and there was no word from the Dane.

  He did not return our pine. He did not pay us our money.

  “The Court needs six million meticais to execute the sentence,” Nelson told O’D. And so on the 8th August, 2002, O’D paid IPAJ the money and we waited for Westh’s arrest. Waited, in vain.

  CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT

  BIASSE TAKES OFF HIS APRON

  By the end of August, Grumpy was well enough to be brought home. We collected him from Dr. Mafara and although he still had black charcoal dust coming out of the corners of his eyes, his lungs were working again and he was able to breathe and eat at the same time.

  And at the beginning of September, Westh was still free!

  While the Dane was enjoying himself, O’D and I fumed with angry frustration. An unwilling participant in Mozambique’s corrupt system of justice in the first place, O’D now found himself embroiled in a court case peopled by some extre
mely unsavoury characters.

  Nelson became elusive, difficult to get hold of and we wondered what game he was playing.

  When O’D did manage to pin him down, he gave us excuses that were highly unlikely. “Yes,” he told O’D, “Judge Magaia signed the execution of Westh’s sentence at the beginning of August. Unfortunately, the Messenger of the Court hasn’t been able to find Westh to serve him with the papers. He’s tried several times.”

  Then, when this excuse wore thin, Nelson told O’D that the Messenger of the Court was now sick … too sick to see Westh.

  Doing some investigating of his own, O’D discovered that Judge Magaia had not executed Westh’s sentence after all and that Nelson had been telling us a pack of lies.

  Furious at this discovery, we made a mistake. We turned to our friends for advice.

  “Why don’t you speak to a journalist at Chimoio Radio about the stalled court case?” Jinho suggested.

  Forgetting that African government officials can’t take even the slightest of criticisms, this seemed a good idea to us.

  The journalist listened with interest to what O’D had to tell him and as it was necessary, of course, to hear the other side of the story as well, he made an appointment to speak to Judge Magaia on the 11th September.

  At the meeting, the Judge erupted with fury when he heard why the journalist had come to see him.

  Angrily, he told the journalist that we were troublemakers! That he did not recognise O’D as Caetano Martins’ legal partner and stated that Caetano had brought the case against Westh in his private capacity and not as a representative of our Company. This was particularly bizarre, as the Judge in his own handwriting in Westh’s Sentence had on every occasion written Caetano’s name followed by the word ‘representing’ our company. At the end of his diatribe against us, he threatened us with court action if we should have any further thoughts of publicising the case!

  It was Magaia’s opinion, it seemed, that the case against Westh was as dead as our partner, Caetano.