Monkeys in My Garden
Page 47
It was about 7 o’clock on the night Douglas, Antonio our dayguard and a young girl gathered around O’D outside our house and spoke to him in lowered and urgent voices.
Wondering what they were talking about, I walked outside and joined them. “What’s going on?” I asked.
No one answered me and then after a long pause, O’D said, “We didn’t want to frighten you but we’ve had a message that some people have been looking for us in Macate. Six men, driving two of those Toyota Mark IIs and a motor cycle. Nobody told them where we live. This young girl’s sister memorised the registration number of one of the cars. AAI 209 MP. It seems that some kind of revenge attack is being planned.”
The news filled me with terror. My legs turned to jelly and I had a hard time to keep from falling. “We must hide – right away – in the forest!” I cried.
Everyone looked at me with dubious expressions on their faces.
“I think I’ll phone Murray and ask him what he thinks,” O’D said.
While O’D looked for network to make his phone call, I ran back into the house on rubbery legs. In the bedroom, I threw off my clothes and rummaged around in the cupboard for something more suitable for a fugitive running for their life. Black jeans, black top, black cardigan. Into my shoulder bag went our passports and grabbing my pepper spray, I ran outside again.
Everyone was still standing where I had left them.
“I managed to get hold of Murray,” O’D told me.
“And what did he say?” I asked.
“He said, ‘Get the hell out of there right away, O’D and come to us here in Gondola!”
I looked at Douglas. “And what about you, Douglas?”
“I’ll be alright, Madam. They’re not after me and if they come, I know where to hide.”
The drive out of the forest and along the dirt road to Chimoio was terrifying. An eerie air of menace hung over the countryside, hideous danger lurking behind every tree, every bush and every bend in the road. Everytime the lights of a car appeared in front of us or behind us, my heart gave a lurch of fear. Was this them? Were we going to be rammed? Hacked at with a machete or gunned down? The only weapon we had to defend ourselves was the little pepper spray I was clutching so tightly in my hand and our pickup, so battered by freak accidents, was in no shape to outrun the bandits’ speedy Mark IIs.
At last we drove onto tar and the road to Gondola. Just another sixteen kilometres to Murray’s house and safety, but anything could still happen.
Then, just a few kilometres from Murray’s turnoff, without warning, the pick-up’s lights went out and the car engine died on us. The Tete electrician’s handiwork had brought us to a standstill at a most inopportune moment!
“Oh, no! Now what?” I panicked.
“It’s alright,” O’D assured me. “We’re not far from Murray’s house. We can walk it.”
And then, for no reason at all, the pickup’s lights came back on again, the engine started up and we were back on our way!
At Murray’s house, Murray and his sister, Dal, were waiting for us with worried looks on their faces. I fell into a chair in their tiny sitting room and closed my eyes. Was this never going to end? It was all like a weird and hideous dream, almost impossible to believe it was happening to us in real life. Bandits had come uninvited into our lives, they had attacked and robbed us and then had got caught by a clever government official because they had been stupid enough to drive a flashy car in a poor rural area and now - incredibly – MORE of them were coming with revenge in mind! They were all mad. Mad. But then this was Mozambique … Africa …where everyone seemed to be out of their minds …
Cars pulled up outside Murray’s house. Mendonca and Tomo. They looked worried too. “Don’t go back to live in your house until the new year,” Tomo warned O’D. “YOU can go back during the day,” he added, “but Valeria must on no account go back there.”
Although the revenge bandits’ car was sighted several times in Chimoio and each sighting was reported to Tomo, the police never did anything about it. And although with the help of Jinho, we traced it to Albas garage in Maputo, this was never investigated. The last sighting occurred on 21st December, and after that it was never seen in Chimoio again.
At the beginning of January, O’D and I went home and the first thing he did was to make bars for our bedroom windows and a big metal door to block off the corridor and keep the bedrooms and bathroom safe from AK-47 bullets. Sadly, life in the forest would never be the same again.
Soon after we arrived back home, Douglas went off to Zimbabwe for a week. He had looked after our house and animals well while we were in hiding. On his own and lonely, he had filled the empty hours by baking cakes for O’D to take to us in Gondola, cakes so scrumptious that Murray who had a sweet tooth ate one whole cake all by himself, all in one go and almost threw up as a result.
On my first morning home, Douglas said, “We are all scattered now, Madam.”
“No we’re not,” I told him. “We’re back now.”
“The bandits have scattered us,” he repeated, as if he hadn’t heard me.
Douglas’ words were prophetic. He didn’t return from Zimbabwe after his week off and we began to get a little anxious. The bandits had stolen his wallet and his Identity Card and so he had taken the kandonga route into Zimbabwe. He had laughed when I had worried about him travelling without an Identity Card. “I’ll be fine, Madam,” he had assured me.
But he had not been fine.
He’d been attacked by Zimbabwean soldiers as he’d been crossing the border and they had beaten him up so brutally, he had ended up in Chimanimani Hospital for two weeks.
About two months later, he sent us an sms. All it said was “My health is too unpleasant to come back to work. You’d better get another cook.”
I remembered him sitting at the table drinking coffee after the bandit attack and telling us that the attack had only increased his faith in God. Now, that faith had been challenged by a second attack and I could only hope it hadn’t been destroyed.
As for the bandits, twelve of them as well as some policemen were arrested. The terrible leader’s wife turned out to be just as evil. She was jailed for stealing children.
Although some of the bandits had been caught the very same day of the attack, not one of our things was found by the police. And although the bandits were sentenced to twelve years in jail for attacking the Chinese sawmill at Tembwe, O’D’s statement to the CID ‘disappeared’ and our case against them was buried and never came to court.
We had all played our part in their capture but we had been let down by those who were supposed to protect us and to give us justice.
And as for Nora Swete ? Her visit to us after an absence of fourteen years was, I’m sure, no coincidence. As Lee had said, we had been through a spiritual war but we had survived.
Now, I hope it’s time for a little rest, a little peace and quiet.
THE END
The Nhamacoa Forest - 1995
The beginning of the destruction of the Nhamacoa Forest - Locals clearing the forest to open maize fields
More fields are opened
One of the many forest fires in the Nhamacoa
The Nhamacoa Forest - 2005 - destroyed almost to vanishing point.