The Soldier who Said No (26 page)

‘Wait till you see Sandton,’ Heloïse said. ‘There the houses are three times as large and the plots so big that they can keep horses.’

De Villiers wondered about the security. Houses of this size must require a large workforce to keep them going, as the queue at the exit had hinted, but inside the estate he found even more workers, domestics pushing prams or walking the owners’ dogs, men working the golf course with specialised machines, supervisors overseeing everything. Men in overalls pushed wheelbarrows at building sites and others stood on scaffolding to lay bricks, plaster, paint. Heloïse employed a woman to do the cooking and another to do the housework.

After thirty-two hours of travelling, De Villiers was in dire need of sleep. He had taken only a few short naps during the long flight from Sydney. He needed a shower, a meal and a soft bed in a dark room. But first he had to see the graves.

The Garsfontein Cemetery was less than a kilometre from his sister’s home and Heloïse kept her promise to accompany him. They left immediately after they had carried his luggage upstairs. In the dusty tranquillity of the cemetery, they stood together looking at the graves. There were three headstones on a common gravesite three metres wide.

ANNELISE DE VILLIERS
12.10.1962–16.9.1992
MARCEL DE VILLIERS
31.3.1985–16.9.1992
JEANDRÉ DE VILLIERS
14.5.1986–16.9.1992

De Villiers felt his sister’s hand on his shoulder. He was shivering. He looked at the empty space where he had booked his own place all those years ago. He didn’t want to be buried in this place any more.

‘I don’t know how you’ve managed to cope with this,’ Heloïse said. ‘If someone were to hurt my children, I wouldn’t know what to do. I’d go crazy.’

The shadows were lengthening in the late afternoon sun. It was hot and De Villiers was perspiring freely. The cemetery had been extended in every direction from the time De Villiers had first come here to visit the graves. He had been in a coma in hospital when the funeral took place, his own life hanging by a thread. He had wished many times since that day that he had died with Annelise and their children.

‘Revenge,’ De Villiers said. ‘The thought of revenge sustains you. You dream of it every night.’

‘Is that why you came back then, to kill them?’ Heloïse asked in a whisper, even though the cemetery was deserted but for the two of them.

De Villiers shook his head. ‘No,’ he lied. ‘How could I get to them while they’re in prison?’

Heloïse looked up into his eyes. ‘But we’ve seen in the paper that they’ve been released. President Mbeki has given them a free pardon, wiping out their convictions.’

De Villiers faced his sister but looked through her. ‘I thought you knew and that’s why you came back,’ she said. ‘You always said you’d kill anyone who hurt your children.’

He lied again when they were in the car. ‘I didn’t.’

Heloïse misinterpreted his answer and said, ‘Good. We have to put the past behind us. We must make an effort to fit into the new environment. And I don’t want you to get into trouble again.’

On the way back De Villiers did a set of Florette Appollus’s exercises with renewed vigour. He also resolved to stop shaving in case he had the opportunity to conduct an operation.

De Villiers slept fitfully, his body clock completely out of synch with the light and sounds outside his room. The dull ache behind his eyes told him it was midnight, but outside the sun was shining against his window and he could hear golf clubs striking balls and golfers shouting
fore!
He had lain awake most of the night listening to the urban sounds of the area, dogs barking at all hours of the night and the sirens of police cars and ambulances.

The voices downstairs obliged him to rise. He stood under a piping hot shower but couldn’t shake off the weariness in his shoulders. When he came down from the first floor, he found his mother at the foot of the stairs. She cried when she saw him. He sat down on the couch with her. She held his hand tightly and spoke of distant times when De Villiers had been a small boy, but she fell silent when the conversation turned to more recent events.

More relatives arrived in the afternoon, De Villiers’s brother from Pietersburg and his younger sister and her husband from Randburg. They brought drinks and braai packs. De Villiers caught Heloïse’s eye and she shrugged as if to say, ‘What could I do? They’re family.’

The braai was a strain on De Villiers’s nerves. Heloïse, a pre-primary school teacher, treated everyone around her as if they were children to be corrected at every turn and prodded into line from time to time. Her house was a chaotic place where you had to follow orders, Heloïse’s orders. She ordered De Villiers to join the men outside. He obeyed, although he would have preferred to remain seated on the couch with his mother and to drift off to sleep with her. He slowly slipped his hand out from under hers. She didn’t wake up.

The men around the fire were talking about the rugby – their team was having an abysmal Super 14 season after winning the trophy in extra time in the final the year before. De Villiers’s arrival at the fire prompted a change of topic.

‘What do you think of the mess the
ANC
has made running the country?’ James asked. Heloïse’s husband was a tall fellow with a loud voice, the heart and soul of every family gathering.

When De Villiers hesitated, not wanting to admit that for years he had deliberately closed his eyes and ears to any news from South Africa, James answered for him.

‘They’ve made a mess of everything, just look what they have done with Eskom and the
SABC
and municipal government and everything. We have seven million illegal immigrants from all over Africa living off crime or welfare, and we have to pay for everything.’ James’s voice had risen an octave by the end of his speech.

‘Crime is the problem,’ Martin said. Martin was a brother-in-law who lived in Randburg and was a multi-millionaire businessman. ‘Without the crime, this country would be paradise.’

The conversation went on and on and De Villiers found that he had surprisingly little to contribute, and even more surprising, that he didn’t care. He waited for the opportunity to escape. When it came, he slipped away and joined the women in the kitchen. They were cooing around the latest addition to the family, a newborn girl.

‘What’s New Zealand like?’ Heloïse asked to draw him into the conversation. She had asked the same question in the car on the way from the airport.

De Villiers gave the same answer, choosing his words carefully. ‘Quiet,’ he said.

When he saw them looking at him, he relented. ‘It’s nice,’ he said.

He dug in his pocket and took three photographs from his wallet. The first showed Auckland from the north. It had been taken from the ferry dock at Stanley Bay. The women handed the photograph around with the comments coming thick and fast.
Beautiful. What’s that tall tower? Is this a river? Wow, it’s so wide.

‘No,’ De Villiers explained. ‘That’s part of the ocean. It reaches quite far in and the bridge over there links the North Shore to the main part of the city. What you see here is the Waitemata Harbour. We have a lot of Maori names for places, especially rivers and mountains.’

He handed the second photograph around. It was a view across Macleans Reserve towards the Tamaki Strait with Motuihe Island in the background. There were small yachts with white sails on the water. It had been taken on a day of clear skies.

‘That’s the view from our house,’ De Villiers said.

‘It looks like Plett, just like the view from our house in Plett,’ Heloïse said.

‘I thought it always rains there,’ Yolandi said before De Villiers could answer.

De Villiers became defensive and held the third photograph under his hand. ‘It’s not as bad as that. The Auckland weather is no worse than that of Cape Town, although it does get a bit colder.’

Heloïse snorted. ‘You could never do that here.’ She pointed at women with strollers on the cycle path in a park and some boys flying a kite. ‘You’d have to take a man or a very large dog with you. Haven’t you got a photograph of Emma and Zoë?’

De Villiers handed Heloïse the third photograph. It had been taken on Bucklands Beach. He remembered the day well. It was about a year earlier and they had gone for a picnic of fish and chips on a Friday afternoon. He had asked someone to take a photograph of the three of them. They stood laughing at the camera, De Villiers having pinched Zoë’s bottom. Zoë was missing some front teeth. De Villiers had his arm around Emma.

This time there was no comment as the photograph was passed from hand to hand. De Villiers sensed the question in Heloïse’s eyes –
How come we’ve never seen a photo of your wife and child before?
– but looked away.

Yolandi broke the ice. ‘But how can you cope without servants?’

De Villiers collected his photographs and pocketed them. ‘We have laundry services that fetch and deliver the washing and we have gardening services for the garden,’ he explained.

‘But what about the housework?’ they chorused.

‘We all chip in,’ he said. ‘We make our own beds. And we take an hour or so every Saturday morning to vacuum the whole house before we go out for breakfast.’

De Villiers sensed that they didn’t believe him. ‘Well, once a month we do a big clean-up. We move all the furniture away from the walls so we can vacuum behind them, we wipe all the flat surfaces down with an anti-bacterial spray cleaner and we clean the windows on the inside. We get a man with a sprayer and a ladder to do the outside once a month.

‘And that’s about it,’ he concluded, even as his memory of the constant battle against the wet and the mould and the mud gave his conscience a jolt. I’m being economical with the truth here, he scolded himself, but they would find it hard to visualise a situation where you had to run three dehumidifiers simultaneously at various points in the house just to keep it warm and dry, and where you had to take your muddy shoes off at the door when you visited someone. In fact, they wouldn’t even know what a dehumidifier looks like.

He must have smiled because Heloïse asked, ‘What’s so funny?’

‘No, that’s about it,’ De Villiers said.

‘Do you help with the housework?’ Heloïse asked. ‘You never did that here.’

‘Of course,’ he said. ‘I do the vacuuming and the windows. Emma does the wiping and washing and Zoë does the dishwasher, the loading after every meal and the packing away when it’s done.’

‘Jeez,’ Heloïse said. ‘Yolandi, you should go to New Zealand and find a husband there, otherwise you’re going to get one of those.’ She nodded towards the television lounge where the men had gathered to watch the rugby. ‘Slobs who sit on the couch and drink beer and comment on the rugby and politics and other things they know nothing about.’

The women’s laughter evoked a response from the lounge. ‘What’s going on there?’ James shouted. ‘Isn’t it time for coffee?’

Yolandi stuck her head into the lounge. ‘Hold up your hands those who want coffee.’

De Villiers couldn’t see into the television lounge, but Yolandi’s reaction said it all. ‘See, there’s nothing wrong with your hands,’ she said. ‘You can make your own coffee, and while you’re at it, you can vacuum behind the couch and wash the windows as well.’

The women’s laughter rose to near hysteria, waking the baby who started crying. She needed a nappy change. De Villiers took that as his cue to return to the men.

He spotted his brother emerging from the toilet.

‘André, I need to ask you something, please.’

‘Sure, go ahead, as long as it’s not money,’ André joked.

‘No, it’s about a place. A place called Swartwater,’ De Villiers said. ‘What I need to know is whether there is such a place and whether there is a shooting range with a baobab tree there.’

‘Oh, that’s easy,’ André replied. ‘I know the place. It’s about five kilometres from the Botswana border. Come. Let me show you on the map.’

De Villiers followed his brother out to a German 4×4. André pulled a road atlas from the leather clad glove box. ‘Here,’ he pointed at the name on page 42 of the atlas. ‘It’s almost exactly halfway between Maasstroom and Tom Burke. Martin and I go hunting in the area every winter. He has a game farm up there.’

‘Would you know if there’s an army camp within the grounds of a school?’ De Villiers asked.

‘I’ll have to call someone to ask,’ Andé de Villiers said. ‘Why do you need to know this?’ he asked.

‘It’s nothing,’ De Villiers lied. ‘It’s just a vague memory I have.’

‘I’ll make a phone call and let you know,’ André said. He looked at his watch. ‘Let’s go for a run. The game is about to start and I’ve set my machine to record it. We lose so often that I’d rather watch the game afterwards when I know the result.’

‘May I borrow this for a moment?’ De Villiers pointed at the road atlas.

‘Sure. Here, take it. Are you coming?’

De Villiers stood next to his brother. He was a head taller than his younger sibling. André was in his running shorts already. De Villiers wondered why he hadn’t noticed earlier. Perhaps a younger brother will always be a little brother, a boy in shorts. He suddenly recalled that they used to run together for a club, and that André had even entered the Comrades Marathon a few times.

‘Where are you going?’ he asked.

‘Once around the golf course, about six or seven kays.’

‘No, I’m too tired. Jet lagged.’

‘You look troubled,’ André observed.

‘I am.’

‘You’ve had this worried look for twenty years,’ André insisted. ‘The bush war fucked with your head.’

‘No,’ De Villiers insisted. ‘It wasn’t the bush. It’s what happened afterwards.’

André raised his voice. ‘I’d have killed those fuckers.’

De Villiers realised his brother was talking about the murder of Annelise, Marcel and Jeandré, but that wasn’t how De Villiers saw it. The messing with his mind had happened long before the murder of his wife and children, and Swartwater had been at the beginning of that.

‘Go and run,’ he said to his brother. ‘We can talk later.’

De Villiers went back into the house. He studied the road atlas while the men were exhorting their players and shouting at the referee. He turned the pages to look at southern Angola and scanned the page for Vila Nova Armada. His eye found familiar names.