The Soldier who Said No (27 page)

Okavango
.

Rundu
was clearly marked, and across the river a short distance away was
Calai
, a small village with an airstrip. He and !Xau had avoided Calai for fear of capture by
FAPLA
.

To the east, where he and !Xau had crossed the river, his finger found
Dirico. Protected Public Reserve of Mucusso. Protected Public Reserve of Luengué.

De Villiers forced his eyes upwards, north, but didn’t recognise the names.

Rito
he remembered, but he’d never been to that town. His recollection was that he had skirted Rito.

He held his breath as his eyes sought
Vila Nova Armada
just below the confluence of the Longa and Cuito Rivers.

Nankova.

He looked again. There was a place called Nankova where Vila Nova Armada ought to have been.

After two months and daily meetings with Professor Nienaber, De Villiers was finally discharged from Weskoppies.

They stuffed his backpack into his hands and gave him an envelope with a prescription for more of Professor Nienaber’s drugs and a list of appointments with the professor. When he checked the contents of his backpack, !Xau’s Best was in one of the side pockets and the staves of his bow were safely ensconced in the straps. The overall they had given him at Rundu was there. What De Villiers saw in his hands was at odds with the memory he now had. When he arrived at home – with someone he now knew to be his wife and was beginning to recognise – he put the backpack in a cupboard and forgot about its existence. His mind was like a jigsaw puzzle with half the pieces missing.

The recovery of his memory took time and came in leaps rather than small steps, leaving him confused for weeks and even months at a time. De Villiers tried his best to make sense of everything by asking guarded questions, observing from a quiet corner during family gatherings or visits to friends, and taking in the sounds and smells of places that once must have been familiar to him. Smells found the quickest route to the gaps in his memory and restored it bit by bit. The smell of boerewors at a braai, the pungency of a dirty nappy, the cleaning oil for his pistol. Once, during a visit to the living quarters at Donkergat to retrieve his gear, the smells of the Atlantic Ocean and the steel deck of a naval strike craft had combined to settle large sections of his memory of training exercises and the men who accompanied him on them. When he had cleared his room, he felt compelled to look into the one across the passage and was strangely disappointed when there was no sign that it had ever been occupied. He turned away, not knowing why he had looked into that particular room.

The process would take years, and he would never again take any memory for granted, always looking for corroboration. Every second week Professor Nienaber would probe and make suggestions, keeping a close watch on his patient for his masters and making sure that De Villiers would not recover those events which could embarrass the men of the third force.

It had been Professor Nienaber who suggested that De Villiers receive equal amounts of physio-and psychotherapy. The psychotherapy the professor provided during the sessions at his university rooms and included hypnotherapy and the administration of psychotropic drugs. The physiotherapy was combined with a fitness programme of which road running was the main component. De Villiers joined a club and ran six kilometres four times a week.

The running helped to clear his mind. He was convinced of that.

De Villiers was slowly reintegrated into his family and social life. He spent the next six years on sick leave, with full pay, moping around at home when he was not seeing Nienaber or out on the road running. When he thought he was fit again, he volunteered for operations. They gave him simple tasks, scouting enemy safe houses in neighbouring countries or escorting strike units to their targets, but he soon sensed that his superiors no longer trusted him, especially after one operation had gone badly wrong and they bombed the wrong house.

When he refused to obey yet another order, this time during a naval operation in Durban, his unit stopped communicating with him.

He became a soldier without a unit.

At half-time André de Villiers arrived back from his run and stood sweating on the veranda. De Villiers could see his brother pacing as he spoke on his cellphone. He looked up in anticipation when André came into the lounge.

‘Yes, there’s a shooting range and there’s a large baobab tree at the one end. But there’s no army camp at the school.’ When André de Villiers noticed the disappointment on his brother’s face, he added, ‘But the guy I spoke to said that there used to be an encampment of soldiers at the school in the eighties.’

De Villiers nodded his thanks, not trusting his voice.

‘I want to show you something,’ André said.

De Villiers followed him to his car. André opened the tailgate of the 4×4. ‘Come and have a look.’

There was a large machine on a wooden sled in the back of the 4×4. The back seats had been folded down to make way for it. ‘What is it?’ De Villiers asked.

‘It’s a power generator,’ André said. ‘It cost me fifteen thousand.’

The generator looked rather large for André’s annual trips to the game reserves in Botswana and De Villiers had to ask, ‘What are you going to do with it?’

His brother sighed. ‘I was at a seminar last week and one of the chaps there said he had heard that Eskom was going to start rationing electricity next month because they had run out of capacity. So the idea is to get a generator before the prices go up.’

It didn’t make sense to De Villiers. The last he had heard, Eskom was supplying electricity to countries as far as the equator. Before he could comment, the men called André back to the lounge. ‘The second half has started!’

‘Even Eskom workers are buying generators now, Pierre,’ André said over his shoulder as he made his way back to the lounge.

Pierre de Villiers stayed on the veranda.

The match ended and De Villiers gravitated back to the men in the television lounge. The post-match interviews analysed individual performances and the coach’s tactics. The whingeing rose in tone and so did the level of swearing when the team’s position on the Super 14 log came up on the screen.

De Villiers slipped away to the lounge and sat next to his mother. Her eyes were closed, but he wasn’t sure that she was asleep. She had been very quiet when she had come to visit him at 1 Mil all those years ago.

‘He’s dead,’ she had said, looking at the tubes connecting him to the machines behind him. Against the wall the bellows of the ventilator rose and fell, and pulse, blood-pressure, oxygen saturation and the respiratory pattern read-outs appeared on a computer screen. ‘My son is dead,’ she had said as she turned away from his bed.

Now, holding her hand as he sat next to her on the couch, De Villiers had to wonder if the seeds of revenge had not been planted in his subconscious on that occasion already by the distress in his mother’s voice.

I was helpless then, he said to himself. But not any more.

The next morning De Villiers rose well before seven. The house was quiet. He made coffee in the kitchen. The sun was up and the air outside crisp but cold. There was a light breeze from the south. He noticed it in the lean of the tall grass on the rough of the sixteenth fairway. He decided to walk around the golf course and set off, hands in his pockets. An
SAA
flight came in from the north, probably from London, he surmised, gliding almost noiselessly towards the airport.

There were very few golfers around at the start of his walk, but he crossed the sixteenth fairway quickly anyway. Guinea fowl huddled together under a thorn tree to catch the first warming rays of the sun. He stood looking at them for a while, stupid birds chasing each other in circles, and returned to the house for his camera. Zoë would never believe him unless he produced proof. He started again and walked up the hillside, following the cement path laid alongside the fairways. He crossed the Apies River. There was a light layer of dust on the leaves and fresh dew on the grass. Crowned plovers hovered near the path and screamed at him. De Villiers suspected that their nest was nearby. He took a photograph and walked on. Smaller birds twittered their way through the small branches of trees and shrubs. The place was slowly coming to life.

De Villiers strode purposefully up the hill. The golf course was immaculate. There were
out-of-bounds take-a-drop
indigenous areas designated as such, at the direction of the town planners he assumed. Even the roughs were not really rough. It would be hard to lose a ball here.

The higher De Villiers ventured into the estate, the larger the houses appeared to be. At the top of the hill, where the golf course petered out, there were palaces on either side of the road, some four storeys high with garages set well back for a minimum of four cars, and in some for as many as six with parking for double that number in the forecourts. He started counting houses but gave up when he saw they were all numbered. House 1103 was a brown stucco house like his own in New Zealand. De Villiers estimated that the footprint of his house and garden was no larger than that of the garage of house 1103. In the fable of the three little piggies, the house on Macleans Road was made of straw, while these houses were made of stone. Many were wrapped in the additional protection of two-metre-high concrete walls. With the security at the gate, a three-metre-high wall with another metre of electric fencing on top, this was a fortress of formidable proportions, enough to give De Villiers claustrophobia. Here keeping up with the Joneses seemed obligatory. In the midst of this wealth, the owners of the ostentatious palaces still fast asleep, De Villiers continued his hike through their domain.

On the way down the hill, De Villiers encountered the first gardeners. ‘Morning, Boss,’ one said politely. Water sprinklers sprayed water on lush lawns and flowerbeds. English roses and African aloes and protea stood side by side along the boundaries of adjoining properties that also fielded many different indigenous trees. Paperbark acacia, sweet thorn acacia, yellow fever acacia, white thorn, river bushwillow, wild olive, water berry, white stinkwood.

There were many more guinea fowl. De Villiers remembered once trapping and eating one. A one-legged member of the flock strained to keep up with the others. He encountered more crowned plovers, a single crested woodpecker, three thick-knees standing under a tree with their owl-like faces and yellow legs, hoopoes, wagtails, bearded finches twittering in the shrubs, doves and pigeons everywhere. Sacred ibis poked their beaks into cricket holes. Two Egyptian geese waddled across the fairway from opposite sides and met in the middle, dancing in an elaborate mating ritual that said, hello, I love you and I missed you.

The geese announced the flight of a red-tailed Virgin aircraft across the clear blue sky. In the last rocky outcrop before his sister’s house, De Villiers found that the reptiles had also come out to sun themselves on the rocks. There were several varieties of lizard and against the sunny side of a thorn tree a blue-headed agama shuffled towards the safe side of the trunk as it warily eyed De Villiers’s efforts to take a photo.

When he neared the tee for the first hole, De Villiers was forced to stop to allow a foursome to play their tee shot. A clutch of caddies formed the advance party and one joined De Villiers on the path next to the fairway.

‘Re a lotša,’ De Villiers heard himself say in Sepedi, the language of his childhood friends.
I greet you.

‘Le kae?’ came the response, a little surprised.
How are you?

‘Ke gona, lena le kae?’ De Villiers confirmed.
It’s going well. How are you?

‘Re tsogile,’ the caddie answered.
I have risen.

The caddie rushed off to locate a ball sent into the rough by a stray drive and De Villiers crossed the river. He stopped in front of the house and reviewed the photographs he had taken before he went in for more coffee. The walk had done him good. His muscles felt smooth and he had not thought about his cancer once.

When the offices at the military archives opened on the Monday morning, De Villiers was already waiting at the door. He was shown to a waiting area and eventually a polite young clerk came out to help him.

‘I’m trying to trace a soldier by the name of !Xau,’ De Villiers explained. He was asked to spell the name but did not know how to render the Bushman clicks and sounds. They tried a number of variations.
Tkau. Tikau. Kau. TeeKau.

But there was no record of !Xau.

When De Villiers asked for access to the records of Angolan operations during May 1985, the clerk called for his supervisor.

A large woman with an elaborate Afro hairstyle wearing a uniform came in. ‘Are you the one asking for records of the war in Angola?’

‘Yes, Captain.’

‘Are you military?’

‘No, Captain, civilian,’ De Villiers answered.

‘Then how do you know my rank?’ the officer demanded.

‘My mother taught me always to be respectful to a person in uniform.’ He smiled, wondering why he was being so obsequious. It was another of his mother’s wisdoms, to bow and scrape to public officials. The lower the rank, the deeper you bow.

She must have read his thoughts. ‘Well, that’s not going to work this time because the apartheid security apparatus has destroyed the records you’re looking for.’

‘Could you tell me in which section General van den Bergh served?’ he asked. ‘I think he is retired now, but he was previously in Military Intelligence.’

She motioned to the clerk. ‘See what you can find on the computer.’

But the search was in vain.

De Villiers thanked the clerk and left. He would have to contact some of his former colleagues and acquaintances in the apartheid security apparatus, he thought.

But they were of no assistance. Those he could trace refused to talk or feigned ignorance. There’s no such general, they said, as if schooled to speak with one voice. And how are you these days? Really? Disbelief was right on the surface of every question.