The Soldier who Said No (29 page)

From there to the city centre there was only more chaos, more dirt, more malfunctioning traffic lights and more people. West Street had been renamed too, he found. The people around him were speaking languages he had never heard before.

Pretoria had been clean and tidy, well run, but Durban was a mess.

Johann Weber was in consultation when De Villiers arrived at his chambers, but his secretary had the keys to the Porsche and offered them to De Villiers when he explained that he had to go to Westville Hospital. ‘Johann will be busy for a while and he asked me to fetch you. He won’t mind if you drive it to Westville. If you’re back by one o’clock, I’m sure he’d want you to have lunch with him.’

‘Thanks. I’ll try to be back by then.’

De Villiers joined the motorists fighting for space in a lane, crawling through intersections. He had to stop for the light at the beginning of the Eilat Viaduct and watched as a taxi driver on the other side of the intersection urinated into the street while talking on his cellphone. In Weber’s Porsche a hundred and twenty kilometres an hour felt slow, but De Villiers tried to stick to the speed limit as overloaded minibuses and small cars overtook him. Everyone seemed to be doing a hundred and forty, he realised. He had to muscle his way across several lanes when the sign for the Westville Hospital came up.

At the hospital each of the car guards had his own turf, a section of the several parking lots, and they directed De Villiers right to the back of the hospital, where he found Hamish McKerron’s rooms. De Villiers had to fill out forms for the third time, name, addresses, phone details, next of kin, the whole catastrophe. The lines from a Donovan song from a 1960s album sprang to mind:

Personnel man he questioned me until I nearly cried,
About the colour of my toilet rolls and if my cousin was queer
.

A fellow recruit had sung it incessantly during the selection process when they were being weighed, assessed and tested for admission to training as Special Forces operatives.

Another time, another place, De Villiers thought as he signed his name at the foot of the form.

McKerron was businesslike. ‘I want you to know from the outset that your life is not in danger. If anything, the fact that a sliver of prostate has been left behind is good news compared to the situation we would have had if there had been
PSA
without it, because that would have meant that the cancer had spread.’

‘How long do I need to stay?’ De Villiers asked. ‘I was planning to go home next week.’

McKerron shook his head. ‘I don’t think that’s going to be possible, unless we do the diagnosis here and you go back there for the treatment.’

‘What treatment do you have in mind?’

McKerron spoke slowly, in pace with the notes he made in the file.

First, colorectal
MRI
to check where prostate tissue and possible

cancer cells are

Then bone density scan – to make sure cancer hasn’t spread –

this type of cancer spreads to bones

Blood results will be available tomorrow

Full assessment of all the results by a team – Dr MacDonald,

the radiologist and McKerron – then decide

If there are cancer cells – probably radiation therapy as

prescribed by Dr MacDonald – 7 to 8 weeks

Surgery not an option

McKerron walked De Villiers back to the reception desk. De Villiers gave the receptionist his army medical aid number.

It was a depressing drive back to Weber’s chambers. De Villiers waited at Reception for him to emerge from his consultation. They spoke little at lunch in a coffee shop at the Royal Hotel after De Villiers had told him the details of the morning’s meetings with the doctors.

‘There’s going to be no argument about this,’ Weber said. ‘You’re going to stay with us for the duration. Besides, Liesl will excommunicate me if I don’t invite you to stay with us,’ Weber added, sealing the offer.

This time the medical profession turned some serious heat on the cancer cells in De Villiers’s body.

First they sent De Villiers for a colorectal scan. He endured the hour-long ordeal with stoic calm which belied the turmoil he felt while the magnetic pulses coursed through every cell in range of the machine’s magnets. The machine rearranged the alignment of the cells and a computer did the rest, marking the cancer cells in red. Red is for danger. Red was where the cancer was.

When De Villiers came out of the room, he was sweating. He wasn’t claustrophobic, but the
MRI
scanner had frightened him with its groaning. Under strict instructions not to move, he had had to make a very deliberate effort not to slide out of the machine and call for his clothes. He kept wondering why, if the machine was as harmless as they had said, there was no one in the room with him. He had been told he would be in the machine for half an hour, but it had felt much longer, and when they eventually came in to release him, he could see on their clock that it had been more than an hour. In the room next to the machine, they showed him on the computer screen where the cancer cells were, near the base of the bladder on the left-hand side.

De Villiers was about to ask if he could leave but they told him to put on his clothes and wait in another room for the next batch of tests.

He tried not to think of the consequences of the spots on the computer screen and fell asleep while they were doing a full-body bone scan.

They woke him up to tell him that there was no sign of cancer in his bones. Good news for Pierre de Villiers, but bad news for the cancer. It meant that the cancer was confined to a small area, the size of a pea, they explained. De Villiers had spent the hour in the
MRI
scanner hatching plans.

Even in his sleep he was planning his revenge.

But there was a lot of work to do. He had to find the owner of the arrow.

At the oncology centre they assigned a radiographer who looked no older than eighteen to see him through all his treatments. ‘Hello, I’m Marissa,’ she introduced herself. ‘I’m afraid you are going to have to take off all your clothes and lie face up on the gurney.’ She closed the door behind her and handed De Villiers a flimsy hospital gown.

Marissa made small talk while De Villiers undressed. ‘Is that your car?’ she asked.

‘No,’ De Villiers mumbled, his back turned to her. ‘It’s my brotherin-law’s.’

‘I’d like to look at the engine when we’ve finished, if you don’t mind,’ Marissa said.

‘What do you want to see?’ De Villiers asked as he turned around, holding the gown in front of his torso.

Completely unabashed and with no lip service to preserve his modesty, Marissa took the gown from him and draped it around his shoulders. ‘Face up, please.’ She pointed at the gurney.

‘I’ve always wondered what a Porsche engine looks like,’ she chatted as she smoothed the sheet. ‘All my life my father and my brother have been building Beach Buggies and they always say a Porsche is just a souped-up
VW
. So I want to see.’

De Villiers hesitated at the gurney. ‘Feet this side,’ she ordered.

Marissa studied his chart and placed it on the gurney next to De Villiers. ‘I think we can cover you up to here,’ she said and drew a sheet up to his pubic bone. ‘I need to draw the lines where the radiation machine will direct the rays and then I have to prepare a shield so that the rays don’t stray outside that area.’

De Villiers couldn’t think of anything to say.

Marissa fiddled with the machinery against the wall and inserted what looked like a large photographic plate into a slot. She turned to the gurney and turned the machine on. An image appeared on De Villiers’s lower abdomen. ‘I’m going to put indelible markings here and here so that every day when you come in we can aim the machine right on the spot,’ she said, tracing the lines with a fingernail.

She scuttled between the controls against the wall and the gurney. De Villiers thought of !Xau while her light fingers drew the lines in indelible violet. ‘The machine is going to burn this hair off,’ Marissa added. ‘But you don’t need to worry about that.’

He felt able to look Marissa in the eye again when he was dressed and they were standing at the reception desk. ‘I’ll take a morning slot,’ he said when she showed him the daily schedule.

‘Okay, nine-fifteen every morning, starting Monday.’ She wrote his name against the time slot on the chart. ‘I’ll walk with you to the car.’

The Porsche stood right in front of the steps. De Villiers unlocked the car but couldn’t work out how to open the engine compartment. ‘How do I open it?’ he asked Marissa.

‘There’s got to be a bonnet release somewhere.’ She leaned into the car but came out shaking her head. ‘Maybe there’s something on the other side. They build these for left-hand drive and don’t always convert everything for right-hand drive.’

She found the release mechanism in the passenger door wall on the left side of the car. The hood at the rear popped open. They stood looking at the engine. None of what De Villiers could see made any sense to him. The whole engine appeared to be hidden from view by an assortment of air intakes and manifolds.

‘Just as they said,’ Marissa said. ‘Just a souped-up Volkswagen.’

De Villiers had no idea what she meant or how she could see.

‘Thanks, see you Monday,’ she said from the steps.

The power under his right foot told De Villiers that she was wrong. This car was no Volkswagen.

In the second week of treatment the middle fingers on both De Villiers’s hands swelled up and were so painful that he had had trouble dressing. The drive to the oncology centre was an ordeal. The Porsche might be a nice car, but its six-speed gearbox was stiff and the urban traffic required frequent gearshifts. When he asked if the radiation therapy might be responsible for the gout, Marissa called the senior radiographer who told him that it was impossible and offered him a prescription for anti-inflammatories.

Liesl found him on a cast-aluminium bench in the garden, a picture of dejection, his elbows on his knees, his face cupped in his hands, his middle fingers held proud of the others. She sat down next to him and put her arm around him.

‘Oh, Pierre,’ she said. ‘I’m so sorry. You can talk to me. You don’t have to do this on your own, you know.’ She stood up. ‘I’m going to make some tea and then I want you to come in and talk to me. You haven’t said anything about yourself from the time you arrived.’

De Villiers watched as she walked back to the house and wondered how much he could tell her. He had been taught to be self-reliant, but now he felt helpless, with no idea what to do or what to believe. He didn’t know whether talking would help, but when he heard the whistle of the kettle, he joined Liesl in the kitchen.

A troop of monkeys arrived and sat on the garden wall, waiting for an opportunity to steal something.

‘Rooibos, black, one sugar,’ Liesl Weber said as she picked up the tray. ‘Let’s go back to the garden. It’s much nicer there,’ she suggested.

De Villiers thought of offering to take the tray from her, but he remembered his hands. Liesl was using her best china with silver spoons and cake forks. He followed as she carried the tray out into the garden.

‘Start at the beginning,’ she ordered as she poured the tea. She held his cup out to him, but De Villiers was unable to take it from her.

‘Look at my fingers,’ he said. ‘I’ve never had gout before.’ He left unsaid the thought that he was disintegrating physically, had endured years of doubt about his memory, and that soon he would be an invalid unable to take care of himself.

She put the cup back on the tray and gently took his hand in hers. ‘How did this happen?’ she asked. ‘It’s not as if you’ve been drinking with Johann. All that cabernet can’t be good for anyone.’

‘No,’ De Villiers protested. ‘I haven’t touched the stuff since I started the radiation.’

He held his hand for her to see.

‘Is it that bad?’ she asked. Not waiting for an answer she asked, ‘What do they say at the oncology centre?’

‘They say it can’t be their machine. I must have a predisposition. It could run in my family, they say.’

‘Well, it wasn’t my cooking, for sure,’ Liesl said with a smile. ‘Too many people have eaten my food and none of them came down with gout, I can tell you.’

De Villiers smiled with her.

‘Tell you what,’ she said. ‘I have some shopping to do at Gateway. Come with me and we could ask the pharmacist there to give you something that is gout specific.’

He nodded.

‘Drink your tea,’ she ordered. ‘But don’t drop the cup, eh!’

De Villiers managed to hold the cup between his palms.

‘Now tell me what’s really troubling you.’ Liesl was relentless.

De Villiers wondered how much he could tell her. Previously he had not told anybody other than the psychiatrist assigned to him for fear of being labelled paranoid, but that was nearly twenty years ago. He hadn’t told Emma. Even a sanitised version of his actions in Angola could put a strain on their relationship.

When he started talking, it came out in a flood, as it would on a psychiatrist’s couch, a steady stream of information, things that had dwelt on the borderline between his conscious and unconscious mind. Some parts, he suspected, were memories of dreams; others he was sure were true.

‘It started with an operation in Angola in 1985.’

De Villiers travelled back and forth through time as he recounted the events. ‘I need to know, one way or the other, whether what I believe happened to me is true or not,’ he concluded. ‘Then I would know how to look at myself and what to do in the future when I have these thoughts and dreams.’

They sat looking at each other for a while before Liesl stood up abruptly and started putting the cups onto the tray. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘We still have to get to Gateway.’

In the car she made De Villiers an offer. ‘I’ll tell you what,’ she began. ‘I‘ve been thinking. I’ll help you look for the Bushman …’

‘!Xau,’ De Villiers said with slow and deliberate pronunciation. He clicked his tongue against the roof of his palate, right at the back.
Tko-au.