The Soldier who Said No (7 page)

He was wide awake and studied the equipment around his bed. There was a saline drip being fed into the vein in the crook of his left elbow. Another needle had been stuck into a vein on the back of his left hand. It was held down with surgical tape and there was a timer and a button connected to it. The device allowed De Villiers to give himself a dose of a morphine-based analgesic when the pain became too severe. He had used it sparingly, expecting worse. The needle hurt, continuously, an irritating sting in the back of his hand under the tape. On the right side of the bed two containers stood on the floor. The one was attached to a catheter and the other drained blood from below the operation scar.

He remembered the surgeon talking to him during his morning rounds. ‘It was a difficult operation. You are quite a stringy bird down there, all muscle and sinew. Are you a jogger?’ he had asked.

De Villiers had been too weak to answer.
I am a runner, not a jogger.

After the surgeon had completed his examination, he had said, ‘I’ll arrange for the catheter to be taken out. The technician will come over later in the day to see if you’re ready for that.’

He had given no explanation. After he had left, De Villiers lay there wondering what else they were going to heap on him. He drifted off in a morphine-enhanced dream.

When you dream the truth, it is bound to be a nightmare.

The soldier carefully circled the tree, the sole rain tree in an amber forest of mopane. He looked carefully for human footprints and leopard spoor before he sat down with his back against the tree trunk. The spitting bugs in the rain tree left spots on his uniform. In early autumn, the veld was a palette of greens, browns and yellows against a clear blue sky, a light blue which matched the soldier’s eyes. The land was flat and the bushy shrub and undergrowth limited visibility to less than forty or fifty paces in any direction. Here and there a tall tree towered proudly above all beneath it, its shade creating a haven of protection for smaller species of plants and hiding places for the wildlife of the bush. Swarms of insects buzzed in the shade, and soon the mosquitoes would be out in force.

The soldier pulled his legs up to his chest and stretched them out again before he arched his back. He was tired and thirsty, having been on the run for half the night in an effort to put as great a distance between him and those he knew would come for him. There was no moon and the low cloud cover produced an impenetrable darkness which could not be imagined in the city.

He was unarmed, except for a small multitool knife strapped to his ankle.

The soldier pulled a small, purpose-made mosquito net from his back pocket and fashioned it over his head and hands, using his floppy bush hat as a stay.

Then the soldier under the tree dreamed, a dream within a dream.

It took him to Pretoria, the city of his birth. He was in a car, with a smiling woman next to him, his wife, and a son and daughter in the seats behind them. He turned in his seat to remonstrate with the children because they had unclipped their seatbelts.

A white Hi-Ace minibus was parked at the side of the road.

The dream ended in a sequence of flashing images, like a black and white motion picture fading from the screen when the reel breaks.

A suburban gate.

Three men with
AK
47s.

Gunshots.

De Villiers woke with a start, confused by the smell of the bush in his nostrils and the sound of gunshots in his ears.

He looked around to see what had woken him. There was a man in the room. He had a black bag on the floor at his feet.

‘Good day,’ he said. ‘I’m the technician. I have a few little tests to do and then we’ll decide what to do with the catheter.’

De Villiers was too weak to speak. His throat was parched and the pain when he tried to sit up was unbearable. He clicked the morphine dispenser twice, the maximum dose he could give himself. Exhausted, he lay back against the pillows and watched the technician with his machine.

‘You’ll be mobile after this, I should think,’ the technician said.

Yeah right, De Villiers thought as the morphine eased him into another dream.

The technician woke him up before the dream had settled in his memory. ‘I need to speak to the surgeon. We won’t be taking the catheter out today. The join hasn’t healed sufficiently yet.’

De Villiers groaned. He wanted to get out of bed. ‘Okay,’ he conceded, ‘but could you call the nurse for me please?’

‘I’ll call her on the way out. I’ll see you again tomorrow and we’ll try again.’

The technician waved from the door and was gone.

De Villiers turned his head to the window and closed his eyes. When he woke again, he saw that it was a clear, sunny day.

‘You called?’ The nurse spoke behind him. She came and stood next to the bed. She pretended to hold his hand, but was looking at her watch. She was surreptitiously taking his pulse. Why can’t the medical profession be straight? De Villiers wondered to himself. Why can’t they tell it like it is?

‘What can I do for you?’

‘I would like to go for a walk,’ he told the nurse, ‘like that woman who walks up and down the corridor.’ De Villiers had seen an Indian woman, a patient in a garish pink nightgown, pacing to and fro past his door, carrying a plastic bag and pulling the stand with her drip behind her.

‘Oh, no problem. How many days since your operation?’

He closed his eyes and counted. The nights and days tend to fade into each other in hospital and he had to guess. ‘Four or five,’ he said.

The nurse looked at the chart at the foot of the bed. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Today is day three.’

He winced. It had felt much longer.

‘Don’t worry, I’ll talk to the sister and we’ll see what we can do.’

Ten minutes later the nurse was back. She held a plastic bag in her hand.

‘Do you want to go now?’ she asked.

‘Please.’

The nurse came to the side of the bed and picked up the containers from the floor. She put the two bottles in the plastic bag and lifted the tubes clear of the bedding. ‘Okay, if you take the bag, I’ll help you to your feet and then I’ll bring the drip around.’

De Villiers nodded and took the bag from her.

The nurse took his legs by the ankles and slowly swung them off the bed. She found his hospital slippers under the bed and slipped them onto his feet.

‘Let’s see if we can stand up, but let’s go slowly, okay?’

De Villiers pushed with his legs and felt his weight shifting from his buttocks to his legs. The wound where the surgeon had cut him open from navel to pubic bone was held together by stitches under surgical gauze but the pain in his lower abdomen was under control. He held on to the side of the bed.

‘Hold it like that, take it easy,’ the nurse said. She smelled of disinfectant.

She waited for him to recover. ‘Are we ready to stand on our own?’

‘I’m okay.’

‘Good, now stay like that while I get the drip.’ She wheeled the drip-stand with the morphine dispenser to the foot of the bed. With one hand on the stand and the other on his upper arm, she guided him to the door.

It was slow going, one small step at a time, holding on to the bed at first, but finding the confidence to let go. They emerged from the room like a pair of chameleons, in slow motion, with exaggerated movements of the limbs.

‘Hold it here,’ said the nurse. ‘We’ve forgotten our gown.’

De Villiers felt a breeze on his back where the surgical gown was open. He looked over his shoulder. The woman in the pink nightgown was behind him, her head inclined with the sympathetic smile of someone in the same predicament.

The nurse draped the gown over his shoulders. They walked slowly up and down the passage, followed by the Indian woman, a solemn procession of invalids, until De Villiers called for a break. He was surprised by his lack of energy. There was a time when I could walk all day, he reminded himself. I could run for an hour or more with a heavy pack on my shoulders and a rifle in my hand.

The nurse led him back to his bed.

De Villiers lay down. He had not slept well the previous night. Each time he felt like sleeping, a nurse would come in and ask him if he needed anything. He thought of his brother’s joke that a hospital was a place where they wake you up to ask if you are sleeping well.

The night had been clear and he could see the stars through the lace curtains. There would be a full moon on Christmas Eve, he calculated, and here he was connected to a series of containers and contraptions with rubber tubes.

The exertion had brought back the pain. With two clicks of morphine De Villiers dispatched it and launched himself into a dreamless sleep.

They woke him early in the morning to ask him to sign the consent – an
informed
consent – form, warning of the dire consequences of Hepatitis C and
HIV
– to receive a blood transfusion. ‘You need two pints of blood,’ the nurse said, pointing at the level of blood in the drainage container on the floor.

A-negative, the drop of blood obtained by a sharp prick to his finger revealed.

I could have told you that, he said to himself. It’s on my dog tags. But the dog tags were in a drawer at home.

‘We’ll send for the blood right away,’ said the sister in charge as she opened the curtains, ‘but it won’t be here for another hour or so. So try to get some sleep, okay?’ He thought he heard a trace of the Cape Flats in her voice.

The small television screen behind her took De Villiers back to the past with a familiar face, that of Robert Mugabe. A white family was being evicted from their farm. A crying woman held her baby close to her chest. Two boys hid behind their father. Some farm workers looked on, their meagre possessions wrapped in sheets. Mugabe supporters stood waiting for their share of the spoils. They celebrated in anticipation, waving rifles in the air.

The taste of bile rose in De Villiers’s throat.

In the breeze the curtains whispered against the Venetian blinds: Why me? Why me?

A red tunic under a mop of blond hair flashed across the screen of his mind. He closed his eyes and drew the curtains of sleep across the image.

From the breakfast nook separating her kitchen from the television lounge, Emma de Villiers watched them park their car across the street. She had seen them drive past, checking the street number on the letter box before they turned at the roundabout near the school and came back. The two policemen stood looking out to sea across Macleans Reserve to the islands of the Hauraki Gulf in the distance, from Rangitoto, almost due north, in a sweep to the east, first Browns Island in the foreground, then Motutapu and Motuihe and the western corner of Waiheke.

Rangitoto means Red Sky she had been told, so named by the Maori who had witnessed its eruption when it rose up from the sea like a flame-spitting monster to dominate the Auckland landscape. In the blue of the gulf the Waiheke ferry was speeding towards Musick Point.

She watched as they came to her door, marching as if they owned the place. When they knocked a second time, she opened the door.

‘Yes?’

‘I am Detective Inspector Henderson and this is Detective Sergeant Kupenga. May we speak to your partner, please?’

‘I don’t have a partner.’

The two policemen looked at each other.

Henderson tried again. ‘May we speak to Detective de Villiers, please?’

‘He’s not here.’

‘His car is here. We saw it,’ Kupenga said.

‘I said he isn’t here,’ she said, holding the door.

‘May we come in?’ Henderson enquired politely.

‘No.’

Henderson was not used to being opposed and his annoyance was beginning to show. ‘Why not?’

‘You didn’t say please, and once you are inside my house, I’d have to be polite.’

They didn’t know what to make of the answer.

Henderson tried another angle. ‘May we leave a message for him, please?’

After a pause, she nodded.

‘Please ask him to contact me urgently. He knows my number.’

She shook her head. ‘No, I’m not going to give him that message.’

‘Well, why not? He works for me, you know.’ The irritation was now evident in every word Henderson spoke.

Emma de Villiers stood her ground. ‘
You
insulted him,’ she inclined her head towards Kupenga, ‘and
you
suspended him without any reason,’ she said, pointing at Henderson. ‘I told you, he’s not here.’

Henderson tried again. ‘Do you know where he is or how we can get hold of him?’

‘I do, but I’m not going to tell you. He no longer works for you. Please leave.’

She tried to close the door, but Kupenga put his weight behind his hand on the door and pushed. Emma de Villiers stumbled backwards and lost her grip on the door handle. The door swung wide open and slammed against the wall. For a moment it looked as if she was going to fall over and Henderson pushed past Kupenga to steady her, but she regained her balance at the last moment. Henderson stopped in mid-motion, his arm outstretched towards her.

‘Are you going to beat me up too, then?’ she asked.

Before they could speak, she turned on her heel and walked deeper into the house, leaving the detectives at the door.

They didn’t follow her, but closed the door behind them and walked slowly to their car.

Clouds were coming in from the Pacific and the wind was picking up. The tide was low and the Waiheke Ferry had not yet reached Musick Point when they got to the car.

They looked back at the house. They could see her at her kitchen nook. She had her head on her arms on the counter.

‘Jesus, Boss, what was that about?’ Kupenga asked. ‘Surely that wasn’t enough to make her cry?’

They stood on either side of their car and looked back towards the city. Mount Wellington was prominent in the foreground with One Tree Hill and the Waitakeres in the background. The highrises of the city, dwarfed beneath the Sky Tower, basked in direct sunlight. Henderson turned northwards as he took in the sights. The North Shore was visible in the haze behind Rangitoto. He unlocked the car and they got in.