The Afrikaner Read online

  She turns and there, a few steps from her, stands the shortest of men — no taller than a metre and a half. His dark olive skin is wrinkled and shrivelled like a walnut shell. Under the visor of a battered baseball cap, she makes out the slants of his eyes and, out of the shade, his slightly restrained, dignified smile.

  She jumps up to greet him.

  “Koma! Ek sien jou!”

  The old Bushman comes up to her with light steps and clasps her hands in his.

  “I see you too, Mejuffrou.”

  Startled by the dream-like apparition, she briefly looks past Koma, trying to figure out where he may have come from. All she can see is a boundless stretch of bare country.

  “Oom, what are you doing here?”

  “I visited friends living on a farm over there,” he says pointing to the east with his arm stretched out, the back of his hand facing up.

  Her memory brings her back to 1986.

  She is a graduate student spending the summer in Schmidtsdrift. The Army has chosen the nearby military base to relocate the Bushmen soldiers who fought in the frontier wars in Namibia. They have been brought here with their families, away from the public eye. There are about 4,000 of them, making it the largest San community left in Africa, and Zoe got permission to study their customs and way of life. On the very first day of her stay, the Base Captain introduces her to Koma, the !Kung shaman, one of the best trackers in the South African Army.

  “Still at the camp, Koma?”

  “Ja, too old to work on a plaas.”

  How old is he? Fifty, sixty? Even he couldn’t tell.

  “You might be too old to work on a farm, Oom, but you don’t seem too old to go on foot across the Karoo. When did you leave?”

  “Three days ago. It will take me another four days to be back,” he says as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

  “I can give you a ride.”

  “Nee. Walking is good. It has taken me back to the lost days, when I was a young hunter.”

  As he talks, Koma lets his eyes roam across the landscape.

  For a while, they share the stillness of the place, drawn by the same sense of wonder, the same urge of wandering. Eventually, with his gaze still fixed into the horizon, the old shaman says: “Your heart is aching.”

  She is taken aback. Startled by the oddness of their encounter, Zoe has momentarily forgotten the cause of her flight. She keeps quiet, looking down at the dust on her boots, forced back into reality. She is trying to answer but something is lodged in her throat.

  “The arrows of sorrow hit me hard this time,” she manages to say at last.

  Another long spell of silence. Zoe glances at the old man but can make out only his profile in the naked light of the veld.

  “At times, we need to be like the weed, which bends in the wind,” Koma eventually says.

  She sits back on her rock. There is no point in asking him to elaborate: The old shaman would look away, pretending not to have heard her. Besides, she doesn’t want to plead for clarity.

  She would rather hush her mind a little longer.

  Instinctively, she finds herself following the old man’s gaze, as the sun heads toward its daily death.

  After a long while she stands up and walks to the car. She pulls from her backpack three packages of biltong she bought for the trip and takes the bottle of water lying on the passenger seat; then goes back to Koma and hands him the dried meat and the water.

  “They will come in handy.”

  “Goed.”

  The old man slips the offerings in his knapsack.

  “Oom, how come our paths have crossed here, in the middle of a desert?”

  “The magic is in every moment of life, Mejuffrou. I thought you took note of this in the little book you used to carry everywhere.”

  Koma clasps her hands, then goes on his way without turning around.

  She watches him walk away, a small dark figure against a scarlet backdrop, the pace slow and measured. He is still wearing his old uniform, all patched and worn-out, and a pair of sandals made from truck tires.

  “Totsiens, Oom,” she finally says, still feeling the bushman’s dry and nervous strength around her wrists.

  She moves towards the car. The light is fast draining from the sky. If she sits tight, she will be in Bloemfontein before dark settles in.

  “Take a few days off, Zoe. Indeed, as many as you need.” Born out of genuine concern, Johan Kuyper’s tone of voice hadn’t left much space for objection. Her boss, the Director of the Bernard Price Institute for Palaeontological Research at the University of Witwatersrand, was right nonetheless: She would do better to go back home for a while, down to the Cape.

  So here she is, on the road home.

  The university will take care of everything, Kuyper assured her, including the red tape to repatriate Dario’s body. As much as she tries, she can’t stop seeing her lover’s parents at the airport being handed their son inside a coffin. But then, everything she does, touches or thinks inevitably brings her back to him, to what his death means.

  Just a few hours before the car rental agent delivered in front of her house in Johannesburg a white Golf GTX. She gasped: the same kind of car Dario had. It would mean driving for 1,400 kilometres with her lover’s ghost still in the driver’s seat. Her immediate reaction had been to call the car rental and ask for a different car. On second thought, though, she decided otherwise. Painful as it might be, she would rather drive picturing Dario’s hands laid on hers, holding gently to the steering wheel.

  She has left the city in an anguished rush. Johannesburg, to her, will never be the same again. It has given her so much, but has also taken away everything in one fell swoop. She has driven the first hundred kilometres in a state of semi-consciousness, as the landscape started undressing with phlegmatic composure. The further she went into it, the fewer houses, fewer hills, fewer trees, fewer people, fewer cars she encountered. And she hoped she could do the same, slowly stripping down to clean, desert air. On other occasions, when facing a crisis, she had been able to do “the trick,” as her brother calls it. She would leave behind everything — sorrows, worries, meanness. Till, in the end, what had seemed a raw pain, an unbearable angst, would dissolve in the dryness of the veld. The Karoo would drain her to the point of nothingness, until the suffering would disperse in the wind, along with her aching soul.

  But this time it’s different. What she thought were the figments of some female ancestor have proven to be real. Deadly real. The blights of a daunting past have caught up with her too.

  On impulse, terrified by her thoughts, she turns on the radio. What a mistake! The notes of a sad love song fill the car. All those memories, those moments of sweetness never to return. She slams the radio off. Too late. Grief seizes her. She begins to yell at the windshield, trying in vain to expel the beast. She presses on the gas pedal and rushes into the twilight. She keeps pushing, wildly, as her vision blurs and the road ahead becomes an ever-narrower strip of asphalt. All it would take is a slight swerve of the wheel. Then, it would all be over: the pain, the shame. Instead, she slows down, back to safety. And she hates herself: She has not the courage, not even now. She’s just a coward, a petty human being pitying herself instead of crying for her dead lover. It hurts, but she can’t deny the selfishness of her tears, of the question vexing her: Why go on living now? Dario has taught her to speak the language of seduction, look straight into the eyes of desire, fall in love. All this is gone. Forever lost. It will be a wasted life.

  A wasted body.

  2

  DEATH

  ZOE IS LYING in bed in her hotel room in Bloemfontein. Alone. In the dusk. Her eyes wide open, her mind racing back to events that happened less than 48 hours ago. But they might date back a week, a month, a year. She thrashes about in a blur of memories, moves, broken images where time seems to have collapsed onto itself.

  It’s early in the morning when Piet knocks on her lab’s door. He doesn’t wait for her
answer to enter, closing the door soundlessly behind him. At this time of the day, the room is bathed in light as the rays of a late spring sunshine filter in, caressing walls and objects with golden dust. She looks up and nods at her long-time friend and colleague, then examines for the umpteenth time what remains of the hominid skull in front of her as she is about to put in place a last fragment in its reconstructed cheekbone.

  An hour earlier, washing hastily in the restroom, she had pretended not to see her messy hair, the shadows under her eyes, the bare landscape of her cheeks and lips. Yet, she has never felt better. Besides, it’s a pivotal moment in her career: She is about to give shape again to Lady J, awakening her from her Palaeolithic sleep. Each element of their ancestor’s ossified identity contains a passage in human evolution and now her secrets, still hidden in the jaws and teeth worn down by use and time, will be gradually revealed in learned hypotheses. Were she able to speak, Lady J would tell them how, why and when humans rejected the kingdom of the apes to take on a long, uncharted journey, leading to the tragic awareness of infamy and death, but also to the uplifting sense of beauty and moral bravery.

  Glancing across at Piet again, Zoe notices a certain awkwardness in his manner. Nothing like his usual easy camaraderie. He stands still at the end of the table, as if in deep contemplation of what lies on it: a dozen hominid skulls, volumes on anatomy, microscopes, empty coffee cups, a bra, the remains of two takeaway pizzas.

  “What’s up, Piet?” she asks.

  At that, his large head with its permanently dishevelled fair hair jerks up, and the young man starts blurting out words in a confused manner:

  “You were keeping it secret, Zoe ... but just about everyone in the Department knew ... well ... you were seeing each other ... Dario ... he confided in me ... just a few days ago ... he was smitten with you ...”

  Still crouched over her fossil, she abruptly stops all that rambling with a simple question:

  “Was?”

  There is a long silence. Too long. She slowly looks up at him.

  Piet’s answer reaches her as if piercing the air through dense mist, past a thick forest — his voice low and hoarse, his chin almost touching his chest. “They killed him, Zoe. Last night, downtown. A hijacking.”

  She feels her lips close tightly, her limbs suddenly numb, as if the blood had instantly drained from them. Her eyes shift back down to the workbench. With incongruous calmness and a steady hand, she puts in place the final piece into Lady J’s skull. What an odd reaction for a woman who has just been told her man is dead: The thought flashes through her mind and stuns her with its brutality. Then, all at once, she feels dizzy, weak. She bends over leaning on the table for support. Piet hurries towards her, although with the circumspection he would use with a wounded animal. Moving from behind he helps her to stand and find comfort in his embrace. Despite her distress, she cannot help noticing the swift gesture with which her friend frees his right hand and pushes Lady J’s skull out of her way.

  Piet has insisted on giving her a lift home. She remains silent throughout the journey, blankly staring out of the car window. They drive through sleepy streets lined with umbrella-shaped jacarandas, the purple of their blooming already fading. As they turn into 7th Street in Melville, the bukinist, an old Ukrainian, recognizes Zoe and waves in greeting through his half-open door. She doesn’t respond.

  A few minutes later Piet brings the car to a stop in front of her house. He squints slightly, as short-sighted people do when they resist wearing glasses, then quickly walks around the car to open the door for her.

  “You know I’m not going to ask you in,” she says softly but firmly as she gets out.

  “You shouldn’t be left by yourself, not today.”

  She doesn’t reply. She briefly kisses his unshaven cheek and turns to open the gate, moving out of his line of vision.

  For a while she wanders around the house without purpose, seeing everything as if from an infinite distance; then she throws herself under the shower, gulps down two Rohypnol tablets and curls up on the couch.

  She is awakened a few hours later by the insistent ringing of the doorbell. When she opens the door, somewhat dazed, she is still in her bathrobe. Standing before her in the late afternoon light is a man in civilian clothes, the butt of a pistol sticking out from under his jacket.

  “Mejuffrow Zoe du Plessis? Detective Inspector Ian Klopper,” he quickly says in Afrikaans, showing his badge.

  “Yes, it’s me,” she answers in English. Afrikaans is the language of domestic intimacy and she doesn’t feel like speaking it with this man. English will place an invisible barrier between them.

  “May I come in?”

  The police officer has switched to English quite easily, quickly reading her silent intention. Like everyone else, he too has had to adjust to the times. In the new South Africa the language of the oppressor is no longer in fashion. She herself uses it only with her closest relations.

  The DI is a stout man with a reddish face, thick blond moustache and beer-drinker’s paunch. When he starts asking questions about her relationship with Dario, she averts her eyes.

  “How long had you been dating?”

  “About six months,” she says.

  Klopper has made no effort to avoid the accusatory tone in his voice. Nonetheless she can picture him exchanging comments with colleagues and friends at his next Sunday braai, as he busies himself turning steaks with the barbecue fork, drinking Castle from the can: “Serves her right, screwing a fokking uitlander, an Italian looking for his fifteen-minute South African thrill. What the guy was doing in the Central Business District at three in the morning anyway is beyond me. Did he want to see what has become of the city centre now that the kaffirs are in charge? Goed, now he knows. All these erudite liberal Europeans who come to teach us how to live in the new South Africa and are dying for a dinner in a shebeen in Soweto. Intercultural experiences, they call them. That’s one less to worry about.”

  “They told me at the Department that you stayed there working all night. When did Dr. Oldani leave?”

  “Around two o’clock, I believe. Two thirty perhaps,” she answers glancing at the stiff collar of his shirt cutting into his stubby neck. The too tight tie doesn’t help either.

  “What on earth was he doing in the CBD after dark?”

  Here we go, Zoe tells herself, knowing where this conversation will lead.

  “He was going home,” she replies. She presumes that by now the DI knows Dario lived in Rosettenville, to the south of the city centre, ‘among the Whites who didn’t make it,’ as he would often remark. “Driving through the CBD is the fastest route, as you well know.”

  “Answer me this, then: Did your colleague know the risk he was running by entering the city centre at that time of night?”

  He did, of course. Even the most liberal-minded colleagues at the Department seemed eager to remind him that with the changed political climate even this city “has gone African.”

  She pauses and, once again, sees the dark, empty streets, the tramps wandering about in the shadows, the red glow of the fires people would light in petrol drums to keep warm.

  “He liked gambling with his life, our professor,” Klopper says as he puts a finger inside his shirt collar and undoes the top button with an impatient gesture.

  These words, or perhaps the contemptuous tone in his voice, make her snap.

  “That’s preposterous, Inspector. Dr. Oldani wasn’t some sort of irresponsible fool. He was a scholar and this city fascinated him. He wanted to understand its historical wounds, its complexity.”

  Klopper doesn’t bother to repress a sneer.

  She suddenly falls quiet. How stupid of me. What is the purpose of such a pedantic tirade? Why bother trying to explain to this man Dario’s social theories on the dynamics of power, conflict, dispossession?

  The Detective Inspector watches her in silence, visibly disappointed. He knows she will never give him this satisfaction: She will never ac
knowledge the evidence of an attitude she too considers rash, excessively casual, presumptuously European. Yes, she feels betrayed by her lover — for not having understood Africa, for not realizing where he was, for having ruined her life as well as his own. She resents Dario’s behaviour since, with his negligence, he allowed fate to materialize. But she won’t admit it. Not to the man in front of her.

  Thus, she finally lowers her gaze and leaves to the police officer the pleasure of uttering the ritual words: “This is Africa, Miss.”

  True, this is Africa, and the worse things get, the more Klopper and his ilk may indulge their subequatorial cynicism.

  Klopper has taken his leave and Zoe is alone now, in the dusk. She goes back to the bathroom, her senses fully alert. She grabs the scissors and, strand after strand, lets her long red hair fall to the ground. In the silence, only the zack! zack! zack! of the blades accompanies the workings of her mind, as grief makes its way in. For the first time in her life, she allowed a man to love her without holding anything back. But this came at a price.

  Dario’s death wasn’t a mere accident. Now she knows.

  The sequence of the last dreadful events keeps playing in her head. Over and over. An ongoing flashback running on a morbid loop, which Zoe seems unable to stop. Unless sleep comes to her aid.

  3

  CANDLES IN THE NIGHT

  “ANDRÈ? IT’S ME, Zoe.”

  “Ousus, howzit?”

  The warmth of his voice has the sudden effect of a balm. Although she is the eldest, Zoe looks up to her brother. At thirty, and after having elegantly survived their troubled childhood, he runs the wine estate they inherited from their parents. His bemused and contagious enthusiasm has kept him afloat. No matter how hard life may hit him, he bounces back. She has never heard him bemoan his problems or rail — for that matter — against the country’s state of affairs — neither before, at the height of apartheid, nor now that Blacks are openly seeking retaliation and redressing the wrongs done to them by Whites. He seems to belong to an unending line of African fatalists — those feeling that “the hand of history” dictates the game, in spite of how each chooses to play it.