Blood Safari

33

I was up at twenty to five.

I didn’t stop to think. I didn’t stop to wash. I took my things and crept out like a coward while she slept deeply under the starry Indian heaven. I walked to the Audi and opened the door quietly, tossed in my bag and drove away.

The sun came up beyond Hazyview, the first day of the New Year.

I stopped at a garage and used the restroom. I could smell her on me when I opened my fly to urinate. I washed my member in the basin with sweet-smelling pink liquid soap. I shaved, brushed my teeth and washed my face, but I didn’t feel clean.

I drove to the hospital where Emma lay. I thought about what I must do, but my brain followed other paths.

I lay on top of and inside her and in the searing heat of the moment I said ‘Sasha’ and something changed in her face, a fleeting moment of intense joy, as if she had been discovered, like an island in the ocean.

She had been seen.

‘Yes!’ she answered with glowing green eyes.

I remembered the first time someone saw me.

It was during my first year as a bodyguard, for the Minister of Transport. It was a summer morning on his farm. I was preparing to go jogging on the dirt tracks between the cornfields. He came out of the homestead with a wide-brimmed hat and a walking stick.

‘Walk with me, Lemmer,’ he said, and we walked in silence up the koppie from where he could survey his whole property.

He was a smoker. He sat on top of a big rock, lit his pipe slowly and said, ‘Where do you come from?’ I gave him a broad outline, but he wasn’t satisfied. He had a way with people. He made me open up, so that eventually, while the sun came up behind our backs, I told him everything. About my father and mother and the Seapoint years. When I had finished he thought for a long time. Then he said, ‘You are this land.’

Twenty years old, still wet behind the ears, I said, ‘Sir?’

‘Do you know what made this land what it is?’

‘No, sir?’

‘The Afrikaner and the Englishman. You are both of them.’

I didn’t answer. He gazed into the distance and said, ‘But you have choices, son.’

Son.

‘I don’t know if this country has any more choices. The Afrikaner’s claustrophobia and aggression and the slyness of the Englishman; these things have brought us to this. It doesn’t work in Africa.’

I was dumbstruck. He was a member of the National Party cabinet.

He knocked his pipe out against the stone and said to me, ‘Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu. Do you know what that means?’

‘No, sir.’

‘It’s Zulu. It’s where the word “ubuntu” comes from. It means many things. We can only be human through other humans. We are part of a whole, of a greater group. Inextricably. The group is the individual. It means we are never alone, but it also means damage to another is damage to you. It means sympathy, respect, brotherly love, compassion and empathy.’

He looked at me through his thick glasses and said, ‘That is what the white man in Africa must search for. If he doesn’t find it, he will forever be a stranger in this land.’

I was too young and stupid to understand what he was telling me. And I never got the opportunity to ask him about it, because he shot himself, on that same koppie, to save his family the trauma of his terminal disease. But I thought about it over the years. I studied myself and other people, remembered, questioned. I developed the talent to watch their appearance and actions for threatening behaviour, but also to guess their life stories and ask myself: ‘How am I human through them?’ I wondered about my inability to be part of a whole. The community is a primitive organism with a selectively permeable membrane and I could not be selected, my shape didn’t fit.

Later, when I had more perspective, I wished I could talk to the minister on the koppie again. Tell him Africa was the source of ubuntu, that was true. In the eyes of many people I saw the softness, the sympathy, the goodwill, the great desire for peace and love.

But the continent had another side, yang to the yin of ubuntu. It was a breeding ground of violence. I wanted to tell him that I could recognise in others the type of man I had become, thanks to my genes and my father’s relentless instruction. That absence in the eyes, like something dead inside, of the man who no longer cares about feeling pain and experiences a certain pressure to dish it out, to hurt others.

And nowhere did I see it more frequently than in Africa. In my travels with the National Party and ANC ministers I saw the world – Europe, the Middle and Far East, and my home continent. And here in the cradle of mankind, in the eyes of politicians and dictators, policemen, soldiers and bodyguards and eventually fellow jailbirds, I recognised the majority of my blood brothers. In the Congo and Nigeria, Mozambique and Zimbabwe, Angola and Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania and Brandvlei Prison. People forged by violence who spread it around like a gospel.

Sometimes I felt a deep desire to be different. To belong to the brotherhood of respect, compassion and sympathy, the astonishing support and selflessness. It was the genetic echo of my forebears who left Africa too many aeons ago, the signal was too faint, the distance too great.

I didn’t fret about it. That’s the way it is: a white man on the continent of ubuntu.

In the VIP suite B. J. Fikter told me his night had passed without incident. He was getting ready to go to bed and I took Emma’s cell phone and charger and went to look for Dr Eleanor Taljaard.

She said the fact that Emma was still comatose was bad news. ‘There has been no change in the last seventy-two hours, Lemmer. That’s the problem. The longer the coma continues the worse the prognosis.’

I wanted to ask her whether there was anything they could do, but I knew what the answer would be.

‘Eleanor, I need a place to rent for a few days, a week maybe, in the Klaserie district. Not a tourist place. Something remote. A farm or a smallholding.’

‘At Klaserie?’

I nodded.

‘Why there?’

‘Don’t ask.’

She shook her head. ‘The police are guarding her. Your people are guarding her. What’s going on? Is she in danger?’

‘She’s safe here. I just want to make sure she’s safe when she gets out.’

The doctor’s expression was unreadable, then she shrugged her questions off and said, ‘Let me ask Koos.’

She phoned her husband and passed on my request.

‘Koos said it’s New Year. Only doctors and people in love are working.’

‘Tell him it’s urgent, please.’

She passed on my words, making notes on a writing pad with a drug logo at the top. She asked for my cell phone number and repeated it to him. When she put the phone down, she tore off the sheet of paper and said, ‘Koos says he will get Nadine Bekker to call you. She’s an estate agent. Just give him some time. He wants to exert a bit of pressure. He’s good at that.’

‘Thank you very much.’ I stood up.

‘Lemmer,’ she said. ‘I assume you know what you’re doing.’

‘That remains to be seen,’ I said.

The only place open for breakfast was the Wimpy. I ordered a Double-Up Breakfast and had drunk the first of two large coffees when Nadine Bekker phoned. Her voice was shrill and she spoke rapidly, like someone who was out of breath and late. ‘Dr Koos Taljaard said you have an emergency, but I must say that it will be a challenge to get what you’re looking for. People don’t want to rent in the short term.’

‘I’ll pay for a month.’

‘That would help. Give me a little time, it’s New Year, I don’t know if I can contact the people. I’ll call you back.’

A waiter with bloodshot eyes brought my breakfast. The cook must have been at the same party, because the eggs were rubbery and the pork sausages dry. I had to eat. I ordered more coffee to wash it down. I looked around at the handful of other people in the restaurant. They sat singly, or two to a table, conversing quietly with heads and shoulders bowed. Did I look like them? Somewhat lost, vaguely lonely, a little self-conscious that a Wimpy breakfast was the best thing we could do on this festive morning.

I had a pointless feeling of guilt that I couldn’t shake off. It had to do with Emma, owing partly to her condition and my work ethic. How could I, who was supposed to be working, pursue carnal pleasure while she lay in a coma? That was the easier part to ponder and shrug off. The other part was more difficult because at the heart of it was the way I felt about her. How much had she manipulated me to like her, to sympathise with her, to give my support to her cause? How much was deliberate? How much of my discomfort had to do with the fact that I couldn’t protect her and that she was the first one I had failed professionally? There was an entire minefield for my conscience.

Besides, I hadn’t gone looking for anything. It just happened. It was ten months since I had been with a woman. That was why last night was so intense. It will happen; sometimes you meet a woman with the same hunger, the same anger, the same need.

My cell phone rang. It was Nadine Bekker. ‘I have two possibilities for you. There are some others, but the owners are not answering their phones. When I have more time I’ll be able to manage something. Do you want to have a look?’

* * *

She was a small woman in her fifties, a busy little bee with short bottle-blonde hair and an extravagant wedding ring on her pudgy finger. She was dressed as though she were off to church, her high heels click-clacking hurriedly across the tar road as she approached my car.

‘Wait, don’t get out, hi, I’m Nadine, pleased to meet you, just follow me, I’ll show you the first place, it’s not far.’

Business couldn’t be too bad in the Lowveld property market; she drove a white Toyota Prado, but not as fast as she could speak.

The first house was near Dingleydale, east of the R40, about ten kilometres from Edwin Dibakwane’s house with the pink concrete. It was right on the gravel road and a huddle of the locals’ houses was in view.

I stopped behind her and got out. ‘Unfortunately, this won’t do.’

‘I’m sorry, I don’t really know what you want, usually we go through all the requirements first. Koos just said a house on a farm or a smallholding.’

‘I want something more remote.’

‘The other place is more remote, but it is a bit run down, if you don’t mind neglected, and there is no electricity, just gas. It belongs to an advocate in Pretoria. He has a few places, but no one lives on that one, he bought it as an investment. It has a beautiful view of the mountain and there’s a river.’

‘I don’t mind neglected.’

‘Let’s take a look, then. Maybe it’s just what you want and the rent is less too. You will have to take it for the whole month, but you said you’re OK with that.’

‘I am.’

We drove on, north on the R40 and then left on a gravel road at Green Valley. Mariepskop loomed directly ahead, the slopes densely forested.

After fifteen kilometres of dusty bends she stopped at a farm gate and jumped out, indicating that I should wait. She fiddled with a bunch of keys and then shoved the farm gate open and called, ‘Leave the gate open, we’ll be coming out here again.’

There was a rusty pole beside the gate with a nearly illegible sign with six bullet holes in it. Moüasedi.

We drove uphill on a rough farm track. I worried about the Audi’s ground clearance. Near the gate it was grassveld, but within two hundred metres the bush grew thick. We drove through a tunnel of trees, the Prado’s roof scraping against the branches and leaves.

The house was over a kilometre from the gravel road. It was an aged building, sixty years or older, corrugated iron roof, yellowing lime-washed walls, a big chimney. The veranda looked out over a stream, rather than the promised river. Directly west the cliffs of Mariepskop dominated the horizon.

Not perfect, but it would do. The yard was big and open enough to see someone coming from a hundred metres off. The disadvantage was that the dense bush would afford shelter beyond that. But it was also difficult to move through. As far as I could see, there was only one workable access route, thanks to the towering mountain and the jungle across the stream.

She got out and waited for me.

‘What does Motlasedi mean?’ I asked.

‘I don’t know, but I will find out. Let’s have a look inside, I don’t know what it’s like, the place has been shut up a long time, but there is some furniture at least. What do you want to do here, so far from everything?’ She walked deftly up the three steps of the veranda in her high heels and tinkled the bunch of keys until she found the one to unlock the door.

‘I just want a bit of peace,’ I said.

‘One needs peace, too. This is the sitting room, there is something to sit on at any rate, the kitchen is this way, gas stove and gas fridge, you’ll just have to get them going, a little bit of dust here, I see, I can get it cleaned for you if you want, it will take a day, come, the bedrooms are this way, at least there’s gauze on the windows to keep the mosquitoes out, but you should get something to spray or rub on at this time of the year, the mosquitoes can be a nuisance so close to the water, unfortunately just the one bathroom, there’s no bedding of course, but in this heat you won’t need much.’ She kept up the monologue right through the house at the same rapid pace as her quick, short steps on the bare floorboards, pointedly ignoring the three big cockroaches that scurried away from us. Eventually running out of breath, she asked, ‘Is this what you’re looking for?’

‘Yes, it is.’

‘Right, then, let’s go and sign the contract, it’s a deposit of one thousand eight hundred and a month’s rent in advance, that’s three thousand six hundred in total, is that all right?’

I took out my cell phone and Emma’s to check whether there was reception. One bar, a second that came and went.

‘That’s fine, thank you.’