The Angels Weep (65 page)

‘Come out immediately. Innocent people will not be
harmed. Do not run.’

Constance spread a woollen blanket over the old man’s
shoulders, then between them they led him through the living-room
to the front porch. Samson unlocked the door and stepped out,
holding both hands high, palms forward, and the blinding white
beam of a searchlight fixed on him, so that he was forced to
protect his face with one hand.

‘Bring Grandfather.’

Constance led the old man out of the front door and the three
of them stood close together in a pathetic huddle, blinded by the
light and confused by the repeated bellow of the loudhailer.

‘Do not run. Do not attempt to hide.’

The row of staff cottages had been surrounded. The
searchlights beamed out of the darkness and picked out the little
family groups of the teachers and nursing staff and their
families as they clung together for comfort, most of them covered
only with flimsy night-clothes or hastily draped blankets.

From the impenetrable darkness behind the searchlight, figures
emerged, moving like panthers, alert and predatory. One of them
vaulted over the veranda railing and flattened against the wall,
using Samson’s body to shield himself from the doorway and
the windows.

‘Three of you. Is that all?’ he demanded in
Sindebele. He was a lean, powerful-looking man in battle-smock
and jungle hat. His face and hands were painted with night
camouflage so it was impossible to tell whether he was black or
white.

‘Only three,’ Samson replied.

The man had an FN rifle on his hip, the barrel swinging
slightly to cover them all.

‘If there is anybody in the building, say so quickly,
otherwise they will be killed.’

‘There is nobody.’

The soldier called an order and his troopers went in
simultaneously through the back and front doors and side windows.
They swept through the cottage in seconds, working as a skilled
team, covering each other. Satisfied that it was clear, they
scattered back into the darkness and left the three on the
veranda.

‘Do not move,’ screeched the loudhailers.
‘Stay where you are.’

In the darkness under the spathodea trees Colonel Roland
Ballantyne took the unit reports as they came in. With each
negative show, his frustration increased. Their information had
been good and the scent hot. It was a scent he had followed often
before. Comrade Tebe was one of their prime targets. He was a
ZIPRA commissar who had been operating within Matabeleland for
almost seven months now. They had been as close to him as this on
three other occasions. It always seemed to be the same. The tip
from one of the informers or from a member of the Scouts
operating under civilian cover.
Tebe was in such and such a
village
. They would move up silently and surround it,
methodically closing every bolt-hole. Then in the darkness and
bleakest hour of the night they would go in and sweep. Once they
had taken two of his lieutenants, but Tebe was not with them. The
regimental sergeant-major of the Scouts, Esau Gondele, had
questioned the two terrorists while Roland watched. By dawn
neither of them were able to stand up any longer but they had not
spoken.

‘Use the chopper,’ Roland ordered.

They hovered at two thousand feet while Sergeant-Major Gondele
hung the most defiant terrorist from the belly hatch, holding him
by the webbing belt looped under his armpits.

‘Tell me, my friend, where we will find your Comrade
Tebe.’

The man twisted his head up sideways and tried to spit at Esau
Gondele, but the down-draught of the spinning rotors had blown
his spittle away. The sergeant-major had glanced at Roland, and
when he nodded, opened his fist. The terrorist had fallen two
thousand feet, turning slowly end over end. Perhaps he was past
screaming or perhaps it was his final defiance, but he was
utterly silent during the drop.

Sergeant-Major Gondele had reached for the second terrorist
and looped a webbing under his armpits. As he lowered him out of
the hatch, his bound feet dangling two thousand feet above the
golden Matabele grasslands, the man had looked up and said,
‘I will tell you.’

However, they had held out for just thirty minutes too long.
When the Scouts hit the safe house in Hillside Location, Comrade
Tebe had moved again.

Roland Ballantyne’s frustration was corrosive. The week
before, Comrade Tebe had left an explosive device in a
supermarket chariot. It had killed seven people, all of them
female, two of them under ten years of age. Roland wanted him
very badly, so badly that when he realized that once again he had
escaped, a kind of heavy black feeling closed down over half his
mind.

‘Bring the informer,’ he ordered, and Esau Gondele
spoke softly into the portable radio. Within minutes they heard
the Land-Rover coming up the hill, and its headlights flickered
through the trees of the forest.

‘All right, Sergeant-Major. Get these people lined
up.’

There were sixty or so of them lined up along the verge of the
road in front of the long row of staff cottages. The searchlights
trapped them in a stark and merciless glare. Colonel Roland
Ballantyne vaulted up onto the back of the Land-Rover and held
the bull-horn to his lips. He spoke in perfect colloquial
Sindebele.

‘The evil ones have been amongst you. They have left the
stink of death on this village. They have come here to plan
destruction, to kill and cripple you and your children. You
should have come to us that we might protect you. Because you
were afraid to ask for our help, you have brought even greater
hardship upon yourselves.’

The long line of black people, men and women and children
still in their night-clothes, stood stolidly and stoically as
cattle in the crush. They were caught between the millstones of
the guerrillas on one side and the security forces on the other.
They stood in the white searchlights and listened.

‘The government is your father. Like a good father it
seeks to protect its children. However, there are stupid children
amongst you. Those who conspire with the evil ones, those who
feed them and give them news and warn them when we come. We know
these things. We know who warned them.’

At Roland’s feet, sitting on the cross-bench of the
Land-Rover was a human figure. It was draped from head to foot in
a single sheet of cloth so that it was impossible to tell whether
it was a man or a woman. There were eye-holes cut in the hood of
the cloth.

‘We will now smell out the evil ones amongst you, those
who give comfort to the death-bringers,’ Roland told
them.

The Land-Rover rolled slowly along the line of villagers, and
as it drew level with each man or woman, the soldier shone his
flashlight into the person’s face at a range of only a few
feet. In the open back of the vehicle, the mysteriously robed and
masked figure stared out of the eye-holes in the sheet. The dark
eyes gleamed in the reflected light of the flashlight as they
examined each face.

The veiled informer sat unmovingly as the Land-Rover came on
at a walking pace down towards where Samson and Constance
supported the old man between them.

Without moving his lips, Samson asked her, ‘Is it safe,
do they know you?’

‘I do not know,’ she answered him.

‘What can we do—’ but by that time the
Land-Rover was drawing level with where they stood, and Constance
did not have time to reply.

In the rear of the vehicle, the masked figure moved for the
first time. A long black arm shot out from under the sheet, and
pointed directly into Constance’s upturned face. Not a word
was spoken, but two of the camouflaged Scouts stepped out of the
darkness behind her and seized her arms.

‘Constance!’ Samson ran forward and reached for
her. A rifle-butt smashed into his back at the level of his
kidneys and flaming agony tore up his spine and burst against the
roof of his skull. He dropped to his knees.

Pain distorted his vision, and the flashlight shone into his
face, blinding him. He pushed himself upright with a violent
effort, but found that the muzzle of an FN rifle was pressed into
his stomach.

‘We don’t want you, my friend. Do not interfere in
what does not concern you.’

The Scouts were leading Constance away. She went docilely. She
seemed very small and helpless between the two tall soldiers in
full battle-dress. She turned and looked back at Samson. Her
great soft eyes clung to his face and her lips moved.

Then for an instant the body of the Land-Rover blocked the
beam of the searchlight. Darkness enveloped the group, and a
second later when the searchlight caught them again, Constance
had broken away from her captors and she was running.

‘No!’ screamed Samson in terrible agony. He knew
what was about to happen. ‘Stop, Constance,
stop.’

She flew like a lovely moth in the light, the pink of her
dress flitting between the trunks of the spathodea trees, and
then the bullets ripped chunks of white wet wood from the trees
about her, and she was no longer swift and graceful; it was as
though the moth’s wings had been shredded by a spiteful
child.

Four soldiers carried her body back, each of them holding a
leg or an arm. Constance’s head hung back almost to touch
the ground, and the blood from her nostrils and mouth running
down her cheeks was thick and black as treacle in the
searchlights. They tossed her up into the back of the Land-Rover,
where she lay in a tangle of dark limbs like a gazelle shot on
the hunting veld.

S
amson Kumalo
walked down the main street of Bulawayo. The cool of the night
still lingered and the shadows of the jacaranda trees threw tiger
stripes across the blue macadam surface. He mingled easily with
the lazy flow of humanity along the sidewalk, and he made no
effort to avert his face as he passed a BSA police constable in
his blue and khaki uniform and pith helmet on the corner of the
park.

While he waited for the traffic lights, he watched the faces
about him: the flat incurious expression of the Matabele, their
eyes veiled defensively, the bright young white matrons in pretty
floral dresses, going about their shopping with a handbag on one
shoulder and a machine-pistol on the other. There were very few
white men in the streets, and most of those too old for military
service – the others were all uniformed and armed.

The traffic that crossed the intersection in front of him was
mostly military. Since the imposition of economic sanctions, the
gasolene ration had been reduced to a few litres a month. The
farmers coming into town for the day drove the ungainly
mine-proofed machines with blast-deflectors and armoured
bodies.

Samson was aware for the first time since Constance’s
death of the true extent of his hatred as he watched their white
faces. Before today there had been a numbness in him that was
anaesthetic, but that was fading.

He carried no luggage, for a parcel would immediately have
attracted attention and invited a body-search. He wore jeans and
a short-sleeved shirt and gym shoes – no jacket that might
have concealed a weapon; and like the other Matabele around him,
his face was blank and expressionless. He was armed only with his
hatred.

The lights changed and he crossed the road unhurriedly and
turned down towards the bus station. Even this early it was
crowded. There were patient queues of peasants waiting to make
the journey back to the tribal trust lands. All of them were
loaded with their purchases, bags of meal and salt, tins of
cooking-oil or paraffin, bundles of material and cardboard boxes
of other luxuries, of matches and soap and candles. They squatted
under the iron roofs of the shelters, chattering and laughing,
chewing roasted maize cobs, drinking Coca-Cola, some of the
mothers feeding their infants from the breast, or scolding their
toddlers.

Every few minutes a bus would draw up in greasy clouds of
diesel exhaust, to discharge a horde of passengers, and
immediately they were replaced from the endless queues. Samson
leaned against the wall of the public latrines. It was the most
central position, and he settled himself to wait.

He did not at first recognize Comrade Tebe. He wore a filthy
tattered blue overall with ‘COHEN’S BUTCHERY’
embroidered across the back in red letters. His careless stoop
disguised his height, and an expression of moronic goodwill made
him appear harmless.

He passed Samson without a glance in his direction, and
entered the latrine. Samson waited a few seconds before he
followed him. The toilet reeked of cheap tobacco smoke and stale
urine. It was crowded and Comrade Tebe jostled against Samson and
slipped a blue cardboard ticket into his hand.

In one of the cabinets Samson examined it. It was a single
third-class ticket, Bulawayo to Victoria Falls. He took his place
in the Victoria Falls queue five places behind Tebe. The bus was
thirty-five minutes late, and there was the usual rush to heave
luggage up onto the roof-racks and find a seat.

Tebe was in a window seat three rows ahead of Samson. He never
looked round while the heavily loaded red bus lumbered out
through the northern suburbs. They passed the long avenue of
jacaranda trees that Cecil Rhodes had planted and which led up to
the gabled State House on the hill above the town where once the
royal kraal of Lobengula, King of the Matabele, had stood. They
passed the turn-off to the airport and reached the first
road-block.

Every passenger was forced to dismount and identify his
luggage. It was opened and searched by the constables manning the
road-block, and then a random selection of men and women was made
for body-searching. Neither Samson nor Tebe was amongst those
selected and fifteen minutes later the bus was reloaded and
allowed to pass.

As they roared on northwards, the acacia and savannah swiftly
gave way to stately forest. Samson crouched on the hard bench and
watched it pass. Ahead of him Tebe appeared to be sleeping. A
little before noon they reached the stop for St Matthew’s
Mission on the Gwaai river at the edge of the Sikumi Forest
Reserve. Most of the passengers fetched their luggage down from
the roof-racks and trudged away along the web of footpaths that
led into the forest.