The Soldier who Said No (17 page)

‘What can you tell us about this arrow?’ Henderson asked. ‘We don’t have much time.’

The way De Villiers had looked at the exhibit suggested that he knew something about the arrow, and that it could not be from the Tokelauan Islands. Henderson was too good a policeman to have missed De Villiers’s discomfort when he first saw the arrow. And he had not missed the fact that De Villiers somehow knew that the foreshaft would slip out of the main shaft of the arrow so easily that the arrow had to be designed to work like that, yet for what reason Henderson did not know.

Behind Henderson a battered khaki backpack with its numerous pouches and aluminium buckles hung on a hook on the wall.

‘What do you want to know?’ De Villiers asked at last.

‘Where does this arrow come from? Let’s start with that,’ Henderson said.

‘From Africa.’

‘How do you know?’

‘I’m from Africa.’

‘The expert from the university thinks it’s from the Tokelauan Islands.’

De Villiers shook his head. ‘No, it’s from Africa.’

‘The Commissioner says it is a Bushman arrow. What do you think?’

‘I agree with the Commissioner. It
is
a Bushman arrow.’

‘Do you know where it comes from?’ Henderson asked. ‘Or how it got here?’

‘It comes from Africa, I’m sure.’ De Villiers was deliberately vague.

‘Yes, but how did it get here? That’s what we have to find out.’

‘Here where?’ De Villiers asked. ‘What’s this arrow doing here?’

Henderson decided to impart some information.

‘Someone used it in an assassination attempt.’

‘Here, in New Zealand?’ De Villiers asked. There was a degree of alarm in his voice which didn’t escape Henderson.

Henderson nodded.

De Villiers took another look at the arrow. He thought he knew where and by whom it had been made, but he wasn’t sure that he was ready to tell Henderson, or that Henderson was ready to know. Henderson had said
assassination
. It wasn’t the right word for the kinds of murders which were most common in New Zealand: domestic killings, gangland killings, drug-crazed people killing for money to buy drugs, scum preying on tourists and immigrants from Asia and farmers shooting intruders on their farms.

‘If it is a Bushman arrow, there’ll be poison on it,’ Henderson said. ‘Am I right?’

‘Yes,’ De Villiers said immediately, ‘but the poison loses its potency after about a year.’ He regretted having added the unnecessary detail.

‘Why do I get the impression that you know more about it than you’re telling us?’ Henderson asked.

The blood drained out of De Villiers’s face a second time. What could he say? If he admitted to being present when the arrow had been made, he would immediately be a suspect in an attempted murder. While he was working out how to answer Henderson’s question, the doorbell rang. De Villiers beat Zoë to the door. When he opened it, he found that Henderson and Kupenga had followed him. He asked them to wait, but they said they had work to do and left, taking the arrow with them.

There were three men at the door, the two boys from the night before and a tall young man wearing a baseball cap back to front. They stood awkwardly, watching Henderson and Kupenga leave in the police car.

‘Please come in,’ De Villiers said.

They took seats in the lounge. ‘Are you their brother?’ De Villiers asked the young man with the baseball cap.

‘They are my nephews.’

‘Good,’ De Villiers said. ‘Let me see your driver’s licence.’

The young man opened his wallet and handed him a driver’s licence. De Villiers checked the details. The photograph matched the young man sitting opposite him.

‘Do you know what happened last night, or rather, early this morning?’

‘They were causing trouble.’

‘True,’ De Villiers confirmed. ‘I am tired of cleaning up after them. And they were driving without a licence and without the permission of the owner of the car.’

The young man didn’t look him in the eye, a sign of respect for an elder. The two boys sat staring at the carpet. They were still wearing the blue bandannas tied around their wrists. De Villiers was suddenly angry.

‘Take those bandannas off immediately,’ he said. ‘This is not your street.’

The one boy was slow to react. His uncle cuffed him roughly on the side of his face and the scarf came off promptly.

‘I’m tired of repainting that box every time some hooligan sprays it with his gang’s logo,’ De Villiers said.

‘I can understand that. We’re trying our best with them, but it’s difficult.’

De Villiers studied the young man carefully. ‘Do you work?’

‘I’m a builder.’ De Villiers looked at the man’s hands. They were honest hands with calluses and shaves and cuts, the hands of a working man.

He decided to take a chance.

‘I think we can keep them out of trouble, but I’ll need some help from you. Can you work with me?’ he asked.

The man nodded.

‘Okay, we start by taking them across the street and they can clean up their mess. Then I want you to take them to Brightside Hospital – I’ll explain where it is – and I want you to introduce them to two guys who work there. Then I want you to ask those guys how these boys can get into jobs like theirs, what training they need, and how old they have to be to join. How does it sound, so far?’

The man nodded again.

‘Okay,’ De Villiers said, ‘I’ll get the paint.’

He left them in his lounge while he fetched the paint and two brushes from his shed. Zoë was entertaining his guests with her xylophone when he returned.

He sent the two boys off with instructions to repaint the whole of the electrical substation box and chatted with their mentor. The young man was part of an extended family living in Pakuranga Heights. Most of their money went back to Samoa every month to support their family there. De Villiers drew a map with directions to Brightside and wrote down the names of Te ’O and Leauanae at the foot of the map.

‘These are good men, blokes who’ll understand when you tell them we need to find something for your nephews to do so that they’ll keep their noses clean. It will help if they can also earn a bit of money.’

They shook hands on the deal. De Villiers fetched the car keys from the dining-room table and handed them over. ‘Let’s see how they’re doing.’

The boys were hard at work. De Villiers couldn’t work out whether they were more fearful of him or their mentor.

‘Listen,’ he said to the boys. ‘I’m not going to take the matter further out of respect for your uncle here. He’s a good man, but you two are on the wrong track. The police have your names and I know where to find you. This box doesn’t belong to you. This is not your street. As a matter of fact, not even the street where you live belongs to you. And I know your sign. If I see the same sign on this box ever again, I’m going to come and look for you. Do you understand?’

The boys looked at their mentor and answered, one after the other, ‘Yes, Sir.’

Their mentor had the last word. ‘And if the two of you ever come past here and you see the sign on the box, you come to this house and you knock on the door and you ask for the paint and the brushes to clean it up, do you hear me?’

‘Yes.’ They didn’t make eye contact with him. De Villiers shook hands with the mentor a second time and returned to the house.

After a shower, De Villiers sat down and tried to make as much sense as he could of the arrow in the Ziploc bag. He had seen it before, or one exactly like it, and knew precisely how it could be made, but he had no idea how that arrow could have found its way to New Zealand. One of the ghosts of his past had followed him all the way to New Zealand, he sensed.

They had made good time the first day east. They had started late in the afternoon after the choppers had turned back to their base at Rundu. When the sun came up the next day, they had covered more than thirty kilometres. They were dehydrated by now, but they had no choice other than to lie low, sleeping rough under a bush. From time to time they could hear helicopters in the distance, but they had no means of knowing whether they were
SADF
or Russian.

De Villiers had a headache he ascribed to the glancing blow of the bullet that could so easily have killed him. He walked or ran, depending on !Xau’s pace, and occasionally found that the Bushman had slowed down to enable him to keep up.

They reached a dry riverbed late in the afternoon of the second day, shortly after they had resumed their flight. It ran west to east, he noted, and was no more than a gully, but the dry reeds on the bank were evidence of water. They dug for the water immediately and found some shade where they rested and drank until their energy returned.

!Xau used his Best to cut some reeds. ‘For arrows,’ he said.

De Villiers marvelled at !Xau’s industry. His own bow was designed for tension – to kill with the speed at which the arrow travelled and the depth it penetrated, cutting through sinew and bone. But it was in his backpack. And that was back at Donkergat.

After drinking to the point of bursting, they continued east. From time to time they heard gunfire, not in bursts as one would hear in a battle, but single shots, probably fired by poachers.

And so their flight continued day after day. At dawn each day they went into hiding, to sleep through the heat of the day. Eventually they were far enough from the river’s course to turn due south. For the first time, their main activity was not flight, but the search for food and water. While De Villiers had some skills in surviving in the bush, in this semidesert he was a beginner compared to !Xau.

They were hungry for meat and !Xau had assured him that they would have meat for breakfast. De Villiers watched with the intensity of a student as !Xau set the thura trap.

‘It is called thura,’ !Xau explained as he constructed it in the footpath made by the feet or claws of small animals. First he stuck a strong but flexible sapling about two metres long into the ground next to the footpath. Then he pegged a noose into the ground, the noose held open by a small circle of sticks. !Xau bent the sapling over and tied the end of the cord to the top of the sapling. De Villiers studied the trigger mechanism carefully as !Xau set it. When !Xau slowly released the tension in the sapling, the noose held and was ready for its prey. !Xau finished by scattering small twigs and leaves over the trap to conceal the string and placed a few seeds in the eye of the noose.

!Xau selected the spots for two more thura traps. At the third, he allowed De Villiers to try his hand at setting the trap. It was more difficult than it had appeared when !Xau was doing it, and twice the sapling whipped up past De Villiers’s nose when the trigger failed to hold, but he eventually succeeded. !Xau rubbed his hands in obvious delight.

‘We’ll eat kgaka tomorrow,’ he promised. Guinea fowl, De Villiers knew from his childhood, when one of his classmates had proudly carried the nickname Kgaka-tarentaal.

They had stopped running on the seventh day, or seventh night, to be more accurate. The tactics of survival had changed. The enemy was now far behind them, or so they thought. They now had to face their immediate environment, the savannah. And it was winter. It was cold at night and hot during the day.

The veld was harsh, but it was also kind. It was vast and because of its vastness provided them with a hiding place and the opportunity to escape. It also provided food and water, but made them work very hard for every edible bite, every drop of water fit to drink.

But there was food and water, if you knew where to find it and were patient enough not to exhaust and dehydrate yourself so that you did not have the energy to look for it.

Water was easier to find than food, even in the dry season. !Xau was able to find tsama melons nearly everywhere, at will it seemed to De Villiers, and tubers. The most innocuous plants surrendered watery roots to !Xau’s digging, and the tsamas – gemsbok melons !Xau called them – provided a meal in a drink. De Villiers had eaten tsamas before. They were part of the survival training regime. !Xau showed De Villiers how to make a small hole in the melon and stir its contents with a stick until it yielded a mushy pulp. !Xau was adamant that the black pips be spat out. They would eventually provide fresh plants, he said, and they could be used to trap guinea fowl.

They saw lightning but there was no rain. They ate raisin berries – !Xau insisting that the rough fibre be spat out. Otherwise it would block your intestines, he claimed. De Villiers complied, not willing to take the risk.

They saw many tiny spoor of partridges and pheasants, but very few belonging to mammals. There were no roads or fences and they had to navigate by instinct, as !Xau preferred to do, or by the map, as De Villiers did.

!Xau taught De Villiers not to fight the bush but to go along with it, to listen to its sounds and to smell its air, to wait and to adapt to its rhythms. It took more than a week of walking and running behind !Xau and listening to his whispered advice before Pierre de Villiers felt in tune with the bush, confident of perhaps surviving for a day or two on his own. In that period he lost weight, about seven kilograms by his estimate according to the number of holes he had to tighten his belt. He was always hungry, every waking moment. When they weren’t moving, he dreamt of food, hot meals with lots of meat and gravy and potatoes.

Every now and then !Xau would burrow under a shrub and cut off parts of its roots. ‘This is not for eating,’ he warned. ‘It’s for the poison on the arrows.’

For two weeks !Xau had kept him alive by feeding him small morsels of food he found in the most incongruous places. De Villiers learnt to eat things he would never have looked at, and would never eat again, he vowed, if he survived this ordeal. !Xau regularly found supplies of large white grubs of the long-horn beetle in the dead wood of the umbrella thorn tree. He called them by their Setswana name, mabungu grubs, and ate them with relish, smacking his lips with delight. De Villiers had quickly learnt to eat harvester termites, but his stomach would always rebel at the taste of the grubs and caterpillars !Xau kept dishing up. Some caterpillars even tasted like kippers. De Villiers ate very little, just enough to survive, but when he was forced by his hunger to eat the grubs !Xau produced, he swallowed the fare quickly.