The Delta (42 page)

And he'd done it. They were not idle threats.

She'd met a white Namibian, an ex-
Koevoet
man, working as a contractor in Iraq. He'd told her he'd served with her father and had been full of praise for the old drunkard. ‘You know, hey, that we caught those terrs that raided your farm and tried to kill you and your mom?' the man had asked her.

She didn't know. She heard his words now, spoken with admiration. ‘It was about a year later, after your dad had transferred to us in
Koevoet
. Our Bushman trackers led us to a SWAPO camp. We slotted four of them and took one alive. Your dad decides to
interrogate
him, in the field, if you know what I mean.' She could only guess. ‘So your pa finds out where this gang has been operating and whatnot, and it turns out this terr was on the raid on your farm. This young
oke
, he was full of spite. A real nasty piece of work. When your pa asks him what kind of men are sent to kill defenceless women and children, he points out that you, when you were a little girl, winged one of his comrades. He said you were hardly defenceless. Your old man, he actually smiled at that and we had a bit of a chuckle, us and this terr. Then the
oke
turns nasty again and says, “But white man, we were not only sent there to kill them, we were told to rape them first.” Your father beat him to death. It took a long time.'

Miriam placed a hand on her arm, gently, breaking into her
thoughts. ‘Your father also told me what he did in the war, and he prays for forgiveness for those many acts, as well.'

‘Hello,' said the little boy at her feet. He seemed miffed at being left out of the conversation.

Sonja put a hand on his springy hair. It was soft. She ran her fingers through it. ‘Hello.' He smiled up at her. She removed her hand.

So what? He had found God and fallen for a black woman, but he had abused and hurt her and her mother and driven them out of his life, and away from Africa. What right did he have to expect he could now come back into her life and think that all would be forgiven?

‘Steele told me you have a daughter,' her father said.

She snapped her head around. ‘That's none of your business.'

He shrugged. ‘No, but I would like it to be. How is your mother?'

It was easy now, to see clearly again. ‘Dead. But what would you care?'

‘Sonja, please … don't talk like that. I'm sorry about your—'

‘Don't you fucking tell me how to talk. I don't care if you've changed your life. You pissed our life away up against a wall. I wish you well, second time around,' she added, not bothering to hide her sarcasm, ‘even though Mom and I never got a second chance.'

Sonja strode away from them, even though she had no idea where she was going. She saw the
mekoro
she had arrived on and headed for that. Something else the old man had just said popped back into her mind. ‘
Steele told me you have a daughter
.' How long, she wondered, had Martin Steele known her father was tied up with this band of rebels? The manipulative bastard was always looking for ways to control her life. He knew she would have refused to have anything to do with the CLA if she'd
found out her father was serving with them. She imagined his gloating. He'd think that now there would be some tearful reconciliation with the old killer who had found God and become a born-again lover of black people. Well, the Kumbaya Rainbow Nation bullshit wasn't going to work with her.

Hans followed her. ‘I tried to contact your mother plenty of times. She never returned a single letter.'

‘Was that before or after you found your new girlfriend?' she asked without looking back.

‘Come, Frederick,' Miriam said softly. She took the confused little boy's hand and led him away. Sonja had hoped for a rise from her. She wondered where and how his father had met her. Had he ended up drinking in African shebeens?

‘Shame,' the ex-
Koevoet
man had told her in Baghdad, ‘an old army buddy of mine who works as a professional hunter in Bots these days told me he'd seen your dad begging on the streets of Maun a few years back. It's terrible when a white man has to do that, hey?'

It was terrible when anyone had to do it – black or white – but the news hadn't softened her feelings for Hans then, any more than his alleged transformation did now.

Sonja had the manners to wait until Miriam was out of earshot before she broke the silence. ‘When did you decide the only good black wasn't a dead one?'

He shook his head and brought his hands together, fingers interlocked, like he was about to start praying. Instead, he began wringing his hands. ‘We … I, Sonja, was responsible for so much evil during the war. I had to live with that – still do – but I should have sought help sooner. I kept you and your mom in the war, living it in my mind and my dreams every day, every night. I thought the booze would make it go away, but it made things worse, as you know.'

She nodded. But her mother wasn't stupid. She knew it was the ghosts from the war days that were tormenting him and driving him to the bottle. She'd pleaded with her husband to go to AA, or a doctor, or a psychiatrist, but he'd brushed her concerns aside like an empty bottle.

‘After you and your mom left, and I lost the job at Xakanaxa, I tried to pull myself together. I wanted to come after you, but when the dreams came the bottle was always there. I had a couple more jobs, as a guide, and then in Maun, at a taxidermy place, but I crashed the company Land Cruiser when I was drunk. No one would employ me. They stopped serving me booze at the Sports Bar, same at Trackers. I got into fights and they banned me. I ended up drinking in the shebeens.'

It was cold comfort to Sonja to see how she'd guessed his downfall. ‘Is that where you met Miriam?'

His eyes flared; it was eerie, like looking into her own eyes. ‘Say what you like about me,' he hissed, ‘but she is a good woman from a good, upstanding family. If you must know, her father was a Methodist pastor. He took me in, when he found me lying, bashed, in the gutter in Maun outside a bar one Sunday morning on his way to Church. Through the booze and my pain I can recall seeing at least three lots of whites drive past me that morning. I swore abuse at them as they drove past me, and I swore at Miriam's father when he stopped for me. I told him to keep his mother-fucking shit-eating filthy kaffir hands off me as he was loading me into his car and asking me if I needed food. That man … that man …'

Sonja looked away when she saw the tears welling in his eyes and the way he wiped them away angrily with the back of his hand. He took another step towards her and she took one back.

‘He locked me in a garage – more a cage – behind his home in Maun, and he kept me there until I dried out. Miriam brought me
food and she washed me and cleaned me while the demons tried to kill me in that
bladdy
room. You don't ever want to go through that hell, Sonja, believe me. They're Lozi, from the Caprivi, and we talked, a lot, about the past, and what had happened to our tribes.'

‘Tribes?'

He nodded. ‘It's all about tribalism, Sonja. He, the pastor, helped me see that. It wasn't about black versus white. He helped me understand that in one way we could never understand or explain why it is that one tribe treats another so badly. He said the Lozi had been screwed by the Ovambo the same way the Afrikaners and the Germans in South-West had been screwed by the British in the old days. Anyway, he told me about the politics of the Caprivi Strip and how the CLA and the UDP had done a deal with SWAPO and Sam Nujoma that guaranteed that the people of the Caprivi would be able to vote for self-rule after independence.'

He was talking animatedly, like a born-again Christian who feels the need to convert every lapsed believer he encounters. ‘I saw it then, Sonja. We – the white settlers in Namibia,' she had never heard him refer to the country as anything other than South-West Africa in the past, ‘had our turn at power and we abused it and we blew it. We had ourselves to blame for the war, because of the way the South Africans imposed their apartheid regime on us, and we lost and we got screwed. But the Lozi – the people of the Caprivi – they had nothing before the struggle; they got nothing out of the struggle; and now they continue to get screwed to this day.'

‘I've heard it all before.' She did not want to get into any kind of a debate with him. She just wanted to be gone from this place.

‘Miriam's father was a man of peace, opposed to military action to take back the Caprivi Strip, but she was secretly in
contact with the CLA. She knew of my background and she told me that God had sent me to her people to train the CLA for war.'

‘Do you know how lame that sounds? What are you now, “God's instrument”? His shield, His sword?'

He waved his hand across his face. ‘I didn't say I believed it, but I knew there was only one thing I was ever any good at in my life, Sonja. I was
kak
at farming – we were nearly broke before we moved off; I was useless as a lodge manager and safari guide – I drank the profits and mostly I hated the clients. The only time I was ever good at anything was in the military, and in
Koevoet
.'

‘I'm leaving.'

She started to turn and she felt his hand on her arm. She shrugged it off but didn't look back at him.

‘You know what I'm saying, don't you, Sonja?'

She shook her head, not wanting to meet his eyes.

‘Look at me.'

She refused.

‘Steele told me about your time in the British Army, in Northern Ireland, then Sierra Leone, Indonesia, Iraq … Afghanistan.'

‘No.'

‘Yes. You know the irony of this whole
bladdy
life I made for us? If I hadn't wasted so many years at the bottom of a whisky bottle I probably would have ended up working with you, alongside you, in all those places.'

‘No.'

‘Yes. Look at me when I'm talking to you, girl.'

She turned and glared at him. ‘You gave up the right to tell me what to do the day you hit me in the face. I came back for you. I knew you were having problems because of the war and I left my mother in England to come back to help you and you repaid me by calling me a “fucking bitch” and punching me. Go back to your freedom fighter wife, your cause and your child. And
don't you fucking dare try to say you have something in common with me.'

He ran a tongue over his lips. ‘No, Sonja,' he said quietly. ‘I don't have anything in common with you, other than the fact that I passed on to you the ability to shoot well and kill well. To tell you the truth, I'm glad that I was too drunk and too stupid at the time to find work as a mercenary, because it would have been
wrong
.'

She leaned back from him, as if trying to readjust her focal length to get a clearer picture of his face. ‘Wrong?'

‘Yes, wrong. I know you don't care what I say to you, and you're a hundred per cent correct that I forfeited my right to give you parental advice a long time ago, but just let me say two things to you before you leave this place. First, I love you, Sonja …'

‘Stop.' She held up a hand. ‘I don't care.'

He grabbed her wrist, though not painfully. ‘I love you, Sonja, and have since the day you were born. The second thing I want to tell you is to give up this life. It doesn't matter what else you do or even if you're no good at anything else in your life, but you cannot take money from a man like Martin Steele to fight other people's wars.'

She laughed at the absurdity of this man lecturing her on morals.

He let go of her and held up his hands to still her. ‘You are being paid to wage war on a democratically elected government in a peaceful African nation, and to destroy a vital piece of infrastructure that will provide water and electricity for hundreds of thousands of people who need both. What you are doing is criminal and it is wrong, Sonja.'

‘I …' She searched for the words but again he was stealing them from her, and she hated him for it. She was not a child. ‘What do you think you're doing, then?'

‘I am helping a people – my people, as it now happens – to reclaim custody of a piece of land that has been in their care for generations. The Lozi have nothing in common with the Ovambo or the rest of the peoples of Namibia. They were a proud, independent nation, Linyanti, before the whites even came to this part of Africa. Ethnically, linguistically, culturally, they are and deserve to be a nation of their own once again.'

‘Pah!'

‘Don't scoff. These people took me in when my own had abandoned me. I am one of them now.' He grabbed her arm again. ‘This is my chance to make things right, Sonja. You do not belong here and, quite frankly, now that we have the guns and the air support that the money from the lodge owners in the delta are paying for, we do not need any more white mercenaries here to tell us what to do and how to fight.'

His eyes were burning with the searing, white-hot intensity and destructiveness of a zealot, or a madman.

No, she told herself as he stood there, still holding her, letting his words sink in. Not mad, just a believer. She knew which was worse – she'd seen the charred remains of the work of believers on the streets of Baghdad.

‘You're fighting for money, Sonja, and it's not a good enough reason to kill for or to risk your life for, or to risk your child's happiness over. Go to her, Sonja. Leave this place now. Steele and the people who work for him are like hyenas, scavenging and growing fat on death.'

God, she was so confused all of a sudden. She had been on her way to the
mekoro
, to get her things and paddle herself away from this swamp. The man she had despised for so many years had just compared her to a hyena. She shook her head and almost smiled at his analogy. As well as being scavengers, hyenas were also ruthlessly efficient hunters and killers, and the females ruled the clan.