Chapter Eight

In Kitwe a laughing African comes running to meet them.

Hans Olofson sees that he has trainers on his feet, with no holes, and the heels have not been cut off.

'This is Robert,' says Ruth. 'Our chauffeur. The only one on the farm we can count on.'

'How many employees do you have?' asks Olofson.

'Two hundred and eighty,' replies Ruth.

Olofson crawls into the back seat of a Jeep that seems much the worse for wear.

'You have your passport, don't you?' asks Werner. 'We'll be going through several checkpoints.'

'What are they looking for?' Olofson asks.

'Smuggled goods headed for Zaire,' says Ruth,'or South African spies. Weapons. But actually they just want to beg for food and cigarettes.'

They reach the first roadblock just north of Kitwe. Crossed logs, covered with barbed wire, cut off the lanes of the road. A dilapidated bus stops just before they arrive, and Olofson sees a young soldier with an automatic rifle chase the passengers out of it. There seems to be no end to the Africans who come pouring out, and he wonders how many can actually fit inside. While the passengers are forced to line up, a soldier climbs up on the roof of the bus and starts tearing apart the shapeless pile of bundles and mattresses. A goat that was tied up suddenly kicks its way loose, jumps down from the roof of the bus, and disappears bleating into the bush by the side of the road. An old woman begins to shriek and wail and a tremendous commotion breaks out. The soldier on the roof yells and raises his rifle. The old woman wants to chase her goat but is restrained by other soldiers who suddenly appear from a grass hut beside the road.

'Coming right after a bus is a nightmare,' says Ruth. 'Why didn't you overtake it?'

'I didn't see it, madame,' replies Robert.

'The next time you'll see the bus,' says Ruth, annoyed. 'Or you can look for a new job.'

'Yes, madame,' Robert answers.

The soldiers seem tired after searching the bus and wave the Jeep through without inspecting it. Olofson sees a moonscape spreading before them, high hills of slag alternating with deep mine pits and blasted crevices. He realises that now he is in the midst of the huge copper belt that stretches like a wedge into Katanga province in Zaire. At the same time he wonders what he would have done if he hadn't met the Mastertons. Would he have got off the train in Kitwe? Or would he have stayed in the compartment and returned with the train to Lusaka?

They pass through more roadblocks. Police and drunken soldiers compare his face to his passport photo, and he can feel terror rising inside him.

They hate the whites, he thinks. Just as much as the whites obviously hate the blacks ...

They turn off the main road and suddenly the earth is quite red. A vast, undulating fenced landscape opens before the Jeep.

Two Africans open a wooden gate and offer hesitant salutes. The Jeep pulls up to a white two-storey villa with colonnades and flowering bougainvillea. Olofson climbs out, thinking that the white palace reminds him of the courthouse in his distant home town.

'Tonight you'll be our guest,' says Werner. 'In the morning I'll drive you to Kalulushi.'

Ruth shows him to his room. They walk down cool corridors; tiled floors with deep rugs. An elderly man appears before them. Olofson sees that he is barefoot.

'Louis will take care of you while you're here,' says Ruth. 'When you leave you can give him a coin. But not too much. Don't upset him.'

Olofson is troubled by the man's ragged clothes. His trousers have two gaping holes in the knees, as if he has spent his life crawling on them. His faded shirt is frayed and patched.

Olofson looks out a window at a large park extending into the distance. White wicker chairs, a hammock in a giant tree. Somewhere outside he hears Ruth's excited voice, a door slamming. From the bathroom he hears water running.

'Your bath is ready, Bwana,' says Louis behind him. 'The towels are on the bed.'

Olofson is suddenly agitated. I have to say something, he thinks. So he understands that I'm not one of them, merely a temporary visitor, who is not used to being assigned a personal servant.

'Have you been here long?' he asks.

'Since I was born, Bwana,' Louis replies.

Then he vanishes from the room, and Olofson regrets his question. A master's question to a servant, he thinks. Even though I mean well I make myself look insincere and common.

He sinks down in the bathtub and asks himself what escape routes are still left to him. He feels like a conman who has grown tired of not being unmasked.

They're helping me carry out a meaningless assignment, he thinks. They're ready to drive me to Kalulushi and then help me find the last transport out to the mission station in the bush. They're going to a lot of trouble for something that's just an egocentric impulse, a tourist trip with an artificial dream as its motive.

The dream of Mutshatsha died with Janine. I'm plundering her corpse with this excursion to a world where I don't belong at all. How can I be jealous of a dead person? Of her will, of her stubborn dream, which she clung to despite the fact that she could never realise it? How can an atheistic, unbelieving person take over the dream of being a missionary, helping downtrodden and poverty-stricken people with a religious motive as the foremost incentive?

In the bathtub he decides to return, ask to be driven back to Kitwe. Come up with a credible explanation for why he has to change his plans.

He dresses and goes out into the large park. Under a tall tree that spreads a mighty shadow there is a bench that is carved out of a single block of stone. He scarcely manages to sit down before a servant brings him a cup of tea. All at once Werner Masterton stands before him, dressed in worn overalls.

'Would you like to see our farm?' he asks.

They climb into the Jeep, which has been newly washed. Werner puts his big hands on the wheel after pulling a worn sunhat down over his eyes. They drive past long rows of hen houses and fields. Now and then he brakes to a stop and black workers instantly come running. He barks out orders in a mixture of English and a language that is unknown to Olofson.

The whole time Olofson has a feeling that Werner is balancing on an ice floe beneath which an outbreak of rage might erupt at any moment.

'It's a big farm,' he says as they drive on.

'Not that big,' says Werner. 'If it were a different time I would probably have expanded the acreage. Nowadays you never know what's going to happen next. Maybe they'll confiscate all the farms from the whites. Out of jealousy, or displeasure at the fact that we're so infinitely more skilled than the black farmers who started after independence. They hate us for our skill, our ability to organise, our ability to make things work. They hate us because we make money, because our health is better and we live longer. Envy is an African inheritance. But the reason they hate us most is that magic doesn't work on us.'

They drive by a peacock ruffling its gaudy feathers.

'Magic?' Olofson asks.

'An African who is successful always risks being the target of magic,' says Werner. 'The witchcraft that is practised here can be extremely effective. If there's one thing that the Africans can do, it's mixing up deadly poisons. Salves that are spread on a body, herbs that are camouflaged as common vegetables. An African spends more time cultivating his envy than cultivating his fields.'

'There's a lot I don't know,' says Olofson.

'In Africa knowledge does not increase,' says Werner. 'It decreases, the more you think you understand.'

Werner breaks off and furiously slams on the brakes.

A piece of fence has broken off, and when an African comes running, Olofson sees to his astonishment that Werner grabs him by the ear. This is a grown man, maybe fifty years old, but his ear is caught in Werner's rough hand.

'Why isn't this fixed?' he yells. 'How long has it been broken? Who broke it? Was it Nkuba? Is he drunk again? Who's responsible for this? It has to be fixed within the hour. And Nkuba must be here in an hour.'

Werner shoves the man aside and returns to the Jeep.

'I can be away for two weeks,' he says. 'More than two weeks, and the whole farm would fall apart, not just a bit of fence.'

They stop by a small rise in the midst of a vast grazing pasture, where Brahma cattle move in slow herds. On top of the small hill is a grave.

JOHN MCGREGOR, KILLED BY BANDITS 1967, Olofson reads on a flat gravestone.

Werner squats down and lights his pipe. 'The first thing a man thinks about when settling on a farm is to choose his gravesite,' he says. 'If I'm not chased out of the country I'll lie here one day too, along with Ruth. John McGregor was a young Irishman who worked for me. He was twenty-four years old. Outside Kitwe they had set up a fake roadblock. When he realised he had been stopped by bandits and not police, he tried to drive off. They shot him down with a submachine gun. If he had stopped they would only have taken the car and his clothes. He must have forgotten he was in Africa; you don't defend your car here.'

'Bandits?' Olofson asks.

Werner shrugs. 'The police came and said they had shot some suspects during an escape attempt. Who knows if they were the same people? The important thing for the police was that they could record somebody as the guilty party.'

A lizard stands motionless on the gravestone. From a distance Olofson sees a black woman moving with infinite slowness along a gravel road. She seems to be on her way directly into the sun.

'In Africa death is always close by,' says Werner. 'I don't know why that is. The heat, everything rotting, the African with his rage just beneath the skin. It doesn't take much to stir up a crowd of people. Then they'll kill anyone with a club or a stone.'

'And yet you live here,' says Olofson.

'Perhaps we'll move to Southern Rhodesia,' Werner replies. 'But I'm sixty-four years old. I'm tired, I have difficulty pissing and sleeping, but maybe we'll move on.'

'Who will buy the farm?'

'Maybe I'll burn it down.'

They return to the white house and out of nowhere a parrot flies and perches on Olofson's shoulder. Instead of announcing that his journey to Mutshatsha is no longer necessary, he looks at the parrot nipping at his shirt. Sometimes timidity is my main psychological asset, he thinks in resignation. I don't even dare speak the truth to people who don't know me.

The tropical night falls like a black cloth. Twilight is an ephemeral, hastily passing shadow. With the darkness he feels as though he is also taken back in time.

On the big terrace that stretches along the front of the house, he drinks whisky with Ruth and Werner. They have just sat down with their glasses when headlights begin to play over the grazing meadows, and he hears Ruth and Werner exchange guesses about who it might be.

A car comes to a stop before the terrace and a man of indeterminate age steps out. In the light from shaded kerosene lamps hanging from the ceiling, Olofson sees that the man has red burn marks on his face. His head is completely bald and he is dressed in a baggy suit. He introduces himself as Elvin Richardson, a farmer like the Mastertons.

Who am I? Olofson thinks. An accidental travelling companion on the night train from Lusaka?

'Cattle rustlers,' says Richardson, sitting down heavily with a glass in his hand.

Olofson listens as if he were a child engrossed in a story.

'Last night they cut the fence down near Ndongo,' says Richardson. 'They stole three calves from Ruben White. The animals were clubbed and slaughtered on the spot. The night watchmen didn't hear a thing, of course. If this goes on, we'll have to organise patrols. Shoot a couple of them so they know we mean business.'

Black servants appear in the shadows on the terrace. What are the blacks talking about? Olofson wonders. How does Louis describe me when he sits by the fire with his friends? Does he see my uncertainty? Is he whetting a knife intended expressly for me? There doesn't seem to be any dialogue between the blacks and the whites in this country. The world is split in two, with no mutual trust. Orders are shouted across the chasm, that's all.

He listens to the conversation, observing that Ruth is more aggressive than Werner. While Werner thinks that maybe they should wait and see, Ruth says they should take up arms at once.

He gives a start when one of the black servants bends over him and fills his glass. All at once he realises that he is afraid. The terrace, the rapidly falling darkness, the restless conversation; all of it fills him with insecurity, that same helplessness he felt as a child when the beams of the house by the river creaked in the cold.

There are preparations for war going on here, he thinks. What scares me is that Ruth and Werner and the stranger don't seem to notice it ...

At the dinner table the conversation suddenly shifts character, and Olofson feels more at ease sitting in a room where lamps ward off the shadows, creating a light in which the black servants cannot hide. The conversation at the dinner table turns to the old days, to people who are no longer here.

'We are who we are,' says Richardson. 'Those of us who choose to stay on our farms are surely insane. After us comes nothing. We are the last.'

'No,' says Ruth. 'You're wrong. One day the blacks will be begging at our doors and asking us to stay. The new generation can see where everything is headed. Independence was a gaudy rag that was hung on a pole, a solemn proclamation of empty promises. Now the young people see that the only things that work in this country are still in our hands.'

The alcohol makes Olofson feel able to speak.

'Is everyone this hospitable?' he asks. 'I might be a hunted criminal. Anyone at all, with the darkest of pasts.'

'You're white,' says Werner. 'In this country that's enough of a guarantee.'

Elvin Richardson leaves when the meal is over, and Olofson realises that Ruth and Werner retire early. Doors with wroughtiron gates are carefully barred shut, German shepherds bark outside in the darkness, and Olofson is instructed how to turn off the alarm if he goes into the kitchen at night. By ten o'clock he is in bed.

I'm surrounded by a barrier, he thinks. A white prison in a black country. The padlock of fear around the whites' property. What do the blacks think, when they compare our shoes and their own rags? What do they think about the freedom they have gained?

He drifts off into a restless slumber.

He jumps awake when a sound pierces his consciousness. In the dark, he doesn't know for a moment where he is.

Africa, he thinks. I still know nothing about you. Perhaps this is exactly how Africa looked in Janine's dreams. I no longer recall what we talked about at her kitchen table. But I have a feeling that my normal judgements and thoughts are insufficient or perhaps not even valid out here. Another kind of seeing is required ...

He listens to the darkness. He wonders whether it is the silence or the sound that is imagined. Again he is afraid.

There is a catastrophe enclosed within Ruth and Werner Masterton's friendliness, he thinks. This entire farm, this white house, is enclosed by an anxiety, an anger that has been dammed up for much too long.

He lies awake in the dark and imagines that Africa is a wounded beast of prey that still does not have the strength to get up. The breathing of the earth and the animals coincides, the bush where they hide is impenetrable. Wasn't that the way Janine imagined this wounded and mangled continent? Like a buffalo forced to its knees, but with just enough power left to keep the hunters at bay.

Maybe she with her empathy could probe more deeply into reality than I can, tramping about on the soil of this continent. Maybe she made a journey in her dreams that was just as real as my meaningless flight to the mission station in Mutshatsha.

There may be another truth as well. Is it true that I hope I'll meet another Janine at this mission station? A woman who can replace the one who is dead?

He lies awake until dawn suddenly breaks through the dark. Out the window he sees the sun rise like a red ball of fire over the horizon. Suddenly he notices Louis standing by a tree, watching him. Even though the morning is already quite warm, he shivers. What am I afraid of? he thinks. Myself or Africa? What is Africa telling me that I don't want to know?

At a quarter past seven he bids farewell to Ruth and takes his place next to Werner in the front seat of the Jeep.

'Come back again,' says Ruth. 'You're always welcome.'

As they drive out through the farm's big gate where the two Africans helplessly salute, Olofson notices an old man standing in the tall elephant grass next to the road, laughing. Half hidden, he flashes past. Many years later this image will resurface in his consciousness.

A man, half hidden, laughing soundlessly in the early morning ...