The Soldier who Said No (25 page)

‘Yes, this is your file, and yes, there was a third operation in May this year, and you were part of that.’

De Villiers shook his head.

‘Here’s what happened, I can tell you. You went ashore in Gemini rubber boats from the submarine twelve miles offshore.’

Nienaber sipped from his cup.

De Villiers remembered the Geminis. They were used for training and had been used on other missions.

‘There was only one Cabinda operation and that was last year,’ he insisted. ‘The November operation was strictly reconnaissance for a big operation, but we never followed up on that.’

‘Hear me out,’ Nienaber pleaded and refilled De Villiers’s cup. He changed tack. ‘Do you know Captain Wynand du Toit?’

‘Yes. We trained together and he’s with me in 4 Recce.’

‘And Rowland Liebenberg and Louis van Breda?’

‘Yes, they’re both corporals.’

‘They were on Argon with you,’ Nienaber said.

De Villiers shook his head. ‘This is crazy. Du Toit was with me last year in November. He was in command, but we’ve since gone in different directions. He’s in ocean water-borne operations and I’m in inland water-borne operations.’

‘Hear me out,’ Nienaber admonished him. ‘Just hear me out before you pass judgment.’

Nienaber waited until De Villiers made eye contact and nodded. ‘You got ashore all right, but you were detected by the local
FAPLA
forces before you could complete the mission. In the fighting which followed, Van Breda and Liebenberg were killed and you and Du Toit were captured. The others came back, some wounded, but they all made it back.’

De Villiers listened but didn’t believe what he was hearing.

‘Where’s Du Toit now?’ he asked. ‘Can I speak to him?’

‘No,’ said Nienaber firmly. ‘He’s still being held by them. They’re parading him all over the place for propaganda purposes.’

‘Then how come I’m here?’

‘That’s where I come in,’ Professor Nienaber explained. ‘You were released near Rundu nearly two months later after they had brainwashed you to believe that you had been sent on a mission to assassinate Robert Mugabe. But there was no Bushman, as you claim. It was just you. There was never any Bushman.’

‘Why would they want to do that, just let me go?’ De Villiers left the second question unasked. When did I say anything about a Bushman?
I
never did, did I?

‘It is for propaganda purposes, Pierre,’ Nienaber explained. ‘They have Du Toit to prove that we’ve been trying to sabotage their oil installations inside Angola. There’s an international outcry over that because those oil installations belong to an American company. On this side they accuse us of being involved in the civil war in Mozambique to destabilise their government. And if they can show that one of our soldiers had been sent to kill Mugabe, we will have another international outcry because we will be shown to have tried to assassinate the President of Zimbabwe. So they planted that in your mind with their mind-altering techniques.’

‘It doesn’t make sense,’ De Villiers claimed. ‘Unless someone actually took a shot at Mugabe, the plan doesn’t make sense.’

Nienaber looked at De Villiers for what felt like a minute. His patient was not as compliant as the doses of medication secretly administered to him ought to have achieved. ‘It would make sense if you were to keep this in mind,’ he said. ‘You were captured and the other men were killed on the 21st of May. Mugabe was to make his speech in a village in south-eastern Angola on the 28th. That gave them enough time to brainwash you.’

‘But why would they release me then? They could just as well have made me talk in front of the cameras to tell everything,’ De Villiers demanded, still in pursuit of a logical explanation for everything.

The psychiatrist looked sideways at the window. ‘Pierre, I have to break this to you gently, so please be patient with me, okay?’

De Villiers didn’t know what to say but nodded.

‘Okay,’ Professor Nienaber said. ‘I suppose I must share something with you. I would have preferred not to tell you, because this information may not be good for your mental well-being or for your recovery. But I’m going to tell you, because I think that’s the only way I’m going to be able to persuade you to accept that the events did
not
occur as your mind tells you.’

De Villiers swallowed heavily.

‘You’ve suffered a brain injury. You’ve been in a coma for months. We must expect there to be some deficit in your memory, in what you can remember and in the way your memory reconstructs the things you do remember.’

De Villiers didn’t understand.

‘It is not possible,’ he insisted. ‘
FAPLA
is a crude fighting force. They just don’t have this kind of finesse.’

Nienaber nodded, but it was not a nod of concurrence. ‘I’m talking of the Soviets, Pierre, not
FAPLA
. They are very skilled at mindaltering and have very advanced techniques for that. They’re miles ahead of the West in that.’

De Villiers shook his head. ‘And, Pierre,’ Nienaber said, ‘the clarity of your memory actually supports my assessment. You see, Pierre, the brain makes up fantastic stories to make sense of things it doesn’t understand, and it clings to them afterwards with a desperation born out of necessity. Otherwise you would lose your mind. You see, the mind protects itself by going into denial.’

Everything I say is turned against me, De Villiers thought, everything. ‘I’m tired,’ he said suddenly. ‘I feel faint.’

‘Okay, get some rest. We can talk again tomorrow when you feel better,’ Nienaber said and pressed the buzzer for the nurse.

‘But Pierre, I want you to think about this: there’s no General van den Bergh in the
SADF
. Not in Military Intelligence and no one by that name in the regular army. We have published lists of all the senior officers, in fact, of every member of the
SADF
, and I can tell you there’s no such general. Please think about that, because it undermines your whole story. And there’s never been anyone called Jacques Verster in the army either.’

It dawned on De Villiers that Nienaber must have been briefed by the military, probably General van den Bergh or the major. This man is not trying to help me remember. He’s trying to make me forget. I’m not saying another word to these people, De Villiers said to himself. Not a single fucking word.

But Professor Nienaber hadn’t finished with him and it would get worse before it got better. De Villiers suffered several petit mal seizures during the night and when they took him to see Professor Nienaber the next morning, he was weak and his limbs felt heavy.

‘Have you given any thought to what I explained to you yesterday?’ Nienaber started.

De Villiers nodded. ‘Yes.’

‘Well?’

De Villiers pushed his hands though his hair. ‘But I remember everything so clearly.’

Nienaber smiled and put his hand over De Villiers’s. ‘That’s precisely the point, Pierre. After everything you’ve been through, you could not possibly have a clear memory. Even the drugs we had to give you to clear the infection and to keep you alive would have an effect. It is nothing to be ashamed about.’

De Villiers licked his lips but his tongue was dry. ‘Could I have some water, please?’

Nienaber pressed the bell for the nurse. She came in and returned a minute later with a carafe and two glasses on a tray. There was ice in a small silver beaker.

De Villiers drank deeply from his glass and poured a second.

When he looked up he found Nienaber studying him. ‘You were never on such a mission, Pierre. They tell me there’s no such weapon either. Just listen to yourself. A weapon with a 2300 metre range when the next best can reach no further than 1600? I don’t think so.’

De Villiers shook his head. He had test-fired the weapon at Swartwater and he had carried half of it in a special backpack, listening to Verster’s groans as he struggled with the other half. He knew what he knew.

Nienaber held eye contact with him and reached under the desk.

‘Here,’ he announced, ‘we have your backpack, the one you used on that last mission.’

De Villiers strained to see behind the desk as Nienaber lifted a standard issue backpack onto his lap. ‘Isn’t this your backpack?’ he asked.

It can’t be, De Villiers thought, but the backpack was there on the desk.

A range of doubts raced through De Villiers’s mind as he watched Nienaber undoing the aluminium buckles one by one. The realisation that it was indeed his backpack was punctuated by the clatter when its contents were unceremoniously dumped on the desk, like a witchdoctor’s bones.

Amongst the scattered items was !Xau’s Best and a few mottled wing feathers of a guinea fowl.

De Villiers stood up and took a step backwards. Professor Nienaber smiled the smile of the knowing. De Villiers’s eyes travelled from the backpack’s contents to the backpack and back again.

This is messing with my mind, he thought.

But it wasn’t the backpack he had carried on his mission with Verster, and the Best didn’t belong with the backpack on the desk.

He found Professor Nienaber’s eyes again.

‘See,’ Professor Nienaber said. ‘We even have your knife.’ He pushed the Best towards De Villiers.

De Villiers opened his mouth to speak, to argue, to deny and to explain, but decided that it would serve no purpose.

‘I can see you don’t believe me,’ Nienaber said. ‘Let’s do a little test.’

He opened his briefcase and pulled a photo album from it. He turned the pages slowly until he found the image he was looking for.

‘Look at this photograph,’ he said and turned the album around. He pointed at a photograph of a woman holding a baby. ‘Do you know who that is?’ he asked.

De Villiers shook his head. He felt the bitter taste of almonds rising in his throat and closed his eyes. He breathed slowly, as they had taught him to do, to ward off another petit mal.

Nienaber waited, and when De Villiers opened his eyes again, he said, ‘Go on. Page through the album and tell me when you recognise someone.’

De Villiers slowly turned the pages. He was in several photographs with the woman and the baby. There were many other people in the photographs and sometimes he was in them too, but he didn’t recognise anyone other than himself.

Exasperated, he eventually looked up at Professor Nienaber. ‘What does this mean?’

‘It means, Pierre, that it may be a while before you’ll be back to normal again.’

De Villiers looked at the knife and the feathers for a long time. ‘What am I going to do?’

Nienaber again placed his hand over De Villiers’s ‘Don’t worry. I’ll look after you. You will be my special project.’

De Villiers took a deep breath. ‘Thank you,’ he whispered.

When the nurse came to take De Villiers back to his room, Nienaber had the last word. ‘Just stop talking about Mugabe and a gun that can kill at over two kilometres and walking through Angola with a Bushman and all that.’

‘!Xau,’ De Villiers said to the nurse when they were at his room. ‘His name is !Xau.’

The upgrade of the airport for the 2010 World Cup was incomplete but had already changed the airport beyond his recognition. De Villiers slowly made his way through the throngs of people towards the Arrivals Hall. He had last been here when he left the country in 1992. He saw his sister Heloïse waving at him from the back of the crowd. She hugged him and held onto him for a long time.

‘Hello stranger,’ she said. Her daughter Yolandi was standing behind her. When De Villiers had last seen Yolandi, she had been a toddler in nappies.

Yolandi drove. De Villiers sat in the passenger seat. Heloïse sat knitting in the back seat. The two women talked continuously. They asked numerous questions about Emma and Zoë and New Zealand. Many of their friends had left for New Zealand, they told him. De Villiers couldn’t keep up with the answers and explanations. Yolandi’s cellphone rang and she answered, providing a short respite from the barrage of questions. He watched anxiously as his niece held the phone to her ear with her left hand while trying to open a chocolate bar with her right, steering the car with her knee. He looked at the speedometer – it showed 140 – and other cars were overtaking them.

The changes were obvious in everything De Villiers saw around him: the personnel at the airport, the extent of the building operations in and around the airport building and the spiderweb of roads leading into and out of the airport. The name of the airport had been changed – OR Tambo International, the signs said. At the Rigel Avenue glide-off a road sign read
CAUTION
!
HIJACKING HOT SPOT
!

Yolandi slowed down for the traffic light. ‘Lock your door, please,’ she asked him. De Villiers complied mechanically. The lack of sleep was beginning to tell.

The area around the sign looked well used, crumpled newspapers and empty beer cans lying around. De Villiers recognised the general area, but it had changed. There were entire suburbs with shopping centres where previously there had been veld, wide dual carriageways where there used to be narrow dirt roads between small-holdings. There were houses in walled estates everywhere, wall-to-wall housing, as Heloïse’s husband would later call it.

When they arrived at the golf estate where Heloïse lived, there was a complete office housing security men at the entrance with a queue of visitors waiting to sign in. Yolandi took the line for residents and swiped a button across the face of an electronic scanner. The boom lifted for them to pass. ‘We have very strict security here,’ Heloïse explained when she caught De Villiers looking back at the queue of cleaners and gardeners who had to sign out at the exit and open their bags for inspection.

A three-metre-high concrete wall with an electric fence on top enclosed the whole estate and ran for miles up and down the hilly suburb.

Inside the walls De Villiers found huge mansions placed right up against one another. A well-manicured golf course and paved paths for golf carts wound between the rows of houses. The prevailing style appeared to be Tuscan –
Tos Afrikaans,
his irreverent brother-in-law would later tell him, was the description given to it by a Pretoria University architecture professor. De Villiers had never seen such wealth concentrated in such a small area.