Authors: Deon Meyer
‘Like closure.’ Melanie nodded her head sympathetically. ‘I understand completely.’
Suddenly Emma’s phone rang shrilly. The baby’s eyes opened and her face crumpled in dismay. ‘I’m so sorry,’ said Emma and pressed the button to turn it off.
Jollie-Jolanie’s eyes drooped slowly shut.
‘You got to know him when he was working at Heuningklip?’ Emma asked in a low voice as she replaced the cell phone in her bag.
‘Jo.
That was serenity if there ever was. I was coming from Carolina way. I had a little white Volkswagen Golf, and its name was Dolfie. It never gave me any trouble. Never. So then I felt something wasn’t lekker and I stopped and it was a flat tyre. Man, I couldn’t even remember where the spare wheel was. Cobie came past, he’d been to the co-op to fetch some stuff with his pick-up and all he saw was this girl with her hands on her hips looking at the flat tyre, and he stopped. Now isn’t that serenity?’
Only when she used the word the second time did I realise she meant ‘serendipity’.
‘Yes it is,’ said Emma with a straight face.
‘So, we began to chat. Actually, you know, I’m a terrible chatterbox and this good-looking ou was so shy and quiet and then he took out the spare and it was flat too! So then we went in his pick-up to the BP beside the resort and I asked him where he worked and what he did and so on. When he said Heuningklip, I couldn’t stop asking questions, because everybody knows about Stef Moller. He’s this billionaire that bought all these farms and made them nice, but nobody knows where his money came from and he lives in this little old house and he doesn’t talk. And Cobie said Stef is this amazing person that just wants to heal the land so nature can balance and I said “how does that work?” and then Cobie began to explain. And that’s when I fell in love, when he talked about the veld and the animals and the economy and you could see the real Cobus, the one behind the shyness. I asked him what is his favourite animal and he said “the honey badger”. So I said why and we sat there in his pick-up on the road beside Dolfie and he told me stories about the honey badgers and he talked with his body like this, his eyes and hands and all.’
Melanie’s blue eyes shone and she looked at the baby on her lap with a tinge of guilt. The child’s eyes were shut and her mouth, a duplicate of her mother’s, was open.
Melanie’s voice dropped an octave when she saw that the child was asleep. She wiped the moisture out of her eyes. ‘That’s when I fell in love. And then he just went off. But I’ve got closure.’
‘How long did you see each other?’
‘Seven months.’
Emma encouraged her with a nod.
‘At first Cobie was so shy. I waited a whole week after the flat tyre, and when I heard nothing from him I took him a gift pack from the Badplaas chemist shop to say thank you. He was back in his shell again, so I said doesn’t a girl get coffee on this farm. I saw he didn’t have proper curtains even in his little house and I said I would make him some, but he said no, he didn’t need them. A woman just knows when an ou likes her and I could see him looking at me behind that shyness and so I knew I just needed to be patient. So I drove out there the next Saturday and measured the
windows and went through to Nelspruit and bought some pretty yellow material that was nice and cheerful. The next weekend he helped me to hang it up and then I said, “You can say thank you now,” and when he held me his whole body was shaking. I think it was his first time.’
It was after eleven when we drove back to Mohlolobe, four hundred kilometres on the Nl via Polokwane and then right on the R71. For a long time Emma just sat staring. Before Tzaneen her head drooped slowly to her shoulder and she slept, too tired to do battle with all the ghosts.
I looked at her and felt the urge to pity her. I felt like running my hand over her short hair and saying with great sympathy and compassion, ‘Emma le Roux, you are the Don Quixote of the Cape, charging Lowveld windmills with pointless bravery, but now it’s time to go home.’
Melanie Posthumus had told us that Cobie de Villiers came from Swaziland. He told her his stories in fragments. He grew up in an orphanage in Mbabane after his parents had been killed during a robbery in their farm shop. He had no family. After school he worked as an assistant game ranger, later he got a job with the company contracted to repair the environmental damage caused by the Swazi’s old Bomvu Ridge iron mine. He told her wonderful stories – of how the archaeologists worked alongside them to investigate ancient history. ‘It’s the oldest mine in the world, you know,’ Melanie said with authority. ‘There were Africans taking stuff out of the ground in 40,000 DC She said ‘dee cee’ with undaunted self-confidence.
She said, ‘Cobie was an outlander, you know.’ The staff members at the Badplaas resort were an isolated group thrown on their own resources and they would frequently braai and dance and party together. But Cobie hadn’t liked to socialise at the resort, despite the stream of invitations. Instead he would take her to the veld when she had a day off and then the ‘real’ Cobie would surface. It was then that he lived, that the sun shone through him and his shyness evaporated. They slept under the stars, and beside a campfire in the veld he told
her that he’d found his niche with Stef Moller; he’d like to stay there for ever, there were so many plans, so much work. Moller’s farms covered fifty thousand hectares. The goal was seventy thousand. That’s when they could reintroduce lions and wild dogs. But not all the neighbouring farmers wanted to sell.
She was the one that began to talk of marriage, ‘because Cobie was too shy’. Initially, he seemed not to hear her hints, later he began to say, ‘maybe, one day’. Melanie had an explanation for that. ‘He was just too used to being on his own, you know.’ She had helped him lose that habit. She let him know that she would come and live on the reserve with him, keep house for him, go to the veld with him, put no social pressure on him whatsoever. Eventually, he began to build up enthusiasm for the idea – in his own quiet way.
I had my own theories about her method of igniting that enthusiasm.
‘One night he came to the resort and he was too serious for words and he said before we can get married there was something he had to do. He would be away a week or two and then he would bring me a ring. I asked him what he was going to do and he said he couldn’t tell me, but he had to do the right thing and he would tell me about it one day.’
She never saw him again.
‘Can you remember the date?’
‘It was the twenty-second of August 1997.’
Emma had brought out her sheet of paper – and the photo of the young Jacobus le Roux. Without a word, she passed the picture across the coffee table. While Melanie Posthumus was looking at it, Emma had written something more on her sheet of paper. Melanie stared at the photo for a long time until she said, ‘I don’t know.’
Her husband, Johan Posthumus, arrived when we were on our way to the door. He was not much taller than his wife. He had protruding ears and a slight paunch. He treated Melanie as if he still couldn’t believe his luck.
As we drove off, they stood close together in the light of the veranda. He kept one hand on his wife’s shoulder, the other waved us goodbye. I read relief in the gesture.
When we turned on to the Nl at a quarter past eleven that night, Emma made a single notation and then put the pen and paper away and stared out of the window for a long time. I wondered what she was thinking. Would she, like me, ponder the glorious irony of Melanie Posthumus – intellectually challenged, but blessed with an instinctive ancient wisdom, knowing precisely how to use her sexy body and pretty face to snare the reluctant Cobie de Villiers? I’d sat there listening to Melanie, the breathless chatter, the childlike naivety, and wondered: why Cobus? As a spa therapist she must have had a constant supply of more well-to-do, better socially adjusted men. What was it about her self-image and genetic requirements that made her choose the ‘outlander’. (That mutation of ‘outsider’ was perhaps her most amusing misuse of the language. It said a lot about the emerging syndrome of quasi-intellectuals. Satellite television brought National Geographic, Discovery and the History Channel to the common crowd, so everyone was familiar with the jargon, although their terminology was frequently faulty.) Was it simply that Melanie wanted the one who didn’t immediately come drooling after her like Pavlov’s dog? Beautiful women do that, even those that aren’t brain surgeons, because the lovely exterior often hides a gnawing insecurity.
And that led me to wonder whether Emma still believed the Cobie de Villiers of Heuningklip and Mogale was one and the same person as Jacobus le Roux. On what grounds? I tried to weigh the compulsion to track down a lost brother against the evidence of the day and came to only one conclusion – her hopes must be dashed. The evidence was against it. But then, I was an objective bystander.
Emma was no Melanie Posthumus. She was smart. She stood up for herself. I respected her perseverance, her relentless crusade to reveal the truth, to ‘know for sure’, as she repeatedly said. But could she see the truth when it was right in front of her nose? Could she take a step back and evaluate the facts without emotion?
Emma slept while I answered Jeanette Louw’s daily ‘
ALL OK?’
SMS with one hand. I would have liked to add ‘except for my
client’s grasp of reality’ to my ‘
ALL OK
’, but Body Armour’s code of conduct didn’t provide for that.
Emma didn’t wake when I stopped in front of the Bateleur suite in the Mohlolobe Game Reserve at three in the morning. She was a vulnerable figure in the front passenger seat: tiny, silent, asleep.
I got out, unlocked the suite and turned on the lights. The door had been repaired, the lamp replaced and there was a giant bowl of fruit, chocolate and champagne on the table in the sitting room. I walked around checking the rooms inside, then outside, testing all the windows. Back at the car, Emma was still asleep.
I didn’t want to wake her. Nor did I wish to spend the night in the car.
I stood looking down at her for a long time and then quietly opened her door and gently picked her up, her head against my neck, one of my arms around her back, the other behind her knees. She was as light as a child. I felt her easy breathing against my skin and smelled the blend of her body scents.
I carried her up the steps, and when I took her into her room, she whispered in my ear, ‘The other room.’ I saw that her eyes were still closed. I turned and went into my bedroom. I put her gently down on my single bed and pulled back the covers of the other. Picked her up again, put her in her own bed and pulled off her shoes. Covered her with the duvet.
Just before I turned away to go and lock the car, I caught a glimpse of the very faintest smile of contentment on Emma le Roux’s face. Like a woman who has won the argument.
At eight in the morning, I was sitting outside on the veranda drinking coffee when Emma appeared, wrapped up in the complimentary white bathrobe, her hair still wet from the shower.
‘Morning, Lemmer.’ The musical tones were back in her voice. She sat on the chair beside me.
‘Morning, Emma. Coffee?’
‘I’ll get some in a moment, thanks.’
The flaps of the bathrobe slid back to expose her tanned knees. I concentrated on the animals that I had been watching. ‘Baboons,’ I said, pointing at the troop on the opposite riverbank on their way to water. The males, like bodyguards, kept watch over the females and little ones.
‘I see them.’
I drank my coffee.
‘Lemmer …’
I looked at her. The idea that she might be wearing nothing under the bathrobe interfered with my concentration.
‘I’m sorry about yesterday.’
‘No apology necessary.’
‘It is. It was wrong and I’m sorry.’
‘Forget about it. It was a rough day, with the snake and everything.’
‘I can’t use that as an excuse. You were irreproachably professional and I respect that.’
I couldn’t look at her. The irreproachably professional bodyguard was battling his imagination, which had inexplicably crept under the soft white towelling of the bathrobe.
There are certain things you will wonder about your entire life, because you can’t discuss them with anyone out of fear of being
branded a pervert. Like the fact that I was sitting beside her on the veranda, visualising her pubic area. That abrupt triangle of fine, dark brown curls below the smooth brown skin of her belly. All that was necessary was to reach out my hand and lift the flap of the robe and there it would be, as damp as her head, a tropical shell smelling of soap and of Emma as I had breathed it in the previous night. I focused on the baboons, feeling guilty, and wondered whether just men were like this, whether a woman, in similar circumstances, could be capable of this degree of banality.
‘Apology accepted.’
It was some time before she spoke again. ‘I was thinking … if you don’t mind, let’s stay another day. We can do the game drive tonight, have a good meal. And go home tomorrow.’
‘That’s fine.’ Had she seen the light?
‘I’ll pay you for the whole week regardless.’
‘Jeanette does the contracts.’
‘I’ll call her.’
I nodded.
‘Let’s go and get a decent breakfast.’
‘Good idea,’ I agreed.
I was waiting for Emma on the veranda when I heard her call me with excitement in her voice. I rose and found her in the sitting room holding her cell phone.
‘Listen to this,’ she said. ‘Let me play it for you again.’ She pressed buttons on the mobile, listened to it against her ear and passed it to me.
‘You have one saved message,’ the voicemail intoned, and then a familiar voice spoke. ‘Emma, this is Frank Wolhuter. I believe you were right, I found something. Call me, please, when you get this message.’
‘Interesting,’ I said, and gave the phone back to her.
‘That must have been last night, when we were with Melanie. I phoned but there’s no answer. Do we have a phone book here?’
‘In the drawer of the bedside table. I’ll get it.’
Back in the sitting room, we looked up the number of the Mogale Rehabilitation Centre and called. It was a long time before someone picked up and Emma said, ‘May I speak to Frank Wolhuter, please?’