They hugged, the embrace of sibling equals, pulling apart to smile and assess. Both fit, tanned, good-looking, the blue eyes and blond-to-chestnut hair that could populate and decorate international weddings and semi-pro tennis tournaments, mingle at parties from Paris to the Upper East Side, or loaf on yachts from Cannes to Marina del Rey. Comfortable with anyone, comfortable with themselves, comfortable with each other. They were friends, confidants, natural allies, a mutual and enduring support system that had carried them from childhood to early adulthood, through pain and laughter, gain and loss, that had conquered the desolation left by the death of their mother and coped with the expectations of a loving and powerful father. Hands rested on shoulders, empathy and wordless understanding transmitted – always there.
‘So, how’s my little sister?’ he teased.
‘Holding her own against her big, patronizing brother,’ she retorted playfully.
‘You’re looking good.’
‘Compliments win loyalty points.’ She pinched his cheek. ‘And you’re still the handsome adolescent I saw last time.’
‘Shucks.’
‘On which subject – I’ve been hearing disturbing rumours of young Jonty Krige’s out-of-control libido.’
‘From which parts of the globe?’
‘All corners. It’s the glory of modern communications.’
His expression turned mock-sheepish. ‘Hey, Vicks. I’m in my mid-twenties, footloose, rich, talented. What can I say?’
‘Don’t. At least until I’ve had a drink.’ She broke away and found herself a chair. ‘Bernard’s bringing me a Pimm’s.’
‘How was Jo’burg?’
‘Still the ugliest city on earth. Our ancestors wouldn’t have left the Sterkfontein Caves if they’d known what was coming.’
‘No one could have predicted that scale of tackiness.’
‘Voortrekker meets modern Afristocracy – it’s a lethal combination.’ She turned to see if the drinks tray was following. ‘Still, I picked up some great secondhand books for Dad in Melville. And for you …’
‘A new mohair jacket?’
‘Well, you did ask for nothing larney.’
‘Tell me it’s a new mohair.’
She sighed. ‘All the way from Swaziland.’
‘Yes.’ A broad smile. ‘Thanks, sis. Really thoughtful.’
‘Never let it be said I don’t spoil my favourite and only brother. There’s also a pair of Zimbabwean buffalo-hide boots from Rosebank market for you to try on.’
‘I’ll wear them all to the next board meeting.’
‘Imagine Dad’s face. Next, you’ll be introducing bobotie and potjiekos to the canteen.’
In-jokes between a brother and sister who had charm, ease and education, who shared secrets and characteristics, enjoyed trust funds and opportunities, were blessed with the effortless class of their English mother and the dynamism and self-confidence of their South African father. Gilded youth had moved into their golden twenties – 24-carat privilege. A vividly coloured hoopoe strutted the lawn, scavenged clownishly for worms; a pair of brick-red laughing doves cooed contentedly from behind a screen of gum trees.
He kept his gaze on her, his antennae tuned for nuance, but would not let his aching concern show. Even twins had their camouflage, private and windowless aspects to their souls. She would accuse him of worrying too much, of being absurd, of seeing ghosts, and then she would move quickly to a fresh subject. But he did see ghosts, heard echoes of the young teenage girl who had visited a friend’s farm in Zimbabwe’s Matabeleland in a previous decade – a previous lifetime – who returned without her childhood, with traumatized eyes, as the brutalized and raped victim of land-grab gangs answerable to yet another rapacious African despot. Gukurahundi – ‘the rains that wash the chaff away’. A neat catchphrase for the return of slaughter. And Vicky was so much chaff. She had been bound, gagged, forced to watch as the Ndebele-speaking staff were beheaded across a car bonnet by their drunk Shona-speaking attackers. Her hosts – friends of her parents – were shot. Then it was her turn. When they had finished, they covered her in Mukwa furniture oil and attempted to set her alight. They failed, left for other sport, new atrocity. No one did violence quite like the Africans.
She chatted happily, unaware of her brother’s thoughts, unburdened by recall, a young woman of extraordinary character. Her health, her strength, her striking looks, the warmth and vitality of a rounded soul, had escaped the past and drew on a boundless future – so different from the torn and bleeding bundle carried lifeless into a Bulawayo hospital, the wrecked and still body festooned in tubes and pumped with antibiotics and drug cocktails for anti-HIV. Rebirth. A miracle. It was their mother who never recovered, who with their father had sat at the bedside, grieved, tended, who within a year was diagnosed with inoperable cancer. Her children and husband pulled together, pulled through. Political protection and Zimbabwean police ineptitude ensured that the farm assailants never faced trial. Yet it did not save them. Several leaders of hit squads allied to the then President Mugabe’s Zanu-PF party simply disappeared; the headless corpses of three officers from the ruler’s CIO secret police, responsible for coordinating much of the ‘cleansing’ of white-owned farms, were found crucified on a roadside leading to Harare. Few bothered to ask questions, none bothered to proffer answers – this was a dark continent, and there were no answers. Krige Snr had an appetite for vengeance.
And now Africa had come to South Africa. Jonty drained his rum, basked in the somnolent afternoon sunshine. They had survived, kept faith – when faith was merely wishful thinking, nostalgia, a denial of logic. A country and gun-culture of over sixty murders a day, of well over 50,000 reported rapes a year, a land from which some million whites had fled, in which several hundred police officers were killed annually, where Aids was epidemic, where the farms of KwaZulu-Natal and Mpumalanga burned. Azania – a post-apartheid nirvana, its prospects as bright as the orange overalls worn by its convicts. It was home.
She frowned on a sudden thought. ‘How are the problems with the East Cape farms?’
‘Growing. But Dad’s got his boys on the case.’
‘I’d bet on it.’
‘Cattle rustling, mutilations – all on the increase. A lot of evidence it’s political.’
‘It always is.’
‘Where there’s money, there’s a thug linked to the old ANC team from Robben Island.’
‘Self-perpetuating.’ She drank from the Pimm’s glass brought across on a salver by an old retainer.
‘You’re right there.’ He stared at the sky, eyes folding into slits, unsure whether the subject should be steered on a different course. She would spot the ruse. ‘You’ve got police collusion, known Pan-Afric Congress guys, and Umkhonto we sizwe bastards moving with impunity back and forth in the Lesotho mountains. They dig a firefight, and they escape every time.’
‘Jesus, why do we stay, Jonty?’
‘Because it’s us, because Mum died here, because there are still good people to fight for, because we’ve got heavy artillery, because we have a fallback – an option to leave.’
‘Worth drinking to.’
‘And being grateful for. The Afrikaaners around Mangete, Eshowe or Pietermaritzburg aren’t so lucky.’
‘They can laager up, weather it.’
