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  7

  We walked in twilight to the Mohlolobe’s Honey Buzzard Restaurant. Emma seemed a little down. She had been quiet at dinner the previous night in Hermanus. Maybe she wasn’t a night person, or perhaps it was the heat.

  While we sat in candlelight at the table she said, ‘You must be very hungry, Lemmer.’

  ‘I could eat’

  A waiter brought menus and the wine list. ‘Sometimes I forget about food,’ she said.

  She passed me the wine list. ‘You’re welcome to have wine.’

  ‘No, thanks.’

  She studied the menu for a long time and without enthusiasm. ‘Just a salad, a Greek salad,’ she told the waiter. I ordered a bottle of mineral water for the price of a small car – and the beef fillet with green pepper sauce and mashed potato. We looked around at the other people in the room, middle-aged foreigners in groups of two or four. Emma tugged the white linen serviette out of its imitation ivory ring. She twirled the ring round and round in her delicate fingers, examining the fine leaf pattern engraved on it.

  ‘I’m sorry about earlier …’ she said, looking up. ‘When I saw the impala …’

  I remembered the moment when she had put her hand over her mouth.

  She turned her attention back to the ring in her hand. ‘We had a game farm in the Waterberg. My dad …’

  She took a deep breath and exhaled slowly, trying to gain control over the emotion behind the words.

  ‘Not a big farm, only three thousand hectares, just a piece of land with some buck so we could go there on weekends. My dad said it was for us, for his children, so we wouldn’t be total city kids. So we would know what klits grass is. Jacobus was never in the house when we were on the farm. He would sleep outdoors and walk and just live outside … He always had two or three friends there, but in the late afternoon when the sun went down he would come and fetch me. I must have been nine or ten; he was nearly out of school. He would go walking with his little sister. He knew where to find the buck. All the little herds. He would ask me, what do you want to see, sis, what buck? Then he would teach me about them, what their habits were, what they did. And the birds, I had to learn all their names. It was fun, but I always felt a little bit guilty because I wasn’t like him. It was like he only came alive when he was on the farm. I didn’t always feel like going to the farm, not every weekend and every holiday …’

  She went quiet again until our food came. I tackled the steak with a passion. She pushed her lettuce around restlessly with her fork, and then put it down.

  ‘My dad … for him the worst thing was that they never found Jacobus. Maybe it would have been better for him if there had been a … a body. Something …’

  She lifted the serviette from her lap and pressed it to her mouth. ‘He sold the farm. When there was no more hope. He never talked to us about it; he just came home one day and said the farm has been… it was the first time … today, when I saw the buck. It was the first time since then, since Jacobus died.’

  I didn’t say anything. My expressions of sympathy had never been reliable. I just sat there, aware that I wasn’t especially privileged. I was merely the only available ear.

  Emma picked up the serviette ring again. ‘I … Last night I was thinking maybe I’m making a big mistake, maybe I so badly want to have something of Jacobus somewhere that I can’t judge this impartially. How can I be sure it isn’t my own emotion and longing? I miss them, Lemmer. I miss them as people and I miss them as ideas. My brother and mother and father. Everybody needs a family. And I wonder, did I come here searching for that? Did the man on TV really look like Jacobus? I can’t be sure. But I can’t just … that phone call … if you asked me now what the man said, what I definitely heard? That’s what you need a father for, to ask him, “Dad, is this the right thing?”’

  My plate was empty. I put down the knife and fork in relief. Now I didn’t have to feel guilt that the food was good and I was enjoying it while she struggled with her emotions. But I couldn’t answer her question. So I said, ‘Your father …’ Just a little encouragement.

  She enclosed the ring with her hand, lost in thought. Finally, she looked up at me and said, ‘He was the son of a stoker.’

  A waiter took my plate away and she pushed her salad towards him and said, ‘I’m sorry, the salad is great. It’s just my appetite.’

  ‘Not a problem, madam. Would you like to see the dessert menu?’

  ‘You should have some, Lemmer.’

  ‘No thanks, I’ve had plenty.’

  ‘Coffee? Liqueur?’

  We declined. I hoped Emma was ready to leave. She put the serviette ring down where her plate had been and rested her elbows on the table. ‘It seems as if everyone has forgotten how poor so many Afrikaners were. My grandmother made a vegetable garden in the backyard and my grandfather kept a chicken coop between the railway lines. It wasn’t allowed, but there was no other space on the property. Those little railway houses in Bloemfontein …’

  So she related the family history, the rags-to-riches saga of Johannes Petrus le Roux. I suspected it was the telling of a familiar story, one she had heard many times over as a wide-eyed child. It was a way for her to touch the cornerstone of her lost family, to redefine herself and this investigation in the immediate present.

  Her father had been the second-oldest of five children, a large family that placed heavy demands on the salary of a stoker. At fifteen there had been no option, he had to go to work. For the first year he laboured as a general dogsbody at the giant SA Railways sheds in Bloemfontein’s East End, within walking distance of hi parents’ modest home between the sidings. At the end of each week he would hand over the envelope with his meagre earnings to his mother. Every evening he would rinse out his single work shirt and hang it in front of the coal stove to dry. At sixteen he began his apprenticeship as a fitter and turner, the area of his interest.

  And thus, in time, the little miracle began. Johan le Roux and his tutors gradually realised he had an instinct for gears, a head for the many ratios and variations they had with each other and the machines that drove them. By the time he qualified as a fitter his skill was widely recognised and his solutions in a dozen different engines were saving the railways thousands.

  One summer morning in 1956, two Afrikaner businessmen from Bothaville walked into the big workshop. Over the racket of hammering and filing and cutting, they shouted that they were looking for the Le Roux boy’tjie who was so good with gears. They built farm implements for the maize farmers of the Northern Free State and they needed his talents in order to compete with the expensive machinery that was being imported from America and the UK.

  His stoker father was against it. The state was a reliable employer, an insurance policy against depression and war and poverty. The private sector was run by the English and Jews and foreigners, all out to cheat the boere, in his opinion; a risky existence. ‘Pa, I can design my own stuff. I can draw up the plans myself and cut the forms and put the machines together piece by piece. I can’t do that in the Railways,’ was his argument. At the end of the month he left by train for the little town on the Vals river, where the gods prepared to smile on him.

  He was everything his new employers had hoped he would be – hard working, dedicated and ingenious. His ideas were innovative, his products successful; his reputation became known in wider circles. It was barely a year later that he met Sara.

  This moment is a crucial one in the Le Roux story, as it is in many family histories I have heard over the years. When Emma presented it, there was the old amazement at destiny, the fate that determined a chance crossing of paths for her future parents and so decided her genetic blueprint.

  The small industrial area of Bothaville is to the north of the town, on the other side of the railway line. To reach his boarding house in the town centre, Johan le Roux had to use the pedestrian bridge at the station and walk down the platform. Sweaty and begrimed, carrying his tin lunch box, he followed his usual path one late aft
ernoon. In passing, he glanced inquisitively through the windows of the brightly lit, jam-packed station tearoom. And spotted the pretty young woman sitting there. He was stopped in his tracks. It was a magical scene: the petite girl in the gay hat and snow-white blouse, with red lips, holding a cup of tea in her delicate hands.

  For a long time he stood on the twilit platform watching out for her, torn by the knowledge that she was meant for him, but that his oil-stained overall was not going to make a good impression. Nor could he risk going home to change; by the time he returned she might have left with the train.

  Eventually, he opened the door and made his way through the tables to where she sat. ‘I’m Johan le Roux,’ he said. ‘I look a lot better when I’ve had a bath.’

  She looked up and to her eternal credit she saw the man behind the workman, the gentle smile, intelligent eyes and the zeal for life. ‘I’m Sara de Wet,’ she said, holding out her hand without hesitation, ‘and my train has been delayed.’

  He offered to buy her another cup of tea. For an immeasurable instant she hesitated, she would tell her children, like someone teetering at the top of a precipice. She knew with absolute certainty that her ‘yes’ or ‘no’ was a fork in the road through her life. ‘Yes, please, I would like that,’ she answered. In the hour before the drawn-out whistle of her train called her away, they had exchanged life stories and taken the first steps on the road to love. She was the elder of two daughters of the only lawyer in Brandfort, on her way to Johannesburg to work as a typist for a mining company. She had a secretarial certificate from a Bloemfontein college – and a nervous excitement about the great adventure awaiting her in the city. He wrote his address on the back of the tearoom account (now a yellowing, barely legible fragment of history that Emma preserved in an old family Bible) and said she could write to him if she liked.

  She had. At first they corresponded for a month or three and then the long-distance romance took shape. Once a month he would go up for a weekend, every week he received a long letter and sent one off. Every now and then, just to hear her voice, he would ring her over the crackling country telephone lines of Bothaville.

  Until a year later, when the men from Sasol appeared at his workshop door. It was 1958. Their plant had already been operating for three years, but some of the gears on the coal lines would just not work smoothly. They had come looking for a contractor to maintain and improve them, and rumour had it that Johan le Roux was the master of gears.

  The contract he negotiated was large enough for him to open his own business in Vanderbijl Park, but not so generous that he could ask for her hand. He had to wait until 1962, when his debts were paid off. But in those four years they saw each other at least every weekend, and could talk on the phone every day.

  In 1963 they were married in Brandfort and together they ran Le Roux Engineering Works – he in the workshop, she on administration and accounts. Three years later Jacobus Dawid le Roux was born and Sara became a full-time mother and housewife. By 1968 they were ready for another child, but Johan le Roux’s growing reputation brought yet another revolution to their life. This time it was a long black sedan at the workshop door – and three white men in black suits and hats who had come to see him. They were from the newly formed Arms Development and Production Corporation, the predecessor of what later became Armscor in 1977. He had to sign an oath of silence before they told him about the artillery pieces and armoured vehicles that had to be designed and built. Since they had already established by careful enquiries that he was a good Afrikaner, they had come to offer him the gearing contract.

  This new income stream had two consequences. The first was that Johan and Sara le Roux grew rich. Not overnight and not without merit, for the state is an unsympathetic client and it took long hours of blood and sweat. But over a period of nearly thirty years, Le Roux Engineering grew to an industry with three giant workshops and a separate building in Johannesburg for research, management and administration.

  The second consequence was that they had to wait until 1972 before they could think of another child. That was the year Emma Le Roux was born. On 6 April, a birthday she shared with the entire Republic in those days.

  ‘Then they moved to Johannesburg so my father didn’t have to travel so much.’

  My own intuition was that Big Bucks no longer felt entirely at home in the middle-class greyness of Vanderbijl Park. Linden was the neighbourhood of the up-and-coming wealthy Afrikaner in those days.

  ‘And that was where I grew up,’ with an apologetic wave of her hand that said ‘that was my fate’. I could see the earlier heaviness had lifted, as if the telling of her story had somehow freed her. She smiled a little self-consciously, and checked her watch. ‘We must be up early tomorrow.’

  We went outside. The night was an incubator of heat and humidity. Far off to the west there was lightning. While we followed the brightly lit pathways back to the Bateleur suite, I considered her story. I wondered whether she ever thought about the source of her wealth, built on the foundation of apartheid and international sanctions and now so wholly politically incorrect. Was it a guilty conscience which made her place so much emphasis on her parents’ poor background?

  Was the origin of her wealth the reason she had a career, the reason she did not simply live off her interest?

  At our suite I asked her to lock her bedroom door from the inside – which, we were soon to find out, was bad advice.

  My cell phone beeped in my pocket. I knew it was Jeanette Louw’s daily ‘EVERYTHING OK?’ text. I took it out and sent back the usual ‘EVERYTHING OK’. Then I walked around the building one more time before going to bed. My own bedroom door remained open. I lay in darkness and waited for sleep. Not for the first time, I chewed over the advantages of a respectable family history.

  8

  Emma’s cry penetrated the thick sand of sleep: ‘Lemmer!’

  I was on my feet and in the sitting room before I was wholly awake, not even sure her cry had been real.

  ‘Lemmer!’ Pure terror.

  I rushed at her door, slammed into it. Locked. ‘I’m here,’ I said, hoarse with sleep and frustration.

  ‘There’s something in the room,’ she shrieked.

  ‘Open the door.’

  ‘No!’

  I hit the door with my shoulder, a dull thud, but it stayed shut. I heard a strange, vague sound inside.

  ‘I think it’s a … Lemmer!’ My name was a frightened scream.

  I took a step back and kicked the door. It splintered open. Her room was pitch black. She shrieked again. I banged my palm where the light switch should be and it was suddenly bright and the snake lunged at me, a huge, grey, hissing, wide-mawed monster, the inside of the mouth as black as death. I recoiled into the sitting room. Emma screamed for me again, and for a fleeting moment I saw her in the double bed, pillow and duvet, everything piled up in front of her for protection. The snake lunged at me, striking again and again, the hollow hiss of pure rage. I tripped over a chair, and the snake’s fangs bit into the material millimetres from my leg. As it pulled loose, venom sprayed in a bright mist. I rolled off the chair, across the floor. I had to get a weapon, a club. I grabbed the lamp off the corner table, swung it, and missed.

  The snake was incredibly long, three metres, maybe more, streamlined and lethal like a spear. I leapt behind the other armchair, trying to keep it between us; the snake came over the top, it front end lifted high. The lamp was too heavy, too clumsy, I smashed it against the wall to get rid of the shade, hit a painting, glass and wood shattered, Emma screamed. The snake struck and I hit, grazing its neck. I leapt to the right to get away. Swiftly, it came again, unmanageable, terrifyingly determined, as though my blow had released a deeper rage, a long, thick, elastic projectile, the black eyes relentless, the maw aggressively gaping.

  I shook with adrenalin. It struck, pain stabbed my foot, I hit back with the lamp, the metal where the bulb had been struck the reptile’s neck, knocking the head against the wall.
For a moment, it was off balance. I struck again. The lamp-stand was long and heavy. It hit the snake’s body where it slid across the tiled floor, and seemed to break something under the gunmetal scales. The snake recoiled, twisted around itself. I hit again and again and again, the head evading me. I saw a line of blood on the floor. It was my foot. The venom would dull me; I must finish it now.

  I lifted the lamp high over my shoulders, smashed it down violently. Missed. Gripped it like a baseball bat, swung, hit, swung, grazed the head. Missed. It was retreating now. I held the lamp-stand like a sword, trying to trap the head against the floor. Once, twice unsuccessful, the third thrust of the point was behind the head, I bored it into the tiles. Its long body wound up the lamp and around my arm. With my bleeding foot I tramped the neck down, lifted the lamp again and stabbed the head with all my fear and loathing and revulsion. The snake was coiled around my leg now, the long supple muscle convulsing one last time. As it relaxed, I jerked my foot away and smashed down one last time to totally pulverise the coffin head.

  She sat on top of the toilet in my bathroom. I sat on the floor, still in my sleeping shorts. My foot rested on her lap. She carefully extracted the splinter of glass.

  ‘I’m bleeding on you.’

  ‘Just keep still.’ Strict, the same schoolmarm who had ordered me to ‘Sit down, Lemmer’ a few minutes ago. I noticed her hand still had an obvious tremor. She pulled the shard out with her fingers and put it carefully on the windowsill. It hadn’t been the snake’s venomous fangs after all. She rolled paper off the toilet roll and pressed the bundle hard against the cut. The blood soaked through it.

  ‘Hold this tight,’ she said, and pushed my foot towards me. She got up and went out. I couldn’t help noticing the imprint of her nipples against the big T-shirt she wore for pyjamas which hung to above her knees and exposed her shapely calves. I kept the toilet paper pressed to the cut. My hands were steady. She was away for a while and then I heard her bare feet moving through the disarrayed sitting room with its overturned chair, broken painting and the pieces of the lamp. The snake lay outside on the veranda. Its long scaly body was still supple and smooth when I’d dragged it out. I felt guilty, despite the circumstances, about the indignity, the sharp contrast between that deadly coil and this lifeless ribbon.