Atie translated.
‘He wants to know why you are fighting his friends in Angola.’
‘Uh… Tell him it’s not me doing that. It must be the other guys,’ I said in my most convincing voice.
‘He says you are talking bullshit. He has the names of every enemy pilot there and you are one of them.’
‘Oh… In that case, please tell him I’m thinking of leaving. I never really liked it there.’
Silence.
After an interminable wait, Rasputin’s bigger nephew growled:
‘Will you go in front of the press and tell them that what South Africa is doing in Angola is wrong?’
‘I will think about it… Can we please go now?’ I pleaded with Atie.
‘He wants to know when you’ll decide.’
‘Tomorrow?’ I offered timidly.
‘He is happy with that. But now he wants you to have a drink with him to seal the deal.’
Even if I’d had any choice of who to drink with at that moment, which I didn’t, my knees were knocking so hard, and my legs were so jelly-like, that I couldn’t have walked away if you’d held a gun to my head. So we drank, like old friends, into the wee small hours until some kind soul got me home and put me to bed… but I’d still not stopped shitting myself – figuratively speaking, of course.
I woke early that Friday morning.
I lay in bed and tried manfully to sort out the conflicting emotions raging in my head. Life had been so easy up to that point, the choices simple, the parameters crisp and clear, the routines set and predictable. Now I was seemingly committed to following through on some quite heady stuff.
Desertion… asylum… persecution and prosecution?
Shit, I thought, as the cogs in my brain spun and then threatened to smash against each other. If I went public, as the Russian wanted, I might even become the target of South African assassins. It had happened before.
While these were things I could still handle, what about those who’d be caught in the crossfire, particularly the members of my family? My mom’s hard-won position at the CSIR aside, my sister had recently become engaged to a senior Foreign Affairs diplomat, and I doubted that she’d be unaffected. My brother was doing his national service and many of my dad’s friends were SADF military people.
Feeling conflicted, I packed my backpack and Atie and I went to Amsterdam. On the way, we debated the first port of call and I was adamant that it be the local British Airways office, so that I might generate the available funds to complete the initial phase of the plan.
I really don’t know if I would have gone through with the plan had British Airways cooperated, but the entire process was halted when the airline personnel refused point-blank to refund the money for my return ticket. I made an obligatory, but small, scene about being a frequent flyer (true for the past month) and stated my disgust at their uncooperative attitude. But deep down I already knew that the damage my decision to seek asylum in the Netherlands would have wrought on my loved ones was a lot more than I was willing to accept responsibility for.
Atie was devastated by my capitulation, which she saw as a convenient excuse to return to my comfort zone rather than to make an honourable but irreversible stand. She urged, and then begged, me to go to the Dutch interior ministry and put myself at their mercy. At one point, she dashed into a bank and emerged with a sizeable wad of cash that she tried to thrust into my hands and pockets, insisting that money, or my lack thereof, was temporary and should be no obstacle to my ‘doing the right thing’.
She tried wailing loudly, attracting a lot of attention from passers-by. The battle raged for the entire morning, up and down the streets that we walked along. Around lunchtime, as we were walking down a little road next to a canal, she suddenly looked up and told me to stay where I was as she had a surprise for me. She dashed across the road to a mobile sandwich vendor.
A few minutes later she returned, carrying something in her hand. She handed me the parcel and said, ‘This is a typical Dutch sandwich. I think you might know it as steak tartare.’
I unfolded the wrapper, revealing an open baguette covered from one end to the other with what looked like raw mince. On top of the mince were the yolks of three raw chicken eggs.
‘Eat it,’ Atie ordered.
‘It’s a bit underdone, even for my liking,’ I replied sceptically, raising an eyebrow.
‘Then just taste it, please, Steve. Do that one thing for me?’ she pleaded sweetly, and I knew that I had to comply.
As I lifted the concoction to my mouth, Atie stepped in front of me and, using both her hands for leverage, slammed the uncooked and gooey mess into my face as hard as she could. I was blinded by the sticky mixture of raw beef and egg yolk covering my face, ears included. I stood rooted to the spot in shock and surprise at the violence and suddenness of the assault.
I tried to clear my eyes but the next moment Atie stepped forward and shoved her compact mirror directly into my field of vision and screamed, ‘What do you see?’
‘What do you mean?’ I hissed back ‘You’ve just ruined my only clean shirt!’
Thrusting the mirror even closer to my face made me squint and draw back but also revealed the reflection of a face that looked like it’d been through the blades of a rotary lawnmower running at full speed.
She shouted, ‘That’s what your guns do to people, you… you murdering bastard!’
It took some time for the words to sink in. As I stood there trying vainly to clean myself up, Atie continued to rant and rave. After a while she just stopped shouting and stood there, glaring fiercely at me while I picked little flecks of meat from my eyebrows and forelock. The sandwich vendor, who’d been observing the proceedings closely, and deducing that it was safe to approach, came over with a damp cloth to help me wipe away the remaining muck.
Looking at Atie, as her anger and indignation slowly leached away and the tension between us waned, and still astounded by the vehemence of her outburst, I felt a range of emotions well up inside me. My newfound doubts about the morality of my SADF involvement, my regret at the anguish I was causing to those close to me, and my trepidation at what the future held for me, brought tears to my eyes. But, summoning all the strength I had, I managed to choke them down and slam the lids on those cans of worms.
Then, in a rare encounter with clarity, consideration and vision, I said softly, ‘Atie, if I don’t go back, the consequences for my family and others will be bad. There’s a right way to get out and it isn’t… like this.’
Atie’s grudging acceptance of my rationale, and the release of the immense pressure that had built up between us, made the declaration of a truce possible.
Although Atie tried, many times, to visit me in South Africa, she was always denied a visa for some reason. Later, the intervals between when we spoke on the telephone, or wrote to each other, gradually grew further and further apart, until the relationship finally petered out completely.
7
The day my world changed
Back in South Africa, I barely had time to repack my battered old kitbag before I found myself on a Flossie headed for Ondangwa for a one-month tour.
Within days of my arrival I participated in a fresh operation with helicopter aircrews based at New Etale, just a kilometre or two from the infamous Oshikango Gate border post. The role of the four gunships stationed there was to be on stand-by to provide close air support to a company of troops who were going to be dropped about 30 kilometres inside Angola, tasked with finding and destroying a PLAN base that had recently been established in the area.