The brigadier threw the blue folder containing the tasking signal to the ground, and mumbling a string of profanities, interspersed with ‘fucking’ and ‘bicycle’, stormed off to wherever pissed-off brigs go in Schmidtsdrift.
During dinner that evening I was asked/told to attend a briefing immediately afterwards with the full team of big-bang and destruction-device experts. The brigadier opened the meeting with another assault on my alleged tardiness but was quickly silenced by one of the Armscor scientists, who then took charge and outlined the programme for the coming week. The combined team’s requirement for chopper support was a lot more involved than I’d thought, and I looked forward to a busy week, despite the hostile attitude of the brig.
The meeting went on until around 22h30, and had just finished when a young national serviceman came into the room and made straight for me.
‘Lieutenant Joubert?’’ he inquired.
‘One and the same,’ I responded.
‘There’s a phone call from Air Force Headquarters for you in the ops room, sir.’
‘Are you sure it’s for me?’ I asked, surprised.
‘Yes, sir. Please follow me,’ and he led the way to a darkened tent where a landline had been tenuously connected to the primitive local telephone exchange network. As we walked the hundred or so metres to the ops room I felt an increasing sense of trepidation. Receiving a call in a place as remote as Schmidtsdrift was rare, and I knew instinctively that it could only mean bad news.
I suspected that the brigadier had already lodged a complaint about my insolence and that, at the least, the call was going to be an unmitigated dressing-down from some ranking desk pilot at SAAF HQ.
‘Lieutenant Joubert,’ I said hesitantly, after picking up the phone transceiver.
‘Lieutenant,’ said a voice on the other end of the line, ‘this is the duty officer at SAAF HQ. I have some bad news for you—’ and then the line went dead.
By now I was convinced that the brigadier had shopped me to SAAF HQ for something I’d not done, and I was plotting my revenge when the phone rang again. I picked it up.
‘Hello, Lieutenant. This line is… mother’s had a… intensive care… get back to Pretoria asap. Your replacement… be there tomorrow… 10h00.’
The call dropped for the second time, and, despite the young national serviceman doing all in his power and winding the handle until it glowed red hot, we couldn’t re-establish contact with SAAF HQ.
For the first time in my life I felt a sense of dread so deep and so strong that I battled to breathe. I concentrated hard to calm myself but couldn’t suppress the blind panic that I felt welling up in my chest. I tried to convince myself that it couldn’t be true, that someone had made a monumental error and confused me with some other Joubert, but deep down I knew that something terrible had happened to my mother.
Going back over the call, I came to the conclusion that Mom had in all likelihood been hurt in a car accident. But then, what of Dad, who would have been with her, or my gran, who they would have been taking home? There’d been no mention of them. At some point, I realised that the sooner I left for home, the better.
It was not a good idea, and a prohibited practice, to fly an Alo III at night without any visible moon and as my poor luck would have it, there was no moon that night. I went in search of the brigadier to inform him of my imminent departure and to apologise for the inconvenience that this would cause. I found him in the ablution block brushing his teeth and preparing for bed.
‘Brigadier, I just got a call from SAAF HQ. Something very serious has happened to my mother and I am leaving for Pretoria as soon as conditions allow. My replacement will be here at 10h00 tomorrow, I think.’
‘Fuck,’ he said, spraying flecks of toothpaste and spit onto the mirror in front of him. ‘You fucking blue-jobs and your never-ending namby-pamby excuses will have consequences. You should realise, my boy, that when you are a soldier you must put the bullshit of families behind the needs of your country!’
‘You don’t know my mom,’ I said, and walked swiftly away, afraid that I’d do or say something that I’d later regret.
Sleep was impossible, and I tossed and turned until around 03h30 or so, when I woke my flight engineer and said I was leaving, in the dark with no moon. If he wanted to stay put I’d understand, but I needed to get to Pretoria. True to the character of SAAF flight engineers, he reached the chopper before I did and we left shortly afterwards. I was fortunate that the sky was clear and that a dull line on the horizon allowed me to keep the aircraft the right way up and to avoid trouble.
After a brief vertical descent and landing in the courtyard of the police station at Wolmaransstad to refuel, we took off into a lightening eastern sky and landed at AFB Swartkop just before 07h00. On the final leg, I had managed to contact a radio ham, and the extraordinarily helpful operator kindly patched my radio call into a telephone and called my sister, who also lived in Pretoria. She then gave me the gist of what had transpired.
Our mom had suffered a stroke.
The previous evening, as she and my dad were driving my grandmother back into Pretoria, without any warning Mom had collapsed in the front passenger seat of the car. They were close to the Pretoria General Hospital and my dad had driven straight to the casualty section. Consequently, Mom had received treatment within minutes for the blood clot lodging in her brain.
For now, that was all she knew. I told my sister that I’d be at the hospital around 07h30.
I don’t think that the rotor blades of the Alo had even stopped before I leapt out and rushed off to my car. Peak-hour traffic notwithstanding, I reached the hospital 20 minutes later and sprinted all the way to the ward where my dad and sister were waiting.
All night long, tossing and turning in my bed at Schmidtsdrift and during the flight home, I had tried to picture what I’d see when I finally got to my mother’s bedside. At the tender age of 21, I had become accustomed to, and had no great fear or dread of seeing blood and guts, severed body parts or gaping violent injuries to the bodies of human beings. I rationalised that they were part and parcel of the work I’d chosen to do, and the price I needed to pay for a career in the aviation industry.
I thought, irrationally, that this was the worst I was likely to encounter when I got to Mom’s bedside. But nothing and no one could have prepared me for what I saw. I was only vaguely aware of the presence of other people, and all I heard was the subdued hum of machines. Sunlight streamed in through a window.
Mom was lying on her back under clean white sheets and a hospital blanket was drawn up to her neck, with just her head, shoulders and arms visible. There was a drip inserted into her right hand and someone was holding her left, which they relinquished to me. Her hand was clammy and cool, if not cold, to the touch.
For some reason, the first thing that profoundly disturbed me was the sight of two transparent plastic pipes running from under the sheets and into her nose. Then I saw that her lips were slightly parted and that the plastic tube from a ventilator leading into her mouth was distorting the left side of her face. I could also hear a faint bubbling sound, but I couldn’t work out where it was coming from.
But the thing that shattered any hope I may have harboured for her return to vitality was Mom’s half-opened eyes.
They gave forth nothing.
They were glazed and blank, and I knew then that her soul was already elsewhere. Slowly, like being pulled into a dark cave, the dullness in those eyes began to draw me in until it held my complete attention.