A Time to Die, page 34
When she blew through this one, a tiny cork of dirt flew out of the end like a blow-pipe and then it was hollow and clear. She flopped onto her backside and sat in the middle of the dirt floor with the straw still stuck in her mouth, laughing around it with triumph. Her sense of elation and achievement dispelled the corroding sense of despair which had almost destroyed her will to keep on living.
She crawled to the corner and carefully hid the precious straw, and then for the rest of that day planned how she would use it.
The rays of sun no longer penetrated to her cell, and the heavy gloom of evening was on her before she heard the wardress at the door. She huddled in her corner when the sergeant stooped into the cell and carelessly dumped the stodgy lump of boiled maize meal into the dirt and stood the metal billy beside it.
She leaned back expectantly against the door jamb and waited for Claudia to scramble for the food and drink like an animal on all fours. Claudia crouched motionlessly in the furthest corner of the cell and tried to show no expression, but her throat contracted in an involuntary swallowing reflex and her thirst was a raging beast within her.
After she had not moved for a few minutes, the sergeant said something irritable in Portuguese and gestured to the billy. With an immense effort Claudia prevented herself from looking down at it and the woman shrugged and once again stepped onto the maize cake and ground it into the dirt. She gave a snort of unconvincing laughter and backed out through the door, dragging it shut behind her, but the billy-can was left standing at the threshold.
Claudia forced herself to wait until she was certain that the wardress had truly left and was not watching her through a spy hole. Once she was sure she was not observed, Claudia crawled in frantic haste to the corner where she had hidden the straw and picked it up between her lips. Still on her knees she crossed to the billy-can and stooped over it.
She drew the first mouthful through the straw and let it trickle down her throat, closing her eyes with pleasure. It was as though she were drinking down a magic potion. She felt new strength and resolve flow through her veins.
She drank most of the contents of the billy-can, drawing out the pleasure of it until it was almost totally dark in the cell, but she could not bring herself to eat the sticky mess of maize cake smeared into the dirt.
She hoarded the remains of the water, taking the wire handle of the billy-can between her teeth and carefully moving it to the far corner of the cell where she could ration herself to small sips during the long hours ahead. She settled down for the night feeling almost cheerful and a little light-headed as though she had drunk champagne rather than plain unboiled river water.
‘I can endure anything they do to me,’ she whispered to herself. ‘They aren’t going to break me. I won’t let them, I won’t.’
Her mood did not last. Almost as soon as it was fully dark in the cell, she realized her terrible mistake in leaving the uneaten maize cake on the floor.
Last night there had been only one rat, and it had fled when she screamed at it. This night the odour of food brought them pouring through the gaps in the roof. To her frenzied imagination, it seemed that the floor of the cell was swarming with furry bodies. The smell of them clogged her nostrils, the nauseating ratty smell like boiling horns and hooves in a glue pot. She cowered in her corner, shivering with cold and horror, and they brushed against her legs and scurried over her feet, squeaking and squealing as they fought for the scraps of spilled porridge.
At last, Claudia succumbed to panic. Screaming, on the edge of hysteria, she kicked out at them wildly; one of them whipped round and bit her naked ankle, the sharp little teeth were like a razor cut. She screamed again and kicked, trying to dislodge it, but for a few dreadful seconds its curved teeth were buried in her flesh, and then at last she sent it flying into the darkness.
The rat hit the billy-can containing her treasured water and she heard the metal clank against the wall and the liquid splash onto the earthen floor. She crawled to the overturned container and wept with despair.
After long hours of horror and dark terror, the rats consumed the last of the maize and disappeared back through the roof. Claudia sank to her knees, exhausted both physically and emotionally.
‘Please God, let it end. I can’t go on.’
She toppled over on her side and lay in the dirt, shivering and sobbing softly to herself, and at last dropped into the dark void of oblivion.
She woke with something tugging at her hair, and a strange grinding sound very close to her ear. Still groggy with sleep it took her long seconds to realize what was happening to her. She had slumped over sideways and one cheek was pressed to the dirt floor. She lay for a moment, enduring the sharp pulls on her hair and the grinding crunching in her uppermost ear and then the terror came back to her in full force.
A rat was chewing off her hair, cutting it with those sharp curved incisors, gathering it for nesting material. So great was her horror that it paralysed her. She could not move. Her whole body tingled, her stomach knotted with cramps and her toes and fingers curled with the strength of revulsion.
Suddenly she was no longer terrified. Her fear changed to anger. In one lithe movement she rolled to her feet and began to hunt the loathsome creature.
Relentlessly she pursued it around the cell, following it only by sound, the tiny scratch and patter of its feet. She no longer kicked out wildly, but deliberately aimed each blow at the sound. Twice the creature tried to climb to safety, but each time Claudia heard it and used her whole body to sweep it from the wall and knock it back to the floor.
This killing anger was an emotion she had never experienced before. It heightened all her senses, it rendered her hearing so acute that she could visualize each movement of her prey; it quickened her physical responses so her kicks were fast and powerful and when one of them landed on the warm furry body, the shrill squeal of pain and fear from the rat inflamed her.
She cornered it against the door of the cell and again stamped on it. She felt the small bones break under her heel, and she stamped again and again, sobbing with the effort, keeping it up until the carcass was soft and mushy under her feet.
When, at last, she backed away and sank down in her corner, she was still trembling, but no longer with terror.
‘I’ve never killed anything before,’ she thought, amazed at herself and this secret savage side to her nature which she had never suspected existed.
She waited for the familiar feeling of guilt and disgust to overwhelm her. Instead she felt as strong as though she had come through some ordeal which had armed her and equipped her to overcome whatever dangers and hardships lay ahead.
‘I’m not going to give in, not ever again,’ she whispered. ‘I’m going to fight and to kill if I have to. I shall survive.’
In the morning when the wardress came for the billy-can, Claudia confronted her resolutely, thrusting her face only inches from the black woman’s, and keeping her voice measured but firm.
‘Take this out.’ She indicated the rat’s carcass with her foot. The woman hesitated and Claudia said, ‘Do it, now!’ And the wardress picked up the mangled carcass by the tip of the tail, and glanced back at Claudia with a measure of respect in her dark eyes.
Carrying the empty billy and the dead rat she left the cell. When she returned a few minutes later with the billy-can refilled and the bowl of maize meal, Claudia subdued her thirst and maintained her new attitude of calm authority as she indicated the sewage bucket.
‘That has to be cleaned,’ she said, and the woman snapped a retort in Portuguese.
‘I’ll do it.’ Claudia did not waver, holding the woman’s gaze until she broke the eye contact. Only then did she turn her back and offer her manacled hands to the wardress.
‘Undo these,’ she ordered, and obediently the wardress unclipped the key from her webbing belt.
Claudia almost cried out as the handcuffs came away. The blood rushed back to her hands and Claudia held them to her chest and massaged them tenderly, biting her lips against the pain, horrified by the condition of her swollen hands and torn bruised wrists.
The wardress prodded her in the small of the back and gave an order in Portuguese. Claudia took up the handle of the sewage bucket and, brushing past the woman, climbed the stairs. The sunlight and warmth and clean dry air were like a benediction.
Claudia looked around the stockade quickly. It was obviously a women’s prison, for a few dispirited feminine figures lolled in the dust beneath the single ebony tree in the centre. They were in ragged loin-cloths, their naked upper bodies so painfully thin that the ribs stood out clearly beneath the dusty dark skin and their breasts, even those of the younger women, were empty and dangled loosely as the ears of a spaniel. Claudia wondered what their crimes had been, or if their mere existence had caused their captors offence.
She saw that her own bunker was only one of a row of a dozen or so. It was obvious that these were reserved for the more important or dangerous prisoners.
The gates of the stockade were guarded by a pair of burly black females dressed in the usual tiger stripes and toting AK assault rifles. They peered curiously at Claudia and discussed her with animation. Beyond the gates, Claudia had a glimpse of the broad green flow of the Pungwe river, and for a moment entertained fanciful visions of plunging into it to bathe her battered body and wash her filthy clothes, but the wardress prodded her painfully in the back and urged her towards the screened latrines at the rear of the stockade.
When they reached them the wardress made hand signals for Claudia to empty her bucket into the communal pit, and then turned away to chat with one of the other wardresses who had sauntered across to join them with her AK 47 rifle over her shoulder.
The back wall of the latrine was also the rear wall of the stockade. However, it offered no avenue of escape. The poles were as thick as her leg, lashed securely together with bark rope, and their tops were several feet higher than she could reach.
She abandoned the idea of escape before it was fully formed and tipped the contents of the bucket into the deep pit. Immediately a humming cloud of flies rose from the depths and circled her head.
Wrinkling her nose with disgust, Claudia was backing towards the exit when a soft whistle stopped her dead. It was a low-pitched mournful note, so unobtrusive that she would have ignored it completely if she had not heard it so often before. It was one of the clandestine signals that Sean and his trackers used. Sean had told her once that it was the call of a bird called a bou-bou shrike, and because of its associations rather than its pitch, it electrified her.
She glanced quickly towards the screened entrance to the latrine, but it was safe. She heard the voices of the wardress and her colleague still chatting outside, and she pursed her lips and tried a soft unconvincing imitation of the whistle.
Instantly it was repeated from just beyond the back wall of the latrine and Claudia’s hopes soared. She dropped the bucket and ran to the wall of poles, putting her eye to one of the larger chinks. She almost screamed when an eye looked back at her from only the thickness of the poles and then a voice, a well-remembered voice, whispered, ‘Jambo, memsahib.’
‘Matatu,’ she gasped.
‘Silly little bugger.’ Matatu gave her the only words of English he knew, and she had to fight to prevent herself bursting out with the laughter of relief and hope and amusement at the incongruity of that greeting.
‘Oh Matatu, I love you,’ she blurted, and a folded scrap of paper was thrust through the chink into her face. The instant her fingers closed on it, Matatu’s eye was snatched away from the peep-hole as though on a fishing line.
‘Matatu,’ she whispered desperately, but he was gone. She had spoken too loudly and she heard the wardress call out, and her footsteps at the entrance.
Claudia spun round and with the same movement crouched over the reeking pit. The wardress looked round the thatched screen and Claudia snapped at her furiously, ‘Get out, can’t you see I’m busy.’
And the woman involuntarily jerked her head back. Claudia was trembling with excitement as she unfolded the note and recognized the handwriting, and at the same time she was stricken with terror that it would be taken from her before she could read it. She refolded it quickly and slipped it deeply into the back pocket of her trousers, where she would be able to retrieve it even with her hands cuffed behind her.
Now she was eager to return to the privacy of her cell. The wardress pushed her down the stairs, but without the viciousness of before.
Claudia replaced the sewage bucket in the corner and then when the wardress pointed at her wrists, she held them out obediently. The touch of the metal on her abraded and bruised skin seemed even more galling than it had been before. The muscles and tendons of her upper arms and shoulders knotted in protest.
Once Claudia was manacled the wardress seemed to recapture her harsh mood of authority. She tipped the contents of the maize bowl onto the floor and lifted her boot to grind it into the dirt.
Claudia flew at her. ‘Don’t you dare!’ she hissed, thrusting her face close to the woman’s, glaring into her eyes so viciously that she recoiled involuntarily.
‘Get out!’ Claudia told her. ‘Allez! Vamoose!’ And the wardress backed out of the cell with a muttered but unconvincing show of defiance, and dragged the door closed behind her.
Claudia was amazed at her own courage. She leaned against the door trembling with the effort that the contest of wills had cost her, only then realizing the risk that she had taken – she could have been brutally beaten or deprived altogether of her precious supply of water.
It was Sean’s letter that had given her the strength and bravado to defy the wardress. Leaning against the door, she reached back into her pocket and touched the scrap of folded notepaper, merely to reassure herself that it was safe. She would not read it yet. She wanted to delay and savour that pleasure. Instead, she retrieved her drinking straw from its hiding-place.
After she had drunk from the billy, she ate the maize cake, delicately picking it out of the dirt with her teeth and trying to shake loose the earth and dirt that clung to the sticky lumps of porridge. She was determined not to leave a scrap of it, not only because she was hungry but because she knew she would have need of all her strength in the days ahead, and because she had learned that food scraps attracted the rats. Only when she had eaten and drunk, did she allow herself the luxurious pleasure of reading Sean’s note.
She took it out of her pocket and carefully smoothed it between her swollen fingers. Then she squatted and placed it in the beam of sunlight that fell in a corner of the cell, and at last turned and knelt over it.
She read slowly, moving her lips like a semi-literate, forming every word that he had written as though she could taste it on her tongue.
‘Be strong, it won’t be for much longer and remember, I love you. Whatever happens, I love you.’ Her vision swam with tears as she read his last words, and then she sat back and whispered softly, ‘I’ll be strong. I promise you that I’ll be strong for you, and I love you too, with my very existence, I love you.’
‘They may fight like women,’ said Sergeant Alphonso, as he surveyed the piles of captured Zimbabwean army equipment. ‘But at least they dress like warriors.’
The uniforms had been supplied by Britain as part of their aid commitment to Mugabe after the capitulation of Ian Smith’s white regime. They were the finest quality, and Alphonso and his men stripped off their old faded and patched tiger-striped battledress with alacrity. In particular they were delighted with the gleaming black leather paratrooper boots with which they replaced their eclectic collection of tattered joggers and grubby tennis shoes.
Once they had decked themselves out in this captured finery and fallen in on the beaten-earth parade ground, Sean and Job went down their ranks checking and instructing them on the correct way to wear each item of uniform. The quartermaster tailor followed behind them, correcting any gross discrepancy in size and fit.
‘They don’t have to be perfect,’ Sean said. ‘They won’t be on parade, just good enough to pass a casual glance. We haven’t got time to waste on the niceties of dress.’
After the men were fully kitted out, Sean and Job worked on their plan of Grand Reef base for the rest of that day and most of the night. First they sat on opposite sides of a desk in the headquarters communications room and brain-stormed for every detail of the base lay-out that they could dredge from their memories. By nightfall, they were satisfied that they had the most accurate picture that they could hope for. However, Sean had learned from experience that it was difficult for an illiterate to visualize physical reality from a two-dimensional drawing, and discreet enquiry had revealed that almost all his new command, although battle-tried warriors, could neither read nor write.
Most of the rest of that night, they worked on building a scale model of the base, setting it out on the beaten surface of the parade ground, working by lantern light. Job had an artistic flair and whittled model buildings from the soft balsa-like wood of the baobab tree, and used water-washed pebbles of various colours from the sandbanks of the river to lay out the airstrip and roads and perimeter fences of the base.
The following morning the raiding party was paraded and inspected by Captain Job and Sergeant Alphonso and then seated around the model in a ring. The model proved to be a major success, provoking lively comment and query.
First Sean described the raid, moving matchboxes down the pebble roadways to represent the column of Unimogs, illustrating the diversionary attack on the perimeter, the withdrawal of the loaded trucks and the rendezvous on the Umtali road. Once he had finished he handed his pointer to Sergeant Alphonso.
‘All right, Sergeant, explain it to us again.’ The ring of attentive troopers delighted in correcting the occasional mistakes and omissions that Alphonso made. When he was finished he handed the pointer to his senior corporal to repeat the lecture. After five repetitions, they all had it perfectly memorized and even General China was impressed.
