Gunship Over Angola

He sported a Paul Kruger-like beard that reached all the way to his navel and a leather jacket-and-shirt combo surely made from the hides of two mammoths. His hands could easily have crushed icebergs and were just as cold to the touch. An odd bearlike growl seemed to emanate straight out of the middle of this giant’s ample chest.

He sat down opposite me and just stared at me, unblinking, for a full two minutes. If his aim was to intimidate me, he succeeded. A fine film of perspiration oozed from every pore on my petrified face. His mouth opened, but only slightly, and he started speaking.

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.