The way he finds out that Antjie is dead is through a short, harried phone call with his uncle Pieter, who rings him from the side of the road in Maritzburg. Traffic roars by, cutting out his words at inopportune moments. Pieter has to say “body” three times before Jaco understands.
After the conversation, during which he mindlessly and methodically tears each page out of his roommate’s nearby notebook, Jaco performs a series of calculations. Antjie is dead. His mother is catatonic. The farm is failing. His friends in London won’t miss him because he doesn’t have any. The city — which has systematically chewed and digested him, leaving bite marks in the soft parts of his brain — will fail to register his absence. The only thing that might possibly remember Jaco is the raven that nests outside his bedroom window. But you cannot build a life on a bird. Things are disintegrating; Antjie is dead.
That evening, he maxes out his credit card on a plane ticket, and takes an extortionate express train to the airport. The flight to Amsterdam is crowded, and he has to hunch his shoulders in to avoid touching the people on either side of him. As they begin a turbulent, rocky descent, the woman to Jaco’s left clutches his knee.
“Oh my god,” she says. “I think we’re falling.”
Jaco stares at her until she takes her damp hand away. “Please don’t touch me,” he says. He hates the thought of dying next to somebody like that.
The next plane is bigger and whiter. On his personal monitor he watches eight and a half episodes of a zombie apocalypse TV show where everybody has clean hair and all their teeth. When the flight attendant offers him a choice of meals, he hesitates.
“The pasta, please,” he says eventually. The sauce is bad and coppery. After a while he goes to the tiny bathroom and throws everything up. Under the sticky airplane light, he thinks he almost recognizes himself in the mirror. An alarm sounds.
“We will be landing in Johannesburg in approximately thirty minutes,” says the overhead speaker. “Please return to your seats.”
For a few hours Jaco lingers, dazed, in the terminal at O.R. Tambo. He is waiting for one last flight. It will take him to a smaller coastal city, and from there Pieter will pick him up in a bakkie stuffed with machine parts and old fast-food cartons. They will drive up into the mountains, past the sea of silver roofs and cable lines, past the goats and cattle on the side of the road.
He will be home. His sister will still be dead.
He chooses London because, like every bastard of empire, he feels a hateful urge to see where the trouble originated. But perhaps that is not the only reason. Despite what his father says, there is something to the English; there is something to English itself, which seems to him a language built for complaint. So many synonyms for unhappiness. Maybe, he thinks, this is admirable.
First he finds a tiny flat in Muswell Hill with three absent roommates, who are all varyingly involved in IT management. Then he finds a pub job on a working visa, where he serves pints to investment analyst assistants and PR reps and drunken members of the B-list media elite. Any day now, his life will change. He mixes cosmopolitans, pours bad pints of Guinness, watches the other bartender crouch over a bin lid in the back alley to snort a line of cocaine. Yes, any day now.
One evening he serves a martini to a writer who is celebrating the launch of his debut novel. The writer is a stringy, gloomy man in a Ralph Lauren sweater who takes one sniff and lies that he’d ordered it with gin and not vodka. When Jaco remakes it, the writer says he’d actually liked the vodka better. His anorexic girlfriend makes a disgusted face and says that they should have had the launch at Soho House. Jaco thinks about spitting in the glass but instead he apologizes and comps the man a free packet of scampi fries.
After he closes up the bar, Jaco sees that a copy of the writer’s book has been left on the counter of the men’s bathroom. The title is The History of Infinity, and it’s about a postgraduate student at Oxford who has an affair with his professor’s extremely attractive Latvian wife. The wife dies prematurely from cancer; the professor and the student end up scattering her ashes together in the Cotswolds. A quote from a Booker-prize winner on the front says it is “luminous and timely and evergreen.”
The lights are flickering, and the book’s pages are damp. Jaco remembers a story he wrote in an undergraduate fiction class, about a father and son going out driving together in the bush. Conversation between them is stilted. Something terrible happened in the past, something for which the father is responsible, and so now they cannot speak meaningfully to each other. In the climax, a kudu stumbles in front of the car, one of its horns dangling from a fleshy thread. The father hands a rifle to his son, but the boy is unable to fire it. Disgusted, the father kills the kudu with one expert shot. Then he saws the unbroken horn off and makes the son hold it on the drive home. A long, hard spiral that leaves blood on his hands.
Unfortunately, his professor wrote, this did not ring true for me.
At Antjie’s funeral there is melktert dusted with cinnamon, and boerewors glistening with fat and oil, charred from the braai. There is yellow mealie bread and white pap and pans of bobotie, steaming slightly. Later, after the few wellwishers have slunk away, the family gathers in the living room of their tired farmhouse. Jaco’s mother looks at him as if he is a clock she has forgotten to start. She is much thinner than Jaco remembers her, and there are purple shadows under her blue eyes. Antjie’s eyes.
“What will you do?” she asks him. “You know you cannot stay.”
“I will go back to London. There are opportunities there,” Jaco lies.
“She was going to be a doctor,” his father says, from the armchair. Jaco looks at him, at the face they share. “You read books for three years. What are we meant to do now?” His father shakes his head, like he is shooing away a fly.
His aunt is sniffling. Pieter is staring at the muted TV where the Springboks are losing to England. Smoke from the firebreak drifts in through the windows, thick and pungent.
“Sorry,” Jaco says to his father. The word gets caught in his esophagus and slithers out. When he was a child he was always apologizing, mumbling the same phrases over and over again. Sorry for his grades, sorry for how much he cost. Sorry for his small body, and the way in which that body made it so easy to be hurt. Jaco wishes for English again at that moment, its beautiful variance. How easy it would be to describe what is inside him. Condition. Disease. Affliction. Rot. The same thing that had been inside his sister, which she had ultimately been unable to excavate.
“London,” his mother echoes, and leans back in her chair. She’s holding an old sweater of Antjie’s, the fabric soft and worn. Jaco looks toward the mantelpiece, where his sister lives now. He imagines her smiling at him from inside her new, cold home, and reminds himself that it is strange to wrap a scarf around an urn.
“Fok,” Pieter says. The English have scored a try.
In first grade, Jaco’s father sends him to the Anglo school an hour away. It is expensive, he says, but it will be worth it one day when Jaco is an engineer or a lawyer, and they can sell the farm and go and live with him in his beautiful Durban penthouse. Jaco looks at his new classmates — with their combed hair and white takkies and elegant mothers — and knows he does not belong. At recess, when he kicks off his shoes to go running on the grass, a playground monitor grabs him by the ear and tells him not to be filthy. The children at his table decide he smells like sheep and scoot their chairs away from him. He does not have a Playstation or a PSP or Nintendo, and this closes all avenues for commonality. He may as well be a girl, and there are enough of those in his life already. His little sister Antjie has just been born. She is a small red thing that writhes around like the bugs in the garden. The love he has for her is faint but promising; he probes it the way a tongue probes a growing tooth. Regardless, his only friend should not be his sister.
When something happens in Jaco’s language, it is always happening. One morning he is trying to tell a story about his great-grandmother, and the koeksusters she used to make, when the teacher corrects him. He must refer to her in the past tense, because otherwise people will not be able to tell that she has passed on. There is a proper way of talking about these things — a time frame that you must place them in — or it all becomes confusing.
Confusing? he thinks. They must be stupid. He has suspected this, but now it is clear. Even Antjie would know what he is talking about. Of course his great-grandmother is dead. Why should that change the fact that she is still here?
Jaco does not go back to London. Instead he rents a car and starts to drive towards Cape Town, where he has the abstract idea that one of his old professors at Stellenbosch will give him a job. Halfway through the journey, he gets a flat tire. Sitting in the dirty petrol station cafe, waiting for the mechanic, Jaco realizes that he’s near a large safari reserve that his mother always planned to go to one day, when they had enough money. Dotted throughout the reserve are many competing lodges that offer two tours a day to visitors, plus coffee and sundowners. An idea swims out of the recesses of his brain.
Jaco calls a friend who once worked as a game driver. “It doesn’t pay very well, but the tips can make up for it,” the friend tells him over the phone, “if it’s the right kind of place.” This friend wanted to be a professional graffiti artist, but has become an engineer instead, and now lives in Gqeberha with his pregnant girlfriend. His father’s old classmate is the manager of a lodge: this, he assures Jaco, is enough of a connection to get a hopeful candidate in the door.
“It’s a boy,” Jaco’s friend says, into the silence, while Jaco is thinking about the proposition. “I am going to name him Henry. Not Hendrik.”
“What?” Jaco asks, before he remembers about the baby. “Oh, yes, congratulations.” Then he hangs up.
It takes a few more days to fix the car and get back on the road, during which time Jaco watches his credit score sink like a bad punchline. He eats exclusively from a rundown Spur, and stays in a B&B that smells like fertilizer. When he finally gets to the game lodge and repeats his friend’s name to the pretty receptionist, he is given an interview at once. Hours later, he is hired.
The manager is a waxy man from Windhoek, permanently red, with straggling bits of dishwater hair lying forlorn on his scalp. He shows Jaco some low-fi safety videos from 2005, which mainly emphasize the necessity of minimizing risk to guests, and thus the risk of legal proceedings. It seems that drivers are far more expendable, given that they are not paid enough to hire lawyers. The manager makes reference to a long probation period and administers a half-hearted animal noise recognition test to gauge how good Jaco’s starting knowledge is. Jaco’s starting knowledge is not good. Finally, he pairs Jaco up with an experienced driver named Patrick, a tall man who smells of spearmint and wears a baseball cap. Patrick gives him a big game rifle and some bullets, and takes him out into the reserve to practice shooting.
“In all my years,” Patrick tells him, “I’ve used the rifle once.”
“On a lion?” Jaco asks. He misses three tin cans in a row and has to reload, fumbling the ammunition into the dirt.
“No,” Patrick says. “On a poacher.”
“Oh,” Jaco says quietly.
Together they survey the uninjured cans. The sunset creeps up on the bush like an infection. In the sick pink dusk, Jaco listens to the noise of the earth and feels as if something crucial is being communicated to him. He must remember this moment: his fingers curled around the barrel, an impala nosing at the grass nearby. Yes, he must. But he is already forgetting.
“You know,” Patrick says after a long time, “I think there is something to be said for being a bad shot.” When he takes the rifle from Jaco, his hands are warm and rough.
No matter their backgrounds, the game drivers speak in isiZulu. Hippos become izimvubu; giraffes become indlulamithi; tourists become izivakashi. Patrick makes Jaco repeat the tones until he can sound them out without embarrassing himself.
Every morning they get up for the 6 a.m. game drive and lay out thick woolen blankets on the seats of the Land Rover. Jaco packs up the snacks and thermoses of hot chocolate and whiskey and coffee. He makes sure the tank is full, and gets an update from the manager on the weather conditions and feeds it back to Patrick, who will alter the route accordingly.
Because the reserve is so large, a kind of ecosystem has developed, governed by remote radio, with the best and most expensive resorts occupying the place of a prime predator. “Inkonkoni in the left lower quadrant,” somebody crackles. The drivers for the nicer lodges arrive first, carrying their affluent visitors. Other drivers circle like hungry scavengers, fighting for remaining vantage points before the animals grow bored and slink off into the trees.
Jaco’s lodge is neither luxurious nor cheap. It’s the kind of place that people settle for but do not regret. Sometimes they have good days, catching a cheetah loping across the road, or lionesses orchestrating a bloody kill. Occasionally a guest drops their designer sunglasses outside of the vehicle and Jaco has to jump out quickly and pick them up, which makes the group tense in half-hopeful fear. The best kill of all, of course, would be Jaco.
Patrick is the one who speaks, conveying facts and repeating jokes. The guests all want to see the same things, and they laugh at the same punchlines. Everybody thinks they are smarter than the rest: more perceptive, more respectful. Patrick encourages this delusion so that they will tip better. The quivering, polite American millennials ask for his Zulu name. “Patrick,” he says. He tells the older, rich women that they look very nice with their beaded bracelets and compliments the men on their authentic Boer War slouch hats. Now that they have discovered Africa, they can go home and recommend the lodge to their friends, with a ten percent off referral code.
On some days, however, Jaco must speak, because the Land Rover is stuffed with people from Pretoria and Bloemfontein, and he’s the only one with fluent Afrikaans. During these drives, he finds himself stammering, mispronouncing basic phrases. At times he hallucinates animals that are not there. “As julle almal daar kyk,” he tries to say. “Sal julle ’n olifant sien.” If you look over there, you will see an elephant. But when they look, there are only a few buck. Nee, jammer, it was yesterday that he saw the elephant here. Or it was the week before. The tips diminish substantially. “That ou sucks,” he hears a father say to his son, when they think he is not listening.
The lodge gives him a bed in a shared hut on the edge of the grounds. He and Patrick navigate the place with careful friendliness, lining up their belongings on opposite sides of the bathroom sink. On Sundays, his mother calls for a few minutes and tells him about the progress of Pieter’s cancer, or his father’s latest animal trophy. He is selling them online because the family is running out of money, which Jaco feels culpable for, given that he did not study engineering and become a successful man. Jaco sends back most of his paycheck, painfully aware of how little it matters. His mother is a ten hour drive away, but it feels like she is living on a different continent.
She never says she misses him.
Every Friday, they serve a picnic breakfast, which involves all of the staff members carting trays of food, barbecues, camping chairs, and cutlery up a very picturesque hill in the bush. The only part Jaco enjoys is the moment right before the guests arrive by car, when all the food is trembling and ready, and the tables are gloriously clean. In those few minutes, it feels like the staff have done something together, like the meal is for them.
Jaco’s job is to fry the bacon and eggs, transferring them solemnly onto a shiny platter. People come along with their paper plates outstretched, and sometimes he amuses himself by imagining they are Dickensian orphans, and he their benefactor. He could upend their food if he wanted. Only his goodness stops him.
“I want it poached harder,” a guest will often say, peering at him. “I like my bacon crispy.” Or: “Why aren’t there chairs with backs?” Or: “Why did you give me eggs? I am allergic to eggs.”
“Sorry ma’am,” he replies. He poaches an egg until it is rubber, and consolidates the crispiest bits of bacon. He goes back down to the lodge and drags out a reinforced chair in case the other one collapses. He explains three separate times that guests are responsible for informing the staff of any allergies. He reminds himself where the epipen is.
These mornings are so beautiful that they hurt. Whenever he looks up from the bacon he sees the sky gone a pure, blazing winter blue. All he wants is to go walking — to go and go and never stop. Sometimes he locks eyes with Patrick, whose job is pouring coffee and adding glugs of amarula or Baileys. During one breakfast, an old man holds out his cup, and a child walks past, nudging his arm. The cup falls into the grass, right by the man’s shoes. Patrick pauses.
“Pick it up,” the man says to Patrick, in Afrikaans. “Jy moet dit optel, kom nou.”
“Hush,” says the man’s wife. “Hendrik, hush.”
“It’s their blerry job, Nadine,” says the man. Then to Patrick: “What on earth are you waiting for?”
At first it seems that Patrick will refuse. He stares down at the man, hands clenched around the coffee thermos. Nobody else seems aware of this small, old war. Then Patrick bends down and fishes the man’s cup out of the yellow grass.
“I’ll get you a clean one,” says Patrick, his tone so bland it might as well be a milk rusk. Jaco releases a breath he wasn’t aware he was holding, and the bacon fat leaps up to burn his knuckles.
The reserve has three rhinos, all of which have their horns shaved down regularly to discourage the poachers — a laborious, dangerous procedure that involves heavy sedatives and very tentative chainsaws. Because the poachers have recently figured out how to tune into the reserve’s frequencies, it is forbidden to discuss or trade the rhinos’ whereabouts, on pain of termination.
Patrick has a special touch with the rhinos. He knows them; he pays attention to their patterns and their diets. He can look up at the clouds and tell, depending on where the front is, whether rhinos will be near the river or closer to the old mine. He can identify them by their steps and pick out their wrinkled backsides on his binoculars. Patrick especially likes the baby, who is unusually small for her age and likes to gallop around while her mother grazes.
One Saturday, while the guests are eating or napping, Patrick asks Jaco to come with him for an hour or so. It’s still deep winter, so the Land Rover is roofless. The sky is purple and tender, and Patrick drives while Jaco sits quietly in the passenger seat. Occasionally the radio crackles and somebody reports an elephant herd or fresh buffalo carcass. Birds and insects make a rhythmic music that reminds Jaco of being a sleepy child and hearing the conversation of adults in the next room.
“I’m sorry about your sister,” Patrick says to him, as he slows down to let a few zebras clear the road. They toss their heads. Jaco remembers what he learned a few days ago — they are black with white stripes, not the other way around.
At staff drinks the Friday before last, after a few too many rum and cokes, Jaco told Cara, the pretty receptionist, about Antjie. She patted his arm and conveyed small, candied condolences, but he is not surprised she hasn’t kept it to herself.
“It’s alright,” he tells Patrick, who speeds up again, cutting across the amber flats toward the far bank of the river. Here the vegetation is thicker, and Jaco can see little bush hares moving around in the scrub.
“You were there when it happened?”
Jaco feels sick. Patrick is paying no attention to the ruts and dents on the road, and his cap shudders on his bald head. “No,” he replies eventually. “I was overseas.”
“Here,” Patrick says, and hits the brakes. Jaco has to brace himself to keep from jerking forward and smacking his head against the dash. They perch on the riverbank, which in the wet summer season will be stocked with game but now is empty save for the herons. The baby rhino is sitting disconsolately by the low, dirty water, eyes flicking around.
“This happens sometimes,” Patrick adds.
“What happens?”
“When they shave the horns off, the rhinos have to be sedated. Over time, the effect of the drugs compound and cause abnormal behavior. The mother wanders off, leaves the baby. It’s sad what it does to them, but there’s no other way to make them less of a target.”
They stare at her wrinkled gray face. She looks like somebody who has entered a place and forgotten why they came. Jaco watches the water for any hint of a crocodile lurking, waiting for a chance. One of the three lion prides often hunts here.
“Will her mother come back?” Jaco asks.
“Maybe. I’ve been keeping her company, just in case.” Patrick casts a glance back at their rifles, which are covered by a threadbare blanket in the back seat.
“Could the poachers get in?”
Patrick turns to him and smiles faintly. “They will eventually. That’s the way it’s going.”
Jaco stares at the baby rhino, her pitiful, puddled body. He wants to leap out of the car and run and gather her leathery flesh in his arms. He wants to snuff her out before anybody else gets the chance. At least he will make it painless. He will not harvest her tiny face for parts.
“I don’t understand why,” Jaco says but does not finish his sentence. He doesn’t quite know what he is talking about.
“I told you about shooting that poacher,” Patrick says. “Everyone was happy with me when that happened. I killed a person, and they were happy. I got a raise.” Later, he explains, he found out the poacher was from a nearby village whose residents had been displaced decades earlier by the reserve. “My gogo knew his family.”
“I’m sorry,” Jaco says.
“Why? We’re both still here, aren’t we?” Patrick shakes his head, and stares back out at the rhino again.
They sit in silence for a while. “Antjie was a fragile person,” Jaco says eventually. “My sister, I mean. The last time I saw her, we were waiting for her train back to the airport.” He remembers her silkworm fingers, glowing white in cut-off gloves as she waved goodbye. “She’d come to visit me, as her graduation present. A few weeks later she went off to Wits to study medicine.” He stops, swallows. “We all thought she was happy.”
That is all he can manage. Slowly, as if trying not to startle a wild animal, Patrick reaches out and takes Jaco’s hand.
It happens a few days later. Jaco wakes up and the air is smokey and still. He neither forgets nor remembers his sister. She’s just there, somehow, hovering unobtrusively beside him. He inhales and exhales her memory, and it passes through him like water, leaving a cold, comforting trail down his throat.
A staccato knock at the door. He puts on his shirt and pants. There is only one pair of boots by the wall. Ah, he thinks. Of course.
“Jaco?” It’s Cara. He steps outside and the cold air burns his eyes. “Have you seen Patrick?” He shakes his head, and her mouth does a funny dance. “One of the cars is gone. Come on.”
He slips on a thick down jacket he belatedly realizes is Patrick’s. It smells of mint. In the early, eerie mist, the other guides are emerging. He follows them down to the main garage, where their manager is waiting, arms crossed. One of his eyes is bloodshot; a vessel has burst. The red seeps across his sclera.
Jaco knows what the manager is going to say before he says it. He knew it on the drive back that afternoon, watching Patrick steer. The secret was in the angle of his shoulders, the somber set to his jaw. A dam about to burst. “It’s no life,” he had said about the baby rhino, before they left. “It’s no life at all.”
‘‘The drives are canceled,” the manager says. Jaco watches his hands shake. “All of you are to remain on the premises while we wait for the police. Get back to your rooms and stay there.”
The staff murmur in a hushed, anxious wave, shifting from foot to foot, biting their nails. One by one, they turn and trail back to their huts, casting worried glances at one another.
Jaco does not go to his room. Instead, he stands behind the garage until everybody is gone and the manager has exited to take a harried phone call. Then he picks up a rifle and the keys to a smaller Land Rover, one with only four seats. The gates to the reserve have not yet shut, though as he passes, he thinks he can hear them moving.
It’s the first time he has ever been alone there. Even without Patrick, he recalls the directions perfectly, as if he has lived here all his life. He greets the animals in the words Patrick taught him. Indlulamithi. Indlovu.
He drives towards the fence, the border by the river where they had last seen the baby. This time the bank is deserted except for a herd of glossy buck, scattering when they hear the rumble of the Land Rover’s engine. Jaco stops, gets out of the car, and walks towards the chain-link posts, dry grass crackling under his feet. Cut out of the bottom of the fence is a jagged hole the size of a tall man, or a young animal. Beyond it, the grass stretches into a rough, beautiful blur. Beyond that, he guesses, the world.
He remembers holding the kudu horn, and how difficult it was to scrub the blood out from under his nails. His father hung it in the living room, over the fireplace, so that every evening he would have to look at it and apologize. There is no way he can tell memory from fantasy anymore, what is real from what he has merely imagined into being.
“As julle almal daar kyk,” he says, “sal julle my suster sien.” If you look over there, you will see my sister. He knows that this is true — that if he turns his head, Antjie will be there, her coat flapping, her hand raised. You make something happen in his language and then it is always happening. Jaco ducks into the hole and passes through the fence, rifle in his hands, following his friend’s path into the veld.
