 
### Rebekah of Lake Sibaya

By Vincent Gray

Smashwords Edition

Copyright © 2016 Vincent Gray

This book is a work of fiction. All the characters developed in this novel are fictional creations of the writer's imagination and are not modelled on any real persons. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead is entirely coincidental.

ISBN: 9781310361593

Author Biography

As a son of a miner the author was born in Johannesburg, South Africa. He grew up in the East Rand mining town of Boksburg during the 1960s and matriculated from Boksburg High School. After high school he was conscripted into the South African Defence Force (SADF) for compulsory national military service at the age of seventeen. On completion of his military service he studied courses in Zoology, Botany and Microbiology at the University of the Witwatersrand. After graduating with a BSc honours degree he worked for a short period for the Department of Agriculture in Potchefstroom as an agronomist. Following the initial conscription into military service in the SADF, like all other white South African males of his generation, he was then drafted into one of the many South African Citizen Military Regiments. During the 1970s he was called up as a citizen-soldier to do three-month military camps on the 'Border' which was the operational theatre of the so-called counter insurgency 'Bush War' during the Apartheid years. Before and in between university studies he also worked as a wage clerk on the South African Railways and as a travelling chemical sales representative. The author is now a retired professor whose career as an academic in the Biological Sciences has spanned a period of thirty-three years mainly at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa. Before retirement he lectured and carried out research in the field of molecular biology with a special interest in the molecular basis of evolution. He continues to pursue his interest in evolutionary biology. Other interests which the author pursues includes radical theology, philosophy and literature.

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This book is dedicated to my wife Melodie and my daughter Ruth.

Chapter 1

Under normal circumstances, especially at 7.00 am in the morning, it would have been indiscreetly too early for an unsolicited social visitation from the favourite niece of a communist living in another universe in Luanda. The fact that it happened bordered on breath-taking audacity. But then he himself had got up prematurely too early for a Saturday, especially for a Saturday in December given that he had just got back after completing almost but not quite 12 months of military service with almost 9 of those months spent lazing on the sun-drenched beaches of Lake Sibaya as a sapper responsible for pumping clean fresh water in a setting that was so scenic that it left him feeling dizzy every day. The lake was absolutely pristine. The surroundings were paradisiacal in the Edenic sense of the word. In the early morning the calm sky blue lake rested peacefully without a ripple in the shadow of the dense forest covered dunes. The dunes were gigantic, like a range of mountains. Behind the dunes the huge rolling swells of the vast Indian Ocean crashed onto hundreds of miles of deserted beaches.

Almost a year ago on the 5th of January 1971 he had embraced his mother and kissed her at the Johannesburg Drill Hall. She was extremely tearful and clung to him. Eventually when all the bellowing and shouting started, commanding everyone to _tree aan_ (assemble) in ranks of three, she reluctantly released her precious son from her tight embrace. With tear filled eyes she waved good bye as her boy joined the column of teenage boys dressed in civilian clothes and carrying suitcases. She watched as they were marched off to Johannesburg Park Station. Zebedee Rottstegge managed while they were being marched away to turn his head to briefly catch one last farewell glimpse of Jennifer Rottstegge his mother. The forlorn image of her sun burnt arm waving vigorously brought an immediate emotional tug to his heart, he battled to fight back the tears, however the image of her standing there waving would remain etched on his mind forever. He waved back.

Yesterday they had an emotional reunion when he arrived back at the farm after hitch hiking through the night. On his homeward journey he found himself stranded on the shoulder of the main road outside Harrismith; the magical road that connects Johannesburg to Durban. He stood under a blazing full moon at the edge of a tar road that glowed like an iridescent blue ribbon that had been draped across a supine landscape.

By 11.00 pm the traffic on the road had died down completely. It was a Thursday night and he had _klaared uit_ (been released from military service) at 15.00 hours that afternoon from the 5th South African Infantry (SAI) Battalion military base in Ladysmith. He thought it would be quicker to hitchhike home than catch the all-stations milk train. If he caught the train he would have to hop off at Glenroy Station, maybe at two o' clock in the morning and then he would have to foot-slog at least 15 km on deserted dusty sand and gravel roads to get home, wearing uncomfortable ill-fitting leather soled shoes and dressed in his equally uncomfortable step out uniform with the heavy _balsak_ (military duffel bag) slung over his shoulder.

He waited for the appearance of the headlights of approaching vehicles. When a pair of headlights appeared first as diamond-like twin pinpricks of light in the distance he kept his eyes fixed on the approaching vehicle hoping that it would be the one that stopped. In theory it would seem that motorists should feel patriotically obliged to pick-up a national serviceman dressed in the uniform of the South African Defence Force (SADF) standing by the side of the road in the dark late at night. It was a theory that he had been banking on. After a couple of hours his theory had been decisively refuted by multiple instances of cars that raced past him without even slowing down or dimming their headlights. Dazzled by the headlights he would find himself staggering at the side of the road after almost being blown off his feet by the powerful vortex of rushing wind swept up by the speeding vehicles that flashed past. Regaining his balance he would watch in disappointment as the red tail lights of the car driven by some anonymous stranger faded away forever into the night.

He stood there in a state of deep reflective meditation for almost 3 hours before he finally got a lift at two o' clock in the morning. Over the past twelve months he had been exposed to radical life transforming experiences that made him see the world with fresh eyes. He had met two uniquely eccentric individuals who had tested and contested all boundaries and life-scripts that were supposed to define the inviolable destiny of every decent and incorruptible young white South African male. In the boundless and boundaryless universe that reigned for a brief time on the shores of Lake Sibaya they had become personalities that were larger than life. The isolation and remoteness of Lake Sibaya made it conducive for them to become what they really were deep down in their innermost core, which was to be anomalous, to be statistical outliers, to be defiant of all conventions, to be freakish, to be weird, to be unreal, and to transcend for an all too brief moment the soulless, stifling and suffocating South African prison house of being-white-in-the-world.

It seemed to Zebedee that they had also found a way to become all these things because they had embraced the power of words, the power of writing, the power of reading, the power of the narrative and the power of the imagination.

In a moment of inspired insight Karl had said that the human capacity for reading and writing was a miracle. He said that the one thing that he had learnt before dropping out of university was that the human brain which was actually a very typical primate's brain had not evolved specifically to read or write books. Humans had acquired the ability to read and write by sheer chance as a consequence of the accidental invention of the alphabet. The capacity for reading and writing were not natural biological or neurological adaptions which had been acquired through the long incremental moulding processes of natural selection.

Karl stated that writing was a human cultural invention. He explained to Roger and Zebedee, that fundamentally the ability to read and write was an accidental cultural invention. As a cultural invention it was never inevitable. As an invention it was made possible by the accidental actualization of a latent potentiality, which could be achieved by means of a neurological ontogenetic reconfiguration of the brain so that it could learn to perform tasks for which it was not originally designed to perform. The ability to read and write was not an adaptation that evolved as a direct consequence of natural selection.

Roger clicked what Karl was trying to explain. Roger expanded that if writing and reading was a human cultural trait, then biologically speaking, as a motor-neurological trait or attribute or capacity, it was eventually acquired by a process of cooptation of other traits to perform tasks other than the ones for which those traits or genetic attributes were originally designed and built to perform by natural selection.

Cooptation, he elaborated, meant that the structure and function of an organ such as the brain could become transformed by a process of non-evolution or phenotypic conditioning to perform alternative functions for which it had not been preadapted by evolution to perform.

"So brain had not actually evolved to specifically function as a reading and writing organ?" Zebedee asked.

"Yes, apparently that is the case according to science," Karl confirmed.

"And by sheer chance it has fortuitously turned out that the human brain was sufficiently phenotypically plastic in its original design and functioning for it to acquire the power to breathe life into the writing of words. So for writing and reading to have become a human possibility the functions of the brain had to be hijacked, thereby forcing the brain to perform other strange and alien tasks for which it had not been specifically designed to perform by natural selection in the first place. The capacity to write strings of words and then recover their meaning in the act of reading was an accident of evolution," Roger added.

"So what you saying is that the invention of writing was a complete fluke, and something like writing and reading should never really have had happened, given the way that the brain had originally evolved to function?" Zebedee asked.

"Yes, apparently," Roger answered philosophically.

"Matter has not only become conscious of the Universe, it had also started to think, in the form of the brain matter has become what can be called a thinking substance, it had begun to write down its thoughts and read the thoughts of others. Writing and reading widened the doors of intersubjectivety across space and time, and supplemented talking and listening across space and time," Karl elaborated.

With reading and writing seeing became a form of silent hearing and silent speech. Karl waxing lyric, explained to Zebedee and Roger that with their eyes they were not only able to see words, but they could also hear the meaning of words through the veil of literal silence in which written words had become shrouded, they could achieve this through the simple act of seeing, by the means of vision words could speak to the inner ear, in a process of soundless vocalizations the inner voice spoke to the thinking self through unmoving lips as the eyes of the reader swept through the written text. Seeing became hearing, seeing became listening, writing became speech, speech became writing. With the remodelling of the human brain, writing, thinking, listening, hearing, speaking, seeing, reading and every possible kind of sensation had all became intermeshed into one seamless web which would now be impossible to disentangle.

For hundreds of thousands of years before the invention of reading and writing humans had survived without the benefit of an alphabet or writing. It was clear to science that the human brain had not specifically evolved for reading and writing. Luckily by chance the brain was sufficiently plastic and flexible so that it could be reconfigured and reorganized and rewired so that humans could learn to read and write. And the big event in human history happened less than ten thousand years ago when it appeared that the human brain had suddenly discovered by accident that it could invent visible marks which could stand for phonetic sound bites, sound bites that made up words, speech and language.

In the words of Karl, seeing had indeed become hearing, reading had indeed become a form of listening.

A working alphabet had been devised by sheer random, trial and error; the purely visual phenomenon of writing and reading was created _de novo_ from marks and lines drawn on slabs of clay.

Karl explained that very recently, which was less than six thousand years ago, the 'human brain had discovered' that it could perform a new functions which it had never performed before in the preceding hundreds of thousands of years or so. It all started when humans began by chance to invent a system of physical signs that stood by convention for something. These signs could be more or less permanently preserved by etching or imprinting them onto a convenient and durable substrate. So after an unimaginably long period of time humans suddenly discovered that their brains could acquire and develop new ways of communicating ideas and thoughts. Without actually understanding what was happening inside their heads humans discovered by sheer accident that they could acquire novel and remarkable abilities and powers which they had previously never really been aware of. The human brain had over-reached itself by performing tasks beyond its design specifications. In the words of Karl: 'Who had ordered reading and writing?' His answer: 'No one, it was never on anyone's conscious list of things to do in order for humans to survive as hunter-gathers for thousands of years.' Humans discovered much later by accident, long after they had evolved into their modern anatomical form that their brains could be taught or conditioned or reprogrammed to do all kinds of new stuff for which their brains were not really designed to do in the first place, such as reading and writing.

Roger liked the idea that humans could reprogramme their own brains to perform new ways of communicating ideas. He specifically liked the idea that the brain could be trained to perform a wide variety of exceeding complex communicative actions which only became possible as a consequence of the development of languages in the form of structured systems of visible signs and symbols.

Roger, who had some tertiary level education in biology, could not get over the profundity of the fact that this capacity, this phenotypic attribute, this phenotypic aptitude, was not the direct result of natural selection acting on the brain. It was a capacity that emerged by chance from a brain which had been preadapted anatomically for other functions. Roger made it clear that the brain had not evolved as an organ specifically adapted for 'the function' of writing and reading in the way that the forelimbs of seals and whales were structurally and functionally adapted through the action of natural section for swimming or in the way that the forelimbs of bats were structurally and functionally adapted for flying.

Listening to Karl and Roger, Zebedee could grasp the fact that the capacity for reading and writing was not a specific evolutionary adaptation of the human brain in the way that the flippers of seals were adaptations for swimming or the wings of bats were evolutionary adaptions for flying.

For Karl, matter had not only become conscious, matter had discovered inadvertently that it could read and write, and create, ex nihilo, a symbolic universe of meaning out of nothing.

Why would man want to read and write? Why would man experience the need to create literature, to fix his narratives, to fix the contents of his thoughts and speech in writing, in strings of written words?

So who ordered reading and writing as brain functions?

No one, it happened by accident.

On the beach of Lake Sibaya they absorbed this fact in all of its profundity.

By learning to write and read humans acquired the ability to visually assimilate and process language in a non-auditory and non-vocal fashion. The primate brain had evolved into its modern hominid anatomical and neurological structural and functional form after an extended period of time that predated the Neolithic epoch. Palaeolithic man had lived for tens of thousands of years with essentially a modern brain encased in his skull without ever experiencing the need to start writing and reading.

Listening to Karl and Roger, Zebedee quickly grasped the fact that biological speaking for more than a hundred thousand years there had been no selective driving force or selective pressure acting on the brain for it to have evolved all the specialized neurological adaptations that could have been structurally and functionally tailored specifically for executing the task of reading or writing. Therefore there was no pre-existing fully-developed capacity for reading or writing ability until the recent fortuitous and sudden invention of writing.

As Roger commented, writing as a form of communication happened very recently, like just yesterday in the chronology of the evolutionary history of man.

As hunter-gathers humans did not need writing.

Anyway why would they need writing and reading?

But reading books on the shores of Lake Sibaya had made Karl, Roger and Zebedee fearless, reckless, intrepid, audacious, creative and daring. Without fully realizing it they found themselves in a state of undeserved grace that preserved them from ending up like the walking dead; they failed to succumb to a plague-like infection of epidemic proportions which would have led to their inexorable and incurable moral, spiritual and intellectual zombification and stupefaction as conscripts in the SADF.

Reading books resulted in a form of mental inoculation, a form of spiritual or psychological vaccination against stupidity. They developed some kind of inexplicable mental immunity, they became morally non-susceptible to indoctrination, and they became spiritually impervious to social influences.

Now standing next to the road in the bright phosphorescent night Zebedee could see for miles. Nocturnal sounds from the surrounding fields punctuated the road side silence. He could clearly make out every feature of the massive flat topped _Platberg_ mountain range that towered over Harrismith which lay at it foot, lost seemingly in a deep dreamless slumber.

The incandescent moon awakened a tinge of regret that threatened to stir up the kind of irresistible madness that one can only read about in the greatest works of literary art. For a moment in the lonely emptiness of the night he seriously entertained doing something quite unthinkable. He began to seriously consider hitchhiking back to Lake Sibaya. Maybe he would be able to get back to the lake by mid-morning, in time to meet the women on the beach.

Yet again he found himself reflecting on the unfathomable depths of possibility which only a perfect night such as this could invite. The unmoving trees were quiet, not a leaf rustled, not even the faintest breeze stirred the showers of moonlight that bathed the dark jewelled inflorescences of panicles, umbels, racemes, corymbs and capitula that stood in unblinking silence along the verge of the silver stream.

Rebekah would be with them carrying her plastic drum.

Would she feel the same about him the way he felt about her now? Were his thoughts inspired by love or was it something else? They had shared a profound experience of loving intimacy. Physically and emotionally they were not complete strangers to each other.

They held each other, their bodies pressed tightly together. They had inhaled each other's presence. For a brief moment without sharing words they had communicated with each other from the deepest core of their beings.

A connection had been made.

She wouldn't have been surprised if he pitched up at the beach. Maybe she would wait forever in the expectation that he would return. Maybe she would wait for the rest of her life standing on beach next to her drum filled with water. She would wait for him, continually looking out for him every morning when they came down to the lake. She would stand on the beach waiting for him to come back to her, waiting to see whether he would come walking down the narrow sand road towards the beach of Lake Sibaya, waiting while they filled their drums with water.

Chapter 2

A giant articulated truck, consisting of horse and trailer, approaching at high speed, suddenly braked sharply, with its engine whining loudly and headlights blazing like a giant aircraft coming in to land it screeched, with rubber tires burning on the tar, it skidded to an earth shuddering halt in a cloud of dust and exhaust fumes. It came to standstill about fifty meters away, the driver leaned over and flung open the passenger door. Zebedee grabbed his _balsak_ and run to the waiting truck. He clambered up into the cab and after a mutual exchange of _dumela_ (hello) the truck roared off again into the silvery night. They drove in silence. Zebedee stared out of the passenger window at the passing landscape, recognizing the topological silhouettes of all the familiar landmarks that broke the flat monotony of the featureless Highveld plains. Landmarks which marked the progress of every journey undertaken by countless travellers and holiday makers who have travelled along this same the road to Durban, travelling from the vast sprawling Pretoria-Witwatersrand-Vereeniging industrial-suburban complex that had originally sprung up in the twinkling of an eye in the shadows of yellow-white mine dumps and vertical shaft headgears.

With the engine howling the truck swept past Warden without slowing. Hunched over the steering wheel with eyes fixed on the broken middle white lines which divided the road the driver pressed down the accelerator as they gunned to Villiers. After flashing past the twinkling lights of Villiers the driver geared down for the crossing of the Vaal River. Zebedee gazed down at the slow flowing steel grey river as the truck thundered across the bridge into the Transvaal.

In front of them, on the road in the bright headlights the broken white line unrolled all the way to Heidelberg. After Balfour the plough shattered steppes of the vast Highveld plains began to be broken by bands of hills formed from ancient rocky outcrops. In the distance they could see the lights of Heidelberg and the shimmering outline of the Suikerbosrand. The driver geared down the truck as it hugged the road while making the wide circuitous centrifugal sweep past Heidelberg. The deafening reverberations of the powerful engine filled the night as the horse and trailer swept along the winding road, down dales and over hills, leaving Heidelberg behind, they crossed the Suikerbosrand. Fifty miles away they could make out the faint golden glowing halo of the vast Witwatersrand with its brightest spot over the Johannesburg skyline.

In the bright night he could make out kilometres away the familiar outline of the row of tall blue gum trees that marked the intersection of the graded gravel farm road with the main tar road. He silently pointed out the spot to the driver, the driver nodded. Changing gears down and braking gently the driver gradually slowed the truck down and a few minutes later he stopped the truck at the T junction intersection, where the sand road turn-off met the main Johannesburg-Durban road.

" _Sala hantle_ ," he said to the driver as he opened the door and climbed out of the cab.

" _Tsamaya hantle_ ," the driver answered. Lost in the silence of their own thoughts, they had not spoken a single word over the entire journey from Harrismith.

Slinging his _balsak_ over his shoulder he started the five kilometre trudge to the farm gate. On the gravel road in the moonlight scrub hares danced and boxed making like puffs of dust. A huge porcupine shambled across the road with quills rattling. Every now and then a bat flittered low over the road. As he passed a vlei a plover called, frogs croaked and crickets chirped. In the distance a farm dog barked at the moon. A snake shining in the moonlight like an undulating ribbon of quick-silver slithered across the road. It was a red lipped herald snake, a nocturnal creature that was often a road-kill victim.

He eventually reached the farm gate. On the gate was the sign Rottstegge Dairy and Stables. He unhooked the chain and pushed the gate slightly open, slipping through the gap. After closing the gate he made his way down the kilometre long poplar tree lined sand road. At the house he was immediately surrounded by a pack of barking dogs. The barking woke up the flock of geese sleeping on the kikuyu lawn in the backyard, they began to gaggle noisily.

He tried to pacify the dogs by saying 'Hey, hey, shoosh,' they recognized his voice and started wagging their tails. He patted their heads and they licked his hands. Zebedee glanced at his watch; it was half past three in the morning. He had been on the road for over twelve hours without having anything to eat or drink.

The barking of the dogs woke Jennifer.

Jennifer who was expecting Zebedee's imminent arrival kicked off the quilt and jumped out of bed immediately, switched on the bedroom lamp and hurriedly put on her gown and slippers. Rushing down the passage she switched on the kitchen and scullery lights before opening the door for him. She embraced him tightly kissing him while laughing and crying at the same time. He could not stop himself from also weeping with joy after seeing his mother following such a long absence. He sat at the kitchen table while she fussed about the kitchen, switching on the kettle, opening and closing the fridge and cupboards and the draws, while speaking incessantly about everything that she thought he wanted to hear, looking for things and forgetting in her excitement what she wanted to find.

His father had already left without saying goodbye to sail the seven seas as Jennifer put it. But otherwise things were going well on the farm. She had a good racing season and had also turned a very nice profit on the stables. Things on the farm were looking up. The horse racing business had grown steadily over the years. She had been training horses for a number of wealthy businessmen who had taken up horse racing as a hobby.

"Do want tea or coffee or milo. You must be very hungry? Can I make you something to eat? I can quickly whip up some steak, eggs and toast?"

"Wow, that sounds great, I am so hungry I can eat a horse," he said.

In a flash she had a slab of rump steak sizzling in a pan on the stove and bread in the toaster. Into another pan she broke two eggs into melted butter. As he ate she told him that Sam Zeigarnik was still alive and as old as he was she was still using him as their farrier, and old Isaac Weinreich was still making racing saddles. All her old connections in the horse racing fraternity were all originally from the Lithuanian district of Novoaleksandrovsk.

She said in passing that she felt an obligation to continue supporting them because they were actually remote relatives of her family. Her remark surprised him.

He knew so little about his family. It felt like he had grown up in vacuum in Rooikraal knowing nothing about aunts, uncles or cousins. It seemed that the Rottstegges had simply dropped out of the sky into South Africa. His ancestry had always been a mystery.

"Midnight Passion has turned out to be an amazing surprise. I have already had offers from Alexander Klausner and Max Rosenberg. As know you from my letters she has won all her races so far," she said.

He was with Jennifer when she bought the unlikely looking filly for a knock down price at the yearling auction at Milner Park show grounds a year ago. The filly was a new addition to the string of racehorses that Jennifer now owned.

He could hear the farm stirring to life. The lights of the dairy had been switched on and cows were being brought in to be milked.

"Time is moving on. I better go get dressed. A farmer's day always begins at the crack of dawn," she laughed.

"You better get some sleep, you must be feeling exhausted."

After washing his face and brushing his teeth he opened his bed room window before he slipped under the quilt, he switched the bedside lamp off, turned over once and fell immediately into a deep slumber.

He dreamed of Lake Sibaya laying peacefully at the foot of forest-covered dunes, indigenous forests that were filled with tall broad leaved trees that towered into the clouds. He was holding the hand of Rebekah the beautiful and sensual young Tsonga woman who drew water every day from the lake. They were in the mystical sand forest that covered the high dunes which overlooked Lake Sibaya. They were locked in an embrace; their mobile lips were pressed together in a passionate kiss. The pleasant sounding high pitched trilling sounds of singing cicadas filled their ears. He hands roved over her body, caressing her breasts and buttocks. She began to speak in English. As he pulled her dress up over her head she asked what Descartes really meant by _cogito ego sum_. She was now completed naked. She asked him what the cicadas were singing about. He answered her. They are watching over us while singing a song about when they too were once men and women living in the sand forest. During that time the Muses brought song to the sand forest and men and women lost themselves in the pleasure of singing. They forgot to eat and drink. They sang until they died. The Muses turned them into cicadas so that they could continue singing all day long without eating and drinking. We must not forget to eat and drink she said looking earnestly at Zebedee. Who are the Muses she asked. The Muses are the nine goddesses who inspire us to tell stories. Are we one of their stories she asked? I don't know Zebedee answered. How can we know she asked? We might never be able to know he answered. Then we need to write our own story about ourselves don't you think she said to Zebedee.

Zebedee looked at her. Her dark body was magnificent in the dappled forest sunlight. They lay down on a bed of dried leaves amongst a brood of Gaboon Vipers on the floor of the sand forest. Multi-coloured giant Vine Snakes with bird heads and gaping beaks glided silently through the forest canopy. He spread her shapely legs and he mounted her. While caressing and fondling her breasts, he felt the exquisite pleasure of his sword wrapped deeply in her dark velvet sheath and then suddenly they found themselves walking hand in hand under a black starlit sky. They were with Karl and Roger. They were walking over the gently undulating grasslands of Tongaland. On top of a high dune covered in ankle deep grass they saw the fearful sight of the black silhouettes of gigantic hippos all walking in a line. Karl sucked deeply on his dagga zol while Roger drank deeply from a plastic bottle filled with lala beer.

And then before the hippos could devour them they found themselves standing on the beach at Sodwana bay. Rebekah was selling packets of peanuts and bunches of bananas. They all watched in horror as the stern faced major with the handle bar moustache, who was the commanding officer of Bravo Company of the 5th SA Infantry Battalion which was based at the Sibaya Lake military camp for six weeks of counter -insurgency training, drive the olive green military Land Rover into the sea.

He, Karl and Roger hauled the Land Rover out of the sea, took out its engine and they stripped it on the beach, with all the parts becoming covered in sand. The major who did not seem to be too concerned about the disaster started fishing from the rocks. They could clearly hear the platoon sergeant whose nickname was Spyker asking the major the same question over and over: ' _moet ek haar nou naai_.' Sergeant Spyker was speaking about a woman sitting among a group of Transvaal holiday makers under a beach umbrella. They were swigging Klipdrift Brandy mixed with coke from a bottle that they were sharing amongst themselves.

While the sergeant and the woman from the Transvaal copulated in full view on the beach they put the engine back together and the engine took at the first turn of the key. Leaving the major on the rocks and the sergeant copulating on the beach they drove the Land Rover through a dense pine plantation. In the middle of the plantation they drove to the top of a high dune covered in short grass. From the top of dune they could see the entire Indian Ocean all the way to India. On top of the dune surrounded by palms was the kraal where Rebekah lived. The ground was crawling with hinge backed tortoises and they had to walk carefully to avoid stepping on them.

Inside a reed hut Rebekah showed them a library filled with all the books that Karl had spoken about. Inside the hut sitting on a chair was the attractive Indian communist from Durban wearing a large heart shape Sibaya bean on a leather throng hanging from her neck. She could not stop saying 'it is so fabulous, it is so fabulous.' Outside the sky was filled with a flock of giant manta ray slowly flapping their massive pectoral fins. They were swallowing seagulls with their huge open cephalic lobed mouths while rotating their eyes like chameleons.

Karl came over him and confidentially told him that the _lobola_ (bridal price) for Rebekah would be seven Friesland bulls and that he need not be circumcised before he took Rebekah as his wife.

He dreamt that it was only a dream that he was having, but then the bedroom door opened. It was Vanessa, she was standing in the doorway, and she came into the bedroom. Vanessa slipped into his bed. She said that she had being searching for him everywhere. Now nothing would ever separate them.

Vanessa was first girl that he had really loved from the very depths of his heart, from the very core of his being. As they held each other she explained that she had never really broken up with him even though she had left him. She said her love was everlasting, it was eternal, and her love for him exemplified the idea of Eros, the heavenly form of Erotic Love. She said that she could only came back to him in dreams, in erotic visitations, to reunite with him, to renew her pledge that she still loved him with an eternal love.

It was midday when Jennifer gently woke him. She sat down on the bed and ran her fingers affectionately over his military cropped dark brown hair which felt stiff and spiky to her touch. Her dark eyes were radiant. She bent over and kissed softly him on his cheek.

"Here is some coffee my darling; I have made lunch for us."

For a moment he was not sure where he was or whether he was still dreaming. Dreaming of Vanessa was always painful; it left an ache in his heart that would last for days. But his unexpected dream of Rebekah was disturbingly pleasant. Everything about her was still so vivid in his mind. It was the kind of dream that made the dreamer fall in love. What was it that lived deep inside of him that had fuelled his dream with the wild fires of passion for Rebekah? He was aware that he had really experienced a profound depth of feeling for Rebekah in his dream state which contrasted sharply with his present state of wakefulness. The dream passion was the kind of passion that ignored all boundaries, the passion that transgressed all norms and conventions; it was the passion of the dream world. Yet it was not disturbing at all, it felt normal to be with Rebekah in the sand forest high above Lake Sibaya.

After lunch they went across to the stables to look at the horses. Jennifer ran a tight ship at the stable yard. He was surprised to see how big Midnight Passion grown since he last saw her. Her shining deep dark brown velvet coat gave the illusion that she was a pitch black thoroughbred which would have been just as strange and impossible as a black rose or black swan. She had turned out to be a truly magnificent animal. Jennifer beamed proudly as Zebedee examined the filly with the trained eye of an expert.

Her lips and muzzle were soft and sensitive. Her nostrils while delicately flared were clean, wide and open. She had a fine head, her chin did not droop, and her face, forehead, cheek and cheek bones were beautifully defined. The lines of her cheeks were well marked and the contours of cheek bones were prominent as they should be. There was a good depth to her jaws and a good width between her eyes. A thoroughbred should have a head that tapers in perfect proportion almost to a point. Her head which was well set on her neck was also in good proportion with her body. Her ears where small and held upright.

Chapter 3

The next morning when he went outside the grass was still heavy with dew. Even though it was still early the sky had already become a deep azure blue. The white full moon still bright in the sky hung over the western horizon. He watched it being swallowed by the earth, like an egg being swallowed by an egg eater.

The short walk through the uncut grass to the machine shed had left his jeans saturating wet up to his knees. At the farm machinery shed he felt the first tentatively warm rays of the sunlight on his back as he stood on the verge of the concrete apron and stared at the farm machinery and implements that were sheltered from the elements under sheets of corrugated iron that had been painted black. The roof of the machine shed began to creak loudly as the radiation streaming from the sun caused the sheets to start expanding. All the working parts of every single implement were covered with a coat of grease. There was not a patch of rust to be seen anywhere.

He had returned to the farm after his national military service without any plans for the future. He had no idea what he wanted to do with his life. He had not made up his mind about what career he would like to pursue. He had returned to the farm, to his room, to the home where he had been born and where he had grown up without thinking about tomorrow. It felt like he had been away for a life time. Yet it also seemed that nothing had changed. His room with the bed made up was just as he had left it, clean and neat with everything in its proper place. Everything looked the same, like a photograph with everything frozen in time. It seemed that while he had been away time had stood still. Time had ceased to flow wherever time was supposed to flow if indeed time did actually flow somewhere. He had had time to think a lot about the meaning and nature of time while they lounged languidly on the white beaches of Lake Sibaya.

Nothing had really changed even though he was seeing everything afresh with new eyes. His mother had asked him about his plans. When she realized that he had none she made him an offer, he could help her run the farm. It was an enticing offer especially the way she put. He would never have to work for boss. In the army he had got used to working without a boss constantly looking over his shoulder all the time, watching his every move. Now he had been given the opportunity to become his own boss. He could run the engineering workshop which his father had left fully intact. Of course he would be expected to help with the horses and the dairy. Twice a week he would oversee the organization and transport of the horses with respect to their racing fixtures at New Market or Gosforth Park or the Vaal or Turffontein. She also promised that one day the farm would be his. It was an offer he could not refuse.

Zebedee's father, Brian Rottstegge had left school midway through standard 9 to start his apprenticeship as an artisan. At 25 years of age he had married Jennifer Gold when she was 20 years old. He was tall, well-built and incredible good looking. Jennifer had found him irresistible and had fallen madly in love with him after their first date. As an ambitious artisan who completed his various apprenticeships he had always dreamt of starting his own engineering business. Zebedee's mother started her career as a professional show jumper after she matriculated. Shortly after they were married it was Zebedee's father's idea to buy the farm and start the dairy business in conjunction with having a small engineering business on the farm for the repair of farm implements and for the servicing of tractors, trucks and bakkies.

With some of the spare cash they made Brian bought a small yacht and joined the Cinderella Dam Yacht Club in Boksburg. Jennifer continued to actively pursue her show jumping hobby, so it was only fair that he also should have a hobby. He usually spent Saturday and Sunday afternoons sailing his yacht on Cinderella dam. Bitten by the yachting bug he started building a steel hulled sea going yacht in his spare time.

His parents inspired by their hopes and dreams for the farm worked hard and sacrificed much in their endeavour to transform it into a flourishing and profitable going concern. Now that Zebedee had also taken ownership of his mother's dream for the farm he felt that his life had a purpose and direction. He did not want her hard years of struggle to be in vain. He mulled over the implications of his parent's divorce which had been finalized while he was in the army. During his final year at school life at home had become a living hell on the farm. It was an emotionally traumatic time as he witnessed the disintegration of his parent's marriage. After school he would come home to angry arguments and bitter recriminations. It eventually had a numbing effect on him. The breakdown started when his father suggested that they sell the farm in order to bail out of their persistently recurrent financial difficulties. His mother with the support of her family firmly resisted and vehemently contested his wishes which in her mind represented a sign of weakness, a cowardly option.

While building the yacht he began to entertain fantasies of escaping from their mundane but trouble filled existence. It was his dream that when the yacht was finally ready for the high seas Zebedee would have finished his Matric and he and Jennifer would then sell the farm and spend the rest of their lives sailing around the world, living of the proceeds earned from the sale of the farm. This fantasy grew into an obsession.

It took him 10 years to build the yacht. Jennifer was indulgent and supportive with regard to Brian's yacht building project. It was not a cheap project and the necessary financial sacrifices had to be made for the yacht's construction. After its completion, the intensity of his wonder lust grew. It was a magnificent yacht that he had built. The craftsmanship was exquisite. It was a monument to his creativity and skill not only as a master craftsmen and supremely gifted artisan but also as a talented engineer. He continued to broach the topic of selling the farm and travelling the world. Jennifer recognized his abilities but did not share his desires and dreams. Instead she recommended that they start a yacht building business. She would support a yacht building business. They could move to the sea and he could sail his yachts around Durban harbour or Table Bay. They could still own a small holding and keep some horses. But this was not the message he wanted to hear.

He was not interested in starting a yacht building business and sailing a sea going yacht in Table Bay. As his plans went into limbo he became more and more frustrated with his life and with the farm. His heart was no longer in the farm. At the same time having reached his early forties he started to experience a severe mid-life crisis. He felt that he had not achieved anything meaningful in his life. He felt increasing unfulfilled. He became a tortured and tormented soul. He complained about feeling stifled by the farm, the dairy and the horses. He wanted to exchange the monotonous steppes of the Highveld which had been ploughed up for maize production for as far as the eye could see for the vast empty horizonless expanse of the oceans.

He could no longer stomach the endless maize filled vistas of the Highveld.

Neither of Zebedee's parents had any intellectual ambitions or pretensions. They were just ordinary hardworking people. All they wanted out of life was a lucky break that would make them financially independent. The crisis that ripped the family apart erupted just when the farm was beginning to turn the corner as a business. For the first time in years the farm had started generating a surplus giving them a modest and predicable net income. But they were not entirely out of the woods. Because their income was still only fairly modest, sufficient only to make ends meet and cover small contingencies, their financial situation remained precarious, making them still sufficiently vulnerable to be anxious. It was this constant precariousness which also began to take its toll on Brian. Things could take a turn for the worst and bankruptcy was always a possibility. The yacht could be seized by creditors to offset their debts and the ten years of his life that had been invested into its construction would have been lost like a puff of smoke if they hit a patch of bad luck and their resources were depleted.

One morning he woke up and he announced to Jennifer that he had had enough. He confessed plainly to Jennifer that he yearned to wake up without ever having a single worry in the world. He could no longer go on living day in and day out always on the brink of one financial crisis after the next, constantly dogged by the ever present risk of losing everything. He wanted to cash in his chips while the going was good. Those were the words he actually used. He wanted to 'cash in his chips'.

He freely admitted he could no longer cope, he complained about being mentally and emotionally burnt out, he said that he had no strength or will left to go on. He wanted a life free of all financial worry. He wanted to shrug off the unbearable load of anxieties that left him emotionally exhausted and mentally tired. He wanted to extricate himself from the perpetual struggle to meet the monthly bond repayments and the recurrent payments on all their expenses. He wanted to escape the unpredictable vicissitudes and the haphazard contingencies that plagued the life of a farmer. Everything on the farm continued to involve one damn thing after another. There was no peace, he often felt like he was drowning.

He felt that after suffering in silence for so long, he had at last found the courage to be honest and to frankly admit that all he wished for in life was nothing more than going to bed at night and waking up in morning without a single care in the world, without any nagging worries, worries that robbed his life of joy and peace; he did not want to have to care about tomorrow and the next day, and the next day, for the rest of his life until he died. He wanted to step off the treadmill on a journey to nowhere.

All of these admissions came as a shock to Jennifer. She was stunned to hear all this. She looked at Brian in a state of confusion. He had become overnight a total stranger. He was no longer the man that she had married. But she refused to give up. She was a feisty woman.

They began to fight over their financial priorities with respect to running and growing the business. He had lost his appetite for risk. For years she recommended that they get a bull to service their cows. She felt that artificial insemination reduced the quality of a cow's life. She had this idea that cows also had the right to enjoy having sex with a bull and that it was cruel for a cow to go through life without ever been mounted and inseminated by a bull.

Predictably the straw that broke the camel's back was her insistence that they purchase a Friesland bull. Jennifer reiterated that they needed to get a bull of good genetic quality for the herd of Friesland dairy cows. It would definitely save money in the long run. Every time a cow came on heat they had to call the vet. He would have to race to Irene to get the semen. Only 60% of the artificial inseminations were successful. If they had a decent bull this would not be the case. Anyway she had done her research on a specific bull which would be on auction with the rest of a Friesland herd that belonged to a deceased estate. She wanted to bid for the bull. She wanted to gamble on the possibility that no one would be interested in the bull.

Anyway there was a little problem, she mentioned in passing, they would have to borrow money on overdraft to try and buy the bull at the auction.

He said no. Taking an overdraft would just exacerbate their financial difficulties further. She countered his reservation by proposing that they could borrow the money from her father. He still said no. He said that he still had some pride left.

In the end she ignored his concerns and borrowed the money from her father and bought the bull at a giveaway price. She got her bull but she lost her husband.

For Brian the purchase of the bull was the final straw. When he saw Jennifer, Daniel and the boys coaxing the huge snorting Friesland bull off the truck onto the ramp he stormed out of the house jumped into the bakkie and sped off. He returned in the early hours of morning in a drunken incoherent state. He started shouting at Jennifer in the kitchen. Zebedee woke from a deep sleep. He lay in bed listening to his dad ranting and raving about how terrible his life was. He told Jennifer that he would no longer endure it for another day.

To Zebedee his father had also become a stranger. He found himself taking his mother's side with regard to the farm. He could not imagine life without the farm. He could not imagine not living on the farm. He could not imagine a life without cattle and horses. He could not imagine a life without been surrounded by vast open spaces, in this sense he had become like his mother. The farm was everything. It was also his life. He loved the horses, he loved the cattle, he loved the dark star filled skies at night, and above all he loved the panorama of the wide open plains and the view of the Suikerbosrand that broke the southern horizon of his world with a chain of rocky hills over which black eagles glided.

In reality it was an ambiguous and contradictory love for a way of life and for a landscape. It was a costly love, a love which had to endure forlornness, melancholy and an element of forsakenness.

There was a flavour of bitter sweetness in the love of the landscape that filled the space between Boksburg, Alberton and Heidelberg.

Yet, like his mother he could not imagine life without being surrounded by the vast rolling open spaces of the Highveld that stretched on forever.

In his drunken anger his father threatened to put the farm immediately on the market. He insisted it was his right; he was a fifty percent shareholder. He also insisted that the proceeds from the sale of all the assets be split equally between them. He wanted something in return for the 20 years of his life that he had given up. She stood her ground, stating firmly and resolutely that over her dead body were they going to sell the farm, the dairy or the stable of horses which had also taken 20 backbreaking years of her own life to establish.

She was not going to do any 'cashing in of chips' just yet so that they could sail into the sunset on the high seas.

She developed a suspicion that his sudden personality change could be due to his having an affair. He was still a raggedly good looking man. She began to accuse him of having an affair.

It was during one such angry exchange that he disclosed that it was only out of desperation that he started having an affair with an attractive 22 year old woman, a Christine McFarland, who he had met at the Cinderella Dam Yacht Club.

Anyway it turned out in the argument that Christine understood him much better than Jennifer ever had. She understood and appreciated his dreams, needs and desires. She was on the same wavelength. She was a keen yachtswoman and shared his passion to sail round the world. All that Brian wanted was his yacht and freedom from care and worries.

In angry retaliation she insisted that she was the co-owner of the yacht and her lawyer agreed. She began to threaten that she would sue him for divorce and that she would take him to cleaners. He would lose the yacht and will be left with nothing, not even one cent. She said that when she was finished with him he would never be in a financial position ever again to buy another yacht.

In the end, as part of the divorce settlement she won complete ownership of the farm. In the divorce settlement it became clear that he was prepared to pay any price for his freedom to sail the seas on the yacht that he had built. All he wanted was the yacht and its trailer. In the final divorce settlement Jennifer took over the ownership of the farm lock, stock and barrel. Jennifer said he could have his freedom and his girlfriend but that it would come at price. She would get the dairy, the Friesland herd, all the horses including the race horses, all the vehicles, all the farm implements, all his workshop and engineering equipment and the 200 morgen of prime Highveld farmland. The audited trial balance for the farm's assets and liability accounts convinced him and his lawyer that it would be better for him to walk away with only his yacht and trailer. He would have to get his own vehicle to tow the yacht away. He left the farm carrying only his suitcase. His girlfriend fetched him at the farm gate. They hired a truck to tow the yacht to Parkdene in Boksburg where it was parked in the street outside her parents' house.

Her parting shot to Brian as she watched him hitching the yacht trailer to the tow-away-truck was:

" _Zolst es shtipin in toches_!" (Shove it up your rectum!)

As usual whenever she made a remark in Yiddish he knew that it would express a sharp, demeaning and vulgar putdown and that always angered him. He hated the sharp Yiddish barbs that erupted from her angry lips.

"What was that? What was that you said?" He asked with an angry scowl on his face. It burnt him to the core that he did not know what she had said. He had a superstitious streak when she insulted him in Yiddish, as he couldn't fathom whether or not he was being cursed.

Chapter 4

While staring at the yellow painted mechanical cultivator in a distracted manner while he was mulling over all the significance of things that he had recently experienced he heard his name been called:

"Zeb, Zeb, Zeeeebbbedeeee."

The fresh morning air resonated with the sound of his name. The soprano quality of his mother's voice echoed across the lush lucerne fields, across the knee high emerald green maize fields. Gifted with that voice she could have been an opera singer. It amazed him that such a diminutive and petite person could have such a strong and powerful voice.

He had watched her riding a spirited and energetic seven year old shining dark bay thoroughbred gelding, a champion showjumper that was 17 hands high and weighed 1600 lbs. Chomping eagerly at the bit it approached the obstacle confidently and fearlessly, judging the distance it slowed slightly before gathering itself together. Without hesitation the horse flew over the high horizontally placed white and black painted delicately balanced poles of the vertical jump like a powerful giant wave that curls over like a tube before it crashes onto the beach. It cleared the jump cleanly, pitching down effortlessly, like an eagle landing.

For Zebedee after a good night's sleep it was the first morning of a new beginning. He felt it in his bones when got up. He had woken up at five-o-clock feeling fully rested. His mind felt sharp and lucid. The sun was already up. His national military service was finally behind him forever and the December holidays had started for him. He was eighteen years of age and would be turning nineteen in the New Year. He got dressed, ate a bowl of Weetabix breakfast cereal with cold milk and sugar, drank a cup of Rick Coffee, brushed his teeth and washed his face and went outside. Jennifer an early riser was already up busy at the dairy.

While standing in the machine shed before his mother began to call him he became almost mystically aware of the fact that he now stood at some kind of profound threshold in his life. It felt as if he was standing at the cross roads of his life; before him lay the vast expanse of never ending horizons. Before him rose the eternal ocean of possibilities. There was no predetermined destiny that mapped out his fate. The Universe was open. The future had not been prearranged in advance. In this sense the future did not exist as something that had been predetermined in the past or in the present. There was no such thing as destiny or fate. The future was in your own hands to mould, fashion and make. The future was open to all kinds of possibilities. The future like everything else was up from grabs.

For a moment he felt immortal. He felt the immortality that only a young person could feel. The only real problem in life was the one which lay immediately at hand, but it was the kind of problem that was not going to have any influence on the rest of his life. It was insignificant, yet it was something that had to be done, today or tomorrow, but not later than tomorrow. He must not postpone it for too long and it had to be done before Daniel left on the short holiday break that he had asked for.

A year ago twelve years of schooling had come to an anticlimactic end. He did not even go to the matric dance. Now he had come back to where he had left off. He had returned to the land, to the wide plains, to the expansive horizons. Everyone he knew, all his boyhood friends, all of them had shared one ideal, they all wanted to escape from the countryside, but he seemed to be the exception to this rule.

He stared at the maize fields; the weeds would soon overtake the maize.

********

Christo Liebenberg who lived on the farm across the river often confessed that he was finding it impossible to endure the suffocating solitude and stifling monotony of farm life on the rural Highveld. In winter there was the constant drone of farm machinery associated with maize harvesting and threshing, there was also the incessant distant drone of tractors transforming the wide treeless and featureless landscape into a vast expanse of ploughed up broken red earth covered with shrouds of rolling clouds of red dust.

Sometimes the drone went on throughout the night. At night on the frozen plains one could see the headlights and spotlights of the tractors breaking the frost covered ground.

Christo Liebenberg was surprisingly articulate for a teenage boy in giving poetic expression to his feelings of lostness and existential angst. This was why Zebedee enjoyed his company; listening to Christo bemoaning his fate in pessimistic tones and apocalyptic forebodings regarding the future.

Christo complained bitterly that the best years of their youthful lives were being wasted. They were missing out on all the action that took place in the towns on the weekends. Their Friday and Saturday nights were lonely, empty and dreary. The only entertainment they had was listening to LM radio. He had spent weekends at his cousin's home in Boksburg north. In Boksburg every weekend there were parties and there were sessions at Boksburg Lake.

The feelings that Christo expressed were not unfamiliar to Zebedee.

Winter days especially never ceased to be filled with unbearable feelings of melancholy that were stirred by unspecific but desperate yearnings for something both mysterious and unattainable. Each day passed by without giving any sign of hope that a change for something better was on the horizon. In the end one was left feeling emotionally numb and empty especially at dusk when the grass owls and barn owls flew silently over dry withered fields and when the mournful lowing of cows begged the bleeding sun not to vanish beneath the earth.

It was not only Christo who felt the unbearable emptiness and hopelessness of rural life on the Highveld plains. Maybe he too had become infected by the contagion of a much deeper more incurable melancholy that arose as a dark miserable vapour from a source which he could not fathom or discern. It was shadow-like, clinging to him. He too was familiar with that vague unsettling feeling that something was missing, that something was amiss. But fleeing the platteland, seeking refuge in the city, in the towns, in the neat suburbs would not shake off that dark shadow of angst and yearning for something indiscernible. In Vanessa he had experienced a brief respite from that indiscernibly vague sense of abandonment, desolation, meaninglessness and lostness that he could never quite grasp or comprehend or explicate in a lucid way. Christo insisted that it was the vast plains of the Highveld that caused it. He said it was like the motionless stagnation of the doldrums of the vast Atlantic Ocean that drove sailors mad. He said that if they lived in a village instead of the isolated far flung homesteads they may feel slightly better.

On the western side of the horse paddocks behind the stables hidden from view stood the forlorn row of white washed single car-garage sized rooms with their slightly inclined corrugated iron roofs which helped to channel the flow of rainwater away from the front façade of the dwellings. In the communal yard in the front of their rooms the wives of the farm labourers bowed over their coal fired braziers cooking the staple evening meal of mielie pap and _morogo_. Raggedly dressed in faded threadbare soiled dresses sullen teenagers stood in darken doorways as the gloom of twilight descended on the sun baked hardened bare red ground of the yard. Half-dressed bedraggled children with gooey green snot noses amused themselves in the yard or sat listlessly on the door steps staring vacantly into space.

Wisps of bluish-grey white smoke unfurled from the _konkas_ (braziers) as the womenfolk of the farm workers attended to the evening meal, the threads of the rising smoke twisted and twirled into the sky. After rising the smoke diffused into a hazy kind of smog that spread out horizontally above the fields. The mist of smog descended with the cooler air and like a ghostly shroud of greyish fog it began to blanket the shallow valley where the Rietspruit River ran its course en route to the Klip River which in turn flowed into the great grey Vaal River that bisected the great plains of the Transvaal and Orange Free State Highveld. In the descending evening gloom the smoky fog followed the river on its journey westwards towards the flaming red horizon; carrying with it the odours of cooked mielie meal pap as a burnt offering in memory of ancient ancestors that now lay buried and forgotten under the great and expansive grassland sea of the Highveld steppes that once supported the great herds of the ancient roving Basotho and Batswana pastoralists.

From the stables Zebedee could see and smell the plumes of white smoke unfurling above the white washed _khayas_ (dwellings) of farm workers that dotted the quilt work of scattered farms that spread their boundaries across the plains. It was always a sorrowful sight that beckoned the end of the working day and the start of another long night of wondering how they had managed to find themselves in such a desolate state of affairs devoid of all meaning and hope. Their lives had become barren ruins, expended and wasted without any compensation.

Daniel once related to Zebedee a bit of his own family history. He described a golden age that stood in sharp contrast to the current plight of black farm workers. Zebedee sat in the cab next Daniel. Daniel was driving the horse trailer. They were transporting race horses to Gosforth Park. On that day the racehorse Hawaii trained by George Azzie and owned by Mr Charles Engelhard won the Benoni Diamond Guineas by 8 lengths.

At the race courses, until he had turned sixteen, Zebedee always stayed behind in the stable yard with the racehorses from the Rottstegge Stables. After turning sixteen while working under the auspices of a Rottstegge stable hand he was allowed to come into the member's enclosure and watch the races with his binoculars from the member's grandstand. Smartly dressed in a tweed sports jacket, white shirt with a bright tie and navy blue flannels he would accompany the Rottstegge horses being led by Daniel to the parade ring before each race. Jennifer also smartly dressed for the races and wearing one of her large hats was a licensed race trainer and registered breeder, plus a proud owner of several of her own race horses. She was a respected and well-known member of the Witwatersrand horse racing fraternity. She would be waiting at the entrance of the parade ring with the owners who were eager to see their horses. With an eagle eye she would give each horse a careful check-up before it was led into parade ring by the stable hand standing next to Daniel. The stable hand would be dressed in a clean blue overall, wearing a white floppy hat and shining black gum boots. The stable hand leading the specific horse would usually also be employed as the horse's groom and rider at the Rottstegge stable yard. All stable hands were Basotho and were both excellent and natural horsemen who spoke and understood only Afrikaans as their second language. So all exchanges between Jennifer and the grooms took place in the special dialect of the Afrikaans spoken by black farm labourers.

Most of the owners, who were also high-maintenance individuals whose egos needed to be constantly massaged, represented the rich and beautiful (even when passed their prime) people of Johannesburg. He had been introduced to many of the Johannesburg business and mining luminaries and had become known as the good looking and bright Rottstegge lad, someone who would eventually grow into his mother's shoes as a leading member of the horseracing fraternity.

Zebedee found himself listening with fascination and interest to the multi-coloured witty banter of the rich and powerful as they mingled at the parade ring while admiring their horses. Mr Ariel Penzig who as a 16 year boy had walked barefoot through the snow in Russia to escape the Nazis had become a property magnet and the owner of five racehorses that were stabled at the Rottstegge yard and trained by Jennifer. He often made asides to her in Yiddish. He had once or twice tried to propose to Jennifer, saying that he would readily divorce his wife tomorrow at the drop of a hat if she agreed to marry him. He was a huge barrel chested man, and at the races he was always accompanied by his elegantly dressed wife at his side; she was also blissfully unaware of her husband's roving eyes and cavorting pastimes.

He was a self-educated man who had read Spinoza and had also read all the Russian writers in Russian. He was a jovial man full of witty remarks, who while extolling the virtues of Capitalism, freely admitted that he had never really ever worked a single day in his life; he had not even exerted the effort involved in the lifting of a single finger to collect the rent of his tenants. He hired others to do his dirty work, like collecting his money from tenants.

Jennifer said he was a natural genius and if he wanted to he could have been another Einstein. She also said you don't need a university education in order to prove that you were clever.

Mr Penzig liked to be ironical and controversial, and he was in the habit of saying things like:

"You can only get rich if other people are stupid."

"I don't know why God put us on earth but it wasn't so that we can enjoy ourselves that is for certain."

"Hard work does not get you anywhere, just look at me I have never done a day's work in my life. I think this describes the essence of Capitalism the rich get richer by working less and less while the rest of humanity finds itself condemned to live a wretched hand to mouth existence by the sweat of their brows."

Jennifer would wink at Zebedee while smiling sceptically.

But to Zebedee whatever Mr Penzig said seemed to be self-evidently true of life. None of the big shot racehorse owners looked like men that were overworked. The only real work they seemed to do generally involved talking.

Mr Penzig had the habit of suddenly stopping abruptly mid-way in a conversation. He would bring his powerful binocular to his eyes, and with his cigar clamped between his teeth he would begin monitoring the activities of the bookmakers within the Tattersall enclosure. Following the odds was an enjoyable part of his race day amusement and entertainment. He would go to extreme lengths to explain why the stock exchange and asset markets shared many commonalities with racehorse betting. In his opinion the buying and selling of securities, stocks, shares or any other kind of marketable asset shared many similarities with punter betting behaviour. Punter betting behaviour exhibited dynamics and patterns of behaviour that were similar in many ways to that of asset traders on the security exchanges. They both exhibit what he called herd or lemming behaviour and behaviour associated with inside trading phenomena. Short on facts, it was behaviour motivated and influenced by sentiment and foggy impressions.

He confidently explained all of this to Zebedee. "When punters see a sudden large decrease or shortening of odds for a horse they take this dramatic movement in price as a sign of insider activity. All the signs suddenly indicate that the horse is going to be a sure winner. Punters who believe they have received reliable insider information about a racehorse with favourable odds will predictably start betting large amounts on the horse at an earlier stage before the day of the actual race fixture. If at the races a large bet is suddenly placed on an outsider, this information is quickly relayed between the bookies. Information also diffuses rapidly among punters triggering lemming-like stampedes while the bookies rub their hands in glee at the prospect of making a killing. A slight favourable upward shift in the odds always follows as a consequence of large bets being placed on a horse. Sudden changes in cumulative betting patterns as more bets start being placed on what was a rank outsider will also cause an adjustment in the betting odds for that horse. The betting pattern at the races is always the same, a shift in betting behaviour always triggers a better's auction which results in a precipitous shorting of the odds. The increase in the odds is taken as a sure sign of a winner, a sign which becomes an irresistible signal to bet or buy and punters start exhibiting herd behaviour by stampeding without thinking, without thinking they rush to place bets on the horse before the already favourable odds start narrowing further, until it becomes an odds on favourite, a clear certainty, an unbeatable horse. Likewise, investor herd behaviour can drive up the share prices of assets to stratospheric heights."

It's the same story that Zebedee had seen with his own eyes many times at horseracing fixtures. But then again if you really know horses you can spot a winner immediately, and when Zebedee saw Hawaii for the first time being led in the parade ring he knew immediately that this horse was going to win the race and many more to come. He glanced at Jennifer; she smiled and nodded her head in agreement.

"He is a great horse there is no doubt about that," she said.

Not only Mr Ariel Penzig but also Messrs Goldhirsch, Schreier, Sokoloff, Vang, Wallach, and Zilberschlag had escaped the Nazis by walking barefoot in the snow across Russia. They had all eventually become owners of racehorses in South Africa by buying short and selling long. They were well known to the Rottstegges. Jennifer had trained their thoroughbreds. It was their business, their racehorse training fees and their racehorse livery fees that had kept the Rottstegge Yard afloat as a going concern.

The Lithuanian and Polish Jewish diaspora were master herdsmen who understood investor herd behaviour; they understood human psychology and human nature. They understood how insider trading, rumour mongering, rumour epidemics and the diffusion of information could trigger an investor stampede that would bring a flood of money into their pockets. You had to have brains to belong to a people who have managed to survive without weapons for 800 years in a hostile Europe, years that were punctured or punctuated by a never ending series of violent pogroms. Zebedee learnt that money and knowledge was a Jew's weapon of survival in a cruel, unforgiving and seemingly malevolently absurd world.

Sometimes Mr Penzig comments had the effect of unveiling the complete absurdity of everything. Many common place beliefs survived because of the sheer force of dumb habit. People will believe anything; they will behave like idiots, like imbeciles, like morons. They will swallow any crock about any topic.

And this was also true for the game of horseracing.

"Why do you think the bookies are guaranteed to make money on ever race? I will tell you why. It is because horseracing is based on the absurd idea that as a result of 'objective' handicapping it is believed that every horse at the starting gate has an equal chance of winning. Because handicapping is based on the so called objective determination of the form of each horse in the field, it is supposed to ensure that every horse has an equal chance of winning irrespective of its actual form on the day of the race. This is the rationale of handicapping; it is to ensure that the sport of horseracing is conducted in a fair and equitable manner, so that every horse in the field, irrespective of its form, can be the winner. If horseracing was not fair and was instead based on the just rewarding of merit then all the punters would be winners and it could be impossible to make a business out of gambling on other people's stupidity, and horseracing as a gambling business would collapse."

"All horses must start with an equal chance; this is the rationale of handicapping. This is the great myth of horseracing. It is also the myth of life. No one is equal. In life there are always more losers than winners. Inequality is built into life. It is the rule of social existence; inequality emerges as the supreme unchanging necessity of all societies, both capitalist and socialist. You think that there is no inequality in socialism or communisms? All societies are hierarchical and socially stratified. I will tell something, there is more inequality and social stratification in communism than capitalism," Mr Penzig said to Zebedee.

Jennifer smiling at Zebedee nodded her head in agreement with what Mr Penzig had to say to Zebedee about the similarities that socialism and capitalism shared when it came to social stratification.

Like Mr Penzig she also said that there would always be some people more equal than the majority of losers.

Handicapping was based on the most enigmatic theory that the entire field of horses should all finish in a dead heat. If a horse is showing good form the handicapper adds more weight to the horse to slow it down so as to equalize the performance of all the horses in the field at the starting line-up. The purpose of handicapping is to slow a good horse down so that more inferior horses will have a chance of winning. To Zebedee, the teenage boy, it was a complete absurdity. As he would always say to Jennifer, no horse ever runs the same race. Every race takes place in a different state of confusion and chaos. All races are different. Handicapping is based on a hypothesis about a horse's future performance. Handicapping depends on the logic of induction; it expects that the future will be like the past. Horses are herd animals that like to run in a pack. The trainer does not want the horse to run as fast as possible but rather to stay well within pack until an opportune moment arises for it to break from the pack and forge ahead. This is when both speed and stamina come in.

Does anyone have superior information? In horseracing there is never enough evidence to support any firm conclusions. Horseracing is ruled by folk-wisdom. If a horse wins on a rainy day everyone believes he loves a heavy going. People scrutinized a horse's pedigree and try to make all kinds of inferences about its ability to win a race.

Actual performance is the only yard stick there is to measure the racing capacity of a horse. You can look at horse until you are a blue in the face, but you will be unable to predict its racing capacity from its outward appearance.

But then again from one look at Hawaii for some mystical reason beyond any rational understanding Zebedee knew in his bones that this horse was a wonder horse.

He shared that intuition with Jennifer. They would often spot a horse in the arena and know for certain that it was going to win. But they never placed a bet on any horse. The moment you betted on the horse it would lose the race.

On the way home Daniel narrated in Afrikaans a strange and unbelievable story about his _groot groot oupa grootjie_ who according to Daniel once farmed hundreds of morgen of prime farmland in the Orange Free State. What made the story even more remarkable and fantastic was the presence of poor whites that also lived on the same farm. It was not clear whether his ancestors actually owned the farm or not, but they farmed the land as if it were their own. As crop farmers and cattle grazers they become incredibly wealthy. They grew vast fields of maize. They grazed vast herds of cattle on the grasslands. They had countless oxen for ploughing. They owned ox wagons for transporting bags of grain to the Witwatersrand gold fields. They supplied great herds of beef to the Witwatersrand gold fields. The poor whites lived among the wealthy black farmers. Then for reasons that were not clear his ancestors lost everything. They were simply kicked off the land.

Why were they kicked of the land when they had proven to be such productive farmers? It did not make any economic sense. They should have been left on the land as productive self-sufficient farmers.

When Zebedee asked Daniel this question, Daniel could not say why. They were simply kicked of the land.

Did they not own the land?

No he was not sure whether they were actual owners of the land. Then who owned those vast stretches of farm land? It was mystery; he could not definitely say who owned the land.

Anyway barbwire fences went up everywhere. They and their livestock were kicked off the land. They lived on the veld between the barbwire fences and the road. As the months went by their herds of cattle, sheep and goats gradually dwindled as they were forced to sell of their stock at cut rate prices to the whites. They had to sell their livestock. They had no alternative. There was insufficient grazing on the verge of the road and they had limited access to water. Kind hearted landowners were far and few, it was not easy to provide drinking for their herds. Their livestock were beginning to starve to death or die of thirst. They began to drop dead next to the side of the roads.

In the end the grandfathers and grandmothers died as broken people in their ox wagons parked on the side of the roads. With no herds and no ground to grow maize the young men and women went back to their old farms to work as labourers to save themselves from starving to death.

For the teenage Zebedee it was a perplexing and counter-intuitive story. He did not know what to make of it. Were Daniel's ancestors indeed wealthy peasants who worked the land and owned great herds before they suffered such an unimaginable and catastrophic reversal of fortunes?

It seemed that Daniel had stoically resigned himself to his fate as a farm labourer. He could do nothing; there was absolutely nothing he could do. As a non-owner of land he was now ironically in a state of absolute bondage to that very land. He was chained by invisible chains to the vast plains of the Highveld, the expansive grassland steppes that once belonged to his ancestors. Yet he could not remove himself from these plains, he was not free to leave them, he could not simply walk away.

Where would he walk to, where would his journey end, where would his destination lie, where would he find his home? He was radically homeless, he was at home without being at home, he was estranged or alienated from the plains, he was legally alienated from them, and even while being estranged, he was being held in a tight embrace as their prisoner forever, a kind of bond-slave at the mercy of forces and powers that he could not comprehend or understand.

At the racecourse behind the scenes Daniel was responsible for the string of racehorses from the Rottstegge Stables. Daniel driving the truck towing the trailer of racehorses usually arrived two hours before the race fixture. From the trailer the horses were taken to their stables.

Now later that day, Zebedee tried to digest and make sense of Daniel's story while he sat in the cab gazing out of the window at the passing landscape on their homeward bound journey from Gosforth Park. Their horses had not won any of their races. Jennifer drove ahead of them back to the farm. There was bleakness to the landscape, even in the summer. The whole Witwatersrand was bleak.

That night he related to Jennifer what Daniel had told him about his great grandparents being successful farmers in the Orange Free State where they had grown vast fields of maize and owned huge herds of cattle.

"Do think there is any truth to Daniel's story?" He asked his mother.

"I don't know. I suppose it could be possible. Who knows how many stories there are of suffering and dispossession of people that have been conveniently forgotten. Many truths about the past are too inconvenient, too embarrassing to remember. No wants to know how and why the poor and down trodden fell into their state of wretchedness," she said.

"Well if Daniel's story is true, don't you think that it is unfair that the black farmers lost everything and ended up as farm workers?" Zebedee asked.

"I suppose it is unfair. But what can we do? We can't save the world if can barely save ourselves. Anyway some of my uncles and aunts who escaped the Nazis became Communists in South Africa because they wanted to save the world. Then the government banned the Communist Party and started arresting all the Communists and so they were forced to flee the country. Some went to Britain and the others landed up in Israel," she said.

"Unfortunately it has always being a Jewish thing to want to save the world from itself," she said without smiling and with an air of indifference.

When Jennifer made some remark about the Jews it always seemed that she excluded herself from that race. He always found his mother's views about the Jews ambiguous if not downright contradictory. In various contexts she would repeat the exact words of Mr Ariel Penzig: 'Wherever the Jew finds himself, the Jew is always only a guest, the Jew always lives with his bags packed, ready to flee at a moments notice.'

"Do you believe this?" He asked his mother.

"Yes in a way I do," she answered as she prepared their Saturday night supper while Zebedee sat at the kitchen table watching her cook.

The revelation that there were Communists on his mother's side of the family intrigued him. It stirred up an admiration for them. In South Africa whites have always hated, feared and loathed Communists. Italian boys that he had known from school who believed they were of Sicilian ancestry had an admiration and fascination for the Mafioso. He began to appreciate why they took pride in being connected to everything that was notorious about being Sicilian. In similar fashion he began to feel secretly proud of his mother's notorious relatives who were Communists.

He pestered her for more information. She had estranged herself from her blood relatives, including her siblings and was reluctant to talk about them.

"I can't remember all the details it was a long time ago. It was during the 1940s and 1950s. My father always referred to them as Reds or bloody Bolsheviks. I remember that they spent all their time reading books by Karl Marx and Lenin, writing stories for the newspapers, arguing about Trotsky and Stalin, debating about theories of revolution and analysing the minutiae of the class struggle in South Africa," she said.

"I suppose it is a true that the horrifying wretchedness of the lives of millions of black people in South African is actually beyond comprehension, maybe that is why nobody really cares much about what black people actually think or feel, and I don't think anyone is going to make any serious effort to find out," she said as an afterthought.

"What about someone who is a Communist?" Zebedee asked out of interest.

"Obviously a true Communist would see things differently. Where the average white will see nothing out of the ordinary in South Africa a Communist would see evil, injustice, subjugation, misery, bondage, hopelessness, despair, suffering, poverty, oppression and inhuman exploitation," she said.

"What about a Christian? Would a Christian see what a Communist sees?" Zebedee asked.

"No, I definitely don't think so, not in South Africa anyway. Christianity has not made the world a better place. The Church in South Africa has always given its blessing to the Apartheid policy of the Nationalist Party government. This proves that Christians are the very last people in the world to concern themselves with injustice, subjugation, suffering and exploitation. Throughout history the Church has always maintained a hand in glove relationship with the powerful ruling elites to the detriment of its own parish members and the ordinary people, especially the poor," she said.

"I would never put my trust in Christians or the Church. Anyway I am not a religious person and I would never put my hope in religion, especially to make the world a better place," she said.

Chapter 5

Zebedee remembered Christo's commentary on how miserable their lives were on the _platteland_ (the rural regions).

_Die platteland se lewer het sekere uitwerking op_ ' _n mens, dit verhinder 'n mens se emotionelle ontwikkeling, dit vertrag n mens deep in sy siel_. _Jy en ek ons raak mal ek se vir jou._

(The rural isolation of farm life has a definite negative effect on a person's mental health, it hinders a person's emotional development, and it is spiritually retarding, destroying your soul. You and I are becoming mad I am telling you.)

It was on a bitterly cold winter's day in July during the school holidays when Christo had made that remark. The thin wintery light was not strong enough to support a single feeble shadow on that day.

They only spoke Afrikaans. Christo could not speak English. With Christo, especially in the school holidays, for days on end, from morning to evening Zebedee spoke only Afrikaans, while he meditated and thought in English about the topics of their discussion. On the Highveld _platteland_ he lived not only between the interfaces of two cultures, two worlds, but also at the interface of two languages, the language of thought and the language of speaking and hearing. Days went by when the only audible language that rang in his ears was Afrikaans. But he always felt like an outsider looking in. He was always aware that he and Christo had different kinds of being in the world. They saw the world differently. But he had also learnt to see the world through their eyes, and he learnt to think their thoughts without ever making them his own. He had a different view of reality which was impossible for Christo or his other Afrikaans friends to comprehend.

While he shared their angst and yearnings he did not share their antipathy to the solitude of the wide open spaces. He did not experience their feelings of alienation, of estrangement, of loss, feelings which were incongruous with the fact that their parents were proprietors of the land.

The meaning of their lives was based on following a religious and political creed. This meant that they lived their lives in a mechanical formulaic fashion which prevented them from deviating as individuals from externally imposed social conventions that had a religious-nationalistic flavour. Their universe was closed to the creative possibilities of a free imagination. They were trapped in the thrall of a predestined but unknown fate. Ironically their destiny did not have the guarantee of certainties. In the absence of certainty they still lived their lives under the yoke of strict religious observances. Eve without the comfort of certainty regarding their election they still remained unwaveringly faithful to their religious and political beliefs. Inexplicably, outside the comfort of their religious and political creeds, they could find no other way of being Afrikaners. It bothered them that the English speakers did not seem to believe in anything transcendental or in destiny or in divine election or in a calling or in a religious-mystical-nationalistic idea of a volk. The English speakers were creedless; there was something heathen about them. They lived without having any firm holdfast or anchor like the Afrikaner; they had no sense of destiny, of calling, of _roeping_ (calling) and of election. In the mind of Christo, Zebedee and the English speakers in general lived futureless lives, for them the future did not exist; they had no sense of destiny.

They did not live historical lives. Cut off from England they seemed to be living outside of history. In Christo's eyes Zebedee lived a life disconnected from history, he did seem to know who he was.

" _Wie is jy_?" He asked Zebedee once.

(Who are you?)

Zebedee said nothing, he did not answer Christo. He just shrugged his shoulders. He knew what kind of answer Christo was looking for.

In the Rooikraal district between Boksburg and Heidelberg near the Glenroy railway station to the unaccustomed ear of English speaking South Africans the rural atmosphere on the farms echoed with a thick and heavy Afrikaans, an Afrikaans that often reverberated with threatening and intimidating tones. It was a deeper Afrikaans, much deeper than the Afrikaans spoken in the towns of the Witwatersrand. It was the Afrikaans that Zebedee had grown up with. It was the Afrikaans to which his ears and mind were acutely tuned.

It was analogous to the deep rural isiZulu that was spoken in the rural districts of Natal.

It was Afrikaans that sounded very different from the soft gentle intimate maternal murmuring and nurturing tones of the Afrikaans spoken by the primary school and high school teachers in the towns. It was definitely different from the urban Afrikaans that the townspeople cultivated. It was different from the urban Afrikaans that the townspeople had learnt to speak as their mother tongue in an atmosphere that had become thick with the English of foreigners.

The Afrikaans that the rural Afrikaners like Christo spoke, was the Afrikaans that they been learnt from their suffering grandparents and great grandparents, who after experiencing internment in the concentration camps, and who had fought in the mounted commandos against the British colonialists. It was the Afrikaans spoken by the Afrikaners who after the Anglo-Boer War, had migrated in their thousands from the platteland, from their burnt out and devastated farms to the towns in search of any kind of work, it was the Afrikaans spoke spoken by the Boers who had become proletarianized.

The rural Afrikaans was not the soft melodious and richly modulated Afrikaans of the townspeople who had not suffered the radical life-changing consequences that had followed the aftermath of catastrophic military defeat. The townsfolk spoke Afrikaans that had not become infused with the memories that were still fresh with the pain of defeat and loss, and with the consciousness of finitude. Instead, unlike the Afrikaans of the townsfolk, the Afrikaans of the Highveld farms was still defiant; it was Afrikaans that reverberated with the strident tones of Afrikaner Nationalism. It was the Afrikaans of the rifle and the kryg horen (gun powder horn) it was the kind of Afrikaans that was always looking for a fight, for an excuse to bliksem (beat up) somebody.

In the towns they spoke a more natural, a more poetic and a more pleasant sounding Afrikaans. It was not harsh and aggressive.

Unlike in the towns, on the platteland everyone spoke Afrikaans, even English speaking farmers, even the local Jewish farmers; they all spoke the same hard rural Afrikaans because it was the only other language that black farm labourers understood. Zebedee and his mother found themselves speaking Afrikaans throughout the day without even realizing they were speaking Afrikaans.

Afrikaans was their other home; it flowed naturally from their English speaking lips.

Of course they were not speaking Afrikaans to Boers; they were speaking Afrikaans to the black farm hands. Compared to the townspeople, they spoke an Afrikaans that was coloured with novel idioms; novel turns of phrase, all of which represented linguistic improvisions or idiomatic innovations that the black farm workers had introduced into the Afrikaans language. The black Afrikaans was not pigeon Afrikaans, it was a genuine and authentic Afrikaans, it was the Afrikaans that the blacks had taken ownership of, it was an Afrikaans that carried the distinctive echoes and undercurrents of black influence, and it was the Afrikaans that Basotho farm workers spoke.

When Zebedee spoke Afrikaans to his Boer friend, he spoke their kind of Afrikaans, not the black Afrikaans. The Boer spoke only white heavy rural Afrikaans to their farm labourers.

It was not only in the holidays that the days would be filled with Afrikaans words, every day was filled with Afrikaans, Afrikaans reigned as the medium of communication, it was everyone's language, it was owned by all the speakers, it flowed naturally, unhindered, it lived a fecund life on everyone's lips. Everyone owned it without knowing they owned it.

During his adolescent years Zebedee often slept over at the homes of Afrikaans friends such as the Vermeulens during the school holidays. They had a small farm on the other side of the dairy and pig farm of the Sachs family, one of the several Jewish farmers in the area. The Vermeulen's farm was not a profitable going concern. Mr Vermeulen had to work at ERPM (a gold mine) in Boksburg into order to make ends meet. He travelled to work on the gold mine every day on his BMW motorbike.

In the morning the aroma of percolated coffee filled the warm Vermeulen kitchen. They sat around the kitchen table and ate soft pap (maize porridge) for breakfast. Before eating they bowed their heads while the mandatory grace was said. Zebedee always first sprinkled his sugar over the surface of the smooth dome-shaped mound of pap, he then dumped a lump of butter onto the centre of the hot mound and watched as the butter melted and spread like rivulets of molten lava down the sides of the dome of porridge. Only then did he carefully pour warm milk down the side of the shallow bowl of porridge. The milk flowed around the perimeter of bowl and then slide under the porridge. The circular domed mound of porridge floated on the layer of milk, only then was it perfect for eating.

Katryn, Riaan's sister was always amused by Zebedee's little ritual.

There was always lively banter at the breakfast table. Once Katryn asked

"Het die Engelse ooit Generaal Christiaan De Wet gevang?"

(Did the English ever capture General Christiaan De Wet?)

Katryn who was just eleven years old needed to hear over and over, for some unfathomable reason, that Generaal Christiaan de Wet was an invincible Boer commando who had never been captured. She looked at everyone sitting round the kitchen table with her intense blue eyes, searching for any answers. She was very pretty, with her long plaited honey blond hair. The answer was always:

"Ons weet nie."

(We don't know.)

She realized that Riaan and Zebedee had made plans for the day, plans which excluded her.

"Ma hulle gaan Lodewyks toe, ek wil ook saam gaan."

(Mom they are going to Lodewyk, I want to go with.)

Riaan pulled a face.

Katryn had developed into a tomboy and whenever Zebedee came to the farm Riaan and Zebedee could never shake her off. She shadowed them everywhere, talking constantly, always asking questions about everything, and always expressing her own opinion. She drove them to distraction.

"Sy klou aan ons soos 'n bosluis op 'n bees se gat, 'n mense kan nie van haar ontslae raak nie."

(She clings and fastens onto us like a tick on cow's backside, it is impossible to get rid of her.)

It was clear that she had a crush on Zebedee. Mrs Vermeulen insisted that they take her with. Mrs Vermeulen just wanted peace and quiet so that she could get on with her household chores. After breakfast they drove the horses which had been grazing in the veld that night into a small paddock. Once they had them in the paddock they slipped on the bridles and strapped on the saddles. Katryn did not need any help with her appaloosa coloured Boer pony. They would canter across the veld towards a concrete drift that had been constructed over the Rietvlei Spruit. The water flowing over drift was about 30 cm deep. Zebedee's roan gelding would always stop in the middle of the drift and start striking the water with its right front leg. Zebedee could sense that that the horse wanted go down onto its side so that it could roll in the water. He would spur the horse onward across the drift. They followed a back route to the Jansen van Vuuren's farm where Lodewyk lived. The route took them along remote farm tracks, through fence gates, between and through extensive maize fields, across wide swards of veld, and over cultivated fields belonging to unknown land owners.

Every time they flushed francolin, quail, hare or a grey duiker, Riaan would excitedly exclaim:

"Jislaaik! Ek wens ek het die haal geweer saam gebring."

(Gee whiz! I wish I had brought the shotgun along.)

One morning on the way to Lodewyk's farm they flushed a grey duiker out of a tall patch of grass. Zebedee had strong feeling that there was a fawn still hiding in the grass and shouted: "Stop, stop". He turned the gelding around and trotted back to the patch of grass. Katryn asked:

"Wat is dit, wat gaan aan now?"

(What is it, what's going on?)

Zebedee said:

"Wag, julle sal nou sien."

(Wait, you will see now.)

They remained mounted on their horses and waited, staring at the patch of grass, and sure enough after about two minutes the fawn lost its nerve, and it broke cover by standing up and then bounded away as fast as it could.

Eventually they came to the edge of a huge lucerne field that had been freshly cut and bailed. At the other side of the field stood the dairy and the homestead of the Jansen van Vuuren family. They galloped their horses along the soft ground at the edge of the lucerne field. From the veranda of the house Lodewyk soon spotted them approaching and walked to the gate to meet them. While they remained saddled, Lodewyk went into an adjacent field and fetched his horse. Soon the four of them were cantering briskly across a wide stretch of veld that had been cropped short by a herd of Friesland cows.

Suddenly Lodewyk yelled "Passop ! Slang."

(Look out! Snake.)

Katryn let out a scream. The horses shied and veered sharply. They all caught sight of a fairly large black coloured Rinkhals. It was obviously distressed. It reared up, spreading its hood and displaying the distinctive white bands on its neck. It then slithered off. They watched the snake as it made for a hole. It disappeared down the hole.

"Ons moet gou grawe en die haal geweer gaan haal."

(We must dig up the snake, but I think I must first go get the shotgun.)

Zebedee felt it was stupid to kill the snake so he argued against destroying the snake

"Nee kom los die slang dit is deel van die nature, die Rinkhals vreet rotte."

(No lets rather leave the snake alone, it is part of nature, the Rinkhals feeds on rats.)

Lodewyk answered him

"Die slang het Adam en Ewe mislei en die Here God het gesê omdat jy dit gedoen is jy vervloek onder al die diere, op jou maag sal jy seil en stof sal jy eet, jou lewe lank. Ek stel vyandskap tussen jou end die vrou, tussen jou nageslag en haar nageslag."

(The serpent misled Adam and Eve _, so the_ _Lord_ _God said to the serpent, "Because you have done this,_

" _Cursed are you above all livestock and all wild animals! You will crawl on your belly and you will eat dust all the days of your life. And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring_ _and hers; he will crush_ _your head,_ _and you will strike his heel_.")

His pleas for the Rinkhals fell on deaf ears. In was in situations such as this that Zebedee recognized the profound wisdom of Jennifer who often remarked that there were many kinds of stupidity. Was this the reason for man's eternal feud with snakes, that every snake, both harmless and dangerous should be killed on sight?

Back at the house Lodewyk went in and fetched the shotgun and a box of cartridges from his parent's room. His elder brother Jacobus soon got wind that they were up something. When he learnt that they wanted to dig up Rinkhals and shoot it with the shotgun he took command of the situation. If there was any shooting to be done he would be doing it. He was 16 years old and therefore was the most senior person. The Jansen van Rensburg farm was not a profitable enterprise. Both Mr and Mrs Jansen van Rensburg had day jobs on the mine in Nigel. It seemed that many of the local farmers had day jobs and worked on the mines.

Jacobus saddled his horse, a huge stocky black stallion. After mounting he made the stallion rear a few times so that it stood up on its hind legs. They then rode off back to the hole where the Rinkhals was hiding. Jacobus had the shotgun strapped over his shoulder. As the horses cantered across the veld Katryn's face was beaming with excitement as she excitedly exclaimed that they were just like a Boer commando.

They dug for more than an hour; the hole went down about a meter and split up into several tunnels. It turned out to be a hopeless task; they would never be able to dig up the Rinkhals.

Back at the homestead the ousie (domestic maid) who was called Meidjie had made stywe pap and lamb chops for lunch. Lodewyk's sister 13 year old Lena joined them for lunch. They took their places around the huge kitchen table. Meidjie placed the pot of pap and a stainless steel bowl filled with chops on the table. Jacobus said grace and everyone tucked into the food. After lunch Lodewyk took his friends to a refrigerated room at the dairy. He opened a huge milk can and scooped out milk with a ladle into the mugs that they had brought along. They then went to look at Jacobus' mk2 Martini-Henri rife. It used a.577/450 caliber cartridge. It was a breech-loading single-shot lever-actuated rifle that proved to be quite effective in the British wars against the Zulus. It had a sighted effective firing range of up to 1 800 yards. That means that the British could start picking off Zulu warriors from about a mile away. Jacobus made his own cartridges and bullets. He loaded the rifle and they all followed him into a nearby field. He set a gallon sized tin petrol can against a 1.5 meter bank of soil as the target. He then paced out a distance 400 m from the gallon can and then lay down to get a bead on the target. After a minute he squeezed the trigger hitting the can dead centre sending it flying into the air.

Katryn wanted to know what weapons the Voortrekkers used at the Battle of Blood River. Jacobus was quite knowledgeable on the topic. Apparently they used muzzle loading rifles, flintlock muskets and they had also one or two cannons. The Boers prayed for God to deliver them. At the dawn the battle began. By midday the Zulu were defeated and fled as horse mounted Boers pursued them. Jacobus solemnly announced that this battle was decisive for South Africa.

"Dit was deur die genader van die Almagtige God dat ons die land SA verower van die heidene by Blood Rivier."

(It was through the mercy of Almighty God that we were able to save our land South Africa from the heathens at Blood River.)

After spending the day with Lodewyk they rode back in silence arriving at the Vermeulen farm at four o' clock. They walked the horses and then brushed them down before turning them loose into the veld. Walking back to the house Zebedee and Riaan passed the rectangular mud hut of Kobus Augustus the Coloured farm hand employed by Mr Vermeulen. Rocks were used to hold down the corrugated iron sheeting that formed the roof of Kobus's one room dwelling which stood near the stone walled kraal and concrete pigsties. He lived with his wife Hester and their three young children in the mud hut. Apparently he had come from the Karoo. Riaan said Kobus had Hottentot blood. One day he pitched up at the farm looking for work and he had been working for the Vermeulens ever since.

He was herding Mr Vermeulen's motley herd of cattle and dorper sheep into the large stone kraal.

Everything appeared so picturesque, the green cropped veld studded with grey termite mounds, the stone kraal built of huge round reddish rust and yellow coloured boulders, the red earthen walls of Kobus's hut. His wife was making a fire in a konka to cook pap for supper and boil water for tea, the grey smoke twirled up like a ribbon into the sky. Riaan must have noticed that Zebedee was taking in the rustic scene.

"Ja ou Kobus hy is 'n baie ordentelike mens, vreeslike betroubaar."

(Yes old Kobus, is a very good person, extremely honest and reliable.)

Zebedee was always intrigued about the origin of the rotundish shaped boulders which had been used to construct the homes and kraals that he had seen on many of the farms. Geologically they could not have been sourced on the actual farms; they must have been brought to the farms by ox wagon at least about100 years ago. They must have been taken from the surrounding hills and koppies that were the remnants of ancient geological outcrops which now broke the flat relief of the Highveld landscape.

Kobus noticed them watching him herding the livestock to the stone kraal, he doffed his hat and they waved back at him. Zebedee followed Riaan to the north facing veranda. His older sister Karen was sitting on the rimpies bank (wooden bench with the seat and backrest made up of strips of woven leather for support) next to her boyfriend. Zebedee could see that they did not want them to join them on the veranda. Riaan ignored his sister and they sat down on two old rocking chairs on the western side of the veranda. From the veranda they could just make out the main tar road to Heidelberg. In the distance they could also just make out the motorbike as it slowed down and turned off the tar road onto the dirt road to the farm. A few minutes later they could hear the drone of the motorbike as it approached the farm. Mr Vermeulen brought the motorbike to a stop in front of the veranda stairs, Mrs Vermeulen dressed like a maid in her apron and head doek (bandana) walked out of the front door. He embraced his wife, kissing her on the lips. The Boere always hugged and kissed and shook hands. He kissed Karen, Katryn came running out to meet him, and he also hugged her affectionately and kissed her. Riaan and Zebedee got up and walked over. He kissed Riaan on the lips and then shook Zebedee's hand warmly, asking him in English if he was having a good time.

At six o' clock they all sat down for supper in the kitchen. Mr Vermeulen opened the Bible and read from Joshua chapter 6. After reading from the chapter everyone closed their eyes and bowed their heads while Mr Vermeulen prayed.

That night they ate ox tail, rice, potatoes, pumpkin. They had melkkos (milk tart) for pudding. Very soon Katryn was nodding off. Zebedee also suddenly felt very sleepy. After tea they were allowed to leave the table. Katryn bathed first. Then Riaan and Zebedee had a quick bath. After brushing their teeth and they retired to Riaan's room. Riaan knelt down by his bed and said a short prayer. Zebedee climbed into his bed without praying. He lay in his bed staring at the ceiling, thinking of the day's events, while Riaan read his Bible.

Chapter 6

While hunting in the winter holidays Christo spoke without smiling, Zebedee listened and nodded the expression on his face being grim, the skies where grey overhead, the bone dry landscape looked brown, yellow and forlorn, and the chilly wind rustled the dry leaves of the tall reed beds along the Rietspruit River. They walked, wearing khaki shorts, thin T-shirts, thin jerseys, school socks and veldskoens; they walked shivering with cold, icy hands clenching the stock and butts of their rifles. They walked unseen by any of landowners on whose land they had been trespassing for ages with the reckless impunity of bored teenagers. They stalked game birds under the cover of river banks and reed beds. They remained unseen by the ever vigilant flocks of guinea fowl and francolin that scurried between the rows of dried out maize and sunflower stalks. Always instinctively keeping under cover they moved like lost ghosts through the dry wintery landscape. They remained invisible to the vast flocks of rock pigeons foraging on the lands that bordered both sides of the meandering channel of the Rietspruit River. The river channel carved a deep black scar into the red earthed plains that stretched to the foothills of the Suikerbosrand.

Stealthily they walked along all the well-worn paths they had made over the years in the black clay lined river channels next to the reed beds. Beneath the soles of their shoes the black clay after months of desiccation had cracked into a complex network of multiple fissures. Under their tread the crisp dried flakes clay crunched audibly in the winter silence as it fell apart into hard crumbs when trodden on.

A vivid mental impression of every visual feature of the surrounding landscape had become imprinted in their minds. It felt as if they were walking in a dream.

Since childhood the landscape had become etched into their brains. Zebedee could find his way with eyes closed through the landscape in his dreams.

Like all the birds that filled the skies, which included the rock pigeons, the swallows, the swifts ,the march harrier, the grass owl, the Sakabula bird, the red bishops, the purple heron, the black shouldered kite and everything else that flew, even the bats, the shapes, contours and geometry of the landscape in all its details had also become etched into their human brains; every willow tree, every reed bed, every contour, every topological feature of the channel, every bend of the river, every oxbow lake and had become imprinted and fixed in their imagination.

In his dreams from childhood Zebedee had often found himself wondering through this landscape. Somethings he was not sure whether he was dreaming or actually walking along the river's channel or along the borders of the vast reed beds or under the boughs of the huge willow trees that clung to the river banks.

Zebedee realized in a moment of profound enlightenment that the world of their familiar environment, which was filled with an infinite collection of different objects with each one having its unique colour and shape, had become privately visible to countless perceiving eyes of an impossible variety of living creatures.

Zebedee wondered whether it was possible that the birds and the river mongoose that frequented this landscape also saw it in terms of the same visual picture that he had.

He looked at Christo; there was no point in sharing this insight with him. Zebedee could read Christo's mind like an open book, he could anticipate Christo thoughts, and he could even predicate everything that Christo would say about anything. Christo suffered from the pervasive _platteland_ narcissistic preoccupation with being a Boer concerned only with the fate of his volk and their divine destiny. This obsession made him shallow and transparent. His friend had no sense of profundity, no paradoxical insights, no enigmatic thoughts, everything was plain to him. Maybe this was why he constantly bemoaned the fact that the _plaas liewer_ (farm life) made him feel _geestelik versteurd_ (spiritually retarded).

In an ironical sense Christo had his finger on the pulse of life in the _platteland_ ; the realities that prevailed in the _platteland_ could make one feel emotionally empty. Spiritual numbness and spiritual retardation was evident on every farm, the symptoms were visible in the scowling dour faces of the Boers and in the unsmiling impassive and listless demeanours of the black farm workers.

Life on the farms for black farm labourers was filled with constant menace and stress; it exacted its destructive toll, destroying their bodies, eroding their health, exhausting their souls, dulling their minds and robbing them of any vestige of happiness. The South African _platteland_ was not only a sad and forlorn place; it was a theatre of violence, oppression and bondage. It was a spiritual wasteland ruled by the violent abuse of ordinary human beings.

Christo was right the _platteland_ turned everyone into a victim, transforming people into zombies, but he failed to fathom why.

He just wanted to flee to the towns, where there were parties and sessions on weekends, and where he could fuck has brains out. He was missing out on all the sex that he friends in the towns were enjoying.

Zebedee shared his mother's inner strength, her resilience and irrepressible optimism. He shared her love for animals and her love for nature. Whenever he expressed his doubts about life with her, she always reminded him that he had inherited an ancient soul that was filled with a natural compassion and which gave him the gift of discerning right from wrong. She always said that he must trust his feelings and listen to the voice of his conscience. She despised religion with a passion. She confessed that she did not believe in God. How could one belief in an almighty, an all knowing and an all loving God after Auschwitz-Birkenau. She said she believed only in nature, whatever that could mean. Religion was also a taboo subject with Grandpa and Granny Gold. Their religion was horseracing and the Johannesburg Stock Exchange. They also said that there was no God after Auschwitz-Birkenau.

After Auschwitz-Birkenau God had vanished.

Jennifer was not very fond of Afrikaners and she hated the Nationalist Party. This could be the reason why none of his friends ever visited him with the exception of one eccentric individual. They could sense Jennifer's distain for their nation. They knew that she was Jewish; people on the farms had figured this out for themselves. She was a Jewess. They also said that Zebedee was a Jew in spite of his father who was definitely a gentile, who was also such a nice man compared to his mother. To them it was plain that Zebedee was also a Jew; they see he was a Semite. Everything about him was Jewish, his manner, the way he spoke, and the way he saw things and thought about things was typical of a Jew.

He also had that Jewish sharpness of mind. They said a Jew had to be sharp in order to survive in a hostile and unforgiving world especially more so when it came to being Jewish.

The only Afrikaner that visited him regularly was Dirk and he was despised by all of Zebedee's other Afrikaans friends. He was two years older than Zebedee. He had left high school in standard eight and was an apprentice diesel mechanic working his apprenticeship at the railway mechanical workshop close to Germiston Station.

Strangely enough Jennifer was always friendly to Dirk and made him feel welcome when arrived on his shaggy looking Basuto pony at the Rottstegge farm. She took a genuine interest in the welfare of his indestructible horse.

He befriended Dirk under unusual circumstances. Zebedee happened to be cantering a thoroughbred ex-racehorse which Jennifer was training for show-jumping on the ploughed and harrowed fire break at the edge of a remote piece of land that they had been renting for growing maize and for winter grazing for steers that Jennifer had astutely bought on auction for beef production. A two track dirt road marked the southern boundary of the rented field. The road ended at an equally remote and isolated old farm house. The red painted corrugated iron roofed house was surrounded by a tall privet hedge. In the backyard under a huge willow tree stood an ancient corrugated zinc dam and behind the dam stood an equally ancient rickety wind mill.

About 100 yards ahead in front of Zebedee, a diminutive figure appeared suddenly on the edge of the field. The figure had emerged from the cover of the maize field next to the weed cleared harrowed border of the Rottstegge's maize crop. She stood there staring at the approaching horse and rider. He realized that it was a young child, a little girl. Zebedee brought the 17 hand high horse to sharp halt next to her. From the saddle he stared down at her. She was bare footed, her long blond hair was uncombed, her arms and legs were tanned and her faded dress was dirty.

" _Waar bly jy_?" He asked.

(Where do you live?)

She pointed to a clump of tall blue gum trees and a windmill some distance away. From the vantage point of being in the saddle he could make out the old farm house nestled between the blue gum trees. He had known about the farm house. It had been unoccupied for years. He was surprised to learn that it was now her home where she lived.

Bending low out of the saddle, he grabbed the little girl by her upper arm and lifted her up onto the horse, squeezing her small body in front of him onto the saddle. Holding her little body tightly with his left arm he cantered the horse to the front gate of her home.

At the rusted ornate gate a medium sized white dog with black ears barked with a friendly happy smile on its face as it waved its tail joyfully. He tied the reigns to the gate post. No one answered his knocking at the front door. The child spontaneously reached out and grasped his hand tightly. Holding the child's hand he walked round the house to the backyard. The yard was full of free ranging chickens, turkeys and Muscovy ducks. In the corrugate iron dam a couple of huge carp swum lazily around the bottom. From the open door kitchen he heard peals of loud laughter.

In the backyard he noticed a small Coloured boy playing in the dirt.

The isolated old dilapidated farm house was been rented by the child' parents and their extended family. The house had no electricity. It had never been connected to ESKOM. A plume of white smoke billowed from the brick chimney.

Standing at the top of the stairs at the entrance of the kitchen door, still holding the child's hand, he explained that he was returning the child that he had found wondering next to a maize field almost a kilometre away from her home.

Unperturbed, they thanked him and invited him to come and sit down in the kitchen

At the door he could feel the flux of the heat radiating from the coal fired stove. The kitchen felt uncomfortably hot. The extended family of grandparents, aunts and uncles were crowded around the kitchen table. They seemed to be oblivious of the heat. Half full bottles of Oude Meester brandy, Mainstay Cane Spirits, Old Brown Sherry and Coca Cola crowded the surface of the wooden kitchen table.

He stared at their grinning alcohol flushed sweaty faces. They did not know who he was. Yet they insisted that he join them at the table. He declined their offer of alcohol.

Her mother was deep frying _vetkoek_ in a large pot of boiling oil on the coal stove for lunch. She turned around and insisted that he come in and have some lunch with them. A black bare footed teenage maid in a short rugged dress was bent over a pile of dishes in the sink.

The father of the child got up to fetch another chair for Zebedee. It was at the moment that a smiling Dirk entered the kitchen. Zebedee instantly recognized Dirk who he had met on an occasion at Christo's home some time ago.

Zebedee decided to stay for lunch.

It was while riding in the foothills of the Suikerbosrand with Dirk that they discovered an extensive network of stone ruins of what seemed to be the remains of the walls of ancient kraals. The stones and boulders were very similar to the material that had been used for building the old kraals and houses on the plains.

In one of the old kraals they decided to eat their lunch that they had brought along. While eating their lunch in the shade of an acacia tree Dirk informed Zebedee that one of the uncles was the father of the Coloured boy that Zebedee had seen playing the backyard. He had impregnated the teenage maid who worked for them.

When Zebedee asked him about what was going to happen to the child. Dirk shrugged his shoulders.

******

As Christo and Zebedee followed the meandering river channel a sudden gust of wind blew over their heads rattling the dried out leaves and stalks of the surrounding maize fields. The channel reminded Zebedee of trenches that traced the front of the First World War battle fields. They followed the river channel; keeping close to the stream's bank they remained hidden in the river gully.

They followed the river beneath stark grey clouds, they moved like unseen shadows, they negotiated barbwire fences, trespassing and hunting with impunity on the private property of other landowners, as they had been doing for years.

They released the dogs. The dogs scrambled up the steep river bank. They run barking through the adjacent dry fields of sunflower and maize flushing quail, francolin, rock pigeon and guinea fowl.

Huge flocks of flushed birds flew over the river channel. Christo swore a lot that day. They needed shot guns not .22 rifles. They could have shot the birds while they were on the wing, flying over their heads, like the rich and affluent visitors from the towns who came to hunt on the weekends on the farm lands with their pointers.

They whistled and called the dogs back. They then continued down the river. They arrived at one of their favourite spots where the river banks were lined with massive willow trees. Again they released the dogs to flush game birds foraging in a field filled with the dry skeletal stalks of a sunflower crop. A flock of flushed francolin flew overhead and settled in full sight on the bare branches of the dormant willow trees directly above them.

Zebedee had begged his parents for years to buy him a .22 rifle. When he turned 14 they finally caved in and bought him the rifle and boxes of cartridges. He was no longer the odd boy out on the _platteland_. All Boer _seuns_ (boys) had rifles, sometimes they even went into the fields with shotguns. It was unheard of that a Boer _seun_ did not own a .22 rifle. Possession and use of a fire arm was a way of life on the _platteland_. Zebedee was the only English speaking teenager in the district. It was critical that he too owned a rifle.

Chapter 7

Like all of his peers Zebedee had also been served with his military call up papers. After Matric no one escaped the call up drag net for military service. In January 1971 his twelve months compulsory national military service in the South Africa Defence Force (SADF) began.

While stationed at Lake Sibaya he received the letter from Jennifer which contained the message that she had finally divorced his father Brian Rottstegge. Brian Rottstegge could now pursue his dream of circumnavigating the world in the steel hulled yacht that he spent so many years building.

After the divorce Brian left the farm to work for a while on the Hendrik Verwoerd dam project on the Orange River deep in the Karoo as a boiler maker or fitter and turner or even as a welder to earn money to buy or hire a truck for towing the yacht to Durban and to finance his sailing adventure.

Jennifer had grown up across the road from the New Market racecourse in a house with stables in the backyard. She came from a horseracing family. Her father was a well-known and successful racehorse trainer

Now standing by the farm machine shed on that warm December morning Zebedee noticed that they had planted 50 morgen of maize sometime in October and the rains had been good. He noticed that weeds were growing high between the rows of maize. He realized that soon the maize would be two high for the tractor to enter the field with a mechanical cultivator. Zebedee decided that he needed to immediately get the mechanical cultivator into the maize fields. There could not be any procrastination. This was why he was standing in the farm machine shed early on that Saturday morning when he heard Jennifer calling.

His mom called again. Zeeeebbbedeeee

He answered his mother shouting

"I am coming, I am coming."

Also out of desperation she, Daniel and the other farm labourers had started to hoe the weeds in the maize field, they had been working in the maize fields for several days before Zebedee's arrival back at the farm. No one had ever seen a white woman hoeing weeds with a gang of black farm workers including their wives and children in a maize field in the entire history of South Africa. The only whites who do manual labour in their own fields in South Africa are the Portuguese. Whites have always shied away from doing hard physical farm labour.

It would have taken two days' work with tractor and mechanical cultivator. Weeding was critical at this stage in order to give the maize a head start. Once the maize canopy has closed the weeds would die in a shadow of death. The fuel account at the garage was in arrears so they could not use the tractor. With payments coming in late for milk sales and livery fees there was a bit of a cash flow crisis for the month of December.

Zebedee had accumulated five months of army pay. He decided that he would buy the diesel they needed.

He walked quickly back to the house to see why Jennifer was calling him so urgently. As entered the backyard he was surprised to see the figure of a young woman standing with his mother at the kitchen door. It was the petite caramel skinned Portuguese girl with her long dark brown hair tied up in two pony tails. He recognized her as the girl from the small farm with which they shared a common border. She was dressed in white shorts and a faded black T-shirt. She was holding a straw hat in her hands. His mom was dressed in a faded floral dress, her neck, face and arms were tanned a deep brown from the hours she had spent in the sun helping Daniel gathering the bails of sundried lucerne into huge stacks.

"Zebedee this is Catarina from the farm next door, she has asked if you would go with her to the river, she afraid to swim alone."

When he saw Catarina at close quarters for the first time his heart skipped a beat. She was not Vanessa nor was she Rebekah but she had the power of presence to induce a Vanessa-like or Rebekah-like effect on him.

Catarina Vasconcelos turned her head and flashed a spontaneous friendly smile at Zebedee, a smile that swept away all feelings of awkwardness that he may have felt by such a sudden close encounter with teenage girl that he had only seen previously at a distance. In fact she had become the only white teenage girl whose presence still adorned the rural landscape.

Following the death of Mr Vermeulen in a motorcycle accident Mrs Vermeulen sold the farm and they moved back to Boksburg. The Liebenberg and the Jansen van Rensberg families had also sold their farms. All of Zebedee's old Afrikaans friends had migrated back to the towns. The Boers that he known for almost all his life had eventually lost the tenuous hold fast that they used to have on their land. Apart from the Jewish Fuchs brothers and the Sachs family, the Rottstegges were one of the few of the original families who were still holding onto their farms.

"Yes I am too afraid to jump into the river by myself. The river looks so scary when I am alone, even when the water is so clear, like a crystal, I still feel funny inside. When I tried to swim alone I felt such great terror while I was in the water, I could not get out fast enough, I don't why," she said with a bright smile playing on her lips and in her eyes, while she fiddled self-consciously with a pony tail, after making this confession.

Zebedee laughed and Catarina also laughed at what she had just said.

She was the eldest child of Mr and Mrs Vasconcelos' five children. The archaic form of her surname was Vasconcellos which represents the ancient surname of a Portuguese family of noble origin going back to the 12th century. He learnt this later from her. She was proud of her noble origins. Later he also told her that his name was from the Bible, the two disciples James and John who were called the sons of thunder by Jesus were also the sons of Zebedee.

Her father and mother were one of the hundreds of Portuguese families that decided in response to the promptings of their government to immigrate to Angola from Portugal. For five centuries Portugal had tried with very little success to encourage her citizens with all kinds of incentives to colonize the hinterland of her African colonies as agricultural settlers or _colono_ as they were called. Ironically when it came to Africa; the Portuguese regime had not learned the secret of successful colonization, in fact as a whole compared to the Americas the European colonization of Africa had been a spectacular failure. Overall the campaign to colonize Angola had failed dismally. With respect to their colonies no European country could replicate the South America Brazilian phenomenon in other countries such as Africa or elsewhere. Whites who did eventually settled sort of permanently in Africa were the ones who had found themselves inadvertently stranded in Africa for good with no other home to go to. Those who could leave, did in fact leave, they left for better climes and better prospects.

With its fixation on the Brazilian phenomenon, a new colonial initiative launched in the 1950s by Portugal resulted in the creation of two large fully subsidized agricultural settlements or _colonatos_ in Angola. One was in Cela in the Central Highland and the other in Matala in the Cunene river valley. In 1950 of Mr and Mrs Vasconcelos arrived in Cela from Portugal. They were given 45 acres of land, a house with furniture, seeds, animals, farm implements and monthly subsidy. By 1960 only 300 families were left in Cela and Matala, the rest had abandoned their farms and gone to Luanda, Brazil or Venezuela, or back to Portugal.

Catarina was born in 1954 in Cela. She went to the little school that had been established in the small village of Cela. Mr Vasconcelos was one of the very rare successful white Portuguese farmers who managed to accumulate sufficient capital to allow him to make a fresh start in any country of his choice, but he decided to immigrate to South Africa at the end of 1964. In 1966 he bought the vacant 20 morgen narrow strip of land next to the Rottstegge's farm. The strip of land had only a borehole, some river frontage, a few tall blue gum trees and that was all. He bought a 5 ton truck, a tractor and implements. He built a huge shed, a corrugate iron dam and a large square single roomed garage-like structure as the home for his family. He built simple small corrugated iron dwellings for his black labourers. Within a year he transformed his narrow strip of land into a thriving high production vegetable farm.

Zebedee found it easy to smile back at Catarina. He instantly decided that he liked everything about her before even getting to know her better.

"I will go get my swimming costume."

Catarina was 17 years old. Four years ago they had moved onto the 20 morgen vacant plot of veld that took a bite out of the Rottstegge's farm along part of river front that formed the northern border of the farm. Apparently it had been standing vacant and unused for as long as anyone could remember. Roughly four years ago an auction notice fixed to a wooden stake driven into the ground announced that the property which was part of a deceased estate was going under the hammer. Mr Vasconcelos arriving fresh out of Angola managed to buy the plot of ground for a song.

In the afternoons and on weekends Catarina worked with her father, mother, brothers, sisters and black farm labourers in the vegetable fields. They had not yet built a house. They lived in the single roomed garage like structure which stood next to a large shed.

While still in high school he often saw them from the back of a horse while riding the horse in a canter across the veld. A few months before he disappeared for a year she had stood up in fields and watched him from a distance as he rode a17 hand high shining chestnut thoroughbred gelding across a field of freshly cut lucerne. He had often noticed her watching him ride and one afternoon he waved spontaneously and she waved back. They then often waved to each other whenever they saw one another across the fence. Even though she was at the same school, he did not know her name. She and siblings caught the railway bus which stopped at Germiston High School. The unmarked bus stop was 5 km away where the gravel farm road intersected the main tar road to Heidelberg and Durban. In the mornings Mr Vasconcelos drove his kids to the bus stop, dropping them off at five thirty in the morning. In the afternoon they used to walk back to the farm after the bus dropped them at the intersection.

In the early mornings after they boarded the bus it made further stops along the way collecting the few English speaking school children from the periurban districts of Waterlands and Mapleton. All the Afrikaans speaking kids caught a school bus to the _Volk Skool_ in Heidelberg.

When Zebedee turned sixteen he started travelling to Germiston High School on his 50 cc moped motorcycle. Somehow the Vasconcelos children managed to learn English and Afrikaans in a short space of time. Mr Vasconcelos managed to speak some rudimentary English whereas Mrs Vasconcelos spoke no English.

Jennifer Rottstegge (née Gold) smiled a mysterious smile to herself as watched the pair walk off together. Even though she thought religion was a load of crock and the fact that she felt no strong attachment to her own Jewishness she accepted from deep within her gut that there were rational and practical reasons that the old people viewed matchmaking as a mitzvah. Nothing should be left to chance when it came to marriage. Her own marriage had ended in a miserable and painful failure. She did not want this to happen with Zebedee. She wanted grandchildren. She wanted Zebedee to have a good wife and in Catarina she had found such a person. It came as a surprise when Catarina told her about their lives on the highlands of Angola, especially the fact that she was familiar with horses and could ride as well.

Jennifer had all what it takes to become a formidable matriarch; she decided she would through the force of her personality make sure that things work out for Zebedee and Catarina. She decided that they would make a good couple and should become married and have children. In the absence of a shadchan she decided on her own initiative to take on the role matchmaker for her son. She had decided that Catarina would be an excellent wife for Zebedee. In Zebedee's absence she began to subtly groom Catarina to become Zebedee's wife. Catarina's mother's great grandmother on the maternal side was a Sephardic Jewess. Jennifer discovered this by pure change when Catarina showed her the family's photo album and family tree. She did not share her insight with Catarina but kept the knowledge to herself.

As Zebedee and Catarina walked to the river he noticed that only the black workers were working in the vegetables fields on the Vasconcelos farm. The 5 ton truck was not parked next to the shed and he could see none of her family.

"Has your family gone to the market?"

"Yes."

"Do your parents know you that will be swimming in the river with me?"

"Yes."

"When will they be coming back?"

"About three o' clock."

"Is your father very strict?"

"Not anymore with me. I am finished with Matric so I am no longer a school girl. He and my mother know I that need to have friends. I have no friends. I have not had any friends since we come to South Africa. Your mother is my only friend. I really wish we did not come to South Africa. I would have preferred to stay in Luanda. Luanda is such a beautiful city. When my dad sold the farm we stayed in a flat in Luanda for a couple of months. It was the best time of my life."

"Don't you like South Africa?" He asked

"No I don't like South Africa. I was made into a South African after I turned 16. I was not happy when I stopped being an Angolan after I got my South African ID. At school they call us sea kaffirs behind our backs. I heard that a teacher thought that we were mulattos, of mixed blood origins just because we came from Angola. But many Spanish, Italians and Greeks are also dark. We are darker than other Europeans because we are Mediterranean people."

"You were born in South Africa?" She asked.

"Yes. I was born on this farm," he said

"Did your ancestors come from England?" She asked.

"I don't really know anything about my ancestors. My dad's great grandfather was German. He came to South Africa to work on the diamond fields. So I don't think I am really English. I only speak English as my first language," He said.

"And your mother **,** are her ancestors from England?" She wanted to know.

"I don't think so. I have an idea my mom's parents came from Poland or Russia or Lithuania and arrived in South Africa just before the Nazi invasion of Russia."

"Once I asked her what our religion was because we did not seem to belong to any church. I needed know what our religion was for school. She just said that I was an uncircumcised Jew with no religion," he answered.

Catarina burst out laughing at Zebedee's description of his religious and ethnic identity.

"Do you think you are Jewish?" She asked.

"No I don't consider myself a Jew nor do I really have a desire to be a Jew. I think my mom is actually very Jewish but she denies that she is Jewish. I find this so strange about her. She says she is secular and atheist. Most of her friends and acquaintances in the horseracing fraternity are Jewish. She knows everything about them, their history, where they come from and so on. They also treat her as one of their own. Now and then she speaks Yiddish, she is always happy when she is with Jews and when they are speaking Yiddish to each other, I have never been able to fathom my mother, she doesn't want to talk about anything to do with Jewishness, yet she is at her happiest when she is with Jews, it is really strange," he answered.

"Do you believe in God?" she asked.

"I don't know. I have never given it much thought. I grew up without having any religion. I suppose I do believe in God in a way," he said.

"But I am completely unreligious," he said.

Catarina walked behind Zebedee as he led the way along a foot path that cut across the heavy black turf soil. She had grown used to the sights and sounds of the lush reed filled wetlands that filled the shallow depressions along the banks of the Rietspruit River. They flushed a Cape longclaw, in the bright sun light the highly visible patch of bright orange covering its throat flashed like a flaming jewel encircled by band of the deepest black. It on settled a nearby fence post.

Overhead a marsh harrier coursed over the tall luxurious grassland. Sitting on the nearby barbwire fence a sakabula with its long black tail waving in the light breeze remained perched dead still while its eyes followed the marsh harrier.

They followed the path along the outer edge of a tall bed of reeds. They could hear the sudden rustling of leaves as the shyer reed dwelling reclusive African rails, African purple swamphens and black crakes scurried away in panic seeking refuge deeper in the bed of reeds. Flocks of red bishops exploded like fireworks above their heads.

She walked close behind Zebedee as he took a foot path which entered into a narrow almost invisible passageway through the tall dense bed of reeds. The reed towered high above their heads blocking out the sun. To her astonishment the tunnel through the reeds led to a large secluded grass covered mound surrounded by a wall of reeds. The mound was on the bank of a deep, wide and crystal clear river channel. On the other side of the river channel for as far as the eye could see there were fields of maize. Their sudden appearance on top of grassy mound startled a pair of yellow billed ducks. A bright iridescent flash of blue plumage caught their eyes. It was malachite kingfisher perched on the branch of a small willow tree on the opposite bank.

They laid their towels out on the short dark green wiry grass which covered the mound.

She pulled off her shorts and T shirt. Under her clothes she was wearing a tiny skimpy black bikini. She was exotic looking with her big brown eyes, large beautifully shaped lips, high cheek bones and a delicately curved Semitic or Asiatic nose. Her lissom but shapely figure measuring not much more that 32B-25-32 gave her a petite almost fairy-like silhouette. Being exactly 152 cm tall and weighing less than 45 kg, she was actually very tiny compared to the majority of South African girls. He was captivated by her looks. She reminded him of a young exuberant filly.

Zebedee told her that this was the best spot to swim. Because the river was deep and the channel wide, the water flowed very slowly, the current was almost imperceptible. Zebedee and his friends had used logs to build steps to get down the steep black clay bank to the river. Chains nailed into the logs held them together. The ends of the chains were tied with thick wire to galvanized steel pipes that had been hammered deep into the top of the mound so that floods would not wash away the logs. For years while everyone spent their December school holidays at Durban, Amanzimtoti, Margate, Umkomaas and Scottburgh, Zebedee and his farm boy friends spent the long lazy summer days in the sun at this hidden and idyllic spot on the river bank, amusing and distracting themselves with fishing, camping and hunting.

He never thought that after standard nine he would ever come back to this secret boyhood spot on the banks of the Rietspruit River to while away his free time on a Saturday morning. He would never have imagined or even entertained such a prospect in his future. It was a place filled with the magic of childhood memories and teenage dreams. Now the presence of someone as sparkling and exotically attractive as Catarina brought about a charming transformation to this secret and secluded hideout next to the river. His familiar childhood and teenage haunt sudden became strangely mysterious, palpably enchanting and enigmatically erotic as he gazed at Catarina shapely body.

Her feminine intuition told her this was going to turn out to be a very special occasion. She looked at her watch it was quarter past eight in the morning and they had the whole day ahead, and they would be alone.

His mother had planned everything so perfectly.

"If I were a black woman who had to collect water this is where I would come. I would use a small bucket tied to a rope, I would throw the bucket into the river, let it sink and then I would pull it up the bank and pour the water into a drum. Do you think there were ever crocodiles in this river? " Catarina asked.

"No it gets too cold here for crocodiles," he replied.

Even though it was still early and the dew on the grass had barely evaporated it felt warm enough to swim and the water looked inviting. Catarina was especially overjoyed to see that there was no _Spirogyra_ or _Oedogonium_ or any other kinds of hair-like slippery and slimy green filamentous algae growing on the sides or bottom of the river to give her the creeps.

Taking her hand he helped to her clamber down the log staircase. Standing on the last log which was submerged in the water he let go of her hand dived into the river. She dived in straight after him and they emerged together in the middle of channel. It was so deep that their feet could not touch the bottom.

As they swam breast stroke down the river channel Catarina entertained him with all kinds of anecdotes and interesting stories about Angola, about coming to South Africa, about the bus trips to school and life on her father's farm. He listened with a perpetual smile on his face to her Portuguese accented English.

The only other female he had ever encountered who was as articulate, and as strongly opinionated, and also as highly intelligent as Catarina was the Indian girlfriend of Roger Pringle's brother Gavin who they had met while they were on their seven day pass in July. Her name was Avinashika Mukhopadhyay. It was almost unpronounceable. They spent their seven day pass staying in Gavin's flat. South beach could be seen from the balcony of the flat. Taking their seven days pass was a last minute decision as they did not want to leave the Lake Sibaya base and be transferred to some other base for the reminder of their military service. For that reason they had postponed taking their seven day pass as it would mean going back to Ladysmith and then they could be shunted off to some other military base for the reminder of their service as sappers. But after some wangling it was decided that they would be able return to take up their duties at the Lake Sibaya base for the last four months of their military service after their seven day pass.

Chapter 8

Carrying their _balsaks_ filled with dirty washing, toiletries and a bundle of civil clothing Zebedee, Karl and Roger joined a section of infantrymen on the back of the dull olive green military Bedford truck which was going back to Ladysmith. The Bedford returning to Ladysmith had to first make a detour to a secret military missile base at Lake St Lucia to drop off a section of infantrymen. The eight infantrymen were going to relieve the current infantry section that had been guarding the base for the past six weeks. The Bedford had to also collect a freight of equipment that was being flown in. The equipment was for a team of Israeli scientists and engineers who were currently working at the secluded missile base on contract for the SADF. They had been involved with the design, development and testing of new missile technology.

The missile base was hidden in the forest close to the shores of Lake St Lucia. On the way to St Lucia from Lake Sibaya the signalman at the missile base managed to establish radio contact with the Bedford driver just after they had crossed over the Lebombo Mountain pass. He asked the driver to stop at the bottle store in Mtubatuba. The corporal sitting in the passenger next to the driver took down the liquor order of the troops that had been guarding the missile base.

After stopping outside the bottle store, four volunteers took everyone's liquor orders and returned twenty minutes later with eight heavy _balsaks_ packed with quarts of beer, Coca Cola, Sprite, cane spirits, rum, vodka and brandy.

An air force Dakota had already landed when they arrived at the well camouflaged remote landing strip in the middle of dense bush that was practically impenetrable. The dense thicket of bush also lined the shores of Lake St Lucia. The two pilots supervised the unloading and transfer of the boxes and crates of equipment from the cargo hold of the Dakota onto the Bedford. Before leaving for the missile base they watched the lumbering Dakota take off from the short bumpy grass airstrip.

Laden with its cargo the Bedford followed a long, narrow and winding sand track through the dense forest and thick bush to the base. On the way, without warning the Bedford came to a sudden halt. A sharp crack of an R1 rifle shot from the Bedford cab shattered the midday peace. The driver switched off the engine. In the confusion, everyone clambered quickly out of the back of the Bedford onto the narrow sand track. It was discovered that the section leader, corporal Bodenstein who had been sitting in the cab with the driver had shot a bush buck that they had spotted standing about 20 meters away in the bush. The corporal had a perfect of view of the antelope through the open window on the passenger side and decided to shoot it on the spur of the moment. The dead bush buck was quickly dragged from the bush and loaded into the back of Bedford.

At the base the Israeli engineers and scientists supervised the transfer of boxes and crates to the workshop and adjoining laboratory which were situated next to their comfortable log bungalows. The troops then returned back to the guard tents that had been erected right next to the gate at the entrance of the small base.

They dragged the buck deep into the thick bush, hanging it by its hind legs from a tree branch they proceeded to quickly skin and butcher the buck for the farewell braai that evening.

Later that night when the dying braai embers glowed weakly in the dark and empty bottles lay strewn on the ground they eventually managed to agree that it was time to leave the drinking party which was becoming increasingly rowdy. The prospect of a long uncomfortable night journey from the missile base back to Ladysmith lay ahead of them. They staggered through the dark dense bush back to the Bedford. Most of them, including the driver, were in state of extreme inebriation.

It was 21.00 pm when they left the missile base and it was a pitch dark moonless night. The driver said he knew of a gravel road which would take them along a little known back route to Ladysmith. He managed convince everyone in their drunken state that the back route was actually a short cut to Ladysmith from Lake St Lucia. He also said that the road which cut across rural Zululand would take them past many Zulu homesteads where they could buy very good quality dagga (marijuana). As the driver explained, the night was still young, young enough for an excursion through the valley of a thousand hills. In their alcohol fueled state everybody felt sufficiently reckless and exuberant for a nocturnal joy ride through rural Zululand in search of dagga, shebeens and maybe also young Zulu maidens.

From Empangeni the driver headed for Melmoth. After passing Melmoth he turned onto a gravel back road and giving foot to the accelerator the Bedford roared into the moonless dark night. The beams of the truck's powerful head light swept wildly through the surrounding hills, grass and bush, cutting and slicing through the darkness first on the one side of the road and then on the other side, as the Bedford revved, growled, veered, skidded and careered along the sand road, that wound through endless bends and twists all the way to the district of Msinga.

Every now and then without any warning to the occupations on the back the Bedford skidded to a sudden halt in the middle of nowhere. Each time the troops bailed out of the back of the Bedford and congregated in front of the blazing headlights of the truck. Except for Zebedee, all the other English and Afrikaans speaking national servicemen were from Natal. Many of them came from the rural farming environs of Dundee, Glencoe, Vryheid and Newcastle. They were on their home turf. They could speak and understand isiZulu. Above the drone of the Bedford's diesel engine he listened without comprehending the exchanges between the troops and the youthful Zulu males who had happened to be walking alongside the road. The word umunyane kept on cropping up.

Eventually after several such stops, one of the Zulu youths climbed into the cab while his friends bundled into the back of the Bedford. The truck turned off the main gravel road onto a narrow two track path. After a bumpy ride into the stony hill country of Msinga they eventually stopped outside a kraal. Again everyone got out and congregated in front of the head lights under an acacia tree. Two of the Zulu youths disappeared into the dark. Ten minutes later they returned with a brown paper packet stuffed with dagga. After some robust bargaining everyone finally agreed on a price, money was collected and the dagga was distributed among the dagga smokers. Zebedee did not partake.

Back on the road, dagga zols were rolled and lit up. Soon the herby aroma of dagga filled the Bedford as dagga zols were passed around. In a dagga induced daze they descended into the deep gorge that had been carved out by the great Tugela River. When they drove into Tugela Ferry the driver pulled the Bedford over to the side of the road. Again, for the umpteenth time that night, everybody disembarked. The driver announced that there had to be a shebeen in the settlement nearby on the outskirts of the sleeping town. Everyone was game to go drinking. At a nearby garage, the petrol attendant gave them directions to a nearby shebeen (tavern).

The shebeen owner was at first very anxious when the Bedford stopped outside his establishment. But he quickly sized up the situation and allowed the national servicemen to enter the shebeen's precincts.

Everyone carrying their rifles slung over their shoulders followed the shebeen boss. Zebedee walked behind his comrades as they entered the dim smoky interior of the crowded shebeen, filled with rhythmic sounds of traditional Zulu music. The patrons gazed briefly with drunken amusement at the new arrivals and then continued with their talking and drinking.

As the night wore on the driver and several of the infantrymen had descended into a state of paralytic intoxication. Some of infantrymen had begun to make moves on the prostitutes. In fact, a rifleman with the nick name Double Tap was trying to collect enough change so that he could go outside with one of the prostitutes that who was clinging to him. Double Tap the son of an NG dominee (minister) had arrived at Ladysmith Military Base as a pious Bible reading Christian, who knelt down to pray every night at his bed side, he never swore, he did not drink and he did not smoke. After basics he stopped reading his Bible, he stopped praying, he started swearing like a trooper, he started smoking and now he was as drunk as a lord trying to get R 5.00 change together so that he could screw a very attractive young Zulu woman in her early twenties.

At the urging of the shebeen owner, who was worried that drunken soldiers mixing with black women of the night could turn out to be an explosive cocktail at Tugela Ferry, Zebedee, Roger and Karl managed coax their comrades back to the Bedford.

Before they left Zebedee did a headcount. It was discovered that Double Tap was missing. A drunken search party found him copulating under a bush. Apparently he had disappeared out of the shebeen with the woman without anybody noticing.

Zebedee who was sober climbed into the driver's seat and started the Bedford. Karl joined him in the cab. The driver now lay past out on the floor in the back of the Bedford among a heap of balsaks

After crossing the Tugela River they took the turnoff to Weenen. From Weenen they could get to Ladysmith via Colenso long before dawn. Zebedee had realized earlier that they were at risk of getting into serious trouble and having their seven day pass cancelled if they had not got to the 5 SAI military base by sunset. Before they left the missile base that evening he had managed to get an intoxicated signalman to send a radio message to the Ladysmith military base to inform the base command that the Bedford was giving engine problems and they could only leave once the sappers, Zebedee, Roger and Karl, had fixed up the problem.

A story of engine problems was going to be their alibi if there was going to be any questions about their delay. He had already invented a number of engine problem scenarios which were technically believable. He had briefed the driver, Karl and Roger, and the entire infantrymen section about the engine problem plan. He had taken on his shoulders the burden of responsibility for saving the group from the consequences of their shenanigans.

At three o' clock in the morning they stopped at the flood lit main gate of the 5th South African Infantry Battalion military base just outside Ladysmith in the shadow of the towering cone shaped hill called King's Post. The guard on duty unlocked the gate and lifted the boom. Karl asked if he wanted a dagga zol. Karl took the dagga zol that he just finished carefully rolling. He lit and dragged deeply on it before handing it to the guard.

The guard took a deep draw on the zol and after a moment he exhaled a sweet smelling cloud of dagga fumes. With the glowing zol stuck between his lips, he let the boom down and closed the main gate.

At midday the next day after a brief pass-out inspection the three sappers were dropped off at Ladysmith Station. As they were driven out of the base in the back of a military Land Rover they saw _Double Tap_ and the comrades of his section doing _opfok_ (punishment) PT. They were running towards the koppie outside the base known as King's Post. On their shoulders they were carrying telephone post poles. Their sweating hungover faces were ashen white and contorted with expressions of pain and physical exhaustion.

From Ladysmith railway station they managed to catch an early afternoon train to Durban. At Durban station Karl caught a train to Amanzimtoti. Zebedee and Roger took a bus to the end of West Street and walked to Gavin's flat.

Of course Zebedee could not hide his surprise that evening when a beautiful young Indian woman dressed casually in a black T-shirt and low-hipped Levi's opened the door to Gavin's flat. Gavin was not home. He was at some National Union of South African Students (NUSAS) meeting at the Durban campus of the University of Natal. Both Gavin and Avinashika were in the process of completing their MA degrees in Political Science and both had got bursaries to do PhDs in England. Roger did not mention anything about Avinashika. He had just mentioned that his elder brother was actually a big time Communist and was studying Karl Marx when not surfing.

Of course at the time Zebedee thought that Roger was just exaggerating and spinning fantastic yarns while under the influence of dagga and lala beer at Lake Sibaya.

Lala beer was an evanescent wine brewed from sap tapped from the palm trees that grew wild around Lake Sibaya and Sodwana Bay. It was sold in the _Cuca_ shops. _Cuca_ shops which were actually _shebeens_ were strictly out of bounds for national servicemen in the South African Defence Force (SADF). SADF troops were forbidden from visiting _Cuca_ shops or mingling with the patrons of _Cuca_ shops especially black women.

All national servicemen doing their military training at the Lake Sibaya base had been strictly forbidden to partake of the alcoholic beverage which was usually brewed in a gourd, tin or bottle at the base of the palm tree into which the sap had been tapped from a cut in the stem of the tree.

Chapter 9

On completion of his training at Engineering School at Kroonstad Zebedee was deployed to a military base in Ladysmith called 5 SAI. On arrival at the base he soon learnt that the acronym stood for the 5th South African Infantry Battalion. Also on the completion of his training as a diesel mechanic Zebedee was promoted to the rank of full corporal which entitled him to the privileges of having his own room and eating his meals serviced on clean white plates in the NCO mess for the remainder of his military service, which would be spent working as a mechanic in the military service and maintenance depot at the military base.

In the vehicle depot two sappers were placed under his command to work as his assistants. They were Roger Pringle and Karl Ikenberry, both of whom had done their basics and training as sappers at the military engineering base in Bethlehem. Both Roger and Karl were university dropouts. Roger who was 20 years old had failed the second year of his BSc in which he had been majoring in Botany and Zoology. After failing he was forced to a take break from university. Karl who had been a BA student majoring in English and Philosophy got into the situation were he had insufficient course credits to graduate and his funding had also been cut off because of his erratic and unsatisfactory progress, so faced with no alternative, he too was forced to drop out of university. Karl was 21 years old. Zebedee who had only just turned 18 years old was the corporal in charge.

Before the end of their second week of toiling from seven to five as mechanics in the vehicle depot they were summarily re-deployed without any explanation to the Lake Sibaya military base. Karl and Roger who has been sharing a bungalow with clerks, drivers, chefs and medics viewed their re-deployment as some kind of deliverance not only from spanners, grease, oil and engines, but also from the company of imbeciles and low-life's with whom they had to share a prefabricated bungalow.

Passing over the Lebombo Mountains the olive green military Bedford descended into the savannah plains of the Makatini Flats. As straight as an arrow the gravel road cut across the open woodlands which ended at the edge of the rolling coastal dune grasslands of Tsonga Land. All over isolated patches of sand forest and lala palms broke the stark relief of the coastal grasslands. In the late afternoon at the end of a long winding sand road the Bedford arrived at the Lake Sibaya military base and stopped next to a conspicuous row of tall pine trees with shaggy and sparse canopies that jarred aesthetically with the surrounding indigenous vegetation. With a sense of relief and elation for having escaped the purgatory of the 5 SAI military base they dropped the tailgate and climbed out of the back of the Bedford. Standing on the loose dune sand that formed the deep upper soil stratum of the coastal plain they were met by the regimental sergeant major who marched the three off to a vacant tent. The tent with the side flats rolled up like all the other tents was also erected on a concrete apron.

Later that evening after supper three sappers who were the _oumanne_ (national servicemen who had were almost at the end of their military service) sauntered into their tent. Sitting on the beds they lit up cigarettes and made themselves at home. For the past nine months they had been responsible for the operation of the diesel generator which supplied the base with electricity chiefly at night and they had also been responsible for the collection and supply of fresh water from Lake Sibaya. Their sun bleached hair was longer than the stipulated army requirements and they had the wild kind of presence that comes from living in a prolonged state of unsupervised isolation outside the boundaries of the symbolic universe of normal day to day civilian life. They had also not bothered to mingle socially with the national servicemen of the 5 SAI companies from Ladysmith that did their 2 to 3 month counter-insurgency training stints at Lake Sibaya. They had been living inadvertently at the faded margins of military discipline. They were part of and yet not part of the military setup at the base. They lived inside the base but outside the military regime. Yet the smooth functioning of the base depended on them, ironically it depended on their capacity, power and skill to deliver and maintain the infrastructural and functional facilities which made the habitation in this isolated and remote military base possible. The searching question that shot through Zebedee's mind was whether the isolation of Lake Sibaya would also transform them to this radical degree?

They learnt from the _oumanne_ that an old dilapidated military water truck was used to collect fresh water from the lake. The truck would be reversed to the edge of the lake and the water was pumped from the lake via a two inch plastic hose into the 3000 L tank. Most of the water was used for the cold water showers and by the kitchen and mess.

They were told by the _oumanne_ that as long as there was electricity and water the three of them would be pretty much left alone. They were informed that the chef, the two cooks, the medic and the military doctor who was also a national serviceman, all had very little contact on a day to day basis with the troops, NCOs and officers of the infantry companies at the base. They as part of the service and technical support team only had to worry about ensuring that all the daily necessities and basic conveniences such as water, electricity, food and aspirins were taken care of. Their job was to make the lives of the infantrymen stationed at the military base slightly more bearable.

The next day the _oumanne_ showed them the ropes and the following day they and the two companies of infantry servicemen left for Ladysmith. A few days later the new conscripts who had finished their basic training at Ladysmith arrived for their two month stint at Lake Sibaya.

Zebedee soon discovered that what the _oumanne_ had told them was true. They soon found that on a day to day basis they were operating and functioning independently of any monitoring or supervision or surveillance by any higher ranking NCO or officer within the hierarchy of the military command structure at Lake Sibaya base. To their amused amazement they were actually left alone, unsupervised, to get on with their daily business. Mindful of their relative good fortune, they managed to exercise sufficient diligence and discipline in the satisfactory fulfilment of their duties. Working in complete autonomy, independent of any directives from the command structure at the base, they managed to maintain their low profile in the base camp, to the point of becoming practically invisible. Only the sergeant major of the infantry company, feeling duty bound, tried to keep tabs on them from time to time. They did everything to avoid him.

What had been said was true; as long as things worked they would be left alone. So knowing this, they set their own pace and planned their day's activities pretty much independently, but still under the command of Zebedee, their two stripe corporal, the bearer the authority of rank. Formally, with respect the chain of military command at the base camp, Zebedee was accountable to the sergeant major, who he had report to, as a matter of course, once a week, which usually turned out to be an _afkak_ (shitting off) encounter in which the sergeant major blasted and berated him with a torrent of abuse littered with unspeakable expletives about what useless lazy shits they were. They were reminded at every opportunity by the infantry sergeant major that they were a disgrace to the SADF with their unmilitary _houding_ , which translated into English referred to their casual attitude to military life. Their relation to the functioning of the command structure with regard to their duties and obligations boiled down to being abused once a week by a high ranking infantry NCO.

Zebedee soon learnt that the bark of the sergeant major was toothless and so the abuse became water off a duck's back.

Yet the burden of responsibility of making sure that the job got done formally fell on Zebedee's shoulders because he was the one who wore the two stripes. Zebedee often felt the emotional conflicts that come with the moral burden of military rank. He did not seek to become a corporal. His natural intellect gifts regarding all things mechanical and his skills in the practical realm made him stand head and shoulders above all the other national servicemen trainees at the Military School for Engineers. Promotion to full corporal as a sapper was inevitable given his abilities, skills and personal attributes.

In the early days at Lake Sibaya, having rank did initially create a subtle barrier between him, Karl and Roger. They were obliged under the orders and legal codes of the military to respect the office and authority of any superior rank. Zebedee had the duty to exercise the burden of leadership which rank had conferred on him. However, on another level, both Karl and Roger had a kind of intellectual seniority over him which was difficult for him not to respect. Their university experiences did endow them with insights, attitudes and knowledge which he did not have, and they were well aware of this.

But it was not his rank nor was it their intellectual superiority that made him feel different from them. Feeling different had become a way of life for Zebedee. As far as their intellectual superiority went, he did not feel inferior; he knew that he could grow to their level of intellectual power and insight. And he knew he could learn a lot from Karl and Roger.

But even in close friendships he always felt different, an outsider, not a full member of the community that his peers belonged to. Somehow he was always outside the charmed circle, a bystander looking in.

So once again on the shores of Lake Sibaya he found himself looking at the world through the eyes of others. Once again he was an outsider; the one who observes the rest of the world as if through a window. This time it was not Christo or Dirk or Riaan. It was Roger and Karl, the English speaking boys from Durban.

Zebedee learnt that Roger wanted to become a herpetologist and that Karl was an aspirant novelist. Karl was always scribbling notes in his dog eared notebook. His enthusiasm for William Faulkner, Norman Mailer, Salinger, Henry Miller, John Updike, Earnest Hemingway, James Baldwin and Mark Twain was so contagious that both Zebedee and Roger unwittingly became students of the American canon of modern literature as they worked through the huge pile of paperbacks that Karl had brought along to Lake Sibaya.

After a few weeks at Lake Sibaya Karl realized that he needed a copy of the Bible so he wrote to his mom asking her to send him a Bible.

Every three to four weeks or so post and packages arrived by Bedford from Ladysmith at the military base at Lake Sibaya. All letters and packages were posted to the 5th South African infantry Battalion's military base at Ladysmith. After being sorted the letters and parcels destined for Lake Sibaya were delivered with all the other supplies such as condense milk, tins of coffee, and boxes of Rice Krispies, bags of mealie meal together with crates of canned bully beef, canned vegetables and tins of Red Robin.

As usual Karl received a huge package of books. This time the parcel included the Bible that he had requested. It was basically Karl's enthusiasm for philosophy that had ignited Zebedee's curiosity about the subject, and had prompted him to ask Jennifer to send him books on philosophy.

In response to his request for books on philosophy his mother, on the advice of Mr Ariel Penzig, sent him a second hand hardcover copy of David Hume's greatest work, A Treatise of Human Nature and a copy of Descartes' Discourse on Method and The Meditations. She also sent him second hand copies of John Locke's An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, George Berkeley's A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge and Immanuel Kant's Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics.

Karl advised Zebedee to start his readings in philosophy with Descartes, the father of modern philosophy.

Now while sitting in the sun on the beach at Lake Sibaya Zebedee started reading Descartes.

On the beaches of Lake Sibaya Zebedee started to enjoy an intimacy of friendship that was new to him. Strong bonds based on trust and mutual respect started to develop between the three. It was indeed the first time in his life as the outsider and as the onlooker that Zebedee began to experience the bonds of genuine friendship with all the complicated emotions and pain that goes with true friendship. Growing up on a farm in the rural district of Rooikraal meant that he could never develop deep bonds of friendship with his class mates. Firm and lasting bonds of comradeship between schoolboys could only be initiated, nurtured, sustained and develop through contact in the afternoons after school hours and on weekends. Opportunities to become involved in each other's lives after school and on weekends was only possible if school boys lived in relative close proximities in the same or adjoining neighbourhoods.

A farm boy like Zebedee had been denied for his entire school life the opportunity to socialize with class mates after school or on weekends. His only friends were Afrikaans speaking boys of similar age on neighbouring farms. During his12 years of schooling he never achieved full social integration with any peer group at school. He was never privy to any gossip or social information regarding the things everyone got up to after school or on weekends. In a real sense he was a mystery to his class mates. All they knew about him was that he lived on a farm somewhere close to Heidelberg and that he rode horses. At school lunchbreaks he was never part of any charmed circle of school friends. Instead he moved around like a roving satellite between various groups of classmates. To everyone he was the familiar stranger, someone you both knew and didn't really know. With girls there also existed a different kind of problem. It was impossible to establish any kind of socially viable connection with girls which had a chance to blossom beyond a passing infatuation into an intimate relationship which with high school teenagers was normally associated with the phenomenon of 'going steady'. He was good looking and girls found him attractive but there was no real practical way for them to have a relationship with him, as he was never around after school in the afternoons or on weekends. He never ever pitched up at any of the sessions (a social-dancing phenomenon in South Africa that evolved into the modern discothèque scene) or parties.

So to his classmates, both guys and girls, he remained a mystery. He only came to school to learn, and then disappeared when the bell signalling the end of school day finally rung. Academically he was one of the high performers. With very little effort he happened to be good at both maths and science, and he was excellent at industrial arts which happened to also be one of his matric subjects.

Roger, Karl and Zebedee all came from different backgrounds. Karl's father was a priest in the Anglican Church and his mother was a school teacher. Roger grew up in various hotels in the Durban CBD. His father who was a decorated veteran of the Second World War had married a girl he had met in London in 1945 after the war. She was only nineteen and he was in his twenties. They came back to South Africa and he got involved in the hotel business in Durban as a hotel manager.

Roger and his bother practically grew up on the Bay of Plenty. They started surfing while in primarily school. Karl the eldest of four brothers grew up in Amanzimtoti. His father was the parish priest of the Anglican Church in Amanzimtoti. Like Roger, Karl was also a keen surfer.

Karl, overjoyed with the arrival of his Bible made the startling disclosure to Zebedee and Roger that he was going to mine the Bible as a literary source for ideas for his future novels. He said that his English teacher, an ex-monk had told the class that the English Bible was the foundation of the English language and English literature. The teacher also said that the Bible was literature, and should be read as literature and not as a text book of religion or a manual of morality. The teacher said the Bible was not about religion or morality. The same teacher said that the vast collection of Biblical narratives were a treasure trove of literary conventions, literary devices, literary ideas, plot structure, dramatic tools, irony that made the Bible the most unique canon of literature in the world.

Roger listened to Karl's raving about what a special book of literature that the Bible happened to be with a sceptical smirk on his face.

Each morning after breakfast they mapped out the day by following the same daily routine; they would begin their day by starting up the old diesel water truck and then headed for the lake. After reversing the water truck to the edge of the water gently lapping onto the beach of the lake, they would kick off their takkies and strip off their brown military T-shirts. Roger or Karl would drag the thick rubber hose into the lake. They would not start pumping water immediately.

Karl would set up his red Philips transistor wireless on the roof of the cab and tune into LM Radio, he would then open a book and start reading. Roger would wonder into the surrounding bush looking for snakes. Zebedee a keen bird watcher would wonder off down the road with his binoculars if he was not reading Descartes.

The density of the local rural population of Tsonga speaking tribesmen on the narrow band of rolling palm-grasslands at the edge of the sand dune forests was low and dispersed. Tsonga homesteads and kraals were remote and isolated. They were scattered around the lake at locations that had been strategically selected to optimize access to water and grazing and at the same time to minimize the risk of nocturnal encounters with wondering hippos.

Every day at more or less the same time a group of young women would come and collect water on the lake shores. They would fill their plastic drums while the sappers were pumping water. It seemed to be their preferred spot because not only was it close to their homesteads which were tucked away in nearby secluded valleys between the high dunes. It was also their preferred spot because there was no apparent danger of hippos or crocodiles at this particular spot which was open and clear of all reed beds. The water was crystal clear and shallow so there was no place where a crocodile could lay concealed waiting patiently in ambush close to the shore of the lake where they regularly filled their drums with water.

It was Karl who observed that since ancient times wells, rivers and lakes were places where the public and open exposure of women to the gaze of men had always been socially sanctioned. It was also a theatre of social transgression, an arena in which men could openly court and woo women. It was impossible for women not to be seen by men when they came down draw water. Public places such as wells or lake shores where water was drawn by women were also places that were profane and secular, places of license for illicit encounters and all kinds of wanton unions.

It was also Karl who concluded that the place where women drew water could not be kept sacred.

Taking in what Karl was getting at; Roger added that water was the place where desire was most rampant.

So Zebedee learnt that at the well, the water hole, the river bank and the lake shore, women also felt free to misbehave, to flaunt their beauty, to encourage desire and the libidinous gaze of men.

The well, the water hole, the hollowed out cistern, the river bank and the lake shore since time immemorial have always been recognized by general consensus and social convention to be places where the profane and the secular reigned.

From his readings of the Bible, Karl became an enthusiastic advocate of the anthropological hypothesis that the places where women drew water had always been, since time immemorial, the sanctuary where lascivious banter was licensed.

Located outside of the protective boundaries of the patriarchal homestead the site where water was drawn, women could linger in full view, in the bright light of day or in the evening's fading twilight. Here they could linger, exposing themselves to the gaze of strangers. Here they could linger beyond the reach of surveillance, beyond the controlling reach that the men of the patriarchal household desired to exert over their bodies and their minds.

Karl concluded that where water was drawn by women no one controlled their bodies or their minds.

Roger agreed with Karl's insight, which Karl argued was also supported by the Bible.

Zebedee also found Karl's anthropological hypothesis, which was the term that Karl used, quite compelling.

Hidden within the boundaries of the patriarchal homestead was the sacred and private space where the bodies and minds of young women were protected from the polluting de-sanctifying gaze and profane advances of men.

Karl started to become obsessed with the idea that Sibaya Lake shared many features with the dramatic site of the Biblical Well. He explained enthusiastically that the well from which water was drawn formed the backdrop of many literary ideas and dramatic plots of which the Bible happened to be full of. The ex-monk English teacher had apparently planted the first seeds of these ideas Karl's mind. Now that he had a copy of the Bible he began in all earnest to explore the dramatic and narrative plots associated with the Biblical Well.

Initially the arrival of the women on the beach did not attract the attention of the three national servicemen. As part of the natural scenery the women would stand ankle deep in the water and using cans they carefully scooped water into their plastic drums. The three boys on the beach had not yet learnt to look at young black women.

When the drums were full they screwed the caps back on and carried the heavy drums off on their heads.

It was Karl who started to take notice of the women when they came to draw water. In particular he noticed the presence of an exquisitely beautiful young woman who was about18 years old among the party of women that regularly arrived at the beach to collect water. One morning he pointed her out to Roger and Zebedee. They took turns to observe her with Zebedee's binoculars.

Over the next couple of day they surreptitiously trained the binoculars on her. She was bare footed. Her state of poverty was extreme. She wore a sun faded thin threadbare dress that came up to her upper thighs. She had sharply legs and a curvaceous body.

Karl began to refer to her as Rebekah. He confessed that he was experiencing feelings of lust for her, but he qualified this admission by saying that he desire was mingled with a profound sense of compassion for her. But then again forgetting his feelings of compassion he openly admitted that he would give anything to make love to her.

He confided that it was Rebekah that had given him the inspiration to write his first novel. The plot would revolve around the seduction of Rebekah. He would call his book 'Lake Sibaya.' His said his novel would be in honour of the exquisitely beautiful Rebekah, it would also be a testimony to his great and secret love for Rebekah.

He spoke his mind freely while gazing through the binoculars at her. They did not know whether to take Karl seriously.

In the days that followed Karl's preoccupation with Rebekah became a source of amusement to both Roger and Zebedee. Karl's erotic obsession with the girl did not abate; day by day it grew in its intensity. His sense of urgency to get to the lake every morning became palpable. He had to see her again, and again.

Karl spoke about having fallen under the spell of the Muse. He wrote profusely, filling his notebook with scribbles. He sighed inwardly as he wrote about the seduction of Rebekah which was going to form the plot of his first fictional debut. He wrote in the first person. Zebedee was curious, he asked if could read Karl's notes. Karl obliged. He watched as Zebedee turned the pages of the notebook, reading carefully every handwritten line. His face lightened up when he saw that Zebedee was impressed.

"Well what do you think?" He asked grinning broadly.

"I think it is very good. But I think you should write in the third person so we can get to know what Rebekah is thinking," Zebedee said.

"You are a genius Zebedee, that is exactly the conclusion that I have also reached," he said.

One morning they saw Roger coming back from his jaunt into the bush. He held a white bag in his hand. He was smiling broadly; they realized that he caught something.

"I have caught a bird shake, Thelotornis capensis capensis, a beautiful specimen. It is a big bugger, a gravid female. She must be almost 1.5 meters long," he said.

On the shores of Lake Sibaya with LM radio blaring out the hit parade, one perfect languid day flowed into the next. Almost every day their topics of discussion inexorably turned to sex including the anatomy of the mammalian penis.

Apparently according to Roger, except for the exotically designed intromission organs of male insects nothing else in the animal kingdom matched the advanced evolutionary adaptions of the mammalian phallus.

They urinated freely within full view of each other and the women whenever it pleased them. Karl and Roger were circumcised. Zebedee was born on the bed on which he had been conceived. He was delivered with the help of Afrikaans speaking midwives from neighbouring farms in the absence of a doctor or paediatrician. His mother did not bother to call in a rabbi on the eighth day. Zebedee grew up uncircumcised. Karl and Roger both had opportunities to view Zebedee foreskinned penis while they showered together.

"You know I read up on the foreskin because I was worried that I had been damaged by circumcision. They say that the foreskin is actually a uniquely human adaptation. Its prime function is to facilitate ease of penetration. Now I reckon that the foreskin is an excellent biological adaptation for having sex. For 99.9% of man's existence since he evolved from the apes he walked around quite happily with his foreskin. What possessed him to want to remove the foreskin? It does not make any sense. It does not fix up the penis or make it better. The penis was never broken, it did not need any fixing up," Roger quipped.

"The foreskin is also the organ of transgression, of rape. No other animal has a foreskin. It is an adaptation that increased the penetrability of the human male intromitting organ. In place of a foreskin the penises of mammals are sharp pointed daggers that penetrate the vagina with the ease of a dagga thrust into soft yielding flesh. The foreskin transforms the human penis into a dagger, into an organ of transgression, of violation, of penetration, of ingress, of intromission," Roger continued to elaborate.

"Hey Zeb, don't be offended. We are actually jealous of your foreskin. We actually think you have a great cock. It is huge, but you got be careful with what you do with it, it could be a lethal weapon especially in inexperienced hands. As Roger said, you actually possess a dangerous organ, an organ of transgression and violation........ha, ha, ha, ha," Karl burst out laughing.

"Fuck both of you," he said feeling highly irritated. He left them to go start the pump.

"I think we really pissed him off," Karl said.

"Well I would not feel pissed off if I had a cock like his, I would be waving it as those girls, shouting look what I have got.....do you want some of it," Roger said.

Chapter 10

Now the girls had just arrived on the beach. It was midmorning.

"Hey man you must listen to the words of this lyric it is completely out of this world," said Karl as he jumped up to turn up the volume. It was The Doors' Riders on the Storm.

"Hey listen man, go ask Zeb to switch that bloody pump off so we can hear the words," Roger asked.

"Go ask him yourself, he is pissed off with me, he will just tell me go get fucked. He is the moer in (fed up with us) with us," Karl answered, with a naughty grin on his face.

After Venus by Shocking Blue, the lyrics of Frozen Orange Juice by Peter Sarsted filled the air.

They were distracted by a sudden commotion on the beach.

They heard the word vula (open) being uttered several times.

Karl was fluent in isiZulu and he could also understand the snatches of the Xitsonga they were speaking. The girls spoke to each other in both isiZulu and Xitsonga. Karl had surmised that they were in the process of being assimilated into completely Zulu culture.

"They can't open the lid of Rebekah's plastic drum, it is too tight, some idiot has overtightened it, and she is very angry," he said laughing

"Is that what she is saying?" Roger asked.

"I think so," Karl said.

" _Mina ngiyasiza_ ," he shouted.

(I can help you.)

Karl reckoned that she needed help with the lid. None of them could turn it loose.

His offer to help them open the drum came as a complete surprise to the women. After initiating some further exchanges in isiZulu with the group of young women standing bare foot in ankle deep water he decided to walked over to them.

Karl with hands in his pockets and his bush hat sitting at a rakish angle on his head _sauntered_ bare foot over to them in a manner that seemed so casual and natural. It was easy for him; he was experimentally acting out fictional roles as he had imagined them. He was acting out the life-script of the characters he wanted to create, characters that he wanted to use in his novel.

He often said that writing was a performance that ended in the death of the author when the reader took possession of the narrative. That is why the Bible does not have any authors. The Biblical narratives come alive when possessed by the reader. In the act of reading, they become revelatory, they become inspired, they become authoritative; they become the very Word of God.

Unopened the Bible is just a thing lying there, and this goes for all books. Something happens when a book is opened and reading begins.

Furthermore, as Karl had lectured them on the beach of Lake Sibaya, this phenomenon applies to all written narratives that are literary artefacts.

He had rehearsed everything in his mind in an imaginative re-enactment of a fictional person. Today on the beaches of Lake Sibaya he was also intentionally acting out the role of the transgressor, the violator of spaces, the violator of geographies, of barriers, of boundaries, of borders, of edges, of precincts. He wanted to feel what it was like to experience the palpability of transgression, to experience the breaching of the invisible boundaries that divided and compartmentalized humanity. To breach, to penetrate, to ingress, all these words are linked to the sexually charged process of intromission. Intromission involves the process of insertion or penetration by the intromitting organ.

Seeing Karl walking off to the women, Zebedee switched off the pump. He asked what was going on.

"I can't believe it. Look Karl is actually walking over to the women. He is going to talk to Rebekah," Roger said with a look of disbelief on his face.

"This may be a problem," Zebedee said, suddenly becoming aware of the moral burden of his rank. He had the authority to stop Karl in his tracks and command him to come back.

Roger saw the sudden flash of concern on Zebedee face.

"Leave him, let's see what happens. It is perfectly harmless, he is an artist, and this is what artists do?" Roger said.

Zebedee was going to call him back.

"No leave him, he is serious; he is not doing this for kicks. He is really fascinated with her obscure life. I am sure he will be the only person in the world who will ever see her as some kind of magical being, as some fantastic and magical person, someone worthy of a life bigger than the one she is currently living, so leave him Zeb, let things be, it is natural that he wants to find out more about her, maybe even where she lives so that he can visit her at night and maybe make love to her," Roger said with a dramatic intensity which he instantly betrayed by grinning a bit too broadly.

As a precaution Zebedee quickly climbed onto the roof of the cab and began to survey the area to see if there was anyone else in the vicinity that would be able to witness the drama of a white national serviceman consorting with young Tsonga women at the edge of the lake.

With curious smiles lighting up their amused demeanours they fixed their gaze on the dashing and athletic young man with sun bleached brown hair and tanned muscular body approaching them.

Nothing escaped their eyes. Years of surfing and swimming had sculptured and toned his lean and supple body making the definition of its lines and contours sensually appealing to the feminine eye. They were aware that he was not shy or bashful in the presence of women. It was clearly evident that he was interested in them. He did not hide the playful fact that he liked to flirt with women, that he was a charmer, a womanizer. He was comfortable and at home in his body. They also sensed that he could be wild and reckless, and that he liked women, even black women very much. All of this was plain to them and it heighted the erotic tension.

He was wearing only his black military pt shorts. They noticed the polished _Entada rheedei_ bean on a leather thong strung round his neck. They noticed the copper bracelet on his wrist. The _Entada rheedei_ beans which had been washed up on the beach were called _Sibaya beans_ by the troops stationed at the Lake Sibaya military base.

He bent down and grasped the plastic screw in a vice like grip, and with the tensed torque of his right wrist he turned it with an intentional display of effortless grace and strength. Their eyes were fixed on his strong hands, his muscular forearm, his biceps, his triceps, and his shoulder muscles.

Squealing with laughter they watched the lid rotate under the rapidly twisting motion of his long mobile fingers. Triumphantly in a premeditated theatrically gesture he held the disengaged plastic screw his hand, the drum plug that had until then had defeated all their efforts.

Holding the plastic lid in his hand he grinned broadly. He passed the lid to Rebekah.

With the job done he began joke with them. His attention remained fixed on the pretty one. She watched his eyes roving over her body, resting on her breasts, gazing into her eyes. She did not avert her gaze. He flirted with her. She did not know what to make of him.

She felt her heart beating widely in her chest. She also felt a strange pleasure.

He did something strange; he pulled of his copper bangle and he held it out to her and said

' _Thatha_ ," (take)

She looked confused. She was hesitant. Smiling he said again

" _Yithatha_ ," (take it)

She curtsied and took the bangle from him.

Roger and Zebedee watched and waited. They relaxed when they heard the bursts of hilarious laughter coming from the women. It seemed that Karl had succeeded in endearing himself with the women. He bid them farewell and he sauntered back with a reckless macho swagger, looking very pleased with himself.

The girls began chatter loudly amongst themselves in wild excitement. Their gay banter broke into regular bouts of loud laughter as the joked among themselves over the incident.

"Well?" Roger asked when Karl arrived back.

"Wow she is beautiful and what a body," Karl said.

"What did you speak about?" Roger wanted to know.

"I asked them if they can get us some dagga and lala beer. I told them we would pay," Karl said.

From that day onwards they exchanged greetings by means of vigorously reciprocal waving and shouting which was always accompanied by bursts of spontaneous laughter from the young women.

Karl made the interesting observation that women were speaking both isiZulu and Xitsonga among themselves. He noticed that some including Rebekah wore the Zulu isiphandla which was a band of goat skin around the left wrist.

He developed a theory about them. He said they were living at the interface of two cultures and were assimilating Zulu customs.

Karl had grown up in a home in which each hour, each day, each week, and each month followed the pattern laid out by the calendar of the liturgical year as determined by the Anglican Book of Common Prayer. It was the same Karl who now initiated the audacious flirtatious chant-like courtship calls in isiZulu and the women spontaneously responded gleefully with teasing, melodic and lyrical Xitsonga and isiZulu refrains from ancient bridal wedding songs that resonated against the equally ancient forest covered dunes.

The substance of the flirtatious calls which were directed at Rebekah was an invitation for her and him to engage in external sexual intercourse or _ukuhlobonga_ which was an intimate liaison which takes place at night under the cover of darkness without the occurrence of penetrative sex.

The sun smiled radiantly, the beds of reeds stirred to life in the light breeze and waved their plumes joyfully. The sea gulls wheeled and turned in the sky, the ever present marsh harrier coursed effortlessly over the joyful plumes.

Their laughter filled the morning air, it rang across the lake, and it echoed against the dunes, it reverberated against the dome of the sky. The sun laughed, the reeds laughed, the sky laughed, the gulls in the sky laughed, the rolling grass covered dunes laughed, the palms laughed and in the forest the cicada stopped their singing as they listened to the ringing laughter of the young women on the beach of Lake Sibaya.

Karl explained that many aspects of the Zulu worldview were consonant with the Old Testament which included the ethical view that participation in sexual intimacy could take place outside the moral realm.

"Rebekah is an _injuba_ which is a girl of marriageable age; her suitor could approach her _amaqhikisa_ to request permission to practice _ukuhlobonga_ with her. The permission is seldom denied when it is made known that they like each other," Karl said.

"What is _ukuhlobonga_?" Roger asked.

Karl explained what kind of physical intimacy was involved in _ukuhlobonga_ _._

"What did the _amaqhikisa_ say with regard to your request," Roger asked out of interest.

"They teased me. She is playing hard to get?" Karl replied with mischievous smile.

"What do mean?" Roger asked

"They said that she thinks that she has eyes for another man who cannot see that she likes him," Karl said.

"Who is this other man?" Roger asked.

"I don't know," he said mysteriously, the expression of his face betraying that he knew.

"Maybe it's you Zeb that she wants. Maybe she wants to practice _ukuhlobonga_ with you," Roger said, laughing.

"Go to hell," Zebedee said in good humour.

"Roger's got a point. I have noticed that she has kept casting her eyes in your direction, wherever you go, whatever you do, her gaze follows you, she is watching you," Karl said, with a broad teasing grin on his face.

"Her friends say she likes you Zeb," Karl continued, with a serious but amused look on his face.

"She really likes you Zeb, she would like to have you as her husband," Karl insisted with a mischievous twinkle in his eyes.

"Hell Zeb, she wants to do _ukuhlobonga_ with you," Roger laughed out loud.

Chapter 11

After they had finished swimming they climbed up the logs. Zebedee soon discovered that Catarina was unlike any other girl that he had ever known. She was intellectually precocious for her age. She reminded him not only of the beautiful Avinashika Mukhopadhyay but in many ways of Vanessa. She shared with Vanessa that natural wantonness filled with an erotic sensuality that was coloured with teasing shades of wit, amusement, humour and mystery.

******

With an amused smile on her face Avinashika Mukhopadhyay stood with her hand on the front door knob of the opened door. She immediately recognized the striking family resemblance that Roger shared with Gavin his elder bother

She stepped back giving them space to enter the lounge. She quickly pressed the door shut behind them. Standing with her hands on her hips she inclined head slightly as she surveyed the two bashful young men standing awkwardly before her in their polished boots, dressed in their smart 'step-out' uniforms and wearing berets, with _balsaks_ hanging from their shoulders.

"So must be Roger?" She said with a posh English accent that sounded very British to Zebedee's ear as she shook Roger's hand.

"This is Zebedee Rottstegge," Roger said.

He also shook Avinashika's hand.

"Please sit down. Can I get you something to drink," she asked.

"I will have beer if you got," Roger said.

"Do you also want a beer?" She asked looking at Zebedee.

"Yes please, that will nice," he answered politely.

"We only have Lion Ale."

"That's fine we only drink Lion Ale," Roger answered.

It was a flat with single bedroom, a kitchen, bathroom and combined dining room and lounge area that opened onto a balcony. The lounge had two sofas and two armchairs.

Avinashika disappeared into the tiny kitchen. Zebedee sunk down in one of the arm chairs and Roger reclined in a sprawling posture on a sofa with his legs spread out on the carpet. Zebedee glanced around. Against the wall there was a book shelf filled with books, but there were also books stacked in piles everywhere, on the floor, on the coffee table in the middle of the lounge, on the other sofa and on the dining room table. It was the first time that he had seen so many books in one place outside a library. It was almost inconceivable that people could surround themselves with so many books stacked everywhere you happened to look.

Karl said he collected books because he wanted to be writer and one could not be a writer if one did not submerge oneself in books. It made sense. If you want to write you must read as much as possible. In Zebedee's mind he could appreciate that reading and writing were opposite sides of the same coin. What's more Karl had this idea of creative reading, which entailed the reading of the counter stories that inhabit any story, counter stories in which the drama of the invisible 'unwritten lives' live in the gaps of any narrative.

He discovered this for himself once he started reading Karl's Bible from the book of Genesis onwards. Not only the stories of literary fiction but especially the stories of the various Biblical narratives were littered with throw-away lives, the lives of these personages that were not important enough to occupy more than a few words in passing. Most of the _persona dramatis_ that lived these throw-away 'unwritten' lives in the Bible were generally slave women or female servants; most of whom also lived in the shadowy world of _concubinage. Karl said they were like the lives of the slave flute playing girls which crop up in Plato's dialogues. Somehow a flute playing girl always crops up from nowhere at a critical junction in some of Plato's dialogues._

_Going back to the Bible, the patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob were fucking women left right and centre, according to Karl. It was unthinkable for the Patriarchs not to have sex with several different women. Sex with several women was a normal activity in their universe, their world throbbed with copulation. Abraham fucked Hagar, Isaac fucked the slaves that Rebekah brought along with her, and Jacob fucked the slave girls Zilpah and Bilhah. All the gaps in the stories are filled with the presence of desire and Eros, and the fucking of slaves, and nowhere in the Bible is slavery or concubinage condemned. Desire and Eros inhabited the counter stories of many Biblical narratives, unwritten stories about the sexual lives of Hagar, Zilpah and Bilhah, and the hundreds of concubines. The_ _Song of Songs_ _was filled with the unstoppable eruption of Eros. An unwritten underground flood of Eros flowed under the thin visible written layers of the readable text that filled the pages of Bible. The unwritten counter stories of erotic pleasure haunted almost every page of the Bible according to Karl._

_It was not surprising that eventually the suppression of Eros in the composition and formation of the Bible became increasing impossible. In the case of the_ _Song of Songs_ _erotic canticles became incorporated into the very canon of scripture. In the very core of the Bible, Eros has been preserved as the counter pole of Agape. For Karl the pious reader seeking a message from God in the act of reading the scriptural text struggles often in vain against the invitations to seek out and find Eros in the dramas and plots of the subterranean counter stories that fill many of the gaps in the Biblical canon._

_This is normal. The unwritten and therefore the unread is all pervasive; it is the stuff of real stories._

Zebedee thought about what Karl had said. It is clear that if you want to become a writer you must first become a reader, a reader of the gaps, of the counter stories, of what remain unwritten beneath the visible text. This would constitute an imaginative reading, a reading that flows into writing where writing is the creative rewriting of the counter story, the story between the lines.

Out of curiosity Zebedee began to read the titles of the books heaped into the various plies. Georg Lukács _History and Class Consciousness_ , Antonio Gramsci Selections from the Prison Notebooks, Louis _Althusser_ and Étienne Balibar _Reading Capital_ , _Jürgen Habermas_ _Knowledge and Human Interests_ _and_ Rosa Luxemburg The Accumulation of Capital.

He thought that all of these books must be filled with gaps, filled with stores between the lines, unwritten counter stories. All of the books must have their own counter stories waiting to be written.

Each of these books must somehow co-exist with some or other kind of counter narrative. Counter stories were everywhere to be found. Karl had said that every true reading of a narrative or of any story had to be a dialectical reading, whatever he meant by that, it still made an impression on both Roger and Zebedee.

So much waits to be written, and so much has to be read. Zebedee felt overwhelmed looking at the heaps of books that filled the flat.

A few seconds later she stuck her head into lounge.

"Do you want glasses or will you drink out of the bottle."

"Don't worry about glasses we will drink from the bottles."

She gave them their beers and sat on the other sofa.

Roger took a swig of his beer. He put the bottle down on the coffee table and began to rummage in his _balsak._ He pulled out a highly polished Sibaya bean attached to a thin leather thong.

"I would like you to have this," he said and got up and presented her with the Sibaya bean necklace. He had been working on it for several days before they left Lake Sibaya.

"Oh thank it so beautiful, what is it?" She said as she examined the bean.

"We call it a Sibaya bean. We find them on the beach. It is actually a giant legume seed. The plant is a creeper that grows on the banks of rivers in Mozambique. The large pods containing the seeds fall into rivers flowing into the sea. The pods and seed drift in the around in the sea and carried away by the currents. They then get washed up onto the beach hundreds of miles away from the rivers where they grew," he said.

"Why do they call them Sibaya beans? I have never heard of a Sibaya bean before," she asked.

"They must have got the name from the troopies based at Lake Sibaya. They may have originally seen the local Tsongas wearing them and the troops must have then copied it," he said.

"Do the troopies actually wear the necklace?' she asked.

"Yes they do, especially on weekends when they laze around the base wearing only PT shorts or when they go to the beach," he said.

"Are they allowed to just walk to the beach in their free time?" she asked.

"No. Usually the beach visits are organized. The whole company is driven in Bedfords to some really remote beaches far north of Sodwana Bay away from any civilian holiday makers," he said.

"But we often slip-off to the beach by ourselves. We are engineers, we are not part of the infantry company, we are sort of independent and nobody really keeps tabs on what we are doing on a Saturday afternoon or on a Sunday," Zebedee said.

She put the necklace on.

She looked with curious interest at Zebedee. In her opinion, he was very good looking. She was also observant. As a well-travelled person she could not help recognizing the Semitic elements in his features. She could even discern vague ancient Asiatic elements in his face. She felt it would not be appropriate to ask if he was Jewish, instead she inquired where he hailed from.

"I grew up on a farm between Boksburg and Heidelberg. To be honest I am not sure if the farm falls within the Boksburg or Heidelberg municipal districts," he said.

"Oh that is interesting. What kind of farm is it?" She asked.

"It is a dairy farm, but we also grow maize and lucerne, and we also have an involvement with racehorses and horseracing. We are not wealthy, we are just ordinary farmers trying to make a living off the land as best as we can," he answered.

She smiled. She was aware of the subconscious defensive tone in Zebedee's admission that he belonged to a farming family.

"I understand. I am glad to have met you. My research focus for my PhD is going to be on the origin and modern development of the capitalist agricultural economy of the South African Highveld. If you don't mind it would be nice to get your take on the farming situation on the Highveld," she said.

"I will be happy to help you. I will tell you everything I know," he said.

She smiled at his innocence and his readiness to help her.

"I suppose you are aware that black farm workers are the most vulnerable and exploited class of workers in South Africa. They are subjected to all kinds of unfair and abusive labour practices. On a personal level they also suffer all kinds of psychological and physical abuse that has robbed them of their human dignity. On the majority of farms they are housed in subhuman accommodation that is not even fit for domestic animals. Individual black families are mostly accommodated in small single room buildings which lack such basic amenities such as electricity or running water. Under these conditions individual blacks families do not have any meaningful privacy. Because the majority of black farmer actually live on the farms owned by their employers the farmer and his family exert almost total control over every aspect of the personal life of every farm labourer on the farm," she said.

"What you said is true. I don't dispute that. It is the reality of the South African agricultural system. I don't know if could be changed or reformed. To be honest I don't like it," he said.

His openness and honesty impressed her. Zebedee in turn beheld her with a sense of awe. Her sharp and acutely sensitive female intuition registered this signal emanating from Zebedee's demeanour and the way he looked at her and engaged with her endeared him to her. She took an instinctive liking to him not only because of his good looks but also because of his naïve honesty.

She noticed that Roger kept on looking at his watch.

"I suppose you guys want to take a shower and change your clothes and then hit out to the bright city lights," she said laughing.

After showering and changing into their civvies, T-shirt and denims, Avinashika gave them a spare key to the flat.

"So what do you think of Avinashika?" Roger asked as they stepped out onto the pavement.

"I like her. I think she is nice person," Zebedee said.

"I like her too; I would also like to fuck her. I can image her saying in her posh English accent 'oh yes, oh yes, please don't stop, oh my gosh, oh my gosh, I don't know what is happening, but is it so glorious, I think I can feel the imminent eruption of an orgasm, oh dear, oh dear, I am coming, it feels so exquisitely fabulous, oh yes it is just simply so fabulous, oh dear it is so unimaginably fabulous, my darling, my darling, my darling, I love you so much, you are the most terrific lover in the universe, do not stop my darling angel, " Roger said while grinning widely.

Zebedee shook his head at his comrade's antics, but he could not help chuckling at Roger's vision of Avinashika wildly writhing and thrashing her legs, arms and body in ecstasy.

"So what are we going to do tonight," Zebedee asked.

"Well I suggest we first eat a big T-bone steak and then we hit out to the Black Moon discothèque in West Street," he said.

While they sliced into their medium rare steaks and stuffed the mouths with chips Roger went over the game plan for the rest of the evening.

"Look if we want to get-off with girls tonight we can't be too fussy. We have to drop our standards if we going to get a bang this week. The nice one's already have boyfriends. Listen to me this is what we must do, before asking anyone for a dance we must first spend some time accessing the talent and see if we can spot any girls that look fairly reasonable, which means that she does not have to be really pretty or a beauty, she could even be ugly, the bottom line is if she must has a good pair of tits and she should not be too overly fat, plump will do. If she has these attributes then she qualifies and makes the grade. Once you spot someone who even slightly makes the grade then keep on looking at her, until you make eye contact with her. If you make eye contact you will know whether or not she is even slightly interested. If she seems interested then take a chance and go over to her and ask her for a dance; if she accepts with a smile then you halfway home. Once the music stops ask her again if she wants another dance, if she accepts then you are made. After the second she will stick with you the whole evening and all you have to do is wait for a slow dance, then you can make your move for becoming more intimate, you must your arms around her and pull her gently against your body. If she stays pressed tightly against you then you know for sure that you can make your next move. You can start kissing her. If she starts kissing you back you then know that anything can happen," Roger explained.

"Why are you telling me all of this," Zebedee asked with an amused twinkle in his eye.

He knew his mother would disapprove of this kind of carousing with girls. She always advised him that he should not worry too much about girlfriends. 'You will meet the right one I promise you,' she said this after his first two girlfriends broke up with him.

"Look you are my buddy, and I know that you are a farm boy, and I acknowledge that you probably know more about animal reproduction than I do. Animal reproductive biology and courtship also happens be one of my main interests, I am a Darwinian, and when it comes to girls you got to know something about courtship, basically we are just animals and like the rest of the animal kingdom when it comes courtship and reproductive biology. Our sole purpose in life is to perpetuate the human species, which requires us to bang as many girls as possible, we have to sow the seed, and it is all part of nature. Let this week be an adventure or a scientific experiment if you like, we are both good looking fellows, let's roll the dice and see how it falls. If we get laid before the end of this week it will great," Roger grinned broadly.

Zebedee shook his head and laughed.

"You are some piece of work," he said to Roger.

"Man this is IT, I tell this is IT, to get laid is all there is we can hope for, there is nothing else," he said.

"Not even God?" Zebedee asked.

"OK maybe God. Atheism is too big a step even for me to make. Gavin my brother is an atheist. Hey you must read Ludwig Feuerbach and also Nietzsche," Roger said.

"Who are Feuerbach and Nietzsche?" Zebedee wanted to know.

"Feuerbach wrote this book called _The Essence of Christianity_. My brother has a copy, he has read it. I haven't read it. Basically Feuerbach argues that man created God in his own image. God is a projection of man's deepest wishes and hopes or something like that. Hey man there is bookshop called Nostrand Bookshop in Smith Street where you can get any book, even banned books. It owned by a mad Dutchmen, Klaus Zomer, he is not an Afrikaner, he is actually a real Hollander from the Netherlands. He speaks with a strong Dutch accent. He stocks every kind of book you can think of. He has two stories of floor space filled with bookshelves stacked with books from the floor to ceiling. Down stairs in a dim basement behind locked doors he keeps all kinds of special books like the book written by the Marquis de Sade. You can buy the full works of Lenin and Marx, my brother buys all his books from the Dutchmen," Roger said.

"Who is the Marquis de Sade?"

"He wrote a book called the 120 days in Sodom. It is just about screwing from beginning to end. It was the first pornographic book ever written. Apparently quite a few of the avant-garde philosophers have gone bananas over de Sade, they think he is some kind of great intellectual hero, it is really weird. I will take you to the bookshop tomorrow afternoon. Tomorrow morning we go can surfing. I will teach how to surf in the morning and then we can go in the afternoon and we browse in the bookshop," Roger said.

Inside the Black Moon it was hot and crowded. The music blared so loudly that one could barely think a coherent thought and the lights were so dim that even the ugly girls looked beautiful. They pressed through the crowds on the dance floor and found a spot to stand. Roger did not stick to the plan, one moment he was standing next to Zebedee shouting all kinds of stuff into his ear and the next moment he was gone. Like a bee in a frenzy he buzzed excitedly from one flower to the next, like a madman he was on and off the dance floor, twisting and shaking, body jerking, arms flailing wildly up and down, head bopping, like a man possessed by demon.

He disappeared again. Zebedee guessed that he had gone to the toilet.

Suddenly Roger reappeared in the middle of the dance floor with a pretty teenage girl clinched tightly in his embrace; they were dancing a slow nightclub shuffle, both swaying gently in a sensual rhythm to the strains of the Moody Blues Nights in White Satin.

After a while Roger came over to Zebedee with the teenage girl clinging to him now. She was dressed in a shiny micro-miniskirt with a black tight tube top and was chewing gum. He introduced her to Zebedee. Her name was Alice McFadden and she couldn't have been older than sixteen, she was soon joined by her best friend Vanessa Wilkinson.

It was almost midnight. He had not realized that he had been standing in the same spot for two hours lost in thought. He had finished reading Henry Miller's Tropic of Capricorn on the train journey from Ladysmith to Durban. Over the past 12 hours everything had become a mad blur. Standing in the club while listening to Donavan's Hurdy Gurdy Man he decided that he would become a Communist. It was Henry Miller's Tropic of Capricorn that had prompted his decision. Meeting Avinashika gave him the confirmation that he had made the right decision. She was a Communist, a fitting role model for him to emulate. From now on he too would be a Communist and would dedicate himself to the cause of Communism with people like Avinashika as his comrade in arms.

The Staccatos' hit _Cry to me_ started to play. Vanessa looked at Zebedee, smiling she asked him if he would like to dance. He noticed couples started to dance in an intimate embrace. She took his hand and he followed her as she moved in amongst the dancing couples. They embraced each other and she pressed her body close against him. Together they shuffled and swayed in a simple touch-step foot movement. They stayed in a close embrace when the DJ played Tony Orlando's _Knock three times_ and they continued dancing in a close embrace in spite of the fast beat.

Zebedee felt the heat of her body; she was as hot as a furnace, her perfume and the fragrance of her hair were intoxicating.

At closing time Roger offered to walk the two girls to their home. They walked with Alice and Vanessa to the blocks of flats where they both lived. Alice in turn invited Roger and Zebedee up for coffee at her flat where she lived with her parents. They took the lift up to the seventh floor. Her parents were sleeping. While Alice made coffee in the kitchen Vanessa kept them company in the small cramped lounge. She eyed Zebedee out. She was fascinated by him; there was something exotic about him with his intense and passionate dark brown eyes, his sensual lips, his slightly aquiline nose, his cropped dark brown hair and the dark shadow of stubble on his jaw. She found him extremely sexy.

He listened attentively and with unfeigned interest to everything she said. She felt that he took her seriously which inspired her to speak non-stop about everything that came into her mind. She felt possessed by a demon that had her made completely garrulous, she felt compelled to express an opinion on everything that mattered to her. She couldn't stop talking, and he didn't stop listening, the more he listened the more she spoke.

When he answered her questions he looked directly into her eyes, she found his voice captivating, mellow, resonant and richly modulated. When he laughed at the funny things she said his eyes sparkled with genuine amusement and humour. He was the first male that made her feel that her opinions on the most insignificant topic were actually important. For the first time in her life she felt she was been taken seriously by a handsome unassuming mysterious male person. There was not the slightest trace of a dismissive or incredulous signal in his demeanour. When it came to women there was an obvious air of open innocence and naivety in his general comportment.

To Roger it was obvious that Vanessa's flirtation with Zebedee was blatant and extremely calculated, and Zebedee was clearly oblivious to her designs, he obviously took her to be an incredibly friendly conversationalist.

Roger was no stranger to Vanessa. She knew him from high school. He had a reputation as a big Casanova when he was at high school. He was much taller than Zebedee. Zebedee was of average height, the population mean, but he was not scrawny. Roger as usual sat sprawled out on the sofa with a bored expression on his face while she spoke. He did not sit on a couch. He occupied a couch. He sat with a smirk on his face while she spoke about things that were important to her. She stopped including him in her conversation. She stopped looking at him. She sat in the armchair next to the one that Zebedee was sitting on. Half-turning away from Roger she sat with her closed legs pointing towards Zebedee's shoes and she leaned towards Zebedee with her elbow resting on the armrest as she spoke him.

Alice came into the lounge with two mugs of instant coffee which she gave to Zebedee and Roger. She went back to the kitchen and returned with mugs of coffee for Vanessa and herself. She gave Vanessa her coffee and then she sat down on the sofa with Roger. Roger moved over and made room for her. She sat close to him and he put his hand on her thigh.

Vanessa sat back and began sipping her coffee.

"I really spoke your head off," she said smiling at Zebedee.

"So what's it like in the army," she asked Zebedee.

"It has not been that bad, we are actually having quite a holiday," he said with humorous grin.

"No you joking," she laughed.

"It is the truth, we spend most of time laying on the beach reading books and listening to LM radio," he said.

She turned to Roger.

"Is that true?" she asked.

"Yes it is, we just read books and talk about the books, and that is pretty much what we do all the time," he said.

"What books do you read?" She asked looking incredulously at Zebedee.

"Mainly serious American fiction," Zebedee answered.

"American fiction?" She asked with a frown of perplexity creasing her forehead.

"Yes fiction by authors like Henry Miller," he explained.

"Henry Miller, can't say I have ever heard of him, what kind of books does he write?" she said.

Roger burst out laughing.

"What so funny?" she said glaring at Roger. When she turned away to focus her attention on what Zebedee was going to say, Roger rolled his eyes and smirked at Zebedee. Alice jabbed him in the ribs with her elbow.

"Ow, what was that for?" He asked.

"You know," she said with a look of firmness on her face.

"Henry Miller wrote _The Tropic of Cancer_ and _The Tropic of Capricorn._ Some people reckon they count as among the most important works of fiction written in the 20th century. Both books have been very influential," he said.

Knowing that Roger was waiting for her to say something that he would use to make her look stupid she ignored him and she asked,

"What kind of stuff did he write about?"

Zebedee could sense the hostility and tension between Vanessa and Roger. He guessed that maybe Roger and Vanessa were acquainted and knowing Roger it was very likely that he had probably pursued her in the past with the intention to bang her and she had spurned his overtures. She was one of his failed conquests.

"I first must warn you that he can come across as quite an obscene writer and much of the stuff he writes about can be quite upsetting and unpalatable to a lot of people I suppose. But the focus of his work is not obscenity for the sake of obscenity. He may also come across as being anti-Jewish, but I don't think he is anti-Semitic. Henry Miller describes the wretched and sordid lives that ordinary people have to endure by force of circumstances beyond their control. He does not try to conceal the fact that the great American dream is actually one big lie for the majority of ordinary Americans. He offers no remedy or cure or solace for the epic failure that everyone has to come to terms with as they discover that their lives count for nothing in the final scheme of things," he explained.

Roger grinned broadly.

"Yup, that is going to be the reality for all of us, that is the stark reality we have to live with, in the end we will all discover that our lives count for nothing, that everything has been a meaningless charade, a sham," Roger added.

"This conversation is really getting so depressing," Alice

"We don't have to passively accept our situation, we don't have be depressed, we can fight to change things, it does not have be like this, nothing is inevitable, I don't believe we must accept our fate or believe in such a thing as destiny," Zebedee said.

"Yes I agree with Zebedee," Vanessa said.

After they had finished their coffee they left. On the way back to his brother's flat Roger made the remark:

"Vanessa has really got the hots for you. I see she spoke your head off; you could not get a word in edge wise. I tell you she has got you in her sights, she has you dead centre in the cross-hairs."

"Nonsense! She was just being polite and considerate," Zebedee said.

"You have a lot to learn about women and life my china," Roger chuckled.

Before they left Alice's flat Roger told them that he and Zebedee would be surfing at North Beach early in the morning. It was a strong hint, like if you want to find us, then you will know where to look for us, we will be there guaranteed.

Chapter 12

Gavin and Roger Pringle were descendants of the original Pringles who landed on the beach in Algoa Bay with the rest of the 1820 settlers. Gavin who was just over six foot tall, blond, bronzed and well-built with broad shoulders woke Roger and Zebedee who were sleeping in their army sleeping bags on the sofas in the lounge. It was 7.00 am. Avinashika laughed at the two drowsy lads standing bare foot in shorts in the kitchenette as they made coffee and poured Kellogg's Rice Krispies into bowls, while warming up milk on the stove.

Outside the sky was covered with a thick impenetrable bank of grey cloud. A light drizzle was falling and the high tide was rolling in.

"Surf's up there is a fantastic swell in the bay, I think I am coming with you guys this morning," Gavin announced.

There was a collection of surf boards stashed on the veranda. Roger selected one for Zebedee to learn on. They headed for the beach bare foot wearing only their bathing trunks. They didn't bother to take towels or anything else apart from the surf boards.

At the beach Roger and Gavin instructed Zebedee in the basics. He managed to paddle out with them in line with the end of the South Beach pier. After two hours he had learnt to judge the velocity of the approaching wave and when to lie down on the board and start paddling like mad. When he could feel the sweeping wave lifting the board he learnt to raise his chest and lean forward so that his centre of gravity was displaced in a forward position away from the centre of the board. He experienced the excitement of the board sliding rapidly down the trough of the curling wave. Aiming the front of the board on the beach he managed to get into a kneeling position, and then a standing position as soon as the board slide out onto the flat water in front of the wave.

On the beach huddled under an umbrella, sitting on a beach towel were two figures that waved every now and then. Roger waved back. Zebedee realized that it was Alice and Vanessa, the girls they walked home, they had actually turned up in the rain to meet Roger and Zebedee.

The sky started to turn black, soon a strong wind began to whip up white spray from the tops of incoming swells and slanting sheets of pelting rain reduced the visibility so that they could hardly see the beach. When they got back to the beach Gavin decided to go back to the flat. He jogged bare foot with his surf board in the driving rain.

Roger and Zebedee run over to Alice and Vanessa. They were standing under the umbrella with the large towel rapped around their shoulders. The umbrella was not large enough for all of them. Roger suggested that go and sit in under the shelters at the paddling pools across the road from North Beach. Carrying their surf boards Roger and Zebedee wearing only their bathing customs followed bare footed behind the teenage girls who were dressed in shorts that only just covered the bottom of their buttocks and loose hanging T-shirts.

"Don't you just dig this?" Roger said grinning exuberantly at Zebedee.

Alice who had brought the beach towel along gave it to Roger so that they could dry themselves. Roger shook the sand from towel and after drying himself he handed the towel to Zebedee.

Alice and Roger cuddled up to keep warm.

Zebedee sat down on the hard bench beneath the shelter, wrapping his arms across his chest in a self-embrace to try and keep warm. His arms and legs were cover in goose bumps.

"Shame you look so miserable and cold," Vanessa said as she slid across the seat and snuggled tightly against him and put her arm around his back. He had been caught completely off guard. He felt that he couldn't pull away from her or disentangle himself. He felt obliged to reciprocate so he slipped his arm around her waist had held her warm body against his. Feeling her pressed so intimately against him felt actually quite pleasant. With Vanessa all the signs were there, he realized that he was on the edge of a very slippery slope. The thought crossed his mind that Roger was right about Vanessa. He found himself holding her hand while she rested her head against his shoulder.

A bunch of teenager surfers with their female on-hangers also arrived out of the rain and took advantage of the cover under the shelters. Everybody knew everybody. Zebedee was the foreign visitor.

"Hey what are you doing tonight," Roger asked.

"I got no plans," Alice answered.

"And you Vanessa," Roger asked.

"I'm not doing anything," Vanessa.

"Would you like to go to the drive-in with us tonight," he asked

"I suppose so, what about you Vanessa, will you be able to go," Alice answered.

"I suppose so," Vanessa said.

"Hey man that's great, we will pick you up outside the block of flats at 6.30 tonight," Roger said.

When the rain stopped, they bid the girls farewell until later and headed back to Gavin's flat for a shower and lunch.

"Why are looking so glum," Roger asked.

"I feel trapped, everything is happening too fast, I feel like I am on a roller coaster, things are getting out of control," Zebedee said.

"This does not sound like you. Don't you like Vanessa, she is a stunning chick?" he asked.

"I agree she is very attractive, I like her," Zebedee said.

"Then what is your problem. It is going to be a huge let down for all of us if you pull out now. She will be incredibly disappointed. She will be hurt. It will be a kind of humiliation for her. She has been reaching out to you. She has made it clear that she likes you. She just about climbed out of her chair last night to get on top of you, didn't you notice that. It took courage for her to snuggle up to you at the paddling pools. She really likes you, she is crazy about you. Look this is going to be our big night. I got FLs. They know score, they know that they are going get banged tonight. You can't pass up this opportunity, we may never get another chance like this ever again, and they hot chicks. I am telling you something now, and it is the truth, we only live once. This is IT. You will live to regret it if you don't fuck Vanessa tonight, you will wonder for the rest of your life what it would have been like to bang her, to feel her tits, to stick your hand between her legs and to put your forefinger up her hot vagina before you fuck her. It will haunt you, it will nag you forever. You will forever wonder about what you missed out on. It will bug you. It will eat away at you. You will wonder and think with regret about Vanessa for the rest of your life. If you bang her you will live with the pleasant memory of that experience for the rest of your life. It will be a special memory that you will treasure for ever. In the darkest moments you will think of Vanessa and that special night, and that memory will help you get through the darkest moments of your life. She will always be a special person to you. Gavin has agreed that we can use his VW Kombi, so you don't have to be shy, you can sit right at the back and I will be in front seat, no one will see anything, it will be nice and private like. They not virgins, they know the score, they are looking forward to being banged, they are looking forward in anticipation to what we are going to do with them. Truth is that when it comes to sex they no different from us guys, girls also want to have fun, they want to be kissed, sucked, fondled, handled and fingered, and fucked," Roger said.

"Don't look so shocked. They not virgins, they have been sexually active before, they are experienced girls, they know the score, they want sex just like us," Roger laughed.

"They were at the same high school that I went to. I know them from when they were in standard six. We even went to the same primary school. They were in standard eight when I was in matric. They have been going out with matric guys since they were in standard six. They also happen to be two of the hottest chicks in the school. You learn about what's going on with all the hot chicks at school. Guys always talk, there are no secrets when you are in high school, boys like to brag, and if a chick has been fucked sooner or later all the details will come out. I can assure that Alice and Vanessa are not _plaas meisies_ (farm girls) from the _platteland_ ," Roger said.

"Are you implying that they are whores?" Zebedee asked.

"No, of course not! They are normal girls, in the same way that we are normal boys. Someday someone will end up marrying them and everyone will live happily ever after. The sands of time will eventually bury all their secrets in an unmarked grave, no one will remember and no one will care, and whatever secrets that are living a shadowy existence in their minds will go to the grave when they eventually die, and the same so goes for everyone else, and in the end no one will be wiser, not their husband, not their children and not their grandchildren, they will be remembered as good and decent people. Both Alice and Vanessa will be remembered as good and decent people even if we bang them tonight. My advice to you is take whatever good things life offers you with thanks giving and gratitude and enjoy the ride, you may never have the chance again," Roger said.

"You say all these things about how wonderful and special everything is going to be, but after a week I will never see her again. She is only sixteen years old. How do you know that she has had sex before? How do I know that it is not just malicious gossip, lies and exaggeration?" Zebedee asked.

"Believe me, Vanessa is not a virgin, she has had sex before, and she likes sex, believe me, I know about this kind of stuff, I have grown up in the same neighbourhood with girls like Vanessa all my life, we went to the same school, we went to the same parties, I know the score," Roger said.

He looked at Zebedee.

"So it is deal, you are coming with us with tonight. You are not going to let us down tonight. You will do your part?" Roger asked.

After lunch they walked down to the Dutchman's bookshop. They spent the whole afternoon browsing through the book shelves. Zebedee counted his money over several times. He wanted to have enough money over for the rest of the week to spent on movies and going out with Vanessa. According to Roger she was apparently going to be his first real girlfriend even if it was only going to last for one blissful week. He decided to take Rogers advice and enjoy with humility, gratitude and profound thanksgiving all the physical, erotic and sensual gifts of nature that Vanessa would unselfishly and generously offer for his pleasure in his short relationship with her. He was going to allow himself to slide down that slippery slope to wherever it may take him. As Roger advised, we only live once and we need to avoid living a life filled with regrets.

In the end he divided his money between the books and Vanessa, the greater proportion going to Vanessa. He selected the books that were of absolute priority for the life of a budding Communist. Many of them were second hand and were priced quite cheaply. The books he could afford he carried to counter. They included the following works by Karl Marx: The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, The German Ideology, Grundrisse and Das Kapital. He also found Fredrick Engel's Anti-Dühring. A very attractive Coloured woman smiled brightly when she saw the titles of Zebedee's purchase. With a flourish of enthusiasm for the coming revolution she rang up the bill on the till. Zebedee counted out crisp notes from his wallet; money that he had been saving up which he had received as his monthly pay as a national serviceman in the SADF with the rank of corporal.

With a radiant smile and sparkling eyes filled with humour she said: "Enjoy your reading comrade," and presented him with the plastic packet into which the books had been packed.

"Do you perhaps have The Communist Manifesto," Roger asked.

She raised her right eyebrow as she cautiously looked at Roger.

"Are you interested in purchasing a copy?" She asked.

"Not me personally, but I think Zebedee would be interested."

She looked at Zebedee.

"It depends on the price?" Zebedee said.

"You can have a copy for R 1.20. It comes in the book Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. Selected Works In One Volume. It is quite a nice book issued by Lawrence and Wishart, printed in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics by Progress Publishers. The book also includes Engel's The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State."

When she went to get a copy of the book Roger whispered into Zebedee's ear that the Coloured woman was Mr Zomer's mistress. They were living together illegally.

Zebedee bought the book.

Roger then paid for the books he had bought which included Friedrich Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals, Twilight of Idols, Beyond Good and Evil and The Gay Science.

When they returned Gavin's flat they found Avinashika busy working at the dining room table.

"Been shopping?" She inquired when she saw their plastic bags stuffed with books.

"Yup we have?" Roger confirmed.

She was curious, so they showed her the books. After looking at their books their conversation eventually turned to the prospects for revolution in South Africa.

"Most of the revolutionary cadres have come from the more literate and educated nascent black middle class based in the locations. One would have expected a peasant uprising or at least an uprising of farm labourers but it has not materialized and there is little prospect of it ever materializing in South Africa. The destruction of the African peasantry in South Africa as an organic cohesive class has been total, making its revolutionary organization impossible. Its destructive annihilation by the Boer-English political alliance following the Boer War resulted in both cultural genocide and real material dispossession that had catastrophic consequences for the rural African population in South Africa. A once vibrant peasant community of producers was destroyed and transformed into an impoverished class of wage slaves to be exploited by a post-Boer War class of land owners that was made possible through the 1913 land act. The eventual economic and political dividends of the Boer War for the Afrikaner were actually quite huge and more than compensated them for all the losses they may have suffered. In fact after the Boer War they were rewarded with full political and economic benefits that flowed from their alliance with Britain against the Africans. This made it possible for them to restructure the political economy of South Africa. Following the restructuring of the South African political economy and its ruling class alliances the Afrikaner capitalist elite emerged as the political and economic masters of South Africa. Afrikaner capital in alliance with English capital engineered the system of Apartheid. Apartheid has been used as the instrument for the consolidation of the class interests of the capitalists through the universal disenfranchisement and proletarianization of the African people. A long road lays ahead for the revolutionary struggle of the African people. The class war needs be conducted on multiple fronts, using multiple strategies, involving multiple means, including armed struggle as one of the means," she explained.

The phone rang, interrupting Avinashika exposition of the revolutionary prospects for South Africa. She answered the phone, after putting the receiver down she announced that she had to go somewhere. Before she left her parting shot was:

"It is a fundamental white racist belief in South Africa that the so-called Communist threat to Apartheid is somehow external, coming from outside of South Africa. This belief is based on the false perception that blacks are incapable of thinking for themselves, that blacks are incapable of deciding anything for themselves, that blacks are incapable of initiating and pursuing their own struggle for political liberation, and that blacks are just passive puppets who can be manipulated by the Russians who wish to impose Communism on South Africa. "

While Zebedee waited to use the shower he began reading the Communist Manifesto

...The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.

Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master‡ and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.

In the earlier epochs of history, we find almost everywhere a complicated arrangement of society into various orders, a manifold gradation of social rank. In ancient Rome we have patricians, knights, plebeians, slaves; in the Middle Ages, feudal lords, vassals, guild-masters, journeymen, apprentices, serfs; in almost all of these classes, again, subordinate gradations.

The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones..........

"Hey Zeb I'm finished," Roger called out.

He put the book down on the sofa and got up to go shave and shower. As Zebedee showered he reflected over the events of the past 24 hours. It seemed that today had all the makings of a red letter day, a day of special significance in his life. He had learnt to surf, he made an intellectual and moral commitment to Marxism, especially after listening to Avinashika, and he had also more or less promised Roger that he would do what was expected of him and bang Vanessa later that night.

Chapter 13

He wondered what kind of morality applied to his situation. How could he act morally? Everything was upside down. He was under moral pressure not to let Vanessa down with regard to what she wanted. But did she really want to have sex with him? Were Alice and Vanessa really sex mad nymphomaniacs as Roger would have him believe, or was it Rogers's untested opinion that when it came to premarital sex girls wanted it just as much boys.

Both Roger and Karl did not have any problems with the ethical acceptability and moral condonation of pre-marital sex. For them it was perfectly moral. Somehow they had become inadvertently illegitimate offspring of a foreign counter culture that had barely rippled onto the shores of South Africa which had become a remote and isolated back-water of the modern Western World. They had been intellectually, culturally and socially influenced by the great American Novel, by rock music and by the 1960s avante-gard films like Easy Rider. They were both free-spirits who were also highly intelligent, extremely passionate and reckless adventurers.

Letting go of all his reservations, Zebedee was beginning to look forward in anticipation to their drive-in excursion into what may turn out to be his first taste of paradise on earth. In his own mind pre-marital sex was not morally inconsistent with his decision to become a Communist. It was his decision, he had made it. It was going to be his personal moral journey and he had made the first step on the road to become a revolutionary by becoming a student of the writings of Karl Marx.

Ironically it was the anti-Communist and counter-insurgency lectures that they were given during basic training that had stimulated his positive interest in Communism.

*******

Catarina had always been the favourite niece of her father's two eccentric brothers, one was a Jesuit Catholic priest in Luanda and the other a civil servant also living in Luanda who was a die-hard Communist and member of the _Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola._

Soaking in the sun while lying on his back on the towel cushioned by the lush wiry grass that covered the banks of the river channel he listened to Catarina as she chattered incessantly, enjoying the pleasant rich cadence of her Portuguese flavoured English accent, and observing how her expressive large brown eyes accentuated and reinforced the views she seemed to hold so firmly.

He closed his eyes as he tried to visualize the magical city of Luanda that she had described so vividly. In his imagination the city of Luanda began to take form, as a fabulous and exotic tropical hybridization of Lourenco Marques and Durban.

"You won't believe it but it is true, compared to Durban, Luanda is actually a very sophisticated modern cosmopolitan city, it has both old and new buildings. There are many tall sky scrapers overlooking the bay. And the old buildings are so beautiful. I love the traditional rose-pink Portuguese architecture of the old buildings. Luanda is alive like no other city in the world; it throbs with intellectual and cultural energy. There are so many restaurants, dance clubs, night clubs and music clubs. Then there is the beautiful marginal, it is a wide boulevard lined with very tall palm trees that touch the stars at night. The marginal boulevard makes a long wide sweeping curve that hugs Luanda Bay in a tight tropical embrace. Luanda is so vibrant compared to Johannesburg. You can never be lonely in Luanda; it is not like other cities. It is romantic there. When night time comes after supper everyone leave their apartments to socialize in the streets. All the pavement cafés are crowded with people until late at night. It is like this every night in Luanda. In South Africa, after five o' clock the towns become graveyards. In South Africa everyone sits in their houses at night behind locked doors waiting for the morning to come. South Africans are the most boring people in the world. They never ever smile, they are always rude and grumpy, and they always walk around with their faces in a dark scowl."

"In Angola there is no Apartheid. All the racial discriminatory laws have been abolished. My uncle is married to a _mestiço_ woman who is now my aunt. In fact Luanda used to be a _mestiço_ city until the 1940s."

She spoke enthusiastically of Angola. He learnt that from a small settlement first founded 500 years ago on the shores of Luanda Bay there arose from the sandy infertile lowlands that surrounded the bay a Euro-African city called Luanda. As a colonial city it slowly underwent an inner socio-cultural-economic division that resulted in the separation of the city centre called the Baixa from the townships known as the _Musseques_ , which had sprung up on the surrounding slopes above the _Baixa_. The inner city grew vertically while the surrounding _Musseques_ spread out growing horizontally.

As she spoke Zebedee could hear in her voice the echo of her Communist uncle's voice which lived in her thoughts, and which found life in the speech that flowed from her lips.

She lay down on her back and closed her eyes against the glare of the sun. The glare was intense even for closed eyes. She grabbed her straw and covered her face with it. Zebedee gazed at her body while she lay silently for a few minutes baking in the sun. She had a skin that did not burn. It just got darker, from caramel to brown. By tomorrow she would be mistaken for a coloured, for a beautiful _mestiço_ woman from the _Musseques_ , from the non-white location that crept up the slopes rising above the _Baixa_ of Luanda in Angola.

After a while she turned over onto her side, resting on her elbow facing him. She put her hat on and smiled at him. It was unmistakeably a flirtatious smile. Also a smile that indicated she was privy to things he could only guess.

"I like your mother very much. We have become great friends. When she heard that we had horses on our farm in Angola she asked if I would be interested in helping out at the stables. She asked if I would like to help with the exercising of the racehorses. She knows so much about horses. I have always loved horses since as I was a little girl," she said.

Zebedee looked at her. The time had gone by so quickly. He glanced at this watch. It was only eleven o' clock. The sun was already high in the sky.

******

Roger stopped at the robot while waiting for the light to turn green he said in matter of fact manner:

"I got some condoms just in case they are not on the pill. It would great if they are on the pill. They should anyway be seeing a gynaecologist or GP for regular check-ups. Women have to be regularly checked up down there where you know. A lot of stuff can go wrong with their vaginas or fallopian tubes or ovaries or uterus. Women are full of tubes which can become all jammed up and congested or even cancerous."

The lights turned green.

Roger knew that Zebedee was a virgin with no sexual experience, so he felt that he needed to explain a few things to Zebedee.

"I don't mean to offend you but there is lot stuff you have to know when you plan to bang a girl. You can't just shove your cock up her vagina without first going through all the necessary preliminaries," Roger said with a comical boyish grin on his face and a humorous twinkle in eyes.

Taking his eye of the road for a second, he looked at Zebedee. Zebedee just shook his head in disbelief at what he was hearing.

He looked at Roger and said in a mildly irritated tone of voice:

"I actually know a lot about sex."

Roger burst out laughing. It was good-natured laughter, laughter which was infectious; it brought a smile to Zebedee's face.

"Hey my china I'm just trying to be a buddy," he said.

Even with no first hand sexual experience with girls there was very little that Zebedee did not know about the theory of sex and the practical dynamics involved in the execution of the sex act. He seen stallions mount, penetrate and inseminate mares on heat. He seen the Friesland bull mount, penetrate and inseminate cows on heat. Before Jennifer acquired the Friesland bull he watched as the Vet carried out countless artificial inseminations on cows, sticking his forearm up the cow's vagina.

Often with his forearm up a cow's vagina while maintaining a deadpan expression on his face the Vet explained to a young adolescent Zebedee many of the biological and evolutions facts surrounding the profound intricacies of sexual reproduction in the animal kingdom.

Zebedee was surprised to learn that the male penis was one of the important adaptations that made the conquest of dry land possible. Without the male penis animals would never have made the great evolutionary leap from the aquatic environment to the harsh and unforgiving terrestrial environment.

Invasion and colonization of the terrestrial environment by both invertebrate and vertebrate animals required the evolution of the male intromission organ or copulatory organ which could be inserted into the female body via a channel that functioned as a receptacle for the sperm. Internal insemination of the female by a terrestrial non-amphibian vertebrate male animal eliminated the reliance of water which was essential for external fertilization in non-reptilian or non-mammalian vertebrates such as most fish and most amphibians. Only a few birds had evolved intromission organs that could facilitate direct penetrative internal insemination of females.

The Vet explained to Zebedee with the unbiased cold clinical humourless objectively of the trained scientist that the evolution of the male mammalian intromittent inseminatory organ also required the evolution of a strong incentive to copulate. If insertion of the intromittent inseminatory organ into the vagina did not result is some kind of pleasurable reward then there would be no incentive or motivation for males to go through the dangerous and tiresome contests of courtship and strenuous physical efforts that necessarily preceded actual copulation. And with nature always being cost conscious the cheapest possible reward it could offer the two partners involved in the act of copulation was the orgasm.

Yes, the Vet said that an orgasm was a pretty cheap payback for the all effort it takes to fertilize an egg.

Why would any male animal show any interest in mounting a receptive female if there was no reward to be derived from the exercise? Also, surely, an incentive to allow her vagina to be penetrated by males of the same species had to also evolve once dry land had been conquered by the chordates. Copulation as a process for the perpetuation of the species had to be driven by a system of incentives and rewards. The orgasm was the reward for any animal that took the trouble to have sex.

Of course cross-species mating was always a risk in nature the Vet had said as an afterthought. The evolution of a species recognition system was necessary to avoid the wasteful expenditure of energy and semen on infertile cross-species mating.

Zebedee was not going to let Roger off lightly.

"You must think that I a complete dimwit, an idiot, a simple farm boy or something," he said.

"No, No, don't get me wrong. I am not the kind of guy that takes anything for granted in these matters. All I am saying don't rush things, take it step for step, and communicate with her. Tell her that she is beautiful, that she smells wonderful, that she has amazing breasts, that her legs feel wonderful and silky, let her know that she is desirable and all that kind of stuff, women want to hear that kind of stuff,"

"OK, OK.....that is enough, I get the picture, if I get stuck on any of the steps I will call out and ask you what I must do next," Zebedee said in an impatient tone.

Zebedee was not sure whether to take everything that Roger said at face value. There were doubts in his mind about whether things were actually going to turnout as Roger predicted. Maybe he had completely misread everything. Maybe being banged to night was the last thing the girls had on their minds. Maybe they did not suspect that there were other ulterior motives behind the invitation to go to the drive-in with the two sex-starved 18 and 19 year old boys bursting with hormones. Maybe they did not in fact know what the score was. There were a lot of maybes to consider. Maybe he had taken the bait hook line and sinker. Maybe he was being completely gullible in believing everything that Roger had said. Maybe Roger was a con artist, a master of persuasion; maybe he was just talking bullshit.

Zebedee also considered the possibility that he did not really know Roger, maybe he knew nothing about Roger even after being with him 24 hours day 7 days a week for months on end on the shores of Lake Sibaya. Maybe Roger was completely out of touch with reality. There were so many maybes.

"Calm down Zeb, I just want to make sure that you know what the score is, this is IT, this is the ONE, this is what it is all about, this is Cosmic, we are experiencing the heart throb of the Universe, the fecundity of the Cosmos, this is the essence of LIFE, the emergence of man from the warm pool of slime, man evolving from the worm, standing up on two legs for the first time with a glorious erection as he surveys his dominion. Hey man I am really starting to feel so bloody horny; I am as randy as a dog after a bitch on heat. I have a constant hard on," Roger said.

Zebedee always felt amused when Roger began to talk like one of the characters in a Jack Kerouac novel.

Zebedee could not help feeling both excited and doubtful at the same time. He too was unable to control his own huge hard on.

"Hell I hope they not menstruating. That would be disaster. It would mean that we would have to abort the mission. Can you just imagine what an anti-climax that be, what a total let down it be? Wow, I couldn't handle it. We may as well just take them for a milk shake at the Cuban Hat and go back to the flat and read _Das Kapital_. Let's just pray that they are not having their periods," Roger said.

On the way to fetch the girls Zebedee examined the banal looking little box containing three condoms that Roger had given him. On the box were the words: Three ultra-thin walled condoms lubricated for extra sensitivity. He opened the box and took one of the condoms out. It was in a plain silver wrapper.

Zebedee slipped the box into the back pocket of his Levis. When Roger and Zebedee arrived in the VW Kombi at the block of flats Alice and Vanessa were waiting on the pavement outside the main entrance to the foyer of the block of flats. Alice wore rayon-nylon light pastel blue square neck sleeveless tank and a short white mini skirt. Vanessa wore a bright red rayon-nylon square necked sleeveless tank top and a short clinging black mini-skirt made from stretch material with the hemline barely covering her thighs. They wore leather sandals and were carrying clutch hand bags. Their shapely tanned legs looked smooth and silky. Vanessa had tied back her thick full bodied glossy dark brown hair back and woven her long locks into a thick plait with little tuft at the end. She was fortunate to have a flawless healthy complexion.

Zebedee slide the back door open and climbed out, he lifted and the adjusted seat by the door so that Vanessa could get past the front seats to the seat at the back. He climbed back in, slide the door closed, she pressed her legs together and moved them against the seat so that he slip past her and sit on her right hand. As he sat down next to Vanessa he felt her thigh pressing against his own thigh. The fullness of her embodied presence was overpowering. His heart started pounding uncontrollably. His state of arousal soared to giddy heights as the erotic fragrance of Vanessa's bouquet of moisturizing cream, shampoo and perfume tingled in his nose. He took her hand and kissed her on the cheek. He became super aware of the mounds of her breasts and the curvaceous contours of her body, the sound of her voice, the texture of her skin, the temperature of her body and her fragrance.

He realized that it was the senses that made a person feel alive. He felt alive sitting next to Vanessa. Her presence made him feel alive in way that he had never experienced before. Life was tasting flavours, smelling a fragrances, feeling textures, feeling temperatures, seeing colours, hearing sounds, all of this makes a person feel alive in the most palpable way possible.

"You look absolutely divine," he whispered in her ear. She squeezed his hand in response.

_Love Story_ based on the book by Eric Segal was showing at the drive-in.

After paying for the tickets Roger drove the Kombi to the empty row at the back of the drive-in movie theatre. He wound down his window and reached over to unhook the metal speaker box from the post. He hooked the speaker on the inside of his window and then wound up the window thereby clamping the speaker against the side window of the cab.

"Have you read the book?" Vanessa asked as they waited for the movie to start.

"Can't say I have," Roger muttered in a disinterested tone of voice.

"Well I read the book, it was so moving and so sad that I cried," Vanessa continued.

The projector room began to pipe music through the speakers as entertainment before the showing the forthcoming attractions.

The melodies of John Lennon's _Let it be_ began to filter into combi.

Zebedee put his arm round Vanessa's shoulders and hugged her affectionately. She smiled, her eyes shone brightly in the rapidly fading light as she turned her face towards Zebedee so that he could kiss her.

Vanessa worked magic with her tongue in Zebedee's mouth; she could the feel tremor of excitement and pleasure vibrating through his body as she probed his mouth with her flickering tongue. She chuckled softy and whispered in his ear

"Do you like my tongue in your mouth?" she asked.

"Yes," he whispered back.

"You also taste amazing," he added

"Can you really taste me?" she whispered.

"I can taste your lips, your tongue, and your mouth. You taste so wonderful," he said.

"Do you want eat me up?" she asked

"Yes. I want to devour you," he said.

They continued to smooch as John Lennon's _Image_ started to play.

He placed his hand on her bare thigh.

Vanessa was the third girl who had walked seemly inadvertently or contingently into his life. He had never directly approached a girl romantically in his life. In his first two short school romances both girls had initiated the relationship a romantic relation with him, both of which left him devastated and depressed for days on end when they broke up with him. And now he was with Vanessa who was everything one could imagine in a girl. She was sweet, lovely, warm, intelligent, exquisitely sexy, sluttish, compassionate, affectionate, stunningly beautiful, witty, sensual, erotic and wanton.

The movie had started, but they did not come to watch _Love Story_.

He wondered: 'Was this the girl for him?'

Sensing something, she whispered to him in the dark.

"What are you thinking?"

"I am thinking that it is so nice to be with you," he whispered.

"I am glad, it is also nice to be with you," she said as she snuggled close to him and kissed him on the cheek.

He felt himself being bathed in the warmth of her affectionate intimacy; it was a new experience for him.

They also began to hear muffled moans and grasps coming from Alice in the front. Vanessa started giggling; she wanted to burst out laughing and held her hand tightly over her mouth. In the dark she laughed with her eyes until her eyes filled with tears and the tears began to roll freely smudging her eye shadow and makeup, eventually she managed to control herself.

At intermission Roger suggested that he and Zebedee go buy popcorn and cool drinks. At the toilet while peeing next to Zebedee he shook his head. He looked frustrated.

"Alice is being quite selfish. I had my two fingers up her vagina and my thumb was working her clitoris until the joints ached. Did you hear her panting, gasping and moaning, she was having such a massive orgasm that she almost passed out. I am telling you she is insatiable, but she is completely selfish, she only thinks of her own pleasure. When I was getting ready to bang her, struggling to undo my fly, struggling to roll the condom onto my cock with my left hand, while keeping her happy with my right hand, she suddenly tells me when I am all worked up and ready to go that she does not want to fuck. Suddenly like a bolt out of the blue it is no longer private enough in the Kombi for fucking. Can you believe it? It is not private enough! She suddenly feels too awkward with you two guys sitting in the back listening in on what's going on in the front, she is of one those girls who make a lot of noise while they are being banged."

"But I have a plan B in mind, you always have to be one step ahead with contingency plans. So when the show ends we can first drive to the Cuban Hat for milk shakes. I will suggest that we go for a walk on the beach. If you want to you can support the idea by saying 'wow that is great idea, I love walking on the beach at night.' I have a great spot in mind. There are some blankets in the back of the Kombi we take can blankets with us and we will meet back at the Kombi later on, you must just walk ahead of us, I will tell Alice that you and Vanessa want to be alone and we should respect your feelings and your need for some privacy, then I will find a spot where I can finally fuck Alice, hell I can't believe it, she can be such a bitch if she wants too be, she knows that I am all revved up and that I want to _pomp_ her, she must be getting some sadistic delight out of stringing me along like this, I never met such a selfish and inconsiderate person in all my life. I know how her mind works," Roger said.

Chapter 14

After the Cuban Hat roadhouse Roger drove north until he spotted a sign indicating the turn-off for beach that had been reserved for Coloureds and Indians.'

'I have never been here before?" Vanessa said as they drove down the gravel road. A couple of cars and bakkies were parked in the parking area in front of what looked like a dimly lit restaurant at the edge of the beach.

"Is that a really a restaurant," Alice asked.

'Yes it is kind of Indian steakhouse. I have been here before when I was still in Matric. I came with Gavin and all his radical university friends. It is not licensed but they do serve alcohol if you ask, but it is hellish expensive, you know like _shebeen_ prices," Roger said.

On the beach Roger stopped to tie his shoe lace. Zebedee took the hint and kept on walking. He heard Roger saying:

"I think they want to be alone."

Vanessa laughed.

"He is such a con man, a real shifty operator if there ever was one," she said so that only Zebedee could hear her.

In the inky pitch dark they soon lost sight of Roger and Alice. They were alone, surrounded by the sounds of crashing surf. In the distance they could only just make out the faint light of the Indian restaurant. They walked on and on passing a few shadowy figures of isolated fisherman standing quietly in the dark with their long surf rods and then it was only them, alone on a long stretch of open beach. Dark ill-defined vegetation covered dunes formed a solid impenetrable barrier that cut them off from roads and sugarcane farmlands.

They stood with their arms around each other's waist and gazed up at the brilliant Milky Way. A meteorite brief blazed overhead.

"It is such a beautiful night," Vanessa exclaimed as she inhaled the fresh sea breeze.

Zebedee spread out the blanket at the foot of a dune on a patch of open sand surrounded by Scaevola and creeping Ipomoea _. They lay on their backs gazing up at the night sky._

"Have you ever been with a girl before?" She asked

"No not really."

"I don't believe you," she answered, genuinely surprised.

"It is true. I have only had two girlfriends in my life. All we did was hold hands in the playground during break and steal a few furtive kisses, and that was all,"

"How can that be possible? I hope you don't mind me saying so but you could quite easily with very little effort get a girlfriend, any girl would fall for you."

"Maybe, but the circumstances in which I found myself were not that conducive for meeting girls and for having a meaningful relationship with a girlfriend."

"I don't understand?"

"I grew up and lived on a farm. It was impossible to socialize with anyone after school and on weekends. We also kept racehorses and with racing on Saturdays there was no time for anything else. Sunday we would be busy with the horses again. It just turned out that way. Maybe it was a blessing in disguise,"

"Why do you say that?"

"I did not form any strong bonds with any school friends. I was never really integrated into a peer group so I was not privy to all kinds of things, I also consequently moved outside the sphere of any group influence that would condition the way I perceived things. My thinking and perceptions were not shaped by the opinions and the pressures of a peer group. I suppose it helped me to be free to think my own thoughts about everything, it helped me be an individual," he said.

"So your mind was not polluted, contaminated and corrupted by any peer group or by any single individual like Roger for instance. He is the type who cannot stop talking about all kinds of salacious things about girls. Guys like him will give you the wrong idea about girls. If you spend too much time with guys like Roger you will start thinking like them, you will start seeing the world through their eyes and not through your own," she said.

"That's it. You hit the nail on the head. You are a clairvoyant or something like that. I know exactly what you getting at," he said.

"Now that you have mentioned it, it is precisely what I have been experiencing with Roger. He can have a polluting, contaminating and corrupting influence on a person," Zebedee admitted.

"Ha, ha, ha, Roger is so transparent. I can read his mind before he has even become conscious of his next thought. He is so predictable. His mind is so one track. We went to the same high school. He strutted around as if he was a Greek God. OK, I must admit, he is really good looking and he knows it. He has always been popular with the girls. He has always had a reputation for being a womanizer and all the girls still fall for him. He so incredibly charming, he will charm your panties off," she said.

"So you are still on school holidays next week," he asked.

"Yes I still have a whole week!"

"When do you go back to the army?"

"Next week Sunday night. Then I have August, September, November and part of December and I will be finished for good."

"What are you going to do next year?" she asked.

"I am not sure yet. I like farming, it is in my blood, so I think I will eventually end up being a farmer or maybe a Communist," he said.

"A Communist? Goodnight cowboy! Why on earth do you want to be a Communist? I have never ever heard of anyone wanting to be a Communist," she laughed.

"I don't even know what it means to be a Communist. You are a strange kettle of fish Mr Zebedee. Aren't the Russians supposed to be Communists? Isn't Communism supposed to be bad?" She asked.

"Maybe for some reason Communism has indeed failed in Russia, but that does negate the principles and goals of Communism. Christianity has also failed. It did not save the Jews from the holocaust; in fact the Jews were persecuted for hundreds of years by the Christians. There was the Roman Catholic inquisition. The Church did not stop slavery. Christians condoned slavery until recent times. But the point I am making is that while Christians failed to make the world a better place in the past it does not mean that Christianity is in itself bad. It is the same with Communism. Communism appears to have become a monumental 20th Century failure, but this does not rule out the possibility that in the future Communism can rise out of the ashes of failure and disaster and achieve its goals for the economic emancipation of mankind," he said.

"OK, I get your point, I will agree that maybe Communism could work sometime in the future. Do you believe God?" she asked.

"I do not see any compelling reason not to believe God. Even the fact of the Holocaust is insufficient reason for me not to believe in God," he said.

"I don't really care if you want to be a Communist, as long as you believe in God I am happy?" she said.

"Why do you say that?" He asked.

"I like you very much Zebedee. You can be a Communist but you must not give up your belief in God, I will even be a Communist with you as long as we can believe in God together," she said.

"What made you want to become a Communist?" She asked.

"It's the army that has made me see things differently. It has been the books I have been reading," he said.

"Does Roger know that you are a Communist?" she asked.

"Yes he does?"

"And what does he say?" she asked.

"He basically doesn't take anything seriously. He is not against Communism. I think he is just indifferent. Roger would be happy to be hippy or a beatnik or something like that. He is actually a rebel; maybe he even has anarchist tendencies. For him life must be a _jol_ (party all the time). But he is not stupid. He is actually quite bright," He said.

"But he is a rebel without a cause." She remarked.

He turned over from his back onto his elbow and looked at her. He could see she was smiling at him. Her eyes gleamed in the dark.

He bent over and kissed her. She put arm around his neck and kissed him back. He felt the surge of arousal in loins. Her tongue began to work. His moved his hand beneath her tank top and slide it under her bra. He felt her firm breasts in the palm of his hand.

When touched the animal becomes the animal electric.

Zebedee felt that his whole body had become electrified as he caressed and fondled her breasts.

"What did you say?" She asked.

"When touched the animal becomes electrified," he said.

She laughed as his hand roved over her body.

"What a strange thing to say Mr Zebedee, you are such a strange and adorable man, a Communist to boot, hey my cowboy," she chucked.

"Am I your cowboy?" he asked.

"Yeah, you are my cowboy, Mr Communist," she laughed.

When the skin is touched the tactile receptors sends electrical messages to the brain. Nerves carry the electric impulses that have been triggered into fleeting existence by the stimulation of tactile receptors. Electrical impulses moving as waves of electrical depolarization across nerve cell membranes travel at lightning speed along the super highway of the nervous system to secret and mysterious destinations that end within various centres of the brain, including the pleasure centres. An electrical storm explodes in the brain. The brain becomes electrified, lighting up like a flashing Christmas which enable the body to respond to touch or tactile pressure. Lips like finger tips also have a high density of tactile receptors, which is why it can be so pleasant to kiss someone or be kissed by someone. But not all touching or kissing is pleasant. It depends on who is doing the touching or kissing. It is important to be attracted to that person. Without even seeing the person, just the conscious awareness of the fact that it is the person you love who is doing the touching or the kissing is enough to create an emotional storm in the brain. Some of these centres in the brain that are stimulated by the nerves emanating from the touch receptors are the pleasure centres. Now the pleasure centres can only be activated if the individual knows the person who is doing the touching or kissing and if that person is the one that the individual is are attracted to.

This person is usually the one that an individual happens to like or love. So it only the touch or kiss of the person that one is attracted too that will cause the nerves emanating from the tactile receptors to activate the brain's pleasure centres. No one else can do this. It has the one.

This is what makes the touching and kissing pleasurable. Humans are wired up for pleasure; there is no doubt about that. But the creation of the sensation of pleasure depends strongly on whether or not one happens to be attracted to the person who is exerting the tactile pressure on one's skin. An individual must be able to know that it is the person that he or she is attracted to, and not someone else. Conscious awareness of the presence of that person sensitizes the sense organs. Pleasurable sensations involving the coordination and cooperation between the brain's visual and touch centres only arise once an individual becomes consciously aware of the person that he or she is attracted to.

"You can make love to me if you want to," she said softly with a gentle smile on her face.

"I want to, but I must warn you, I may fall in love with you," he said

"I like that; I could live with that possibility, maybe I have already fallen in love with you, have you thought about that, " she said and then laughed.

She sat up and loosened her bra and then she pulled off her panties, hiked up her short skirt above her hips. She pulled her top off over her head. His hand roved over her body touching her everywhere.

"Take off your shoes and jeans," she said.

She helped him pull of his shirt. Her hand slid down and she grasped his swollen and erect penis tightly in her hand.

They pressed the lips together.

He finally put his hand on her vulva, sliding his fingers into her wet crevice. She gasped immediately at the rush of pleasure she felt. Following Roger's advice he felt around with his figure and discovered the entrance to her vagina. He could not resistance his curiosity and gently pushed his fore finger into the interior of her vagina. She began to moan with pleasure moving her hips, pelvis and legs.

When she was ready he felt for the box of condoms.

"You don't need to use a condom, I am on the pill, thanks to my older sister who has been like a mother to me, she has always looked out for me, you don't want to wear a condom when it is going to be your very first time, anyway I don't like condoms," she said.

He mounted her and began to thrust.

He felt the shape of her firm breasts, he felt her cool, smooth, soft, satiny, silky her skin, he listened to her soft breathless gasps and sweet moans of pleasure as she climaxed with her thighs camped tightly round his body, he smelt the erotically fragrance of her perfume as she writhed beneath him in orgasmic convulsions, he smelt the bouquet of her hair shampoo, he smelt the vanilla aroma of her breath, he tasted the sweet vanilla flavour of her lips, tongue and mouth.

"You must let yourself come, bring yourself to a climax," she whispered urgently. He let himself go, she heard him grasp in surprise at the intensity of his own orgasm and ejaculation.

"Wow that feels so nice," she said as she felt the powerful squirting of warm semen into her vagina.

Burning with the pleasant after-glow of sensual passion that followed their intense physical intimacy he discovered for the first time the magic and mystery of erotic perception. In the heat of love his sensory awareness of Vanessa had been aroused to heights that were sublime in their intensity. For the first time he became acquainted with the exquisitely pleasurable immediacy of erotic sensations stimulated by the touching and feeling of sensitive finger tips running over, pressing, gasping, fondling, stroking, squeezing and caressing the firm and smooth surfaces of breasts and thighs. He felt the pleasurable erotic sensations that were mysteriously and magically stimulated by the hearing of a sound, by the tasting of a flavour, by the scent of a fragrance, by the sight of a body that was shapely, lithe and beautifully moldered.

To see a colour, to see a shape, to hear a sound, to taste a flavour, to smell a fragrance, to feel a shape, to feel the cool, smooth, soft, satiny, silky surface of skin, to feel the moist warm luxurious interiors of the Vanessa's body, was to become consciously aware of sensations that were pleasurable beyond imagination.

They lay in each other arms.

"We must not fall asleep now," she laughed.

"Don't worry I am wide awake," he laughed.

"You went so quiet that for a moment that I thought you had fallen asleep. Is everything OK," she asked.

"Everything is perfect. It could not get better than this. I don't want this to end," he said.

He lay holding her, enjoying the pleasant tangible immediacy of her naked body pressing tightly against his.

"So this was your first time," she asked.

"Yes."

"Was it nice?" she asked smiling.

"It was wonderful, it was perfect," he said.

"So you not disappointed?" She asked.

"No, it was exquisite, it was beautiful, like I said it was perfect, beyond imagination," he said.

"I am glad, that is how I wanted it to be for you," she said as she embraced him and hugged him tightly.

"And for you?" he asked.

"It was heaven on earth, it was incredibly special, I don't think I could ever be with anyone but you," she said.

"You must not say that," he said.

"Why not?" She responded.

"I don't know, it is frightening for me, I have only known you only for 24 hours, and I want to be with you forever, what will happen if this cannot be, what about the pain and the heart ache?" He asked.

"Let us not think about that, let things just be, we still have the whole week ahead of us, I am yours right now, it that not enough?" She asked him.

"It is enough," he answered.

"We better get dressed and go back to the car park," she said.

"Vanessa, I need to tell you something."

"Yes, what is it."

"I just want you to know that I like you very much."

"I like you too."

On the way back as they drew closer to the Indian Restaurant they recognized the shape and form of Roger and Alice. They were in an exuberant mood like new lovers.

"I don't know about you guys but both of us are famished. We have checked out the Restaurant they still open," Roger said.

They ordered rump steaks and chips and a round of Black Label beer. Except for what appeared to be group of Indian businessmen having dinner they were the only other patrons in the establishment.

In days and nights that rolled by Zebedee and Vanessa lived each moment as if it were their last. The lived each finite day like two people intoxicated with each other. They cavorted through the passing of each moment as if time no longer existed. From the fresh skies of sunrise to the lingering hour of midnight they clung to each other with an affection and love that seemed to be inexhaustible. It felt as if they could defy the power of death to separate them.

Walking along the Durban marine parade arm in arm she suddenly confessed:

"I love you Zebedee. I have fallen in love with you. I never expected that things would turn out like this between us. I cannot bear the thought that you will soon be gone, I fear that it will be forever," she said.

"I love you too. It does not have end when I leave," he said.

"I know you love me, you don't have to tell me," she laughed.

"There are moments in life when you realize that maybe; just maybe, you may have actually found true love. I know this sounds corny and also dangerous, and it may be something that should best be left unsaid. But then again you may have met the person who will always be your one and only true love forever," she said.

"Forever is a very long time," he said.

"I know, but sometimes you get this feeling that you could love someone for ever, for all eternity," she said.

"Do you think the love between two people should be forever?" He asked.

"I would like to believe that," she said.

He suggested that after he had _klaared uit_ that he could come to Durban for the Christmas period or alternatively she could come up and stay on the farm for the holidays. He offered to pay for her train ticket to Heidelberg or Germiston Station. They discussed the possibility that he could move to Durban and find a job in Durban. Or alternatively she could spend her school holidays on the farm until she matriculated and then she could move to the farm. Jennifer could give her a job or she could work in Germiston. There was the railway bus that travels daily, morning and afternoon, between Germiston and Heidelberg. She could easily find a job in the Germiston CBD. There was a spare bedroom at the farm so her accommodation would not be a problem. So all in all they would only be apart until December and then they will be reunited again for forever. When she matriculated she would be 17 turning 18 and he would be 20. While he did not talk about it, in his mind the thought crossed his mind that they could get married in two years' time.

After their chat her spirits picked up, there was now a tacit agreement between them that they would be together come what may. The next day the penultimate day of Zebedee's leave her mood was exuberant.

She held Zebedee tightly:

"I think I can love you forever, I want to be with you until I die," she said earnestly, her eyes filled with the emotion intensity of someone deeply in love.

But like an incoming tide the insatiable appetite of the future devoured the moments they spent together, consigning each one of them to an afterlife in which they could only exist as thin shadows in the dim twilight of fading memories. Right until the last day they lived as if their love would last for all eternity.

On the last night before Zebedee's had to leave, after a long walk along the beach, they made love under stars with the sound of the surf crashing onto the beach. They made love at their regular secluded spot, the spot which they visited each night. They fell asleep on the beach with her head resting on his forearm as a pillow and with his other arm wrapped around her breast, holding her tightly against his body.

When they woke the tide was already going out. Zebedee glanced up at the night sky. The stars had not stopped their march across the sky chasing after the sun which was now blazing brightly over the beaches of Rio de Janeiro. Vanessa felt Zebedee stirring and she woke up.

"What time is it?" She asked in a drowsy voice before she yawned.

It was two o' clock in the morning. He was concerned that she would get into trouble for being out so late.

"It does not matter, my parents don't really care. Anyway I have keys to the flat," she said as sat up, yawned and stretched her arms.

"What time does your train leave tomorrow?"

"It leaves at five o clock in the afternoon."

******

A tearful Vanessa was finally forced to release her beloved Zebedee as he bordered the train at the last moment when the conductor blew the final whistle for the train's departure to Ladysmith. His seven day pass had come to end which included two weekends giving him a total of 11 days with Vanessa. They had exchanged their postal addresses. They promised to write to each other every day. She promised she would wait for him no matter what. Roger and Zebedee leaning out the coach window waved at Alice and Vanessa who stood on the platform. As the train started to move Karl came sprinting along the platform, Roger and Zebedee pulled him through the open window into their compartment. Vanessa stood on the platform waving back at them until the train disappeared.

Chapter 15

As the train chugged off to Pinetown Roger sprawled himself out like a lord on one of the green padded leather seat in the compartment. Karl and Zebedee sat on the opposite seat.

"How was your holiday?" Zebedee asked Karl.

"Well I surfed almost every day and did some fishing, but I did not have much luck with girls, otherwise I worked on some ideas for novels," Karl said

"And how was your holiday?" Karl asked.

"Great, we screwed our brains out non-stop for 11 days, ask Zebedee if don't believe me," Roger said with a broad satisfied grin.

"Your _balsak_ weighs a ton," Roger quipped.

"Yeah, it is stuffed with books and stuff, I think I went a bit overboard," Karl laughed.

He unlocked the padlock, opened the top end of the bag and began to haul out books.

"I have also brought along a fishing rod and tackle, some more books to keep us busy and also two bottles of Tequila."

He unpacked the sections of his fishing rod, reel and fishing tackle.

From the bottom of the bag he retrieved a bundle. Carefully wrapped in his clean army nutria combat fatigues were two bottles of Tequila. Karl put the pile of books on the foldout table. Roger and Zebedee immediately began to examine the paperback book titles that Karl had brought along which included works by Albert Camus, Dostoevsky, Thomas Mann, Proust, Kafka, Balzac, Gogol, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett and Thomas Hardy.

"I tried to digest Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations, but I have to agree with John Locke that words symbolize ideas or stand for things or refer to objects, end of story. The word dog stands for a domestic canine mammal that has four legs, wags its tail and barks. When someone uses the word dog we have the capacity to form a picture of a dog in our minds. In our minds the word dog and the mental picture of a dog go together. Surely this is what is entailed in thinking. Thinking involves always thinking about something rather than nothing. Thinking must involve the relationship between words and mental pictures or thoughts or ideas. Our lives are filled with words and all kinds of mental pictures and thoughts that we can associate with those words. In way words are thoughts. If someone asked me what is a 'word' my answer would be a thought, words cannot exist without thoughts and may be thoughts cannot exist without words. We cannot say what we cannot think and we cannot think what we cannot say, Wittgenstein said something like this in his first book, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Our thoughts are often linked to the visualization or imagination or recollections of mental pictures or ideas. To communicate our thoughts, the stuff that is in our brains, we have to use words. In order to communicate what is in our minds we have translate or transform mental pictures, ideas and thoughts into words. Surely when we use words or sentences containing a string of words it is our intention to convey our mental pictures or thoughts to some listener or audience. Surely the same applies in the case of writing. In writing as in speech it is the intention of the writer to use written words to convey mental pictures or thoughts about stuff to the reader. In life we use words all the time, we cannot get by without words, just try and communicate what you think or what you want or need in a foreign country where you cannot speak or understand the local language. We use words and strings of words all the time to communicate mental pictures, thoughts and ideas. We are helpless if we cannot speak. Also, if we don't have a language which others can understand, then we can't think what we want to say about anything. What's more, when we use a string of words to convey a thought or a mental picture, the relative position of each word in the string of words, which we use to construct a sentence, has to be in the grammatically correct sequential order for the sentence to make any sense or express a meaningful statement. Language can only convey meaning if the grammatical rules are followed and if the words refer to meaningful objects or things or ideas or thoughts. But what is so really amazing about language is this: For a finite set of grammatical rules and a finite vocabulary of words an infinite, endless number of meaningful things can be said, in fact one could speak for all eternity until the Universe ends without ever exhausting what can be said about the various kinds of stuff that could fill a human head. And this goes for any language, English or Xitsonga. One could speak about anything under the sun until the cows come home in Xitsonga if you wanted," Karl explained with his eyes blazing with intense passion regarding what he was saying to Roger and Zebedee, as they sat silently flipping through the pages of the paperbacks in order to get a feel for stories in the novels.

"With words, spoken or written, we are able to transfer from our own minds, thoughts, ideas, feelings, sentiments, emotions, intentions, desires, fears, hopes, anxieties, commands, needs and mental pictures onto paper or into the minds of others, this capacity which we take for granted is actually quite an amazing feat if you come to think about it. If through the medium of written or spoken words new thoughts, ideas or mental images can be formed in our minds, then in a way our minds have an almost infinite capacity to undergo all kinds of changes related to the content of our thoughts. Just think, reading a book does something to your mind, it fills your mind with new images, ideas, feelings, emotions, desires, fears, hope, pictures and thoughts, which transform you, leaving you a changed person, with a head filled with new thoughts. After reading a book or listening to what someone has to say, you are no longer the same person because you have acquired new information that you did not have before," Karl went on.

"And having new information can change you in ways that you least expect," Karl added as an afterthought.

Roger and Zebedee looked up at Karl and both gave him a silent attentive look which indicated that they had assimilated everything that he had said and that they also agreed with every word that he had spoken.

Karl was not finished. They could see that he had a lot of stuff on his mind which he wanted to speak about.

"Have you ever wondered how grammar developed?" He asked.

"We take the rules of grammar for granted. We don't even think about it when communicating. We don't consciously reflect on the correct application of the rules of grammar when we speak or utter a sentence. Strings of words flow spontaneously from our mouths without any apparent effort or hesitation. It is true that we often speak before we think. The rules of grammar are fixed in our heads with all the vocabulary that we need to get by in life. In fact speech consists of a stream of words flowing from our minds through our mouths in some grammatically correct sequential order. And writing also consists of a stream of words flowing from minds through hands onto paper in some grammatically correct sequential order. Speech and writing are both similar and different. Speech dies in the moment of its birth and can only live a shadowy ghostly after life in the memory of the hearer, whereas writing becomes fixed into written symbols and thereby acquires a life of its own outside the mind and memory of both the author and reader, writing lives on in all its freshness, indefinitely and independently of memory, writing escapes the ravages of time, whereas memories fade and mutate, or are forgotten and then lost," Karl said.

"This is so mindboggling, thoughts originating from within our minds, flowing out from us as visual or audible streams of words, not just in any order but in a very specific and precise sequential order that is grammatically correct. How on earth did this capacity evolve in the first place and why? Writing came after speech, speech precedes writing, but the speech embodied in writing is inexhaustible," Roger said on reflection in response to what Karl had been speaking about.

"We take speech, writing and language for granted, as a capacity to create meaning it is all just there, like some unexplained brute fact of human life, most of the time we are not even conscious of the fact that we live and breathe in a universe filled with symbols and signs that refer to all kinds of entities," Karl said.

"Have you ever wondered how language evolved or why it emerged as a capacity or as an evolutionary adaptation in the first place?" Karl asked his two friends, now that he was on roll.

"Well it had to be firstly a biological and social adaptation that increased the ability of humans to survive and reproduce," Roger answered thoughtfully.

"Yes to reproduce! Language and speech evolved as a biological and social adaptation so that humans and their hominid ancestors could reproduce successfully, this is exactly what I wanted to get too," Karl replied enthusiastically.

"I did a bit of research. Like you said we can put together evolutionary theories on how and why it became possible for speech to evolve as an important adaptive capacity in man. It is obvious that being able to communicate ideas and thoughts through the medium of speech must have increased man's ability to survive, so we can assume that it was under strong positive evolutionary selection pressure. This is the reason why we find man having this capacity, the possession of language and linguistic ability, it actually increased the probability for survival and for generating progeny," Karl said.

He continued to expand on his response to Roger's hint that language was an important social adaptation, especially with respect to biological reproduction.

"Biological and social adaptation is the correct answer to the question why the capacity for speech evolved in the first place? That is a good hypothesis. Of course the capacity for speech and language must have emerged as a consequence of natural selection. It became fixed or conserved as a crucial evolutionary adaptation in hominids. It made the complex social existence of hominids possible. We do not doubt this, but we need explore all the facets associated with language acquisition as an evolutionary adaptation. For example, the capacity for speech and the capacity for complex thinking must have co-evolved together in a positive feedback reinforcement manner because we can't speak without simultaneously thinking and we cannot think what we cannot say. We cannot really speak or communicate meaningfully without simultaneously having meaningful thoughts and ideas. Surely language must have evolved reciprocally or interactively, in a positive feedback manner, with an expanding neurological capacity for self-conscious awareness, self-reflective awareness and communicative self-expression. Surely, there was a positive feedback relationship between this ever expanding hominid self-conscious and self-reflective conscious awareness and the drive or need to express or communicate the content of this internal self-conscious awareness to others, to third parties. What is really mind blogging is the fact that this capacity for speaking while simultaneously thinking at the same time was acquired contingently as an evolutionary adaptation by a process involving only the interactions between random genetic variation and natural selection," Karl speculated.

"I would agree with you that the neurological capacities for a conscious mind and language must have co-evolved, it makes perfect sense as a scientific hypothesis. I would also agree that language co-evolved with an expanding self-conscious awareness, and I would agree that language co-evolved with the need to communicate the contents of this expanding self-conscious awareness, because this communication would have great adaptive or survival value for our ancestral hominids," Roger said.

"There is something very significant and profound about the claim that in order for speech to be meaningful it is necessary that the temporal flow of words must occur in a specific sequential grammatical ordering. The same fact applies to the flow of words in writing and reading. The point of interest that I am making is that speech, writing and reading are all temporal processes as opposed to being instantaneous or atemporal processes, and this has all kinds of theological consequences, it could mean that if the future is open and does not exist as a preordained arrangement of events, then even God will not necessarily know what you are going to say in the next moment, it means that God is not a ventriloquist putting words into our mouths which would be the same as putting thoughts into our minds, " Karl said.

"That is interesting, it obvious that it takes time to say something, write something and read something. So I agree that speech, writing and reading are time-bound or temporal phenomena," Zebedee agreed.

"But what is time? What is God's relationship to time and its passage, if time does indeed flow even when nothing else changes," Roger asked.

"That is a profound question but before we try to answer that question I need to tell you guys about some other really radical stuff that I read. It is also linked to the origin and evolution of language and speech. Would you believe it if I told that Darwinian sexual selection played a prominent role in the evolution of speech, language and the brain?" Karl asked.

"I had a feeling that our conversation was going in this direction," Roger laughed.

"So you must know about Darwin's theory of sexual selection as an explanation for the origin and evolution of sexual dimorphism?" Roger asked.

"Yes I do, I am familiar with the theory of sexual selection," Karl answered.

"Then you must also know about Darwin's theory of secondary sexual characters or sexual ornamentation?" Roger asked.

Before Karl or Zebedee could reply, Roger continued with what he wanted to say:

"We actually covered all of this stuff in first year Zoology and I have also done some reading up on it as well. Few people know that in Darwin's theory of evolution there are actually two kinds of selection which result in the evolution of two kinds of adaptations. There is natural selection and then there is sexual selection. It is through natural selection that animals, birds and plants become better adapted to their environment. Natural selection facilitates the evolution of various adaptations in the form of characters, traits or attributes which increases the survival rate of some individuals over other less well adapted individuals. And the survivors will produce most of the progeny which in turn will propagate through genetic inheritance the adaptive attributes to future generations. OK, this is basically what happens in evolution, it is actually very simple as a theory. Individual animals or plants that have better survival rates are said to be fitter; this evolutionary phenomenon gave rise to the idea of the survival of the fittest. The fittest always have a better chance of survival and because of this they end up producing more offspring than the individuals which are relatively less fit," Roger elaborated.

"As I said this is precisely what Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection is all about. Natural selection acting on random genetic variation leads to the development or evolution of traits or characters or attributes, call it what you want, which increase the fitness of individuals, where fitness is always measured or quantified in terms of the reproductive capacity to produce more progeny. All of these traits that increase fitness are referred to as primary characters. Now generally in nature if we look at animals or birds sexual selection leads to the evolution of traits in the male that increases the preference or receptivity of the female for that particular male individual as a mate. All the attributes or traits which make a male attractive to a female or preferable as a mating or sexual partner have been referred to by Darwin as secondary sexual characters," Roger said.

Noticing that Zebedee was listening with intense interest to their conversation, Roger felt the need to expand on some examples of secondary sexual characters.

"In male birds or fowls the secondary sexual characters or sexual ornaments in other words, are pretty obvious. In the case of roosters their large fleshy wattles and combs, spurs, ornate tails, long colourful neck feathers are all typical examples of male sexual ornamentation or secondary sexual characteristics. In mammals, especially in the case of herbivores, horns, antlers and body size are examples of male secondary sexual characters. Plumage colour in male birds generally represents secondary sexual attributes which evolved under sexual selection as an adaptation to secure sexual partners. Evolution in the differences in the secondary sexual characteristics between male and female has resulted in the development of very marked differences in the outward appearances of males and females. This difference in male and female appearance is referred to as sexual dimorphism. Sexual dimorphism is very obvious in many bird species such as the mask weavers, golden bishop birds, red bishop birds and the long tailed widow bird."

Zebedee nodded quietly as he listened. He readily grasped the point that Roger was making.

"What about sexual dimorphism in humans?" Karl asked with an amused grin on this face.

"Well according to Darwin sexual selection has also shaped the human body of both male and female. Sexual selection has also shaped the human face. Darwinian sexual selection exerted by male sexual preference has definitely shaped the breasts, waists, hips, buttocks, legs of human female bodies after our hominid ancestors had branched off from the apes. Darwinian sexual selection exerted by female sexual preference has shaped male body size and shape, male hairiness and the size of male penises. Similarly sexual selection in humans has also influenced other human secondary sexual characters such as hair colour, skin texture, skin colour, eyes colour, eye size and shape, lips, ears, nose size and shape, face shape, hand size and shape. So sexual selection has basically shaped certain aspects of our outward external appearance to increase our sexual attractiveness or desirability to the opposite sex. Sexual selection has transformed our bodies into a sexual ornament so as to facilitate mutual reciprocal sexual attraction between the sexes," Roger said.

"So you would agree that with regard to its external appearance the female body has evolved into a sexually attractive ornament for men?" Karl asked.

"Of course!" Roger replied.

"Shit, this is the stuff that interests me. I shouldn't have I dropped out of university. I have cooked my goose, my dad won't pay for me to go back," Roger sighed.

"You can always study Zoology through UNISA if that is really what you are interested in," Zebedee said.

"Yeah, I suppose I can, but it is not the same as being a full-time student at university," Roger answered.

"Don't worry, I am in the same boat, but I can tell you one thing, I never studied so much and learnt so much after dropping out of university, I have become a convert to self-study, anyway a degree is not going help me become writer, studying for a degree will in all likelihood stifle me as a writer," Karl said.

"Well maybe I will start studying Zoology through UNISA and then when I have my BSc degree and I can go back to university as a postgraduate student. Anyway, the point that I was leading to is that male desire has shaped the bodies of women into sexual ornaments and the sexual ornamentation of the female body has the capacity to excite desire in men. In order to induce men and women to have sex sexual selection has also resulted in the evolution of richly-innervated penises, clitorises, nipples, and mouths. Sexual selection has also primed our brains and our sex organs so that we predisposed to continuously seek the physical pleasure of sex and to be continuously receptive to sexual advances. Human females are unique amongst mammals because unlike all other mammals they do not come on heat like mares or cows. Human females have concealed ovulation and unlike bulls or stallions men never know whether a woman is or is not on heat. So unlike cows and mares women are sexually receptive to male advantages independent of whether or not they are ovulating, but of course when they are ovulating or about to ovulate they become more randy," Roger explained.

"So in contrast to all the mammals women want to have sex all the time, I thought it was only men that want to have sex all the time," Karl asked.

"You absolutely right, all women just what have sex all the time, they are insatiable when it comes to sex, they can't get enough of it," Roger laughed.

"I always thought that was the case," Karl laughed.

"I think you guys are exaggerating," Zebedee responded.

"You got to understand that nature has always been ingenious when it comes to promoting sexual activity in animals and especially in humans. In contrast to the rest of the mammals, women have evolved concealed ovulation and the capacity for constant sexual receptivity because they want to keep men constantly interested in having sex with them. This is because as long as men are banging them they will continue to be attentive to the needs of women with respect to supporting, provisioning, protecting them irrespective of whether or not they are ovulating. This is also why females with narrow waists or a waist to hip ratio of 0.7 are preferred by men because it indicates non-pregnancy. If a woman is not pregnant by another man then she is fair game for all other men," Roger elaborated with an ironic grin on his demeanour.

"OK let's see if I have correctly understood all this Darwinian stuff on secondary sexual characters and sexual ornamentation. Firstly, the beautifully proportioned and curvaceous contours of the female sexual ornaments are meant to be appealing to the male, and are also meant to be highly pleasurable to look at. Secondly, the shape and form of the female's secondary sexual characteristics, her breasts, waist and hips, were meant to provoke desire, in fact they are meant to provoke lust, where in plain language lust is just the banal craving for sexual gratification. And thirdly, our minds, sense organs and bodies have been hijacked for one purpose only, sexual gratification, so that the goal of sexual reproduction can be fulfilled. Humans are simply well tuned machines engineered by nature to be fruitful, to multiply, this is the great conspiracy of nature, this is our destiny, and we as conscious beings have become unwitting prisoners of our drive for sexual gratification in order to perpetuate the species. Is this the great enigma and mystery of our existence that Darwin has finally unlocked and unveiled, by showing that there is in fact no great mysterious enigma to our existence? We are just naked apes constantly on the lookout for a quick fuck. Is this the meaning of human life? Is human life no less mundane, no less banal and no less ordinary that the life of animals? Like the rest of the animal kingdom we have no significance other than dispensers of semen and receivers of semen. Is there no other purpose to life as men other than banging women and fertilizing their eggs?" Karl asked.

"Yes, there is no other purpose to life. It could be that in reality or in the big scheme of things, human life biologically speaking has no more intrinsic significance or meaning than the life any other animal. Biologically speaking we are all equals; no animal has more intrinsic worth than any other animal. Humans are just primates who happen to have big brains, there is nothing more to us," Roger said bluntly.

"Do you really believe this?" Zebedee asked.

"Yes I do," Roger laughed.

"I am a Darwinian and I suppose that I am also a Marxist like you, I suppose that Darwin and Marx have fathomed the deep materialist plot of the human narrative," Roger admitted.

"So Zebedee has become a Marxist?" Karl asked with interest.

"Yes he has become a bloody full-blown Communist if there ever was one," Roger said seriously.

"But seriously I would like to make an important observation, actually a deeply historical materialist observation, well it's not actually my observation, the idea comes from a guy called Ronald Fisher. He was the first one to propose that sexual ornamentation or secondary sexual characteristics are a perfect example of what he called runaway sexual selection. Now consider this, it is very possible, actually I would say it certain, that the extraordinary development of the human brain is an example of runaway sexual selection. The human mind, human intelligence and the human capacity for language are the result of nothing else but runaway sexual selection," Roger announced.

"Wow, now why did I not think of that. I should have been able to join the dots. It is so obvious," Karl exclaimed excitedly.

"Now wait a minute, let me finish the story. The behaviorally complex, complicated and intricate demands of monogamous sexual reproduction depended on the evolution of a large intelligent brain which made language possible," Roger laughed ironically.

"I can believe that! Successful development of primitive monogamy in the very first hominids would not have been possible without a sexual adaptation like the runaway evolution of the hominid brain or the runaway evolution of language," Karl agreed.

"Runaway evolution of language, I like that! The coevolution of language, mind and brain has been a runaway evolutionary process. This is one helluva idea don't you think?" Karl remarked

"And sex was the real trigger behind the runaway evolution of the human brain, mind and language," Roger said triumphantly.

"So the brain is actually an amazing sex organ?" Zebedee asked with an amused grin.

"Yes for sure, that is the chief purpose of the human brain, it is an organ that has been designed for getting sex, the rest of what the brain does is just a side show to the main act," Roger agreed with a chuckle.

"I suppose we can also view the language, mind and brain as a secondary sexual characters or attributes," Karl mused.

"Yeah, language, mind and brain are really just nothing more than sexual ornamentation, and basically we are nothing more than just 'dumbarsed' naked animals walking around on two legs waving our arms and reciting poetry!" Roger laughed.

"But these sexual ornaments that have undergone runaway evolution have given us poetry, philosophy, literature, science, mathematics and religion," Zebedee said, joining in the conversation with his own commentary and insights on the topic.

"That is so true," Karl agreed in a comradely and friendly fashion as he smiled at Corporal Zeb their younger companion.

"Yes runaway evolution involving the self-re-enforcement of or positive feedback on the selection of sexual characters has led to the emergence of Eros, and Eros as the runaway desire for knowledge has given us poetry, philosophy, literature, science, mathematics and religion. The erotic runaway desire for knowledge can be equated with Plato's _scala amoris_ _which finds its culmination in the contemplation of the beautiful in-itself and the contemplation of the beautiful leads to the realization of the GOOD," Karl said._

_" What the hell is_ Plato's _scala amoris_ _?" Roger laughed._

_" It is the 'ladder the love'," Karl answered._

"Like Jacob's ladder or Jacob's staircase to heaven?" Roger asked.

"That is an interesting idea, a kind of marriage between Hellenism and Judaism, making Eros and Agape the two sides of the same coin, involving a marriage between Moses and Plato, what a thought," Karl laughed.

Chapter 16

After spending two days in Ladysmith they found themselves sitting on the back of a lumbering Bedford following a convoy of Bedfords on a journey back to Lake Sibaya. The growling column of Bedfords were transporting a company of national servicemen infantrymen who would be spending the next six weeks engaged in simulated conventional war training on the rolling grasslands of Tsonga Land.

Zebedee, Karl and Roger would again be taking up their responsibilities for the water and electricity supply at the Lake Sibaya military base. They would be at the base for the next couple of months until the end of November.

Zebedee was in constant state of elation. With his mind flooded with thoughts of Vanessa he sat in the back of Bedford completely oblivious to the passage of time as the convoy passed through Dundee, Vryheid, Piet Retief and Pongola. After Pongola the convoy took the Jozini turn-off and soon they were over the Lebombo Mountains and down into the vast savannahs of the Makatini Flats.

So much had happened since they had left Lake Sibaya that for Zebedee it felt like a life-time had passed. Within a few days after their arrival back at the military base they fell back into their old daily routine and they picked up the strands of their previous languorous life that they had enjoyed before their seven day pass.

Over the next six weeks he accumulated a pile letters from Vanessa every fortnight. He spent each evening rereading all her letters and writing long replies to her.

Now he opened the latest letter from Vanessa which had arrived that afternoon at the Lake Sibaya base and he began to read it.

It was a beautiful letter, yet the contents of the letter hit him like thunder bolt out of the blue. It was a beautiful letter but the message was unbearable. The message robbed him of all hope, of all his dreams, of everything that had become beautiful in his life. It was a beautiful letter, yet each word, each noun, each verb, each article, stunned Zebedee to the core of his being, to the marrow of his bones. The familiar neat handwritten words on the page blasted him like giant shock waves, shock waves of bad news. The sub-vocalization of each word echoed in his mind, the words bounced around in his brain, the words knocked him into an abyss of emotional oblivion. He began to feel as if he were free falling into a bottomless dark crater that had suddenly opened beneath him by an exploding bombshell. The words tore him apart. The words smashed him. The words crushed him. The words ground and broke his very soul into mushy pulp. The words came at him like the tumbling of huge steel balls in a rotary crusher that breaks up massive rocks into fine powder.

He felt himself going ice cold as he slipped into a state of mental and physical shock.

Both Karl and Roger noticed the sudden very visible physical and emotional change in Zebedee. The blood had drained from his face. His eyes became filled with the terrible stark expression of loss and despair. He slumped down on his the bed. His body seemed to become like jelly.

"Are you OK Zebedee?"

"Not really. I am not feeling too good. Vanessa has broken up with me," he said with an emotionally choked voice while trying to fight back the tears.

Now the tears began to run freely down his suntanned checks, and he began to weep silently, trying desperately to suppress the escape of an anguish sob from his trembling lips.

Karl and Roger felt awkwardly disturbed by the sight of Zebedee's emotional state.

He folded up the letter and put it back into its envelope. He unthinkingly put the envelope into his shirt pocket and buttoned up the pocket. He lay down on the bed, with his head on the pillow. Karl left the tent for the kitchen to go organize a mug of coffee for Zebedee.

My Dearest Zebedee,

Our short love was something extremely beautiful, it was filled with such profound emotional and physical intimacy, it was filled with so much empathy and compassion, our love was an amazing love, it was filled with the most incredible passion. But circumstances have made it impossible for us to be re-united as much as this would have been my first and eternal wish, and my strongest desire. Zebedee I will always love you. I will love you until I die. You have to believe that and you have to forgive me. I have met a man who wants to marry me and look after me, and take care of me. I am not saying that you could not do the same. He is a good man. I can learn to love him. He is much older than me, but he is gentle and kind. My situation has become very difficult, if not impossible; I cannot endure living in this tiny flat with my parents. The constant domestic conflict and constant crisis is unbearable and I am only human. As a consequence I am not doing too well at school. I have to get out of the situation that I find myself in. To escape an unable situation of alcoholism and domestic violence, I have left my parent's flat and moved into the home of my future husband. So I will be leaving school when I finish this year. My future husband who is a qualified electrician is very hard working. He has his own business. He does not drink or smoke and is very religious. I am going to his church which is a Pentecostal Church. I have found God. I have accepted the Lord Jesus Christ as my eternal saviour. I am very happy and have also found peace at last. My husband to be is willing to allow me to work as his general office assistant and girl Friday. He can provide me with a home and a decent life. He is gentle and caring, and will never harm or abuse me. I am eternally grateful to God who has had mercy and compassion on me in my time of desperate need.

My dearest Zebedee you are also a good man, a man of great integrity. Do not change. I will Love you forever with all my heart. Deep down I remain yours. I am asking you not to reply to this letter. All I want from you is your understanding and blessing. I know in my heart that you will also love me forever no matter what. I know in my heart that you will forgive me. I take comfort in this thought. Zebedee you will find someone, someone who is beautiful in every way possible, I am sure of this. I will always remember you Zebedee my dearest eternal darling, my true love. Please be happy for me. Please do not be angry with me. I could not bear your anger, it will destroy me.

Yours sincerely,

Vanessa.

Both Karl and Roger struggled to put on their most empathetic faces. The distress of their comrade was palpable. Instinctively they knew he would be inconsolable. They knew that in the days to come Zebedee would have to walk alone that painful emotional journey of heart-break. They would respectfully allow him to mourn his loss in the coming days.

In Roger's mind Vanessa was an absolutely stunning girl; there is no doubt about that. He knew that this would make the pain of loss and betrayal all the more awful. While it would never be the right thing to say at this moment, Roger knew that with time Zebedee would get over her.

"We have all been there believe me. A break up or a betrayal in love always feels like the end of the world. What is the old saying again, all is fair in love and war. As the old adage goes, time is the great healer. Just let time do its work. You have to pick yourself up and shake off the dust," Karl recommended.

"You are right, but it so painful and I love her so much, I don't know if I will ever get over her," he said, as fresh tears began to run freely down his cheeks again.

"If only she could have found a way to wait for me, I would have taken care of her," Zebedee said as he battled to regain his composure.

"Do you mean you wanted to marry her?" Karl asked with a look of genuine surprised amazement on his face.

"Yes," he answered.

"Shoo man, that is really heavy, I didn't realize you were that serious about her," Roger exclaimed.

As the weeks passed, Zebedee waited expectantly, but in vain, for a letter from Vanessa. He respected her request and did not answer her letter and try and write to her. He carefully wrapped her letters up in tight neat parcel with newspaper and tied up the parcel with string. He then sealed the letters in a plastic packet so that they would not be damaged by rain or moisture.

Karl and Roger watched in respectful silence as Zebedee went through this little ritual of archiving Vanessa's letters for eternal safe keeping.

He gradually accepted the finality of her breakup, and made peace with the fact that he had lost her forever.

Every second week they received mail. Jennifer wrote to him every week without fail. She spoke in glowing terms about the Portuguese girl who lived on the farm next door. They had become firm friends. The beautiful Portuguese girl, who was so small and petite, was also galloping the racehorses with the boys. She was a magnificent horsewoman. Jennifer said the Portuguese girl even reminded her of herself when she was young. She is so amazing, and so attractive, his mother wrote. She ended the letter saying that she is sure that Zebedee would also like her once he gets to know her.

'He would also like her?'

What the hell was his mom trying to say or imply? He wondered.

Here he was struggling to get over Vanessa and his mother was constantly sending him letters about the young Portuguese girl that lived on the farm next door, who was an amazing horsewoman and who was becoming more beautiful and more wonderful in each letter. The Portuguese girl was hardworking, she did not have a lazy bone in her beautiful body, she was not afraid of manual labour, she loved the rural life, she was of impeccable character, she was extremely intelligent and had the most wonderful sense of humour. And then the strangest cryptic remark: the Portuguese girl was almost Jewish. How can someone possibly be almost Jewish? There was no mistake about being a Jew. Were all the wonderful attributes of the Portuguese girl also the qualities possessed by a good Jewish girl? He felt that his mom was sounding more and more like a traditional and conservative Yiddish Jewess from the old country, from rural Poland. Has she lost her mind, he wondered.

He could not imagine anyone ever replacing Vanessa.

Mother's should not interfere in this kind of stuff. She must stop writing this kind of stuff in the letters that she sent him. It was so embarrassing. He avoided responding to her comments about the Portuguese girl.

******

While watching the women standing in the water filling their drums, Karl made a confession:

"Humans are the only animals on this planet who have become preoccupied with the questions regarding the meaning of life."

When they left carrying the drums of water on their heads, both Zebedee and Karl marvelled at this feat. According to Karl women had carried burdens on their heads since ancient times. It was a universal phenomenon, women walking away from the wells, from the rivers, from the lake side with jars or drums of water balanced on their heads.

Did women balancing burdens on their heads inspire Solomon to write his proverb: 'If your enemy is hungry, give him food to eat; if he is thirsty, give him water to drink. In doing this, you will heap burning coals on his head, and the Lord will reward you.'

It was Karl who quoted the proverb. Zebedee wondered whether this embodied the essence of Judaism. The Jews, his mother's ancestors, had lived as an oppressed people for more than 800 years in Europe. During this time they never raised a weapon in self-defense, never drew blood, yet they were slaughtered in their millions. This bothered him deeply, the Jews never resisted with violence the pogroms, and they did not resist with violent retaliation their constant persecution during their almost millennial-long difficult sojourn in Europe. They went like dumb sheep to the dead camps. They should have fought back.

That they did not fight back bothered him deeply. He did not want to be Jewish or viewed as a Jew. Unlike a Jew a Boer would resist. He admired this in the Boere; the Boer would fight to the bitter end. He like the Boer would rather die an honourable death fighting to the end than submit to a humiliating death in the concentrations camps or genocide in the death camps.

Throughout their history the Jews had always ended up carrying fire on their own heads. He did not want to carry fire on his head.

What did it mean to carry fire on one's head instead of water? The women on the farms carried both water and burning konkas on their heads. In South Africa black women carried burning coals on their heads. He had seen it.

Fire, water and black women. He remembered the words tableau vivant. He smiled to himself. It was Karl's phrase. He said:

"The scene of the well, outside the protective walls of the city, crowded with unchaperoned women engaged in laughter and free-flowing sexualized banter, while drawing water from the well, has always being a highly erotically charged tableau vivant in the Bible."

"Tableau vivant! What the hell is that?" Roger asked

"Never mind," Karl said.

"No serious what is a tableau vivant?" Roger persisted.

"The phrase is used in the context of theatre, cinema and in paintings. It stands for the atmosphere and mood generated by the picture of a dramatic scene that has been brought to life with the aid of all the necessary props and actors. It is also the kind of thing we have experienced at Lake Sibaya when we started noticing how attractive the girls were who came down to draw water from the lake," Karl elaborated.

One morning when the women arrived to draw water, Rebekah leading a party of giggling female friends approached the water truck. Rebekah was wearing Karl's copper bangle. They had finally taken Karl's request for dagga and lala beer seriously. They were carrying bottles of lala beer and a small brown packet of dagga. Karl wanted to know the price.

Much laughter and gaiety accompanied the price bargaining.

Both Roger and Zebedee had an opportunity to get a good look at Rebekah at close quarters. When the deal was done a merry hand shaking ceremony erupted spontaneously. Karl teasingly held onto to Rebekah's hand while everyone laughed. He would not let go of Rebekah's hand. She did not try and free her hand. Instead she relaxed her arm and allowed her own fingers to remain curled around his hand and they stood comfortably together holding hands in the shade of the water truck. Eventually Karl released her hand.

They paid Rebekah the money and the girls walked back to their peers talking loudly among themselves.

"Wow, I have got such hard on, a huge erection. I can die. She actually squeezed my hand. I can't believe it, what an experience, I really love her," he said laughing.

"No you don't really love her," Roger told him bluntly.

"What do you mean?" Karl asked, with a look of indignation on his face. Zebedee was sure whether Karl was putting on an act with that face.

"You just want to bang her, you are only interested sex not love," Roger said.

"Well I won't deny that, but who would not want to bang her?" Karl asked

"To bang her would not be morally right. She is vulnerable and powerless. She is susceptible in any kind of advances that will make her feel significant. You are in a position of power; you are able to exploit her vulnerability, her susceptibility, her powerlessness. You are able to take advantage of her by virtue of who you are," Zebedee said in a disapproving tone of voice.

"And who I am?" Karl challenged Zebedee.

"I don't need to answer that, you know who you are relative to them," Zebedee answered.

"Would you bang her?" Karl asked Zebedee.

"I don't know. All I know it would not be right to just bang her because you can," Zebedee said.

"Do mean it would not be right because it is against the law for whites to have sex with blacks?" Karl asked.

"No it is not that. It would not be right to bang her because it is not right to hurt people or take advantage of them just because you can," Zebedee said.

"But what if she freely acquiesces and allows herself to be banged by the person who makes the advances? Maybe she wants me to bang her. Maybe she dreams and fanaticises that I am banging her. Maybe she enjoys it when I show an interest in her," Karl said.

"Look in a way she has already signalled that she is ready for physical intimacy with me. She let me hold her hand and that is a profound act of physical and emotional intimacy. She will let me bang her and I know that, and I really think she wants me to bang her," Karl argued.

"It would still be wrong to bang her even if she consents. Consent means nothing. People consent under all kinds of pressure, and it may not be real consent. Even if she acquiesces to your advances it may not indicate genuine consent, it may merely indicate that she is bowing to the pressures of your wishes because she does not want to displease or disappoint you. People consent to intimacy in response to all kinds of vague promises and lies. Anyway it would be wrong for you to become intimate with her if you were not going to take care of her and be responsible for her, you may make her pregnant and then what?" Zebedee asked.

"What if I use condoms?" Karl replied.

"Where are you going to get condoms?" Roger asked.

"We could slip off to the trading store and buy a pack of condoms," Karl said

"And when and where are you going to bang her?" Roger asked.

"I think I will bang her next week in some secluded place in the dune forest. I will be free next week to woo and court her here at the beach. I will ask her if we can meet somewhere. I know she will agree. She will slip off. I will arrange for her to meet me in the afternoon near the freshwater fish research station up the road and then we will cut up the path into the dune forest. You know that path that we went up with you when you were looking for Gaboon Vipers the snake that you insisted on referring to as Bitis gabonica. Anyway after I have banged her we will go and have a swim in the sea and then we will walk hand in hand along the beach like lovers," he said with a broad smile on his face.

"How come will you be free next week?" Roger asked

"Have you forgotten, we got no duties next week? By end of this week the base will be vacated; Bravo Company will be going back to Ladysmith on Friday. That is in two days' time. It will only be us, the doctor and the medic at the camp for the next couple of days or so before Alpha Company arrives, so we will be free. I was going to suggest we go for a walk on Friday night, nobody will miss us, we can drink some lala beer and smoke some zol under the stars while we chat about the idea of the great America Novel," Karl argued.

"Why don't we talk about the great African Novel," Zebedee asked.

"It has not been written yet. I am going to write it," Karl said.

"Maybe we will meet up with Rebekah and her friends on our nocturnal excursion," Roger speculated.

"Would you ever consider marrying her?" Roger asked Karl out of the blue.

"I suppose I could marry her under the right circumstances," Karl answered.

"What are the right circumstances?" Zebedee asked.

"You guys are getting so serious. We are just having a debate. We are just discussing things hypothetically." Karl laughed.

"What about you Zebedee, would you marry Rebekah if the circumstances were right?" Roger asked.

"I really don't know. I can't speak Tsonga or Zulu, and she can't speak English, so how are we going to communicate our feelings and that kind of stuff," Zebedee answered.

"But if hypothetically speaking the circumstances were right would you consider marrying Rebekah?" Karl asked.

"It would be a possibility if the circumstances were right," Zebedee said.

"Ha, ha, so you would then consider marrying Rebekah under the right circumstances?" Roger exclaimed.

"Yes I would marry Rebekah if there were mutually reciprocal feelings of love between us and if we could communicate, and if the relationship between us had a chance of enduring given the huge gulf that separates us," Zebedee admitted.

"So you also find Rebekah attractive?" Roger asked.

"Yes I do. I would be lying if I said I didn't, she is not just attractive or pretty, she is actually quite beautiful," he replied.

"Ravishing beautiful?" Karl asked teasingly.

"Yes," Zebedee replied.

"I think Rebekah has obviously bewitched all of us, we have become enamoured with her. We have become smitten, besotted with her only because she happens be physically very attractive and she is the only attractive female we have seen for months," Zebedee

"She has bewitched us, she has used very potent muti, she definitely has cast a spell on us, we have all become infatuated with Rebekah, have we not, I won't deny it, I would fuck her at a drop of the hat, she has a killer body," Roger said.

"Well I have real feelings for Rebekah, I may even love her," Karl admitted philosophically.

"You are talking absolute crap! You only think you have feelings for her, you only think that you are in love with her, but the real truth is that you are actually in love with a fantasy, a forbidden fantasy, an unattainable fantasy, you are only really in love with an idea for your great African Novel," Roger laughed.

"What! Are implying that the great African Novel is about betrayal, about dashed hopes, about broken dreams?" Karl exclaimed in mock gravity.

"Roger is right. You actually in love with the idea of being in love with someone like Rebekah. Your feelings for Rebekah are only convenient for the sake of your novel; they are not for her sake. You love for Rebekah will turn out to be an act of betrayal, and act that ends in hurt, pain and suffering, all because this embodies the ingredients for the great African Novel that you have in mind," Zebedee asked.

"Oh come on Zebedee, you take life too seriously, you must not believe everything I say about Rebekah, I was only joking," Karl laughed.

"You could have fooled me. I really believed you about the condoms especially after we have already sneaked off in the water truck to the trading store. I am actually disappointed in you. I really thought that you were the kind of guy that could pull this off, especially a man of your calibre," Roger said.

"Naa, I was only joking, but you can read about it in my novel, you will get all the details. In the novel the protagonist will bang Rebekah bare back without any condoms and they will live happily ever after in a reed hut somewhere in Mozambique making beautiful mulatto children, this will be the first Great African Novel, " Karl smiled.

"So a white man is going to write the first Great African Novel?" Roger asked.

"Why not?" Karl shot back.

Chapter 17

Before the sun climbed to the zenith of midday the girls arrived on the beach of Lake Sibaya to draw water. This was their routine. They waved and shouted at the boys. The boys shouted back and waved. They preferred to come in the heat of the day. They did not want come in the late afternoon or at twilight when the shadows lengthened, when the light played dangerous tricks on the eyes, when danger lurked in the surrounding reed beds.

They liked to linger at the lake side, sometimes until midday, they never seemed to be in any hurry to leave. It did not matter to them, all their days were endless; the girls, the young women, standing in the immobile sun, were oblivious to its rays. Their skins were a deeper shade of black. Their skins were brilliantly lustrous like the velvet sheen of a thoroughbred racehorse.

The boys wished that the young women would take their clothes off and bath in the shallow waters so they that could see their unclothed bodies, so that they could see their breasts, vulvas and buttocks covered in a gleaming thin film of water in the sunlight, shining as only black skin could shine in the heat of the midday sun that had reached its zenith.

Their wish came true. One morning the girls arrived with plastic basins which they filled with fresh cool water from the lake. Thinking that the boys at the water truck would not notice they undressed and began to wash themselves in the bright sun.

But the boys quickly noticed what they were doing.

"Why would a woman bath naked in broad day light where she could be seen by a man? Was Bathsheba doing anything uniquely different?" Karl uttered while he looked through the binoculars at the young women bathing.

"What about the mind and motives of the voyeur?" Roger asked.

"Are you implying that I am a voyeur?" Karl asked with the binoculars trained on Rebekah's naked body.

"Of course you are a voyeur. Give me those binoculars so that I see what the attraction is," Roger teased.

He took the binoculars and trained them on Rebekah.

"Wow she is definitely a black Venus if ever I have seen one. Hell I have never seen a woman with such a beautiful body and face, I am sure that she must have Arab ancestry or even Jewish blood in her veins, maybe queen Sheba was her ancestor, maybe her mother was a Jewish slave that had been fucked by an Arab slave trader; I would gladly bang her any day. She could be a model or even a film star with such a magnificent body," he exclaimed with genuine enthusiasm.

"Maybe she is Semitic. I would not be surprised if she started speaking Aramaic," Karl said.

"Nor would I be surprised if I saw ten camels coming down the road laden with gifts, golden bangles and golden nose rings," Zebedee laughed.

"Maybe she is in actual reality a Xitsonga speaking black Jewess; a product of multiple generations of miscegenation of the bloodline that stems from that original Jewess that was enslaved by an Arab, maybe her successive ancestors were traded along the east coast of Africa with the blood line finally reaching Lourenço Marques and then escaping by genetic introgression into the local population of Tsonga Land," Roger laughed.

"I still need to fuck a Jewess," Roger admitted while gazing at Rebekah through the binoculars.

Before the dust of the departing convoy of Bedfords transporting Bravo Company back to Ladysmith had settled they dug up the bottles of lala beer that they had buried in the sand. They put the bottles into the gas fridge in the camp's kitchen.

Lazing around in the sun they spent Saturday polishing off the chilled lala beer. Later that night feeling merry and in high spirits they decided to go for walk along sand a track which took them into the open rolling coastal grasslands of Tsonga Land, the home of the ancient Xitsonga speaking VaTsonga. Long ago, Shaka the king of Zulus sent an _impi_ under the command of Soshangana to conquer the peaceful Tsonga people living around the shores of Lake Sibaya.

The thought that had also crossed their minds was the possibility that the group of young Tsonga women may also be wondering around in the dark on the same road looking for boyfriends.

Karl said that he should have first claim over Rebekah; and Roger and Zebedee should focus their attentions on the other girls in the group who also happened to be attractive.

Roger said they should rather let Rebekah decide who she wants to be with.

Zebedee jokingly agreed with Roger's proposal, especially since Karl himself had hinted that Rebekah actually fancied Zebedee.

Roger was already feeling amorous and reckless from the lala beer. He thought that because they were on friendly terms with the girls things might happen if they bumped into the girls in the dark along the road. They would then walk with them; they could hold their hands, put their arms around their waists, hug them and kiss them on their necks, on the cheeks and lips. Anything could happen. They could get laid under the stars on the soft cool grass.

Once they had reached a two track path they followed the road into the open rolling coastal grasslands under a brilliant star lit sky. Karl and Roger lit up their dagga zols and drew deeply on the smouldering dagga. They walked in silence with their R1 rifles slung over their shoulders.

Zebedee still had the forlorn image imprinted on his mind of his tearful mother vigorously waving her arm as they were marched from the Drill Hall to Park Station. It was the memory of this image that caused him to refrain from partaking in the smoking of a dagga zol or doing anything that would disappoint his mother. The bulk of the liquor was consumed by Karl and Roger, with Zebedee restricting himself to half a fire bucket of the fermented brew.

"Why do you call her Rebekah?" Roger suddenly asked out of the blue.

"Well it is a long story which changes all the time, but I will try and tell it. Our English teacher gave us an interesting literary analysis of a collection of similar kinds of narratives which he referred to as stories about 'The Woman at the Well.' He said that almost all of the stories of Bible were full of gaps and it is the gaps which actually make the stories interesting. The gaps are interesting because they represent the untold stories behind the stories. Very often it is the gaps in the story which makes the overall narrative shocking, paradoxical, nonsensical, mysterious and strange. Once the gaps of the story have been filled in the overall colour and plot of the story changes dramatically, the story can become even more enchanting, more thought provoking, more exciting and gripping, more horrifying, more mysterious, stranger, more real, more enlightening, more truthful, more beautiful, and more entertaining. There are all kinds of subtleties in a story that signal the existence of a hidden submerged narrative; even a single word within the story can signal that there is actually more going on in the story than what is apparent in a superficial reading or in the conventional learned or conditioned reading of the story. It is impossible to tell the whole story or total story in which a given ostensive or apparent narrative is actually embedded, this is why writers say that a book, novel or a work of fiction never ends, it is never final, the story is never completed; the story can never be finished. Every story is incomplete, every story ends prematurely, we never get to the bottom of the story, the entire story is never told no matter how close we read the story. The total or ultimate meaning of the story is unfathomable. It must also be borne in mind that the full meaning of the story cannot be reduced to the authorial intention. This is the big mistake of hermeneutics. The story is only a performance of the author. Once the writer's performance has been completed and the pen is laid down, at that moment the story begins to live its own independent life outside the controlling intentions of the author. Once written the narrative escapes its authorship; in the hands of the reader it floats free without the author as its anchor. The totality of the story with its unfathomable meanings always belongs to the reader. The reader is the supreme authority. This is the true magic of writing. Exegesis or interpretation represents the futile attempt to fill in all the gaps, it is the futile attempt to complete the telling of the story, to bring the story to its final conclusion, and this is especially true for the stories in the Bible, and this why I have started to read the Bible as a form of literature, and this is why I have become interested in the stories of women drawing water and it was the story of Isaac and Rebekah which prompted me to call her Rebekah. I could have called her Rachel for that matter, but the name Rebekah came to mind when I first noticed her," Karl explained.

He drew deeply on the zol and it smouldered bright red in the darkness and gave off a tiny shower of explosions of orange, yellow, blue, magenta and green sparks of fire.

Zebedee listened with intense interest to Karl's views on the plague of 'the gaps of the untold', the lacunae, the omissions, the voids which infected all storytelling and because of this the dilemma of the inevitable _un-finishability_ of all writing; _un-finishability_ was the word that came to Karl's mind as he spoke about his theory of the narrative on the dark grassy rolling coastal plains of Tsonga Land. Zebedee had also read almost as many books as Karl, but they were all non-fiction books, books on practical topics and on natural history or popular science. He had read very little fiction. Before he came to Lake Sibaya he had only been motivated to read books that contained topics that aimed at presenting the truth on the nature of reality or contained topics of practical value.

"So writing and reading can never reach final completion?" Zebedee asked.

"That is the reality not only for any novel but even for all the short narratives in the Bible. The story of David and Bathsheba is full of gaps and omissions, and so are the stories of Abraham and Sarah, Isaac, and Rebekah, Jacob and Rachel, Joseph and his brothers, Judah and Tamar, Ruth and Boaz, I can go and on. My dad's study was filled with commentaries from floor to ceiling on every book in the Bible. He despaired at the endless commentaries and interpretations," Karl said.

"There are not only gaps or omissions or deep voids in the fiction of great literature or Biblical stories; there are also are serious gaps in the writing of history and even in the reporting of the daily news. Because of the persistence of 'inadvertent' omissions, we will never know the whole truth of history, how can we know the whole truth if the whole truth cannot ever be reported even in a daily newspaper. It makes you wonder how we can know the truth of history if we don't even know how history happens because of the gaps, voids and omissions," Karl said.

"Do you think we will know the truth of history only at the end of history?" Zebedee asked.

"That is a profound question, my buddy, a really profound question?" Karl admitted.

"I would like to hear about the gaps in Rebekah's story," Roger said.

"Which Rebekah story, the story of the beautiful Rebekah who draws water from Lake Sibaya or the Biblical story of Rebekah drawing water from the well for ten thirsty camels?" Zebedee quipped feeling the pleasant effects of the lala beer.

"Well let's start with the gaps in the Biblical story of Rebekah. The story of the other Rebekah is still unfolding," Roger said.

"I think the story of Rebekah of Lake Sibaya will remain one of the biggest gaps in the story of man's history or even the story of South Africa, it is a story that no one will ever know about, I think only a dozen people actually know Rebekah, and even they do not know her full story," Karl mused philosophically as he gazed at the stars.

"Who wants to hear the stories of insignificant people?" Roger asked.

"I do, I am interested in the story of Rebekah the Tsonga maid. In the big scheme of things her story is no less significant than the story about any famous person, in fact think her story could be full of intrigue and quite spell-binding," Zebedee argued.

"I agree with Zebedee the story of the beautiful Rebekah of Lake Sibaya is intriguing. She is a mystery, she appears to draw water and then she disappears into a path that takes her into the valleys of the dune forest, we don't where she lives, we don't where she sleeps, we don't even know what she eats, what she dreams, what she thinks, what she desires, what she hopes for," Karl said.

"Even if I have carnal knowledge of her she would still be a mystery, holding her hand was the most mysterious and mystical experience that I have ever had in my life," Karl said.

Karl looked at stars thoughtfully as he exhaled the dagga fumes.

"It was the most erotic experience that I will ever have in my life," he said philosophically.

"It was metaphysical, if you know what I mean, it was NOW, it was the ONE, it was IT, just like what Jack Kerouac speaks about in his book _On the Road_ ," Karl tried to explain.

"What can be better than having carnal knowledge?" Roger joked.

"No Roger, it was far better than any carnal knowledge that I have ever had with any other girl," Karl said.

"Well I would say if you want to know someone well, then nothing beats carnal knowledge, now that is real knowledge, I like the idea of carnal knowledge, it really is the only way we can get know anyone intimately, knowledge which is so profane that we cannot get enough of it," Roger said, and he started laughed uncontrollably.

"What actually is a story?" Zebedee asked.

"Listen to that. What is a story, that is so funny, I have never heard such a funny question, what is a story, ha, ha, ha, Zebedee you really can be quite a comedian, what actually is a story, ha, ha, ha," Roger said while continued to laugh hilariously, his laughter continued unabated, until he eventually bent over and while clutching his stomach he continued to laugh and laugh until the tears run down his cheeks. He fell onto his knees and shook his head in mirth.

"A profound question indeed," Karl said as he took another deep drag on his dagga zol. He gazed up at the stars while he reflected on Zebedee's question.

"The answer is somewhere out there," he said after a while.

And Roger burst out laughing again; tears continued to flow down his mirth-flushed face. This time round he could not contain himself. He remained on his knees in the road as he roared and howled with laughter.

Eventually he managed to get up and they continued with their walk into the night.

"A story is an account about something rather than nothing. I don't believe that there is nothing, there is always something, as long as there is something man will feel compelled to invent stories about something. Man needs to tell or write stories, man needs to hear or read stories. Man differs from animals because he is a story teller. People need to tell stories, people are constantly telling stories about themselves, and everyone is telling a fictionalized version of their own autobiography. But for every story there is counter story," Karl said.

"What about the Bible, are all the stories in the Bible also fictionalized accounts of something or other?" Zebedee asked.

"Well yes, from a literary perspective Genesis and the rest of Pentateuch for example are basically a work of fiction that was written in Babylon during the exilic and post-exilic between 580 and 500 BC. Genesis includes fictionalized biographical accounts of historical personages such as Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Their stories as the ancient ancestors of Israel were preserved in the form of oral traditions before the exilic period. During the exile period the oral traditions became the source material that inspired the creative writings that were used in the literary compilation of the Pentateuch and the rest of the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament as we call it," said Karl.

"Christians believe that the Bible was inspired by God so how can it be fiction?" Roger said.

"God does not tell stories, he does not need to tell stories, man is the storyteller, man needs to tell stories and the Bible contains the stories that man has told about himself and about his belief in God. Man needs to tell stories about God. Man needs to tell stories about what God expects from us. The Bible is a fictionalized biography of various men and women, not of God," Karl said.

"What about other religions?" Roger.

"All religions are based on fictions and stories that men have invented. All religions are stories invented by men about God, about God's nature, about what God expects from us and about God's habits and so on. The truth about reality has never been the goal or purpose or aim of the various religions. All scripture, the Bible, the Koran, and the Bhagavad Gita are products of man's imagination, they are not divinely inspired, infallible and inerrant writings dictated word for word by God, they all carry the grubby imprints of man's creative authorial efforts as the actual the creator, composer, redactor, editor and compiler of the work of fiction that we call holy scripture," Karl said

Karl drew deeply on his dagga zol; he exhaled a cloud of smoke.

"The creative evolution of religious writings has actually been quite a weird phenomenon. It is like a scary game of broken telephone in a fantastical and amazing horror story. For example, take the case of Adam. First the Jews while exiled in Babylon invented Adam as a fictional character living naked with Eve in a garden with magical trees and talking snakes that are craftier than all the animals. Later the same Adam with the all the angels of heaven bowing down to him becomes the first prophet of Islam, the very first Muslim, and he grows up like some kind of Alice in Wonderland to become a 30 meters tall giant and defying the laws of gravity he goes marching up and down a greatly shrunken earth crushing all the animals in his path under his feet. But the story of Adam continues to get more and more fantastical and wonderful. On a clear night Mohammed travels from Mecca to Jerusalem on a flying horse or a flying donkey. Donkey or horse it does not really matter. Anyway after landing in Jerusalem he tethers the flying donkey to the Western Wall of the temple and who do you think he meets in Jerusalem, he meets Adam smoking a zol of dagga," Karl solemnly announced.

He tried unsuccessful to light up another dagga zol.

He inhaled the air sharply through the zol while cupping his one hand over the lighted match. The dagga eventually ignited and the zol began to glow brilliantly. He took a few puffs and Zebedee could smell the strong and sweet incense like fragrance of the dagga on the fresh evening sea breeze.

"Wow, this is really a wonderful story, did you make it up? I feel so inspired tonight. What a story, Adam smoking a zol of dagga in Jerusalem next to a flying donkey. Everything makes sense. One could write an amazing and fanciful novel called 'The Amazing Adventures of the Prophet Adam in Wonderland," Roger exclaimed, his face a portrait of saintly intoxicated delight.

"Yeah it will be an amazing story," Karl nodded sagely as he stood shrouded in a cloud of dagga smoke.

"What is even more amazing is that man who evolved from the apes could have invented such fantastical fictional stories that have had such a powerful hold on the mind of man," Zebedee added, feeling suddenly very sober.

"Well that is religion for you. In religion all things are possible, even travelling to Jerusalem on a flying donkey in the middle of the night. Religion with all its fantastical and amazing magical stories of heaven filled with highly fuckable virgins and the burning lakes of fire in hell, of prophets and angels, of giant men defying gravity and flying donkeys, of hate and slaughter, is indeed a bad nightmare from which mankind has not yet woken up from. It is something that has been self-inflicted. Man has voluntarily imprisoned his own mind in a world of fiction, in world of fantastical stories. This is the true story of man, the story that Darwin should have told," Karl added.

"But it is the story that Karl Marx has told," Roger said.

"Who told you that?" Karl asked in genuine surprise.

"Hey man, my brother is a big time Communist, when it comes to Karl Marx he is a main man I tell you, he knows everything about Karl Marx and _Das Kapital_ and all that kind of stuff, he said exactly what you said but in other words," Roger explained.

They began to hear crashing sounds accompanied by grunts, groans, roars and whizzing. They stopped and listened, straining their eyes to see through the pitch dark. Silhouetted against the star lit sky they could make out the vague outline of a hippo standing on the summit of a grass covered dune. The sounds were coming from all directions.

"Hippos! It looks like there are hippos everywhere, we need to beat a retreat, there are no trees that we can climb," said Zebedee.

"Should we make a dash for it?" Karl asked.

"No, let us just turn around and walk away as quick as we can, we can gamble that they will not perceive us as a threat if they see us retreating instead of challenging them," Zebedee said.

"I don't want to challenge any hippo in the dark," Roger agreed.

The base was in darkness when they arrived back. There were no sentries on duty. The section of eight infantrymen lead by a corporal and lance corporal who were supposed to guard the base lay snoring on their beds in their tents. The side flaps of the tents had been rolled up.

At 7.00 am the section of eight infantrymen lead by a corporal and lance corporal who had remained behind to guard the base were still sound asleep.

Chapter 18

It was Sunday morning. Wearing sandals and black PT shorts Karl, Roger and Zebedee sauntered bare-chested off to the kitchen. They were ravishing hungry after their boozing session and nocturnal excursion looking for their Tsonga girls. Zebedee unpicked the lock of the large gas deep freeze chest in the kitchen. They found frozen packets of bacon. He then unpicked the lock of the gas fridge. Inside they found butter, bread, cheese and eggs. Karl found oil, condense milk and instant coffee in the pantry.

Roger switched on the gas stove which was equipped with a large one centimetre thick and one meter square stainless plate that was used for frying. He poured oil on the heated plate. They open four packets of bacon and laid the strips of bacon on the plate. While the bacon sizzled they began to crack a dozen eggs onto the plate, the eggs immediately began to explode on the hot oil with sharp cracking sounds. Zebedee switched on the large urn to boil water for coffee. Within minutes the bacon was crisp and the eggs were fried sunny side up. Karl toasted slices of bread on the hot plate.

They scoped piles of bacon and eggs into their _vark pans_ (army stainless meal tray). Smeared the toast with thick layers of butter and washed down the breakfast with fire buckets filled a litre of instant coffee mixed with table spoon ladles of condense milk.

******

"What are the gaps in the story of Rebekah?" Zebedee asked as they ate their breakfast.

"Like most stories in the Bible there are many gaps in the story of Rebekah and each gap inspires a counter-story. Like I have said many times before the counter-story is the untold story. It is the story of another perspective on the nature of the events unfolding in the words of the narrator. The counter-story does not necessary agree with or even supplements the narrator's account or the writers account of how things seem to be and how they turned out to be," Karl explained.

"Abraham sends his servant to find a wife for Isaac. He sends the man with ten camels. The man sets out to Aram Naharaim which is in north-west Mesopotamia. At the end of the journey in the late afternoon he stops at a well near the town of Nahor. He is the only man at the well. He waits by the well. Why does he tarry at the well? He tarries at the well because that is the place where he could pick-up women. Indeed it is his plan to pick-up a woman. It is late afternoon but still very hot, it is also the time when women could be expected to start arriving at the well to draw water. As twilight approaches a beautiful young woman arrives at the well. It is Rebekah. She is alone at the well, there are no other women, and there are no witnesses. In her unveiled state she notices the presence of a strange man. She does not cover herself up; she does not show any sign of modesty. She does not see a servant, she see a man with ten camels laden with good things. In her eyes the man is wealthy. Being at the well she is ready for any signs of courtship. The man takes the initiative he asks her for water. When he asks for water she takes it as a sign that he is flirting with her, that she is being wooed, that he is courting her. She goes along with the game and addresses Abraham's servant as 'lord.' The man does not correct her, he does not state that he is only a servant sent by Abraham to find a wife for his son Isaac. The servant of Abraham for a moment plays the role of the Lord, the man who possesses the wealth and power which makes him desirable in the eyes of Rebekah. For a brief moment he is the man who could woo the beautiful maid who has come to draw water," Karl elaborated as he got into the rhythm and beat of the narrative.

Zebedee and Roger waited for him to continue with story as Karl paused for a moment to gather the threads of the narrative together into the tapestry that he was going to weave for their benefit as listeners.

He took a sip of his coffee.

"She volunteers to give his ten camels water as well. A thirsty camel can drink up to 30 gallons of water. For the camels she has to draw up 300 gallons or 1350 litres of water from the well to fill the troughs. One litre of water weighs one kilogram, so Rebekah lifts and carries a total of 1350 kilograms. By volunteering to provide water for the camels she prolongs the time that she spends with the 'lord' at the well. He watches her work. She does not have a lazy bone in her beautiful body. She is not afraid of strenuous manual labour. She has beautiful arms, her clothes cling to her sweating body, she grids up her skirt so that she can run to and fro between the well and the trough, he sees her calves, he sees her thighs, he sees the movement of her heaving breasts against the fabric of her clothing, they are shapely and firm, he sees the contours of her hips, he notices her narrow waist, she is a virgin and has not borne any children, she is unmarried, all this time she is exposed to his gaze as she exerts herself in the strenuous physical labour of hauling water from the well in the gathering gloom of twilight. He watches her continuously; he is absorbed completely with her. She knows that the man is watching her every move, she knows that he is taking pleasure in what he sees. Her beautiful face is flushed; she is smiling radiantly all the time. She knows that she is sensual, that she is desirable. She has worked hard to impress the wealthy stranger. He then performs an act of proposal to her. He fixes a nose ring to her nostril. He slips gold bracelets onto her forearms. He asks her whose daughter she is."

"Breathless with excitement and in a state of high sexual arousal she informs him that she is the daughter of Bethuel, the son that Milcah bore to Nahor. The words 'whose daughter are you' is a signal that he is interested her. With the word 'whose daughter are you' ringing wildly in her head she runs home excitedly and tells her mother everything that happened at the well with the wealthy stranger. Laban, Rebekah's brother goes down to meet the man at the well. The man is invited back. He tells Laban the purpose of this mission. He negotiates and pays the bridal price for Rebekah."

"Rebekah is unaware that the man is only a servant sent by Abraham. She thinks the man is her bridegroom. After the bridal negotiations she is called into the room where the man is sitting with Laban. Laban asks her whether she will go with this man. She answers yes believing that she has accepted his marriage proposal. Then after bidding farewell to her family Rebekah mounts one of the camels. The man mounts his camel and they ride away. As they travel she wonders when the man is going stop the caravan of camels so that he can take her down from her camel and consummate their marriage. But they don't stop; they proceed on with the journey."

Zebedee and Roger listen with undisguised intrigue to the story.

"It was late afternoon when they approached Abraham's settlement. Isaac was walking in the fields nearby. He noticed the camel train approaching. When she saw Isaac approaching the camel train she falls off the camel with shock. She asked the man who Isaac was. The man answered: 'He is my master.' She immediately took her veil and covered herself. She discovers that the man she called lord is not her husband but the man servant of Abraham. Isaac is her husband. Isaac takes her to see his mother and then he takes Rebekah to his tent and mounts her," Karl ended the story with a grin.

"There is the counter-story behind any story, a counter-story which fills in the gaps and the omissions with a subterranean tale. It is a different story, but more interesting and no less true. This is Rebekah's story, it is a story with a sudden unexpected anti-climax for both reader and for Rebekah who is the main character of the counter story," he said.

******

Flocks of red bishops with their striking plumage gathering in the reed beds ignored their presence on the grassy mound. The birds assembled in large noisy congregations, perching high on the pinnacle of bending reed stalks while making themselves visible to their rivals and prospective mates. In ritualized choreographies of courtship displays, males puffed their feathers; spread their tail feathers out like a fan and lifting their wings up at half-mast while spreading out their wing feathers. Zebedee listened to the buzzing, hissing and sizzling sounds of the red bishops. Suddenly the tsssssss zeeeee tssipitsipip tsip-tsip-tsip was interrupted by a movement.

Chapter 19

It was their last day at Lake Sibaya. On Monday the Bedford supply truck would take them back to Ladysmith and they would klaar uit on Wednesday. Their army days would be over in a matter of days. The base was currently being occupied by the Natal Carbineers which was a citizen force regiment whose members had been called up for their three week camp. They had already handed over the keys to the ammunition magazine and to the water truck to the Carbineers. After Sunday lunch Karl, Roger and Zebedee decided to slip off to the beach to fish. Late that afternoon they spotted five figures walking towards them. As they drew closer they recognized Rebekah among them.

She was with her father, uncle and two younger brothers. They had also been fishing all afternoon but with no luck. On their way back home they had to walk past Karl, Roger and Zebedee. They saw the R1 rifles resting against a large piece of drift wood. Roger had started a fire on the beach. They saw the catch of Pompano. Karl who was standing knee deep in the churning white surf had just hooked another Pompano. They saw the outline of more Pompanos in a large wave that was on the verge of breaking. After a brief exchange of words they decided to join Karl in the surf. While they started baiting their lines Rebekah did not seem to be very happy that the men wanted to fish. Light was fading fast and it appeared that she did not want stay any longer on the beach. The moon would only be coming up after 8.00. She wanted to get back to the homestead while there was still light. Karl walked over with the fish that he had just caught. He listened to the conversation taking place between Rebekah and her father, and he gathered what the situation was. He looked at Zebedee.

"She is impatient to go home and they want to stay and continue fishing into the night or at least until the moon rises. So why don't you go with her? Take the torch and your rifle. I would gladly offer but I have had too much to drink and Roger is already too drunk," he said. An hour ago they had started drinking Karl's Tequila. Zebedee was stone cold sober; he had not touched any alcohol. Karl spoke to the men in isiZulu telling them that Zebedee would escort Rebekah home through forest covered dunes and he would be able to find his way to the beach once the moon had risen above the dune forest.

They were happy with his suggestion and they told Rebekah go with Zebedee. She smiled at Zebedee, she was happy to go with him into the dune forest. Zebedee smiled back at her. Rebekah's father told her that they would find their way back through the dune forest later that night once the moon has risen.

They pointed to a dark spot in the dense thicket of Brachyleana discolor that grew at the foot of the forest covered dunes, this was where Zebedee would find the path entrance into the dune forest that would take him and Rebekah over and through the dunes to their homestead. Zebedee slung his rifle over his shoulder and took the torch. He walked to the spot at the foot of the dunes with Rebekah following close behind him.

When Zebedee and Rebekah set off the sun had already disappeared behind the high dunes and twilight was rapidly advancing. The evening star was already twinkling in the sky that had turned a darker shade of purple and the sea had become a deep uninviting dark navy blue with black streaks. Ghost crabs had started to emerge from their deep burrows and were scurrying over the beach.

They entered the gloom of the dune forest and followed the path that rose steeply taking them to the summit of the dunes. At the summit they took a smaller path that branched off from the main path which cut across the dune in the direction of Lake Sibaya. The torch light started to fade; it became dimmer and dimmer as they pressed on. The soft sandy path had become a dark tunnel through the dense forest vegetation. Rebekah seemed to be uncertain about whether they were on the right track. She had started to hesitate at every fork and at every turn. They could only communicate with their hands, she did not understand or speak a word of English and Zebedee could not understand Xitsonga. It soon it became clear that they had lost their way in the depths of the dune forest. In the shadowy light she had missed the path that branched off to the homestead where she lived. They walked deeper and deeper into the forest following paths that took them down into dune valleys and then up again onto the summit of another dune. It was humid and warm in the forest and they were soon drenched in sweat. Their sweat soaked clothes clung to their bodies. Night had now descended upon the dunes. They were now enveloped in a thick blanket of pitch darkness.

Unsure which way turn to take they slowed down. Their senses became increasing heighted as the sounds of the night began to stir in the creeping darkness, and as the forest foliage started emitted its distinctive aroma of the night, filling the heavy and warm air with the intoxicating promise of a million mysterious attractions. And within the enveloping gloom they could hear all around them the constant muffled percussion of crashing surf. It was difficult tell whether they were far from or close to or high above the surf racing up the dark beaches. Standing close together they both stood still for moment, straining their ears they listened, the dunes, the dense foliage, the thickness of the night seemed to amply the acoustics of the distance breakers, they seemed to be incredibly near.

He also heard another noise emanating close by on the ground. She also heard the noise; it was a slithering and soft rustling sound. He shone the torch around. In the dim torch light they both saw the huge cream coloured triangular head of a massive fat Gaboon Viper. If they had taken one step forward one of them would have certainly stepped on it. She let out a terrified shriek of fright and at that moment the torch battery finally gave up the ghost and they were engulfed by an impenetrable blackness. She turned around and flung her arms around him, she grasped him as tightly and fearfully as someone who was about to drown at the bottom of a deep dark well. He felt the goose bumps covering the skin of her arms. She began to scream in absolute terror and panic. He put his arms around and held her tightly.

"It is gone, it is gone, it will be OK, don't worry."

But to no avail; she became completely hysterical. She began to weep. Her whole body was trembling with shock. He tried his best to calm her down and comfort her. Her weeping gave way to sobs. He held her tightly and he stroked her arms and her back. He patted her back softy with the palm of his hand. He even felt a strong compulsion to kiss her neck and cheek. In the end he kissed her tear stained cheek and she responded immediately by tightening the grip of her embrace. The kiss seemed to calm her down. They stood holding each other in a mutual embrace. For months they had seen each other every day, for months they had cheerfully waved their hellos and their goodbyes. Now the only way they could communicate with each other in the dark was through physical contact, through grasping, holding and touching. They could only communicate through their skins.

He held her tightly in his arms. He kissed her checks and neck while he held her. She responded to the sensation of his lips on her skin by tightening the grip of her strong arms around him.

Without been able see anything in the pitch darkness he became aware of the extraordinary degree of sensory acuity that his skin and finger tips possessed. It was if the skin in which his body was encased had become his only sense organ, his only means of sensory perception, his only means of communication. With Vanessa he had discovered the pleasant sensations that were mysteriously orchestrated by the thousands of densely packed richly innervated tiny tactile or touch receptors that covered every millimeter of a person's skin. Now he felt that his own skin had become sensually sensitive to every part of Rebekah's body that pressed tightly against his. She pressed her face into the crevice of his shoulder. He found the wood smoke fragrance of her hair and skin a very pleasant scent.

Her body felt erotically electric against his body; he struggled not to feel sexually aroused by her physical closeness, even the wood smoke fragrance of her hair and skin, and her sweet body odor made him feel erotically intoxicated. He would never have dreamt that he would ever find himself lost in the forested dunes in the pitch dark with Rebekah clinging desperately to him too frightened to move. She continued to cling tightly to him like a terrified child.

She seemed to have found comfort and security in the physically closeness of Zebedee's body; a physical closeness that bordered on the threshold of real and not inadvertent physical intimacy. Physical intimacy is nothing less than experiencing the exertion of mechanical pressure on the skin's surface. Pleasant physical intimacy is made possible at the boundary of the skin, a boundary which paradoxically represents the body's defense barrier against many kinds of physical intimacy.

No physical intimacy would be possible if the skin were not enervated; to be enervated and electric the skin surface is densely covered with thousands of pressure-sensitive nerve endings. Embedded in the epidermis are thousands of individual tiny touch receptors or tactile sensors per square centimeter that have evolved to awaken and stir the pleasurable sensuous awareness emanating from the mysterious and enticing contact pressures exerted by the another person's body of the opposite sex. The fingers are like sensitive antennae. The fingers and the hand are potent sense organs, possibly the most sensitive of all sense organs. The human hand is exquisite in its dexterity, exquisite in its ability to manipulate, sublime in it's to capacity to communicate the deepest emotions, also comforting in its capacity to communicate love and affection and supreme in its ability create the most intricate artifacts.

He thought that it would be heaven or even paradise on earth if he could just touch her all over in the inky dark with his fingertips. If only he could touch her ear lobes, her lips, her face, her breasts, her lower back, her hips, her buttocks and her mound, he would be in paradise. If only he could just run his fingers over the surface of her body in the dark, just his fingertips running lightly over her skin caressing her everywhere. Without being able perceive anything through the veil of the dense darkness that had enveloped them he would discover the mysteries of her fleshly incarnation, he would discover whether her skin was hard, firm, friable, soft, smooth, rough, hairy, velvety, sticky, cold, cool, hot, wet, dry, moist, slippery, slimy, silky, satiny or warm. If only he could lay her down gently in a bed of dry leaves that covered the soft sand under the dark canopy of the sand forest and kiss her and make love to her.

She made him feel intoxicated with desire. Her close intimate physical presence began to overwhelm him.

Zebedee's mind began to race. Thoughts and emotions flooded his mind as Rebekah clung to him. Possessing her in his embracing he pressed her tightly to his body, and she did not demur.

In the pitch dark, as Zebedee meditated deeply, reflected profoundly and contemplated seriously, on the prospects of being able to make love to Rebekah, his train of thought was interrupted strangely and inadvertently by the problem of what Descartes was trying to solve with his _cogito ergo sum_. The whole problem of the _cogito ergo sum_ in all it tantalizing and palpable vividness sprung into Zebedee's mind. Could one exist as a disembodied mind? Could we experience mental states as disembodied beings, could we experience mental states if we were not embedded in a physical world as physically embodied beings, could a physically disembodied and disembedded brain in vat experience meaningful mental and sensual states of the material and physical world of incarnation, of being embodied in the world of sensation? Could the brain in a vat have a mind in the absence of an incarnate body?

What was the actual relation between the _cogito_ and the _sum_ if in his _First Meditation_ Descartes claims that he has neither senses nor a body, but then surely without senses and without a body Descartes' question of his existence become vacuous? Surely he cannot speak or think about existing without at the same time speaking or thinking about 'the what' of his existence? Can it only be a person that thinks? Can a person only exist in a bodiless state and still experience the mental state of conscious self-awareness? What is a person? Is a person a subjective thinking self? Is a person a conscious thinking self? What is thinking? What does it mean to think? What does it mean to experience a mental state? Is a person a being that has the power to experience mental states? Is a person a being that has the power to experience states of conscious awareness? Is a person a being that possess a mind? What are the defining properties, qualities, attributes, powers and depositions which make the existence of an individualized conscious state possible? What makes the capacity for self-conscious subjective experience possible? What is mind?

Can a mind exist without senses and without a body, surely not? Can mental states exist without senses and without a body? Surely not. If you do indeed exist you have to exist as something, you cannot exist as nothing. What if we exist only as erotic beings and that _Eros_ is indeed the real relation between the _cogito_ and the _sum_ , as Roger would believe. What if 'I desire' is a more real foundation that I am something rather that the disembodied 'I think'; and what if erotic perception is the essence of existence. Darwin's sexual selection and the evolution of sexual characters would be consistent with this idea. In our erotic perception, as embodied and embedded perceivers, we are held physically captive in the intimate sensory embrace of the perceived and the sensed. In the erotic encounter, the perceiver and the perceived, are bound together reciprocally and mutually as an interdependent unity, the perceived becomes known to the perceiver through the power of the affects which the perceived exerts on the perceiver's sensory surfaces. In the perceiver's physical and mental experience of the perceived, the perceived is intimately present as a conscious being and not remote.

Rebekah in her vulnerable state of overwhelming terror of being in the presence of an unseen deadly menace in the form of the Gaboon Vipers lurking everywhere in the impenetrable darkness of the dune forest, let go of all her inhibitions regarding physical intimacy.

She whimpering like a frightened animal she continued to cling desperately to Zebedee. She felt safe in his embrace as she pressed even more tightly against his body. The sound of his voice and the feel of his warm breath close to her ear was comforting and reassuring. His cheek felt pleasantly hot against her own cheek.

In their dark embrace they had both became hyper-conscious of the mysterious pleasantness of their uninhibited physical closeness. They felt themselves mutually and reciprocally succumbing to an irresistible state of arousal. Her body radiated heat, her skin felt smooth and silky, and she carried the scent of wood smoke; her presence excited every nerve ending in Zebedee's skin. Contrary to Descartes, Locke, Berkley and Hume, how can the reality of her physical presence be doubted or reduced to something that is intermediate, something which stands only as a fragile proxy or a vague token of her immediate but enduring physical existence which persists in its tangible presence; is her presence nothing more than fleeting sensations felt at every nerve ending, is her presence nothing more solid, nothing more substantial, than shifting sense impressions or fading ideas, does she only exist as 'sense data'; but now the perceiver is held captive to the libidinous gaze, the libidinous touch, the libidinous sensation, the libidinous thought, the libidinous fragrance, and the libidinous sounds, all felt at every nerve ending in his body.

Now in the inky dark, except for the now fainter sounds of waves crashing, silence returned and began to fill the dune forest.

He kissed her gently first on her neck, and then on her cheek still moist with tears. He then tentatively and lightly kissed her on her lips; she tightened her embrace and pressed her slightly opened lips against his. His heart began to pound madly, he began to feel strangely breathless, he felt her breast heaving against his chest, he felt the pressure of her mound against his loins and felt his hands over her buttocks, he could feel that she was going to give herself to him. He began to fondle and caress her breasts through the thin wet threadbare sun bleached fabric of her bodice. Her lips remained tightly mobile against his. Their instincts had taken over and their thoughts merely followed. He touched her mound and she breathed in sharply as she was overcome by an unexpected wave of exquisite pleasure.

The veil of darkness lifted. Shafts of bright moon light began to filter through the forest canopy. He could see her face. She lifted her head and looked at him intensely with searching eyes. Her face broke into a soft and affectionate smile, but her smile was filled with the unfathomable and ancient mysteries of the human species that were beyond speech.

He whispered, "I could easily fall in love with you Rebekah and love you forever and forever, for all eternity without communicating a single meaningful word to you. It would be like the pure pristine primordial love of the first human animals living in the shelter of the sand forests on the shores of freshwater lakes filled with fish to catch and eat."

Through the gap between the trees they could see the enchanted lake below them, bathed in moon light. A silvery visibility now filled the night. The frogs in the reeds beds began to croak and the crickets in the forest began to chirp. The volume of the amphibian and the trilling invertebrate chorus gradually increased until it reached a crescendo that the filled the night with erotic arias of love, love that had been lived in all its passionate intensity and then lost forever, but never to be forgotten as the unfaded memory of its sweetness always returned in the misty forlornness of melancholy. A whiff of their presence spooked a lone bushbuck which fled, crashing through the thickets.

Stilling clinging to him she did not move as the dark shadows slowly retreated from the dune forest, melting away. After a while he gently and carefully disentangled himself.

She watched as he took of his sweat damp T-shirt and spread it out on a bed of dry leaves. Bare chested, standing in his black army issue shorts, he helped her as she pulled her sweat damp dress up over her head. Now standing naked in the forest, she care spread her dress out over a bush. After removing her panties she laid down on his T-shirt while he slipped off his shorts and laid down next her. She turned onto her side and he snuggled close up to her and inserted his erect penis between her upper thighs. She clamped his penis between her strong and muscular upper thighs so tightly that could not shove his penis up her vagina. He put his left arm around her and pulled her tightly against him. She put her right arm around him, also pulling him holding him tightly against her body. They pressed their open lips together while he gently thrusted until he climaxed, ejaculating between her thighs.

They lay in each other embrace until they fell asleep under the spell of a pleasant drowsiness.

When they woke up the moon was high above Lake Sibaya. Streams of moonlight penetrated through the forest canopy illuminating the forest floor. Walking through the silvery shafts of moonlight they followed a game trail through the dense thicket which took them down the steep slope of the forested dune until they reached the gravel road on the eastern shore of the lake. The lake was hidden behind a thick blanket of tall reeds.

They followed the Southern Cross which pointed out the path to the homestead where Rebekah lived. They left the sand road and followed a path, the path took them to a secluded valley between vegetation covered dunes. In the clearing at the foot of the towering dune forest, bathed in moonlight, stood a number of reed huts. The moon seemed to tarry above the lake and smiled down on them. A couple of pawpaw trees heavy with fruit cast strange looking shadows across the yard. Behind the reed huts Zebedee could make out groves of banana trees from which large bunches of bananas hung. In the wooden stockade that formed the kraal multicoloured big horned sleepless cattle stood patiently chewing the cud. Behind the kraal were small patches of tall sugarcane, maize, pumpkin, cabbage and ground nuts. No single living being bothered to stir the moon bathed tranquility of the homestead with any unnecessary sound. The dogs lifted their sleepy heads, wagged their tails and instantly fell asleep again. The chickens shifted on their roosts as they dreamed of grain falling from the sky. The goats stared unblinking at the pair standing on the smoothly swept sand in the middle of the yard.

Zebedee felt completely dehydrated. He also suddenly felt emotionally exhausted. The sexual encounter with Rebekah had drained him. His lips felt dry and his throat was parched.

"Amanzi," was the only word he could find in his head to indicate his thirst.

Her face broke into a board friendly smile, exposing perfect white teeth that flashed brightly. She disappeared into a reed hut and quickly came back carrying a large tin can filled with cool water.

She gave him the tin can and watched in silence as he quenched his thirst. He gave her back the tin and she too drank deep drafts from it.

They stood in silence looking at each with mysterious smiles playing over their lips. He did not know how to take leave of her, how to disentangle himself from the spider's web of the nascent and fragile emotional bonds that had been forged between them in the darkness of the sand forest.

He began to speak in English to her.

"This is my last night at Lake Sibaya, tomorrow I will be gone for good. It is strange to say that I will to be gone for good, it makes me feel sad. Right now the way I feel, I don't want to leave you, I don't want to leave Lake Sibaya. I know that tomorrow I will feel worse when I think of you and about the brief moment we had together in the forest. There is lot of stuff I would like to say to you. I feel very emotional. I don't know what to say to you. In a way you have become part of my life and I have crept into your life. I will never forget you. I am glad that I met you; you are really one fine woman. I suppose in another world, in another life things could have been different. Anyway, I am not really good at this emotional stuff," he said.

She listened attentively to his speech, the silent smile remaining fixed on her face while gazing intensely into his eyes which were filled with emotion.

She liked the boys, she liked Zebedee the most, her friends also liked the boys, they enjoyed their blatant and obvious flirtation at the beach, and they spoke about boys all the time and they joked about them. They found the boys funny, they saw that the boys were exceedingly naughty, and they knew that the boys liked the girls too much. They were not like the other soldiers, the ones whose faces were smeared black with charcoal, who fixed leafy twigs onto their bush hats and who always had dark scowling faces and averted their eyes and never looked into their faces, they were unlike the three boys who fetched water every day from the lake.

"Well I suppose this is it; I don't know what else to say to you. I think that will be all. I have to go back to the beach; maybe they have left some fish for me."

He stood there unable to leave. He reached out and took her hand and held it for a while.

"Siyabonga, _Sala kahle," he said, using the few isiZulu words that he had managed to pick up over the past few months._

_" Hamba kahle," she said softy._

_She stood in the yard and watched him as he walked off along the meandering path that would take him back to Lake Sibaya. After a while he turned round. She was still standing in the yard. He waved and she waved back._

When he got back to the beach it was almost 02.00 in the morning.

The full moon still hung high in the star lit sky above the dunes. It was like day light on the beach. The tide was coming in. Waves crashed on the beach. The percussion of the waves echoed against the high dunes.

Karl and Roger were sitting only in their shorts on a log by the fire. The others had left. An empty bottle of tequila lay in the sand. They had saved some grilled fish fillets for Zebedee which he hungrily wolfed down.

The next day sitting on the hard bench at the back of the Bedford truck Zebedee stared at the passing open savannah woodlands as the truck droned along the gravel road that cut a straight line through the Makatini Flat towards the Lebombo Mountains. From his elevated seat he gazed at the vast breathtaking vista of the open savannah woodlands that were dotted with an overabundance of truly magnificent trees such as the Tamboetie (Spirostachys africana) and the Knobthorn (Acacia nigrescens).

He spotted homesteads, kraals, herds of cattle, flocks of goats and women walking with the ubiquitous plastic drums of water perched on their heads. He took particular notice of the women. After months at Lake Sibaya which was only interrupted by one 11 day leave pass, they had acquired the habit of looking at black women with the appreciative eyes of admiring _connoisseurs._

_He kept on thinking of Rebekah. He became lost in a beautiful reverie in which he imagined a life with Rebekah. He entertained a dream of living with her in a reed hut on their homestead. He was a farmer at heart. Farming was his destiny. He would become a peasant farmer, a subsistence farmer with Rebekah as his partner and wife. He knew a lot about farm animal husbandry. He knew a lot about growing crops. He would get strong and hardy horses which they would ride. He would breed horses; he would also breed cattle and goats. They would make butter and cheese. They would get a donkey to haul the water from Lake Sibaya. Their only luxuries would be books. When the work was done and when there were no distractions he would read and possibly write. Sitting in the shade of an acacia tree canopy in the yard of their homestead next to their kraal he would read aloud and she would listen, of course she would learn English and he would learn Xitsonga. They would fill their lives with stories. They would also start inventing their own stories, they would practice story telling until in their hands it would become a fine art, a beautiful craft that would take the imagination on the most splendid and awe inspiring journeys._

Chapter 20

"You can kiss me if you like," Catarina said.

He leaned over her and kissed her, a long lingering kiss and while he kissed her he began to caress her.

"Mmmmh that was so nice, I am so super sensitive to your touch. I think my whole skin is extra-sensitive to your fingers. Why it is so pleasant to be touched in a certain way or to be kissed? Do you know why?" Catarina asked.

"It is just the way our brains and nervous systems works," he said.

"What about our minds and our imagination?" she asked.

"Well our minds allow us to think about what we experiencing and our imaginations, well our imaginations allow us think about what we would like to experience," he said.

"Our minds allow us to reflect on everything. Our minds can set us free and allow us to experience the power of transcendence over the thing that we are," he said.

"Ha, ha, ha, what kind of thing are we?" She asked after laughing.

"Is it animal, vegetable or mineral?" She asked.

"It is animal," he answered.

"And what is transcendence?" She asked.

"Transcendence means going beyond limits or constraints. So transcendence also means not to be subject to limits and constraints. It means the mind can escape or free itself from constraints and limitations. Man can reflect on everything that constraints or limits the person as a conscious agent. It means I don't have be a slave to my desires, my compulsions, my needs, my impulses, my habits, my fears, my anxieties and all that kind of stuff. I can be free if I so wish. It is up to me," Zebedee said.

"Can anyone ever be really free?" She asked.

"We can be free to do good. That is why I am a Communist," he said.

"If it were impossible for us to do good, then I would not be a Communist," he continued.

"What is good, what do we mean by the good?" She asked.

"To do good, is to prevent or stop the exploitation, the harming and the injuring of others, which ultimately means to fight and prevent things which are evil," he said.

"Do you believe in the existence of evil?" She asked.

*******

In 1962 her uncle was appointed as a professor in sociology at the Estudos Gerais Universitários de Angola, the newly established university in Luanda. During the early 1950s as a student at the University of Lisbon he became a secret member of the illegal Partido Comunista Português. In Angola he soon became an active member of the Portuguese Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola (MPLA).

Catarina was his favourite niece. Her aunt was a _mestiço_ woman who was born in Luanda. Her uncle was a Communist.

He thought about Vanessa. He thought about Rebekah. It seemed to be unfair to Catarina to be thinking of them. But he would never be able to let them go, he could not release them from his thoughts, from his dreams, from the nocturnal visitations when he would meet with them again and they would renew their vows of eternal love.

Rebekah would live in his dreams forever.

Vanessa and Rebekah would be part of his life forever. Even when they had forgotten about him he would still think of them, he would still remember them. He would remember them even in the autumn of his life when the darkness of winter finally beckons.

Even though he would love Catarina forever and be loyal and faithful to her, he would not be able to let Vanessa or Rebekah go.

Lying on the grass mound in the sun surrounded by a wall of reeds in the secluded spot on the banks of the Rietspruit Zebedee would never have imagined that such a thing could ever happen to him, to be with an attractive dark haired caramel skinned girl who had originally came with her family from a farm somewhere deep in the Angolan hinterland, who arrived at the door step of the kitchen early this morning; a young woman who was behaving flirtatious towards him, next to a pool of deep water through which the current run slowly.

He would always remember this December day in 1971; it was dreamlike, improbable, bordering on the surreal. It could only happen where a special geography lends itself to the surreal by opening up a universe of possibilities, the kind of possibilities that do not exist in the towns and in the suburbs. The geography of RooiKraal fell into that category of rural space.

It can only be within this kind of rural isolation or marginalization that boundaries can be dramatically transgressed.

It was on the beach at Lake Sibaya that he first experienced the destruction of boundaries that held people apart. It was in the dark forest dunes with Rebekah that he really felt what it must be like to be a Communist. It was standing in the moonlight with Rebekah at her homestead after she had given him water to drink that he felt what it must be like to be a Communist.

Somehow he knew that Catarina was going to be his wife.

He knew that he would be with her for the rest of his life. He knew that their love would be deep and everlasting.

Like Isaac's Rebekah, Catarina had been chosen for him.

He felt in his bones that his ancient roots were also reaching out to claim him, drawing him back to the way of his ancestors, drawing him back to the people to whom he belonged.

How many women can a man love in his life?

He knew that Catarina was going to be his wife.

It had been arranged.

She too knew it had been arranged.

She smiled.

She knew that Zebedee was going to be her husband.

It had been decided.

His mother had told her in passing that marriage was not the kind of thing that you left to chance.

These things cannot be left to chance.

It was always best that some things in life should be decided for you.
