The Ghost-Eater and Other Stories Read online

  She knew about every major pilgrimage – religious, sporting or otherwise – as though she were herself devoted. She worked eight hours a day, five days a week, with very few distractions. And she smiled a lot, as required. She would probably never use her Fanon or Chomsky at Cant Travel, but she knew the weather over the Mediterranean like the back of her hand.

  ‘Sir, if you travel a week earlier you will probably hit the mistral, which … the mistral, it’s a wind, a strong wind, that blows from the north, so … no, no, it will actually save you money because it will be a tail-wind … a little bit of turbulence, but your flight will be an hour or two shorter, which is almost £2,000 saved … that’s right, the mistral, it’s a wind that cleans … well, it brings fresh and clear weather … ja, I suppose you could call it that … ja, a wind of change.’

  And then she smiled, even though the person on the other end of the phone couldn’t see her, she smiled.

  ‘May your hajj be blessed, sir. Goodbye.’

  She wasn’t sure if the smile required of her had kept her from complete depression or driven her to the edge of despair, but recently it had come more easily. As the addresses and phone numbers and even fax numbers for the peripheral, forgotten comrades accumulated, she found herself walking more upright into the agency’s tea-soaked premises, despite the drizzle in her collar.

  The day she penned her first inquiry was a fortnight before Nelson Mandela’s release from prison. It was addressed to a middle-aged man she had known twenty years earlier, a teaching student then, with a scarred bottom lip and his own car. He had asked her name as she sat smoking on Jorissen Street and then insisted on calling her ‘Vars’ instead of Fraus. She had been offended and perhaps, in that unintentional protest, he had seen someone worth a bit of effort. From there she had met other lifestyle liberals and even one or two genuine articles. His name was Jonny Boonstra, a coloured man from Westbury, and he wrote angry pamphlets. Jonny was never happier than when he was angry. Ms Burkhardt had liked him. It is possible that kissing him was her first real act of sedition. Her first heroic gesture. He was, she supposed, the thin edge of the wedge, although to credit him with such significance, given his anaemic contributions to the struggle since then, left her feeling sour. He lived in Stoke, where he continued to write angry pamphlets about ‘neo-colonisation’ and white hegemony. He only ever shouted. In her opinion, he had never evolved.

  The letter read:

  From the Office of Ms Fraus Burkhardt

  Dear Jonny

  This note will probably come as a surprise to you. I think we last spoke more than three years ago at the Amnesty International thing in Hackney. When I think about it, I am sorry that we left that thing on bad terms and that I haven’t bothered to contact you until now. I should have tried a bit harder to understand your unhappiness. I suppose I just thought you were always finding a reason to be unhappy. Anyway, I’m sorry.

  You have probably been following the changes back home as closely as I have. I didn’t think we’d see it in our lifetimes, to be honest, but then when the Soviets seemed to relax and the Wall came down and I started to think something’s happening here. Maybe it will spread. And then the Nats changed their stance and now Mandela is finally getting out! It is all a bit magical. I need to pinch myself.

  I remember you saying how much you longed to be home. You said you wanted to be there when things changed, to remind the boers (your word, I think) of what dogs they are,never to let them forget. And never to let the people forget either. Well, I also want to contribute. So what I am doing is contacting people who I don’t think will be contacted by the Struggle directly with a view to getting them back home. I am organising a plane to fly them all back to SA. It will be very cheap, and I am sure I can pass the cost on to an NGO or concerned corporate. It also doesn’t need to be permanent. People can always return.

  Anyway, I was hoping you might be the first to commit, in principle only at this stage, to my idea. It will be a plane of returning exiles, all wanting to contribute in their way. Most of the people I am contacting are, like you, about remembering the bad stuff. Writing about it and speaking about it. I think it will be quite a homecoming.

  Please let me know soonest. There are only fifty seats available.

  Best wishes,

  Vars

  Ms Burkhardt was surprised by Jonny’s response. That is to say, she was surprised by the speed of his response. He had become a tardy human being. He was passive and felt entitled to his sullen disappointment in just about everything, mostly in the lack of recognition that he believed was due to him. Yet his reply had been swift.

  The nature of the reply, on the other hand, did not surprise her at all. He was in. He wanted to be there, scowling in the background when the international press tried to ‘blur the shit into some kind of a rainbow’. He even offered to place an advertisement in the national papers to let ‘the comrades in oblivion’ know about the plane. She told him that she had managed to get contact details for most of their English comrades, but suggested he might advertise in a Paris paper and a Berlin paper. He replied that he would do that, and that he would use Afrikaans and Zulu words to ‘open the closing hearts and sores’ and to distinguish the ‘bulletin’ from the French and German surrounding it. He proposed naming the plane and said he would pen some ideas.

  He came back later in the day, roused by his prodigal zeal, huffing and puffing down the telephone: ‘Vars, hallo? Hallo, Vars. Listen …’

  ‘Hello, Jonny, I’m here.’

  ‘Listen, this plane of ours …’

  ‘Umm, Jonny, I’d really like to keep quite a clear … What I mean is, too many cooks at this stage—’

  ‘Ja, this plane of ours, which will carry the chaff thrown out by the boers’ bloody mill back home, to choke the air the Nats are already taking for granted, this plane of ours, it should be called …’

  There was an inelegant pause.

  ‘Hello, Jonny?’

  ‘Can you hear me?’

  ‘Ja, you just—’

  ‘The plane will be called …’

  ‘Jonny?’

  ‘Fok, man, Vars! It will be called … Mnemosyne’.

  ‘What?’

  ‘That’s what it will be called. Mnemosyne.’

  ‘Nemmersign?’

  ‘That’s right. She’s the Greek goddess of memory and also the mother of the muses. It’s perfect, I think, and it even sounds a little like “nemesis”, which I like—’

  ‘Jonny, we’re talking about South Africans here, don’t you think—’

  ‘She’s the goddess of revenge. Anyway, can we get it painted on the plane?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Fuck it, I’ll get a big sticker made. And I’ll use the name in the bulletin as well.’

  ‘Look—’

  ‘Cool. I must go, Vars. Thanks.’

  Things moved very quickly from then. Jonny had been the right person to contact first. He spread the gospel of Mnemosyne like an epidemic, and Ms Burkhardt found herself needing to apologise to her work colleagues for the stream of faxes that began to flow. Everyday more people were committing themselves to the plane. Little people who had become littler and wanted to return to their roots and to nourish their wilting beliefs. Most would return alone, but some would bring their families, often acquired in the brief flush of celebrity and danger that a newly arrived exile is granted. NGOs and corporates also came on board, eager to brand themselves participants in freedom’s latest and greatest achievement.

  Ms Burkhardt felt new. She felt as though she was finally taking up meaningful arms on behalf of the Struggle. And she was, she told herself in the evenings as she sewed the finishing touches on the most critical part of her plan, completely at peace with her approach. She knew this would not win her the Nobel Prize for Peace, but was somehow comforted by the knowledge that Alfred Nobel had himself invented the first plastic explosive in 1875. Peace was never all olive branches and white doves. Alfred N
obel epitomised that. Everything felt right to her. It did.

  The fax she received on 23 November 1990 brought about Ms Burkhardt’s most irresolute moment. It had crawled, line by line, into her day, calmly waiting between a leaflet for cheap furniture, a promise of $7 million from the director of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation, and a confirmation from the Fikeni family, two adults and two children. The fax was only half a page in length and it was from Stephanie Swart.

  Up until that moment, Ms Burkhardt had always thought that the fax machine could devalue any document entrusted to it. The buckled letters and sheer paper diminished all sentiment to dross. However, this half-page could not be abased. It was fortified by the conscience of a heroine, undimmed by wrinkled obscurity and faded ink. Stephanie Swart could not be spoiled, not by time and not by fax. She had been detained by the state police in the early seventies. She had been tortured to unconsciousness without uttering a word of betrayal. She had been motivated by principle, and she had endured her decade in the cold as though it were as sharp and meaningful as a public arrest. She had betrayed her family and her community and her church. Her own language revolted her. Her skin was a constant reminder of the debt she would pay in perpetuity, and which interest she had serviced since her moral puberty had broken in her mid-teens. She was virtue, she was courage, and Ms Burkhardt could hardly breathe as she re-read:

  Dear Ms Burkhardt

  I wish to thank you.

  Your undertaking to ferry us back across the Styx, to allow us our ascent from Hades to hell, there to administer the gentle redress of a constant reminder, is a gracious and timely deed. I believe De Bono is correct: A memory is what is left when something happens and does not completely unhappen.

  What was done can never be undone. What happened cannot unhappen.

  Please reserve my place on the aircraft.

  Sincerely

  Stephanie Swart

  Ms Burkhardt’s first tears in ten years dropped from her cheek and slid unnoticed from the fax paper. She assigned a seat over the wing to Stephanie Swart, close to the starboard engine.

  By January 1991, the Mnemosyne was full. Thirty-seven adults and fourteen children, four of whom were toddlers. The plane was a BAC 1-11. There would be four crew members on board, and passengers were asked to provide their own refreshments. Ms Burkhardt would not be taking a seat. She needed to remain in London, she said, just in case there were any administrative problems to sort out. She would fly a couple of weeks later with KLM via Schiphol.

  When I saw the hole, the crater – from my side there was almost no debris around it – I thought that maybe this was the council redirecting the canal or something. But that made no sense. It was in the bicycle path. Maybe that’s when I felt a bit like this was wrong. Something has happened. And then I felt my heart in my throat and my breath was quivering. I think I was guessing what had happened. I think I started to know what I would find on the other side of this hole.

  Ms Burkhardt was at the airfield on 27 April 1991 to see off Mnemosyne. She carried with her a clipboard and a soft rag doll she had been making since 1990.

  ‘Here you go, my angel. Take this with you.’

  The little girl hesitated and looked up at her father.

  ‘Oui, petit, you may take it. And what do you say?’

  ‘Merci,’ the little girl whispered and clutched the doll to her chest.

  ‘No, I must thank you, my darling, for taking this doll. She’s is very important. Her name is Libby, which is short for Libertas. Can you say Libby?’

  ‘Libby.’

  ‘That’s good. I know she will feel safe with you and you will be safe with her. Can you guess what Libby wants to be when she grows up?’

  ‘Libby smells funny.’

  ‘No, sweetheart, Libby is odourless. Now tell me, can you guess what Libby wants to be when she grows up?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, my darling, she wants to be a doctor. She wants to get rid of germs and she wants to cut away the diseased bits so that we can move forward. She wants us to be healthy in the future.’

  The father furrowed his brow and thanked Ms Burkhardt before continuing towards the plane, with his child holding his hand. Ms Burkhardt stood and waved and waved at the line of detritus as it inched onto the plane.

  I have this paper with me. It’s from the official report. I keep it with me always. I don’t know why. Perhaps to remember. Perhaps it is not healthy for me to keep it. But here, you can … Should I read it to you? Okay … ‘The forward fuselage and flight deck area separated when the aircraft was in a nose-down and left-roll attitude, peeling away to the right at Station 800. The nose section then knocked the number 2 engine off its pylon. The remaining aircraft disintegrated while it was descending nearly vertically from 19 000 feet to 9 000 feet. A section of cabin floor and baggage hold, from approximately Station 1241-1920, fell onto housing at Nieuwe Kalfjeslaan, Amstelveen. The main wing structure struck the ground with a high yaw angle at De Braak, Amstelveen causing a massive fire.’ … I don’t know why I keep this with me. Perhaps to remember.

  Long Life

  Tembi Charles

  I experienced hunger – the lack of food – for the first time in my life when I travelled home to Zimbabwe after a couple of years. This was in the year 2004. I stayed in Harare, the capital city, for about two weeks. I reacted very badly to hunger; to poverty. To me, hunger is poverty and poverty is hunger. The two go together; they are one and the same thing. For those two weeks, I lived on pizza, simply because I refused to pay the ridiculously high prices for food. I did not understand how a burger could cost Z$15 000. My mind refused to accept this. So for the two weeks I was there, I ate pizza day in and day out. This cost me about Z$4 000 a day. Somehow, mentally, I could accept that price. I suppose the pizza was cheaper because there was hardly anything on it, just a bit of cheese and tiny pieces of chicken.

  One day, while shopping in OK Stores, the one in Samora Machel Avenue in Harare, I came face to face with hunger. Actually, the last time I saw you in 2000, I now recall, we bought Mazoe Orange Crush from that OK Store before we drove to the airport. Yes, that one. Well, I was standing in a queue waiting to pay for my six-pack, when something happened that I will never forget. There was an elderly woman in front of me, also waiting to pay. The till operator tallied up her goods and waited for payment but the woman did nothing. From what I could see, she could not pay for her goods. Her money was just not enough! The woman looked at the till, looked at the money in her hand, looked at the till, looked at the money in her hand … It was as if her neck was going to twist and break with all this looking; to and fro, to and fro. She looked at the cashier, she looked at her hand as if willing it to multiply the money and produce the correct amount. You know, like magicians do it. From one coin, abracadabra and bang, you have coins materialising in their hands and cascading to the floor. Well, this did not happen to this lady. Not on this day. No magic, nothing!

  The only thing left for her to do was to remove the Huletts White Sugar, the Iwisa Super Maize Meal, the Crown Cooking Oil, and the Snowflake Wheat Flour. These were all South African products that had taken over the shelves. The only Zimbabwean item in her basket was the packet of cheap kapenta fish; that she kept. But then what would she have left? I could see what was going on in her mind. If she removed all this, what would her children eat? These items were very basic foodstuffs; very, very basic. In the course of her deliberation, the twisting and turning of her neck as she looked from her hand to the cashier, her green doekie fell to the floor, revealing a full head of grey, almost white, hair. That’s when something gave within me. I could no longer just watch. That woman could be my amai, my mother! I picked her doekie off the floor, a floor covered in dust, its tiles peeling off … When was the last time this floor was swept? Poverty was everywhere, even in this store stacked with goods from corner to corner.

  There were imported items that no one but the diasporas could buy when they ca
me home laden with British pounds, Australian dollars and South African rands. What had life come to in Zimbabwe? I wanted to go home; go home to England, my home for the last twenty-five years. But right now, in that moment, I had to deal with this hunger that stood right in front of me. I moved closer to the woman, and whispered to her that I would pay for her food. She almost collapsed, opening her tired eyes with a look of disbelief.

  So, to cut a long story short, I paid for all her groceries. I mean, I had to. Here was a poor woman, with kids at home waiting to be fed, and all I was thinking of was my beer. I could not allow myself to be that selfish even though I was home on vacation. She took her goods and left the store. For some reason unknown to me, I went back to the supermarket and frantically started filling a large trolley with groceries: bright yellow oranges, cabbages, a huge bottle of Mazoe Orange Crush, this and that and this and that. It all went into the trolley. Quite honestly, I did not look. I was taken over by some force. You know, a shavi. Some kind of spirit that comes into you and you lose control. From aisle to aisle, I just took down whatever my hand landed on, Coca-Cola, Fanta, samp, sugar beans, until my trolley was full. Then I stopped. Who was I buying all these things for? The amai had left the shop and was probably at home already. It just did not make sense. I was not making sense. I pulled out my Visa credit card and paid for everything without even looking at the amount. I felt relief go through me like the relief a smoker feels when he drags on his first cigarette after a long day. Yes, that kind.