She wasn’t finished. ‘But it’s no use talking to a brick wall. You’ve probably signed some clause that forbids you to talk about stuff like that.’ Her hands began to gesture angrily. ‘What’s your story, Lemmer? Are you always so sullen, or is it just that you don’t like me? I must be very boring after all the important and famous people you’ve looked after.’
I suspected the real source of her frustration was that her contrived cuteness was not working as it ought. Not on Phatudi, not really on Wolhuter, and also not on me. Welcome to the real world, Emma.
‘I appreciate that you’re angry,’ I said.
‘Don’t patronise me.’ She dropped her knees, turned her shoulders away from me and stared out of the window.
I kept my voice courteous. ‘To do my job, I have to keep a professional distance. That’s one of the fundamental principles of my vocation. I wish you would understand; this is an unusual situation. Ordinarily, the bodyguard would not even travel in the same vehicle as the client, we never eat at the same table, and we are never included in conversation.’
And I could tell her about Lemmer’s First Law.
She took a while to process this. Then she turned back to me and said, ‘Is that your excuse? Professional distance? What do you think I am? Unprofessional? I have clients too, Lemmer. I have a professional relationship with them. When we work, it’s work. But they’re human beings, too. And I had better see them as human beings and respect them as such. Otherwise, there’s no point in what I do. Last night we weren’t working, Lemmer. We sat at a table like two human beings and …’
‘I’m not saying …’
But she was on a roll. The anger made her voice deep and urgent. ‘Do you know what the trouble is, Lemmer? We live in the age of the cell phone and the iPod, that’s the trouble. Everyone has earphones and everyone lives in this narrow little world where nobody wants to hear anybody else, everyone wants to listen to their own music. We cut ourselves off. We don’t care about anyone else. We build walls and security gates, our world gets smaller and smaller, we live in cocoons, in tiny safe places. We don’t talk any more; we don’t hear each other any more. We drive to work, each in his own car, in his own steel shell, and we don’t hear each other. I don’t want to live like that. I want to hear people. I want to know people. I want to hear you. Not when you speak as the strong, silent bodyguard. As a human being. With a history. With opinions and perspectives. I want to listen to them and test my own against them, and change if I should. How else can I grow? That’s why people become racists, and sexists and terrorists. Because we don’t talk, we don’t listen, because we don’t know, we live only in our own heads.’ All that in complete, fluent sentences, and when she had finished she made a gesture of frustration with her small, fine hands.
I had to admit that she nearly had me. For a moment I wanted to submit to the temptation and say, ‘You’re right, Emma le Roux, but that’s not the whole story.’ Then I remembered that when it came to people, I was a disciple of the Jean-Patd Sartre school of philosophy and I merely said, ‘You have to admit that our work is somewhat different.’
She shook her head slowly and shrugged in despair.
We drove in silence for over an hour, through White River and Nelspruit, then the sublime landscape beyond the town – the mountains, the vistas, and the winding road up the escarpment to Badplaas, to the entrance of the Heuningklip Wildlife Preserve. No decorated entrance, just a tall wire gate in the game fence and a small sign with the name and a phone number. The gate was locked.
Emma called the number. It was a while before someone answered.
‘Mr Moller?’
Apparently it was. ‘My name is Emma le Roux. I would very much like to speak to you about Cobie de Villiers.’
She listened, said, ‘Thank you,’ and disconnected the call.
‘He’s sending someone to unlock the gate.’ She was irritated.
Ten minutes of silence passed before a young white man in blue overalls arrived in a pick-up. He said his name was Septimus. He had a squint in one eye. ‘Uncle Stef is in the shed. Follow me.’
‘Ah, my dear, I have to honestly say that it doesn’t look like Cobie,’ said Stef Moller, multimillionaire, apologetically and carefully, as he passed the picture back to Emma with grimy fingers.
He stood in a large corrugated-iron shed alongside a tractor that he had been working on when we entered. A muddle of tools, spares, drums, cans, steel shelving, workbenches, tins, paintbrushes, coffee mugs, empty Coke bottles, old tyres, a plate with breadcrumbs, the smell of diesel and lucerne. The standard farm shed. There was something that tugged faintly on my subconscious. Perhaps it was the contrast between expectation and reality. There was oil on Moller’s bleached T-shirt and jeans. He was close on sixty, tall and almost totally bald. Strong workman’s hands. His eyes were large and they blinked behind large gold-rimmed spectacles. His speech was painfully slow, like a tap dripping. He didn’t look like a rich man.
Emma took the photo without a word. She couldn’t hide her disappointment. The day had begun to take its toll.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Moller sincerely.
‘It’s OK,’ said Emma. She didn’t mean it.
So we stood in silence in the gloom of the shed. The zinc roof creaked in the heat. Moller’s eyes blinked as he looked from me to Emma, and back to me.
Rather reluctantly, she asked: ‘Mr Moller, how long did he work for you?’
‘Just Stef, my dear.’ He hesitated as if it were a weighty decision. ‘Perhaps we should have something to drink up there.’ He pointed a dirty fingernail towards the house.
We went out and I couldn’t rid myself of the feeling that I had seen something vital.
The homestead was without character, a white house, bleached corrugated-iron roof, built in the unimaginative seventies, perhaps, and fixed up a bit later. We sat on a veranda made of paved cement blocks. I satisfied my hunger from a big bowl of biltong and drank three glasses of Coke. Moller apologised for bringing the refreshments himself on a tray. ‘There’s only Septimus and myself, no other labour. I’m afraid there’s only Coke, will that do?’
‘Of course,’ Emma replied.
He related his story for Emma. I could see that he liked her in a shy, apologetic way.
He said that he remembered Cobie de Villiers well. ‘He turned up here in ninety-four, March, I think, in a beat-up old Nissan 1400 pick-up.’ He spoke in a measured, unhurried way, like a man dictating to a dim secretary. ‘In those days I didn’t lock the gate. He came knocking on the door.’
When Moller answered the door, he found a young man standing with his baseball cap in his hand who said, ‘Oom, I hear you are making a game reserve,’ using the unique Afrikaans term of respect for elders.
Moller said that was so.
‘Then I would really like to work for you.’
‘There are lots of game farms with jobs for game rangers …’
‘They want guides to take the tourists around, oom. I don’t want to do that. I want to work with the animals. That is the only thing I can do. I heard you don’t go in for tourists.’
There was something about Cobus, a simple determination, and a strong conviction, which appealed to Moller. He invited him in, and asked for references.
‘Sorry, oom, I don’t have any. But I have two hands that can do anything and you can ask me anything about conservation. Anything.’
So Moller asked him whether it would be a good thing to plant ilala palms on the reserve.
‘No, oom.’
‘Why not? They are good food. For the fruit bats. And the monkeys and elephants and baboons like the nuts too …’
‘That’s true, oom, but it’s a Lowveld tree. It’s a bit too high above sea level here.’
‘And tamboti?’
‘Tamboti is good, oom. This is its area. Plant them near the rivers, they like water.’
‘Are they good for the game?’
