WE WAITED UNDER an acacia tree, where there was a clearing in the surrounding elephant grass, until all the light had slipped from the landscape. We waited until the white clouds of day had faded into the sky above us. We waited until we saw the moon. It was just a sliver, I remember. It looked like a fingernail trapped in the branches above our heads. After a while even the tall clumps of elephant grass all around us were barely distinguishable. The bush had fallen silent. It was that in-between time between day creatures and nocturnal ones. Every now and then a breeze stirred the grass. It made a runaway, rustling sound. Nobody spoke. I wrapped my arms around myself and pulled the fabric of my donkey-jacket closer to me.
Then came Themba’s hoarse whisper. “Let’s go.”
We moved out in a line behind him, close together, following the light from his torch. It was a lizard’s tongue, flicker-flicker, through the grass. Sometimes it shone on the stones – I think the rock in that area is quartz. It has hard angles. When you stepped on it, even through our boots – well, you could feel its sharpness.
There were five of us: Themba, myself, and three shy young women. These girls had hung back in their room at the safe house in Mbabane. I had had only the most fleeting contact with them. I was glad of their silence now and their reticence – less chance if we were caught that we would betray one another. I remember the woman in front of me. She had a sweet scent. She smelled like roses. When she bent below the overhanging branch of a thorn tree, she would turn her head slightly, to make sure that I had seen it too. I was grateful. I remember that courtesy.
The grass was thick and knotted. It pulled at our ankles. It threatened constantly to trip us up. I learnt fast, lifting my feet high and setting them down firmly, but even so it wasn’t easy going. Occasionally, the thorns of an acacia clawed at our jackets and we’d have to stop and unhook ourselves. It was difficult, that negotiation of the dark with only the pinprick illuminations of veld by the torch. Even in daylight it would have demanded concentration. I struggled to control my uneven breathing. At one stage I fought to suppress a sudden urge to cough. From the elevation of her breathing, now a series of staccato gasps, it seemed my rose-scented comrade was struggling too. For all this we were a quiet group and our progress was steady.
Themba was “infiltrating” us back across the Swaziland border into South Africa. Once we were there, the plan was that we would split up. Each of us had been assigned his or her own mission.
Themba saw to it that we stopped regularly so that we could rest and he could take soundings. We passed around a plastic one-litre Coke bottle filled with tap water. The water was warm from being carried against Themba’s body, but we were grateful for it all the same. Themba was a veteran of these infiltrations and we trusted him to get us where we needed to be. He didn’t seem to struggle as we did in his negotiation of the terrain. It was as if his feet read the unevenness of the path and his limbs anticipated the obtrusive trees. He was tall and supple, but a very fit, strong man. His stride was unaffected by the heavy machine-gun slung across his back.
We must have hiked in this way for two and a half, perhaps three hours. Then suddenly Themba halted. We gathered around him. Torchlight snaked across the striations of a fence just in front of us. It was topped by barbed wire. We had reached the border.
“We must be extra careful from now on,” Themba said quietly. “There may be patrols.”
The fence was less formidable than you might think. From missions that had gone before us there were holes dug underneath it, concealed afterwards by the scrub. Themba went unerringly to one of these.
I was able at last, in a real mission, to execute the leopard-crawl that had been drilled into us during training in Minsk. I was under the fence in seconds. I was home. Five years in exile and here, under cover of darkness, on an arbitrary piece of ground in the middle of nowhere, stretching my arms up to the stars, I was home.
In the camps and later in safe houses first in Botswana and then in Swaziland, I had thought of home constantly. I missed my mother, who had died soon after I left the country, and my father, who had wanted me to be a lawyer. At first I was impatient, eager to be deployed where I might do something useful, but we had to learn to put a lid on that impatience. A lot of the time I was bored to distraction. I read second-rate novels and much Marxist literature, whatever was being passed around; I played cards with my comrades; we tended our vegetable garden. We grew very good tomatoes. Sometimes there was a raid by the South African military but we usually had enough warning to disappear into the streets or the bush. Then we would be moved on again, in broken down military trucks, to another town, another camp, or another country. But wherever we were, we were always waiting to go home.
So here we were. It was almost an anti-climax except for the new fear that gripped me. I was aware of how vulnerable we were. All we had done was negotiate an arbitrary fence, but with that transition each of us could be arrested. We could meet a sudden and brutal death. Sweat ran down my cheeks. It was the sweat of fear, underscored by an icy pang beneath my lungs that constricted my breathing.
We carried on in the same way, lumbering through the elephant grass, clinging to the contours of the faint path.
Then there it was – a scent of pine – at first elusive, then heavier on the air. It was so familiar, so redolent of home, that it brought sudden tears to my eyes. The things you don’t expect, that’s what gets you. The things stored deep in your cells. I stood there breathing it in, resisting the childish urge to sink to my knees and kiss the soil. But already the line was moving on in front me.
Suddenly there was a tearing sound, as if the night were a coarse fabric being shredded apart. It started low and then gained in intensity. In the distance we saw lights – headlights. A brief illumination of the veld, of wheaten grass, and they were gone, the growl of the engine fading. Silence returned.
“That’s the road,” Themba said in a sardonic tone. It broke the tension and for a minute we relaxed and glanced at one another. He meant the highway from Johannesburg to Durban. “That’s where the pick-up will be in the morning. We must wait now. Let’s rest – it will be some hours.”
We walked another few hundred metres until we were abreast of the tar. There was a stormwater-drain culvert there, under the road, which allowed water to pass under the highway in the rainy season. It was dry and so we took shelter there. “No talking. Absolute silence,” said Themba.
We lay down in the soft riverine sand. From the gradual change in the breathing around me I sensed that most of my comrades succumbed to slumber before very long. Myself I could not sleep. I was tense, elated to be home, apprehensive at the mission ahead, uneasy in the darkness. At one stage I stepped out of the culvert to stretch my legs and breathe in the scent of the pines. There was a faint light on the horizon. It would soon be dawn. Themba was standing guard against a tree, the machine-gun an arc in silhouette against his body.
Light slowly filled the sky. It drew shapes from the landscape that had been elusive under cover of night. The road stretched out into the distance. There was the treacherous elephant grass as far as the eye could see, golden and innocent now in the grey morning light, and sunflowers on long stalks ready to turn their faces to the sun. There stood a regimental line of pines. I could also see the hazy outlines of a farmhouse in the distance.
As the light grew so did the chorus of birds hidden in the bushes around us. I leaned against the concrete struts of the culvert and closed my eyes, absorbing the growing clamour, identifying from their songs the birds of my youth. Off left I could distinguish a colony of masked weavers and red bishops, which nested in reeds. That meant there was water nearby, a stream or small dam perhaps. From further off the familiar backdrop of turtledoves, interrupted by the harsh cry of a hadeda as it landed in a nearby field.
A rumble rose from under the tar, gentle at first, then more insistent. In the distance I could see headlights. Themba motioned at me to move out of view and we both ducked into the culvert. The rumbling grew in intensity as a truck passed overhead. The shaking of the walls woke up our comrades.
As the early morning advanced, the volume of traffic grew: delivery supply trucks moving from small town to town in this northern Natal province. Occasionally, we heard voices, most probably farmworkers greeting each other as they walked over the culvert, conversations that lingered in time, a series of calls over distance, until they were too far apart to still be heard. We drew to the centre of the culvert. For perhaps another hour we huddled there.