The Soldier who Said No by Chris Marnewick Page B

pleaded.
    De Villiers sat down and untied his shoes and put them on properly, lacing the bootstraps up tightly. When he raised his arm holding the knife as high as he could, the knife reached only as high as the Bushman’s thighs. De Villiers thought he would have to make a jump of about a metre to be able to cut the rope. He made a practice jump, reaching as high as the ankles. A second jump brought a grunt from his throat, but reached no higher. He improvised by cutting a length of sapling from a shrub and tied the Leatherman to its end, extending his reach. The rope parted quickly under the blade and the Bushman fell to the ground in a heap of dust and mopane leaves.
    The Bushman coughed before he spoke, ‘Eh, the lion has to send his women to find his meat. He’s not going to dine on !Xau tonight!’ His name sounded like Teekau. It started with a click of the tongue at the back of throat, like a cork popping out of a champagne bottle.
    De Villiers studied the Bushman. He was small, with a wrinkled face and yellowish-brown skin. His eyes were drawn to slits, his teeth yellow, and his hair caked with dust. It was impossible to gauge his age, but De Villiers guessed that !Xau was somewhere between forty and fifty years old, perhaps older.
    ‘Who did this?’ he asked.
    ‘Soldiers,’ the Bushman said. He rolled over and tried to get to his feet, but his hands and feet would not cooperate. He ended up on his knees and elbows.
    When De Villiers bent over him, the Bushman touched his camouflage shirt, rubbing the cotton material between his fingers. ‘Soldiers,’ !Xau said a second time.
    De Villiers took the Bushman’s small yellow-brown hands, scarred by hard living, into his own. The hands were cold. He rubbed some warmth into them. Then he started on the feet. Starved of blood during the ordeal, the feet were slow to recover.
    ‘Were you tracking for them?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘Why did they do this to you?’ De Villiers pointed at the remnants of the rope hanging from the tree.
    ‘I wanted to go back to 31.’ De Villiers knew that the Bushmen trackers were attached to 31 Battalion, not 32, and concluded that they must have brought !Xau in for a special operation.
    ‘What did they say?’ he asked.
    ‘They said we had to find you quickly.’
    ‘Why?’
    The Bushman swallowed. ‘They said you were SWAPO . And they showed us the body of another one there at the river.’ The Bushman pointed in the direction of the river behind him.
    ‘Was he dead?’
    ‘Yes. They threw the body in the river.’
    The Bushman was slow to recover and unsteady on his feet. De Villiers knew they had to get going.
    ‘Are you well enough to go?’ he asked.
    !Xau took a few steps, holding on to De Villiers’s arm.
    ‘Why do white men smell so bad?’ he asked with no trace of shame or humour in his voice.
    De Villiers sniffed at his shirt. There was no trace of deodorant or aftershave. ‘I don’t smell bad,’ he said. ‘It’s you who smells bad.’
    ‘No, it is you.’
    ‘What do I smell like?’ De Villiers had to ask.
    ‘Like the rancid fat of an eland,’ !Xau said without hesitation.
    ‘We have to go,’ De Villiers said, at a loss for a suitable response. He had expected something kinder, like sweat, or work. ‘I need water. And you can be glad I smell bad,’ he said. ‘Otherwise I’d have walked right past you and you would still be hanging in the tree.’
    ‘He-he-he.’
    ‘Where are your things?’ De Villiers asked.
    ‘I have a knife,’ !Xau said. He dug in the back pocket of his trousers and produced a black-handled clasp knife.
    The knife was a Best, a tin-handled folding knife sold in trading stores all across the rural areas of South Africa in the sixties. This one had seen years of use, its blade reduced to little more than an awl. Countless schoolboys had chanted the praises of the Best. Baas Ek Sny Treurig. BEST . And in reverse: Tog Sny Ek Blik.
    De Villiers remembered when he had his own Best as a