Fourth Protocol Read online

  Two days after my eighteenth birthday, in August 1943, I said good-bye to my father and took the train to Pietersburg and then changed for the line south to Pretoria. My father came as far as Pietersburg, and my last sight of him was standing on the platform there, waving me off to the war. The next day I walked into Defense Headquarters in Pretoria, signed on, and was sent to Roberts Heights camp for basic training, kitting out, drilling, and small-arms instruction. There I also volunteered to be red-tabbed.

  “What does ‘red-tabbed’ mean?” asked Preston.

  Viljoen looked up from his writing. “In those days only volunteers could be sent to fight outside the borders of South Africa,” he said. “They could not be compelled. Those volunteering for combat overseas were given a red tab to wear.”

  From Roberts Heights I was posted to the Witwatersrand Rifles/De La Rey Regiment, which had been amalgamated after the losses at Tobruk to form the Wits/De La Rey. We were sent by train to a transit camp at Hay Paddock, near Pietermaritzburg, and attached to reinforcements for the South African Sixth Division, awaiting transport to Italy. Finally, at Durban, we were all shipped out on the Duchess of Richmond, up through the Suez Canal, and disembarked in late January at Taranto.

  Most of that Italian spring we were moving up toward Rome, arid it was with the Sixth Division, then composed of the Twelfth Motorized Brigade and the Eleventh Armored Brigade, that we in the Wits/De La Rey went through Rome and began the move on Florence. On July 13 I was forward of Monte Benichi in the Chianti Mountains with a scouting patrol from C Company. In thickly wooded country I became separated from the rest of the patrol after dark and minutes later found myself surrounded by German troops of the Hermann Goering Division. I was, as they say, “put in the bag.”

  I was lucky to stay alive, but they put me in a truck with some other Allied prisoners and took us to a “cage” or temporary camp, at a place called La Tarina, north of Florence. The senior South African NCO, I recall, was Warrant Officer Snyman. It was not to be for long. As the Allies advanced through Florence we were suddenly subjected to a brutal night evacuation. It was chaos. Some prisoners tried to escape and were shot. They were left lying in the road as the trucks rolled over them. From the trucks we were put into railcars built for cattle and went north for days through the Alps and finally to a POW camp at Moosberg, twenty-five miles north of Munich.

  Even this was not for long. After only fourteen days about half of us were marched out of Moosberg and back to the railhead, where we were entrained in cattle cars again. With hardly any food or drink we rolled across Germany for six days and nights, and in late August 1944 we were finally disembarked again and marched to another and much bigger camp. It was, we discovered, called Stalag 344, and was at Lamsdorf, near Breslau, in what was then German Silesia. I think Stalag 344 must have been the worst stalag of them all. There were 11,000 Allied POWs there, on virtual starvation rations, kept alive mainly by Red Cross parcels.

  As I was then a corporal I was required to join working parties, and was sent every day with many others by truck to work at a synthetic-petrol factory twelve miles away. That winter in the Silesian plain was bitter. One day, just before Christmas, our truck broke down. Two POWs tried to fix it while the German guards kept them covered. Some of us were allowed to jump down near the tailboard. A young South African soldier near me stared at the pine forest only thirty yards away, looked at me, and raised an eyebrow. I will never know why I did it, but the next moment we were both running through the thigh-deep snow while our comrades jostled the German guards to upset their aim. We made the forest line alive and ran on into the heart of the woods.

  “Do you want to go out for lunch?” asked Viljoen. “We have a canteen here.”

  “Could we have sandwiches and coffee here, do you think?” asked Preston.

  “Sure. I’ll ring for it.”

  Preston resumed the tale of Jan Marais.

  We soon discovered that we had in effect jumped from the frying pan into the fire, except that it was not a fire but a freezing hell where the night temperatures sank to thirty below zero. We had our feet wrapped in paper inside our boots, but neither this nor our greatcoats could keep out the cold. After two days we were weak and at the point of giving ourselves up.

  On the second night we were trying to sleep in a tumble-down barn when we were roughly jerked awake. We thought it must be the Germans, but with Afrikaans I could understand some German words and these voices were not German. They were Polish; we had been discovered by a band of Polish partisans. They came within an inch of shooting us as German deserters, but I screamed that we were English and one of them seemed to understand.

  It appeared that while most of the urban dwellers of Breslau and Lamsdorf were ethnic Germans, the peasants were of Polish stock, and as the Russian Army advanced, numbers of them had taken to the woods to harass the retreating Germans. There were two kinds of partisans: the Communist and the Catholic. We were lucky—it was a group of Catholic resistance fighters who had taken us in. They kept us through that bitter winter as the Russian guns rumbled in the east and the advance came closer. Then, in January, my comrade caught pneumonia; I tried to nurse him through it, but without antibiotics he died and we buried him in the forest.

  Preston munched his sandwiches moodily and sipped his coffee. There were only a few pages left, he noted.

  In March 1945 the Russian Army was suddenly upon us. In the woods we could hear their armor rumbling westward down the roads. The Poles elected to stay in the forests, but I could take no more of it. They showed me the way to go, and one morning, with my hands above my head, I stumbled out of the forest and gave myself up to a group of Russian soldiers.

  At first they thought I was a German and nearly shot me. But the Poles had told me to shout “Angleeski,” which I did repeatedly. They put up their rifles and called an officer. He spoke no English but after examining my dog tag said something to his soldiers, and they were all smiles. But if I had hoped for an early repatriation, I was wrong again. They handed me over to the NKVD.

  For five months, in a series of damp and icy cells, I was accorded brutal treatment, all of it in solitary confinement. I was subjected to repeated third-degree interrogations in an attempt to make me confess I was a spy. I refused, and was sent naked back to my cell. By the late spring (the war was ending in Europe but I did not know this) my health had broken completely and I was given a pallet bed to sleep on, and better food, though still uneatable by our South African standards.

  Then some word must have come from the top. In August 1945, more dead than alive, I was taken many miles in a truck and finally at Potsdam in Germany handed over to the British Army. They were more kind than I can say, and after a period in a military hospital outside Bielefeld I was sent to England. I spent a further three months at Killearn EMS Hospital, north of Glasgow, and finally in December 1945 I sailed on the Ile de France from Southampton for Cape Town, arriving in late January this year.

  It was in Cape Town that I heard of the death of my dear father, my only relative left in the world. It caused me such distress that my health suffered a relapse and I entered the Wynberg Military Hospital here at Cape Town, where I stayed for a further two months.

  I am now discharged, given a clean bill of health, and hereby apply to join the South African foreign service.

  Preston closed the file, and Viljoen looked up.

  “Well,” said the South African, “he has had a steady and blameless, if unspectacular, career since then, rising to the rank of first secretary. He has had eight foreign postings, all the countries firmly pro-Western. That’s quite a lot, but then he’s a bachelor and that can make life easier in the service, except at the level of ambassador or minister, where a wife is more or less expected. You still think he went rotten somewhere along the line?” Preston shrugged. Viljoen leaned over and tapped the folder. “You see what those Russian bastards did to him? That’s why I think you are wrong, Mr. Preston. So he likes ice cream, and
he made a wrong-number phone call. A coincidence.”

  “Maybe,” mused Preston. “This life story ... There’s something odd about it.”

  Captain Viljoen shook his head. “We’ve had this file in our hands ever since your Sir Nigel Irvine contacted the general. We have been over and over it. It’s absolutely accurate. Every name, date, place, Army camp, military unit, campaign, and tiny detail. Even to the crops they used to grow before the war in the Mootseki Valley. The agriculture people confirmed that. Now they grow tomatoes and avocados up there, but in those days potatoes and tobacco. Nobody could have invented that story. No, if he went wrong at all, which I doubt, it was somewhere abroad.”

  Preston looked glum. Outside the windows, dusk was falling.

  “All right,” said Viljoen, “I am here to help you. Where do you want to go next?”

  “I’d like to start at the beginning,” said Preston. “This place Duiwelskloof, is it far?”

  “About a four-hour drive. You want to go there?”

  “Yes, please. Could we start early? Say at six tomorrow morning?”

  “I’ll get a car from the pool and be at your hotel at six,” said Viljoen.

  It’s a long haul on the road north to Zimbabwe, but the motorway is modern and Viljoen had drawn a Chevair without insignia, the car usually driven by the NIS. It ate up the miles through Nylstroom and Potgietersrus to Pietersburg, which they reached in three hours. The drive gave Preston a chance to see the great limitless horizons of Africa that impress the European visitor accustomed to smaller dimensions.

  At Pietersburg they turned east and ran for fifty kilometers over flat middle veld, with more endless horizons under a robin’s-egg blue vault of sky, until they reached the bluff called Buffalo Hill, or Buffelberg, where the middle veld drops to the Mootseki Valley. As they started down the twisting gradient Preston drew in his breath in amazement.

  Far below lay the valley, rich and lush, its open floor strewn with a thousand beehive-shaped African huts, the rondavels, surrounded by kraals, cattle pens, and mealie gardens. Some of the rondavels were perched on the side of the Buffelberg but most were scattered across the floor of the Mootseki. Timber smoke eddied from their central smokeholes, and even from that height and distance Preston could make out the African boys tending small groups of humped cattle, and women bent over their garden patches.

  This, he thought, was African Africa, at last. It must have looked much the same when the impis of Mzilikazi, founder of the Matabele nation, marched north to escape the wrath of Chaka Zulu, to cross the Limpopo and found the kingdom of the people of the long shields. The road bucked and twisted down the bluff and into the Mootseki. Across the valley was another range of hills, and in their center a deep cleft, through which the road ran. This was the Devil’s Gap, the Duiwelskloof.

  Ten minutes later they were into the gap and cruising slowly past the new primary school and down Botha Avenue, the principal street of the small township.

  “Where do you want to go?” asked Viljoen.

  “When old farmer Marais died, he must have left a will,” mused Preston. “And that would have to be executed, and that means a lawyer. Can we find out if there is a lawyer in Duiwelskloof, and if he is available on a Saturday morning?”

  Viljoen drew up to Kirstens Garage and pointed across the road at the Imp Inn. “Go and have a coffee and order one for me. I’ll fill the tank and ask around.”

  He rejoined Preston in the hotel lounge five minutes later.

  “There’s one lawyer,” he said as he sipped his coffee. “He’s an Anglo, name of Benson. His office is right there across the street, two doors from the garage, and he’ll probably be in this morning. Let’s go.”

  Mr. Benson was in, and when Viljoen flashed a card in a plastic wallet at Benson’s secretary, the effect was immediate. She spoke in Afrikaans into an intercom and they were shown without delay into the office of Benson, a friendly and rubicund man in a tan suit. He greeted them both in Afrikaans. Viljoen replied in his heavily accented English.

  “This is Mr. John Preston. He has come from London, England. He wishes to ask you some questions.”

  Benson bade them be seated and resumed his chair behind the desk. “Please,” he said, “anything I can do.”

  “Can you tell me how old you are?” asked Preston.

  Benson gazed at him in amazement. “All the way from London to ask how old I am? As a matter of fact, I’m fifty-three.”

  “So in 1946 you would have been twelve?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can you tell me, please, who was the lawyer here in Duiwelskloof in that year?”

  “Certainly. My father, Cedric Benson.”

  “Is he alive?”

  “Yes. He’s over eighty and he handed the business over to me fifteen years ago. But he’s pretty spry.”

  “Would it be possible to talk to him?”

  For answer Benson reached for a telephone and dialed a number. His father must have answered, for the son explained there were visitors, one from London, who would like to talk to him. He replaced the receiver.

  “He lives about six miles away, but he still drives, to the terror of all other road users. He says he’ll be here directly.”

  “In the interim,” asked Preston, “could you consult your files for the year 1946 and see if you, or rather your father, executed the will of a local farmer, one Laurens Marais, who died in January of that year?”

  “I’ll try,” said Benson Junior. “Of course, this Mr. Marais may have been with a lawyer from Pietersburg. But local people tended to stay local in those days. The 1946 box must be around somewhere. Excuse me.”

  He left the office. The secretary served coffee. Ten minutes later there were voices in the outer office. The two Bensons entered together, the son carrying a dusty cardboard box. The old man had a fuzz of white hair and looked as alert as a young kestrel. After the introductions Preston explained his problem.

  Without a word the older Benson took the chair behind the desk, forcing his son to draw up another one. Old Benson placed glasses on his nose and gazed at the visitors over them. “I remember Laurens Marais,” he said. “And yes, we did handle his will when he died. I did so myself.”

  The son passed him a dusty and faded document tied in pink ribbon. The old man blew the dust off it, untied the ribbon, and spread it out. He began to read it silently.

  “Ah yes, I remember it now. He was a widower. Lived alone. Had one son, Jan. A tragic case. The boy had just come back from the Second World War. Laurens Marais was going down to Cape Town to visit him when he died. Tragic.”

  “Can you tell me about the bequests?” asked Preston.

  “Everything to the son,” said Benson simply. “Farm, house, equipment, contents of house. Oh, the usual small bequests in money to the native farmworkers, the foreman—that sort of thing.”

  “Any other bequests—anything of a personal nature?” persisted Preston.

  “Humph. One here. ‘And to my old and good friend Joop Van Rensberg my ivory chess set in memory of the many contented evenings we spent playing together at the farm.’ That’s all.”

  “Was the son back home in South Africa when the father died?” asked Preston.

  “Must have been. Old Laurens was going down to see him. A long trip in those days. No airliners then. One went by train.”

  “Did you handle the sale of the farm and the other property, Mr. Benson?”

  “The auctioneers did the sale, right out at the farm. It went to the Van Zyls. They bought the lot. All that land belongs to Bertie Van Zyl now. But I was there as chief executor of the will.”

  “Were there any personal memorabilia that did not sell?” asked Preston.

  The old man furrowed his brow. “Not much. It all went. Oh, I recall there was a photograph album. It had no commercial value. I believe I gave it to Mr. Van Rensberg.“

  “Who was he?”

  “The schoolmaster,” cut in the son. “He taught me until I
went to Merensky High. He ran the old farm school until they built the primary school. Then he retired and stayed here in Duiwelskloof.”

  “Is he still alive?”

  “No, he died about ten years ago,” said the older Benson. “I went to the funeral.”

  “But there was a daughter,” said his son helpfully. “Cissy. She was at Merensky with me. Must be the same age.”

  “Do you know what happened to her?”

  “Certainly. She married, years ago. A sawmill owner out on the Tzaneen road.”

  “One last question”—Preston addressed himself to the old man—“why did you sell the property? Didn’t the son want it?”

  “Apparently not,” said the old man. “He was in the Wynberg Military Hospital at the time. He sent me a cable. I got his address from the military authorities and they vouched for his identity. His cable asked me to dispose of the entire estate and cable the money to him.”

  “He did not come for the funeral?”

  “No time. January is our summer in South Africa. In those days there were few morgue facilities. Bodies had to be buried without delay. In fact I don’t think he ever returned at all. Understandable. With his father gone, there was nothing to come back for.”

  “Where is Laurens Marais buried?”

  “In the graveyard up on the hill,” said Benson Senior. “Is that all? Then I’ll be off to my lunch.”

  The climate east and west of the mountains at Duiwelskloof varies dramatically. West of the range the rainfall in the Mootseki is about twenty inches a year. East of the range the great clouds beat up from the Indian Ocean, drift across Mozambique and the Kruger Park, and butt into the mountains, whose eastern slopes are drenched with eighty inches of rain a year. On this side the industry comes from the forests of blue gum trees. Six miles up the Tzaneen road Viljoen and Preston found the sawmill of Mr. du Plessis. It was his wife, the schoolmaster’s daughter, who opened the door; she was a plump, apple-cheeked woman of about fifty with flour on her hands and apron. She was in the throes of baking.