Eugene put his weathered copy of Inferno down and scooped up a handful of dirt. As in much of Africa, it was red, like a handful of blood. Even in West Africa where the surface soil was a deep black loam, if you dug a little, the red turned up, underneath everything; like the very continent’s blood: everyone was buried in it and everyone came from it. If there was an Africa, this was it. Eugene was crumbling the earth into a fine red drizzle.
I believe in this, this fucked-up land we call Africa, he said. I’m a real Boer like that. Like the Zulu or the Ndebele, I live and die for this earth. I sleep it, I dream it, I taste it, I love it, hell, I even breathe it.
I see, Sunil said.
It was hot, and flies were beginning to buzz around the dead man and the stack of kudu meat, both raw and cooked. The men were eating, drinking, and generally joking around. The mood seemed light, like any picnic Sunil had attended.
Baas, you want some food, one of the men called to Eugene.
He shook his head, never taking his eyes from Sunil’s face.
See, I’m nothing like these barbarians, he said. That’s why I brought you in. These men care nothing for Africa, even the blacks among them. They care nothing for causes. They only care about having and using brutish power. Without thinkers like me, it will all be taken from them, because that kind of brutish power cannot survive for long. It begins to feed on itself.
That takes no great insight to realize, Sunil said, swatting at a fly. If you brutalize an entire people to have your way then you must always live with the fear of retaliation; it means you can never drop your menacing guard. We can only live like that for so long before we slip up. That’s what you do have in common with these men, Dante or the Bhagavad Gita notwithstanding.
Eugene let the rest of the earth drizzle from his hands. Sunil became aware suddenly that the men by the barbecue had stopped talking. The only sound was Eugene dusting his hands off and the buzzing of flies. Then there was the unmistakable click of a hammer cocking on a gun. Sunil felt the hair on his neck rise to attention. Although he could not see who had the gun, because his back was to them, he knew it was pointed at him. Eugene looked from Sunil to the men behind him and shook his head. The hammer was released and just like that, the chatting and laughter resumed behind Sunil.
I like you, Sunil. I really need a man who speaks his mind, Eugene said, picking up his book and waving it at Sunil. So what else do you make of a man like me?
Professionally?
It would hardly be personal since you don’t know me.
And there won’t be a gun to my head?
No, no, of course not, Eugene said, smiling, eyes cold.
Sunil took a swig of beer. He knew this was a test, but he wasn’t sure how to pass it. There were a lot of metal clanking sounds coming from behind him but he didn’t turn around.
You are a man who strives for the power to control other people, he said.
But why do you think that is?
I would say it is because the striving and the power keep you from realizing just how helpless you really are. It protects you from facing the fact that others are manipulating you, that regardless of what you might claim, your philosophy is simply a way to rationalize what you do for others too afraid to do their own dirty work; that you are in a way also a victim of the apartheid state.
You are wrong about me, Sunil. Unlike men like you and even Dante here who have wandered into the dark forest of error unknowingly and who now desperately want to return to their joy, kept from it by your own demons, your ferocious beasts of worldliness, I came here to this hell by choice. Those beasts that are your terrors are my constant companions, sometimes my pets, sometimes my leaders, but never ever the source of terror. I have no terror, you see. I’m not like Dante, who has come upon the sign that asks all who enter to abandon hope. I came here to find hope. I know that I have done bad things, that I must continue to do bad things, but I do so for the ideal. For the utopia that this land was and will remain — we drove the blacks from it and we drove the British from it, and I will be damned if I will let any Afrikaner destroy it. Do you understand? This is the only thing that will last, this land, long after those fools and incontinent cowards and liars in Pretoria and Bloemfontein have been driven from power. Let me tell you, it is hard to tell sometimes who is being controlled and who is doing the controlling, and so the only way forward is to have purpose, and purpose is an ideal. That ideal can be found in heroes like Arjuna. Do you know what Arjuna means?
Sunil shook his head.
Do you know who he was?
Sunil shook his head again.
Your father, before he died, was Indian, right? You of all people should know about the hero of the Bhagavad Gita.
My father was Sikh.
Arjuna means light, white, shining, bright, Eugene continued, as though Sunil had not spoken. Arjuna is a peerless archer and a reluctant hero who doesn’t want to go to war at first because he loathes having to kill his own relatives who share a different ideology. But Krishna comes to convince him of his duty, the warrior’s duty. That was his code, which was the ideal that transformed everything Arjuna did to an act of God, to an act of the highest ethical order.
Do you think you are Arjuna, Sunil asked.
My friend, a tracker who taught me how to love this land, a Zulu, told me that there are two kinds of people in the world, farmers and warriors. You are clearly a farmer. Listen, I don’t think the blacks are savages like my friends over there by the fire. I think that they are honorable people, but in the hierarchy of food, they are wildebeests and we are lions. The lion doesn’t hate the wildebeest; he just knows he is the better. I’m not a racist, ja? Just a pragmatist.
Sunil said nothing.
Let’s get on with it! Eugene yelled at the men. Pack up the food first.
The sun was beginning to dip behind the hilltop to their west, by the river, as the men began to pack up for the night. The food was wrapped carefully, attentively even, and placed into coolers. Then more wood was gathered and the fire in the pit fed until it raged, more bonfire than barbecue. The earlier grill had been removed and from the grass a larger one had been picked up and erected over the fire.
Did you know, Eugene said, that Dante describes hell as a funnel-shaped cone that bores into the center of the Earth? Like a wormhole, no pun intended. I like that image, the idea of descending concentric rings of hell, each ring a different level of sin, each ring its own kind of torture populated by its own depraved souls, and, at the very center, Satan himself. Now that’s an interesting being, an angel with a sense of purpose. He doesn’t whine like Christ in the garden of Gethsemane when the hard thing has to be done. He just gets on with it. He knows that he is Jesus’s dark soul, his unconscious, and his id, that there is no meaning to any of this, no God, without him. Now, that’s a sense of purpose.
So you are both Arjuna and Satan, Sunil asked.
Yes, you could say that. They are both balanced between their human ideal and their animal baseness. Nature worships harmony. I told you, this land is my purpose. It has taught me everything; Dante and the Gita just provided the language. My father worked as a ranger in Kruger trying to protect wildlife from poachers. He taught me that the only people who really respect and understand this world are the Bushmen; they know everything must live in balance, in harmony with everything else. Have you seen a lion stalk a wildebeest? It does so with respect. It takes its time and tries to make its kills as elegant and efficient as possible. When it kills it doesn’t do so for sport or because its feelings have been hurt, it kills for hunger and protection, nothing more. And in this way it brings honor to its victims. And what it doesn’t eat of its kill, the land takes back, using scavengers from the four-legged kind down to the microscopic kind. Nature uses everything in a cycle of honor, each thing in its right place. I told you that I am different from these men. When I kill a man, or a woman, it is with regret and honor. I never dispose of their bodies; I return them to the honor of nature’s use. I feed their bodies to the scavengers; I grind their bones up and fertilize the flowers in the compound. I pray when I do this, not in a Christian way, but in the way of Bushmen, I say to the souls of the dead, You can leave this place now and return in another form because you have been honored. I am an elegant and efficient killer, and a warrior with the highest ideals; I take no joy in my work, except when it is done with honor. This in the end is the truth of this land.