RUTHERFORD & JOSETH

The bush telegraph let it be known that a white man, suspected of being Emil Coetzee, had, the day before, walked into the veld and had, as yet, not walked out of it. The bush telegraph also stated with due delicacy that two leopards and a lion had been spotted in the vicinity. The worst was feared.

When the news reached Clement E Rutherford, known to all as Rutherford, he was sitting in the glass enclosure that was his office in the Secret Intelligence Unit (SIU) section of the Central Intelligence building, and, as he pondered what had been communicated to him, he began enthusiastically and spectacularly chewing down an HB pencil.

Rutherford doubted very much that the man who had walked into the veld was his lifelong friend Emil Coetzee. He could not count the number of times, during the war, that the bush telegraph had claimed to have sighted Emil Coetzee doing something or other, usually truly Herculean, like single-handedly defeating a group of terrorists that had attacked a convoy he was in. Rutherford had always accommodated such stories because he understood that during times of war, people needed heroes wherever they could find them. But the war was over now, and Rutherford found that he could not be as good-humoured and good-natured about this latest sighting as he had been about the earlier ones.

He attributed the multiple sightings of Emil Coetzee to two sources: mujibhas and housewives. The mujibha, having lived in the village all his life and therefore having rarely seen a white man, naturally allowed his fancy to believe that whatever white man he saw must be Emil Coetzee. Emil Coetzee was, after all, the most famous white man in the City of Kings. Being rather photogenic, his picture often accompanied reports about the things that he had said, and during the war he had said plenty as The Head of The Organisation. The mujibha, who spent many solitary hours in the bush, spying on everything and nothing, fearing for his own life, could be forgiven for seeing Emil Coetzee in almost every white man he came across, because otherwise every white man would have had to be the Prime Minister, who was the most famous white man in the country, and not even the mujibha could allow his imagination to run that wild.

The second source was just as innocent as the mujibha, and perhaps as easy to understand, but definitely not as easy for Rutherford to forgive. The savannah where most of these sightings allegedly took place were dotted with vast farms on hectares of land. On these vast farms there were homesteads. On these homesteads lived farm wives – harried, lonely, disappointed, sun-stricken – who were waiting for something exciting to happen in their lives. Emil Coetzee had a reputation with the ladies that had found its way to all the corners of the country, so if farm wives wanted to dream of having seen Emil Coetzee, they could and often did. Rutherford, believing that they should be contented with the husbands that they had, just chose not to forgive them for their dreaming.