The Destiny of Dzaramba

'What did you enjoy the most about being a mercenary‽ '

At the dinner party at the Danté's home, Doc Sanford looked at his wife with wide eyes as did Phil's wife Fran. Their two poodles Franco and Ciccia joined in looking at Tory Sanford with a loud silence. Phil brandished a wide smile.

A nervous Fran recalled the time the pair once had dinner at Phil's sister's house and his sister Jean let it slip that he had once been a soldier of fortune in several nations. One of her smug girlfriends asked him how many people he had killed. Phil paused and replied,

'I don't know...how many blokes have you sucked off?'

The women at the table gasped in horror; he continued,

'You see, I'm just like you, there's too many to be able to recall...'

Phil had never been especially close to his sister until what seemed her perfect life fell apart after her bitter divorce. She came back from the depths when she discovered evangelical Christianity and realised how much her younger brother who she had always bickered with really loved her and was there for her when she needed someone. He joked that Jean had enough 'Frequent Forgiveness Points' that she earned from putting up with him for a trip around the world.

'I'm just starting a conversation, Doc.'

'You never start conversations, Tory, you stop them.'

'Why are Franco and Ciccia staring at me?'

'Ciccia's upset because you're eating out of her bowl.'

She only realised Phil was joking when Doc and Fran laughed. The poodles began panting in laughter as if they said 'Gotcha!'

'Phil?'

He responded with the parody of the 1960s army recruitment posters,

'You get to travel to distant and exotic places. meet interesting and exciting people, and then legally kill them.'

This time Tory laughed whilst Fran and Doc stared, as Phil put it, like kangaroos caught in the headlamps of a car. Tory winked at the poodles who seemed to understand her and panted in laughter.

Despite the vast difference in their ages, there was a special relationship between Phil and Tory that neither could explain. The pair had a genuine rapport that he only had with his beloved wife, their daughter who was away as an officer in the Royal Australian Air Force, their poodles, Alison Williams, the widow of his former commanding officer and recently, his sister. This relationship would manifest itself in a variety of ways; Tory could make him think, recall things and reveal matters he would never confide to anyone else, and vice versa.

'Well, Phil, who was the most interesting person you ever met in your life, whether you killed them or not?'

'My wife Francesca...and my Auntie Micheline.'

'Phil's sister told me that he wanted to be his Auntie', Fran interjected.

Tory helped herself to the dessert in Doc's bowl. Doc reflected that she was on one of her diets again where she would only eat his food. Doc always had the fear of coming home and seeing fire trucks, rescue vehicles, television cameramen, reporters and gawking crowds asking his reaction to the breaking news of his wife having an ice cream bucket cut off her head by fire rescue workers...The worst thing about it would be that she would go on international television and blame him for her predicament...and the women of the world would believe her.

'I agree, but I knew your Auntie and I know Fran. I mean when you were a globetrotting soldier of fortune. Who was the most fascinating person that you ever met...out of all of them...'

Even the poodles agreed to themselves that this was a genuinely interesting question, and they wanted to hear the answer. For that was Tory; she could sound silly, then come out with a devastating piece of brilliance that made everyone think...

Phil was off in his mind through time and space...who would it be?

He started with the Australian Army in Vietnam and elsewhere. He recalled his fellow private soldiers whose tedious collections of sounds masquerading as conversation made him glad he was a loner. Loudness made up for substance, and it was like a very young child's game where if you were silent for only an instant you'd lose and be 'it'. There were the eternal interjections of 'mate' and 'you know', as well as the primitive caveman 'uh' to avoid even a second of silence; he felt it should be enshrined in law that if a person uttered three of the same interjections in less than 30 seconds, they could be legally euthanised. The less they had to say, the louder they were, the less humorous something was, the louder the laughing. They repeated the same things over and over again, especially obscenities without any trace of meaning. He equated repetition with stupidity, and the people he knew who were married emphatically agreed with his theory. If they had no words to string together they would play music loudly...Get back on the track, Danté! She wants to know the most interesting person, not the most uninteresting person.

He remembered his Company Sergeant Major who mentored him into being a proficient section leader; but was he the most fascinating person that he ever met? Could he explain what made a person the perfect soldier to someone who didn't have one day of military experience, and most importantly, would she find him fascinating?

He could say the same about his leaders and mentors, 'Hellfire' Hugh Williams and 'Hot' John Coleman...but again, outside the military would they be considered fascinating? He was too much of a gentleman to talk in front of his wife about some of the women he intimately knew, an American war correspondent, a former Hollywood actress who revenged the death of her son, a South African international smuggler, a Hawaiian hit lady or some of the others...

The rain that had been threatening all afternoon manifested itself in a cloudburst. Tory lived up to her tradition by stating the obvious,

'Rain...'

The sound of the raindrops hitting the terracotta tiles on their balcony grew louder and louder and in Phil's mind the rain drops transformed into the sound of drums...Suddenly, the answer to Tory's question was front and centre...

'Dzaramba. He was an N'anga in Rhodesia.'

'What's an N'anga?'

'You'd call him a witch doctor.'

A loud explosion of thunder startled everyone except Phil. He was back in Rhodesia in 1979 in his mind at the same time his body sat in a chair in their Australian home. He had had a splendid time serving under his leaders, mentors, friends, and surrogate father figures, Major 'Bill' Williams and Captain 'Cole' Coleman and his peers in his Rhodesian Light Infantry Commando had been a group who had truly deserved their nickname of 'The Incredibles'. However, Phil had been fascinated with Africa and wanted to see it from a different angle other than being with a group of international and White African Commandos. He found employment as an Irregular with the British South Africa Police where he trained and led African militia. It was on one of his patrols in a tribal area that he came across Dzaramba.

'So, are you really a witch doctor?'

'No, I'm a witch prevention doctor.'

'Do do that voodoo that you do so well', Phil sang.

Dzaramba's entire body laughed, and he sang,

'Ting tang walla walla bing bang!'

The two became friends for life.

When he found out that Phil wasn't African born or raised, he spoke to him in the same English that he used when he worked as a public servant in Salisbury before he tired of the bullshit and went back to his tribal land and moved into one of the traditional positions in his village, or musha.

The pair had formed a friendship, bonding over the fact that Dzaramba had done his university studies not all that far from where Phil had lived in England, and he shopped at the same Allenby's department store that Phil had been assigned to after completing his ill-fated executive training course. Every conversation they had was an intellectual delight.

Though Dzaramba had studied in the United Kingdom, been sucked up to by guilty and gullible university professors and clergymen and had his way with a large number of English women, he felt that he lived a better life in a traditional African musha where he had the authentic respect and admiration of the people he belonged with, as well as his four wives. It wasn't just the miserable English weather; he had the same distaste about his career in the Rhodesian public service. Phil understood and told him that the visiting Poms that he had met confided to him that though they had reached the top of British society, they really loathed the Rhodesians because they had a better life style than they did.

Phil was fascinated by Dzaramba's theory that the Western equivalent of magic was called advertising, and the majority of people were not only content to believe it but would become hostile if you tried to shatter their illusions. The end result of both magic and advertising were dreams or nightmares, and you used more magic or advertising to end the nightmare and get back to a dream. As further evidence, Dzaramba expounded his theory that the majority of the Gross Domestic Product of the United States of America came from advertising, with Phil adding that the money from lawsuits also contributed to its heights. They agreed that people could be as addicted to magic, advertising and suing each other as much as to pharmaceutical or illegal drugs. The pair found themselves so simpatico that they began singing Give Me the Simple Life together.

Dzaramba was actually fond of what was called British Colonialism as it preserved the traditional African structures of chiefs. N'angas and mushas. Both the Americans and the Eastern Bloc wanted to destroy the traditions, move everyone into small apartments in large cities and turn them into either petty bureaucrats, public servants or mendicants, the latter addicted to the social welfare provided by the former. Like Phil, Dzaramba had no lust for power or greed, he just enjoyed what he was doing. When you're around someone who knows what they're doing and are good at it and enjoy being good at it, their feeling of being happy becomes contagious. Dzaramba had not only seen the system of the future close up in both England and Salisbury, but he was informed that he would be one of the anointed ones; yet he wanted no part of it. Phil often thought how Australia was changing by becoming more rushed, greedy, and American.

The N'anga regarded compulsory literacy as the first step towards perpetual economic slavery.

Phil recalled his childhood theory and asked,

'Tell me true, are the witches you come across similar to schoolteachers?'

'They're identical, Phil.'

* * *

Phil looked forward to the day when his next patrol would be in the area of Dzaramba's musha. When the day came, and they had accomplished their objectives without incident, he found Dzaramba outside of his hut. For the first time he was oblivious to Phil's presence. He tapped him on the shoulder,

'Bet you didn't see that one coming, Dzaramba!'

There was only the look of resignation in his friend's eyes.

'Thank you for your friendship, Phil, and thank you for coming to say good bye.'

'You're leaving?'

He gravely nodded. The look in his friend's eyes didn't make Phil think he was going to take a Super Six holiday excursion to Lake Kariba...

'Where are you going?'

Phil understood from the look in his eyes that his friend had convinced himself that he was going to die.

'If you're my friend, you can tell me. What's New, Pussycat? Whooah whooah, whooah!', Phil sang to him in the hope that his laughter would return. It didn't.

'My time is through. It is over.'

'Why don't you let me get you into Salisbury?'

'If they don't kill me here, they'll kill me there. You know that a man is judged by how he accepts his death and whether he runs away from it or stands like a man.'

'You accept it?'

He nodded.

Phil knew there was nothing to say. If an African wanted to die, he would, but how would he die?

The pair embraced.

'Let me get you out of here', Phil whispered in his friend's ear.

'A city is a limbo where no one has a soul, if a person lives in a city, he soon has his soul taken away.'

Dzaramba made the quick motion of grabbing something out of the air and placing it in his palm, then loudly blowing it away.

'Zombies...', Phil realised.

'If I can't live the way I want to, I'll die the way I want to. Grant me that, my Australian friend.'

Phil's voice was subconsciously relating memories as if he viewed them again and he seemed to be staring without blinking; Tory was fascinated, Doc was repelled, Fran and the poodles were used to it. Tory's voice brought his mind back to their dinner party in the small coastal Australian town.

'What happened to him, Phil?'

'A pack of terrs came in that night and hacked him up with their pangas...machetes.'

He pronounced the latter word in the Latin American way and made gestures of chopping that made everyone else wince; his eyes were still elsewhere.

'There you go...', he concluded.

'Why did they kill him?', asked Fran.

'That's Africa...I'll never forget him, Tory.'

'He knew what was going to happen, and yet he stayed?', asked Doc.

'Sometimes it's not how you live, it's how you die. When you're an N'anga, you're an N'anga to the end.'

'I don't understand.'

'I do, Doc', Tory reached across and held Phil's hand, 'I'll never forget him either.'

FIN

Author Notes: Happy Chinese New Year, Tiger!
I am the author of three Extra Dimensional/Ultraterrestial military science fiction novels MERCENARY EXOTIQUE, OPERATION CHUPACABRA and WORK IN OTHER WORLDS FROM YOUR OWN HOME! as well as two travel books THE MAN FROM WAUKEGAN and TWO AUSTRALIANS IN SCOTLAND (all from Lulu.com). I live happily ever after with my wife in paradise (coastal Kiama, NSW Australia).

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