YD6-88(ZA)1991/92 Savannah Backroads, Pretoria’s Fortress, and the Light that Unveils Weskoppies
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Notice: This image is AI-generated, a glimpse into the story.
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Chapter Synopsis: A cigarette flares in Ilona’s hand, smoke curling into silence as we drive north. The savannah slips past, memory rising in waves—childhood hills, ghosted farms, prisons looming like castles. She leads me without explanation, into corridors of whiteness, where light fractures and two zombies drift from a mirage. At Weskoppies, the threshold opens—family, mystery, and the unmaking of form.
BOOK SYNOPSIS: Aetheria, in the zodiacal forest—where birds sing and leaves flutter like wings bathing in light. The symphony of the forest comes to mind. This is the cosmos’ whisper through our creatures, and in these pages, she leads me. These chapters unfold as a clarifying companion to my earlier book, The Code: Horizon of Infinity—a philosophical memoir exploring how the universe sculpted our minds. Through Aetheria, the lens of consciousness who begins to reveal herself, her presence lives in the rhythm. She seeks form—moving toward the name she will one day claim: Sunshine.
YD6-88(ZA)1991/92 “Savannah Backroads, Pretoria’s Fortress, and the Light that Unveils Weskoppies”
Jeans and a tucked shirt, Texan. We part at the Audi taillight’s fenders; I glance over my shoulder. Her steps slow down behind the body undulation lines, half-movements of lighting a cigarette. I climb into the car, tweak the engine to idle, watch her slow approach through the windows—the door gaping as she steps into the footwell tucking a Texan soft pack into her pocket. She slides into the passenger seat, right hand pulling the door close behind her, the tip red-hot cigarette switching hands, clipped fingers drawing her toward the dashboard to tug the ashtray open. Then, she sinks back in her seat, wafting bittersweet smoke—while I sit upright, hands on the wheel, listening for what churns in her mind.
“Ilona!” I call out, whispering with a crisping frown. “Why do you always have to light a cigarette before climbing into the car?” My sister, her Moon in Libra, draped in down-soft ease, ignores me—as she always did. I give her a breath of space, then ask. “Where to?”
A puff of smoke drifts free, lingering, curling and teasing the dead-still air vents edging the windshield, before in the next breath she says, “Flemish—[Ge zult het zo meteen wel weten.]—You’ll know just now.” A policing stop. ‘That’s all you need to know.’ She starts again: “[Ge moet op de grote baan geraken.]—You’ve got to get to the main road.” Her voice lags behind her words as I release the clutch and ease on the throttle. Pressing her for more would be useless; I tell myself, ‘leave it at that.’
At ease with the tracks, the savannah hisses against the chassis as we leave the cottage behind, cross the plot front and pass through the gateway, veering onto the helmet’s back street. We circle a grid of wild-groomed properties, each a tuft of trees looming with its house. We pause at the junction—an echo of those thirty-mile Voortrekker outposts where tired horses were reined in for the fresh. We only came to know the rudimentary native general store, a gas station, and a post office morphing through our teens. My mind stirs as she points north—up the swell of a hill leaning into the azure skies—while south, wave backwash and trough linger with scattered properties and cows in the fields, phantoms of the family poultry farm, living with those endless changing sunsets.
Through widespread cars, I steer the four-cylinder’s purr with a light touch on the throttle. But Ilona’s hush stays behind me as the uphill mounts in our face. My mind lingers, leaves the glass bubble, carried into blusters of a lunatic teenager—me and my brother Igor spinning feet. He challenges me, both of us pushing to the crest of the hill.
I’m done at the top, legs spent, but still gripping traction with a large 52-tooth chainring. I descend into the backwash, coasting, surfing into the shadows where winter cold burns my fingers. Igor rides beside me through the trough, his high school uniform stuffed with a sheet of brown paper. In a brief exchange of words—my leather bomber jacket against his padding—we seem on par, each of us shielded in our way.
At the asphalt deformation line by the culvert parapets, in the trough, his idea took root. I sprint off for the swell before us. Halfway up, my leg strength fades. My brother—the competitive Leo—sweeps past, leaving me behind. His silhouette breaks the sky, a golden aura crowning these grassy hills. Yet, day after day, each hill watches us with its own golden eye. One crest stacks another, a swell prolonging the ascend—still there as, in the glass bubble, I’m fresh at the purr of the four-cylinder ride, catching the crest to the top of the world’s crossroad.
The reward is short-lived; my heart pounces as my eyesight is drawn down in the backwash, into the gutter of a dry streambed. I sprint from my mind, asking Ilona, “What happened here?”
I’m on a memory ride, a wafty golden hand livening the bristly savannah. A cigarette consumed itself at Ilona’s hand; sheepish, she says. “[De zwarten zijn de boerderijen beginnen overnemen.]—The Blacks begun to settle the farms.“
The car glides through the savannah, eaten from the roots by dry sandy earth. I dare not peek beyond mindful blinkers—holding my memory, my hopes high—but then I fall on the remnant, searching the wayside for the life-style farmhouse that once loomed behind the green hedgerow of full-grown, cigar-shaped poplars. Fragmented, the beaten foot trail of earth breaks into a rocky and chaotic landscape where dusty boxy sheets ghost the craft bushwasked native huts, shadowing lost alleys in crooked grids, sprawling like a veld fire—only the green blades no longer flower the field, and a crossroad stretches on, extenuating itself into the drift of a shanty town.
We leave behind the traffic island, an African dynamic of peddlers at taxi ranks beside a bus’ self-implanted terminal. Ilona might have sensed I wasn’t breathing at ease; she drops in a thought: “[De P’pa. Houdt zich bezig met zijn postzegels.]—Keeps busy with his stamps.” In my mind she seems to share Father's family tree, colloquial in tone: she knows what goes on with every member of the family, updating me as we drive.
Rising on a wave after the trough, the plains plateau into the Monavoni roundabout. I’m pulled back from reliving the day I fancied myself a racing driver, rolling my two-month-old Volkswagen Beetle. Instead, Ilona insists, “[Draai hier.]—Turn here.“ But all I see is an earth’s scar across our way. She repeats herself—maybe she sensed I was lost—while my mind floated on Europeans right-driving roads, searching for an on-ramp that wasn’t there. Her eyes steer me orbiting the entrenched overpass of a newly cut highway; until the far left etched embankment strangely flags my mind’s awakening to the ingress. I spool onto it, merging with a few cruising vehicles.
I can hardly believe how far out she leads me. ‘You’ll see. Trust me,’ plumes my thoughts as we catch the Johannesburg stream, downhill in its sweeping, cleaving the roadway. Beside us, “The Fountains,” a silver sail alone in a sea of expanding roadways. We descend through soft, humble hills, leaving the Voortrekkerhoogte monument behind.
The highway traffic zips along the asphalt band’s overlapping lanes, relinquishing the car coasting the Voortrekkers road into the city, breaking the generation to the cast shade to the wrought iron railway bridge. This frees the monumental castle at the gate of a cascade of bright traffic light lenses, uniform through the city grid blurring at the Pretoria Zoo against the distant hills. I’m still hit with this medieval fortress, pair of late-Victorian inspiration arched doors, intimidation, functional security, ideological theater.
Ilona leads me, venturing to coast into the midst of the junction’s toggle red to green, her eyesight reaching either to recognize the side street or read the nameplate. “Turn here,” she says in a non-assuring tone of voice. As I’m fascinated to see the stone wall beyond the pivotal quoin. We crawl along the massive wall of Pretoria Central Prison, to a deserted backyard and expect to witness a prison break by the flimsy mesh security gates. But Ilona waves me on, the street leads a stretch into a colonial alleyway beyond the gates of a looming English mansion in the wooded property.
Frustrated by Ilona’s knack for secrecy, I track a wild junction branch left through an island of wild vegetation, house fronts glinting through the leaves. In their midst a road sign flashes: “Weskoppies”—tolling the nefarious lunatic asylum—its arrow pointing right into the other branch. A snarl. Yet, it doesn’t reveal where Ilona is leading me, only that, within the historic enclave, we follow on.
I breathe. “Ilona, where are we?” She doesn’t answer, only eyes the wayside posts, coasting into an intersection, doubtful, waving me to steer right. We follow a single-lane strip of jagged asphalt. Pools of lawns girdle the front, falling short of the road’s dirt shoulder streaming past a fenestrated half-dozen rows of portrait windows punctuating the flush facade. Amid the evanescent blank white carton box architecture, midway, a covered walkway reaches toward the street. Ilona says. “Pull up here.”
The car rocks off the asphalt to a halt. ‘Ilona! What now?’ I spare a thought, or two. Since I was a toddler, she's been the big sister leading me through the reticence of my unknown. I never imagined her needing to gather courage. After the hush of a breath, “Come!” she says, waving a hand to the door latch. The door swings open with her turn. “I just want to go and see Paul.” She steps out.
I lean over as she strides away, catch to press down her doorsill button, swing back, to step out. Rushing to keep up with her, doubt flickers—then, with a shrug, intuition gets the better of me. In one swoop, I grip the handle, smack the door shut, and leave it locked.
Swift in her strides, I lag in the half-dozen car lengths along the dirt, baffled over my needed presence, and for having parked so far back. She swerves, and we pass steel-pipe roof-stands along the portico’s terrazzo quarry tiles. She cranks the lever, the full-length glazed, white-painted wooden door giving way from its dormant leaf.
My eyes rafts past Ilona as she creeps deeper into the hush of clinical whiteness, the hallway arousing a tingling phantom fear. In an asylum, I expect at least a guard behind the glazed cubicle, vacant. But Ilona is wiser, sneaking deeper, undaunted by the unmanned reception. She cracks the brightest right corner, where the rear wall breaks into blind wings on both sides.
Her shoulder grazes the corner; in an offside aquatic tank a heavenly glow shimmers, spilling a sheen across the corridor floor. Her silhouettes enter the mirage. At the far end, a labyrinth mouth cracks; shifting shades on the wall before yielding to the sentinel of opposing doorways. From the right, two trailing zombies emerge, one stays behind, the foremost creeping into the glow, merging with the mirage—suspended in the radiance pressed behind the glazed curtain wall, on the threshold of the courtyard.
A flagrant coincidence—the question. ‘What has become of my nephew?’—as Ilona and her son calibrate a stance. Her eyes drag over Paul Herbst’s shoulders, whom I’m facing too, while she hands him bars of chocolate from a shopping bag.
I deduce him to be twenty-four-year-old man, placid in his exchange with his mother. “No, Nona.” Paul says.
Ilona turns her shoulders, eyes lagging. ‘I'm busy.’ Her familiar expression—I often crossed when she’s engulfed in her accounting ledgers. “Bye, Paul.” She says, leaving him standing, baffled.
The mirage engraves my mind. Before Ilona turns away, her eyes leash me along. In her strides, in her discretion, she tracks back through the empty hallway, out the shaded portico stretching to the street, veering towards the Audi.
I step into the driver's seat; she stands outside. I tweak the engine to a purr. She steps in with a burning cigarette, shuts the door. With a smoke trail as she waves me to drive—a mysterious course, sharing the adventurer in us. I discover the railway crossings, emerging from the historic wild enclave into the familiar city grid. In silence, I mush my disbelief—how her son had been left in the liberty of an asylum's staff--numbed into a zombie.
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