The Zero Hour

In 1889, the Belgian government decided its army needed a reliable single source for the Mauser Model 1888 military rifle, and founded at Liège the Fabrique Nationale d’Armes de Guerre. Ten years later, Fabrique Nationale, or FN, began making Browning pistols, which it makes to this day, along with machine guns and rifles. (It was FN rifles that Fidel Castro first used upon seizing power in Cuba.) As a result of this industry, a number of small-arms dealers have grown up around Liège in the last half-century, some of them dealing quite profitably outside the law.

By four o’clock in the morning Baumann had reached Liège. The sky was pitch-black; dawn was still a few hours away. He was exhausted, badly in need of a few hours’ rest, and he considered what to do next.

He could drive into the Place Saint-Lambert and fortify himself with a cup of strong black coffee, perhaps read a few newspapers. Or park somewhere quiet and doze until he was awakened by first light.

But he decided not to trouble with driving into the city, and instead continued on southwest. As he drove through the darkness, he found himself growing increasingly contemplative. The gloomy landscape reminded him of the western Transvaal of his childhood.

The small town in which Baumann had been born was settled in the early nineteenth century by Voortrekkers. Very quickly it became a plak-kie-dorp, a shantytown. When Baumann was a child, the town was made up of Dutch farmhouses and rondavels with thatched roofs. His parents’ farmhouse was situated hard by the Magaliesberg Mountains, forty kilometers outside Pretoria, surrounded by broodboom and bread trees.

He taught himself to hunt in the bushveld nearby, which teemed with wildebeest and springbok, the perfect game. For all of his childhood, and even into his adolescence, he kept to himself, preferring solitude to the company of other children, who bored him. When he wasn’t hunting or hiking or collecting rock and plant specimens in the bushveld, he was reading. He had no brothers or sisters: in the years after his birth, his Boer parents tried repeatedly to conceive, but miscarriage followed miscarriage until it became clear his mother was unable to bear another child.

His father, a tobacco farmer who’d sold his farm to the Magaliesberg Tobacco Corporation, the cooperative that owned most of the tobacco farms in the region, was a gloomy, silent man who died of a heart attack when Baumann was six. Baumann’s memories of his father were few. His mother supported the two of them by taking in sewing.

She worried constantly about her only son, whom she didn’t understand. He was unlike the other children in town, unlike the sons of her neighbors and few friends. She was concerned he had been damaged by the untimely death of his father, had turned inward from the lack of brothers or sisters, had been rendered permanently sullen by his solitary existence. And she despaired of a solution.

The more she urged him to do things the other children did-play games, even get into trouble-the more he kept to himself. Yet he caused her no grief. He excelled in school, made his bed, tidied up his room, read, and hunted. After a while she gave up trying to push her son in a direction he clearly didn’t want to go.

Mother and son rarely spoke. During the long, furiously hot December afternoons and evenings-the South African summer-the two of them sat silently in the kitchen. She sewed; he read. They lived in separate universes.

One afternoon in his twelfth year, unknown to his mother, Baumann went hunting for springbok in the bushveld and came upon a drunken Tswana, a local black tribesman. (Baumann had learned to distinguish among the tribes who lived nearby, the Tswanas or Ndebeles or Zulus.) The drunk, a young man perhaps ten years older than Baumann, began taunting the white boy, and Baumann without a moment’s hesitation aimed his hunting rifle and squeezed off a single shot.

The Tswana died instantly.

The victim’s blood, even his brain matter, splattered Baumann’s face and hands and muslin shirt. Baumann burned the bloodied shirt, bathed himself in a stream, and went home shirtless, leaving the crumpled body where it had fallen.

When he returned home, his mother could see he hadn’t caught any game and didn’t even ask what had happened to his shirt. She’d given up asking questions only to receive monosyllabic replies. He read quietly, and she sewed.

But that evening he was unable to concentrate on his reading, for the killing had thrilled him more deeply than anything had ever thrilled him before. It had scared him, yes, but it had also given him a warm and satisfying sense of control, of mastery, of power over the insolent black man. To Baumann, this was not a racial issue, because he thought little about Coloureds and Blacks. It was the ability to end a human life that intoxicated him-all the more when, after a few weeks, he realized he had gotten away with it, with no consequences whatsoever.