Jimfish (14 page)

C
HAPTER
29

Jimfish had just
one goal now: to be reunited with Lunamiel. Helped by Soviet Malala's connections in the new government, being a devout member of the Communist Party, Jimfish soon knew the name of the good Samaritan who had rescued Lunamiel in Monrovia and brought her back to South Africa. Now a minister in the presidency, he lived in a grand house in the tree-lined northern suburbs of Johannesburg, behind tall walls topped with razor wire and electrified fencing, patrolled around the clock by armed guards.

Having announced their presence on the intercom, Jimfish and his friends waited while the CCTV cameras checked them over. The automatic steel gates opened, the dogs were kennelled, they were signed in by the gatekeeper in his wooden sentry box, passed through the metal detectors, and a bodyguard escorted them into the minister's study.

‘It is very like visiting a prisoner,' said Zoran.

‘Better,' said Deon. ‘State-of-the-art electric fencing,
lovely-looking razor wire, serious firearms on the guards and infrared beams. I'll bet they've got sound sensors buried under the walls to keep out tunnellers.'

‘But it's all perfectly normal around here,' said the minister, clearly embarassed. ‘As a member of the new government I had to move into a neighbourhood that was once the sole preserve of our former masters. To show the flag. But I felt a lot safer when I lived in a black township.'

Jimfish sympathized. The man had been parachuted into the world of the rich white classes – at once so pleasurable and so like a prison.

‘We are here to see your maid, Lunamiel,' said Jimfish, ‘the girl you rescued in Monrovia.'

The minister was more embarrassed than ever. ‘I'm afraid that's impossible. She's left.'

‘But why?' Jimfish was horrified.

‘I don't know why,' said the minister. ‘We treated her kindly, paid her promptly, fed and clothed her, gave her an afternoon off once a week. But then, you know how it is with domestic staff, one minute they're fine – the next they've gone. Maybe she had challenges' – the minister paused delicately – ‘coming from a formerly privileged group.'

Jimfish was flummoxed. ‘I don't know how you can call her privileged.'

‘He means white,' said Soviet Malala briskly.

‘I must find her,' said Jimfish. ‘Please help me.'

The minister sighed. ‘I hear she's living in a shanty town. In a shack of tin and tarpaulin. Without lights or
running water and just a bucket toilet. I'll give you the address. If you see her, please say that her job is still open. She's a good girl and I was sorry to lose her.'

The informal settlement where they would find Lunamiel, the minister warned them, was crowded with poor whites and notorious for drugs, robbery, rape and drug addiction. Tour buses took black families to see for themselves what happened to whites who had lost everything; much as whites once toured black townships for glimpses of life on the other side of the colour bar.

The minister had not overstated the conditions in the camp where Jimfish and his companions found Lunamiel stooped over a zinc washing tub. It was not easy to recognize her. She looked so much older and her luscious skin, once as downy as a ripe peach, was deeply lined and she had lost much weight.

‘My darling Lunamiel! How do you manage to live here?'

Jimfish put his arms around her and she felt as thin as a starving bird.

‘As you see, I take in laundry,' she told him.

Soviet Malala was not particularly sympathetic. ‘She comes from a life of pampered privilege. Too bad if she learns how our people had to live.'

Zoran the Serb said simply, ‘Isn't it strange how things go around?'

Jimfish was so overcome with guilt that he covered his long-lost love in kisses and did not notice the looks he was getting from her brother Deon.

‘My poor, dear Lunamiel! Can you ever forgive me for
abandoning you to the mercies of Brigadier Bare-Butt?'

‘It's an ill wind that blows no good,' said Lunamiel sweetly. ‘It was when he was with me that the brigadier heard the call of the Lord and turned overnight from homicidal maniac into a holy man.'

‘God works in mysterious ways,' said Jimfish.

‘Amen to that. And nowhere are His ways more of a mystery than right here,' said Lunamiel. ‘The brigadier passed me on, briefly, to a Rwandan politician of the Hutu tribe, but the poor man was far too busy with the civil war in his country and soon dropped me. I was on the streets when this rich South African saved me, flew me home and gave me a job amongst his domestic staff.'

‘What generosity!' cried Jimfish. ‘And he wants you back. Your job is still open!'

Lunamiel shuddered. ‘Never! I don't deny he was a kind employer. I had my own room in the backyard, a spoon, an enamel plate and a tin mug. But I had to scrub, wash, iron, cook, sew and look after my employer's children six days a week – things no normal white woman has ever in her life done for herself, never mind doing it for people who just the other day were doing it for me, whose mother kept a fleet of staff and assigned separate servants to each hand when her nails needed painting. Worse still, my boss had advanced political views and his domestic employees reflected the demographics of our country. He kept ten black staff to one of me and the others mocked me for being useless at the simplest jobs, telling me I hadn't a clue how to do anything except give orders. They kept asking how it was that whites had run South Africa for so long
when we were so useless. One night I ran away and here I am in this shanty town for very poor whites, whose numbers grow each day, but at least I'm back amongst my own people.'

Listening to the story of Lunamiel's decline and fall, Zoran sighed his Serbian sigh. ‘This talk of togetherness is all very well,' he said. ‘But it's going to take a long time before it works.'

Soviet Malala regarded Lunamiel's plight as nothing less than the punishment the settler entity deserved. ‘You've at last felt the angry lash of the masses,' he said. ‘The rage of lumpenproletariat has blown you on to the rubbish dump of history.'

‘I don't care about any of that,' said Jimfish, and he took Lunamiel in his arms. ‘I have deserted you too often, and I will marry you tomorrow and we'll go home to Port Pallid!'

That was when Deon Arlow stepped forward and angrily separated the lovers.

‘Now, listen here,' he said. ‘I'm ready to adapt and I'll never oppress another because of race or colour. As our new President said in his speech, what is past is past. OK? I love every last colour in the rainbow, I swear to God. But I also swore on the family Bible that I would never let my sister marry a black man, not even one who might be white. Over my dead body.'

Lunamiel flung herself at her brother's feet and begged him to reconsider.

Deon Arlow repeated that Lunamiel descended from the purest Dutch and German and Scandinavian stock;
she was Aryan to the
n
th degree, and love across the colour bar was a rainbow too far.

Jimfish wheeled on him, yanking his pistol from its python-skin holster.

‘Aryan?' he said. ‘What nonsense! Your family probably descended from slaves and pirates, and Hottentots, Malays and Bushmen. If there is any German or Dutch blood in you it's from the press-ganged scum of the Berlin gutters and the dross of the Amsterdam pot-houses. Rogues who sailed to the Cape of Good Hope, slept with their slaves and told themselves they were the master race. You leased my dearest Lunamiel to a brace of black Congolese cabinet ministers and a naked Liberian brigadier, without thinking twice. Well, I saved your life in the Comoros and brought you home. I've already shot you dead once and I'll happily do it again!'

But Soviet Malala stepped between them just in time and took Jimfish aside.

‘I have a better use for him,' he said. ‘Yes, he's an unreconstructed racist of the old school: cynical, meretricious and stupid. But the old white mindset aside, since his recent transplant he has an African heart. In the new South Africa we need people able to speak out of both sides of their mouths. His combination of boneheadedness and
ubuntu
would make him an excellent ambassador.'

And so it was – after Soviet Malala dropped a few words in the ears of his powerful friends in the governing party – that Deon Arlow was appointed ambassador to Rwanda, where terrible massacres had begun. There it was that the founder of Superior Solutions would come face to face
with the wholesale murder of the minority Tutsis by the majority Hutus, and witness the racial cataclysm that those of his kind had been ready to risk – and promote – in South Africa, where, for decades, one tribe ruthlessly ground all others into the dust and where bloodshed of Rwandan proportions was about to happen, had not the miracle of messy compromise arrived at the last moment.

Everyone praised the brilliant idea of sending Deon Arlow to Rwanda – except Zoran, who thought it might make matters worse.

‘At the moment in that sad place Tutsis are being slaughtered by Hutus,' he said. ‘But what if the tide turns and the Hutus are stopped and defeated? Won't Tutsis take their turn at the top table and make life hell for the Hutus? They will need arms, advice and military contractors. That's when Ambassador Arlow's former skills as Commandant of Superior Solutions will come in handy.'

Soviet Malala announced that he was shocked by such cynicism.

‘Why call me cynical when I am just being Serbian?' Zoran wanted to know.

‘Because there are things people don't want to hear,' said Jimfish.

‘Or to say,' said Zoran the Serb. ‘And when that happens you know the new regime has started shutting down debate.'

Soviet Malala, who was rising fast in the ruling party, was deployed to warn Zoran that while positive criticism was welcome and essential and the democratic right of every citizen, if he insisted on sowing discord the Serb
should not complain if some patriot gave him (and here Soviet Malala used a local word that covered everything from a slap on the wrist to a bullet in the heart) a good ‘
klap
' and bundled him back to Belgrade. There was no room for a sceptical Serb – or anyone else who failed to applaud the miracle of peace and harmony that was the Rainbow Nation. Negative thinking must be monitored, just as the press, which had been showing signs of irresponsible behaviour, would be made to put its house in order. The beloved country was a miracle in the making and that was official.

Zoran was amused in his gloomy way. ‘Just one miracle in the making? Why so shy? I can give you a few more. Here's Miracle Number Two: nowhere can you meet any white person who will admit to backing the old system of locking people in the prison of their skin. People who stewed in murderous racial hatred now lose themselves in a haze of sentimental self-congratulation and officially endorsed national amnesia. Next comes Miracle Number Three: a ruling party with a massive majority, claiming the right to rule until the day of judgement, turns overnight into a fractious bunch of finger-wagging scolds, frightened of their own shadow, terrified of dissent, seeing enemies everywhere and threatening to shut them up.'

‘Foreigners are always frightened at the way we do things in this country,' said Soviet Malala.

‘I'm not a foreigner, I'm a Serb,' said Zoran. ‘And what I'm feeling is not fear, it's déjà vu.'

Soon, when Soviet Malala began leading marches of youthful supporters chanting their promise to kill for
the Party, Zoran decided it was time to pack for Belgrade.

‘So God works in mysterious ways in many places,' he said. ‘But He is at the very top of His game in the new South Africa.'

‘I'm really sorry to see you go back to the violence, corruption and hatred of war-torn ex-Yugoslavia,' said Jimfish, hugging his gloomy friend.

‘Don't give it a thought,' said Zoran the Serb. ‘When I see where you guys are heading, I think maybe we're not doing so badly, after all.'

C
HAPTER
30

Port Pallid, South Africa, 1994

Jimfish and Lunamiel
married and returned to peaceful Port Pallid on the Indian Ocean, where, in the mad mid-1980s the trawler skipper had one day found a boy on the harbour wall. They bought the old man's house and took over his boat, the
Lady Godiva
.

Port Pallid had remained what it had always been, a rocky knoll jutting into the Indian Ocean, a thumb poked into a cerulean eye, where no one now was to be found who had ever in their lives believed in the old religion of race and colour; and no one remembered their pledge to the former leader, Piet the Weapon, ‘to die for you till kingdom come'. But everyone believed instead in the saintliness of the man who had spent all those years on Robben Island.

Jimfish often sailed to the fishing grounds of the Chalumna river mouth, where the old skipper had seen his first coelacanth, and, as the boat rocked on the water, he knew that deep down in the ocean there lived a beautiful blue fish with four legs that could stand on its head and swim backwards.

‘A very queer fish indeed. Just like me.'

The thought gave him comfort and pleasure. The coelacanth had kept going when everyone had taken it for dead. But Jimfish knew now that it was being hunted and desired, and if this went on, the creature that had been alive milions of years before humans were even thought of, would disappear again, and this time there would be no miracle return.

Jimfish would ask Lunamiel: ‘If the coelacanth knew this, what would it think?'

Lunamiel said maybe it would think that it had not been a good idea, many millions of years ago, for an early relative to have struggled ashore on its four legs and stayed.

‘Because here we are,' said Lunamiel, ‘and that is not good news for the coelacanth.'

In the deep calm of the little fishing port there seemed room for everyone, and Jimfish and Lunamiel were very happy.

It was quite an event, then, to see a column of Mercedes slide into town one day, each as long and as big and as shiny as the one in which Jimfish and Lunamiel had fled Zaire. A platoon of young men jumped from the cars and began marching down the main road of the town, led by none other than Soviet Malala. In place of the Lenin cap he had once worn long ago, he now sported a cherry-red beret and T-shirt emblazoned with the letters FFF. As they marched, they sang to a tune Jimfish thought he remembered:

‘What's left to fight for?' Jimfish asked his old teacher. ‘I thought you had won?'

Soviet Malala adjusted his red beret. ‘Nothing has changed for the masses. This so-called new regime is just the old regime in disguise. My Fiscal Fighting Force will destroy these sell-outs and traitors, these black masks on white faces.'

Jimfish was as confused as ever he had been in the days when he sat at Soviet Malala's feet in the garden of Sergeant Arlow, absorbing his philosophy of prolo-fisc-freedo-mism. He appeared to have everything he wanted and yet he seemed angrier than ever – but now it was with those he had sworn to fight and die for.

‘Down with the Party!' Soviet Malala punched the air.

‘Have you left your own movement?' Jimfish asked.

‘It has left me,' said Soviet Malala. ‘When I remind them that rage is the rocket fuel of the lumpenproletariat, what do they do? They tell me I need anger-management classes. Come and join us, Jimfish! Nothing is more important than saving the lumpenproletariat!'

‘That may be so,' said Jimfish, ‘but I'd be happy if I could save the coelacanth.'