Kruger's Alp (10 page)

But with Magdalena,
wow
! seemed just about to cover it. He had invited her to Bishop Blashford's vineyard, his other garden, and she had nodded with complete enthusiasm. She had streaked blonde hair. Her face ended in a pointed chin. Her eyes were blue-grey.

He led her through the darkness with a churning stomach feeling rather like a young man who has come into a large fortune and has no idea how to begin spending it. She looked like a model, Van Vuuren had promised. So this was how a model looked! Clearly there could be no holding hands this time. He would grapple her to him. Kiss her. Remove her bra and fondle her breasts, maybe take them in his mouth. Why not? He was fifteen, it was about time. They would lie on the grass afterwards. It happened to be raining softly so perhaps they wouldn't, but if it stopped raining they could lie on her mac. That she wore a mac was evidence of her practicality and added to her charm. Would he try and take off her pants? He doubted it – but nothing was ruled out. They stood beneath the dripping trees and Magdalena drew him towards her and said: ‘You're a pretty boy.' Her thin plastic raincoat crackled as she pressed him against her. There was something so practised in the kiss she gave him. Her lips were wet. With a stab of despair he noticed that the buttons on her mac were large and stuffed tightly through their buttonholes. This presented a smooth and shining armoured front. But she was well ahead of him and had no similar problems. Her hand reached up behind him under his shirt pressing into the small of his back. The other hand expertly opened his fly – smooth, fast, deft movements, and then she had his penis in her damp fingers and was lifting it over the elastic band of his underpants which slid painfully upwards to trap his testicles. But then she rubbed and rubbed and soon things grew warm and better. Then he groaned and spurted and all at once she laughed delightedly. ‘But you're quick! The quickest I've ever met.' Not quite scorn in the laugh, but tones of someone pleased at their own handiwork and still willing to continue. He knew the matter wasn't closed as far as she was concerned. He also knew he'd come before he'd even kissed Magdalena. There might be more if he liked, he could feel it. It was up to him, he could feel that too. But of course it wasn't. What was to come had been and gone. The elastic cut more cruelly into his testicles. ‘You're really nice,' Magdalena said, ‘we'll do this again.' His own incompetence baffled and enraged him. Afterwards he picked a small bunch of the Bishop's grapes. Magdalena declined saying they were too sour, but he finished them anyway, sour or not, punishing himself. The perfectly ordinary, reasonable and agreeable reactions of human beings seemed closed to him. A few, like Magdalena, dwelt happily among them. And there was that girl he'd met when he was very much younger,
somebody's big sister, whose he couldn't remember. He went to play with her, at her invitation. They played in the empty garage. Postman's knock and spin the bottle.

‘How do you play?'

‘If your number comes up you pay forfeits.'

‘What forfeits?'

‘Well, for instance, kisses or feelings, if you like. Otherwise hair-pulls and toe-stamps.'

He won a lot and took hair-pulls and toe-stamps and it was very many years later that it occurred to him what was being offered and why there was that strange, softly appealing note in her voice.

There was no possibility of normal, natural, obvious behaviour for him.

Instead he had, as Lynch said, moral crusades.

‘You on our side believe in the multi-racial paradise in which Boer and Zulu lie down together like lambs. There are no longer any Kaffirs, coolies, Jew-boys, coloured bastards, hairies, rock spiders, Dutchmen, all the rich store of invective so vital to political debate – I mention too Rednecks and English swine – and no one notices what colour you are. You believe God is behind you in this. They, on the other side, believe that everyone has their own identity. Everyone deserves separate lavatories and if the crunch comes they will fight to the death, to the last man who will blow his brains out on the last beach, preferring death to dishonour and will go to heaven where there will also be parallel toilet facilities. We are all superior people, on both sides.'

Lynch spat on these dreams, sat beneath the Tree of Heaven spitting with amazing accuracy also into an old brass spittoon. Kruger had spat, with embarrassing frequency, he said, and he enjoyed learning how to do so. ‘This society is one of deep criminality, its ministers have a tough job laying down the law, that's why if you want to be a priest, join the police force.'

The Bishop's other garden had been closed to Lynch's altar boys without warning. Three strands of barbed wire slanting inwards were fixed above the hedge and a great new lock appeared on the gate. Gabriel was given the key. The Garden of Eden had been closed, Father Lynch said, and the sinners ejected therefrom. The Archangel barred the way.

‘We don't care a damn,' Van Vuuren said, ‘he'll have to clear up our mess.'

‘He'll have to pick up the french letters, the old cigarettes and clear the well of about a hundred vodka and brandy bottles.'

‘He's ending up as just another garden boy,' Blanchaille said.

Father Lynch had listened to all of this with a faint smile. ‘But he's in the Bishop's employ, isn't he? At his age and already an episcopal appointment! You keep an eye on Gabriel. That boy will go far.'

Bishop Blashford yawned and stretched. The interview was over.

‘Perhaps Gabriel is around? I thought I might say goodbye,' Blanchaille said.

Bishop Blashford beat a retreat to the house where Ceres was waiting at the french windows. She held them open as he approached and once he'd slipped inside she quickly closed them to all but a few inches. Obviously Blanchaille was not invited to tea. ‘You go up and see Gabriel,' Blashford shouted through the crack. ‘He's our legal eagle. He'll get you whatever papers you need to make the application. There's no more I can do for you. Be it on your own head. Now, if you'll excuse me, I must go and wash my hands.'

‘Your bags are outside by the front gate,' Ceres said and closed the french windows with considerable dignity.

CHAPTER 6

Blanchaille walked down the hill struggling with the heavy cases. He regretted vaguely having brought them. Books, socks, clerical suits he had never worn; the blue barathea blazer he was wearing when he entered the seminary, big lapels and double vents – quite out of fashion now . . . the weeds of yesteryear.

The sky above the crest of the hill was dark grey and becoming blacker with every moment. There was something huge and flamboyant about a highveld storm, an occasion of relentless melodrama. The sky grew heavy and crowded in over you. As the storm built, the air became more highly charged. The trees shook themselves. Birds would swoop and flee. The hush would begin to weigh. Occasionally a small wind would drift a few leaves past your ankles or slide past the eyebrows carrying a faint watery scent. The first flash would come, white as a slash of chalk across a blackboard and a crash that split the ear-drums. But it did not necessarily mean rain, something might happen in the atmosphere and the storm would wheel and miss you leaving you only with prodigious explosions, blackness and vivid fractures of light. All show, impressive but empty bluster, truncheon weather, crash, bash, wallop. Your hair stood on end but you didn't get wet. Yet you felt the threat, looked with respect at the towering darkness above. Not for nothing did the Regime sometimes broadcast important policy statements on radio and television during electrical storms, the words interspersed by static and thunder. When it did rain, the relief was palpable.

A large black car came bowling down the hill and stopped beside him with a shriek of brakes. The window descended with smooth electrical precision, and there was Gabriel. The interior of the car smelt of its blue vinyl coverings and the refrigerated whisper of its air conditioning. Gabriel didn't switch off the engine. The car waited, hissing faintly. Gabriel massaged his jaw, smooth, golden, smiling, a model of casual elegance.

‘What's this, Blanchie? You'll be soaked if it comes down. You're a long way from home.'

Blanchaille nodded. Maybe he should ask his question now?

‘I'd give you a lift but I'm meeting the Rome plane. Vatican bigwigs.
Visiting firemen. Ah well – no rest for the wicked.'

‘No.'

‘Never be a bishop's chaplain.'

‘No,' said Blanchaille, ‘I won't.'

Blanchaille watched the big black car go purring down the hill. He hadn't asked his question. It was this: Looksmart Dladla had been warned to get out of the country by his brother. Fair enough. So then, if Gabriel told Looksmart the cops wanted him in connection with the Kipsel business, who told Gabriel?

As he reached the bottom of the hill the first drops fell but he was lucky enough to find a bus stop and gratefully took shelter beneath the corrugated iron roof, swung his cases up on the bench and himself up beside them while the rain sheeted down and ran rivers of red mud and gravel beneath the spindly metal legs of the shelter. Highveld rain was like no other, the drops were large and would sting the hand and batter the head, drilling into the earth, beating and upbraiding it. The highveld rain had weight and made each drop count, was a battering of the country, brief but overwhelming. The earth, so dry, was soon saturated in great pools everywhere, joining up into streams carrying off the top soil, rough brown surges hurtling down the gutters and thundering in the storm-water drains, and everything which had been settled was fluid and running. It never lasted of course. After the deluge the sun would come out and everything dried away to sticky mud and then to dust. But while it lasted the world ran free, and the mind with it.

Now in my dream, as the storm began tapering off, a figure stepped out of the rain and sat beside him on the bench. ‘God Almighty, Blanchie! Did I not direct you to the Airport Palace?' Father Lynch's black raincoat was a sheen of wet cloth; rain gathered in the brim of his hat; when he spoke a hundred droplets exploded in the air before his mouth. ‘You delayed. And now you may find the going harder. Bubé is gone!'

‘So?'

‘What do you mean – so? This is the most extraordinary news. At last the truth is beginning to emerge. Bubé has gone. Of course this affects your travel plans.'

‘Why should it?'

‘Why? Because the roads will be full of police. Theodore, for the first time since Paul Kruger's departure, a president has fled! Adolph Gerhardus Bubé has fled!'

Adolph Gerhardus Bubé, father of the nation. An intellectual who
studied in his youth in universities in Holland, Germany and Belgium. One of the original founders of the old policy of ethnic parities, as it was then called, with his thesis ‘Racial Separation with Justice', which became the Ur-text, the philosophical underpinning of the racial policy of equal freedoms or concomitant responsibilities, the vision of ‘ethnic heartlands' each reflecting its distinctive tribal rhythm, each tribe breeding to its heart's content. It was from this thesis that many of the crucial ideas of modern South Africa originated, regarded as revolutionary once but now outmoded, its once striking maxims absorbed into everyday language, sentiments such as: ‘There's no such place as South Africa', or as Pik Honneger, his most distinguished disciple put it, ‘What's ours is ours, and what's theirs is what we are prepared to give them.'

Bubé's thesis had been required reading on Father Lynch's picnics. It was Lynch who pointed out how profoundly influenced Bubé had been throughout his career, as a young MP, as a distinguished Economics Minister and as President – by the birth-rate. Bubé in his formal suits, with his paunch, his watch chain, his benign manner made speech after speech pointing to the burgeoning black population and he would appeal to his followers to remember the old Boer wife in the days of the Great Trek, during the wars of freedom and the oppression of the Boers by the British Empire. The old Boer wife, he said, had been a breeding machine, her womb was a weapon more potent than the Mauser, a holy factory in which there was renewed each month a new army, the white man's hope of a secure future in South Africa where he could thrive and prosper and protect his traditional way of life, his culture and his Christian God. But now the white birth-rate was spiralling down to zero growth while the black man was rearming in the belly of his wives. Tirelessly the President expounded his theme: ‘White women, remember your duty!' H
AVE A BABY FOR BUBÉ
! the headlines ran. His supporters took up the slogan and ran through the streets chanting it, breaking into chemist shops, puncturing contraceptive sheaths and flushing birth control pills down the toilet and assaulting non-white persons for allegedly failing to respect pregnant white women. It was Bubé who funded the sterilisation campaign in the countryside, the secret radiation trucks, the so-called ‘Nagasaki ambulances' which so terrified the rural population.

Lynch often expatiated upon the role of President Bubé, as he rested beneath the Tree of Heaven, ‘It was our Adolph who reminded us that an earlier and better name for the Boer War was
the Gold War. It was a war between Gold Bugs, who understood the importance of the metal, and the Boers who had still to learn this. The British Army came in on the side of the Gold Bugs – people like Werner and Beit, Himmelfarber etc. Let's not believe the story put out by men in an advanced state of dementia such as Cecil Rhodes, or Alfred Milner that they were defending the Anglo-Saxon race of which the English, God forgive poor Rhodes, were regarded as the most perfect flower, “the best, the most human, the most honourable race the world possesses . . .” This I quote to you from his
Confession of Faith.
Have you ever heard such rubbish? Reasons, you see –
reasons.
We must have reasons before the killing can begin. The Boers on their side under Kruger were fighting, they said, for the right to be free, for Calvinist Afrikanerdom, for the little man against the big, for independence, for truth. All lies, all lies. Gold it was and gold it has always been, the dream, the rumour, the hope and despair of the conquerors and of the conquerors before them, Arabs and Portuguese both. Stories of magical gilded cities, of Solomon's mines, of Monomatapa and Vigiti Magna lured them here. The Portuguese, the Dutch, the British and finally even the Boers, they all wanted it. Rhodes and all his fellow Bugs had the gold but Kruger owned the sacred soil from which it was mined. They thought that the Boers didn't want the gold. How absurd! It was the miners they hated. They saw them as the sub-life that crawled beneath the stone, so they averted their eyes, usually upward to God their Father and kept to the veld, content with their horses, their guns, a herd or two, the horizon endlessly receding, a host of servants and a wife in the back room breeding like a machine, claiming always simply that they wished to be left alone. The Boers were the Greta Garbos of history. The Boers didn't want the gold only so long as no one else had it. But they soon found the stuff had its uses. Before the war they were already building up their funds by illicitly buying gold stocks and amalgam from shady sellers. There were organised Government theft departments, that's what it amounted to. Contemporary observers were lost in admiration for the bribery, greed, corruption, the whole quality of the unblushing venality with which those involved enriched themselves in the Boer Republics. The lot of them. All those wily Hollanders surrounding Kruger, were rotten from the toes up. The Transvaal Government was supported by secret funds administered from secret accounts and with this stash fund the Krugerites bought votes, nobbled opponents, paid off old scores and enriched family and friends. When the war broke out
they no longer had to buy their gold under the table, because they'd taken over the gold mines. They could take it straight out of the ground and put it into their vaults. So when they went to war with the British they said they were fighting for God and freedom and independence. But by then they knew that whoever got the gold had God and freedom thrown in buckshee. Even so, as Bubé points out in his thesis, men like Kruger and Rhodes were of the old century. Nineteenth-century men. And the quality of their hypocrisy and the nature of their corruption was a Victorian thing. The gold was a means, the way you paid for your dreams, financed them. The difference with us, the New Men, Bubé says, is that gold came first, the dreams later. You can see this change taking place at the end of the Boer War when even the most Christian fighting generals became bank robbers literally overnight. As the British marched into the capital, General Smuts was holding up the Standard Bank and the Mint and making off with a cool half-million in gold. Kruger saw it coming. His
Memoirs
make it clear that the discovery of gold was a catastrophe. It would ‘soak the country in blood'.

The rain had stopped. Sheets of muddy water rushed past the two priests in the bus shelter. They could hear it thundering deep down in the storm-water drains.

‘With Bubé's flight history comes full circle. It's the Kruger departure all over again. Heaven be praised!' Lynch's jug ears waggled in delight. Blanchaille noticed that the old man appeared to have lost more of his teeth. He grinned like an ancient baby. ‘You're still planning to travel?'

Blanchaille nodded, ‘Yes Father.'

‘Oh you call me Father all right, but I'm not, you know.
Of course
you know! I'm more like an uncle to you boys. I like you, that makes me really different, close. Yes, I like you and mind you I'm probably the only one who does – and I nourish hopes for you all yet, though I look dark into your futures. But Father you call me! And what do you call your old President, the President Kruger? Why man, you call him Uncle, Uncle Paul! But that's all wrong. Sure it is. He's not your uncle, I am. He's your father, father of the nation, father of misfortune. Follow Kruger, find the truth. That's the line, Blanchie. Stick to it like glue as you're pitched into an uncertain future. Be sure and look out for your old Uncle Lynch because he'll be looking out for you. Take this. Trust me.' Lynch gave him a brown envelope on which an address was scrawled. ‘You'll need cash.' The envelope smelt faintly of pistachio.

‘You've taken Ferreira's money!' Blanchaille was outraged.

‘I've simply returned the funds Ferreira bequeathed to you and which you unwisely left behind when you fled. I give it to you, after making suitable deductions. You can take a bus from here. At this address a friend is waiting. It's nine stages, and then you hop.'

Blanchaille counted the nine stages because he hoped against hope he might end up at an address different to that given on the envelope. It did no good. Nine stages brought him to the centre of the town, to the tall skyscraper known as Balthazar Buildings which housed the Security Police, the Special Branch and the organisation, so secret no one could be certain of its existence, known as the Bureau, under its phantom chief, Colonel Terblanche.