Kruger's Alp (13 page)

Of course Kuiker did not care. Augustus Carel Kuiker, Minister for Parallel Equilibriums, Ethnic Autonomy and Cultural Communication, cared only for success. Kuiker with the thick, ridged, almost stepped hairstyle, a rugged jaw and heavy, surprisingly sensuous lips. He looked like a rather thuggish Charles Laughton. Blanchaille recalled Kuiker's speeches, how he tirelessly stomped the country reeling off figures. The total population was already over twenty-seven million, it could rise to thirty-eight million or more by the year 2000. The number of whites was dropping. Zero population growth might be all very well for the rest of the world but for the Europeans of the southern sub-continent it was suicide. The percentage, now about sixteen, would fall to eleven after the turn of the millennium. The Government, he announced, might have to introduce a programme. It would not shrink from introducing a programme. This programme might well involve penalising certain groups if they had too many children as well as offering sterilisation and abortion on demand. He felt sure that many black people would welcome abortion on demand, and even, he hinted with that famous frown wrinkling across his forehead, also by command. He was not afraid to speak plainly, if non-whites were not able to limit their own fertility, then the Government might have to step in to find a way to help them do it. This was not a threat but a promise. The Regime might also have to remind white women where their duty lay. Requests were not enough (this was a clear jibe at Bubé). Despite countless fertility crusades, tax incentives for larger families among whites, the ratio of black people to white people in the country was still five or six to one, and rising. The Government looked with new hope to the extraordinary advances in embryology and fertility drugs, much of which was due to the pioneering work of the brilliant young doctor, Wim Wonderluk. There were those who were clearly breeding for victory, who planned to bury the Boer. Well the Government would not stand by idly and see this happen. If offers of television sets and free operations did not work, then other measures must be taken. Soon rumours reached the capital that
vasectomy platoons were stalking the countryside, that officials in Landrovers were rounding up herds of young black matrons and giving them the single shot, three-monthly contraceptive jabs. There were stories of secret radiation trucks known as scan vans, far superior to the old Nagasaki ambulances Bubé had sponsored, raiding the townships and tribal villages and the officials in these vans were armed with demographic studies and at the first sign of a birth bulge would visit those potential centres of population growth after dark and give them a burst of radiation, enough, the theory was, to impair fertility. A kind of human crop-spraying technique. People said it couldn't be true until they remembered that anything you could think about could very easily be true. Kuiker was as forthright in his address to white women, ‘our breeders of the future' he called them and he talked of introductory programmes of fertility drugs for all who wanted or needed them. Teams of researchers were working with selected females of child-bearing age on Government sponsored programmes to increase the white birth-rate without excluding the possibility, difficult though it might be, of obligatory implantation of fertilised ova in the selfish white wombs of women who had put golf and pleasure before their duty to the country. Pregnancy was good for the nation. He compared it with the military training which all young men had to undergo and pointed out that nine months' service was not too much to ask of a woman. Gus Kuiker was clearly going places. He caught the public eye. He didn't look to the past, he looked to the future which could be won if allied to technology. ‘Breed or bleed' had been his rallying cry and he asked the eminent embryologist, Professor Wim Wonderluk, to prepare a working document encompassing his plans for the new future. Yes, Blanchaille knew all about Kuiker. Knew more than enough to be going on with.

‘Why have you got me here? I was heading out under my own steam. It would have been easier, cleaner.' Blanchaille stood up knowing the policeman was not ready to release him.

‘Two reasons. Mine and Lynch's. I wanted to make you take another look at things you thought you knew all about. I don't want to be left alone with my mysteries. You're going out. Fine. So maybe you'll be able to use some of what I show you to get some answers out there in the outside world. That's my reason. Lynch's was more practical. He knew you'd never get out without my help.'

‘Why not? How many have gone already?'

Van Vuuren's look was cold. ‘Not all those who disappeared have
left the country. Getting out is not what it was. It has become a police matter. Things got difficult when Bubé and Kuiker issued instructions that disappearances were becoming too frequent and a close watch was to be kept on ports and airports.'

‘Then disappeared themselves.'

‘Yes, but the orders are still in force,' Van Vuuren said.

Blanchaille sat down again. ‘O.K. What else do you want to tell me?' he asked warily.

‘Turn around,' Van Vuuren ordered, ‘and watch the screen.'

On a television monitor behind him there appeared a group of men sitting at a long table, six to a side, all wearing earphones.

‘A delegation from the Ring are meeting a delegation from an Italian secret society known as the
Manus Virginis,
the Hand of the Virgin. The Hand is some sort of expression of the Church Fiscal. This lot arrived in the country claiming to be a male voice choir and they all have names like Monteverdi and Gabrielli and Frescobaldi. The Hand appears very interested in investment. Each chapter or cell of the Hand is called a Finger and takes a different part of the world for its investment which is done through their own bank called the Banco Angelicus. On the other side of the table is the finance committee of the Ring. They read from left to right: Brother Hyslop – Chairman; Brother van Straaten – he's their political commissar; Brother Wilhelm – Treasurer; Brother Maisels – transport arrangements. Don't laugh. Getting here in style and doing it in secret is very important to them. Brother Snyman – catering and hospitality. Since the Brothers regard themselves as hosts they put themselves out for these meetings, they bring along wine, a good pâté, a selection of cheeses. Headphones are for simultaneous translation.'

‘But why are you monitoring the Ring? All the major figures in the Regime are members of the Ring, so why get you to spy on it?'

‘Because though all members of the Government are in the Ring, not all members of the Ring are in the Government.'

Blanchaille looked at the heavy men on both sides of the table with their earphones clamped around their heads like Alice-bands which had slipped, and thought how alike they looked with their big gold signet rings, hairy knuckles, gold tie-pins, three-piece suits, their burly assurance. Here were devoted Calvinist Afrikaners who spat on Catholics as a form of morning prayers, sitting down with a bunch of not only Catholics, but Roman
wops
! To talk about – what?

‘Money,' said Van Vuuren. ‘Highly technical chat about investments,
exchange controls, off-shore banks, letters of credit, brokers, money moving backwards and forwards. But how are such meetings arranged and, more importantly,
why
?'

‘Ferreira would have understood,' said Blanchaille. ‘But I don't. What is the connection?'

‘I think,' said Van Vuuren, ‘that the connection isn't as odd as it seems. The philosophical ideas behind the Ring are not too dissimilar to those practised by Pope Pius X. He fired off salvos at the way we live. He attacked the ideas about humans improving themselves. He pissed on perfectability. He lambasted modern science and slack-kneed liberal ideas. So does the Ring. They have more in common than we think. Perhaps we do too.'

Blanchaille stared at the men on the screen. ‘I still can't believe what I'm seeing.'

The picture faded into blackness. ‘You haven't seen anything,' said Van Vuuren. ‘Now come along and look at what we have in the holding cells.'

CHAPTER 8

The holding cells were below ground, arranged in tiers rather in the manner of an underground parking garage, Van Vuuren explained in what to Blanchaille was an inappropriate and chilling comparison. And why ‘holding' cells? Van Vuuren was also quick to counter the notion that this was intended to distinguish them from ‘hanging' cells, or ‘jumping' cells. The policeman seemed, surprisingly, to regard this suspicion as being in bad taste.

Van Vuuren led him into a long concrete corridor: air-conditioning vents breathed coldly, a thin, flat hair-cord carpet on the floor, abrasive white walls, overhead fluorescent light-strips pallid and unforgiving. Down one side of the corridor were steel cell doors. At the far end of the corridor, in front of a cell, stood a group of uniformed officers. Senior men they must have been for Blanchaille caught the gleam of gold on caps and epaulettes. They seemed nervous, slapping their swagger-sticks against their thighs. One carried a clipboard and he was tapping his pencil nervously against his teeth.

‘We'll wait here and watch,' said Van Vuuren.

Then I saw in my dream, marching around the corner, two more policemen and between them their prisoner, a powerful man in grey flannels and white shirt, at least a half a head taller than his captors. As they approached the cell door the policeman with the clipboard stepped forward and held up his hand. ‘We are happy to inform you, Dr Strydom, that you are free to go. There is no further need to hold you. Your name has been removed from my list.'

The reaction of the prisoner to this information was sudden and violent. He gave the clipboard carrier an enormous blow to the head. The two men guarding him fell on him and tried to wrestle him to the ground, but he was too big, too strong. The uniformed policemen with the swagger-sticks joined in and a wild scrum of battling men seethed in the corridor. The prisoner laid about him with a will and reaching his objective, the cell door, opened it, rearing and lashing out with his feet, kicking backwards like a stallion at the policemen clawing at him. ‘Now write down my name in your book,' he roared at the unfortunate clipboard carrier who was leaning shakily against the wall and then leapt into the cell,
slamming the heavy door behind him.

Glumly the policemen gathered themselves together and wiped the blood from their faces. From behind the cell door Blanchaille could hear the prisoner's voice raised in the National Anthem:

‘On your call we may not waver, so we pledge from near and far; So to live, or so to perish – yes we come, South Africa-a-a-r!'

‘That's quite a patriot you've got there,' Blanchaille said. He couldn't help smiling, ‘Balthazar Buildings is a place from which generations of doomed prisoners have tried to escape. I think I've just seen a man fighting to get in. The world is suddenly stood on its head.'

‘That man is Wessels Strydom, once a leading light in the Ring which he left claiming it had been undermined by the Communists. Strydom said that the Regime was going soft on the old enemies, Reds, liberals, Jews, internationalists, terrorists. He expressed the feeling that control was slipping away from God's people. With a group of like-thinking supporters he formed what they called the
Nuwe Orde.
This organisation aims to expose betrayals of the Boer nation, by direct action. The military wing of the
Nuwe Orde
is the Afrika Straf Kaffir Brigade. You've heard of their punishment squads who deal with people they see as threatening or sullying the old idea of purity? Their ideas of punishment are juvenile but no less painful for that, mind you. They'll hang about a house where they know blacks and whites are holding a party and slash tyres; a little while ago they devised a plan of releasing thousands of syphilis-infected white mice in one of the multi-racial casinos; they're not above kidnapping the children of social workers or trade unionists who they feel are betraying the Afrikaner nation; or breaking into cinemas and destroying films they disapprove of; or shooting up the houses of lawyers (Piatikus Lenski, the liberal defence lawyer was a favourite target); or preparing to mate with their wives in front of the Memorial to the Second Mauritian Invasion in response to the falling white birth-rate, a huge breed-in of hundreds of naked male members of the
Nuwe Orde
and their carefully positioned wives all preparing for insemination at a given signal. They want a homeland for the Boer nation and eventual independence. In this new homeland only white people will be admitted. The idea is to remove all dependence on black labour. They'll do their own housework, sweep their streets, run their own factories, deliver their own letters, mow their lawns. They'll be safe, separate, independent. They've bought a tract of land down on the
South Coast. The sea is important to them as a symbol, it's something that they have to have their backs to.'

‘Would they be capable of killing?'

Van Vuuren shrugged. ‘You're thinking of the writing on Ferreira's wall, aren't you? So were we. That's why we hauled this Strydom in. Frankly it was a terrible mistake. I'm not saying that the A.S.K. couldn't have killed him but Ferreira was dealing in highly complex matters concerning the movement of funds through very complicated channels which none of us understood. Certainly not this Strydom. He could barely read his own bank account. And he doesn't care about those things, he cares about race, about history, about being right. Arresting him has proved to be a terrible mistake. We can't get rid of him. We don't need him any more, we don't want to hold him, there's nothing he can tell us, but he won't go! And it suits the
Nuwe Orde
to have him here. It makes it look like the Regime is really taking them seriously, locking him up like any black radical. You can see how determined Strydom is. He literally fights his way in back into his holding cell. The thing to remember about the
Nuwe Orde
is that it is actually a very old order.'

Now I saw in my dream how Blanchaille and the policeman Van Vuuren moved to another cell and peered through the thick glass spyhole in the door and Blanchaille recoiled at what he saw. For there, lying on the bunk, was Roberto Giuseppe Zandrotti, the anarchist. He recognised immediately the spiky black hair, the long, thin chin, the freckled, ghostly white face. ‘I don't believe this. He's in London.'

Van Vuuren shook his head. ‘We had known he was planning to return secretly to the country. We knew when he would arrive and, most importantly, what he would be wearing. The information was top-grade. So accurate Zandrotti never stood a chance. Blanchie, he came back disguised as a nun, of the Loretto Order, to be precise. Imagine it if you will. There's this double-decker bus trundling through a green and leafy suburb, all the passengers peering out of the window and paying very little attention to what some of them afterwards thought of as perhaps rather ‘swarthy' a sister who sat there on her seat keeping her eyes demurely downcast and most of her face hidden behind her large wimple. Imagine their surprise when three large men in hairy green sportscoats and thick rubber-soled brown shoes jump aboard the bus and begin attacking this nun. Apparently the conductor went to her assistance and was struck down with a blow to the temple. He lay sprawled in the aisle,
bleeding, and all the coins from his ticket machine went rolling beneath the bus seats.'

Blanchaille imagined it. He saw it. He heard the jingling flutter as the coins spun and settled beneath the seats.

‘Anyway, these three guys wrestled with the nun who hoofs them repeatedly in the nuts until they pick her up and carry her down the aisle head first. The other passengers see that this nun isn't what they thought because the headdress has been torn off and they look at the hair and the freckles and the beard and fall over themselves with amazement – this is a man! There was no end of trouble afterwards stopping them talking to the papers, and the conductor, he was well into negotiations to sell his story to something called
Flick,
a flashy picture magazine, when he was stopped at the last moment.'

Of course escaping from jail in clerical dress had a long history. There had been Magdalena who got out disguised as a nun. A less appropriate garb could not be imagined. From that day nuns leaving the country were abused by Customs officers still smarting over the one who got away. Then there had been Kramer and Lipshitz who bribed their way out of their cells dressed as Cistercian monks. But for a wanted man to return to the country in clerical dress, to certain arrest, that was beyond comprehension. The exit permit on which Zandrotti had left the country on his release from jail specified arrest should he return.

‘Unless, of course, he wanted to be caught,' suggested Blanchaille.

‘It makes no sense. But you know Roberto, and you know his way of thinking. Jesus, he must have wanted to be caught! There is no other explanation. He let it be known in London, in certain quarters, that he was going home – knowing the details would get back to us. They did. We even knew his seat number on the aircraft.' Van Vuuren unlocked the door and drew Blanchaille into the cell.

Zandrotti had always gone his own way, opposed not merely to the Regime but to every authority he encountered. His schemes for that opposition were novel, intriguing, entirely characteristic, quirkish, outrageous, quite impractical and wonderfully diverting. Zandrotti's plan for immediate revolution was a message, passed by word of mouth to all those opposed to the Regime, that on a particular day at a particular time each man, woman and child would fetch a stone, the biggest and heaviest that could be carried,
and place it in the middle of the road and then go home and wait for the country to grind to a halt. Zandrotti's grand coup at school had been the occasion when he broke into the cadet armoury and stole a supply of .303 rifles and full sets of uniforms, khaki shorts and shirts, boots and puttees and caps, with which he dressed and armed a platoon of black school cleaners and drilled them on the school playground for all the world to see. The sight of black men marching with rifles caused panic in the neighbourhood. Zandrotti was expelled from the Hostel and they remembered how he was driven away in Father Cradley's grey DKW, sitting in the back fervently making the Sign of the Cross. The rector was a notoriously bad driver and they watched Zandrotti's mock gibbers of terror, helpless with laughter.

His star appearance was in the dock at the Kipsel trial. The trial of the so-called Fanatical Five. It wasn't Five for long. Looksmart Dladla had fled, mysteriously warned a few days previously by an unknown source. That left just four: Kipsel, Mickey the Poet, Magdalena and Zandrotti.

The number was further reduced when Mickey the Poet hanged himself in his cell. What a miracle of athletic agility that had been, what a wonder of tenacity! Michael Yates, little Mickey the Poet, short, blond, barrel-chested, the build of a youthful welter-weight with powerful forearms and lengthy reach (which perhaps helped in the miracle of his death). But Mickey wasn't a boxer, he was a poet, not by practice but by acclamation. He was known for four quite hopeless lines:
Bourgeois, bourgeois, bourgeois fool/ Little capitalistic tool/ What you ask, will end white rule?/ Ask the children in the school!
With these few lines of thudding doggerel Mickey acquired the sobriquet ‘the Poet', and met his end. For not very long after that came the township disturbances when the school-children rioted and Mickey's words seemed amazingly prophetic, if not a straight case of incitement, and his little poem was printed in an anthology of revolutionary verse and was much quoted abroad. And then there was the photograph of Mickey with the ‘Liberation Committee', as the leaders of what later became the Azanian Liberation Front were known. A famous photograph showing Mickey standing between Athol Ngogi and Horatio Vilakaze, and with Achmed Witbooi, Oscar Amandla and Ramsamy Gopak, all raising clenched fists and singing. Mickey said he had gone to the meeting by mistake, someone had told him it was a jazz concert, that he never knew.
He never knew.
Another brief epitaph for his gravestone. He never knew when he was approached by Kipsel for a
lift what it was that Kipsel carried in the brown leather briefcase. Mickey's ignorance was invincible and nothing that the State Prosecutor, Natie Kirschbaum, said could pierce it. With wonderful simplicity Mickey informed the judge that since he hadn't the first idea of why he had been arrested but since the prosecution seemed to have a number of explanations, he planned to call the entire prosecution team as witnesses for the defence and to cross-examine them carefully on all aspects of his case. The surprised judge adjourned the hearing to consider the application and promised a decision the following day. It caused a sensation. P
OET TAKES ON PROSECUTION
! the headlines read.

The next day never came for Mickey the Poet. Some time during the following twenty-four hours Mickey had attached a strip of towel to his bedstead and the other around his neck and strangled himself. The incredulity with which this was greeted stopped the trial while evidence was heard of Mickey's last hours. The shock of his death was only surpassed by the wonder of its achievement. The defence lawyers produced a statement in which Mickey complained of electric shocks, beatings, and frequent threats that he would be thrown from a high window in Balthazar Buildings. Mickey, it seemed, had demanded to see, as was his right, the Inspector of Detainees, but this had not happened. He had then, it was alleged, gone to bed, tied the towel around his neck and choked himself. Sergeant Betty Paine was called to the witness box to explain why the Inspector had not called. Sergeant Paine's job was to take down statements from prisoners when they complained that they had been tortured and, as she added charmingly with a little flick of her blonde head, to hand this to the interrogator so that he might determine whether indeed there was a case for reporting the complaint to the Inspector of Detainees. However, when the Inspector arrived he was told by Sergeant Paine that the prisoner, Michael Yates, was ‘out'. The judge was puzzled by this and asked for the meaning of the word ‘out'. Did Sergeant Paine mean ‘out' as in ‘out for the count,' or ‘out for lunch', or ‘out of order'? Or perhaps ‘out like a light'? Presumably she did not mean ‘out to tea' or ‘out on the town'. There was laughter in court at this and the judge threatened to clear the galleries.