Kruger's Alp (14 page)

Sergeant Paine replied that political prisoners were the responsibility of the Security Police who were interrogating them. The police held the keys to the cell and entrance was by permission only, one could not simply go barging into a detainee's cell unannounced or uninvited at any old hour of the night, and although it was true
that the officer in charge had given permission for the Inspector of Detainees to call on Yates, as it happened she did not have the keys that night and there was nothing she could do. Rather than hurt the Inspector's feelings she had told him that Yates was ‘out'. Sergeant Paine told the court that she dreaded such requests and did her best to please, she even kept a sign on her desk which read: ‘Please don't ask to see the prisoners as a refusal may offend . . .' Well, the judge enquired, if the Inspector of Detainees had not seen the prisoner, then presumably Paine had done so, since she had taken down his statement on her Brother electric typewriter. Did he strike her as someone who had been assaulted by interrogating officers? She gave a rather flustered glance desperately towards what were known as the choir stalls, the front benches of the court where the prosecution witnesses from the police sat. A security branch man was shaking his head vigorously at her. The defence counsel protested, claiming that the witness was being prompted from the wings. Sergeant Paine shrilly denied the charge and burst into tears and the judge cautioned the defence for hectoring the witness and permitted her to step down.

And that was the end of the inquiry into the strange death of Mickey the Poet.

The next day Kipsel turned state witness and gave his evidence in a hoarse whisper. He took all the blame on himself: he had persuaded Mickey the Poet to drive him, it was his uncle who ran the compound where the explosive store was situated, it was he who persuaded Looksmart to draw the map of the township and it was through her love for him that Magdalena had allowed herself to be persuaded to take part in the operation. And Zandrotti? Why, he hadn't really been involved at all, he'd merely winked, smiled and sang a couple of verses of the National Anthem.

Kipsel was given a suspended sentence and discharged.

While he was giving evidence to a hushed courtroom, Magdalena turned her back on him and Zandrotti shouted angrily that he should keep his explanations to himself, better a bungling saboteur than a traitor. For this he was removed to the cells beneath the court room.

He received five years.

Magdalena was given three.

A few weeks later, after apparently bribing a wardress, and disguised as a nun, Magdalena escaped from jail and fled across the border. The disguise she affected led to a tremendous row between Church and State. President Bubé in a warmly received speech to
his Party Congress warned that the Roman danger was growing, and called on the Pope's men and women to put their house in order. He hinted at Church connivance in Magdalena's escape and its tacit support of terrorist groups. Bishop Blashford, speaking for the Church, responded by ordering a central register of all working nuns, ‘genuine sisters' as he called them and disclaimed any connection between the renegade Magdalena and the true Brides of Christ who, he said angrily, dedicated their lives to serving God and their fellow men and took no part in politics. At the same time he warned that violent opposition to the Regime would continue while they maintained their hideous racial policies. He took the occasion for attacking as well their authoritarian methods of birth control, the dumping of unwanted people in remote camps in the veld, and the crass folly and blatant inhumanity of the Regime's political arrangements. He drew parallels with Nazi Germany and went so far as to compare President Bubé with Hitler, a time-honoured insult and much appreciated throughout the country where Blashford earned enthusiastic praise from the anti-Regime opposition but equally delighted President Bubé's followers, so much so that in the traditional response he publicly thanked the good Bishop for the compliment, since after all Hitler had been a strong man, proud of his people and his country. Both men came out of the confrontation with their public prestige much enhanced and behind the scenes it was said they were both good friends and often went fishing together.

The anarchist's eyes were red-flecked milky pools surrounding pupils dark and hard as stones. And I saw in my dream how hesitantly Blanchaille approached him, not knowing what his reception was likely to be at the hands of his old friend not seen for so long, so cruelly used, for after that terrible trial it had been Zandrotti alone who faced the assaults of his jailers, cruelties not refined but oafish, coarse, persistently callous, and above all, juvenile. The young warders had waged a campaign of humiliation against him, Blanchaille heard on his weekly visits to the prison; they would apple-pie his bed, piss on his cigarettes replacing them limp and wet in the pack, tear pages from the books he was reading and allocate him cells from which he could hear the singing of the condemned men on death row. Lovely singing it was too, Zandrotti told him, day and night, right up to the last moment, this male voice choir of killers waiting for the end. They would sing special requests, the warders joked with Zandrotti. It had been his idea of
hell, Zandrotti told Blanchaille afterwards when he was free, to be locked in a small room with the intellectual equivalent of the police rugby team. Beside that horror the fires of conventional Roman hell cooled to an inviting glow.

Blanchaille drove him to the airport after his release, the anarchist clutching a few clothes, a little cash and an exit visa which ensured he would depart from the country forever within forty-eight hours. ‘They opened a little gate in the big prison gate and pushed me out clutching my money, in this badly fitting blue suit, carrying my passport and an exit permit and told me, God bless, old fellow. God bless! Can you believe that?' All he wanted on the road to the airport was news. He had none in the years inside. He greeted the news that Magdalena was regarded as dangerous by the Regime with a whistle of appreciation. But he was amazed to learn that Kipsel was still alive, had not done the expected and hanged himself, or shot himself.

Apparently Magdalena had helped Zandrotti when he reached London. Blanchaille had no idea of his situation there except for one report that showed his old perverse sense of humour operated still. He read of the anarchist being hauled before an English court for persistently photographing everyone who entered or left the South African embassy because, as he explained to the magistrate, this was a custom in his own country where everyone expected to be photographed on street corners by agents of the Regime not once but many times during their lives and he wished to continue this ancient custom in exile.

Now he lay in a bunk in the cells of Balthazar Buildings, strangely quiet, supine, and yet with a gleam of defiance which contrasted oddly with his air of defeat.

‘Ask him why he's here,' Van Vuuren said.

‘What brought you back, Roberto? And looking so holy, too. The flying nun. Mother Zandrotti of the Townships . . .'

The prisoner favoured him with a fleeting smile. ‘I met Tony Ferreira in London. He was staying at this hotel and we went down to the bar. He was in London on the last leg of a world tour. He got very drunk in the bar, kept falling to his knees and reciting bits of the Litany. You will remember the sort of thing – “Bower of Roses, Tower of Ivory, Hope of Sinners”, and so on. You know the lyrics, I'm sure you could sing it yourself. But in a bar in London surrounded by English Protestants, it can be rather alarming. Anyway the barman, thank God, ordered him to stop or leave . . .'

‘But why did Ferreira want you back here?'

‘He didn't. That was the last thing he wanted. The bastard slandered his country!'

‘Slandered his country! God almighty, Roberto! What sort of rubbish is that? Where did he want you to go?'

‘To the other place. To Geneva. Oh hell, you know, Uncle Paul's place.'

‘What else did he say?'

‘I don't remember.' The anarchist's eyes swam on their veined pools. ‘Ask him yourself.'

‘Ferreira is dead. Murdered.'

The anarchist shrugged. ‘So they say. Well, not before time. I would have killed him myself.'

Blanchaille tried to control his astonishment. ‘What did he do to you?'

‘He tried to destroy everything I've ever believed in, hoped in. He pissed on it! He crapped on it! Rubbed my nose in it, between invocations to the Queen of Heaven . . .'

‘But what did he say?'

‘Don't remember.'

Van Vuuren interposed. ‘That's all you'll get from him, the forgetfulness is strategic.'

They withdrew. The prisoner showed little sign of recognizing their going until they reached the door when Blanchaille said, ‘Goodbye then, Roberto, and I'm sorry to meet you in this place.'

The anarchist sat upright and waved his fist in fury. ‘I'm sorry for you, yes, because if you're going where I think you're going, then you're going to die of sorrow! Don't be sorry for me, Blanchie, save it for yourself. I'm still here.'

Outside in the corridor Blanchaille asked Van Vuuren: ‘What does he mean – he's still here?'

‘Just what he says. Here, in jail, he is Zandrotti, known as such, wanted by the police and dangerous enough to apprehend, torture, perhaps kill. These threats confirm his existence, his importance, not least to himself. Here and perhaps only here he is Zandrotti still. We are the police, this is the infamous prison, Balthazar Buildings. Everything is what it is expected to be. I don't know what Ferreira told him in London but clearly it made him so desperate that prison seems infinitely preferable to all other alternatives . . . But let's get something clear, we don't want him. We're not holding the anarchist Zandrotti, despite what the papers say overseas and the silent vigils in front of our embassy demanding the brave soul's release. No, he is clinging to us. It is he who won't let us go . . .'

Blanchaille was becoming more weary and confused by the mysteries which though they had a certain bizarre interest were not getting him very far along the road to the Airport Palace Hotel and his flight to freedom and he respectfully requested to be allowed to continue his journey.

‘One last port of call,' Van Vuuren promised, ‘and then you can go.' He paused outside a cell door and lifted the steel cover from the spyhole and invited Blanchaille to look inside. ‘Recognise him?'

‘Naturally.' How could he not do so? The large fine head, the grizzled steel-grey curls, the powerful dignified bearing of the man who had done more than anyone else to advance the cause of liberation in Southern Africa, Horatio Vilakaze, arrested soon after the fateful picture had appeared showing Mickey the Poet apparently in attendance on the liberation leaders, back in those exciting days before death, dispersal, imprisonment, exile, house arrest and age had split and destroyed the original organising committee of the Black Justice Campaign. How long ago? Years, years and years. It did no good to count them.

‘Vilakaze is perhaps the saddest of all our cases,' Van Vuuren said. ‘We don't have to go into the cell, we can listen to his speech from out here,' he flicked a switch and the old man's powerful voice reverberated along the chill, empty corridor.

‘Brothers and sisters, comrades, freedom will be ours!' He held up his arms as if to still the cheering crowds and when the applause which must have rung between his ears like brass bands had died away he rallied the faithful thousands only he could see and hear. ‘Within the country our forces are massing, our fighters are brave, the Regime shrinks from them. On the borders the armies of our allies gather like locusts to sweep on our enemy and defeat him. Together we will overcome, we will drive the oppressor into the sea, God is with us!'

Van Vuuren killed the vibrant, echoing words. ‘Too sad to hear. That was his last great speech before he was arrested. He was speaking to thirty thousand supporters, and he can't forget it. It preys on his mind, he reruns the speech a dozen times a day. That was before the young men took over. He is a great man.'

‘It didn't stop you arresting him.'

‘Yes. We did arrest him, but only after we had been approached by a number of his friends anxious to spare him the humiliation of ejection from the movement he had helped to found. So yes, you can say we arrested him, but really we took him in.'

Took him in?
Took him in!
What a terrible thing to say. As if this
place had been a home for strays, a dogs' home. Or an orphanage. There was in this something he could not accept. Something so awful it didn't bear thinking about.

‘You're saying that it was an act of charity?' He could hear the incredulous ring in his voice.

‘Something like that. And a mistake, too. Once in custody there was no releasing him. We tried once, sent him back to his people who wouldn't have him. They're hard-nosed, young, efficient elements who want power, who want to succeed at any cost even if it means some weird, subtle deal with the Regime, and to them old Vilakaze with his talk of armies and locusts is an embarrassment . . . they're happy to use his name, to keep the Free Vilakaze committees going all over the world, the silent vigils, the marches, the petitions calling for his release but what they won't stand for is for us to let him go. We've been warned – put him back on the street and he's a dead man.'

Back in the reception area with its portraits of the presidents, Blanchaille said, ‘I think I begin to understand what you're up against. Once the police were there to arrest people they considered a danger to the State. This was our world. Ugly, perhaps cruel. But dependable. Things have changed. These people, Strydom, Zandrotti, Vilakaze, they don't know where they are anymore. Except when they're in here. What you've got here are specimens from another age. This isn't a prison, it's a museum.'