Kruger's Alp (21 page)

All this I saw through Blanchaille's eyes. He watched the men come out of the liquor store, smelt the spirits on them and imagined in his naïvety that they had been drinking and this accounted for their strained, pale faces, their laboured breathing, the slightly giddy looks, and the stains on Oscar's blue suit. He watched as the money was paid ‘for the hire of the hall', as Momzie called it. A handful of small gold coins on the bar counter.

‘Who else but these guys pays in Krugerrands?' he asked proudly, scooping up the hoard. ‘But then again, who better? Ain't they got the market cornered?'

It was only when Dudley from Malta complained about the heat that they realised something had happened.

Minto went over and tried the handle.

The explosion blew off the door of the liquor store and carried away Minto, still attached to the handle. Momzie and Dudley from Malta screamed as they tried to beat back the flames with their jackets. The bottles of booze shattering like brilliant bombs. The body on the floor glowed like a lamp, and exploded, lighting up its own disfigurements, the smashed face, the knife wounds. A hot gust of alcohol, sweat and, yes, urine, hit them. And Blanchaille, finding himself unattended, took the dead man's earlier advice and ran.

CHAPTER 15

And so it was that I saw Blanchaille retrace his steps and I saw how despite his terrifying experience, once back in Magdalena's flat he cooked eggs. In the midst of tragedy, of bereavement, scorched by the fiery vision of Van Vuuren's pricked and broken body, he had not expected to feel suddenly, ravenously, hungry. But there it was. The fleshly appetites were unrelenting, the Margaret Brethren had warned their boys, which if not constantly beaten into submission would command the frail human creature and bend him to their will.

Now we know that the stories of how Van Vuuren met his end were eventually to differ widely. The Regime acted quickly to claim him for their own. He became the faithful detective murdered by agents for the Azanian Liberation Front. The Front further complicated matters by admitting responsibility for the ‘execution', declaring that the police-spy's fate was a warning to any other agents of the Regime who attempted to subvert the forces of liberation. The Regime in turn announced that brilliant undercover work by Captain Van Vuuren had revealed a deep split within the Azanian terror group resulting in the demotion of its president, Kaiser Zulu. The Front in a statement called this a typical lie of fascist adventurers and claimed that President Zulu was enjoying a well-deserved retirement in a home for high state officials ‘in the country of a friendly ally', somewhere on the Caspian Sea. The Regime then posthumuously awarded to Van Vuuren its premier decoration, the Cross of the Golden Eland with Star, an honour previously accorded only to visiting Heads of State, that is to say, to General Stroessner of Paraguay, the only Head of State to pass that way in living memory. The national poet composed an ode in honour of the dead policeman. This was the former radical poet, Pik Groenewald, who after years of self-imposed exile in Mexico City plotting the destruction of the Regime had a vision one night of a lion attacked by army ants and returned home immediately and joined the tank-corps where besides valiant service in the operational areas he composed a series of laments upon his previous treachery which he dedicated, with apologies, to President Adolph Bubé. Groenewald's
‘Ode to an Assassinated Security Branch Officer' played cleverly on the flammable connotations of Van Vuuren's name, in the celebrated line
Flame to the fire they fed him/Blade to the vein they bled him
. . . And it was quoted in Parliament to spontaneous applause.

Blanchaille of course, as I saw, knew the true story, knew that by some peculiar chain of logic both the Regime and the Front derived profit from the death of Van Vuuren. That this knowledge did not drive him to anger or despair but left him ravenous is testimony to the toughness of human nature or to the growing self-awareness of the fat ex-priest from the camps that nothing was what it seemed.

What a place this England was! Blanchaille stared at the English eggs, they were not like African eggs, they were pallid, waterish little things by comparison with the garish orange, cholesterol-packed bombs from the hot South. But he cooked three or four, even so, and a mound of bacon and ate without stopping, shovelling the food into his mouth and plugging it there with chunks of thin white bread, running a very fine line between sustenance and suffocation. In the cupboard beneath the sink he found half a bottle of Chianti and finished it off directly. It was as if there were spaces inside him he must fill, not simply hungry spaces but vulnerable sections which he must protect.

Afterwards he lay in the great white tub, soaking there beneath the benign gaze of the Duke of Wellington upon the wall, beneath Magdalena's stockings, hanging above him from a cunning arrangement of lines, and looking, through the steam, like skinny vultures perched upon telephone wires. Magdalena's depilatories, her soaps, her shampoos, some sort of nobbled glove affair, presumably meant for rubbing dry skin from the body, her back brush and sponge and bubble bath, all waited with the air of things that know their owner will not be returning. He lay in the bath and let the grime of the past hours float from him and begin to form a brown ring around the bath. Strangely comforting, this evidence of life, human dirt.

As he sat on the side of the bath drying his hair the doorbell rang.

Beside the door hung a photograph. It showed Magdalena in Moscow. She wore a white fur hat and a white fur coat. Beside her were the onion towers of the Kremlin. She was smiling radiantly. The photograph was a trophy. It showed how far and how successfully Magdalena had gone in the service of her cause. The
picture was unassailable proof of her credentials as a radical, as a leading member of the Front, as one of the prime enemies of the Regime in exile. It insisted upon this achievement. And yet there were certain matters unexplained, certain questions he wanted to ask Magdalena which could not be answered by that photograph. ‘I have been to Moscow', the photograph trumpeted. ‘Few of you have been further than Durban!' True. But not enough.

It took him a few moments to recognise the man at the door. The hair was still as unruly as ever, growing now even more thickly above the ears. The eyebrows were more bushy than he remembered but the lips were the same. Oh yes, they were the same rather bulbous lips, wet from continuous nervous licking, the nose broad, the eyes soft waterish brown, and there it was, the characteristic pout with the lips pushed outwards into a little ‘o', surrounded by soft white down. A fish pout. Kipsel!

‘Hello Blanchie, long time no see.'

That was that. No apology, no cringing and fumbling explanation, no sign of regret or mortification. Merely – ‘Hello Blanchie, long time no see.' Blanchaille stood back from the door and let Kipsel enter. And there he was in the room, that same Kipsel who had grievously betrayed everyone he knew, had fled the country in utter despair, the man who had had the gall to go on existing after the treachery, which even those who benefited from it had condemned. Why had he not done the only decent thing and slashed his wrists or hanged himself from a stout beam? Instead Kipsel had gone out and got a job, in a northern university, and taught sociology. Of all things,
sociology,
that quasi-religious subject with its faintly moralistic ring. Perhaps more than anything the choice of the subject he taught had scandalised friend and enemy alike.

‘Why have you come?'

‘Because there was a question I wanted to ask Magdalena. I've turned it over in my mind for so many years now but I can't come up with an answer. There is something I don't understand. I'm not sure she's got the answer. Or if she'd tell me if she knew. Or if I want to hear it. But I know I want to ask the question.'

‘You can ask me if you like.'

‘That's kind. But in the first place I didn't expect to see you. And secondly, you won't do.'

‘I'm all you've got. Magdalena isn't here. I don't know where she is. She met me at the airport yesterday morning. She brought me here and then she disappeared.'

‘What are you doing here?'

‘Just passing through. My ticket gave me an unrequested stopover in London and I fly out tonight. Is that your question?'

Kipsel shook his head. His eyes were large and liquid. ‘No, that was plain curiosity. The real question goes back much further. To the days I spent in jail, and before that to my interrogation in Balthazar Buildings, after the business of the pylons. The official story is that I gave the police information about everybody connected with the explosions. I told them everything. In exchange I got a deal, I got immunity from prosecution. Only I didn't! Do you hear, Blanchie? And for one bloody good reason. I didn't have to tell them. They knew! They knew already! About me, Mickey, Magdalena, Dladla – everyone! For God's sake, they even knew what brand of petrol we used, they had copies of the maps, recordings of our phone conversations . . . You name it, they had them. So I changed tack. I accepted everything – except where it concerned Magdalena. I confirmed everything they had was right –and dammit, it was! – except for the girl. She had known nothing of our plan, of the bombs, of the Azanian Liberation Front. She had been duped. She came along for the ride. She was only there because she loved me. That's what I told them. I tried to save Magdalena. I am
not
Kipsel the traitor. But if not me, then who?'

Blanchaille looked at the pale, trembling creature before him. The round, downy cheeks quivered. Kipsel's extraordinarily thick eyelashes rose and fell rapidly and his round mouth shone as his tongue licked the blubber lips. His hands flapped. He looked more like a fish than ever. A fish drowning in air.

‘I understand your question. If you didn't tell the police, who did?'

Then the two friends flung their arms around each others' necks and embraced. Lost in the world, how they rejoiced in each other's company. Blanchaille told Kipsel of his arrival in London, of his meeting with Magdalena, of the visit to the Embassy, of the encounter with Father Lynch in a Soho street, of his warning and of Van Vuuren's brave death in a Soho cellar. At this news Kipsel broke down and wept unashamedly. I heard, too, how Blanchaille told his friend of the two watchers outside the fishmonger's and their strange name: Apple Two.

‘I also have a question,' said Blanchaille. ‘Who is Apple One?'

And Kipsel replied. ‘Perhaps when we answer mine, we will answer yours.'

CHAPTER 16

Blanchaille knew the man at the airport bar as a fellow countryman from his accent. But he could also identify him from a picture he had just seen which showed him strolling along a Paris street. It had been printed in the English newspaper he bought on arriving at the airport. He was relieved to see that he drank brandy.

Is not the choice of strong drink one of the easiest, not to say one of the most pleasant ways of rising painlessly on the social scale, of impressing friends and confounding enemies? Or for that matter, of refuting the notion, lamentably widespread even in this day and age, that South Africans are only interested in beer and shooting kaffirs, and in either order. There is even a calumny, sadly current still, that a famous South African lager I must not name (suffice it to say that the beer in question is a product of a brewery owned by the Himmelfarber empire) is supposed to have run an advertising campaign with the slogan S
HOOTING KAFFIRS IS THIRSTY WORK
. Now the truth is not (as some Government apologists maintain) that the campaign in question was run many years ago and is now thoroughly discredited. Nor that Curtis Christian Himmelfarber himself led the campaign to deface the posters, altering the wording to something less likely to incite racial hostility and with his own hand struck down the forgotten manager who first coined the infamous slogan, although it is a satisfying tale. Misunderstandings abound. There is even argument about the precise wording of the slogan. There are some who maintain that what it really said was: I
S SHOOTING THIRSTY KAFFIRS
'
WORK
? Whilst others say it read: T
HIRSTY KAFFIRS IS SHOOTING WORK
. Whereas in fact the truth is that the original slogan read simply: S
HOOTING IS THIRSTY WORK
, but unseen enemy hands across the land at a pre-arranged signal added the offending words, either with the intention of discrediting our country in the eyes of the world, or of embarrassing C.C. Himmelfarber who with his giant enterprise, Consolidated Holdings, had always been a stalwart champion of the progressive forces for political change in the country, or both. None the less the malicious legend lingers on and so when you come across a South African drinking not beer but brandy in a bar at Heathrow airport, as Blanchaille and Kipsel did
as they waited to be called for their flight to Geneva, even if one does not particularly wish to meet another fellow South African at the time, a feeling of patriotic pride and relief suffuses the frame.

The so-called ‘kaffir beer' scandal was a typical example of the concerted campaign waged by overseas dissidents, hostile forces and illegal organisations such as the Azanian Liberation Front, against the honest efforts of the Regime to offer justice to all its population groups. Such black propaganda was in turn just another adjunct of the universal campaign to destroy the white man in Southern Africa, which came to be known as the Total Onslaught.

It was to counter this campaign that the new minister of Ethnic Autonomy and Parallel Equilibriums, Augustus Kuiker, vowed to devote himself when he was appointed Deputy Leader of the Party by the President, Adolph Bubé. It had been Kuiker who replaced Hans Job when that decent man was driven from office by a scurrilous whispering campaign soon after he had succeeded the flamboyant but ailing merino millionaire, J.J. Vokker, when sudden ill health forced him to step down. This change had been the subject of a very cruel joke. ‘Who will replace a Vokker?' went the question. ‘Only a Hansjob!' came the reply and the whole country doubled up with ribald laughter. Even those who should have known better held their sides. It was then that the formidable Kuiker was appointed and the laughing had to stop. ‘Our Gus', people called him, and shivered. The face of granite, the lips of a cement-mixer. It was Kuiker who had appointed Trudy Yssel to the newly formed Department of Communications with the brief to put our country's case abroad with all the punch she could muster. It was regarded as a brave move.

It was a very curious combination; Kuiker the granite man at home, but curiously, even distinctively, colourful abroad, with his taste for bright Hawaiian shirts aglow with orange sunsets and rampant palms, and the new Secretary to the Department of Communications, Trudy Yssel, young, pretty, tough as hell, shrewd and decidedly modern. There was always something stubbornly old-fashioned about Gus Kuiker. He was large, lumpish even. Trudy was svelte and auburn. He looked like a prize fighter, with a big bone-plated forehead, cauliflower ears, a doughy nose, fleshy and rather sensuous lips. But they were a formidable team, it was widely agreed, and of their determination to change the face of internal and foreign propaganda there could be no doubt. As far as Gus Kuiker was concerned, Trudy Yssel could simply do no wrong. What's more she was funded to the hilt. She seemed unstoppable.

As Blanchaille and Kipsel arrived at Heathrow Airport the newspapers they bought told a very strange story. D
EPCOM MYSTERY DEEPENS
. W
HERE IS TRUDY
?

Kipsel studied the paper. The Kuiker/Yssel affair was now making international news. The English papers printed an account of an interview given by a spokesman in Kuiker's Department.

A few days later, after Trudy Yssel had been sighted in Philadelphia, another news conference was given.

Well, of course, the invitation was impossible to resist and a search was immediately launched and indeed another Philadelphia was found, closer to hand, in the Cape province, a small town consisting of no more than the usual bank and church and a few hundred puzzled inhabitants who lined and cheered when the reporters from the nation's press arrived in their Japanese estate cars and their big Mercedes to interview everyone from the mayor to the town's oldest inhabitant, Granny Ryneveldt, aged 103, who declared that she hadn't seen such excitement since Dominee Vasbythoven ran off with his gardener and joined the gay community in the Maluti mountains. However, there was no trace of
Trudy. Everybody had heard of her, of course. But nobody had seen her.

It didn't matter. The Regime made capital out of the reporters' double discomfiture. Journalists, they said, should get to know their own country better and not always look overseas for glamorous stories. Various sanctions were hinted at if the newspapers did not take up this suggestion. Then ministers of the Dutch Reformed Church expressed their outrage that the affair of the renegade minister, Vasbythoven, had been dragged up once more. For their part, several liberal English clerics preached sermons against the hounding of the unfortunate minister, reminding their congregations that homosexual practice between consenting adults was widely regarded as acceptable in the outside world and they lauded Dominee Vasbythoven who had shown his bravery not only by taking as a lover one of his own sex but someone of another race which showed him to be not only sexually liberated but racially balanced and they pointed out that this was no small feat for a man whose great-great uncle had been Judge-President of the Orange Free State, when it had still been a Boer Republic. Here again the Regime waded in with warnings to the opposition press against attempts to slander the memory of the Boer Republics when, led by Uncle Paul Kruger, the Boer Nation with God's help had fought for its freedom against the wicked imperialist colonialist oppression of the British. Anti-Government papers were warned for the last time to put their house in order.

The English papers overseas, beyond the reach of the Regime, agreed that Minister Kuiker and his protégée Trudy Yssel had disappeared. They also agreed that large sums of Government money appeared to have gone missing with them. They printed a photograph which showed the missing pair in a Paris street. She carried several shopping bags and smiled vivaciously. He covered his face with one hand, but was instantly recognisable. Behind them walked two men in dark suits. One of these men now sat drinking at the bar.

The only other drinkers were a small group of oriental businessmen who drank from globular tankards foaming pink cocktails garnished with sprigs of mint and cherries, leaning forward above the liquid and tasting it with tongues and fingertips, giving excited little barks of encouragement. A small girl carrying an enormous soft green cat with wild eyes and a forest of woolly whiskers wandered around the footrail with tear-stained face obviously searching for her parents. All around was the teeming flux of
anonymous travellers departing for a hundred destinations.

The drinker who aroused this rhapsody of patriotic memories in Blanchaille was painfully thin, his sports jacket hung on him, a loud tweed of blues and greens with an ugly stiffening of the bristles which had the effect of making the colours of the cloth shimmer, a sickly rainbow effect. His complexion too was strange, a light grey translucency tinged with pink. He'd been drinking for some time, Blanchaille judged, and despite the flush that warmed the bony face, it was the air of desiccation that struck him, as if a kind of internal emaciation had taken place, an interior drought, a profound dryness which no amount of watering could end. He had crisp, slightly oiled sandy hair through which the scalp gleamed bleakly. Altogether he had the look of St John of Capistrano, formidable Inquisitor-General of Vienna, a portrait of whom had hung in Blanchaille's class-room many years before.

His message to Kipsel was succinct: ‘Cop.'

Kipsel did not thank him. ‘I warn you Blanchie, when shown a South African security man competing urges threaten me.'

‘Which?'

‘Do I hit out, or throw up?'

At the bar the oriental businessmen had replenished their tankards and were lapping away happily at the pink stuff. The little girl had been given a bowl of crisps by the barman and sat eating steadily, gazing out into the seething concourse with tearful eyes. Blanchaille introduced his friend and himself to the solitary drinker.

‘Jesus!' said the drinker, ‘Not Kipsel the traitor?'

‘No,' Kipsel said firmly. ‘Not Kipsel the traitor.'

‘Ernest Nokkles,' said the drinker, ‘passing on to Geneva.'

‘So are we.'

‘Let me get you a drink,' said Blanchaille.

‘Brandy,' said Nokkles. ‘A large one if you will. The bloody English tot is about as much as a nun pees with her knees crossed. And Coke with it. I always have it with Coke. The bastards here drink it neat, y'know.'

‘How are things at home?' Kipsel asked.

‘Do you mean militarily or economically?'

‘I didn't know there was a difference.'

‘They're linked, but they're different. Militarily we're all right. Hell, there's nobody who's going to touch us. Frankly I think we're in more danger from the drought. But if you consider the Total Onslaught, then there's no doubt about its having an effect. Slow but cumulative. We might crack one day. But despite that, the Big
Seven reckon we're doing O.K., financially.'

The Big Seven were those groups which between them controlled almost every area of life and dominated the Stock Exchange. The gold mining companies of course and various major industries – armaments, insurance, drink and tobacco together with the Government control boards that regulated everything from transport to citrus. Seven was a mystical number. The Big Seven represented the aggregate of national interests.

The profile which emerged of your average South African was a dedicated smoker who took to booze in a big way, kept himself armed to the teeth but was sensible enough to insure against the risk that either cigarettes or drink or terrorists might blow him away, and paid for this lifestyle with gold bullion. For the rest he did as the Regime told him, travelled as the Government directed him and died when and where the State demanded it. This handful of huge conglomerates owned everything and they also owned slices of each other and were all held, in turn, in the capacious lap of the Regime which allowed and even encouraged these cliques, cartels, monopolies to operate and indeed took a very close interest in them to the extent of inviting their directors to sit on various Government boards, boards of arms companies and the rural development agencies. Private business responded by asking Government ministers to take up seats on the boards of the gold mining companies, army officers were invited to join insurance companies, tobacco groups and breweries. Complicated interlocking deals were set up between the State and the great conglomerates, a famous instance of which was the Life Saving Bond which allowed families of soldiers to purchase a special insurance policy on the life of their loved one for a small monthly premium. ‘In the event of deprivation', as the preamble to the policy put it, the next of kin received a ‘Life Saving Bond' certificate which showed the value of all their contributions to date. The premiums which had accrued were then ‘sent forward', which meant the sum was invested in ‘armaments and/or other industries vital to the war effort', thereby giving all soldiers a second chance to serve by helping to ensure that the country's weaponry was the best possible. The casualties joined what the field padres called the army invisible, or simply the Big Battalion, known familiarly as the BB. ‘Oh, he's serving with the BB' became a common way of skirting around a tragedy and won for those who spoke the words a new respect. The Regime encouraged positive thinking and inspectors ensured that the
attractive blue and white Bond Certificates were prominently displayed in the home. Every month a draw took place and the family with the lucky bond number won for themselves a tour of the forward operational areas, plus a visit to the site of some celebrated victory (combat conditions permitting) and invariably returned strengthened and resolute. The newspapers and television followed these visits with great interest and press stories appeared and television reports showing pictures of Dick and Eugenia and their children, Marta and Kobus, proudly wearing combat helmets they'd been given, trundling through the veld in an armoured troop carrier. ‘My Day in the Operational Areas' was an increasingly popular title in school examination papers.