Kruger's Alp (22 page)

‘The English,' said Nokkles, ‘are bloody awful snobs. And racialists. They also have their kaffirs, you know. It's just that you can't tell them apart. Being English they all look alike. But they have them. Oh yes, they have them.'

He swallowed his brandy with relish, clicking his tongue. But no amount of drinking would irrigate that consuming desert within Ernie Nokkles.

A man in a dark green anorak and a big woman in a pixie cap, its straps pulled down hard over her ears and knotted cruelly beneath her chin, both of them buttoned everywhere, plumply encased, walked up to the little girl and removed her from the counter. ‘We've been calling you on the loudspeaker,' the woman said between clenched teeth. And then bending over the little girl she administered several stinging slaps, saying at the same time and in rhythm to her blows: ‘
Why didn't you listen?
'

‘And child beaters, too,' Nokkles said. ‘What do you think?'

‘We think that you must be Trudy's detective,' Blanchaille said.

‘That,' said Nokkles with a contemptuous downward twitch of the lips and a sideways flick of the head. so sudden Blanchaille thought for the moment he might have spat on the floor, ‘is a newspaper lie. I am not a policeman. In fact my function is quite vague. I fall within the remit of a number of officials – there's Pieter Weerhaan, Dominee Lippetaal, as well as Mr Glip, and then of course there is Ernest Tweegat and Dr Enigiets. Actually I work for all these people, and of course for Miss Yssel. This for me was a fairly recent move. By training I'm a population movement man. I came from the PRP, the Population Resettlement Programme. I only got this Yssel job because someone went sick and I was shoved in. Believe it or not, I began working as a rookie years ago in Old
Ma Dubbeltong's Department, as it then was, of Entry and Egress; that was the original outfit, that was the egg which this new-fangled Department for Population Settlements came from. The PRP is really just old wine in new bottles. Anyway when I was there it was a damn sight tougher than anything today. God! My boss was old Harry Waterman, my hell what a tartar! Screaming Harry we called him. Well, say what you like, credit where credit's due, he was largely instrumental, along with Ma, in formulating policy for what we now call population settlement. Screaming Harry was a blunt official, no fanciness about him. Nothing elegant. A straight guy, a removalist of the old school. Look, he'd say, you've got all these blackies wandering around the country or slipping into the towns or setting up camps wherever they feel like it and squatting here and there, and they've got to be moved. Right? They've got to be put down in some place of their own and made to stay there. Now you never beg or threaten when you're running a removal. It doesn't matter if you're endorsing out – because that's what we called it then, endorsing out – some old bastard who doesn't have a pass, or an entire fucking tribe. First, you notify deadline for removal, then you get your paper-work right, you double check that the trucks are ordered up – and then you move them. As I say, old Harry Waterman was a plain removalist. None of these fancy titles for him, like Resettlement Officer or Relocation Adviser, as they like to call themselves now, these clever dicks from Varsity. No, everything was straight talking for Harry. As the trucks come out of the camp which you're removing, Harry said, you put the bulldozers in and flatten the place. End of story. It's quick, clean, efficient. You know something?' Nokkles gazed earnestly at Blanchaille and Kipsel. ‘I don't know if it's not a lot kinder than the boards of enquiry and appeal and so on which dominate the resettlement field today. After all we all know in the end, after all the talking's done, they're going to have to get out. So why lead them on? The only talent you need to be a removalist, old Harry was fond of saying, is eyes in the back of your head. Front eyes watch the trucks moving out, those in the back watch the bulldozers moving in. A great guy, old Harry. Dead now. But he never understood the new scheme of things. I believe you have to move with the times. So when the call came, I was ready. Fate spoke. “Ernie Nokkles,” it said, “will you or will you not accept secondment to this new Department of Communications run by this hot lady said to be going places under the aegis of Minister Gus Kuiker?” And like a shot I answered back, “Damn sure!” But I am not, and never was, Trudy's detective.'

‘What were you then?' asked Kipsel.

‘Her aide, confidante and loyal member of her Department,' said Nokkles proudly. ‘What I wanted was to help her and the Minister in their great task.'

‘Great task,' Kipsel repeated scathingly. ‘Trudy Yssel tried to carry the propaganda war to the enemy abroad, she wanted to coax, buy, bend overseas opinion about the true nature of the Regime. It was her task to show them as being not simply a gang of wooden headed, rock-brained farmers terrified that their grandfathers might have slept with their cooks – no – they were to become human ethnologists determined to allow all ethnic groups to blossom according to their cultural traditions within the natural parameters recognised by God, biology and history.'

‘I don't know what you mean,' said Nokkles. ‘But if you're saying she wanted to save us, I say
yes.
She and the Minister wanted to lead us out of the past, back into the world, into the future. And that's what I wanted too.'

‘And what do you want now?' Blanchaille asked gently.

Nokkles looked around quickly. He dropped his voice. ‘I wish I was back in old Ma Dubbeltong's department again. But that can't be. Look, you guys are going to Switzerland and I am going to Switzerland. We're countrymen abroad. So why don't we travel together? I mean we don't have to agree politically, just to keep company a bit – not so?'

‘Sure, we'll go along with you, but you might not like where we're going,' said Blanchaille.

‘We're heading for Uncle Paul's place,' said Kipsel.

The change in Nokkles was dramatic. He stood up and drained his glass. He picked up his bag. ‘God help you then. That old dream's not for me.'

They watched him walk away, blindly shouldering his way through the crowds. They're ruined, these people, Blanchaille thought. They don't know who they are or where they're going. Once nothing would stop them doing their duty as they saw it and that was to defend their people and their way of life. And they were hated for it. Good, they accepted that hate. But then the new ideas took over, they got wise, got modern, took on the world. Once upon a time nothing would make them give up the principle that the tribe would survive because God wished it so – now there's nothing they won't do just to hang on a little longer. Uncle Paul's other place is a bad dream, it takes them back to the
velskoen
years, the days of biltong and boere biscuits, of muzzle loaders, Bibles, of creeping
backward slowly like an armour-plated ox, out of range of the future. Some no doubt wished to go back, as Nokkles did, wanted to go back to Old Ma Dubbeltong's department, back to the old dream of a country fit for farmers, where a man was free to ride his acres, shoot his game, father his children, lash his slaves, free from drought, English, Jews, missionaries, rinderpest, blacks, coolies and tax-collectors. But back there waited the hateful legend, the impossible story, the triumphant British, the defeated people, the exiled president, the store of gold, the secret heaven somewhere in Switzerland, the last refuge of a broken tribe.

‘What do you think?' Kipsel asked.

‘I think he's Trudy's detective and he's lost Trudy. All he's left with is what she taught him. He's dead. He's spinning out of control. He's like a space probe gone loco. Nothing can save him unless he finds another mother-ship to lock onto, or another planet to land on. He's spinning into space. And space is cold and big and blacker than Africa.'

On the plane service was polite but cool and they didn't get a drink until they asked the stewardess. ‘It's a short flight, we prefer passengers to ask,' she told them. ‘Except in first class.'

At one point the curtains closing off the first class cabin opened to reveal Nokkles sprawled across two seats. He was drinking champagne and his hand rested on the neck of the bottle in a protective yet rather showy manner. In the way that a man might rest his hand on the neck of an expensive girl whom he wishes to show off to the world. It was a gesture of desperate pride. It turned its back on Boers and shooting kaffirs and beer. It looked outward. It was confident, modern, worldly. Much had been invested in it.

CHAPTER 17

Of their arrival at Geneva Airport there is to be noted only that Ernest Nokkles was swept into the arms of that growing number of castaway agents abroad, all now increasingly anxious about the disappearances of their various chiefs and determined to reattach themselves to centres of influence or persons of importance whenever they appeared.

My dream showed me Nokkles, awash in good champagne, immediately claimed as he left the Customs area by three men who introduced themselves as Chris Dieweld, Emil Moolah and Koos Spahr. Two members of this burly trio claimed to have been recently attached to the office of the President, had travelled with him as far as London in search of medical treatment and there he had given them the slip. And I saw how these big men shivered and trembled at their loss.

Chris Dieweld, Emil Moolah and Koos Spahr surrounded Trudy's detective demanding to know what news he had brought. Dieweld was big and blond with a great cows-lick combed back from his forehead like a frozen wave, Moolah thin and springy with a mouth full of gold teeth and Spahr, bespectacled, with a round expressionless face and astonishingly bright blue eyes, gave no clue to his expertise with the parcel bomb. Nokkles knew Spahr as one of the men on Kuiker's security staff. The others he thought he knew vaguely from photographs of the President in foreign parts. Dieweld, he vaguely remembered, had disgraced himself by fainting when a demented maize farmer had attempted to shoot the President at the official opening of the Monument to Heroes of the Mauritian Invasion.

Nokkles' first question was about Bubé. The President was in Geneva, he had it on the best authority. Trace the President and surely the others could not be far away?

The security men looked glum. They too had heard of the President's visit to London. They had heard he was on his way to Geneva. They had met every plane. But the old fox must have disguised himself because he eluded them.

‘Remember,' said Moolah, ‘the President visited most of the European capitals during his celebrated tour and was never once
recognised. What chance did we stand?'

As for Blanchaille and Kipsel, they stood on the moving pavement carrying them towards passport control and Customs, gazing with fascination at the advertisements for watches sculpted from coins, or carved from ingots, the offer of hotels so efficient they operated without manpower and the multitude of advertisements in cunningly illuminated panels alongside the moving pavement showing deep blue lakes and icing sugar alps. Most of all they stared at the multitudinous shapes and forms of gold to be purchased, ingots, coins, pendants, lozenges; some cute and almost edible came in little cubes, fat and yellow like processed cheese. How extraordinary that so much treasure should be produced from the deep, black, stony heart of their country.

This reverie was broken by a chauffeur in smart green livery who carried a sign reading ‘Reverend Blanchaille' and announced that he had instructions to transport them to ‘the big house on the hill', where a friend awaited them.

Who were they to argue? Alone and unloved in a strange land? However close to the end of their journey they might be (for after all ‘the big house of the hill' was a tantalising description) offers of friendship from whatever quarter were difficult to resist.

It is a sign of the desperate state to which the once-powerful security men had been reduced that they, seeing Blanchaille and Kipsel escorted to a great limousine, should have decided to follow them, despite Nokkles' warning that these men were deluded pilgrims come to Switzerland to seek Kruger's dream kingdom and that they were in real life a disgraced traitor and a renegade priest. As Chris Dieweld put it: ‘We're lost without someone to follow.'

The chauffeur pointed to the grey Mercedes keeping discreetly behind them. ‘We'll lose them,' he promised.

The road ran for miles along the lakeside. The lower slopes of the mountain were thickly crammed with vines, every inch of land terraced to its very edges, the dense greenness tumbling down to the roadside, vine leaves stirring in the passing breeze their car made. Then on the other side of the road the vines continuing their downward plunge to the very water's edge. Up ahead were larger mountains folding one into another and covered in a thick dark fur of vegetation. It amazed him, the roughness of this vegetation, its harsh contours. No doubt it was different in the winter when the snows softened and smoothed away the detail, but now, under the sun hot and high, under a light-blue sky, there was a rough, wiry, raw determination about the way these shrubs and trees clung to the
mountain side, a lack of softness, an absence of prettiness that reminded him very strongly of Africa. After running some way along the lakeside they began climbing steeply. The driver pointed to the town of Montreux below and to a small tongue of land jutting out into the lake, that was the prison castle, Château Chillon, very famous. They climbed through the thick fuzz of bush and forest, the harsh unlovely vegetation. Here and there boulders broke through the dark green and nearer the summits were ridges of grey stone, mountain skulls, patched and balding. And even higher still was the snow, even in this June heat, last year's snow, icy grey.

And here was a grand house, a castle within its own walls, but no rearing bulk of dull stones, more of a
Schloss,
a château, whitewashed, trim and solid. Then they were driving through the great wrought-iron gates with their chevrons and swans intricately worked, along a gravel drive up to great oaken doors.

Their host in his big solid house at the end of a long drive, behind high walls and wrought-iron gates, awaited them on the steps. With his hand outstretched, wearing the dark business suit, the well-shaped smile so familiar from a thousand press photographs and television, with his head cocked to one side, sparse grey hair neatly combed, the round intelligent face with bright eyes that gave him the look of an intelligent gun dog, the characteristic quick shrewd glance from behind thick lashes, the quiet, formidable air of authority. It was very difficult for them to suppress their astonishment.

‘What? Himmelfarber, you!' Blanchaille said.

Kipsel said, ‘It really is another bloody exodus. It's a diaspora. If Himmelfarber the mine-owner has left, then it's all finished. Everyone will leave. You won't be able to move anywhere overseas for fleeing South Africans.'

‘But I haven't left,' said the mine-owner. ‘This is merely my summer place. I spend the African winter here.'

Blanchaille turned on his heel. ‘Have a happy holiday,' he said.

‘I have a proposition,' said Himmelfarber.

‘We're not open to any proposals,' Blanchaille said very firmly.

‘We may as well hear what he has to say,' said Kipsel, ‘now that we're here.'

‘Let's talk inside,' Himmelfarber led them through the house into an enormous lounge furnished in white leather with thick pink carpets on the floor, a large generous room looking through french windows onto the lawn and large circular lily pond. Himmelfarber stood at the bar at the far end and poured them drinks. A little fruit
punch, he said, of his own making, light and refreshing.

On the walls of this room were blow-ups of black and white photographs of miners working below ground, drilling the rock face, or loading the ore, coming off shift. Happy pictures of a classroom full of new recruits learning Fanagalo. Other photographs, far more disturbing, showed men terribly mutilated, crushed and bleeding; they also saw corpses lying on sheets in what must have been a morgue, rows of them, they stared at the ceiling wide-eyed and with quite terrible, unfrightened detachment. Why should Himmelfarber keep these reminders about him?

Blanchaille considered the entrepreneur. Curtis Christian Himmelfarber was the brilliant son of a brilliant family. The family had been established by the remarkable Julius Himmelfarber, a penniless Latvian emigrant to the South African goldfields who had founded a great mining empire. Old Julius had been an intimate of Cecil Rhodes and Milner, a drinking companion of Barney Barnato, a sworn enemy of Kruger who had called him
‘Daardie Joodse smous'
. . . that Jewish pedlar . . . Julius Himmelfarber had bought Blydag, his first mine and one of the premier producers of all time, for a little more than was now paid for one single ounce of its gold, and the foundation of a great financial empire had been laid.

Frank Harris, the noted Irish philanderer on a visit to South Africa shortly before the Boer War began, had been favourably impressed.

Harris had met Julius Himmelfarber and liked him well enough to leave a portrait of him: ‘. . . cultured, urbane, very pointed in conversation, a gentle Croesus, a philosopher miner, a flower of the Semitic type, markedly superior to your Anglo-Saxon sportsmen.' But then Harris, of course, had held a long-standing prejudice against the Anglo-Saxon sportsman, for, as he told Cecil Rhodes in a bizarre meeting which took place on top of Table Mountain while Rhodes presumably gazed from this fairest Cape in all the world towards distant Cairo, it was perfectly understandable that God in his youth should have chosen the Jews for his special people, for they were after all an attractive, lovable race. But that later he should have changed his mind in favour of the English, as Rhodes contended, showed that he must be in his dotage.

Curtis Christian Himmelfarber, who was now handing out drinks in the pink and white room to Blanchaille and Kipsel, would not have been described by Harris as the flower of the Semitic type. In any event, the Himmelfarbers had long since severed the connection.
Curtis Christian was an Anglican and this faith, along with his mines, had been part of his inheritance. The change in faith had taken place when his fierce grandfather, Aaron, always a mercurial man, the ne'er-do-well of the family, had persuaded investors that a local mine under his control was capable of producing richer amounts than anyone had suspected, and displayed samples to prove it. Alas, a surveyor's report revealed that the mine was likely to produce far less than promised and Aaron found himself in jail, awaiting trial. It was there that he underwent a spectacular conversion at the hands of a travelling Baptist minister. Naturally the entire family followed suit. They did not long stay with the Baptists but moved instead, down the years, by degrees, with a stately assurance that reminded one of a luxury liner heading for its home port, from the choppy seas of Baptist rhetoric into the calmer, shallower waters of the Church of England and in these pacific waters had floated ever since.

The Himmelfarbers were the closest thing to a Royal family the country had. Each member of this family received adulatory notice in the media. Everyone in the country was familiar with the little vagaries of the Himmelfarbers. There was Waverley, C.C.'s wife, tall, tanned and fit. She appeared often at fund-raising dinners, drove jeeps for famine relief, organised milk for the townships and free school books for the kids. There was Elspeth, the eldest daughter and the ‘serious one', a lawyer. There was Cookie, the madcap gadabout youngest, with a taste for high living and drugs, a kind of painter, and reportedly a great strain on her parents. And then of course Timmo, the son and heir, dashing, eligible, often pictured behind the wheel of a racing car, or in his yacht off Cape Point. Photographers had accompanied him on his first day of military service. That service was later to be marred by a scandal when it was rumoured that Timmo, who had trained with a crack paratroop squadron ‘The Leopard's Claw', had been excused jumps over hostile territory. The chiefs of staff took the unusual step of refuting the rumour and reported that young Himmelfarber always jumped with his comrades and, what was more, he had one of the highest ‘score' rates (the name given to the jump/kill ratios), in the entire regiment.

‘I see you're examining my photographs,' said Himmelfarber. ‘These pictures, you know what they are? They're photographs of my workers and show the full extent of their employment. The dangers of mining are not disguised. Accidents at the rock face,
drilling accidents, men hurt in rockfalls, or ramming, that is to say when loading the trucks with gold-bearing rock. I wonder if you have any idea what a mine looks like underground? Imagine a buried Christmas tree, the trunk is the mine shaft plunging down hundreds of meters. Off the shaft the stopes radiate like branches. At the far tips of these branches is the thread of gold. Think of it rather like tinsel that you drape over the branches of your Christmas tree. Gold mining is deep, dark, hot, dangerous work. You must break a great deal of rock to claim a little of the glitter, a couple of tons of ore give you little more than twenty grammes of gold. I keep these pictures on my wall to remind me where I come from, how I live and what it costs.' Himmelfarber brought their drinks across. ‘This is a good light punch. I hope you'll enjoy it. Fruit juice spiked with rum and lemon, mixed with a little pomegranate, satsuma segments, some passion fruit and thin shavings of watermelon. Shall we drink to the health of our President? I believe he needs our good wishes,' Himmelfarber smiled, and raised his glass. ‘But that's another story. I haven't got you here to talk about poor Bubé.'

‘Why are we here?' Blanchaille demanded.

Himmelfarber looked surprised. ‘To listen to a few stories of my own. Such as the story of Popov.'

‘Do you really mean that?' Kipsel demanded incredulously. ‘Do you know the true story of Popov?'

This is where Blanchaille waded in. ‘Now just a moment,' he said. ‘Let's get this straight before you start swallowing everything he tells you. Himmelfarber here and his firm, Consolidated Holdings, have propped up successive governments for as long as anyone can remember. Himmelfarber buys defence bonds, sits on armaments boards, advises the Regime on its business deals, he even plays golf with Bubé.'

‘That's one way of looking at it. I also fund the Democratic People's Party, I'm a public supporter of racial freedom and Consolidated Holdings is one of the most enlightened employers in the country. It has more black personnel managers than any other, it was the first to employ Indian salesmen, our coloured cost accountants are internationally known and bright young Liberals join us in the sure knowledge that their ideas will be welcomed and acted upon.'