Kruger's Alp (32 page)

CHAPTER 24

Blanchaille and Kipsel heard, rather than saw, Looksmart, for it was quite dark by the time they had regained their position at the crossroads, deeply regretting the distance travelled and the time lost in the vain detour into which Gabriel had tricked them.

They heard the scrape and scrabble of his dragging walk while he was still some distance behind them and they heard him muttering to himself. They heard the name ‘Isobel'. They heard how he addressed himself in a language composed of grunts and clicks, in a dialogue between the foreigner and the lunatic.

‘Here comes Looksmart,' whispered Kipsel. ‘Poor bastard. If he saw Bubé it will have finished him. Let's wait.'

‘Perhaps he really does imagine himself to be another Columbus. Listen how he argues with himself. Do you think he could be talking about Isabel of Spain? Didn't she send Columbus off to discover the New World?'

‘Isabella,' said Kipsel. ‘It was Queen Isabella and Ferdinand who sent Columbus off.'

Looksmart approached. ‘Isobel,' he said firmly, ‘who sent me to find America.' Here he took out a tiny, weak torch and examined their faces. What a strange couple, the big round one with a face like kneaded dough and the other, thin, big-lipped, with hands that sliced the air like fins. Though it was many years ago they still retained the familiar shapes of the boys he remembered toiling in Father Lynch's parish garden. In his curious click language he muttered their names.

‘He really knows us now,' said Blanchaille.

Of course he knew them now. They were the altar servers whose heads Lynch had filled with stories of vanished millions, of Uncle Paul's promised land across the sea, of gold and secret colonies and lost souls, of the illusions of politics and the sole reality of power. Above all he remembered the pleasure he felt at seeing how hard those white boys were made to work in a garden which would never be got right, by an Irish priest leaning on an elbow on a tartan rug on a hot day drinking something from a thermos flask. But these memories returned in bits and pieces, now bright, now fading, like light glimpsed through a smashed windscreen. The work done by
the policeman Breek on Looksmart's head had been thorough, the damage to the brain irreversible, but these glimpses remained of the old days. ‘Blanchie, and Kipsel . . .'

‘Odd that he should know us by night and not by day,' Blanchaille reflected.

The weak, yellow flickering torch-light searched their faces, assembling sections for process and developing in the dark room of Looksmart's brain.

‘Did you meet with the President?' Kipsel asked.

The torch went out. ‘Looksmart saw him, oah yes. What a traveller! He must be on another diplomatic tour. He had been given a special police escort. I approached the car with my treaty and asked for ratification that this land belongs to me and my descendants, in perpetuity.' Looksmart had trouble getting the word out. ‘The President looked at me. He pushed my pen away. “No need for me to sign. You have it anyway. You and your descendants, forever”. Then he went away, the President and the police. Perhaps they planned to show him to the people of all the towns he passed through.'

‘Perhaps,' said Kipsel drily.

Blanchaille felt his pity mounting. This shambling wreck in the darkness with his weak little torch and his insane ideas. This shadow of Looksmart. The real Looksmart had been a holy terror. This was a mumbling ghost. ‘Who is this Isobel you're talking about? Tell us, please.'

On went the little torch again, probing their faces as if verifying the authenticity of this request. ‘It's a good story,' said Looksmart. ‘Oah yes.' And switching off his torch he began.

If Looksmart had been ignorant of his famous travelling companion, Lenski, on his flight to America, he had not wanted for company. In the seat beside him sat Isobel. And before we are too quick to condemn Looksmart for his failure to recognise the treachery of which he was a victim we would do well to remember the fate of other black exiles who went to America, reached New York, and later jumped to their deaths from sky-scrapers, or bridges; and the white exiles had come to no happier conclusions. Their patron saint is probably General Cronje, who earned a few dollars at the World Fair in St Louis in 1904 by re-enacting for gawping tourists his disastrous defeat and surrender at the Battle of Paardeberg. That Looksmart arrived in Philadelphia and discovered the roots of the American revolution was an advance due
entirely to Isobel. That he drew strange conclusions from what he learnt must be laid at the door of the Salvationist delusions of all South Africans.

Pretty Isobel, in her caftan, cowboy boots and soft generous ways had come to Southern Africa as a mere tourist intending to visit the famous game reserves including, of course, the Kruger National Park. Instead she had fallen into conversation with the man who carried her cases to her hotel bedroom soon after her arrival in the country and had been converted. This radical spirit had taken her on a tour of the townships, to the resettlement camps, had taken her to meet those who had been detained, mothers whose children had died in front of them, people under house arrest and discarded people of all sorts. The high point of her visit had been taking part in the great student march on the Central Police Station in the capital to protest against the detention without trial of student leaders. It was this that suddenly radicalised Isobel, plump, pretty and so pleasant, so cordial in her peppermint caftan and cowboy boots, who found herself sitting beside Looksmart on the flight to America. He had never met anyone so thrilled to hear he had been in prison. Her face puckered, she cried for some moments before pulling herself together and then defiantly ordered champagne. She felt utterly privileged, she told him. He liked her, too. She did not make his eyes water. Over the champagne he told her he was also fleeing the country. After that they never looked back.

Isobel carried his luggage and refused to comment on his behalf when the reporters encountered him in Kennedy Airport after their interviews with Piatikus Lenski. It had been Isobel who dealt gruffly with the surly immigration officers over the matter of Looksmart's presence in the United States. It was Isobel who got the tickets for the train to Philadelphia and who moved him into her apartment on Walnut Street.

It was Isobel who took him into her wide soft bed beneath the eiderdown decorated with signs of the zodiac and its sky blue sheets.

She removed his clothes, she took his penis between her breasts and massaged it. It had been Isobel who straddled him. She was an odd girl, he remembered thinking. Political commitment made her misty-eyed, stimulated her, while he looked on quizzically with his one good eye caught between the desire to help and the vague feeling that he ought to apologise, wondering whether this was quite the career Gabriel envisaged for him in America. She took his now rampant member and kissed it, crooning to it between kisses, pulling and patting the foreskin gently as if trying to get it to lie
down, as if it were the corner of a shirt collar she'd been ironing and which refused to stay neat. She took him inside her and began rising and falling, her face tightening with concentration, her forehead shiny with effort. He tried to move with her, to make some gesture of communion, but her knees gripped his hips and kept him still. He lifted his hands to her breasts but she took them down and pressed them flat on the bed, gripping his wrists hard. She had told him on the plane how she loved Africa, how joined to it she felt however vast it was and with this her grip on him tightened. He wished he were more substantial beneath her, he did not feel very large or even very African. She was riding him more swiftly now, her breath coming in short hisses. He realised that his role at this particular point anyway was to lie still. He realised from something in the movement of her body that what was happening was in some sort a further dimension of her tribute to him, both to his person and his cause, as she had taken it to herself, now she took him. Looksmart's good eye watched the triangular patch of pubic hair rising and sliding, felt the contractions of her vaginal muscles, felt himself swell and spurt within her as she came to a shuddering, panting conclusion, dropping her head onto his chest and resting on her arms which curved outwards at right angles to her body like staves, or hoops, cutting half moons out of the white walls behind her. Afterwards it was Isobel who told him that this was her commitment to a vision of freedom. It was a vision to which Looksmart felt he had been permitted to make only an involuntary contribution. It was rather like giving to some mysterious, distant charity, he decided. You felt better for it after you had done it, though you couldn't help wishing you had a clearer idea of where the money went.

A few weeks later it was Isobel who arranged their marriage by ‘the turkey who lives on the hill'. The turkey turned out to be a pleasant young Methodist minister; the hill, Society Hill. It wasn't so much marriage, Isobel explained to him, as the question of his visa, his freedom to stay in the United States. She said this very delicately as if she feared he might take offence. Afterwards she took him to lunch at a fish restaurant called Bookbinders and ordered him lobster. The waitress produced a huge paper towel which she tied around his neck and Looksmart felt very embarrassed to be wrapped like a parcel. With his knife he tapped an anxious tarradiddle on the red beast's back. Isobel asked about his mother.

Looksmart's mother had been called Agnes. That much he did
remember. Up from the kraal, a raw farm girl, she came to the capital in search, not of work, but of her husband who worked on the gold mines. Which mine? No one knew. One day her husband's letters had stopped. Worse still, so had the money he used to send. So Agnes brought her sons to the city and failed to find him. She was told to go home and wait. But she couldn't do that, her children had no food. She looked for work. Those to whom she applied warned her, threatened her: she had no papers, no permission, no future, no business to be there. Tap, tap went Looksmart's knife on the lobster's gate of bone behind which the beast hid and would not let him in, knock as he might. The hot, salt, sea flesh inside steamed in his nostrils. He realised then what was to be done in order to eat a lobster, why the huge paper bib, the finger bowl. You were supposed to tear it apart with your bare hands. His mother would have fled from this monster. The lobster fixed him with hard, unblinking eyes. Never mind, he would outstare it, using his bad eye.

Agnes, Looksmart's mother, arrived at Father Lynch's front door clutching Gabriel's hand and Looksmart, then still a baby, strapped to her back. Lynch took her on immediately, impressed on the one hand by her inability to do any cooking or washing or ironing or sewing. These were deficiencies he approved of heartily. Coming into contact with the white madams who taught these things was the ruination of many a good person, he liked to say. Lynch was delighted by the impressionable enthusiasm she showed and her lack of bad culinary habits. He taught her to cook what he called Irish food, plain and solid, stews and roasts and soups and plenty of potato with everything, since that was the way it was done in Ireland, his country, God help it, a tiny island no bigger than the tip of a finger nail, and here he squeezed between thumb and forefinger the requisite area of nail for her inspection. A little place so full of priests it would sink beneath their weight into the sea one day.

So much for the wedding lunch and Looksmart's mother. It was Isobel who acknowledged that she would awake one morning and find him gone, having slipped away in the night, summoned by his comrades to return home and fight for the cause of freedom.

And it was Isobel, above all, who sent him out one day with instructions to cast an eye over ‘our revolution'.

Down Walnut Street Looksmart scrabbled towards that amazing rectangle bounded by Second Street and Sixth, by Larch Street and Spruce, the launching pad of the American revolution. He visited
the Declaration Chamber in Independence Hall along with a bunch of tourists. Their guide was a bluff young man who wore what looked to him like a scout's uniform, but who turned out to be a Ranger in the Parks Department. He discovered that the area of Independence Hall was designated a National Historical Park. How strange America was! In his country the national parks were full of animals; here, they were full of people. The crowds stood behind the railing which enclosed the sacred area where the furious debates about independence had taken place. They stared at the tables covered with green baize and the crowded, spindle-legged Windsor chairs, the papers, the quills, the inkstands. They saw the Speaker's Chair with its rising sun motif and heard how Benjamin Franklin sat day after day, during deliberations that led to the Declaration, wondering whether that sun was rising or setting. He gazed at the silver inkstand designed by Philip Synge for the Speaker's Table, he learnt that unlike most of the other furniture, the inkstand was original; from it had come the ink that had loaded the quills that signed the Declaration of Independence adopted by this rumbustious, Second Continental Congress of 1776. The tourists stared at the crowded tables and chairs in that silent, empty chamber and tried to imagine the bells, the bonfires, the cheers and the shots with which the revolution began. Most of them were dressed in jeans or slacks and had this shifty, almost guilty look about them, Looksmart thought, as if try as they might they simply couldn't imagine that such climactic matters had begun in this small place. Afterwards, Looksmart bought a copy of the Declaration Document and a postcard of Trumbull's painting,
The Signing,
with its bouquet of American flags and its serried racks of bewigged and utterly respectable gentlemen who beneath their composure and their wigs had proved to be wild and redhot revolutionaries.

Looksmart visited, that same day, the House of Representatives Chamber in Congress Hall, as well as the Senate Chamber. He stared at the great star-spangled eagle painted on the ceiling overhead with its claw full of arrows. He admired the creamy symmetry of the old Supreme Court Chamber and he walked across Market Street and joined the crowds thronging the Glass Pavilion where the Liberty Bell hung.