Kruger's Alp (36 page)

The matron drew deeply on her cheroot and puffed creamy smoke. Her voice sharpened and quickened in an American drawl. ‘Roll up! Roll up! See the
Boojers
meet the British in mortal combat! See General Kitchener's final triumph! See the Boojers digging nests of trenches! See the Lydite shells blasting their positions! Read Cronje's courteous request for a truce to bury his dead and for British doctors to treat his wounded. Listen as Field-Marshal Roberts pronounces his niggardly refusal. Then hear General Cronje's noble response, which was in essence,
Then bombard away
. . .! Now watch the great Boer military genius De Wet harassing the British from Kitchener's
koppie
which with supreme daring he has snatched from under their noses. See him command the strong point of Paardeberg for three days. But it is too little, too late. Now see everything lost. See General Piet Cronje and his four thousand men surrendering to Roberts. See him stepping down from his white horse, the Boer in his big hat and his floppy trousers and see the triumphant Roberts, neat and dapper, stepping towards him while in the shade Cronje's broken troops
watch impassively from their wagons, and all around them sit the British in their khaki, wearing their funny hats with those strange protective peaks back and front to keep the sun off those long, thin noses, those red necks . . .' The matron's impersonation using hands and napkins impressed a number of the diners who applauded politely. She acknowledged the compliment with a nod of the head. ‘You can imagine the old man's agony when he heard of Cronje's preparations at the World Fair, of his old friend's plan to make money while the bones of the Boer dead whitened on the slopes of the mountains their General had lost. But it spurred Kruger on. He told his doctor, according to a story that has come down to us, “You take care of the bodies, but someone must take care of the souls. We must make a little hospital, a little spirit hospital, ready for them.” Well this is that little hospital. By July of that year, 1904, Uncle Paul was dead, but
Bad Kruger
was alive and well.'

‘And what do you do here?' Kipsel was bold enough to ask.

‘What do we do? We tell stories, of course.'

‘More stories!' Kipsel protested. ‘I'm tired of stories. Will we never get to the end of stories?'

Matron turned on him sternly. ‘Never. And what would you do if that happened? Stories have brought you this far. From the most powerful member of the Regime to the lowest gardener, cook or nanny, we all need stories. We owe our lives to stories. Would I be here now? Or you? Or any of these people if it weren't for the stories of another place, of Uncle Paul's arrangements for the likes of us? Do not spit on stories, Mr Kipsel, or stories might spit on you.'

Kipsel hung his head. ‘I'm sorry, it's just that we never seem to get to the end.'

‘The end? Mr Kipsel –
we
are the end of these stories. I see you're puzzled. You fail to understand – even now.'

Sweets were brought, great big dishes of
koeksusters,
golden plaited sweetmeats oozing oil, and milk tarts as big as wagon wheels, fig jam, watermelon conserve, raw sugar cane, fly cemetery, coconut ice and, of course, peach brandy with the coffee.

‘Fail to understand what, precisely?' Blanchaille asked.

‘Everything,' came the laconic reply. Matron nodded her head towards the first speaker who had got up and was preparing to address them. ‘Listen and you'll learn.'

A thin man with a nervous manner. His cream towelling robe
made him look rather like a chemist, a little drunk, and he tugged nervously at his ear-lobes while he spoke.

‘My friends, my name you know.'

‘I don't,' whispered Kipsel.

‘It's Peterkin, Claude Peterkin, the radio producer,' said Blanchaille, ‘from home, I knew him immediately.'

‘From home!' Kipsel echoed in hot sarcastic tones. ‘Where's that?'

Matron banged on the table with her spoon. ‘Let him tell his story,' she ordered.

Peterkin bobbed his chin gratefully towards her. ‘I was by trade a radio producer and rose in time to become Head of Broadcasting. My motto had always been – “choose the middle way”. Useful advice to myself, working on the State radio you might say, since it meant I could steer between what was on the one hand a public broadcasting facility and on the other a Government propaganda service. You could say I'd been happy and moderately successful. Then one day I made a mistake. I allowed myself to be persuaded by Trudy Yssel that times were changing. “Produce plays,” she said, “which display our adaptiveness to new political perceptions, which are modern, which are of today!” I went out and commissioned a play by none other than Labush Labuschagne. The Labuschagne you all know with his Eskimo wife and his interest in Zen and his quivering attacks upon the Regime's race policies and his impeccable Boer credentials, being a descendant of one of those heroes in Piet Retiefs party who were murdered by Dingaan. And what did Labuschagne give me? He gave me an attack on the Catholic Church in Africa. Fair enough, you might say. The play was entitled
Roman Wars
– and not, let me stress,
not Roman Whores.
That was an incredibly stupid printing error. The same combination of bad luck and mechanical error which has pursued me all my life. Be that as it may, my intentions were good. Could I have made a better choice of playwright than Labush Labuschagne? His radicalism was unchallenged and yet his Government connections were superb. He wrote a play about a Church which is far from popular and he portrayed its missionary activity on our continent as hypocritical, self-serving and deceitful. What better way of encouraging a debate? Why then did the Regime put out a statement saying that while it was true they had differences with the Roman Church in the past, there was now no room in the new South Africa for religious or racial bigotry and they deplored the irresponsibility of those, they did not say whom, who attacked other religious groups? Now if this
wasn't enough, at the same time stories of my homosexuality began appearing in the newspapers. It was suggested that I had a particular taste for young police reservists. Readers' letters choked the columns of the newspapers demanding that this faggot be neutered on the spot. Then the Board of Governors of the Broadcasting Service put out a statement that I was considering, quite voluntarily, whether I shouldn't perhaps take early retirement. The first I knew of this was when I heard it on the “Six O'Clock News”. Then the Chairman of the Governors organised a farewell party. And who do you think he invited? He got in Bishop Blashford, the Papal Nuncio, Agnelli, and half a dozen pretty young police reservists. And this was to be my retirement party – a surprise retirement party! I walked in and found myself on the way out. Of course the cameras were there and the whole thing was shown live on television. I was presented with a farewell memento. I have it here.' Peterkin reached inside his robe and withdrew a large knife. ‘It's a hunting knife, for those of you not near enough to see it. It has a sheath of genuine kudu-hide, its blade is fashioned from a piece of steel taken from one of the original rails from the Delagoa Bay line which carried President Kruger to exile. Its handle is made of rhino horn. This is inset with four golden studs, representing the four major racial groups in South Africa. I accepted the gift. After that I was escorted to the door and shown into the night. And so I came here, like so many of you. One morning the gardener found me wandering in the vineyard, and here I am. I thank you for listening to me and most of all I thank our President who made this place ready for us.' And with that he lifted his glass towards the portrait of President Kruger on the wall. The old man with the tufty beard, the sashes, the rows of medals, stared broodingly down upon his displaced children.

Another then rose, a bulky man with a bristling moustache, a big belly beneath the robe. Of course they all knew him, Arnoldus Buys, the nitrate millionaire. Even Kipsel knew him.

‘I was a Government man, through and through. I was amongst the chief sponsors and backers of the New Men in the Regime. I was something of a rough diamond, but I was modern, tough, pragmatic. I backed the new dispensation. I believed in the new vision. I supported the principle of Ethnic Parallels, Plural Equilibriums, Creative Differentiation, all the terms, all the ideas, all the words. I also believed that we could fight our way back into history. I was one of the original backers of Minister Kuiker and his Creative
Sterilisation Campaign. I backed the propaganda war. But my friends I was asleep. We have all been asleep so you know what I mean. I was asleep and when I woke up I found I'd been taken to the cleaners. My story is brief and tragic and may be encapsulated in a few words; I fell victim to our own propaganda, I believed in it because I was paying for it.' And here Buys, the businessman, sank back into his chair and buried his face in his arms and a sympathetic hush descended on the room.

Then there rose a man who Blanchaille and Kipsel knew immediately – and who would not? For here was Ezra Savage, the novelist, the most notable writer the country had produced, described by some as a sad, thin old lay-preacher. Savage was the dogged champion of a Christian, liberal multi-racial vision of the future, author of a shelf of books amongst which the most famous were of course,
My Country 'Tis Of Thee; Come Home Dingaan!; Our Land Lies Bleeding;
and
White Man Weep No More.
It was extraordinary to see him here. He who had proclaimed that
Emigration is Death!
A man who had stood up for years against the harassment of the Regime, had survived countless arrests, imprisonment and privation, had seen his house set on fire by gangs of white youths wearing ruling Party sashes, an attack which his asthmatic wife barely survived and which undoubtedly contributed to her death soon afterwards. A man who had withstood this and yet now stood here in this room full of fugitives.

‘What the Regime had been unable to achieve, my daughter accomplished. Some of you will be familiar with the extraordinary events surrounding the elopement of my daughter, Mabel, with Sunshine Bwana, the black taxi driver. When Mabel and her lover set up house in open defiance of the laws against interracial cohabitation, the pressure on me of course increased. Some of you will perhaps have read my
Letters to a Daughter of the Revolution,
in which I tried to set out, as calmly and dispassionately as I could, the difficulties which her behaviour had caused me. Mabel's reaction was to give an interview to a Government paper in which she identified people like myself with “liberals who thought left and lived right”. We owned large comfortable houses in the white suburbs, preached racial harmony to our black servants and were in reality the true enemies of the revolution. Mabel said she preferred the Regime to us, that if she were made to choose she would have found more in common with those who ruled the country than she did with these vague and sentimental politics, these liberal
chimeras, these values of a damp English rectory. But of course Mabel knew the thing was not to talk about the world but to change it. And so, though perhaps this is not widely known, my daughter Mabel led a second charge on her father's house at the head of a gang of black youths, and they attempted to set it on fire. Considerable damage was done. The Regime's newspapers took pleasure in reporting this, as you can imagine and there was a lot of speculation at the time, probably mischievously put about, that I was thinking of selling up at last, leaving the country and moving to a home for retired clergy on the Isle of Wight. It was then that I made my declaration – emigration is death! Well then, you must be asking yourselves, what is he doing here in this room full of fugitives? What drove him? I'll tell you what drove me. What I wasn't prepared for, what I think many of us were not prepared for, was the impact of what are called the Young Turks, or sometimes the New Men, or the Pragmatists, or whatever term you chose to designate that dangerous breed personified by the likes of Minister Gus Kuiker and Trudy Yssel. What was at the heart of their programme? It was to talk to us, persuade us, delude us into the belief that substantial changes were under way. It depicted a new deal in race relations in which people of goodwill and of good sense were seen working together in a society based on synchronised ethnicity, equal freedoms and plural balances. So it went. New names, old ideas. You might have laughed. I might have laughed. But my daughter accepted the challenge and that wasn't amusing. She took a job in Gus Kuiker's Department on the understanding that she was totally free to work for its destruction from within. She justified her job by saying she was genuinely interested in power and since this was the case it made sense to get as close to the centre of it as possible. If working for Kuiker meant getting her hands dirty, well that was too bad. Working with power meant coming to grips with it. That's what I didn't understand, she told me. That's what I was too frightened, too pure to grasp. Was there any greater test of a man's resolve than to realise he was fighting a regime ready to die for the sacred right to segregated lavatories? Well, yes, actually there was. As Mabel said: what I couldn't face was the fact that they had no intention of dying at all! Well, that's when I went away. You understand I couldn't take that. I think I would've preferred my daughter to shoot me, it would have been kinder than preaching at me from the Government benches.'

There were sighs all around the dining hall and an evident feeling of sympathy translated itself into an audible hum. Several diners
wiped their eyes with their sleeves. Savage sat at his table clasping and unclasping his hands, a look of intense puzzlement on his nut-brown, wrinkled, intelligent, simian face. Every so often he shook his head and they knew the rage to understand what had happened to him still went on inside him.

Next there arose two ladies who introduced themselves as the Misses Glynis Unterjohn and Moira Schapp, the noted lesbians. They rose, not to tell their own story, at least not then, but to introduce a third friend, the journalist Marie Hertzog, whose pioneering study of the working conditions of black domestic servants entitled
Matilda: Venus of the Servants' Quarters
had caused a considerable stir some years before. The study had been notable not only for its original work on the conditions in which black women were forced to live but also because Hertzog herself was a card-carrying member of the ruling Party. Her book, which revealed the women she studied to be serfs in a male-dominated world, victims both of their drunken, brutal husbands as well as of their white mistresses and masters, had been promoted by Trudy Yssel and Minister Kuiker, both at home and abroad, as an indication of the new mood of liberalisation and self-examination sweeping the country. The book was held up as an example of the way in which members of the Regime were turning the microscope upon themselves, fearlessly analysing their weaknesses, changing the system from within.