Kruger's Alp

by Christopher Hope

  Now I saw in my dream how Blanchaille and the policeman Van Vuuren moved to another cell and peered through the thick glass spyhole in the door and Blanchaille recoiled at what he saw. For there, lying on the bunk, was Roberto Giuseppe Zandrotti, the anarchist. He recognised immediately the spiky black hair, the long, thin chin, the freckled, ghostly white face. ‘I don’t believe this. He’s in London.’

  Van Vuuren shook his head. ‘We had known he was planning to return secretly to the country. We knew when he would arrive and, most importantly, what he would be wearing. The information was top-grade. So accurate Zandrotti never stood a chance. Blanchie, he came back disguised as a nun, of the Loretto Order, to be precise. Imagine it if you will. There’s this double-decker bus trundling through a green and leafy suburb, all the passengers peering out of the window and paying very little attention to what some of them afterwards thought of as perhaps rather ‘swarthy’ a sister who sat there on her seat keeping her eyes demurely downcast and most of her face hidden behind her large wimple. Imagine their surprise when three large men in hairy green sportscoats and thick rubber-soled brown shoes jump aboard the bus and begin attacking this nun. Apparently the conductor went to her assistance and was struck down with a blow to the temple. He lay sprawled in the aisle, bleeding, and all the coins from his ticket machine went rolling beneath the bus seats.’

  Blanchaille imagined it. He saw it. He heard the jingling flutter as the coins spun and settled beneath the seats.

  ‘Anyway, these three guys wrestled with the nun who hoofs them repeatedly in the nuts until they pick her up and carry her down the aisle head first. The other passengers see that this nun isn’t what they thought because the headdress has been torn off and they look at the hair and the freckles and the beard and fall over themselves with amazement – this is a man! There was no end of trouble afterwards stopping them talking to the papers, and the conductor, he was well into negotiations to sell his story to something called Flick, a flashy picture magazine, when he was stopped at the last moment.’

  Of course escaping from jail in clerical dress had a long history. There had been Magdalena who got out disguised as a nun. A less appropriate garb could not be imagined. From that day nuns leaving the country were abused by Customs officers still smarting over the one who got away. Then there had been Kramer and Lipshitz who bribed their way out of their cells dressed as Cistercian monks. But for a wanted man to return to the country in clerical dress, to certain arrest, that was beyond comprehension. The exit permit on which Zandrotti had left the country on his release from jail specified arrest should he return.

  ‘Unless, of course, he wanted to be caught,’ suggested Blanchaille.

  ‘It makes no sense. But you know Roberto, and you know his way of thinking. Jesus, he must have wanted to be caught! There is no other explanation. He let it be known in London, in certain quarters, that he was going home – knowing the details would get back to us. They did. We even knew his seat number on the aircraft.’ Van Vuuren unlocked the door and drew Blanchaille into the cell.

  Zandrotti had always gone his own way, opposed not merely to the Regime but to every authority he encountered. His schemes for that opposition were novel, intriguing, entirely characteristic, quirkish, outrageous, quite impractical and wonderfully diverting. Zandrotti’s plan for immediate revolution was a message, passed by word of mouth to all those opposed to the Regime, that on a particular day at a particular time each man, woman and child would fetch a stone, the biggest and heaviest that could be carried, and place it in the middle of the road and then go home and wait for the country to grind to a halt. Zandrotti’s grand coup at school had been the occasion when he broke into the cadet armoury and stole a supply of .303 rifles and full sets of uniforms, khaki shorts and shirts, boots and puttees and caps, with which he dressed and armed a platoon of black school cleaners and drilled them on the school playground for all the world to see. The sight of black men marching with rifles caused panic in the neighbourhood. Zandrotti was expelled from the Hostel and they remembered how he was driven away in Father Cradley’s grey DKW, sitting in the back fervently making the Sign of the Cross. The rector was a notoriously bad driver and they watched Zandrotti’s mock gibbers of terror, helpless with laughter.

  His star appearance was in the dock at the Kipsel trial. The trial of the so-called Fanatical Five. It wasn’t Five for long. Looksmart Dladla had fled, mysteriously warned a few days previously by an unknown source. That left just four: Kipsel, Mickey the Poet, Magdalena and Zandrotti.

  The number was further reduced when Mickey the Poet hanged himself in his cell. What a miracle of athletic agility that had been, what a wonder of tenacity! Michael Yates, little Mickey the Poet, short, blond, barrel-chested, the build of a youthful welter-weight with powerful forearms and lengthy reach (which perhaps helped in the miracle of his death). But Mickey wasn’t a boxer, he was a poet, not by practice but by acclamation. He was known for four quite hopeless lines: Bourgeois, bourgeois, bourgeois fool/ Little capitalistic tool/ What you ask, will end white rule?/ Ask the children in the school! With these few lines of thudding doggerel Mickey acquired the sobriquet ‘the Poet’, and met his end. For not very long after that came the township disturbances when the school-children rioted and Mickey’s words seemed amazingly prophetic, if not a straight case of incitement, and his little poem was printed in an anthology of revolutionary verse and was much quoted abroad. And then there was the photograph of Mickey with the ‘Liberation Committee’, as the leaders of what later became the Azanian Liberation Front were known. A famous photograph showing Mickey standing between Athol Ngogi and Horatio Vilakaze, and with Achmed Witbooi, Oscar Amandla and Ramsamy Gopak, all raising clenched fists and singing. Mickey said he had gone to the meeting by mistake, someone had told him it was a jazz concert, that he never knew. He never knew. Another brief epitaph for his gravestone. He never knew when he was approached by Kipsel for a lift what it was that Kipsel carried in the brown leather briefcase. Mickey’s ignorance was invincible and nothing that the State Prosecutor, Natie Kirschbaum, said could pierce it. With wonderful simplicity Mickey informed the judge that since he hadn’t the first idea of why he had been arrested but since the prosecution seemed to have a number of explanations, he planned to call the entire prosecution team as witnesses for the defence and to cross-examine them carefully on all aspects of his case. The surprised judge adjourned the hearing to consider the application and promised a decision the following day. It caused a sensation. POET TAKES ON PROSECUTION! the headlines read.

  The next day never came for Mickey the Poet. Some time during the following twenty-four hours Mickey had attached a strip of towel to his bedstead and the other around his neck and strangled himself. The incredulity with which this was greeted stopped the trial while evidence was heard of Mickey’s last hours. The shock of his death was only surpassed by the wonder of its achievement. The defence lawyers produced a statement in which Mickey complained of electric shocks, beatings, and frequent threats that he would be thrown from a high window in Balthazar Buildings. Mickey, it seemed, had demanded to see, as was his right, the Inspector of Detainees, but this had not happened. He had then, it was alleged, gone to bed, tied the towel around his neck and choked himself. Sergeant Betty Paine was called to the witness box to explain why the Inspector had not called. Sergeant Paine’s job was to take down statements from prisoners when they complained that they had been tortured and, as she added charmingly with a little flick of her blonde head, to hand this to the interrogator so that he might determine whether indeed there was a case for reporting the complaint to the Inspector of Detainees. However, when the Inspector arrived he was told by Sergeant Paine that the prisoner, Michael Yates, was ‘out’. The judge was puzzled by this and asked for the meaning of the word ‘out’. Did Sergeant Paine mean ‘out’ as in ‘out for the count,’ or ‘out for lunch’, or ‘out of order’? Or perhaps ‘out like a light’? Presumably she did not mean ‘out to tea’ or ‘
out on the town’. There was laughter in court at this and the judge threatened to clear the galleries.

  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 . . .’