Blanchaille was becoming more weary and confused by the mysteries which though they had a certain bizarre interest were not getting him very far along the road to the Airport Palace Hotel and his flight to freedom and he respectfully requested to be allowed to continue his journey.
‘One last port of call,’ Van Vuuren promised, ‘and then you can go.’ He paused outside a cell door and lifted the steel cover from the spyhole and invited Blanchaille to look inside. ‘Recognise him?’
‘Naturally.’ How could he not do so? The large fine head, the grizzled steel-grey curls, the powerful dignified bearing of the man who had done more than anyone else to advance the cause of liberation in Southern Africa, Horatio Vilakaze, arrested soon after the fateful picture had appeared showing Mickey the Poet apparently in attendance on the liberation leaders, back in those exciting days before death, dispersal, imprisonment, exile, house arrest and age had split and destroyed the original organising committee of the Black Justice Campaign. How long ago? Years, years and years. It did no good to count them.
‘Vilakaze is perhaps the saddest of all our cases,’ Van Vuuren said. ‘We don’t have to go into the cell, we can listen to his speech from out here,’ he flicked a switch and the old man’s powerful voice reverberated along the chill, empty corridor.
‘Brothers and sisters, comrades, freedom will be ours!’ He held up his arms as if to still the cheering crowds and when the applause which must have rung between his ears like brass bands had died away he rallied the faithful thousands only he could see and hear. ‘Within the country our forces are massing, our fighters are brave, the Regime shrinks from them. On the borders the armies of our allies gather like locusts to sweep on our enemy and defeat him. Together we will overcome, we will drive the oppressor into the sea, God is with us!’
Van Vuuren killed the vibrant, echoing words. ‘Too sad to hear. That was his last great speech before he was arrested. He was speaking to thirty thousand supporters, and he can’t forget it. It preys on his mind, he reruns the speech a dozen times a day. That was before the young men took over. He is a great man.’
‘It didn’t stop you arresting him.’
‘Yes. We did arrest him, but only after we had been approached by a number of his friends anxious to spare him the humiliation of ejection from the movement he had helped to found. So yes, you can say we arrested him, but really we took him in.’
Took him in? Took him in! What a terrible thing to say. As if this place had been a home for strays, a dogs’ home. Or an orphanage. There was in this something he could not accept. Something so awful it didn’t bear thinking about.
‘You’re saying that it was an act of charity?’ He could hear the incredulous ring in his voice.
‘Something like that. And a mistake, too. Once in custody there was no releasing him. We tried once, sent him back to his people who wouldn’t have him. They’re hard-nosed, young, efficient elements who want power, who want to succeed at any cost even if it means some weird, subtle deal with the Regime, and to them old Vilakaze with his talk of armies and locusts is an embarrassment . . . they’re happy to use his name, to keep the Free Vilakaze committees going all over the world, the silent vigils, the marches, the petitions calling for his release but what they won’t stand for is for us to let him go. We’ve been warned – put him back on the street and he’s a dead man.’
Back in the reception area with its portraits of the presidents, Blanchaille said, ‘I think I begin to understand what you’re up against. Once the police were there to arrest people they considered a danger to the State. This was our world. Ugly, perhaps cruel. But dependable. Things have changed. These people, Strydom, Zandrotti, Vilakaze, they don’t know where they are anymore. Except when they’re in here. What you’ve got here are specimens from another age. This isn’t a prison, it’s a museum.’
Van Vuuren reflected. ‘And a hospital. They pose no threat to the State. The only people they’re a danger to are themselves. These people shouldn’t be here. They’re not criminals. They’re failures. They shouldn’t be in jail. They should be sent somewhere for treatment. Some special hospital for incurable failures.’
‘I believe there is,’ said Blanchaille.
Van Vuuren joined his hands together in a pious gesture of the altar server of long ago. ‘Let’s hope so.’
CHAPTER 9
Van Vuuren loaded Blanchaille’s cases into a small, powder-blue Volkswagen Golf. There wasn’t room for the cases in the boot and he put them on the back seat. ‘Don’t worry about the car, just leave it at the airport. Its owner, I’m afraid, has no further use for it. It comes from our pool.’
‘Goodbye,’ Blanchaille said dazed by all he had learnt.
‘Good luck,’ Van Vuuren replied. ‘I take it you see things a little differently now?’
Blanchaille felt embarrassed. Van Vuuren had made himself difficult to dislike. ‘Why do you stay on?’
Van Vuuren looked uncomfortable. He shrugged. ‘Duty, perhaps.’
‘Duty? To what? To whom?’
Again Van Vuuren was silent but he gave Blanchaille an odd, rather mocking glance and waved him away. ‘You’re under police protection. It’s about as good as being anointed.’
In order to reach the airport one takes the national highway, a great curving road much of it a long, gentle climb. It was getting dark. A stony, glittering moon rose swiftly, glared briefly and was gone. Just as he cleared the city it began to rain. Rounding a bend he found his way blocked when three men in orange oilskins stepped into the road and flagged him down. His bright lights reflected back off the brilliant orange plastic and dazzled him so that he had to shield his eyes. The men stepped up to the window: ‘Theodore Blanchaille?’
‘What do you want?’
‘Please get out of the car,’ said the first policeman.
‘We’re giving you something,’ said the second policeman.
‘Please take off your clothes,’ said the third policeman.
The door was opened and Blanchaille was helped out. A large green and red golf umbrella was unfurled and held over his head. The first policeman reached into the car and dragged out Blanchaille’s three cases.
‘What are you doing with those?’
‘We’re relieving you of them.’
‘But it’s all my stuff.’
‘You won’t be needing it where you’re going. Now in return we have three things to give you. A change of clothes, good advice and proper papers.’
The first policeman went over to his car and returned with a large cardboard box. This he unpacked carefully and took from it a white suit. There in the pouring rain, standing beneath the umbrella, Blanchaille was forced to remove his clothes and don the new white suit. There was a red woollen tie to go with it, silk shirt, a crimson spotted handkerchief for the breast pocket and slim, pale, pointed Italian shoes with cream silk socks.
The rain stopped, the wild moon reappeared. Blanchaille gleamed coldly in its light.
‘That’s better,’ said the first policeman. ‘Now you look like somebody.’
‘I am to give you some advice,’ said the second policeman. ‘You’re going out, you’re leaving, you’re going to visit the outside world, you will need to be prepared. Remember things aren’t quite so simple there, people worry about different things, about inflation and unemployment. They worry about whether to have their children vaccinated against whooping cough. They argue about the environment and the rights of women and they fear the extinction of the world by atomic explosion.’
And then the third policeman stepped closer to the now resplendent priest looking like a plump, prosperous riverboat gambler in his white suit and after checking his passport, handed him his exit permit. ‘Although we all know you are leaving, the point of this permit is to ensure that you take a one-way trip. There is no return.’ Then stepping even closer he whispered in the fugitive’s ear in a voice so low I could not catch them, the directions he was to take once he arrived safely at his f
inal destination.
They put him back in his car, they stepped away from it in unison and they waved him on, three wet policemen, shining in the fierce moonlight.
I saw in my dream how Blanchaille went very little further that night but pulled over onto the side of the road and with his head swimming with all that had happened to him that day, and having first carefully folded his new jacket and put it on the back seat, he slept.
In the first light of the new day he started the car and set out to complete his drive to the airport. This gently rising country he knew well, here it was where the huge army camps were situated with their big red notices warning of electrified fencing and the regular watch towers. And on the other side of the road lay the military cemeteries, entered by way of giant bronze gates cast in the form of wagon wheels through the spokes of which he could glimpse the orange crosses on the graves. Orange crosses were a particular feature of the military graveyard. No other colour was suitable. White, brown, pink, black, yellow and even red, all carried racial or political connotations which were judged to be undesirable. After all, since the Total Onslaught began it had not been only Europeans who gave their lives for the mother country. People of many colours including large contingents of black storm-troopers, Indian cooks, coloured drivers, Bushmen trackers, served in the armed forces. So it was orange, the dominant colour of the national flag, colour of the original Free State, the substantial feature of the African sunset, that was found in military memorials.
Here was the Air Force base which they had visited as boys with Father Lynch, when the priest had worn his beret as a mark of cordiality to celebrate the French connection, ‘an entirely appropriate symbol, I think, and a gesture of esteem for one of our most faithful arms suppliers, the old Sabre Jets are gone and the new French fighters are in.’
‘Not swords into ploughshares. Sabres into Mirages . . .’ Blanchaille muttered.
Along these perimeter fences he saw the early morning Alsatian patrols, the dogs held in a U-shaped metal lead with their trainers running behind them. It was rather reminiscent of guide dogs leading the blind. Here were endless miles of military suburbs named Shangri-La, Valhalla, El Dorado, Happy Valley.
The first of the great national monuments was the burly granite sarcophagus raised to the memory of the early Trekkers, grey and powerful on a low green hill and looking like nothing so much as an old-fashioned wireless, a giant Art-Deco piece, a great circular window intersected by deep parallel grooves where the loudspeaker would have been, hidden behind its wire and wicker screen. The monument sat in its massive bulk on the hill, forever.
Next, the monument to the dead of the concentration camps which the British ran in the Boer War, a huge, weeping, gilded Boer mother dipping her poke bonnet over her starving children who buried their faces in her ample lap.
Next, the monument to the first invasion of Angola, the bronze soldier posed behind a captured Russian artillery-piece mounted on a lorry, everything precise in all its details, the 122-millimetre rocket launcher, the famous ‘Stalin organ’, capable of firing salvos of forty rockets at a burst. The soldier and artillery-piece and lorry were on a raised grassy bank surrounded by a mass of flowers, a kind of floral gunpit, banks of white madonna lilies bloodily speckled here and there with clumps of red hot pokers.
Here was the monument to the dead of the abortive Mauritian landings, perhaps the first military invasion organised by private enterprise, the money having been put up by the large mining companies which had found themselves under fire for lack of patriotism and wished to provide assurances of good faith to the Regime. It had been a monumental error, the soldiers had come ashore from their landing craft under the most terrible misapprehension that the way was clear and that a coup would simultaneously topple the Government. Came ashore at the wrong time on the wrong day, and under the very guns of a section of the army out on manoeuvres who had observed the seaborne invasion with incredulity from their fortified emplacements and then opened fire with gusto laying the invaders face down on the beach in a grotesque and bloody mimicry of holiday sunbathers. The dead were remembered by a towering block of marble. The early morning sun hit the golden orange lettering in which their names were incised, row upon row.
And here were the military camps which stretched as far as the eye could see. Huge townships in the veld. Once the country had had a civilian army, when people left their jobs and served time in the forces. Now at the time of the Total Onslaught the length of military service was indefinite and people took off their uniforms for brief periods and served time in their old offices, in their firms and factories.
All this great military complex spread before Blanchaille was an expression of unshakable faith, an affirmation of survival, a substantiation of the vow that white men would survive in Southern Africa whatever the odds. It affirmed the covenant between God and his people that they would serve him and he would preserve the nation. The country was run by the national party in the national interest, the national borders were safeguarded against the national enemy, the arms the people carried were the arms of God. This was the war-music of the Republic. This was the song of the mourning Boer mother, it was the message broadcast from the granite wireless, it was the symphony played on the Stalin organ.
Blanchaille was within sight of the airport. He could see the hangars, he could see the planes on the tarmac, he passed the Holiday Inn, he slowed down and looked about him for the Airport Palace. Two black men appeared running towards him holding up their hands and shouting. He slowed and rolled down the window. The men seized the window-frame panting, their eyes rolling, ‘Sir, you must go back. Everybody must go back. There are soldiers in the airport. Crazy men. They have guns, they’re shooting. Turn back, turn back!’
But Blanchaille knew he’d come too far to turn back, whatever the danger. ‘Do you know the Airport Palace Hotel?’
‘Yes, yes, we know it.’
‘Can I walk there from here?’
‘You can walk, but you must pass through the soldiers. And they’re shooting. They are crazy and roaring like lions.’
Blanchaille got out of the car. He gave the keys to the men. ‘You go back, but I have to tell you it’s no safer behind me. Go. Take the car. I won’t need it any more.’
They told him to keep walking down the road and he would find the hotel, he would hear the shooting and he would know he was there. And the roaring, he would hear that too.
Blanchaille set off. As the men had predicted he heard the firing first but quickened his pace. It meant the hotel was close.
The Airport Palace was built of steel and green glass. It was surrounded by a brick wall and outside this wall were the soldiers. He knew at once who they were. They weren’t regular troops, they wore an unusual uniform, black three-cornered hats, bottle-green tunics with gold buttons, grey riding breeches and knee-high boots and they ran here and there, firing their rifles, shouting, weeping and groaning. It was these groans the fleeing men had taken for roars. They carried the traditional Boer muzzle loader and their firing, though noisy, was wild and inaccurate. They fired into the air and they fired into walls and they had to stop to reload each time, to prime the guns and to fire again. This was the ceremonial President’s guard who accompanied Adolph Bubé on all official occasions. Their uniform was modelled on the guard of honour which had greeted the President on his celebrated visit to General Stroessner in Paraguay. He had gone home and designed the uniforms himself. Blanchaille remembered the headlines at the time: BUBÉ VISITS STROESSNER! A few years later the visit was returned: STROESSNER VISITS BUBÉ! Stroessner and Bubé presented each other with medals: PRESIDENT BUBÉ HONOURED BY REPUBLIC OF PARAGUAY – FREEDOM MEDAL FOR BUBÉ. AFRICA STAR FOR STROESSNER!
The soldiers ran here and there, wild-eyed and sweating in their heavy uniforms. They reminded Blanchaille of marionettes. They seemed out of control, demented with fear. There was a cast-iron gate in the wall. Blanchaille banged on the gate and called for someone to let him in
. The soldiers ignored him, charging about in their stiff-legged tin-man way.
An elderly man limped to the gate, drying his hands on a tea towel.
‘Name?’
‘Blanchaille. I think I’m expected.’
‘You used to be called Father Theo of the Settlements?’
‘Of the Camps, but now it’s plain Blanchaille.’
‘What kept you?’
‘It’s a long story. I’d like to come inside. Are those real bullets those guys are firing?’
‘Oh no. The President’s guard were never provided with live ammo. In case they got tempted, see? No, they’re just shouting and shooting and running around like chickens who’ve had their heads cut off. They’ve lost their President, you see. They’re supposed to guard Bubé and Bubé’s gone, and it has sent them round the bend. They’re like deserted robots. The man who used to wind them up has gone away. Come inside. Come inside and meet the girls.’
CHAPTER 10
Now I saw in my dream the reception of the plump renegade Blanchaille by the ancient porter of the Airport Palace Hotel, a certain Visser, once a colonel in a tank corps fighting Rommel’s troops in the desert war Up North. Something of a trace of military bearing remained about the doddering fellow who worked now unbeknown to the world as concierge, doorkeeper, porter, cleaner and barman at the Palace. He promised his guest ‘interesting stories’.
To Visser there attached a tale no less tragic than the hundreds he had heard across the bar of the Airport Palace Hotel from sad pilgrims about to quit the country. Except Visser would never leave, he said. If he did he would shrivel up and die he claimed, not realising he had been as good as dead for years. For it was Visser who had started the once-famous Brigades of Light when he returned from the war and found enemy sympathisers poised to take power. From the stage of the Sir Benjamin D’Urban Memorial Hall on the South Coast with the Indian Ocean seething outside the windows, he told his audience of ex-servicemen that they had been betrayed. While they’d been fighting Up North the new Regime had been blowing up bridges and knitting woolly socks to send to Hitler’s troops. Was it for this that young men had risked their lives in the desert war? He called on them to go home and set a lighted candle in the window to burn for liberty. And thus the Brigades of Light had been born. The name conjured up dedicated fighters for freedom. It turned out to be a group of newly demobbed, enthusiastic young men who went about at night in large cheerful rather drunken groups and stuck pictures of flaming candles on letter boxes and gates. It was good fun while it lasted but the raids, as they were called, soon deteriorated into nightly gallops and drunken binges. At Christmas their flaming taper was confused with that of the Carols by Candlelight organisation which collected for a host of deserving charities. After this discipline deteriorated. The exuberant ex-soldiers threw stones on corrugated iron roofs, rang the bells and ran away, or peered at young women undressing in their bedrooms. It was hardly the liberation force Colonel Visser had hoped for. For a while he managed to rally his troops. Duty platoons went to election meetings and fought with supporters of the Regime, collecting black eyes and bloody noses and feeling that at least they were doing something, though they knew in their hearts that the Regime was unstoppable. The wilder souls dreamt of burying rifles on the lonely beaches, there was even talk of secession but it didn’t last. The young men went to work as accountants, got married, took up Sunday rugby. Colonel Visser issued increasingly desperate orders from Brigade headquarters but it was useless. He disappeared from public view and there were rumours that he had been hideously disfigured in a car crash and was hiding in some obscure Cape resort attended only by a faithful black servant; there was talk that he had emigrated to England where he entered a closed community of Anglican brothers; but instead he had come here, to the Airport Palace Hotel, despite its name an obscure hostelry for souls on their way out – and to be found in no hotel directory.
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