‘Yes, yes,’ Minto persisted. ‘Yes there is and I know what it is!’
‘What is it?’ Momzie demanded. ‘And this better be good.’
Minto beamed. ‘They like even more than men dressed as women making jokes about foreigners, men dressed as women making jokes –’
‘For God’s sake get on with it!’ Dudley groaned.
‘Making jokes about foreigners . . . in lavatories!’ crowed Minto triumphantly.
They seemed to recognise the justice of this, but Momzie was not giving up yet. ‘Oh yes, how do you know?’
‘Saw it on TV.’
That clinched it. They all nodded. Clearly there was no further argument.
‘We watch a lot of television,’ said Momzie. ‘Ours is the best television service in the world.’
‘Have you watched any of our television?’ Minto asked.
But Blanchaille was watching Van Vuuren. ‘Please,’ he said, ‘those guys are going to hurt my friend.’
‘Balls,’ said Momzie. ‘We’re here, aren’t we. We’re here to see fair play.’
Van Vuuren had stopped struggling against the ropes. ‘I can’t believe I’m hearing this.’
‘You aren’t,’ the man called Oscar said bluntly. ‘This conversation never took place.’
Kramer came over the Momzie. ‘Do you have somewhere more private where we can continue our discussion. A cellar maybe?’
‘This is a cellar,’ said Momzie.
‘There’s the liquor store,’ said Dudley from Malta.
‘There’s not much room in there,’ said Minto.
‘Going to cost you extra,’ said Momzie.
The front row stood now, picked up the black leather chair and, in a procession which had a triumphant air about it, carried the prisoner from the stage. Blanchaille tried to intervene but Momzie produced an ugly little pistol from beneath the bar and hit him across the mouth. After that Blanchaille made no attempt to move but sat there watching the blood from his mouth dripping into his untouched whisky.
‘This place of mine is in heavy demand, being an easy walk from your Embassy,’ said Momzie proudly. He went on to tell the story of how he had recruited Minto and Dudley.
‘I met these guys when we were on a tour through the regions, or at least they were. They were walking a troop. What’s walking a troop? I hear you ask. It’s like taking a show on the road. You march a bunch of slags around the place from hotel to hotel and you nail a customer or two. He’s out there for a few days in the sun and isn’t with his wife and wishes he was, or is and wishes he wasn’t. It’s hard work and pretty thankless. You get girls who fuck around just for the hell of it. And some of them won’t keep accounts and they really begin to believe they are on holiday. They shoot off here and there and you spend half the day running after them like a fucking collie dog chasing sheep. I suppose you can’t blame them, the holiday atmosphere gets to the girls. I can tell you there’s nothing worse than a whore on holiday. These guys got so tired chasing after their pigeons they tried to lay it on me. Lay it on Momzie, shit that’s a joke! I read them like a book. I told them – look get out of the provinces, I mean regions, as we got to call them now, and come up to town. I need a bit of knuckle on the door, I said, and you want a bit of peace and quiet after years of pushing fanny around the place. So here we are, as happy as sandboys in The Bare Pit.’
‘This is the land of opportunity,’ said Dudley from Malta.
‘I’m proud to be British,’ said Minto.
One would like to draw a veil over subsequent proceedings. Alas, in dreams veils cannot be drawn.
And so I saw them carry the prisoner into the cellar, in the chair, like some mutant pope, and there they beat him, stamped on him, stabbed him. Though whether he died when they stabbed him or was dead when the knives went in, I cannot say. Also they pissed on him, as Kramer had sworn they would do, showing that he had not been speaking metaphorically. They actually, together or singly, urinated on him as he lay in his blood among the broken whisky bottles the fumes of which were suffocating in the small room and the air soon became fetid – which I agree is not really surprising when you remember that there were several strong men taking violent exercise in a small space; a crude, enthusiastic, messy, bludgeoning assault of boots, fists, bottles. It resembled nothing so much as the violence which passes for pleasure in the lower divisions of the rugby league. Even in this instance they reverted to type. They whooped, stamped, yelled. It was foul play. It was the foulest play imaginable. But it was damn good sport! Those who speak of rugby as a game believe they are making a joke. I can tell them they’ve seen neither the game or the joke – for neither is involved. What we are talking about are matters of life and death, not of who should live, or who should die, but who should decide! We are talking of sacred matters.
All this I saw through Blanchaille’s eyes. He watched the men come out of the liquor store, smelt the spirits on them and imagined in his naïvety that they had been drinking and this accounted for their strained, pale faces, their laboured breathing, the slightly giddy looks, and the stains on Oscar’s blue suit. He watched as the money was paid ‘for the hire of the hall’, as Momzie called it. A handful of small gold coins on the bar counter.
‘Who else but these guys pays in Krugerrands?’ he asked proudly, scooping up the hoard. ‘But then again, who better? Ain’t they got the market cornered?’
It was only when Dudley from Malta complained about the heat that they realised something had happened.
Minto went over and tried the handle.
The explosion blew off the door of the liquor store and carried away Minto, still attached to the handle. Momzie and Dudley from Malta screamed as they tried to beat back the flames with their jackets. The bottles of booze shattering like brilliant bombs. The body on the floor glowed like a lamp, and exploded, lighting up its own disfigurements, the smashed face, the knife wounds. A hot gust of alcohol, sweat and, yes, urine, hit them. And Blanchaille, finding himself unattended, took the dead man’s earlier advice and ran.
CHAPTER 15
And so it was that I saw Blanchaille retrace his steps and I saw how despite his terrifying experience, once back in Magdalena’s flat he cooked eggs. In the midst of tragedy, of bereavement, scorched by the fiery vision of Van Vuuren’s pricked and broken body, he had not expected to feel suddenly, ravenously, hungry. But there it was. The fleshly appetites were unrelenting, the Margaret Brethren had warned their boys, which if not constantly beaten into submission would command the frail human creature and bend him to their will.
Now we know that the stories of how Van Vuuren met his end were eventually to differ widely. The Regime acted quickly to claim him for their own. He became the faithful detective murdered by agents for the Azanian Liberation Front. The Front further complicated matters by admitting responsibility for the ‘execution’, declaring that the police-spy’s fate was a warning to any other agents of the Regime who attempted to subvert the forces of liberation. The Regime in turn announced that brilliant undercover work by Captain Van Vuuren had revealed a deep split within the Azanian terror group resulting in the demotion of its president, Kaiser Zulu. The Front in a statement called this a typical lie of fascist adventurers and claimed that President Zulu was enjoying a well-deserved retirement in a home for high state officials ‘in the country of a friendly ally’, somewhere on the Caspian Sea. The Regime then posthumuously awarded to Van Vuuren its premier decoration, the Cross of the Golden Eland with Star, an honour previously accorded only to visiting Heads of State, that is to say, to General Stroessner of Paraguay, the only Head of State to pass that way in living memory. The national poet composed an ode in honour of the dead policeman. This was the former radical poet, Pik Groenewald, who after years of self-imposed exile in Mexico City plotting the destruction of the Regime had a vision one night of a lion attacked by army ants and returned home immediately and joined the tank-corps where besides valiant service in the operational areas he composed a series of laments
upon his previous treachery which he dedicated, with apologies, to President Adolph Bubé. Groenewald’s ‘Ode to an Assassinated Security Branch Officer’ played cleverly on the flammable connotations of Van Vuuren’s name, in the celebrated line Flame to the fire they fed him/Blade to the vein they bled him . . . And it was quoted in Parliament to spontaneous applause.
Blanchaille of course, as I saw, knew the true story, knew that by some peculiar chain of logic both the Regime and the Front derived profit from the death of Van Vuuren. That this knowledge did not drive him to anger or despair but left him ravenous is testimony to the toughness of human nature or to the growing self-awareness of the fat ex-priest from the camps that nothing was what it seemed.
What a place this England was! Blanchaille stared at the English eggs, they were not like African eggs, they were pallid, waterish little things by comparison with the garish orange, cholesterol-packed bombs from the hot South. But he cooked three or four, even so, and a mound of bacon and ate without stopping, shovelling the food into his mouth and plugging it there with chunks of thin white bread, running a very fine line between sustenance and suffocation. In the cupboard beneath the sink he found half a bottle of Chianti and finished it off directly. It was as if there were spaces inside him he must fill, not simply hungry spaces but vulnerable sections which he must protect.
Afterwards he lay in the great white tub, soaking there beneath the benign gaze of the Duke of Wellington upon the wall, beneath Magdalena’s stockings, hanging above him from a cunning arrangement of lines, and looking, through the steam, like skinny vultures perched upon telephone wires. Magdalena’s depilatories, her soaps, her shampoos, some sort of nobbled glove affair, presumably meant for rubbing dry skin from the body, her back brush and sponge and bubble bath, all waited with the air of things that know their owner will not be returning. He lay in the bath and let the grime of the past hours float from him and begin to form a brown ring around the bath. Strangely comforting, this evidence of life, human dirt.
As he sat on the side of the bath drying his hair the doorbell rang.
Beside the door hung a photograph. It showed Magdalena in Moscow. She wore a white fur hat and a white fur coat. Beside her were the onion towers of the Kremlin. She was smiling radiantly. The photograph was a trophy. It showed how far and how successfully Magdalena had gone in the service of her cause. The picture was unassailable proof of her credentials as a radical, as a leading member of the Front, as one of the prime enemies of the Regime in exile. It insisted upon this achievement. And yet there were certain matters unexplained, certain questions he wanted to ask Magdalena which could not be answered by that photograph. ‘I have been to Moscow’, the photograph trumpeted. ‘Few of you have been further than Durban!’ True. But not enough.
It took him a few moments to recognise the man at the door. The hair was still as unruly as ever, growing now even more thickly above the ears. The eyebrows were more bushy than he remembered but the lips were the same. Oh yes, they were the same rather bulbous lips, wet from continuous nervous licking, the nose broad, the eyes soft waterish brown, and there it was, the characteristic pout with the lips pushed outwards into a little ‘o’, surrounded by soft white down. A fish pout. Kipsel!
‘Hello Blanchie, long time no see.’
That was that. No apology, no cringing and fumbling explanation, no sign of regret or mortification. Merely – ‘Hello Blanchie, long time no see.’ Blanchaille stood back from the door and let Kipsel enter. And there he was in the room, that same Kipsel who had grievously betrayed everyone he knew, had fled the country in utter despair, the man who had had the gall to go on existing after the treachery, which even those who benefited from it had condemned. Why had he not done the only decent thing and slashed his wrists or hanged himself from a stout beam? Instead Kipsel had gone out and got a job, in a northern university, and taught sociology. Of all things, sociology, that quasi-religious subject with its faintly moralistic ring. Perhaps more than anything the choice of the subject he taught had scandalised friend and enemy alike.
‘Why have you come?’
‘Because there was a question I wanted to ask Magdalena. I’ve turned it over in my mind for so many years now but I can’t come up with an answer. There is something I don’t understand. I’m not sure she’s got the answer. Or if she’d tell me if she knew. Or if I want to hear it. But I know I want to ask the question.’
‘You can ask me if you like.’
‘That’s kind. But in the first place I didn’t expect to see you. And secondly, you won’t do.’
‘I’m all you’ve got. Magdalena isn’t here. I don’t know where she is. She met me at the airport yesterday morning. She brought me here and then she disappeared.’
‘What are you doing here?’
‘Just passing through. My ticket gave me an unrequested stopover in London and I fly out tonight. Is that your question?’
Kipsel shook his head. His eyes were large and liquid. ‘No, that was plain curiosity. The real question goes back much further. To the days I spent in jail, and before that to my interrogation in Balthazar Buildings, after the business of the pylons. The official story is that I gave the police information about everybody connected with the explosions. I told them everything. In exchange I got a deal, I got immunity from prosecution. Only I didn’t! Do you hear, Blanchie? And for one bloody good reason. I didn’t have to tell them. They knew! They knew already! About me, Mickey, Magdalena, Dladla – everyone! For God’s sake, they even knew what brand of petrol we used, they had copies of the maps, recordings of our phone conversations . . . You name it, they had them. So I changed tack. I accepted everything – except where it concerned Magdalena. I confirmed everything they had was right –and dammit, it was! – except for the girl. She had known nothing of our plan, of the bombs, of the Azanian Liberation Front. She had been duped. She came along for the ride. She was only there because she loved me. That’s what I told them. I tried to save Magdalena. I am not Kipsel the traitor. But if not me, then who?’
Blanchaille looked at the pale, trembling creature before him. The round, downy cheeks quivered. Kipsel’s extraordinarily thick eyelashes rose and fell rapidly and his round mouth shone as his tongue licked the blubber lips. His hands flapped. He looked more like a fish than ever. A fish drowning in air.
‘I understand your question. If you didn’t tell the police, who did?’
Then the two friends flung their arms around each others’ necks and embraced. Lost in the world, how they rejoiced in each other’s company. Blanchaille told Kipsel of his arrival in London, of his meeting with Magdalena, of the visit to the Embassy, of the encounter with Father Lynch in a Soho street, of his warning and of Van Vuuren’s brave death in a Soho cellar. At this news Kipsel broke down and wept unashamedly. I heard, too, how Blanchaille told his friend of the two watchers outside the fishmonger’s and their strange name: Apple Two.
‘I also have a question,’ said Blanchaille. ‘Who is Apple One?’
And Kipsel replied. ‘Perhaps when we answer mine, we will answer yours.’
CHAPTER 16
Blanchaille knew the man at the airport bar as a fellow countryman from his accent. But he could also identify him from a picture he had just seen which showed him strolling along a Paris street. It had been printed in the English newspaper he bought on arriving at the airport. He was relieved to see that he drank brandy.
Is not the choice of strong drink one of the easiest, not to say one of the most pleasant ways of rising painlessly on the social scale, of impressing friends and confounding enemies? Or for that matter, of refuting the notion, lamentably widespread even in this day and age, that South Africans are only interested in beer and shooting kaffirs, and in either order. There is even a calumny, sadly current still, that a famous South African lager I must not name (suffice it to say that the beer in question is a product of a brewery owned by the Himmelfarber empire) is supposed to have run an advertising campaign with the slogan SHOOTI
NG KAFFIRS IS THIRSTY WORK. Now the truth is not (as some Government apologists maintain) that the campaign in question was run many years ago and is now thoroughly discredited. Nor that Curtis Christian Himmelfarber himself led the campaign to deface the posters, altering the wording to something less likely to incite racial hostility and with his own hand struck down the forgotten manager who first coined the infamous slogan, although it is a satisfying tale. Misunderstandings abound. There is even argument about the precise wording of the slogan. There are some who maintain that what it really said was: IS SHOOTING THIRSTY KAFFIRS’ WORK? Whilst others say it read: THIRSTY KAFFIRS IS SHOOTING WORK. Whereas in fact the truth is that the original slogan read simply: SHOOTING IS THIRSTY WORK, but unseen enemy hands across the land at a pre-arranged signal added the offending words, either with the intention of discrediting our country in the eyes of the world, or of embarrassing C.C. Himmelfarber who with his giant enterprise, Consolidated Holdings, had always been a stalwart champion of the progressive forces for political change in the country, or both. None the less the malicious legend lingers on and so when you come across a South African drinking not beer but brandy in a bar at Heathrow airport, as Blanchaille and Kipsel did as they waited to be called for their flight to Geneva, even if one does not particularly wish to meet another fellow South African at the time, a feeling of patriotic pride and relief suffuses the frame.
The so-called ‘kaffir beer’ scandal was a typical example of the concerted campaign waged by overseas dissidents, hostile forces and illegal organisations such as the Azanian Liberation Front, against the honest efforts of the Regime to offer justice to all its population groups. Such black propaganda was in turn just another adjunct of the universal campaign to destroy the white man in Southern Africa, which came to be known as the Total Onslaught.
It was to counter this campaign that the new minister of Ethnic Autonomy and Parallel Equilibriums, Augustus Kuiker, vowed to devote himself when he was appointed Deputy Leader of the Party by the President, Adolph Bubé. It had been Kuiker who replaced Hans Job when that decent man was driven from office by a scurrilous whispering campaign soon after he had succeeded the flamboyant but ailing merino millionaire, J.J. Vokker, when sudden ill health forced him to step down. This change had been the subject of a very cruel joke. ‘Who will replace a Vokker?’ went the question. ‘Only a Hansjob!’ came the reply and the whole country doubled up with ribald laughter. Even those who should have known better held their sides. It was then that the formidable Kuiker was appointed and the laughing had to stop. ‘Our Gus’, people called him, and shivered. The face of granite, the lips of a cement-mixer. It was Kuiker who had appointed Trudy Yssel to the newly formed Department of Communications with the brief to put our country’s case abroad with all the punch she could muster. It was regarded as a brave move.
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