They watched him walk away, blindly shouldering his way through the crowds. They’re ruined, these people, Blanchaille thought. They don’t know who they are or where they’re going. Once nothing would stop them doing their duty as they saw it and that was to defend their people and their way of life. And they were hated for it. Good, they accepted that hate. But then the new ideas took over, they got wise, got modern, took on the world. Once upon a time nothing would make them give up the principle that the tribe would survive because God wished it so – now there’s nothing they won’t do just to hang on a little longer. Uncle Paul’s other place is a bad dream, it takes them back to the velskoen years, the days of biltong and boere biscuits, of muzzle loaders, Bibles, of creeping backward slowly like an armour-plated ox, out of range of the future. Some no doubt wished to go back, as Nokkles did, wanted to go back to Old Ma Dubbeltong’s department, back to the old dream of a country fit for farmers, where a man was free to ride his acres, shoot his game, father his children, lash his slaves, free from drought, English, Jews, missionaries, rinderpest, blacks, coolies and tax-collectors. But back there waited the hateful legend, the impossible story, the triumphant British, the defeated people, the exiled president, the store of gold, the secret heaven somewhere in Switzerland, the last refuge of a broken tribe.
‘What do you think?’ Kipsel asked.
‘I think he’s Trudy’s detective and he’s lost Trudy. All he’s left with is what she taught him. He’s dead. He’s spinning out of control. He’s like a space probe gone loco. Nothing can save him unless he finds another mother-ship to lock onto, or another planet to land on. He’s spinning into space. And space is cold and big and blacker than Africa.’
On the plane service was polite but cool and they didn’t get a drink until they asked the stewardess. ‘It’s a short flight, we prefer passengers to ask,’ she told them. ‘Except in first class.’
At one point the curtains closing off the first class cabin opened to reveal Nokkles sprawled across two seats. He was drinking champagne and his hand rested on the neck of the bottle in a protective yet rather showy manner. In the way that a man might rest his hand on the neck of an expensive girl whom he wishes to show off to the world. It was a gesture of desperate pride. It turned its back on Boers and shooting kaffirs and beer. It looked outward. It was confident, modern, worldly. Much had been invested in it.
CHAPTER 17
Of their arrival at Geneva Airport there is to be noted only that Ernest Nokkles was swept into the arms of that growing number of castaway agents abroad, all now increasingly anxious about the disappearances of their various chiefs and determined to reattach themselves to centres of influence or persons of importance whenever they appeared.
My dream showed me Nokkles, awash in good champagne, immediately claimed as he left the Customs area by three men who introduced themselves as Chris Dieweld, Emil Moolah and Koos Spahr. Two members of this burly trio claimed to have been recently attached to the office of the President, had travelled with him as far as London in search of medical treatment and there he had given them the slip. And I saw how these big men shivered and trembled at their loss.
Chris Dieweld, Emil Moolah and Koos Spahr surrounded Trudy’s detective demanding to know what news he had brought. Dieweld was big and blond with a great cows-lick combed back from his forehead like a frozen wave, Moolah thin and springy with a mouth full of gold teeth and Spahr, bespectacled, with a round expressionless face and astonishingly bright blue eyes, gave no clue to his expertise with the parcel bomb. Nokkles knew Spahr as one of the men on Kuiker’s security staff. The others he thought he knew vaguely from photographs of the President in foreign parts. Dieweld, he vaguely remembered, had disgraced himself by fainting when a demented maize farmer had attempted to shoot the President at the official opening of the Monument to Heroes of the Mauritian Invasion.
Nokkles’ first question was about Bubé. The President was in Geneva, he had it on the best authority. Trace the President and surely the others could not be far away?
The security men looked glum. They too had heard of the President’s visit to London. They had heard he was on his way to Geneva. They had met every plane. But the old fox must have disguised himself because he eluded them.
‘Remember,’ said Moolah, ‘the President visited most of the European capitals during his celebrated tour and was never once recognised. What chance did we stand?’
As for Blanchaille and Kipsel, they stood on the moving pavement carrying them towards passport control and Customs, gazing with fascination at the advertisements for watches sculpted from coins, or carved from ingots, the offer of hotels so efficient they operated without manpower and the multitude of advertisements in cunningly illuminated panels alongside the moving pavement showing deep blue lakes and icing sugar alps. Most of all they stared at the multitudinous shapes and forms of gold to be purchased, ingots, coins, pendants, lozenges; some cute and almost edible came in little cubes, fat and yellow like processed cheese. How extraordinary that so much treasure should be produced from the deep, black, stony heart of their country.
This reverie was broken by a chauffeur in smart green livery who carried a sign reading ‘Reverend Blanchaille’ and announced that he had instructions to transport them to ‘the big house on the hill’, where a friend awaited them.
Who were they to argue? Alone and unloved in a strange land? However close to the end of their journey they might be (for after all ‘the big house of the hill’ was a tantalising description) offers of friendship from whatever quarter were difficult to resist.
It is a sign of the desperate state to which the once-powerful security men had been reduced that they, seeing Blanchaille and Kipsel escorted to a great limousine, should have decided to follow them, despite Nokkles’ warning that these men were deluded pilgrims come to Switzerland to seek Kruger’s dream kingdom and that they were in real life a disgraced traitor and a renegade priest. As Chris Dieweld put it: ‘We’re lost without someone to follow.’
The chauffeur pointed to the grey Mercedes keeping discreetly behind them. ‘We’ll lose them,’ he promised.
The road ran for miles along the lakeside. The lower slopes of the mountain were thickly crammed with vines, every inch of land terraced to its very edges, the dense greenness tumbling down to the roadside, vine leaves stirring in the passing breeze their car made. Then on the other side of the road the vines continuing their downward plunge to the very water’s edge. Up ahead were larger mountains folding one into another and covered in a thick dark fur of vegetation. It amazed him, the roughness of this vegetation, its harsh contours. No doubt it was different in the winter when the snows softened and smoothed away the detail, but now, under the sun hot and high, under a light-blue sky, there was a rough, wiry, raw determination about the way these shrubs and trees clung to the mountain side, a lack of softness, an absence of prettiness that reminded him very strongly of Africa. After running some way along the lakeside they began climbing steeply. The driver pointed to the town of Montreux below and to a small tongue of land jutting out into the lake, that was the prison castle, Château Chillon, very famous. They climbed through the thick fuzz of bush and forest, the harsh unlovely vegetation. Here and there boulders broke through the dark green and nearer the summits were ridges of grey stone, mountain skulls, patched and balding. And even higher still was the snow, even in this June heat, last year’s snow, icy grey.
And here was a grand house, a castle within its own walls, but no rearing bulk of dull stones, more of a Schloss, a château, whitewashed, trim and solid. Then they were driving through the great wrought-iron gates with their chevrons and swans intricately worked, along a gravel drive up to great oaken doors.
Their host in his big solid house at the end of a long drive, behind high walls and wrought-iron gates, awaited them on the steps. With his hand outstretched, wearing the dark business suit, the well-shaped smile so familiar from a thousand press photographs and television, with his head cocked to one
side, sparse grey hair neatly combed, the round intelligent face with bright eyes that gave him the look of an intelligent gun dog, the characteristic quick shrewd glance from behind thick lashes, the quiet, formidable air of authority. It was very difficult for them to suppress their astonishment.
‘What? Himmelfarber, you!’ Blanchaille said.
Kipsel said, ‘It really is another bloody exodus. It’s a diaspora. If Himmelfarber the mine-owner has left, then it’s all finished. Everyone will leave. You won’t be able to move anywhere overseas for fleeing South Africans.’
‘But I haven’t left,’ said the mine-owner. ‘This is merely my summer place. I spend the African winter here.’
Blanchaille turned on his heel. ‘Have a happy holiday,’ he said.
‘I have a proposition,’ said Himmelfarber.
‘We’re not open to any proposals,’ Blanchaille said very firmly.
‘We may as well hear what he has to say,’ said Kipsel, ‘now that we’re here.’
‘Let’s talk inside,’ Himmelfarber led them through the house into an enormous lounge furnished in white leather with thick pink carpets on the floor, a large generous room looking through french windows onto the lawn and large circular lily pond. Himmelfarber stood at the bar at the far end and poured them drinks. A little fruit punch, he said, of his own making, light and refreshing.
On the walls of this room were blow-ups of black and white photographs of miners working below ground, drilling the rock face, or loading the ore, coming off shift. Happy pictures of a classroom full of new recruits learning Fanagalo. Other photographs, far more disturbing, showed men terribly mutilated, crushed and bleeding; they also saw corpses lying on sheets in what must have been a morgue, rows of them, they stared at the ceiling wide-eyed and with quite terrible, unfrightened detachment. Why should Himmelfarber keep these reminders about him?
Blanchaille considered the entrepreneur. Curtis Christian Himmelfarber was the brilliant son of a brilliant family. The family had been established by the remarkable Julius Himmelfarber, a penniless Latvian emigrant to the South African goldfields who had founded a great mining empire. Old Julius had been an intimate of Cecil Rhodes and Milner, a drinking companion of Barney Barnato, a sworn enemy of Kruger who had called him ‘Daardie Joodse smous’. . . that Jewish pedlar . . . Julius Himmelfarber had bought Blydag, his first mine and one of the premier producers of all time, for a little more than was now paid for one single ounce of its gold, and the foundation of a great financial empire had been laid.
Frank Harris, the noted Irish philanderer on a visit to South Africa shortly before the Boer War began, had been favourably impressed.
Harris had met Julius Himmelfarber and liked him well enough to leave a portrait of him: ‘. . . cultured, urbane, very pointed in conversation, a gentle Croesus, a philosopher miner, a flower of the Semitic type, markedly superior to your Anglo-Saxon sportsmen.’ But then Harris, of course, had held a long-standing prejudice against the Anglo-Saxon sportsman, for, as he told Cecil Rhodes in a bizarre meeting which took place on top of Table Mountain while Rhodes presumably gazed from this fairest Cape in all the world towards distant Cairo, it was perfectly understandable that God in his youth should have chosen the Jews for his special people, for they were after all an attractive, lovable race. But that later he should have changed his mind in favour of the English, as Rhodes contended, showed that he must be in his dotage.
Curtis Christian Himmelfarber, who was now handing out drinks in the pink and white room to Blanchaille and Kipsel, would not have been described by Harris as the flower of the Semitic type. In any event, the Himmelfarbers had long since severed the connection. Curtis Christian was an Anglican and this faith, along with his mines, had been part of his inheritance. The change in faith had taken place when his fierce grandfather, Aaron, always a mercurial man, the ne’er-do-well of the family, had persuaded investors that a local mine under his control was capable of producing richer amounts than anyone had suspected, and displayed samples to prove it. Alas, a surveyor’s report revealed that the mine was likely to produce far less than promised and Aaron found himself in jail, awaiting trial. It was there that he underwent a spectacular conversion at the hands of a travelling Baptist minister. Naturally the entire family followed suit. They did not long stay with the Baptists but moved instead, down the years, by degrees, with a stately assurance that reminded one of a luxury liner heading for its home port, from the choppy seas of Baptist rhetoric into the calmer, shallower waters of the Church of England and in these pacific waters had floated ever since.
The Himmelfarbers were the closest thing to a Royal family the country had. Each member of this family received adulatory notice in the media. Everyone in the country was familiar with the little vagaries of the Himmelfarbers. There was Waverley, C.C.’s wife, tall, tanned and fit. She appeared often at fund-raising dinners, drove jeeps for famine relief, organised milk for the townships and free school books for the kids. There was Elspeth, the eldest daughter and the ‘serious one’, a lawyer. There was Cookie, the madcap gadabout youngest, with a taste for high living and drugs, a kind of painter, and reportedly a great strain on her parents. And then of course Timmo, the son and heir, dashing, eligible, often pictured behind the wheel of a racing car, or in his yacht off Cape Point. Photographers had accompanied him on his first day of military service. That service was later to be marred by a scandal when it was rumoured that Timmo, who had trained with a crack paratroop squadron ‘The Leopard’s Claw’, had been excused jumps over hostile territory. The chiefs of staff took the unusual step of refuting the rumour and reported that young Himmelfarber always jumped with his comrades and, what was more, he had one of the highest ‘score’ rates (the name given to the jump/kill ratios), in the entire regiment.
‘I see you’re examining my photographs,’ said Himmelfarber. ‘These pictures, you know what they are? They’re photographs of my workers and show the full extent of their employment. The dangers of mining are not disguised. Accidents at the rock face, drilling accidents, men hurt in rockfalls, or ramming, that is to say when loading the trucks with gold-bearing rock. I wonder if you have any idea what a mine looks like underground? Imagine a buried Christmas tree, the trunk is the mine shaft plunging down hundreds of meters. Off the shaft the stopes radiate like branches. At the far tips of these branches is the thread of gold. Think of it rather like tinsel that you drape over the branches of your Christmas tree. Gold mining is deep, dark, hot, dangerous work. You must break a great deal of rock to claim a little of the glitter, a couple of tons of ore give you little more than twenty grammes of gold. I keep these pictures on my wall to remind me where I come from, how I live and what it costs.’ Himmelfarber brought their drinks across. ‘This is a good light punch. I hope you’ll enjoy it. Fruit juice spiked with rum and lemon, mixed with a little pomegranate, satsuma segments, some passion fruit and thin shavings of watermelon. Shall we drink to the health of our President? I believe he needs our good wishes,’ Himmelfarber smiled, and raised his glass. ‘But that’s another story. I haven’t got you here to talk about poor Bubé.’
‘Why are we here?’ Blanchaille demanded.
Himmelfarber looked surprised. ‘To listen to a few stories of my own. Such as the story of Popov.’
‘Do you really mean that?’ Kipsel demanded incredulously. ‘Do you know the true story of Popov?’
This is where Blanchaille waded in. ‘Now just a moment,’ he said. ‘Let’s get this straight before you start swallowing everything he tells you. Himmelfarber here and his firm, Consolidated Holdings, have propped up successive governments for as long as anyone can remember. Himmelfarber buys defence bonds, sits on armaments boards, advises the Regime on its business deals, he even plays golf with Bubé.’
‘That’s one way of looking at it. I also fund the Democratic People’s Party, I’m a public supporter of racial freedom and Consolidated Holdings is one of the most enlightened employers in the country. It has more black
personnel managers than any other, it was the first to employ Indian salesmen, our coloured cost accountants are internationally known and bright young Liberals join us in the sure knowledge that their ideas will be welcomed and acted upon.’
‘For God’s sake, Ronnie, you’re not going to stand there and swallow that stuff, are you? Why don’t you ask him about Popov?’
Kipsel’s eyes widened. ‘You knew Popov?’
‘Knew him! Himmelfarber ran him!’ Blanchaille shouted.
‘I asked Mr Himmelfarber, Blanchie, let him answer for himself.’
Himmelfarber placed four fingers over the rim of his glass and put his mouth to the liquid and laughed softly, a frothy resonance. ‘Now you see the trouble with our holy friend here. He’s very much the obsessive South African type. He’s more of a danger to our country than the entire Total Onslaught. And d’you know why? It’s because he combines this horrible puritanical streak on the one hand with an absolutely crusading ignorance on the other. Your friend Blanchaille suffers from the characteristic South African disease. He wishes to blame people. No, Mr Kipsel, I can’t promise you the true story of Popov. But I can give you my version.’
‘That will do,’ said Kipsel, and he helped himself to more punch.
‘But before you can understand the importance of Popov, you must listen to my story of why we love the Russians.’
‘Do we love the Russians?’ Kipsel asked.
‘In our own way, yes we do. We have something in common which completely overrides our political differences – our gold sales. This is only natural since the Soviet Union and the Republic between them possess most of the gold in the world. It’s obviously in our mutual interest to regulate the supply of that gold to the world markets and thereby to control the price. Remember that every fluctuation of a few dollars up or down is a total gain or loss of millions to our economies. Let me give you an example of the sort of co-operation I have in mind. For years gold sales were handled in London. But we found that successive British governments were becoming too damn inquisitive about our sales. So we pulled out. London till then was the gold market, the next moment we were gone. On our side naturally it gave the Regime great pleasure to kick the Limeys in the teeth, it’s an extension of the Boer War, of course – I quote to you President Bubé’s choice remark: “We’ve got nothing against the British – it’s the English we hate.” The Russians also had their reasons for pulling out. They said they were concerned about security at Heathrow. But they weren’t really worried about the stuff being stolen, although it happens from time to time. What they really objected to was having people sniffing around their gold because word might get out about the amount they were selling. So off we went to Switzerland and there, with the price doubling and redoubling like crazy, we had a high old time in our Zurich years. In fact so much gold was sold that the Swiss threw caution to the winds for once, and seeing a chance of making even more money the Government slapped on a sales tax, something a little over five per cent I seem to recall. It’s a long time ago now. Well, that was a very bad mistake. It wasn’t that we objected to the Swiss becoming even richer but having that tax meant that the dealers had to show how much gold they were selling, from which could be calculated the amount that we were putting onto the market. We were right back where we were before. And the amounts of gold we were making available were in danger of being anticipated, even discounted. Even then we might have hung on, but the price crashed as it does every few years and the Swiss dealers, who had grown fat in the good years, dragged their feet over selling our newly mined metal at a much lower price than in the old good gilded days of yore. So back we went to London with some of our business. We and our friends. Not all our business. Never again all of it. What a welcome! Kisses on both cheeks from the Bank of England, no unseemly taxes, or too close a scrutiny of sales – our friends were most insistent about that – and everything looked like sweetness and light.’
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