Kruger's Alp

by Christopher Hope

  They sat trussed like chickens all day. At one stage Mevrou Fritz came in and used the ironing table, complaining increasingly about their presence and of the trouble which the arrival of Gus Kuiker and Trudy Yssel had caused her. ‘This is Government property. I’m here as a housekeeper, I see to it that the tourists don’t break things or take things. I sell them postcards. I polish the floors. I dust the Kruger deathbed and I straighten the pictures. It is dull and lonely work, far from home and the last thing I expect is to have to share my extremely cramped quarters with a jumped-up little hussy who’s too big for her boots and a Government minister on the run who spends most of the day drinking. And now I have prisoners in the cellar.’

  Blanchaille and Kipsel were not fed. They were released from their chairs only to go to the lavatory and then only under Gus Kuiker’s gun.

  Later that night Trudy Yssel lay in bed. Down the corridor from the small spare bedroom they could hear the continual low grumblings of Mevrou Fritz now relegated to this little corner of the house, as if, she said, she were a bloody servant, or a skivvy.

  Minister Gus Kuiker poured whisky into a tooth glass. Trudy Yssel looked at him. It was hard to believe that this unshaven drunk was the Minister confidently tipped to succeed President Bubé. But then she considered her own position. Despite the attempt to maintain appearances, the carefully groomed nails, the chiffon négligé, the impeccable hair, it was hard to believe that she was the Secretary of the Department of Communications.

  ‘What do you recommend, Trudy?’

  Trudy looked at him pityingly. ‘Why ask me? You brought them in here. Now you deal with them. Why couldn’t you have left them in the garden? Then they would have come in at the official time, with all the other tourists, looked around and left. None the wiser.’

  ‘Maybe they’re spies,’ said Kuiker. ‘Maybe the Regime sent them to find us.’

  ‘Well, that doesn’t matter now – does it? You’ve found them. They know who we are. Worse still, they know where we are. What’s to be done?’

  ‘Get rid of them, I suppose,’ said Kuiker.

  The blood had dried on Blanchaille’s face and on the ropes that strapped him in. He blamed himself for not anticipating something like this. Kipsel was hard put to find anything to say that would cheer him up. When Kuiker arrived the general mood of gloom darkened still further. He pulled up a chair and sat opposite them, he swung his pistol around the finger guard in a manner so casual Kipsel would not have expected it in a police trainee. He was very drunk. His midnight blue dressing gown was monogrammed with a great G gulping down a smaller K. The stubble on his chin was longer and tinged with grey. His feet were bare and the pyjama trousers which protruded beyond his dressing-gown creased and rather grubby around the unhealthy whiteness of his ankles.

  ‘Why are you here? Who sent you?’ Kuiker demanded.

  Blanchaille ignored him.

  ‘If we’d known you were holed up here we’d never have come,’ said Kipsel. ‘Come to that – what are you doing here? The papers said you were in Philadelphia.’

  ‘We were betrayed in Philadelphia. That black shit Looksmart dropped us in it. He and that oily priest bastard brother of his got together and destroyed us in America. Years of work wiped out in a few minutes. Our plans broadcast all over the bloody country. Now, at home, they’ve turned on us. We heard today that there are warrants out for our arrest, it seems that the Regime, desperate to find somebody to blame has settled on us. It is we, it seems, who have been rifling the treasury, absconding with public funds, hiring executive jets and wining and dining our way around the world, all for our own selfish ends. They are saying that we went abroad once too often and were seduced by foreign ways and luxuries. But they, they stayed at home, they are the only ones who remained pure. They will preserve racial amity, only they can withstand the Total Onslaught, they have never been corrupted. They are no longer pretending that we are in Philadelphia, they have officially announced that we are on the run and what’s more the bastards have taken credit for making the announcement, for setting up an enquiry into the misuse of public funds, for the dismantling of the Department of Communications, they have resurrected the dead official, Ferreira, they have announced that this good and faithful official discovered the beginnings of this rotten business, as if small peculiarities in the movements of Government funds which we handled are worth twopence compared to the much larger, one could say total, distortion and perversion of reality the Regime has organised against us.’

  ‘Do you know who killed Ferreira?’

  ‘Who? You mean what! What killed Ferreira? I’ll tell you what killed Ferreira. Curiosity killed Ferreira, and ignorance and the refusal to operate within the parameters of the practical. The mind of an accountant. The insistence on perfection, his own perfection. The stubborn desire to go by the book. His book. His books! The refusal to recognise that we were just proper people doing what we could to change things for the better, to win our country a place again in the world. To fight. And we had to fight because we were at war, see. And you can’t behave like you’re in a monastery garden when you’re at war with the rest of the world. But ignorance and pig-headed fucking stubborness chiefly – that’s what killed Ferreira. He wouldn’t listen, he wouldn’t learn, he wouldn’t adapt. So he died.’

  The Minister lurched forward waving his revolver and perhaps in his rage might have killed the prisoners had not Mevrou Fritz bustled in at that moment with a fresh pile of ironing and complained that the prisoners were beginning to smell.

  ‘They’ll stink a lot more when they’re dead,’ said Kuiker.

  Kipsel kept perfectly calm. ‘This place as such is of no importance to us, it’s a shell, a ghost house. We only came here because it’s the start of our mission. We’re not fighting the war against you. We’re looking for the other Kruger House, we’re retiring.’

  Kuiker made a sound, somewhere between a belch and a laugh. ‘There is no safe house, no garden of refuge, no asylum, no home for the likes of you – or me. And shall I tell you how I know? For one very good reason. If there were such a place you can be damn sure I would have found it by now.’ He swayed and almost fell, ran a hand through his hair, pounded himself several times on the chest and hawking phlegm turned abruptly on his heel they heard him clumping upstairs.

  That night when Kuiker got into bed he said, ‘There’s no persuading them. They’re mad. I tried to explain this is the end of the road. This is where we turn and fight. But they seriously believe in some promised land. We’ll have to finish with them.’

  ‘Let me try,’ said Trudy Yssel.

  Early next morning she fetched the prisoners from the cellar. Blanchaille and Kipsel were unshaven and smelt badly and after days without food they were weak on their feet. But Trudy smiled at them as if she were taking them on a picnic. Before the first visitors arrived at Uncle Paul’s House she wanted to take them on a little tour, she said. She wore a spotted blue dress with pearl ear-rings and was unnaturally cheerful, relaxed and chatted to them as if she might have been any houseproud wife showing off her establishment and not the mistress of a hunted Government minister with a price on his head and she the disgraced and vilified civil servant accused of spiriting away thousands upon thousands of public money.

  ‘Don’t you think, Father Blanchaille, that the tour is nowadays the chief way we now have of communicating information to busy people? We have a tour of the game reserve to learn about animals. We tour the townships to show our black people living in peace. We tour the operational areas of our border wars to discover how well we are doing. Talking of war, do you know I have toured forward areas where it felt as if the war had been turned off for the day, like a tap, or a radio broadcast, or a light. You expected when you got back to your tent at night to find a small note on your pillow saying –“The conflict has been suspended during your visit by the kind agreement of the forces concerned”, but of course you knew that wasn’t so when you heard of American senators caught
in the bombing raid, or a group of nuns from one of the aid organisations like “Catholics Against Cuba”, had been ripped to pieces by shrapnel. Follow me, gentlemen. Don’t hang back.’

  The place was kept spotless, a gleaming polished purity, it seemed to them that Mevrou Fritz must have caught the Swiss passion for cleanliness. It smelt of elbow grease, it smelt of floor wax. It was heavy, dark, depressing and virtually empty. Their footsteps echoed on the smooth boards. ‘Of course none of the furniture remained when the old man died. It was sold off. The house now comes under the Department of Works and they’ve replaced what they can with copies, or pieces of the period. But it’s still pretty bad. A bit of a tomb really. When the old man died his body was taken back to South Africa, again on a Dutch warship, and given a hero’s burial. That was the end of his association with Switzerland. There was no money left here, the furniture was sold off, the house given up and any talk of the missing millions was simply a myth. And it remained, as General Smuts said, merely something “to spook the minds of great British statesmen”. The time has come to stop talking of these dreams. We must wake up. We’ve been woken up, the Minister and I. We’re considering our position. When we’re ready we will move.’

  ‘I think you’re on the run,’ said Blanchaille.

  ‘You’re in hiding,’ said Kipsel. ‘We read the papers.’

  ‘Bullshit,’ said Trudy pleasantly. ‘This house is Government property. As Government people we’re entitled to stay here.’

  ‘You said you were getting ready. For what?’ Blanchaille asked.

  ‘Our President is expected shortly. Once he arrives we’ll be in a position to put certain thoughts to our Government at home. We plan to hold talks with our Government.’

  ‘What makes you think they’ll talk to you?’

  She smiled again. ‘We would rather talk to them than to the world press.’

  ‘Blackmail,’ said Blanchaille.

  ‘We won’t be blamed for having done our duty. When we’ve cleared our name we shall return in triumph.’

  ‘And until then?’ Kipsel asked.

  ‘We will wait here. In the Kruger House. You believe in the sad story of a rest home for the refugees the Old President set up. You should be the first to understand the use we put this place to. Uncle Paul would have understood.’

  ‘You don’t understand what has happened back home,’ Kipsel said. ‘They’ve dispensed with you. When Ferreira found the figures, publicised them and died, he blew the matter wide open. The Regime stepped away from its anointed Minister and his favourite. First they covered for you. But now they’re joining the crowds calling for your blood. You should be going where we’re going.’

  ‘There is no place where you’re going,’ said Trudy. She led them into a small bedroom. ‘This is Uncle Paul’s death room. Here is the actual death bed. Well no, not the actual death bed, but a replica.’

  They saw the dark wood of the bedstead. The sturdy head board, the starkly simple bulk of the bed with its white linen counterpane. On a small bedside table stood a vase of pink carnations. Thick green drapes in the window and fuzzy white net curtains strained the sunlight to a weak, pallid wash. A huge old-fashioned radiator stood in the corner and a large carved chair stood very prominently by the bedside. The seat and back of the chair were decorated in bold floral patterns and surmounted by crossed muzzle-loaders. This was a recurring emblem throughout the house, the Boerish equivalent of the fleur-de-lis. Other popular symbols about the house were powder horns, ox wagons and lions. Lions had always been associated with Uncle Paul. Hadn’t he wrestled one to death before his thirteenth birthday? Or outrun one? And had he not been known as the Lion of the North? Or was it of the South? Blanchaille couldn’t remember. All presidents had been identified with larger powerful beasts, or weapons. President Bubé had been known as Buffalo, or more colloquially as ‘Buffels Bubé’, while the young and thrusting Wim Vollenhoven, ‘Bomber’ Jan Vollenhoven as they called him, the Vice-President, continued the old tradition.

  Trudy sat on the bed. Blanchaille was struck by the ease with which she committed this sacrilege. Here indeed was one of the new people. He pushed open the french windows and stepped on to the veranda where the flag gave its leathery rattle.

  ‘Our belief, our brief, our mission was straightforward. In this matter of putting across our country’s position we should attack. Fuck sitting on our arses any longer. Get out there and sell the bastards our bag of goodies. Don’t try and win through to the big men overseas, spot the young ones in advance, pick them when they begin to come up the tree, and gamble. Don’t expect the foreign newspapers to print nice stories about you, the only reason they like producing stories about you is because you’re so horrible. So don’t wait for them to tell your story, buy a space and tell it yourself. If possible buy the fucking newspaper, radio station, investors’ bulletin, whatever. If that won’t do then buy the owners lunch, dinner, drinks as often as possible, have them around to your place for confidential chats. If governments are against you, fly their MPs over, show them the game reserves, the war zones, the beer halls, peace in the townships. Play golf with them. Did you know we were the ones who got Bubé to play golf with the newspaper owners? We made him take lessons, even though he moaned like hell at the time. Well, today, they’re saying back home that we stole the money for the golf clubs. They say it was Government money. Well of course it was bloody Government money! Where else would it come from? And what’s more the Government knew it was Government money, because that was the deal. I said to them, I spoke to half the damn cabinet, that half of it which matters: Kuiker, the President himself, Vollenhoven and of course General Greaterman, the Defence Minister. I said to them, look, I want permission to go ahead on a propaganda offensive. O.K. they said. Wait, I said, till I finish. It’s going to cost a bomb. If I need to send an editor away with his mistress to Madeira, then I’ll do it. If I have to bribe a newspaper editor, then I need the funds immediately. No questions asked. If I need to hire an executive jet to fly a party of journalists into the country via Caracas or Palm Springs or anywhere else on the globe, then I want the wherewithal to do it – without anybody raising an eyebrow. Bubé was there and he wanted to know how much this campaign would cost. I gave it to him straight. Millions, I said. He took it on the chin. I should start as soon as possible and the funds would be forthcoming. So I went ahead, and I stress this, with full official backing. And I’ve done so from that day to this. They all knew. President Bubé knew. Vollenhoven knew. Greaterman knew. And approved. The money was raised from various departments so as not to cause too great a dent in individual budgets. So much from Defence, so much from Security, so much from Tourism, everybody had to cough up their share and the money was then transferred to Switzerland and passed through various Swiss banks. And let me here say a word for the Swiss banks which have been bloody unfairly slandered. We have a great debt of gratitude to the Swiss banks. They have raised loans for us when nobody else would and we were damned hard up for foreign capital. They’ve safeguarded difficult deposits, overseen delicate payments and observed the strictest confidentiality in sensitive matters such as the volume of gold sales. To suggest that we bribe certain Swiss banks to hold secret funds is a gross lie. And a nonsense. They did it for nothing. Well, for a small holding percentage. And even there we get a discount from them. No, I won’t hear a word said against the Swiss banks. Where would South Africa be today without them?’

  ‘Why were you denounced then? Why have you made a run for it? Why are you hiding out here?’ Kipsel demanded, scratching blearily at the thick stubble on his jaw, and shivering slightly in the early morning damp rising from the lake.

  ‘We were fingered by the Regime! They were frightened to own up to a mission they had sanctioned. They wanted scapegoats.’

  ‘And the story about the missing money, the Swiss accounts, the house in Capri, the apartment on the Italian Riviera?’

  ‘The houses were part of the job, safe houses
for our people, reception centres for new recruits, entertainment bases for important visiting VIPs who didn’t want the world to know that they were spending the weekend with South Africans. The houses were used in the course of operations, they weren’t holiday cottages, you know. As for the money we’re supposed to hold – what money?’

  Blanchaille looked out across the big green lawn to the lake. It was on this balcony the old man had sat, the Bible open on his knees, peering blearily across the water at the big blue mountains on the other side. The locals had paused, he knew, as they passed by and pointed up at the famous old exile, Uncle Paul on his balcony. The lake lapped at the bottom of the garden. The gulls made their skidding contact with the water, claws angled for the landing as if not knowing for certain where they were putting down until they had actually landed, distrustful of the medium. The old man had sat on his chair, solid as the mountains, deep as the lake. Perhaps he had seen and admired this tireless energy of the gulls, this compulsion to take off and land, but that energy always tempered by caution, their wildness calmed into life-preserving habit. Away to the right was the town of Montreux, it crowded down to the water’s edge along a gentle crammed curve of densely packed buildings on the shore, pretending to be a small Mediterranean port. But here was no sea, this was still water, a great placid lake lying in the bowl of the mountains. Those mountains in the distance, the big blue ones across the water that he knew were in France, if one screwed up one’s eyes and gazed blindly until they began to water, they were vaguely reminiscent of mountains in the Cape Peninsula. But of course the old refugee and his rented accommodation wouldn’t have known the Cape mountains either, he’d seldom been out of the Transvaal veld until, that is, he began his great last journey into exile.

  The flag-pole on the balcony was slanted at an angle of forty-five degrees and from it hung the familiar blue and white and orange colours. Very carefully Blanchaille lowered the flag to half-mast.