Текст книги "Kruger's Alp"

Автор книги: Christopher Hope

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Текущая страница: 10 (всего у книги 25 страниц)

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 final 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.

That Blanchaille should have been welcomed by an elderly military man who promised him a selection of tales not without historical interest to be told by a collection of ‘rather special’ ladies, might have surprised Blanchaille had his experience in the holding cells not destroyed his remaining reserves of surprise.

Visser talked to Blanchaille of the old connection between the Regime and the Nazi movement as he conducted him to his room and from there to the bar. ‘Why did they support Hitler? On the basis that my enemy’s enemy is my friend. Tradition played a part as well. The Kaiser had supported Paul Kruger against the British in the old days and that was a pretty good precedent for his descendants to do the same. There had been German support for the Boer fighters for freedom. Ergo — the later liaison between the Austrian housepainter and the hairy little rockspiders who run our country. A marriage of true minds.’

The hotel was huge and empty, built of steel and glass and filled with the hiss of the air-conditioning. The tinted windows did not open. Brown chocolate carpet climbed the walls. Visser stood behind the bar, a great polished bank of teak surrounded by a brass rail, and I saw in my dream how he summoned the first of the four girls whom he described as hostesses dedicated to the refreshment of guests at the Palace ‘with a selection of stories and even an exhibition or two’, he said. The first of the storytellers was Freia.

Freia was blonde, she wore denim shorts, Visser described her as ‘our conductor’. She did not look like it. Her hair was scraped back and held in place by a blue Alice-band, she was crumpled and yawning and had obviously been sleeping. Across the front of her tee-shirt was the map of Switzerland cunningly placed so that there rose up from it the twin alps of her breasts. She ordered ‘the usual’ from Visser, a green cocktail in a frosty glass and licking the sugar from the rim with a sharp pink tongue, she began in a voice dreamy and lilting as if she recalled something recent and strange, but which Blanchaille soon understood from the expert timing and sardonic emphases of her delivery to be a story often told.

‘I used to be a tour conductor. I worked in the townships in the days when we still ran tours. I was in Gus Kuiker’s department – you know Gus Kuiker? Augustus Kuiker, the Minister? My job was to show tourists around, the official tourists who get invited out here, ageing film stars, American senators, elderly prima donnas, industrialists, pop-singers, tennis players, members of Anglican investigative commissions.’ Freia laughed, drained her glass and held it out for a refill. ‘I remember my last tour. Eighteen English footballers and one of their big men from British television, Cliff Irving, a pointy fellow with a sparse beard, balding, small bright black eyes, hands like soup-plates. They’d been bribed, of course. They’re all bribed. When they come out here the townships are on every itinerary. Obligatory. There were, besides, a few Japanese businessmen, good loyal friends. It’s the pig-iron they come for, or did, years ago. We’d stopped looking on them as little yellow devils with funny eyes and saw them as honorary white men. Loaded with cameras, of course. And a batch of Israelis in funny hats. We weren’t supposed to know they were Israelis. They were described as a Chilean judo team. A smattering of Germans, industrialists or bankers, came too. The soccer tourists from Britain were ageing hacks for the most part, best years behind them, anxious to make more money in three weeks than they’d ever made before in their lives. Nice enough fellows, but forever making speeches. At the drop of a hat they’d tell you that they were really interested in pushing back the barriers of racial segregation, playing township teams, coaching barefoot piccaninnies, and so on. They climbed aboard loaded with coolbags full of beer because they’d just been to the brewery which sponsored their visit and put them on show. They were ticking nicely by the time they got to us and the famous TV sports journalist had trouble calming them down. First stop was the 200-megawatt generator which could supply millions of kilowatt hours, all the Japanese taking notes, very impressed to learn we were supplying electricity not only to our own industries but to big power stations hundreds and hundreds of miles away in independent countries to the north. Everybody needs our power. We told these countries. “Look, you deal with us. Or nothing. You either pay or you shut up.” My tourists always glazed over when I hit them with pig-iron and electric power figures. But they had to get the sell. Not easy for me, with everyone gazing dutifully out of the windows at the cooling towers, except the Japanese. Pretty boring stuff I have to admit. Someone always asked why the power station was surrounded by barbed wire, fields of lean, cruel, spindly stuff like some dangerous crop. Well, you explained that it had to be there otherwise these guys came in and blew it up. You had to have the wire and the dogs and the night patrols, and so on. Then we drove through the town proper, I mean what can you say? Thousands upon thousands upon thousands of tiny brick and tin houses. There it is, staring you in the face, it lies there in the veld and the tourists stare at it for a while like they can’t believe what they’re seeing, and I remember one of the footballers said it was worse than bloody Manchester. So at this point we were trained to talk about murder. You sat back in your uniform and your perky cap in your seat next to the driver and turned the mike up and hit them with the murder rate. More people killed hourly in our townships than in New York on a good hot summer’s night, more than in Guatemala! That was always good for a bit of a sharp intake of breath. They always believe that Guatemala is really the killing ground of the world. Down the dusty streets we trundled with the barefoot kids charging after us. The soccer players would get into the spirit of things and we’d open a window or two and encourage them to throw coins out to the kids, and perhaps a few sweets. Or they’d throw signed photographs of themselves. We passed the Umdombala Cash Store and the Dutch Reformed Church. Usual thing, polished blond wood, glass, with that thin skinny little black metal chicken on the steeple that’s supposed to serve as a weather vane. One of those horrible little buildings that they put up, all sharp angles and shiny edges and you’re supposed to get the feeling of upward thrust of flight, but the base is so broad and heavy it’s like a fat space rocket that can’t take off. And then we’d stop at the local cash store and we’d let them buy brightly coloured kaffir blankets. They had an absolute fascination for these sorts of native goods. They liked blankets and beads and wire work. We didn’t hide things. We took them past the police station, they were always interested in that, and you know the police stations in the townships are always barred, with enormous gates and acres of barbed wire, with the armoured cars drawn up in front of the charge office and the parade ground with the flagpole and ornamental cannons. They all noticed the sportsfields and we’d make the point that the police would often invite neighbouring children to come and play with them, kids from the township, and if they were tough, well they had to be, that they were really not as bad as they had been painted, after all they were policing one of the murder capitals of the world. You’d get people who simply wouldn’t let the murder rate drop, who’d say, “I still believe it’s Guatemala that’s the murder capital”, and you’d say, “Look, maybe thirty or fifty people a night die in Guatemala, whereas here we’re way ahead of anything like that, we’re in a different league here”. Then, to redress the balance as it were, we’d stop at the kindergarten run by a buxom little nun, Sister Edith. Sister Edith’s crèche was a very popular tourist stop. She’d call the kids out and they’d sit on their little wooden benches in their blue smocks and their large yellow sashes and they’d sing for the tourists, beautiful singing, wonderful intonation, and you could tell that Sister Edith spent a lot of time polishing up these tiny choirs of hers. They used to sing laments usually. They seemed to be awfully good at laments those little kids. I remember one – it went “My mother has gone to Egoli… my father comes no more…”’ Freia sang softly to herself, a mournful, achingly despairing little air echoing around the bar. ‘We’d have to tear ourselves away from Sister Edith’s singing kindergarten and I would generally drive them past the big hospital where the stab cases were recuperating, lying out on the big old stoep, paralysed from the waist down after being attacked by local hoodlums with sharpened bicycle spokes lunging at the spinal cord. And these young cripples would wave and smile as we drove by and show that they still had a lot of spirit. Next stop, millionaire’s row, places like Mr Masinga’s mansion and we’d make the point: look, no matter what you’ve read about starvation and so on in the townships, you will see that these people are actually thriving, that they are actually getting on bloody well. That men like Mr Masinga could have bought anybody on that bus, German, Japanese or Israeli, five times over. But remember, this isn’t Clacton or Bremerhaven, this is Africa! With that, off to the beer hall where the municipal authorities brewed their own beer, tremendously popular and fantastically healthy for the workers who absolutely lapped it up at a few cents for a great big plastic bucket of the stuff. Occasionally we saw a fight and I’d let them sit through it. Why hide the unpleasant side of life? After all they’re adults. People fight all over the world when they’ve had too much to drink, not just our blacks. Then on to the pride of the township, the sports centre with its football pitch and its cycling track and the footballers would get excited because they would be playing there, or at least they expected to, but these bandit tours were often cancelled in mid-course when the centre-forward was arrested in a black brothel, or the sponsor got cold feet, so there was always an air of unease in the first glimpse of the soccer stadium. We’d watch a black cyclist in full gear making a circuit of the track in his Coca-Cola cap and his Barclays Bank shorts and his Raleigh bike. Finally we drove past the funeral parlour with all the coffin prices clearly displayed and the Christmas Club where you pay off so much a month to make sure that you get buried. So much for a funeral with car, without a car, and priced according to mourners, just like a roadhouse. The tourists were always fascinated and would ask questions like, why are these people sitting with bundles of blankets on their laps? And then of course it gradually dawned on the innocents that what looked like bundles of blankets were in fact dead babies. You should have seen their faces! I couldn’t help smiling. Suddenly they realised that they were in Africa! I mean I don’t have to tell you this, Father Theo of the Camps – but this was the place where you got babies dying like flies because of these epidemics sweeping through the new-born of the townships like Herod’s soldiers. And then you’d get one of these Japanese – you know how it is, they’d photograph anything! – and one of them would pull out a camera and ask if he could take a shot and we’d say, look, you know, look, if you don’t intrude on a mother’s grief then it’s okay. If you’ve got a telephoto lens then go ahead, but no going up close and snapping right in their faces, have some respect for the dead, this is Africa and Africa is cruel but we want to maintain civilised standards if at all possible… But why am I telling you this? You’re Father Theo of the Camps —’ Freia widened her big green eyes in mock astonishment.

‘Was,’ Blanchaille contradicted her. ‘Was once.’

‘Well, anyway, why tell you? You’ve seen more of infant mortality than I ever will. But that’s my piece and you’re welcome to it. Now it’s Happy’s turn. She’ll give you a different view of things.’

Happy, tall, black, appeared with Visser leaning gratefully on her arm. She took a seat between Freia and Blanchaille and ordered a highball. Her hair was drawn up in a great dark crown and seeded with what looked like pearls. Her fingernails were painted pink. Her manner was strident, even aggressive and Blanchaille shifted uneasily. Freia caught his eye and winked. Takes all sorts,’ she whispered sympathetically, ‘that’s the trouble.’ Happy glared. Freia fell silent. Blanchaille sighed and turned to Happy. He was being punished with parables.

‘I worked in the house of my Minister from about the age of fourteen onwards. Because my Minister was powerful I learnt things and because I learnt things I went places. My Minister’s department decided that it was no good dealing with our northern black neighbours as we’d done in the old colonial times with the white men lording it over blacks. In the new age black must speak to black and so I became a negotiator, that’s to say I dealt with heads of state and political officials in the enemy states to the north. Since as you may know, they buy the works from us – power, food, transport, arms, everything from nappies to canned fruit – I used to say to them, look, this is our price, take it or leave it. Sometimes I’d get a lot of opposition. Some big hero of the African revolution, chest clinking with medals, would meet me at the National Redeemer Airport and say: “Jesus Christ! You’re black, Happy, you’re one of us, how can you help them to bleed us to death?” And I’d say, “Man – we take forty thousand mine workers a year from you, and if you don’t like the arrangement and the price per head we’re quoting then fine – don’t send them. Or maybe you’d prefer that instead of remitting their salaries to you in toto, direct, we might consider paying the poor bastards individually and in that case half your national income goes out the window…” Allow me to present you with a photograph of my Minister.’