Текст книги "Kruger's Alp"

Автор книги: Christopher Hope

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Текущая страница: 22 (всего у книги 25 страниц)

CHAPTER 24

Blanchaille and Kipsel heard, rather than saw, Looksmart, for it was quite dark by the time they had regained their position at the crossroads, deeply regretting the distance travelled and the time lost in the vain detour into which Gabriel had tricked them.

They heard the scrape and scrabble of his dragging walk while he was still some distance behind them and they heard him muttering to himself. They heard the name ‘Isobel’. They heard how he addressed himself in a language composed of grunts and clicks, in a dialogue between the foreigner and the lunatic.

‘Here comes Looksmart,’ whispered Kipsel. ‘Poor bastard. If he saw Bubé it will have finished him. Let’s wait.’

‘Perhaps he really does imagine himself to be another Columbus. Listen how he argues with himself. Do you think he could be talking about Isabel of Spain? Didn’t she send Columbus off to discover the New World?’

‘Isabella,’ said Kipsel. ‘It was Queen Isabella and Ferdinand who sent Columbus off.’

Looksmart approached. ‘Isobel,’ he said firmly, ‘who sent me to find America.’ Here he took out a tiny, weak torch and examined their faces. What a strange couple, the big round one with a face like kneaded dough and the other, thin, big-lipped, with hands that sliced the air like fins. Though it was many years ago they still retained the familiar shapes of the boys he remembered toiling in Father Lynch’s parish garden. In his curious click language he muttered their names.

‘He really knows us now,’ said Blanchaille.

Of course he knew them now. They were the altar servers whose heads Lynch had filled with stories of vanished millions, of Uncle Paul’s promised land across the sea, of gold and secret colonies and lost souls, of the illusions of politics and the sole reality of power. Above all he remembered the pleasure he felt at seeing how hard those white boys were made to work in a garden which would never be got right, by an Irish priest leaning on an elbow on a tartan rug on a hot day drinking something from a thermos flask. But these memories returned in bits and pieces, now bright, now fading, like light glimpsed through a smashed windscreen. The work done by the policeman Breek on Looksmart’s head had been thorough, the damage to the brain irreversible, but these glimpses remained of the old days. ‘Blanchie, and Kipsel…’

‘Odd that he should know us by night and not by day,’ Blanchaille reflected.

The weak, yellow flickering torch-light searched their faces, assembling sections for process and developing in the dark room of Looksmart’s brain.

‘Did you meet with the President?’ Kipsel asked.

The torch went out. ‘Looksmart saw him, oah yes. What a traveller! He must be on another diplomatic tour. He had been given a special police escort. I approached the car with my treaty and asked for ratification that this land belongs to me and my descendants, in perpetuity.’ Looksmart had trouble getting the word out. ‘The President looked at me. He pushed my pen away. “No need for me to sign. You have it anyway. You and your descendants, forever”. Then he went away, the President and the police. Perhaps they planned to show him to the people of all the towns he passed through.’

‘Perhaps,’ said Kipsel drily.

Blanchaille felt his pity mounting. This shambling wreck in the darkness with his weak little torch and his insane ideas. This shadow of Looksmart. The real Looksmart had been a holy terror. This was a mumbling ghost. ‘Who is this Isobel you’re talking about? Tell us, please.’

On went the little torch again, probing their faces as if verifying the authenticity of this request. ‘It’s a good story,’ said Looksmart. ‘Oah yes.’ And switching off his torch he began.

If Looksmart had been ignorant of his famous travelling companion, Lenski, on his flight to America, he had not wanted for company. In the seat beside him sat Isobel. And before we are too quick to condemn Looksmart for his failure to recognise the treachery of which he was a victim we would do well to remember the fate of other black exiles who went to America, reached New York, and later jumped to their deaths from sky-scrapers, or bridges; and the white exiles had come to no happier conclusions. Their patron saint is probably General Cronje, who earned a few dollars at the World Fair in St Louis in 1904 by re-enacting for gawping tourists his disastrous defeat and surrender at the Battle of Paardeberg. That Looksmart arrived in Philadelphia and discovered the roots of the American revolution was an advance due entirely to Isobel. That he drew strange conclusions from what he learnt must be laid at the door of the Salvationist delusions of all South Africans.

Pretty Isobel, in her caftan, cowboy boots and soft generous ways had come to Southern Africa as a mere tourist intending to visit the famous game reserves including, of course, the Kruger National Park. Instead she had fallen into conversation with the man who carried her cases to her hotel bedroom soon after her arrival in the country and had been converted. This radical spirit had taken her on a tour of the townships, to the resettlement camps, had taken her to meet those who had been detained, mothers whose children had died in front of them, people under house arrest and discarded people of all sorts. The high point of her visit had been taking part in the great student march on the Central Police Station in the capital to protest against the detention without trial of student leaders. It was this that suddenly radicalised Isobel, plump, pretty and so pleasant, so cordial in her peppermint caftan and cowboy boots, who found herself sitting beside Looksmart on the flight to America. He had never met anyone so thrilled to hear he had been in prison. Her face puckered, she cried for some moments before pulling herself together and then defiantly ordered champagne. She felt utterly privileged, she told him. He liked her, too. She did not make his eyes water. Over the champagne he told her he was also fleeing the country. After that they never looked back.

Isobel carried his luggage and refused to comment on his behalf when the reporters encountered him in Kennedy Airport after their interviews with Piatikus Lenski. It had been Isobel who dealt gruffly with the surly immigration officers over the matter of Looksmart’s presence in the United States. It was Isobel who got the tickets for the train to Philadelphia and who moved him into her apartment on Walnut Street.

It was Isobel who took him into her wide soft bed beneath the eiderdown decorated with signs of the zodiac and its sky blue sheets.

She removed his clothes, she took his penis between her breasts and massaged it. It had been Isobel who straddled him. She was an odd girl, he remembered thinking. Political commitment made her misty-eyed, stimulated her, while he looked on quizzically with his one good eye caught between the desire to help and the vague feeling that he ought to apologise, wondering whether this was quite the career Gabriel envisaged for him in America. She took his now rampant member and kissed it, crooning to it between kisses, pulling and patting the foreskin gently as if trying to get it to lie down, as if it were the corner of a shirt collar she’d been ironing and which refused to stay neat. She took him inside her and began rising and falling, her face tightening with concentration, her forehead shiny with effort. He tried to move with her, to make some gesture of communion, but her knees gripped his hips and kept him still. He lifted his hands to her breasts but she took them down and pressed them flat on the bed, gripping his wrists hard. She had told him on the plane how she loved Africa, how joined to it she felt however vast it was and with this her grip on him tightened. He wished he were more substantial beneath her, he did not feel very large or even very African. She was riding him more swiftly now, her breath coming in short hisses. He realised that his role at this particular point anyway was to lie still. He realised from something in the movement of her body that what was happening was in some sort a further dimension of her tribute to him, both to his person and his cause, as she had taken it to herself, now she took him. Looksmart’s good eye watched the triangular patch of pubic hair rising and sliding, felt the contractions of her vaginal muscles, felt himself swell and spurt within her as she came to a shuddering, panting conclusion, dropping her head onto his chest and resting on her arms which curved outwards at right angles to her body like staves, or hoops, cutting half moons out of the white walls behind her. Afterwards it was Isobel who told him that this was her commitment to a vision of freedom. It was a vision to which Looksmart felt he had been permitted to make only an involuntary contribution. It was rather like giving to some mysterious, distant charity, he decided. You felt better for it after you had done it, though you couldn’t help wishing you had a clearer idea of where the money went.

A few weeks later it was Isobel who arranged their marriage by ‘the turkey who lives on the hill’. The turkey turned out to be a pleasant young Methodist minister; the hill, Society Hill. It wasn’t so much marriage, Isobel explained to him, as the question of his visa, his freedom to stay in the United States. She said this very delicately as if she feared he might take offence. Afterwards she took him to lunch at a fish restaurant called Bookbinders and ordered him lobster. The waitress produced a huge paper towel which she tied around his neck and Looksmart felt very embarrassed to be wrapped like a parcel. With his knife he tapped an anxious tarradiddle on the red beast’s back. Isobel asked about his mother.

Looksmart’s mother had been called Agnes. That much he did remember. Up from the kraal, a raw farm girl, she came to the capital in search, not of work, but of her husband who worked on the gold mines. Which mine? No one knew. One day her husband’s letters had stopped. Worse still, so had the money he used to send. So Agnes brought her sons to the city and failed to find him. She was told to go home and wait. But she couldn’t do that, her children had no food. She looked for work. Those to whom she applied warned her, threatened her: she had no papers, no permission, no future, no business to be there. Tap, tap went Looksmart’s knife on the lobster’s gate of bone behind which the beast hid and would not let him in, knock as he might. The hot, salt, sea flesh inside steamed in his nostrils. He realised then what was to be done in order to eat a lobster, why the huge paper bib, the finger bowl. You were supposed to tear it apart with your bare hands. His mother would have fled from this monster. The lobster fixed him with hard, unblinking eyes. Never mind, he would outstare it, using his bad eye.

Agnes, Looksmart’s mother, arrived at Father Lynch’s front door clutching Gabriel’s hand and Looksmart, then still a baby, strapped to her back. Lynch took her on immediately, impressed on the one hand by her inability to do any cooking or washing or ironing or sewing. These were deficiencies he approved of heartily. Coming into contact with the white madams who taught these things was the ruination of many a good person, he liked to say. Lynch was delighted by the impressionable enthusiasm she showed and her lack of bad culinary habits. He taught her to cook what he called Irish food, plain and solid, stews and roasts and soups and plenty of potato with everything, since that was the way it was done in Ireland, his country, God help it, a tiny island no bigger than the tip of a finger nail, and here he squeezed between thumb and forefinger the requisite area of nail for her inspection. A little place so full of priests it would sink beneath their weight into the sea one day.

So much for the wedding lunch and Looksmart’s mother. It was Isobel who acknowledged that she would awake one morning and find him gone, having slipped away in the night, summoned by his comrades to return home and fight for the cause of freedom.

And it was Isobel, above all, who sent him out one day with instructions to cast an eye over ‘our revolution’.

Down Walnut Street Looksmart scrabbled towards that amazing rectangle bounded by Second Street and Sixth, by Larch Street and Spruce, the launching pad of the American revolution. He visited the Declaration Chamber in Independence Hall along with a bunch of tourists. Their guide was a bluff young man who wore what looked to him like a scout’s uniform, but who turned out to be a Ranger in the Parks Department. He discovered that the area of Independence Hall was designated a National Historical Park. How strange America was! In his country the national parks were full of animals; here, they were full of people. The crowds stood behind the railing which enclosed the sacred area where the furious debates about independence had taken place. They stared at the tables covered with green baize and the crowded, spindle-legged Windsor chairs, the papers, the quills, the inkstands. They saw the Speaker’s Chair with its rising sun motif and heard how Benjamin Franklin sat day after day, during deliberations that led to the Declaration, wondering whether that sun was rising or setting. He gazed at the silver inkstand designed by Philip Synge for the Speaker’s Table, he learnt that unlike most of the other furniture, the inkstand was original; from it had come the ink that had loaded the quills that signed the Declaration of Independence adopted by this rumbustious, Second Continental Congress of 1776. The tourists stared at the crowded tables and chairs in that silent, empty chamber and tried to imagine the bells, the bonfires, the cheers and the shots with which the revolution began. Most of them were dressed in jeans or slacks and had this shifty, almost guilty look about them, Looksmart thought, as if try as they might they simply couldn’t imagine that such climactic matters had begun in this small place. Afterwards, Looksmart bought a copy of the Declaration Document and a postcard of Trumbull’s painting, The Signing, with its bouquet of American flags and its serried racks of bewigged and utterly respectable gentlemen who beneath their composure and their wigs had proved to be wild and redhot revolutionaries.

Looksmart visited, that same day, the House of Representatives Chamber in Congress Hall, as well as the Senate Chamber. He stared at the great star-spangled eagle painted on the ceiling overhead with its claw full of arrows. He admired the creamy symmetry of the old Supreme Court Chamber and he walked across Market Street and joined the crowds thronging the Glass Pavilion where the Liberty Bell hung.

He arrived home that night loaded with papers. He had gone out a tourist and come back a recruit to the American revolution. Something had caught fire within him and the roar of its flames competed with the deep internal cranial rumblings and explosions inside his damaged head and sometimes, hallelujah! overcame them and drove them out, even quietened the continuous buzzing in his ear, warmed his stiff and stupid tongue, disciplined the feet that each went their stupid, separate ways. He carried brochures, postcards, maps, prints and an armful of books he had discovered on sale at the Visitors’ Centre on Second Street. Isobel was amused by this enthusiasm. He lay there that night staring up at her sizeable breasts, swinging like bells. Later, while Isobel slept, he got up and went through his papers.

The next day he was back at Independence Hall. He admired the style of the ground-floor rooms which he now knew to be in the English Renaissance style, with graceful pilasters proceeding heavenwards in strict proprietorial order, Doric on the first floor, Ionic on the stair landing, Corinthian cornice beneath the tower ceiling. When the guide asked the tourists whether anyone could identify the rather skinny-looking chairs crowding the Declaration Chamber, Looksmart said right out loud that they were Windsor chairs, adding in his slow and rather baffling tones, that legend had it several of the chairs had been borrowed to accommodate the delegates who crowded into the Chamber on those heady days in July, 1776. The guide stared back at him, thunderstruck.

In the Liberty Bell Pavilion across the road, a plump lady in furs and dark glasses asked why the bell was cracked.

‘It cracked when they rang it,’ said the guide, an innocent girl staring with big eyes at the huge brassy bell.

Looksmart stepped forward. ‘The bell has always been cracked,’ he said, rejoicing that his tongue obeyed him. ‘It’s been cracked from the day it was born. Since 1752 when it arrived from England and they hung it up on trusses in State House Yard. It cracked on the first bang. Pass and Stow cast it again. But this time it didn’t sound right. Too much copper. The third time —’ Looksmart held up three fingers ‘– they got it right. The bell rang for the Declaration of Independence in 1776, and for another fifty-nine years until, in its eighty-second year of service it rang out for the death of Chief Justice Marshall in 1835, and cracked for the last time…’ He leaned over and with his knuckle knocked on the bell. It gave off a dim and distant echo. His audience stared. It’s doubtful they understood much of this explanation, for though he pronounced quite perfectly the words came out a trifle rough and slurred and sluggish perhaps. The tourists backed away from him. The guide and the plump lady in furs beckoned frantically to the two heavy gents in green standing at the door, doubtless the guardians of the bell, and up they came and very firmly requested Looksmart to leave the Pavilion.

Looksmart sat on a bench in Independence Square and read a copy of the Declaration of Independence and I saw in my dream how the scales fell from his eyes, poor fellow. America appeared to Looksmart rather in the way that the Angel of the Lord appeared to the Virgin Mary. In Philadelphia, the cradle of revolution, an idea of an African redeemer was born.

Of course he quickly realised that the American Declaration of Independence was a document so advanced in its political thinking that, had it been promulgated on that day in his own country as the manifesto of some new party or movement, it would have been shredded on the spot and its adherents exiled or arrested, banned, imprisoned, or tortured as wild men beyond the civilised pale. It rang with phrases, any one of which would have brought blood to the eyes of the followers of the Regime; it spoke of equality, of inalienable rights, of Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. It spoke of Just Powers, and, most startlingly, of the ‘Consent of the Governed’.

It must have been likely that in the years that followed the Revolution some news of its occurrence would have travelled abroad, even as far as Southern Africa. But to judge from all the evidence no such thing occurred. Of course it was not unusual nowadays to claim kinship in retrospect. It was put out by the Regime that they too had fought for their freedom against the Imperialists, to say that ‘we were fighting for our freedom from the British at about the same time as the Yanks, you know.’

In fact they hadn’t stayed to fight at all, they had not been set afire with a light of freedom. Instead, deeply unhappy about the loss of their slaves and chafing at the English overlordship, though they had settled the country with their first colonists at about the same time as the Americans, they put up with successive overlords for years – until damn busybodies got between them and their slaves, and the disgruntled Boers migrated northward with God as their guide and their guns loaded, set the whips cracking over the backs of oxen, and the covered wagons rolling north into the interior in search of fresh grazing, uninterrupted privacy, and plenty of servants, in search of a heaven in the middle of nowhere. A Garden of Eden free of English and full of garden boys. Over half a century had passed since the time the Massachusetts militiamen shot it out with the British at Lexington. But no news of these great events appeared to have reached the Boers. Or if it had, Looksmart suspected, they wouldn’t have liked what they heard. The early Americans wanted a nation free and independent among the nations of the world. The Boers had no nation, distrusted freedom and cared nothing for the world. The very idea would have had your average Boer choking into his brandy. What he wanted was to be left alone and to put as much distance between himself and the English enemy as possible, to trek until he reached that magic land, the land of Beulah, where the game was limitless, grazing good and armies of black slaves kept him in clover. That was the cloud-capped summit of the dream towards which they had trekked. Trekked once more. And Uncle Paul had trekked yet again.

In the end they had to stand and fight. They found you could never go far enough. It wasn’t just that the English were following them, it was history that stalked them down and chased them and in time overtook them and ran them to earth. They fought and lost. But when the Dutch farmers lost the war to the English rednecks at the turn of the century, and Uncle Paul Kruger fled into exile, it was the end of the Boers forever. Those who replaced them, that is to say those who remained, and never took the one-way ticket to the remote Paradise on the Swiss mountains set aside by Uncle Paul for his dispersed people, those who remained got wise. If you couldn’t out-gun the English, you could out-vote the bastards. And they did. And scooped the board and so in exchange for the two Boer republics they had lost, they gained the whole damn southern subcontinent and as many servants as any reasonable man could wish to flog in a lifetime.

On through Philadelphia Looksmart trekked, to Betsy Ross House with its spinning wheel and its first American flag; then to Franklin’s Tomb in Christ Church, to Carpenters Hall and to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier of the Revolution where Looksmart laid a dozen red roses. And towards evening he set off back down Walnut Street, forgetting, as Isobel had prophesied he would, where home really was, to Penn’s Landing where he fell on his knees to the amusement of a man selling pretzels and gave thanks for his salvation. And he began to plan in his mind his ‘holy experiment’, his own Pennsylvania, his own Philadelphia, City of Brotherly Love, which was to absorb him utterly from then on and dreamt in Franklin’s words that he might one day set foot on its surface and say, ‘This is my country.’

It was Isobel who remained loving and true even when he fell so deeply into these reveries that he forgot who he was or where he lived and spent the winter nights in the streets crouched over the iron gratings from which the hot wind blew, like any other bum. And of course it was Isobel who, when the invitation came to present himself at the Barclay Hotel where ‘he would hear something to his advantage’ encouraged him to go at once.

‘You’ve heard of the wandering Jew, well you’re the wandering African. Finding ways to go home.’

Isobel was a dreamer. And a bit of a dope. But she loved him. And though there are some who say that Looksmart would have learnt more of the genius of America in her arms than in all his researches into Benjamin Franklin, they forget how far gone he already was when he met her.

Looksmart’s head had been repeatedly knocked against the wall by Captain Arrie Breek, who today imports famous crooners and entire Las Vegas girlie line-ups to perform in his Mountainbowl Auditorium, and arranges pro-am golf tournaments at his Palace in the Veld, with million dollar prizes, and his part in the little matter of Looksmart’s head should not be forgotten. When you twirl a glass of water, the glass moves but the water stays still; unfortunately, when the head is struck and moves violently this rotation means the brain tries to move with it, with calamitous results for concentration, pronunciation, locomotion.

Looksmart crossed Rittenhouse Square in brilliant sunshine and went up to a suite on the tenth floor where he met a certain Mr Carstens and his friend, Estelle. Mr Carstens said he was an American with plenty of available capital. Estelle was a friend of his from Looksmart’s country. Carstens wore a vivid green and orange shirt. Estelle was dark, authoritative, and her features were chiselled, determined and pert.

Now again, there are those who say Looksmart should have known the score. He should have spotted who Carstens was. And anyone who had looked at a newspaper in the months past would have identified Estelle as Trudy Yssel. But Looksmart did not know the score and he did not read newspapers, not when he had the mountainous literature of the American Revolution to consume.

‘Mr Dladla,’ said Estelle, ‘we are here with a revolutionary plan.’

‘Mr Dladla,’ said Mr Carstens, ‘you may or may not know that there is in our country a new dispensation. A New Order. Changes are occurring.’

‘Mr Dladla,’ said Estelle, ‘I have here a letter of introduction from your brother, Gabriel. He is one terrific guy. And a friend.’

Again, there are those who charge that Looksmart should have known Carstens was a phoney, that his accent was ridiculous, and, anyway the shirt he wore with its mango sun floating above some palms should have been a dead give-away. But Looksmart had long passed beyond the petty day-to-day treacheries of the Regime. He was out of all that. He had entered a new world.

And they overlooked the letter from Gabriel.

Dear Looksmart,

This is to introduce you to a couple of friends of mine, useful contacts and deep down, I believe, supporters of the cause. They have proposals to put to you which I genuinely believe can promote our struggle for liberation. I urge you to listen carefully to what they have to say and to act quickly.

Remember me in your prayers.

Your brother in Christ, Gabriel Dladla.

‘We represent a force so radical we cannot reveal ourselves,’ said Carstens, ‘so secret it speaks only through its appointed agents. The Regime wouldn’t tolerate our liberal aspirations or pragmatism. The Americans will not believe them. We have a problem. We wish to invest in several of the communications media in this town to promote our message. A couple of radio stations, a closed-circuit TV station and a news magazine.’

‘What can I do for you?’ asked Looksmart.

‘Scepticism, cynicism, downright suspicion of our intentions is what we have to combat. If we are to buy into these businesses, our enemies would cry foul. But if you were to bid, or to allow us to bid for you —’

‘You want me to buy some radio stations?’

‘We will do the actual buying,’ said Carstens.

‘We will do the actual paying,’ said Estelle. ‘But you’ll be the owner.’

Looksmart stared at them, wonderingly. This they misinterpreted.

‘Of course, we would make it worth your while. I understand you are a student of history here. We believe you wander the streets. Sleep rough.’

‘I’m a student of revolution,’ said Looksmart proudly.

‘Aren’t we all?’ said Carstens politely.

‘Don’t want money,’ said Looksmart.

‘That’s up to you. Maybe you want something else. You just tell us and we’ll see if we can help.’ Estelle smiled sweetly.

‘Do you know anyone in the Regime?’ Looksmart demanded. ‘Do you know President Bubé?’

After some hesitation Carstens said he had met the President, briefly, on one of his foreign tours, he thought.

‘O.K.’ said Looksmart. ‘Now this is what I want.’

In the darkness on the mountainside Blanchaille and Kipsel heard him waving what he had got, his slip of paper, his dream. ‘Here it is! Here it is! Pennsylvania here I come!’ The little torch was switched on, the light pale on the paper.

‘You fool,’ said Blanchaille. ‘You idiot!’ Blanchaille yelled. ‘You’ll never do it. Our country is already torn into independent kingdoms, homelands, reserves, group areas, Bantustans, casinostans, tribal trust lands and all you’re proposing to do is to fucking well found another!’

‘Mine will be different!’ Looksmart’s voice cracked and trembled. At Blanchaille’s raised voice he could feel the tears beginning to start. ‘We’ll have no racial separation, no servants, no gold mines, no Calvinists, no faction fights. In my country the Boer will lie down with the Bantu.’

‘Numbskull!’ Blanchaille shrieked. ‘They’re all different. All these places. That’s why there are so many of them. Everybody who is different has got to have one. The one thing we have got in abundance is difference. Difference is hate. Difference is death. I spit on your difference.’ And he did, spitting noisily into the night. ‘You’ve been gypped, by your brother, by the Regime, by yourself.’

They heard the scrabble of paper as Looksmart returned the precious document to his pocket. ‘You can’t scare me,’ he replied through his sobs, ‘I will continue. Oah yes, right on to the end of the road, as the song says. I will enter Uncle Paul’s place and lay my case for a new republic before the lost souls. And they will hear Looksmart, and return with me to our homelands leaving you behind, Blanchie, like the last bit of porridge clinging to the pot.’

Here I truly believe Blanchaille would have leapt at Looksmart and killed him if Kipsel hadn’t pulled him off. The two friends turned to their path again and by starlight continued on up the mountain, soon leaving the sobbing, crippled, cracked visionary far behind.