Текст книги "Kruger's Alp"

Автор книги: Christopher Hope

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Текущая страница: 24 (всего у книги 25 страниц)

The matron drew deeply on her cheroot and puffed creamy smoke. Her voice sharpened and quickened in an American drawl. ‘Roll up! Roll up! See the Boojers meet the British in mortal combat! See General Kitchener’s final triumph! See the Boojers digging nests of trenches! See the Lydite shells blasting their positions! Read Cronje’s courteous request for a truce to bury his dead and for British doctors to treat his wounded. Listen as Field-Marshal Roberts pronounces his niggardly refusal. Then hear General Cronje’s noble response, which was in essence, Then bombard away…! Now watch the great Boer military genius De Wet harassing the British from Kitchener’s koppie which with supreme daring he has snatched from under their noses. See him command the strong point of Paardeberg for three days. But it is too little, too late. Now see everything lost. See General Piet Cronje and his four thousand men surrendering to Roberts. See him stepping down from his white horse, the Boer in his big hat and his floppy trousers and see the triumphant Roberts, neat and dapper, stepping towards him while in the shade Cronje’s broken troops watch impassively from their wagons, and all around them sit the British in their khaki, wearing their funny hats with those strange protective peaks back and front to keep the sun off those long, thin noses, those red necks…’ The matron’s impersonation using hands and napkins impressed a number of the diners who applauded politely. She acknowledged the compliment with a nod of the head. ‘You can imagine the old man’s agony when he heard of Cronje’s preparations at the World Fair, of his old friend’s plan to make money while the bones of the Boer dead whitened on the slopes of the mountains their General had lost. But it spurred Kruger on. He told his doctor, according to a story that has come down to us, “You take care of the bodies, but someone must take care of the souls. We must make a little hospital, a little spirit hospital, ready for them.” Well this is that little hospital. By July of that year, 1904, Uncle Paul was dead, but Bad Kruger was alive and well.’

‘And what do you do here?’ Kipsel was bold enough to ask.

‘What do we do? We tell stories, of course.’

‘More stories!’ Kipsel protested. ‘I’m tired of stories. Will we never get to the end of stories?’

Matron turned on him sternly. ‘Never. And what would you do if that happened? Stories have brought you this far. From the most powerful member of the Regime to the lowest gardener, cook or nanny, we all need stories. We owe our lives to stories. Would I be here now? Or you? Or any of these people if it weren’t for the stories of another place, of Uncle Paul’s arrangements for the likes of us? Do not spit on stories, Mr Kipsel, or stories might spit on you.’

Kipsel hung his head. ‘I’m sorry, it’s just that we never seem to get to the end.’

‘The end? Mr Kipsel – we are the end of these stories. I see you’re puzzled. You fail to understand – even now.’

Sweets were brought, great big dishes of koeksusters, golden plaited sweetmeats oozing oil, and milk tarts as big as wagon wheels, fig jam, watermelon conserve, raw sugar cane, fly cemetery, coconut ice and, of course, peach brandy with the coffee.

‘Fail to understand what, precisely?’ Blanchaille asked.

‘Everything,’ came the laconic reply. Matron nodded her head towards the first speaker who had got up and was preparing to address them. ‘Listen and you’ll learn.’

A thin man with a nervous manner. His cream towelling robe made him look rather like a chemist, a little drunk, and he tugged nervously at his ear-lobes while he spoke.

‘My friends, my name you know.’

‘I don’t,’ whispered Kipsel.

‘It’s Peterkin, Claude Peterkin, the radio producer,’ said Blanchaille, ‘from home, I knew him immediately.’

‘From home!’ Kipsel echoed in hot sarcastic tones. ‘Where’s that?’

Matron banged on the table with her spoon. ‘Let him tell his story,’ she ordered.

Peterkin bobbed his chin gratefully towards her. ‘I was by trade a radio producer and rose in time to become Head of Broadcasting. My motto had always been – “choose the middle way”. Useful advice to myself, working on the State radio you might say, since it meant I could steer between what was on the one hand a public broadcasting facility and on the other a Government propaganda service. You could say I’d been happy and moderately successful. Then one day I made a mistake. I allowed myself to be persuaded by Trudy Yssel that times were changing. “Produce plays,” she said, “which display our adaptiveness to new political perceptions, which are modern, which are of today!” I went out and commissioned a play by none other than Labush Labuschagne. The Labuschagne you all know with his Eskimo wife and his interest in Zen and his quivering attacks upon the Regime’s race policies and his impeccable Boer credentials, being a descendant of one of those heroes in Piet Retiefs party who were murdered by Dingaan. And what did Labuschagne give me? He gave me an attack on the Catholic Church in Africa. Fair enough, you might say. The play was entitled Roman Wars – and not, let me stress, not Roman Whores. That was an incredibly stupid printing error. The same combination of bad luck and mechanical error which has pursued me all my life. Be that as it may, my intentions were good. Could I have made a better choice of playwright than Labush Labuschagne? His radicalism was unchallenged and yet his Government connections were superb. He wrote a play about a Church which is far from popular and he portrayed its missionary activity on our continent as hypocritical, self-serving and deceitful. What better way of encouraging a debate? Why then did the Regime put out a statement saying that while it was true they had differences with the Roman Church in the past, there was now no room in the new South Africa for religious or racial bigotry and they deplored the irresponsibility of those, they did not say whom, who attacked other religious groups? Now if this wasn’t enough, at the same time stories of my homosexuality began appearing in the newspapers. It was suggested that I had a particular taste for young police reservists. Readers’ letters choked the columns of the newspapers demanding that this faggot be neutered on the spot. Then the Board of Governors of the Broadcasting Service put out a statement that I was considering, quite voluntarily, whether I shouldn’t perhaps take early retirement. The first I knew of this was when I heard it on the “Six O’Clock News”. Then the Chairman of the Governors organised a farewell party. And who do you think he invited? He got in Bishop Blashford, the Papal Nuncio, Agnelli, and half a dozen pretty young police reservists. And this was to be my retirement party – a surprise retirement party! I walked in and found myself on the way out. Of course the cameras were there and the whole thing was shown live on television. I was presented with a farewell memento. I have it here.’ Peterkin reached inside his robe and withdrew a large knife. ‘It’s a hunting knife, for those of you not near enough to see it. It has a sheath of genuine kudu-hide, its blade is fashioned from a piece of steel taken from one of the original rails from the Delagoa Bay line which carried President Kruger to exile. Its handle is made of rhino horn. This is inset with four golden studs, representing the four major racial groups in South Africa. I accepted the gift. After that I was escorted to the door and shown into the night. And so I came here, like so many of you. One morning the gardener found me wandering in the vineyard, and here I am. I thank you for listening to me and most of all I thank our President who made this place ready for us.’ And with that he lifted his glass towards the portrait of President Kruger on the wall. The old man with the tufty beard, the sashes, the rows of medals, stared broodingly down upon his displaced children.

Another then rose, a bulky man with a bristling moustache, a big belly beneath the robe. Of course they all knew him, Arnoldus Buys, the nitrate millionaire. Even Kipsel knew him.

‘I was a Government man, through and through. I was amongst the chief sponsors and backers of the New Men in the Regime. I was something of a rough diamond, but I was modern, tough, pragmatic. I backed the new dispensation. I believed in the new vision. I supported the principle of Ethnic Parallels, Plural Equilibriums, Creative Differentiation, all the terms, all the ideas, all the words. I also believed that we could fight our way back into history. I was one of the original backers of Minister Kuiker and his Creative Sterilisation Campaign. I backed the propaganda war. But my friends I was asleep. We have all been asleep so you know what I mean. I was asleep and when I woke up I found I’d been taken to the cleaners. My story is brief and tragic and may be encapsulated in a few words; I fell victim to our own propaganda, I believed in it because I was paying for it.’ And here Buys, the businessman, sank back into his chair and buried his face in his arms and a sympathetic hush descended on the room.

Then there rose a man who Blanchaille and Kipsel knew immediately – and who would not? For here was Ezra Savage, the novelist, the most notable writer the country had produced, described by some as a sad, thin old lay-preacher. Savage was the dogged champion of a Christian, liberal multi-racial vision of the future, author of a shelf of books amongst which the most famous were of course, My Country ’Tis Of Thee; Come Home Dingaan!; Our Land Lies Bleeding; and White Man Weep No More. It was extraordinary to see him here. He who had proclaimed that Emigration is Death! A man who had stood up for years against the harassment of the Regime, had survived countless arrests, imprisonment and privation, had seen his house set on fire by gangs of white youths wearing ruling Party sashes, an attack which his asthmatic wife barely survived and which undoubtedly contributed to her death soon afterwards. A man who had withstood this and yet now stood here in this room full of fugitives.

‘What the Regime had been unable to achieve, my daughter accomplished. Some of you will be familiar with the extraordinary events surrounding the elopement of my daughter, Mabel, with Sunshine Bwana, the black taxi driver. When Mabel and her lover set up house in open defiance of the laws against interracial cohabitation, the pressure on me of course increased. Some of you will perhaps have read my Letters to a Daughter of the Revolution, in which I tried to set out, as calmly and dispassionately as I could, the difficulties which her behaviour had caused me. Mabel’s reaction was to give an interview to a Government paper in which she identified people like myself with “liberals who thought left and lived right”. We owned large comfortable houses in the white suburbs, preached racial harmony to our black servants and were in reality the true enemies of the revolution. Mabel said she preferred the Regime to us, that if she were made to choose she would have found more in common with those who ruled the country than she did with these vague and sentimental politics, these liberal chimeras, these values of a damp English rectory. But of course Mabel knew the thing was not to talk about the world but to change it. And so, though perhaps this is not widely known, my daughter Mabel led a second charge on her father’s house at the head of a gang of black youths, and they attempted to set it on fire. Considerable damage was done. The Regime’s newspapers took pleasure in reporting this, as you can imagine and there was a lot of speculation at the time, probably mischievously put about, that I was thinking of selling up at last, leaving the country and moving to a home for retired clergy on the Isle of Wight. It was then that I made my declaration – emigration is death! Well then, you must be asking yourselves, what is he doing here in this room full of fugitives? What drove him? I’ll tell you what drove me. What I wasn’t prepared for, what I think many of us were not prepared for, was the impact of what are called the Young Turks, or sometimes the New Men, or the Pragmatists, or whatever term you chose to designate that dangerous breed personified by the likes of Minister Gus Kuiker and Trudy Yssel. What was at the heart of their programme? It was to talk to us, persuade us, delude us into the belief that substantial changes were under way. It depicted a new deal in race relations in which people of goodwill and of good sense were seen working together in a society based on synchronised ethnicity, equal freedoms and plural balances. So it went. New names, old ideas. You might have laughed. I might have laughed. But my daughter accepted the challenge and that wasn’t amusing. She took a job in Gus Kuiker’s Department on the understanding that she was totally free to work for its destruction from within. She justified her job by saying she was genuinely interested in power and since this was the case it made sense to get as close to the centre of it as possible. If working for Kuiker meant getting her hands dirty, well that was too bad. Working with power meant coming to grips with it. That’s what I didn’t understand, she told me. That’s what I was too frightened, too pure to grasp. Was there any greater test of a man’s resolve than to realise he was fighting a regime ready to die for the sacred right to segregated lavatories? Well, yes, actually there was. As Mabel said: what I couldn’t face was the fact that they had no intention of dying at all! Well, that’s when I went away. You understand I couldn’t take that. I think I would’ve preferred my daughter to shoot me, it would have been kinder than preaching at me from the Government benches.’

There were sighs all around the dining hall and an evident feeling of sympathy translated itself into an audible hum. Several diners wiped their eyes with their sleeves. Savage sat at his table clasping and unclasping his hands, a look of intense puzzlement on his nut-brown, wrinkled, intelligent, simian face. Every so often he shook his head and they knew the rage to understand what had happened to him still went on inside him.

Next there arose two ladies who introduced themselves as the Misses Glynis Unterjohn and Moira Schapp, the noted lesbians. They rose, not to tell their own story, at least not then, but to introduce a third friend, the journalist Marie Hertzog, whose pioneering study of the working conditions of black domestic servants entitled Matilda: Venus of the Servants’ Quarters had caused a considerable stir some years before. The study had been notable not only for its original work on the conditions in which black women were forced to live but also because Hertzog herself was a card-carrying member of the ruling Party. Her book, which revealed the women she studied to be serfs in a male-dominated world, victims both of their drunken, brutal husbands as well as of their white mistresses and masters, had been promoted by Trudy Yssel and Minister Kuiker, both at home and abroad, as an indication of the new mood of liberalisation and self-examination sweeping the country. The book was held up as an example of the way in which members of the Regime were turning the microscope upon themselves, fearlessly analysing their weaknesses, changing the system from within.

Marie Hertzog spoke in a low, angry growl. ‘It was my feminist investigations that took me to the Misses Unterjohn and Schapp because they came and complained to me that their houses were being raided by the police. Imagine my horror one Sunday morning when I discovered a photograph on the back page of the paper. This photograph purported to show what was described as “an illicit love-in” in a house of sin. It showed leather-clad women scrabbling suggestively, and among the tangled legs and tongues and other phantasmagoric elements I glimpsed my own face. No names were printed beneath the photograph, I wasn’t identified. But then it was hardly necessary. Those who printed the photograph knew I would recognise myself. Quite obviously someone had decided to discredit me and since they were unable to do so publicly – my uncle was after all Attorney General for many years, and my connections with the Party were good – they had turned to this means. Naturally I suspected the Bureau, for what reasons I couldn’t be sure, but it smacked of their taste and planning. Naturally I said so, right out loud. I had no intention of keeping such news to myself. The Bureau immediately denied it and to prove their good faith to a loyal daughter of the Party, offered to investigate themselves. They did. And they produced the culprit.’ Marie Hertzog’s head drooped, she found it difficult to continue. ‘It turned out to be my own domestic servant, Joy, whom I’d invited to the party believing that she was as much entitled to go as I was. It seems she took along a camera, just because she thought it might come in useful. And it was. The picture she took turned out to be worth a lot of money and poor Joy needed money. She had a sick mother, she was a working girl. What else was she to do?’ Marie Hertzog threw back her head. ‘Friends and colleagues, everyone of you has lived through a similar experience. That isn’t what’s brought us here. No, I’m afraid the trouble with us is that we’ve all expected to win. We’re on the right side, we said, so we’ve got to win. Well that sort of dreaming is all right I suppose provided you win. You can say a lot of things about us. You can say we’ve been foolish, that we’ve been sentimental, we’ve been misled, we’ve been badly treated. Maybe all these things are true, but truer than them all, simpler, ordinary, horrible, is the truth that given the way things are – we’ve been dead wrong.’

Many were the stories they heard that night, terrible, heartrending. Consider the tragedy of Maisie van der Westhuizen, a singer synonymous with local opera, a well-loved soprano, ‘Our Maisie’, a familiar figure, somewhat bulky in flowing electric blues and acid greens, with elaborate black bangs and her huge sapphires, a wonderfully successful artist, best known of our singers abroad, making regular appearances with the Vienna State Opera. Fame and a soft heart and an excellent command of German; thereby hung her tale and her downfall. For Our Maisie was one of the chief supporters of the Benevolent Fund for Forgotten Germans, which, as everybody knew, was a front organisation for the support of elderly Nazis, a group of demanding old pensioners for whom, generally speaking, holidays were difficult to arrange. To this end Our Maisie had founded a group of sunshine homes on the South Coast to which these loyal old soldiers could be flown for a few weeks, to bask in the sun in the evening of their lives. Maisie told her story:

‘One day a party were turned back at the airport when they arrived. And the reason given? Because they were National Socialists. I couldn’t believe my ears! So were half his Government, I told Gus Kuiker, who had signed the exclusion order against my old gentlemen friends. It did no good, they were turned back, flown out, sobbing some of them, back to their little flats in Düsseldorf and Frankfurt, to die of disappointment. And if this wasn’t enough, when I returned to the country some while later to open the new opera house in the great University of Christian National Education I walked out onto the stage to discover all the front rows were crammed with Jews, wearing yarmulkas and carrying placards: SAY NO TO MAISIE’S NAZIS! My voice snapped like a pencil, I stormed off the stage, I walked to my dressing room, I fetched my car, I drove to the airport and here I am, as you see, finished…’

Then there was the pathetic little tale of Hans Breker, the long-service South African spy who had worked for years in London under cover of a stringer for Dutch and South African newspapers, passing back information, mostly pretty low-grade stuff, to Pretoria, without interruption for almost two decades. His material had been rather pedestrian, nothing in comparison to the jewels of information achieved by the likes of Magdalena. Breker had culled the newspapers for reviews and articles by South African exiles, photographed them secretly at political rallies, looked up information on suspect organisations, kept his eye on peripheral figures, supplied biographies, checked addresses, filed descriptions and generally carried on the boring everyday business of undercover surveillance. This loyal agent lived in a flat in Hackney and in the normal course of events could have expected to see out his time and return home and spend the rest of his life in a special settlement for retired spies on the South Coast, with his pension sufficient to keep him in gin and cigarettes. Alas, Breker had fallen in love with an artist. She taught him to paint. The results were fatal. He sold his large flat in Hackney and took a room in Chelsea. He began to be seen in art galleries. His shoes were hand-made. He entered paintings for the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, he even began learning French. By this time the woman had left him, but the damage was done. Breker was seen around town frequenting the oyster bars, he even signed his name in a letter to The Times about the fate of the Turner paintings.

‘In short, I committed the worst sin of an agent – I became known. When the Government ordered me back I refused. I said I wasn’t going back to some holiday home for senile spies in Bronkhorstspruit. Well, that did it. I was as good as dead. I came here – where else?’

And many more were the stories they heard that night. Too many to be recounted here, though mention must be made of the odd little history of Bennie Craddock, C.C. Himmelfarber’s nephew, whom Blanchaille had last seen in a photograph weeping in Red Square. No wonder! He spoke briefly and movingly of his arrest in Moscow and of his eventual freedom which was achieved when Popov was exchanged for several agents who had been held in the Soviet Union, to wit a Briton, two Frenchmen, an American and a German. This young man, with his thin face and shaking hands, gave no indication that he had once been on the board of Consolidated Holdings, his uncle, Curtis Christian Himmelfarber’s right hand. He produced copies of the Regime’s propaganda magazine Southern Comfort (free to all foreign embassies, colleges, doctors’ waiting rooms worldwide), its cover-story the exchange of Popov in Berlin and he pointed to his uncle, Curtis Christian, among the smiling observers of what was widely regarded to be a sensational coup for the Western intelligence services and not least, of course, for the Regime.

It would be unfair not to mention also the appearance of the former opposition leader, Sir Glanville van Doren who didn’t in fact tell his story at all but instead gave a repeat performance of his farewell speech to Parliament, the one he made before he disappeared. The speech ran as follows: ‘With happy memories of a full and useful life, conscious of having fought the good fight, I leave this House now to return to my farm, Morsdood, near my hometown of Glanville, which those of you who know your history will remember was named for my grandfather – and there I plan to devote myself, as a good dairy farmer, to rebuilding my herd.’

Matron gave a little bow when she heard this. ‘Brave words, and absolute utter nonsense. What he was saying was that he was a shattered man. It was only a question of time before he left his cows and came to us.’

So it was, in the silence that followed the recounting of these cruel events that Blanchaille had time for reflection. He remembered what Kipsel had said about the plants and flowers growing in the garden; it was that most of them were found only in Africa and some were extinct. Was there something on this mountainside, in the quality of the air, or the soil, or some strange trick of climate that enabled them to survive here and only here? He found himself remembering the balcony of Uncle Paul’s other house in Clarens, his heart went out to the old prophet, sick and tired, sitting on his front veranda staring blindly at the blue mountains across the water, those mountains which looked so curiously African. How sharply they must have reminded him of home! And then he found himself studying the waiters, or stewards, or whatever they were (he didn’t really like to give them any other titles or descriptions). Waiters would do. Waiters sounded safe. They stood there against the wall in their white jackets and trousers, observing the diners. He knew there was nowhere else to go now, this was where the Last Trek ended, in this refurbished bathing establishment, this decrepit onetime spa on a Swiss mountainside attended by a matron and surrounded by Happies… They had indeed come home, they had all come home. They had come home with a vengeance.

Now let it be remembered that in this great dining-room there were many hundreds of people; that Blanchaille and Kipsel were excited, disturbed and that the alcohol had had some effect on them; and let it also be said that the stories they’d heard moved them very deeply and unsettled them more than they wished to admit. For one thing it was quite clear that they too would be expected to tell their stories, if not that night, then soon. It was in this unsettled, bewildered state that one must treat Kipsel’s extraordinary claim, made in a choked whisper to Blanchaille, that sitting in a small group of men near the door, a group who he had not noticed until they got up to leave the room, hadn’t wanted to notice, hadn’t looked at really, who were partly masked by the fountain anyway and had their backs turned… that in this group of men he had recognised Ferreira.

It was a claim which Blanchaille dismissed out of hand. And a short angry conversation was conducted between the two men in whispers which the matron pretended not to hear.

‘Perhaps you were mistaken. It’s the light. There were a lot of people in here. It could not have been Ferreira.’

‘I tell you it was.’

‘How do you know?’

‘What do you mean – how do I know? Of course I know! I know Ferreira. As well as you do. I’m telling you it was him!’

It clearly excited and delighted Kipsel to think he’d spotted his friend. The implications were astonishing! If Ferreira was here then why not others? Why not Father Lynch (only to be expected, surely?), Mickey the Poet, Van Vuuren? Or any of those who had gone before.

The possibility excited Blanchaille too. If Kipsel had been right then they would find their friends here. Now a second realisation occurred to him which he preferred not to contemplate, which he put out of his mind almost as soon as it had made its insidious, chilling entry. For if Ferreira was here it told them something about themselves which Kipsel hadn’t thought of yet. Because the point about Ferreira which really alarmed was not that Ferreira was there – but that Ferreira was dead.

Despite the implication of this he couldn’t stop himself from scrutinising with ever great intensity the faces of his fellow diners.

‘You are perhaps looking for somebody?’ the matron asked.

Blanchaille nodded. ‘A friend. A friend I knew once.’

‘I’m sure you’ll find many of your friends here.’

‘Her name was Miranda, I knew her some years ago. She – she went away. Do you know if she’s here?’

Matron blew jets of steely smoke from her nostrils. ‘Regret I can’t answer. I’m not at liberty to disclose the names of our patients. That’s up to them. Rights of privacy are paramount in our little community. It’s up to people themselves to decide whether they want to be known, or whether they want us to know who they are. And if they do, they tell us their story. In fact it’s very often by telling us their story that we find out who they are and they find out why they’re here.’

Then I heard Kipsel ask Matron a question which went to the heart of the mystery. ‘Where did Kruger hide the gold he brought with him?’

On this subject she was forthcoming. ‘Oh yes, the gold. Do you remember the scenes you so often enacted, where you played the old President in the railway saloon waiting to be taken to the coast and the ship which was to carry him off into exile? Well most conveniently he had with him a number of Bibles. They were big family Bibles. Very heavy. Each capable, I suppose, of holding a few pounds of gold – once the pages had been removed of course.’

Kipsel shook his head incredulously. ‘He would never have done that! Never! Not in the Bibles.’

‘Why not?’

But Kipsel would not bandy words, simply shouted, red in the face, ‘Not in the books!’

She shook her head. ‘You don’t understand. You see for him the gold was no longer money, treasure. It was his sacred trust. He wasn’t stealing it. As far as he was concerned he was safeguarding it. And where better to do so than God’s holy book? Nobody would have thought of looking there, nobody would have thought of searching an old man’s Bibles. Of course many realised that the gold had gone. The British knew it had gone. And when he was out at sea, on board the man-of-war, the Gelderland, a curious incident occurred. As they steamed between Cairo and Corsica five British men-of-war were sighted and they gave every impression of being about to attack. Certainly the Dutch captain thought so. He prepared to fight. But at the last moment the British ships turned away. The story is that somebody big in London decided to let it go. Perhaps even Chamberlain himself. They called it off at the last moment. It wasn’t worth an international incident. It would have looked like the worst sort of bullying. “Let the old man have his few dubloons which he’s tucked into his socks,” Chamberlain is supposed to have said.’

‘So he got his millions after all?’ Kipsel asked.

‘Not exactly. The amount has been grossly exaggerated. He collected a few hundred thousand in total when the gold was sold but hardly the fortune of myth and popular imagination. I hate to spoil a good story but the money didn’t amount to that much. Not even with the sums flowing into the house at Clarens from Boer sympathisers and charities from all over the world. But it was enough for him to do what he had to do. Enough for him to buy this place. And remember he was a man of simple faith. He believed that once he had the place, the funds to keep it going would follow. And he was right.’