A large black car came bowling down the hill and stopped beside him with a shriek of brakes. The window descended with smooth electrical precision, and there was Gabriel. The interior of the car smelt of its blue vinyl coverings and the refrigerated whisper of its air conditioning. Gabriel didn’t switch off the engine. The car waited, hissing faintly. Gabriel massaged his jaw, smooth, golden, smiling, a model of casual elegance.
‘What’s this, Blanchie? You’ll be soaked if it comes down. You’re a long way from home.’
Blanchaille nodded. Maybe he should ask his question now?
‘I’d give you a lift but I’m meeting the Rome plane. Vatican bigwigs. Visiting firemen. Ah well – no rest for the wicked.’
‘No.’
‘Never be a bishop’s chaplain.’
‘No,’ said Blanchaille, ‘I won’t.’
Blanchaille watched the big black car go purring down the hill. He hadn’t asked his question. It was this: Looksmart Dladla had been warned to get out of the country by his brother. Fair enough. So then, if Gabriel told Looksmart the cops wanted him in connection with the Kipsel business, who told Gabriel?
As he reached the bottom of the hill the first drops fell but he was lucky enough to find a bus stop and gratefully took shelter beneath the corrugated iron roof, swung his cases up on the bench and himself up beside them while the rain sheeted down and ran rivers of red mud and gravel beneath the spindly metal legs of the shelter. Highveld rain was like no other, the drops were large and would sting the hand and batter the head, drilling into the earth, beating and upbraiding it. The highveld rain had weight and made each drop count, was a battering of the country, brief but overwhelming. The earth, so dry, was soon saturated in great pools everywhere, joining up into streams carrying off the top soil, rough brown surges hurtling down the gutters and thundering in the storm-water drains, and everything which had been settled was fluid and running. It never lasted of course. After the deluge the sun would come out and everything dried away to sticky mud and then to dust. But while it lasted the world ran free, and the mind with it.
Now in my dream, as the storm began tapering off, a figure stepped out of the rain and sat beside him on the bench. ‘God Almighty, Blanchie! Did I not direct you to the Airport Palace?’ Father Lynch’s black raincoat was a sheen of wet cloth; rain gathered in the brim of his hat; when he spoke a hundred droplets exploded in the air before his mouth. ‘You delayed. And now you may find the going harder. Bubé is gone!’
‘So?’
‘What do you mean – so? This is the most extraordinary news. At last the truth is beginning to emerge. Bubé has gone. Of course this affects your travel plans.’
‘Why should it?’
‘Why? Because the roads will be full of police. Theodore, for the first time since Paul Kruger’s departure, a president has fled! Adolph Gerhardus Bubé has fled!’
Adolph Gerhardus Bubé, father of the nation. An intellectual who studied in his youth in universities in Holland, Germany and Belgium. One of the original founders of the old policy of ethnic parities, as it was then called, with his thesis ‘Racial Separation with Justice’, which became the Ur-text, the philosophical underpinning of the racial policy of equal freedoms or concomitant responsibilities, the vision of ‘ethnic heartlands’ each reflecting its distinctive tribal rhythm, each tribe breeding to its heart’s content. It was from this thesis that many of the crucial ideas of modern South Africa originated, regarded as revolutionary once but now outmoded, its once striking maxims absorbed into everyday language, sentiments such as: ‘There’s no such place as South Africa’, or as Pik Honneger, his most distinguished disciple put it, ‘What’s ours is ours, and what’s theirs is what we are prepared to give them.’
Bubé’s thesis had been required reading on Father Lynch’s picnics. It was Lynch who pointed out how profoundly influenced Bubé had been throughout his career, as a young MP, as a distinguished Economics Minister and as President – by the birth-rate. Bubé in his formal suits, with his paunch, his watch chain, his benign manner made speech after speech pointing to the burgeoning black population and he would appeal to his followers to remember the old Boer wife in the days of the Great Trek, during the wars of freedom and the oppression of the Boers by the British Empire. The old Boer wife, he said, had been a breeding machine, her womb was a weapon more potent than the Mauser, a holy factory in which there was renewed each month a new army, the white man’s hope of a secure future in South Africa where he could thrive and prosper and protect his traditional way of life, his culture and his Christian God. But now the white birth-rate was spiralling down to zero growth while the black man was rearming in the belly of his wives. Tirelessly the President expounded his theme: ‘White women, remember your duty!’ HAVE A BABY FOR BUBÉ! the headlines ran. His supporters took up the slogan and ran through the streets chanting it, breaking into chemist shops, puncturing contraceptive sheaths and flushing birth control pills down the toilet and assaulting non-white persons for allegedly failing to respect pregnant white women. It was Bubé who funded the sterilisation campaign in the countryside, the secret radiation trucks, the so-called ‘Nagasaki ambulances’ which so terrified the rural population.
Lynch often expatiated upon the role of President Bubé, as he rested beneath the Tree of Heaven, ‘It was our Adolph who reminded us that an earlier and better name for the Boer War was the Gold War. It was a war between Gold Bugs, who understood the importance of the metal, and the Boers who had still to learn this. The British Army came in on the side of the Gold Bugs – people like Werner and Beit, Himmelfarber etc. Let’s not believe the story put out by men in an advanced state of dementia such as Cecil Rhodes, or Alfred Milner that they were defending the Anglo-Saxon race of which the English, God forgive poor Rhodes, were regarded as the most perfect flower, “the best, the most human, the most honourable race the world possesses . . .” This I quote to you from his Confession of Faith. Have you ever heard such rubbish? Reasons, you see – reasons. We must have reasons before the killing can begin. The Boers on their side under Kruger were fighting, they said, for the right to be free, for Calvinist Afrikanerdom, for the little man against the big, for independence, for truth. All lies, all lies. Gold it was and gold it has always been, the dream, the rumour, the hope and despair of the conquerors and of the conquerors before them, Arabs and Portuguese both. Stories of magical gilded cities, of Solomon’s mines, of Monomatapa and Vigiti Magna lured them here. The Portuguese, the Dutch, the British and finally even the Boers, they all wanted it. Rhodes and all his fellow Bugs had the gold but Kruger owned the sacred soil from which it was mined. They thought that the Boers didn’t want the gold. How absurd! It was the miners they hated. They saw them as the sub-life that crawled beneath the stone, so they averted their eyes, usually upward to God their Father and kept to the veld, content with their horses, their guns, a herd or two, the horizon endlessly receding, a host of servants and a wife in the back room breeding like a machine, claiming always simply that they wished to be left alone. The Boers were the Greta Garbos of history. The Boers didn’t want the gold only so long as no one else had it. But they soon found the stuff had its uses. Before the war they were already building up their funds by illicitly buying gold stocks and amalgam from shady sellers. There were organised Government theft departments, that’s what it amounted to. Contemporary observers were lost in admiration for the bribery, greed, corruption, the whole quality of the unblushing venality with which those involved enriched themselves in the Boer Republics. The lot of them. All those wily Hollanders surrounding Kruger, were rotten from the toes up. The Transvaal Government was supported by secret funds administered from secret accounts and with this stash fund the Krugerites bought votes, nobbled opponents, paid off old scores and enriched family and friends. When the war broke out they no longer had to buy their gold under the table, because they’d taken over the gold mines. They could take it straight out of the ground and put it into their vaults. So when they
went to war with the British they said they were fighting for God and freedom and independence. But by then they knew that whoever got the gold had God and freedom thrown in buckshee. Even so, as Bubé points out in his thesis, men like Kruger and Rhodes were of the old century. Nineteenth-century men. And the quality of their hypocrisy and the nature of their corruption was a Victorian thing. The gold was a means, the way you paid for your dreams, financed them. The difference with us, the New Men, Bubé says, is that gold came first, the dreams later. You can see this change taking place at the end of the Boer War when even the most Christian fighting generals became bank robbers literally overnight. As the British marched into the capital, General Smuts was holding up the Standard Bank and the Mint and making off with a cool half-million in gold. Kruger saw it coming. His Memoirs make it clear that the discovery of gold was a catastrophe. It would ‘soak the country in blood’.
The rain had stopped. Sheets of muddy water rushed past the two priests in the bus shelter. They could hear it thundering deep down in the storm-water drains.
‘With Bubé’s flight history comes full circle. It’s the Kruger departure all over again. Heaven be praised!’ Lynch’s jug ears waggled in delight. Blanchaille noticed that the old man appeared to have lost more of his teeth. He grinned like an ancient baby. ‘You’re still planning to travel?’
Blanchaille nodded, ‘Yes Father.’
‘Oh you call me Father all right, but I’m not, you know. Of course you know! I’m more like an uncle to you boys. I like you, that makes me really different, close. Yes, I like you and mind you I’m probably the only one who does – and I nourish hopes for you all yet, though I look dark into your futures. But Father you call me! And what do you call your old President, the President Kruger? Why man, you call him Uncle, Uncle Paul! But that’s all wrong. Sure it is. He’s not your uncle, I am. He’s your father, father of the nation, father of misfortune. Follow Kruger, find the truth. That’s the line, Blanchie. Stick to it like glue as you’re pitched into an uncertain future. Be sure and look out for your old Uncle Lynch because he’ll be looking out for you. Take this. Trust me.’ Lynch gave him a brown envelope on which an address was scrawled. ‘You’ll need cash.’ The envelope smelt faintly of pistachio.
‘You’ve taken Ferreira’s money!’ Blanchaille was outraged.
‘I’ve simply returned the funds Ferreira bequeathed to you and which you unwisely left behind when you fled. I give it to you, after making suitable deductions. You can take a bus from here. At this address a friend is waiting. It’s nine stages, and then you hop.’
Blanchaille counted the nine stages because he hoped against hope he might end up at an address different to that given on the envelope. It did no good. Nine stages brought him to the centre of the town, to the tall skyscraper known as Balthazar Buildings which housed the Security Police, the Special Branch and the organisation, so secret no one could be certain of its existence, known as the Bureau, under its phantom chief, Colonel Terblanche.
CHAPTER 7
Balthazar Buildings on Jan Smuts Square in the centre of the city – notorious headquarters of the Security Police, scene of violent incidents beyond number. Together with the usual offices it comprised several hundred cells, interrogation rooms, as well as offices of the Bureau for Public Safety, or, more briefly, the Bureau. So mysterious that a Government committee found itself unable to confirm its existence, despite the fact that a number of the committee members were rumoured to be officers of the Bureau, or Bureaucrats, as the knowing called them. Balthazar Buildings also housed Die Kring, or the Ring, a secret society formed, according to legend, at the turn of the century, at the time of Kruger’s flight into Swiss exile and dedicated to the preservation of the Calvinist ideal, and the continuance, protection and furtherance of the Boer nation. On the further fringes of the political spectrum, Blanchaille remembered, there had been speculation that the Bureau and the Ring were one and the same. Perhaps. There were many such secret societies, all-male, dominated by devoted followers of the Regime, dedicated to racial purity and in love with uniforms – the Phantom Kommando; the Afrika Straf Kaffir Brigade; the Night Riders; the Sons of Freedom; the Ox-Wagon Patriots – but the Ring, it was said, controlled and dominated them all.
It had been claimed that the Ring was a fascist secret society. Bubé had denied this, as had every president before him – all of whom were members of the Ring. ‘The English have their Rotary Clubs, the Catholics have the Jesuits, the Bantu have their burial societies – and we have the Ring. It is not a society, it is more like a family gathering.’
It was with considerable trepidation that Blanchaille surveyed the stone steps leading up to the great steel doors of Balthazar Buildings and only by considerable effort of will did he tell himself that if this was the place to which Lynch had directed him then he must have his reasons. Across the road a boy was selling papers. PRESIDENT FOR TREATMENT OVERSEAS? the posters ran. So Lynch had got hold of the right story, at any rate. Blanchaille pushed the bell. Few who came to Balthazar Buildings ever emerged unless they were led away to waiting police vans, to court, to jail, to the gallows. Others left briefly in flights from high windows, or tripped down staircases, or were found hanging from their cell bars by their belts or pyjama cords. This fortress housed the Russian spy Popov. Two TV cameras swivelled above his head and examined him silently.
The young constable who let him in was of the type Blanchaille knew well from school rugby matches against just such long-limbed, rangey sorts, full-grown men at twelve with moustaches to prove it. They smelt of sweat and onions and stomped you unmercifully whenever you went down with the ball. He gave his name. There he was in Balthazar Buildings along with the likes of Popov. He hoped Lynch knew what he was doing.
The story of Popov was widely known and loved and taught in school. Once a cipher clerk named Steenkamp was sitting at his desk in Balthazar Buildings on Sunday afternoon, hot and bored. He had just decided, by his own admission, that his job as a security policeman was at an end. The codes were beyond him and the amount of application required was simply too much for a simple man. And a simple man he was, this Steenkamp, the fifth son of a large and impoverished Karoo family, regarded by his superiors as a good policeman but unimaginative and perhaps a trifle slow. There was no hint then of the blaze of glory with which his career was to be crowned and was to make his photograph a familiar sight in every house in the country. Blanchaille had seen the photograph, everyone had seen the photograph. The mild empty eyes, the bored and unlined forehead which gave him the look of a man a decade younger than his forty years, the strong curling hair and the protuberant ears, the penalty of playing lock-forward for many years for the police team without wearing a scrum cap. It was this Steenkamp who one hot afternoon happened to look out of his window and see down below in the street a man taking photographs of him. He might have been picking his nose or yawning and there was this stranger in the street below taking pictures! He was down the stairs two at a time and he collared the impudent photographer who turned out to be Nikita Popov, a genuine, real, live Russian spy, and a full colonel in the KGB. It was a considerable coup and the President, wearing his other hat as Police Minister, went on television and thanked the Security Services for their watchfulness and said, ‘Let this be a lesson to any other hostile countries who may have thought of infiltrating agents. The Security Forces are ready and waiting for them and will do their utmost to defend the country’s integrity against the orchestrators of the Total Onslaught.’ A police spokesman in turn thanked the Minister for thanking the police and the session ended in an orgy of mutual gratitude.
An anti-Regime paper caused a stir by suggesting the arrest was a fluke. The police issued a statement asserting that Steenkamp had known immediately that something deeply suspicious was going on since photographing police property was forbidden, along with army property, railway stations, harbours, electric pylons, atomic research centres and at least three hundred and sixty-three other items,
from the servants of ministers to radio stations, which fell within the so-called ‘Sensitive Subject Catalogue’, regularly updated in the Government Gazette. As a general rule of thumb photographers should stick to photographing one another, unless one of them happened to be a banned person or a named Communist, in which case such photographs were also against the law. A few voices were raised inquiring how it was that a Russian colonel in the KGB should have entered the country in the first place and why he should spend his afternoons photographing police stations? But in a fiery parliamentary speech the Minister for Defence, the former army chief General Greaterman declared that the Russians were a devious and stealthy people and that such queries were clearly designed to denigrate the police and should cease immediately, or else. As for Steenkamp, he was sent to lecture at various police colleges and became a kind of saint for the new, young recruits who prayed that they too might one day strike such a blow for their country.
A photograph of Popov appeared which was to become ‘the photograph’: it showed a round, rather soft, boyish face with just a trace of a slant to the dark eyes, a sleepy, not unintelligent look, and, if you peered at it very closely, a gleam of utter astonishment in those eyes. Here was a living rebuke to those who accused the Regime of seeking Reds under the beds. Well, now the secret was out, they were in the streets taking photographs. The interest in Popov was enormous. It was presumed that he would be thoroughly interrogated, and then executed. A group of nurseryschool teachers canvassed the idea that the method of his execution should be one which would least disfigure his person. They argued that coming across Popov like this was rather like being given a giant panda, a rarity which should be preserved, perhaps put on display in a public place in a glass case where groups of school children could be taken to be shown the true reality of the Russian menace. ‘Cut out his derms, stuff him and mount him!’ sang the children in kindergarten as they drew pictures of the spy, Popov.
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