Kruger's Alp

by Christopher Hope

  Blanchaille waited in the lobby, a bare place with a desk and a few chairs. On the walls were the TV monitors for the closed-circuit cameras. Could the screams of the detained be heard from here? He strained his ears. Silence. There were two portraits on the wall. One showed President Bubé in tribal dress. Chief for the afternoon of some forsaken tribe upon which the Regime had visited the dubious distinction of independence and the President had gone along in ceremonial tribal finery to cut the umbilical cord. He wore a bulky fur hat, perhaps torn from a meerkat, and its tail curled about his neck. Over his shoulders hung a pelt, monkey probably, and beneath that another spotted skin, leopard perhaps. Various herbs and amulets dangled from his shoulders and sleeves and he carried a short stabbing spear and a cowhide shield. Even beneath this exotic head-dress his round owlish face in its heavy spectacles peered out almost piteously. Beneath the animal skins he could be seen to be wearing a dark morning suit and tie. He looked as if he were about to burst into tears. He would have made a speech to the gathered tribe standing upon a chair beneath a thorn tree.

  ‘Dear Friends, it is nice to be here with you. I am from the Government and the Government’s attitude is that we have to help people like you to have a better life in this beautiful country of ours. With that I will say goodbye and may you stay well.’

  A similar speech was given by ministers visiting resettlement camps. But there it was followed by a hymn from the people – usually a lament.

  On the opposite wall was the famous Kruger portrait. Blanchaille knew it well for Lynch always had a copy on his wall. Uncle Paul wore a top hat and his beard was thick and white with holes in it like a hedge that has been eaten away. Around his barrel chest was a broad green sash and on the right shoulder was a silver epaulette to take the sash – this epaulette was thickly fringed in tufty gold thread hanging in rich fronds. The old man’s beard, so untidy, yellowly white, had the look of a fake. It seemed theatrical, stuck on, as if a powerful hand reaching below the ear lobe might with a sudden tug strip it from the powerful jaw with a medicinal screech. Perhaps the same might be done with the cotton wool eyebrows. ‘Look to the past,’ Kruger had written to his people as he lay dying in exile, Lynch had taught, the African Moses warning his unruly people that if they forgot their God then they would perish and never find the Promised Land. ‘The old Israelites built a golden calf,’ Lynch said, ‘these new ones build a stock exchange, they build a share portfolio, they build an army, they build themselves. They look to the future.’

  The officer who entered was instantly familiar, the thick black hair glossed over the ears, the square powerful hands, the solid square jaw and his manner somewhere between that of some distinguished visiting specialist in the house of a dangerous case and a powerful athlete, a weight-lifter with a muscle-bound body unused to moving in a suit, and that strange, well-remembered faintly menacing mixture of formality and muscle power. But the smile was the same: open, pleasant, appealing. An utter contradiction stretching back to hostel days when he would half kill a boy for stepping out of line, then break every rule with affable, serene good nature and never a qualm.

  ‘Hello Blanchie, long time no see.’

  How long? At least ten, fifteen, years since Father Lynch, Van Vuuren, Ferreira, Zandrotti, little Mickey and Kipsel set off on holiday. They rode in an old Studebaker which Lynch had borrowed from somewhere, towing a caravan. It had been a Sprite, he remembered that, he could still see the flighty ‘Caravans International’ logo. The caravan was not for sleeping in, they had tents for that. Instead the vehicle was packed with large black boxes tied up with string. It had been a last holiday for Father Lynch and his altar boys. They were suspicious of the term ‘holiday’, knowing what Lynch had done to ‘picnics’. It was all very mysterious but Lynch would say no more. All in good time. Officially it was put about that they were going to the Game Reserve. They would be exploring the flora and fauna of the Eastern Transvaal.

  The Eastern Transvaal was a countryside vividly beautiful, of tangled greenery, plunging waters, thronging banks of azaleas which grew ever thicker as they approached the water; and then the crouching, tousled, tawny veld with its stinging sibilance where the thorn trees held up their fierce yellow heads in the hottest of suns. And it was hot. At noon the tall choked grass began ticking like a clock. The day wore on, wore out, and with the evening coming on the sky would turn a flushed pink, the colour of an electric bar-heater and the glow caught the undersides of the clouds and showed them pink and gold. The day didn’t die but burnt away, faded suddenly with the last light in a smell of wood-smoke and the first crickets shrieking among the lengthening shadows.

  Lynch had taken them to the Kruger Game Reserve, advising them to enjoy it while it lasted for soon work would start. They saw some lion, several buck, a couple of giraffe and then an extraordinary aged buffalo. This beast was indelibly printed on Blanchaille’s memory; it was a buffalo seemingly determined to shatter its reputation as the most dangerous animal alive, terrifying when angered, capable of moving at amazing speed. When they drove up beside it, it stood there with its shuffling lop-sided bulk and its expression of weary but disconcertingly kind intelligence. The horns were a marvel, razor sharp, ready to kill, but seemed more homely than dangerous, appropriate, even graceful. They looked like the stiffened plaits on a little girl, they traced the outlines of a Dutch cap beginning in two thick round plaits clamped to the top of the skull, sweeping down and up in beautifully symmetrical curves into whittled points. Looked at another way they gave the impression of a frozen hairstyle, a stylised wig. The buffalo’s forehead was broad, deeply lined and strangely white, perhaps this was where he showed his age. It was, if one could conceive of such a thing, a thinker’s forehead. The eyes were not impressive, being small, bleared, brown beneath their heavy lids. A single stem of broken grass hung head downwards from the buffalo’s mouth. If anything looked dangerous and menacing about the buffalo it was the ears, which were busy, angry, muscular. ‘People will not believe it when you tell them you were frightened by a buffalo’s ears,’ Lynch warned.

  The Elands River Falls gave its name to two villages, one beneath the waterfall and appropriately called Waterval Onder, and the one above called Waterval Boven. It was to Waterval Onder that Father Lynch came with his boys and his caravan on that one and only holiday and just outside town the camp was set up. The mysterious cardboard boxes were unpacked and were found to contain the uniforms of Boer soldiers, leather trousers you wrapped around yourself called klapbroek, bandoliers, muskets and hats. The boys became Boers and the caravan became a railway saloon and Father Lynch, in yellow straggly beard and cotton wool eyebrows became, of course, President Kruger. For it was here at Waterval Onder that the Boers had their last glimpse of their leader, of the Old Lion, before the railway line carried him out of the country forever. Lynch pointed out that the building of this line had long been Kruger’s dream. He wanted a rail link which ran from his capital through the Eastern Transvaal and into Portuguese East Africa and the friendly port of Lourenço Marques, a line which avoided the hated dependency on the ports in the rest of the country held by the British. As it happened, he proved to be the most valuable piece of freight it ever carried. Outside Waterval Boven, President Kruger old and ill (Lynch in the part) sat once again, watched by Denys Reitz and his brother Hjalmar (Blanchaille and Van Vuuren), reading his Bible in the railway saloon (played by the Sprite caravan), ‘a lonely, tired man’ Reitz observed.

  Lynch made them walk the distance between Waterval Onder and Waterval Boven which, although only some eight kilometres in distance, was virtually straight uphill and Lynch pointed out to them the one and only stretch of railway still to be seen there, built by the South African Railway Company in 1883. He took them to the tunnel cut through the rock beside the pretty Elands River Falls to help reduce the gradient and he pointed out the old stone bridge with its graceful arches along which the trains had trundled as they crossed the aptly named Get-Lost-Hill stream. H
ow much had been lost crossing that stream! The presidential train had strained up the steep gradient of one in twenty, crossed the border and steamed into the port of Lourenço Marques where the Dutch cruiser, the Gelderland, lay riding at anchor in the blue swell of the Indian Ocean. And the gold went with him on 21 October 1900.

  In bullion or minted coins, in gold dust or in bars? And in what guise? And how much? Father Lynch stood on the quayside in Lourenço Marques and stroked his fake beard, and wondered aloud. His boys in their slouch hats and their crossed bandoliers sweated beside him in the moth-eaten uniforms, the stage property of some defunct theatrical company which Lynch had raided for these old khaki cast-offs, velskoens and reproduction muzzle loaders. And did the millions really go at all? Or was it another story? They wanted to ask but dared not. Lynch stood there comfortably enough in top hat and fake beard but his boys were deeply embarrassed by the looks they were given by the black Portuguese who giggled behind their hands and pointed.

  ‘Jesus, what a bunch of tits we must look!’ he remembered Ferreira fumed.

  Blanchaille answered Van Vuuren, ‘How long? Not since we were living history.’

  ‘Living history! We were dying of embarrassment,’ Van Vuuren said. ‘He claimed he was trying to make us understand the roles we played.’

  Blanchaille remembered how they had shuffled and glowered and banged their rifle butts on the ground. ‘I never felt a bit like a Boer.’

  ‘Lynch never cared about our feelings. He made us pretend because he knew that’s what we did best. Lynch wanted us to understand that our lives were all play-acting. There was nothing real about them. He wanted us to see that all we lived for was to pretend to be what we weren’t. Your role, Blanchie, has always reminded me of St Paul. You remember the trouble with St Paul, don’t you? He spent all those years persecuting Christians for being Christian and then he got converted and spent the rest of his life persecuting them for not being Christian enough. And for that he was canonised by his grateful victims. God’s policeman, old Paul was. And you’re another. Why do you think Lynch always insisted that you’d gone to police college and refused to accept that you were in the Seminary? The dogmatic, policeman-like qualities in you, were what he saw. Look at your life! You went into the camps and you gave the Regime hell for treating people like garbage. You attacked the Church, your own church, at every turn for failing in its responsibility. Then you took to touring the country like a wandering madman demanding that the camps be bulldozed. Then you were given a church and you stood up in the pulpit and addressed your parishioners like the investigating officer. You stood up there to unmask the villain, like the tiny Flemish tax inspector or the seemingly genial ex-nun in the detective yarn unmasking the totally unsuspected killer. You expected them to stand up and confess. Instead, like Makapan, they lost their tempers and besieged your house. Well, what did you expect? You’ve lived the investigating life, you’ve taken the high moral ground, you’ve gone after the culprits, the criminals. Your vocation is to bring the guilty ones to book, you’re the holy detective, the righteous sleuth. And where’s it got you? Nowhere. It’s done nothing for you – except to ruin you. You’ve taken the drugs this country offers – moral outrage, angry condemnation – and they’ve wrecked you. You’re on your last legs and you’re going down, you’re going out.’

  ‘And you? I suppose you know better,’ Blanchaille said angrily.

  ‘I joined the police because I believed I would find out what was really going on. You know what it’s like. Under the Regime everything important is called a police matter, history is a police matter. All presidents as far back as Babbelas and Breker have also held the portfolio of Minister of Police. You know the argument – the State is an instrument of God. Its security is a matter of divine concern. The police are the mediators between the Almighty and the citizen. I believed it. We all believed it.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘But Blanchie, what if it isn’t true?’

  ‘You mean it isn’t true?’

  ‘Not entirely. That’s the thing. Nothing is entirely true. Or entirely anything. I began to learn that as a rookie cop when they put me on surveillance in a department called “foreign friends”. Now that alone was an eye-opener. I thought we didn’t have any foreign friends. Or need them. Or want them. We were the Albania of the South. Our foreign policy was to tell everyone to go and get stuffed. But that’s wrong! We’ve got loads of foreign friends. That’s why President Bubé went on his whirlwind foreign tour. He wasn’t foisting himself on his hosts in the capitals of Europe. He was returning calls! We do have foreign friends. Lots. And I was detailed to watch over them. Once they came singly: businessmen, politicians – here to collect their bribes to arrange shipments of materials we needed like planes or football teams. But soon we had so many foreign friends they took block bookings and came on chartered flights calling themselves the Patagonian Hockey Team and were taken away in buses with darkened windows. I got assigned to one of these teams. The papers usually got the story after the new arrivals had been spirited away and ran headlines like: VICTORY FOR GOVERNMENT SPORTS POLICY: PATAGONIANS TO TOUR! This led to world-wide protests and the Patagonians would flatly deny that any of their teams was playing in South Africa. By then the ‘team’ had disappeared. I looked after a team who wore baseball caps the wrong way round, with the peaks down their necks. Or yarmulkas. And they’d get drunk with the township girls and cause us a lot of trouble. They worked in a camp in the mountains outside the capital. It turned out that the language they were speaking was Hebrew and they were scientists of some sort. I went to my superiors and said, “Look there’s a colony of Jewish scientists working in the mountains.” “Nonsense,” my superiors said. “They’re not Jews, they’re Israelis. And this conversation did not take place.” I was sent to another camp about five miles away. This one was a very different kettle of fish. It was full of Chinese. Now wasn’t that strange? I mean we don’t even have Chinese laundries and here is a colony of Chinese working in a strange factory. I went to my supervisors. “Look here,” I said, “what are all these Chinese doing? I thought we didn’t like Chinese. I thought the Regime had taken a vow of No More Coolies! Ever since their bad experience with the indentured labourers on the gold mines early this century.” “There are no Chinese,” said my superiors, “only Taiwanese and this conversation did not take place.” Then I was taken off people and put on to things. I was posted to security on the atomic research station out there in the mountains. I missed the voluble scientists and the quiet, hardworking technicians but you go where you’re sent. The atomic research station was getting large shipments of equipment. I happened to see the inventories. They took delivery of something called the Cyber 750-170 which is an interesting computer. Because its main strength is multi-channel analysis, it’s used for sorting through the hundreds of cables collecting data from a test-blast site. Other shipments to the research centre included vibration equipment and ballistic re-entry vehicles. Oh, I almost forgot, there were supplies of some gas too, Helium 3 it was. I thought about this. You put together the scientists, the technicians and the equipment and you come up with something that explodes.’

  Blanchaille began to understand. He knew the rumours, the unmentionable stories.

  Van Vuuren’s blue eyes widened. ‘Go on, Blanchie, take a guess.’

  ‘A bomb! The bastards are building a bomb. Now the question is – are we working on a large dirty weapons system, or small, relatively clean devices? Neutron bombs, say? Or field launching systems. Yes, tactical battlefield weapons. Or both? That would give flexibility. Large bombs against hostile forces on our borders, or on the capital of an enemy, or on the capitals of states supporting that enemy. Then the smaller, cleaner, weapons for specific jobs, say the 155 millimeter cannon, capable of lobbing nuclear shells. But what’s the gas for? This Helium 3?’

  ‘It’s used to make Tritium. That’s a form of hydrogen used in thermo-nuclear weapons.’

  ‘Wha
t a lot you know about this sort of thing,’ Blanchaille said.

  ‘I remember hearing about it first years ago from Kipsel, Silberstein and Zandrotti and the others in their bomb-making days. No, I did not interrogate them, that affair was before my appointment to Interrogation, or Twenty Questions, as they call it here. But I read the report of Kipsel’s confessions. Even though all they were planning to demolish were a few pylons, Kipsel was never one to do anything by halves. He got Silberstein to swot up on everything from fireworks to weapons in the megaton range.’

  Blanchaille nodded. ‘Lawyers read.’

  Van Vuuren looked cagey. ‘They were young. They confused yearning with faith. They really believed the revolution had started. Zandrotti was convinced.’ Again the odd look, almost embarrassment. ‘Poor old Zandrotti.’

  ‘We were all young and we all believed. What else could we do?’

  ‘Sure, sure.’ Van Vuuren regarded him steadily. ‘From what I’ve told you, then, you conclude that we’re building a bomb, or rather the Taiwanese are building us a bomb designed by the Israelis who are selling it to us wholesale?’