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.