Kipsel was given a suspended sentence and discharged.
While he was giving evidence to a hushed courtroom, Magdalena turned her back on him and Zandrotti shouted angrily that he should keep his explanations to himself, better a bungling saboteur than a traitor. For this he was removed to the cells beneath the court room.
He received five years.
Magdalena was given three.
A few weeks later, after apparently bribing a wardress, and disguised as a nun, Magdalena escaped from jail and fled across the border. The disguise she affected led to a tremendous row between Church and State. President Bubé in a warmly received speech to his Party Congress warned that the Roman danger was growing, and called on the Pope’s men and women to put their house in order. He hinted at Church connivance in Magdalena’s escape and its tacit support of terrorist groups. Bishop Blashford, speaking for the Church, responded by ordering a central register of all working nuns, ‘genuine sisters’ as he called them and disclaimed any connection between the renegade Magdalena and the true Brides of Christ who, he said angrily, dedicated their lives to serving God and their fellow men and took no part in politics. At the same time he warned that violent opposition to the Regime would continue while they maintained their hideous racial policies. He took the occasion for attacking as well their authoritarian methods of birth control, the dumping of unwanted people in remote camps in the veld, and the crass folly and blatant inhumanity of the Regime’s political arrangements. He drew parallels with Nazi Germany and went so far as to compare President Bubé with Hitler, a time-honoured insult and much appreciated throughout the country where Blashford earned enthusiastic praise from the anti-Regime opposition but equally delighted President Bubé’s followers, so much so that in the traditional response he publicly thanked the good Bishop for the compliment, since after all Hitler had been a strong man, proud of his people and his country. Both men came out of the confrontation with their public prestige much enhanced and behind the scenes it was said they were both good friends and often went fishing together.
The anarchist’s eyes were red-flecked milky pools surrounding pupils dark and hard as stones. And I saw in my dream how hesitantly Blanchaille approached him, not knowing what his reception was likely to be at the hands of his old friend not seen for so long, so cruelly used, for after that terrible trial it had been Zandrotti alone who faced the assaults of his jailers, cruelties not refined but oafish, coarse, persistently callous, and above all, juvenile. The young warders had waged a campaign of humiliation against him, Blanchaille heard on his weekly visits to the prison; they would apple-pie his bed, piss on his cigarettes replacing them limp and wet in the pack, tear pages from the books he was reading and allocate him cells from which he could hear the singing of the condemned men on death row. Lovely singing it was too, Zandrotti told him, day and night, right up to the last moment, this male voice choir of killers waiting for the end. They would sing special requests, the warders joked with Zandrotti. It had been his idea of hell, Zandrotti told Blanchaille afterwards when he was free, to be locked in a small room with the intellectual equivalent of the police rugby team. Beside that horror the fires of conventional Roman hell cooled to an inviting glow.
Blanchaille drove him to the airport after his release, the anarchist clutching a few clothes, a little cash and an exit visa which ensured he would depart from the country forever within forty-eight hours. ‘They opened a little gate in the big prison gate and pushed me out clutching my money, in this badly fitting blue suit, carrying my passport and an exit permit and told me, God bless, old fellow. God bless! Can you believe that?’ All he wanted on the road to the airport was news. He had none in the years inside. He greeted the news that Magdalena was regarded as dangerous by the Regime with a whistle of appreciation. But he was amazed to learn that Kipsel was still alive, had not done the expected and hanged himself, or shot himself.
Apparently Magdalena had helped Zandrotti when he reached London. Blanchaille had no idea of his situation there except for one report that showed his old perverse sense of humour operated still. He read of the anarchist being hauled before an English court for persistently photographing everyone who entered or left the South African embassy because, as he explained to the magistrate, this was a custom in his own country where everyone expected to be photographed on street corners by agents of the Regime not once but many times during their lives and he wished to continue this ancient custom in exile.
Now he lay in a bunk in the cells of Balthazar Buildings, strangely quiet, supine, and yet with a gleam of defiance which contrasted oddly with his air of defeat.
‘Ask him why he’s here,’ Van Vuuren said.
‘What brought you back, Roberto? And looking so holy, too. The flying nun. Mother Zandrotti of the Townships…’
The prisoner favoured him with a fleeting smile. ‘I met Tony Ferreira in London. He was staying at this hotel and we went down to the bar. He was in London on the last leg of a world tour. He got very drunk in the bar, kept falling to his knees and reciting bits of the Litany. You will remember the sort of thing — “Bower of Roses, Tower of Ivory, Hope of Sinners”, and so on. You know the lyrics, I’m sure you could sing it yourself. But in a bar in London surrounded by English Protestants, it can be rather alarming. Anyway the barman, thank God, ordered him to stop or leave…’
‘But why did Ferreira want you back here?’
‘He didn’t. That was the last thing he wanted. The bastard slandered his country!’
‘Slandered his country! God almighty, Roberto! What sort of rubbish is that? Where did he want you to go?’
‘To the other place. To Geneva. Oh hell, you know, Uncle Paul’s place.’
‘What else did he say?’
‘I don’t remember.’ The anarchist’s eyes swam on their veined pools. ‘Ask him yourself.’
‘Ferreira is dead. Murdered.’
The anarchist shrugged. ‘So they say. Well, not before time. I would have killed him myself.’
Blanchaille tried to control his astonishment. ‘What did he do to you?’
‘He tried to destroy everything I’ve ever believed in, hoped in. He pissed on it! He crapped on it! Rubbed my nose in it, between invocations to the Queen of Heaven…’
‘But what did he say?’
‘Don’t remember.’
Van Vuuren interposed. ‘That’s all you’ll get from him, the forgetfulness is strategic.’
They withdrew. The prisoner showed little sign of recognizing their going until they reached the door when Blanchaille said, ‘Goodbye then, Roberto, and I’m sorry to meet you in this place.’
The anarchist sat upright and waved his fist in fury. ‘I’m sorry for you, yes, because if you’re going where I think you’re going, then you’re going to die of sorrow! Don’t be sorry for me, Blanchie, save it for yourself. I’m still here.’
Outside in the corridor Blanchaille asked Van Vuuren: ‘What does he mean — he’s still here?’
‘Just what he says. Here, in jail, he is Zandrotti, known as such, wanted by the police and dangerous enough to apprehend, torture, perhaps kill. These threats confirm his existence, his importance, not least to himself. Here and perhaps only here he is Zandrotti still. We are the police, this is the infamous prison, Balthazar Buildings. Everything is what it is expected to be. I don’t know what Ferreira told him in London but clearly it made him so desperate that prison seems infinitely preferable to all other alternatives… But let’s get something clear, we don’t want him. We’re not holding the anarchist Zandrotti, despite what the papers say overseas and the silent vigils in front of our embassy demanding the brave soul’s release. No, he is clinging to us. It is he who won’t let us go…’