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.
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.