CHAPTER 15
And so it was that I saw Blanchaille retrace his steps and I saw how despite his terrifying experience, once back in Magdalena’s flat he cooked eggs. In the midst of tragedy, of bereavement, scorched by the fiery vision of Van Vuuren’s pricked and broken body, he had not expected to feel suddenly, ravenously, hungry. But there it was. The fleshly appetites were unrelenting, the Margaret Brethren had warned their boys, which if not constantly beaten into submission would command the frail human creature and bend him to their will.
Now we know that the stories of how Van Vuuren met his end were eventually to differ widely. The Regime acted quickly to claim him for their own. He became the faithful detective murdered by agents for the Azanian Liberation Front. The Front further complicated matters by admitting responsibility for the ‘execution’, declaring that the police-spy’s fate was a warning to any other agents of the Regime who attempted to subvert the forces of liberation. The Regime in turn announced that brilliant undercover work by Captain Van Vuuren had revealed a deep split within the Azanian terror group resulting in the demotion of its president, Kaiser Zulu. The Front in a statement called this a typical lie of fascist adventurers and claimed that President Zulu was enjoying a well-deserved retirement in a home for high state officials ‘in the country of a friendly ally’, somewhere on the Caspian Sea. The Regime then posthumuously awarded to Van Vuuren its premier decoration, the Cross of the Golden Eland with Star, an honour previously accorded only to visiting Heads of State, that is to say, to General Stroessner of Paraguay, the only Head of State to pass that way in living memory. The national poet composed an ode in honour of the dead policeman. This was the former radical poet, Pik Groenewald, who after years of self-imposed exile in Mexico City plotting the destruction of the Regime had a vision one night of a lion attacked by army ants and returned home immediately and joined the tank-corps where besides valiant service in the operational areas he composed a series of laments upon his previous treachery which he dedicated, with apologies, to President Adolph Bubé. Groenewald’s ‘Ode to an Assassinated Security Branch Officer’ played cleverly on the flammable connotations of Van Vuuren’s name, in the celebrated line Flame to the fire they fed him/Blade to the vein they bled him… And it was quoted in Parliament to spontaneous applause.
Blanchaille of course, as I saw, knew the true story, knew that by some peculiar chain of logic both the Regime and the Front derived profit from the death of Van Vuuren. That this knowledge did not drive him to anger or despair but left him ravenous is testimony to the toughness of human nature or to the growing self-awareness of the fat ex-priest from the camps that nothing was what it seemed.
What a place this England was! Blanchaille stared at the English eggs, they were not like African eggs, they were pallid, waterish little things by comparison with the garish orange, cholesterol-packed bombs from the hot South. But he cooked three or four, even so, and a mound of bacon and ate without stopping, shovelling the food into his mouth and plugging it there with chunks of thin white bread, running a very fine line between sustenance and suffocation. In the cupboard beneath the sink he found half a bottle of Chianti and finished it off directly. It was as if there were spaces inside him he must fill, not simply hungry spaces but vulnerable sections which he must protect.
Afterwards he lay in the great white tub, soaking there beneath the benign gaze of the Duke of Wellington upon the wall, beneath Magdalena’s stockings, hanging above him from a cunning arrangement of lines, and looking, through the steam, like skinny vultures perched upon telephone wires. Magdalena’s depilatories, her soaps, her shampoos, some sort of nobbled glove affair, presumably meant for rubbing dry skin from the body, her back brush and sponge and bubble bath, all waited with the air of things that know their owner will not be returning. He lay in the bath and let the grime of the past hours float from him and begin to form a brown ring around the bath. Strangely comforting, this evidence of life, human dirt.
As he sat on the side of the bath drying his hair the doorbell rang.
Beside the door hung a photograph. It showed Magdalena in Moscow. She wore a white fur hat and a white fur coat. Beside her were the onion towers of the Kremlin. She was smiling radiantly. The photograph was a trophy. It showed how far and how successfully Magdalena had gone in the service of her cause. The picture was unassailable proof of her credentials as a radical, as a leading member of the Front, as one of the prime enemies of the Regime in exile. It insisted upon this achievement. And yet there were certain matters unexplained, certain questions he wanted to ask Magdalena which could not be answered by that photograph. ‘I have been to Moscow’, the photograph trumpeted. ‘Few of you have been further than Durban!’ True. But not enough.
It took him a few moments to recognise the man at the door. The hair was still as unruly as ever, growing now even more thickly above the ears. The eyebrows were more bushy than he remembered but the lips were the same. Oh yes, they were the same rather bulbous lips, wet from continuous nervous licking, the nose broad, the eyes soft waterish brown, and there it was, the characteristic pout with the lips pushed outwards into a little ‘o’, surrounded by soft white down. A fish pout. Kipsel!
‘Hello Blanchie, long time no see.’
That was that. No apology, no cringing and fumbling explanation, no sign of regret or mortification. Merely — ‘Hello Blanchie, long time no see.’ Blanchaille stood back from the door and let Kipsel enter. And there he was in the room, that same Kipsel who had grievously betrayed everyone he knew, had fled the country in utter despair, the man who had had the gall to go on existing after the treachery, which even those who benefited from it had condemned. Why had he not done the only decent thing and slashed his wrists or hanged himself from a stout beam? Instead Kipsel had gone out and got a job, in a northern university, and taught sociology. Of all things, sociology, that quasi-religious subject with its faintly moralistic ring. Perhaps more than anything the choice of the subject he taught had scandalised friend and enemy alike.
‘Why have you come?’
‘Because there was a question I wanted to ask Magdalena. I’ve turned it over in my mind for so many years now but I can’t come up with an answer. There is something I don’t understand. I’m not sure she’s got the answer. Or if she’d tell me if she knew. Or if I want to hear it. But I know I want to ask the question.’
‘You can ask me if you like.’
‘That’s kind. But in the first place I didn’t expect to see you. And secondly, you won’t do.’
‘I’m all you’ve got. Magdalena isn’t here. I don’t know where she is. She met me at the airport yesterday morning. She brought me here and then she disappeared.’
‘What are you doing here?’
‘Just passing through. My ticket gave me an unrequested stopover in London and I fly out tonight. Is that your question?’
Kipsel shook his head. His eyes were large and liquid. ‘No, that was plain curiosity. The real question goes back much further. To the days I spent in jail, and before that to my interrogation in Balthazar Buildings, after the business of the pylons. The official story is that I gave the police information about everybody connected with the explosions. I told them everything. In exchange I got a deal, I got immunity from prosecution. Only I didn’t! Do you hear, Blanchie? And for one bloody good reason. I didn’t have to tell them. They knew! They knew already! About me, Mickey, Magdalena, Dladla — everyone! For God’s sake, they even knew what brand of petrol we used, they had copies of the maps, recordings of our phone conversations… You name it, they had them. So I changed tack. I accepted everything — except where it concerned Magdalena. I confirmed everything they had was right — and dammit, it was! — except for the girl. She had known nothing of our plan, of the bombs, of the Azanian Liberation Front. She had been duped. She came along for the ride. She was only there because she loved me. That’s what I told them. I tried to save Magdalena. I am not Kipsel the traitor. But if not me, then who?’
Blanchaille looked at the pale, trembling creature before him. The round, downy cheeks quivered. Kipsel’s extraordinarily thick eyelashes rose and fell rapidly and his round mouth shone as his tongue licked the blubber lips. His hands flapped. He looked more like a fish than ever. A fish drowning in air.