‘I understand your question. If you didn’t tell the police, who did?’
Then the two friends flung their arms around each others’ necks and embraced. Lost in the world, how they rejoiced in each other’s company. Blanchaille told Kipsel of his arrival in London, of his meeting with Magdalena, of the visit to the Embassy, of the encounter with Father Lynch in a Soho street, of his warning and of Van Vuuren’s brave death in a Soho cellar. At this news Kipsel broke down and wept unashamedly. I heard, too, how Blanchaille told his friend of the two watchers outside the fishmonger’s and their strange name: Apple Two.
‘I also have a question,’ said Blanchaille. ‘Who is Apple One?’
And Kipsel replied. ‘Perhaps when we answer mine, we will answer yours.’
CHAPTER 16
Blanchaille knew the man at the airport bar as a fellow countryman from his accent. But he could also identify him from a picture he had just seen which showed him strolling along a Paris street. It had been printed in the English newspaper he bought on arriving at the airport. He was relieved to see that he drank brandy.
Is not the choice of strong drink one of the easiest, not to say one of the most pleasant ways of rising painlessly on the social scale, of impressing friends and confounding enemies? Or for that matter, of refuting the notion, lamentably widespread even in this day and age, that South Africans are only interested in beer and shooting kaffirs, and in either order. There is even a calumny, sadly current still, that a famous South African lager I must not name (suffice it to say that the beer in question is a product of a brewery owned by the Himmelfarber empire) is supposed to have run an advertising campaign with the slogan SHOOTING KAFFIRS IS THIRSTY WORK. Now the truth is not (as some Government apologists maintain) that the campaign in question was run many years ago and is now thoroughly discredited. Nor that Curtis Christian Himmelfarber himself led the campaign to deface the posters, altering the wording to something less likely to incite racial hostility and with his own hand struck down the forgotten manager who first coined the infamous slogan, although it is a satisfying tale. Misunderstandings abound. There is even argument about the precise wording of the slogan. There are some who maintain that what it really said was: IS SHOOTING THIRSTY KAFFIRS’ WORK? Whilst others say it read: THIRSTY KAFFIRS IS SHOOTING WORK. Whereas in fact the truth is that the original slogan read simply: SHOOTING IS THIRSTY WORK, but unseen enemy hands across the land at a pre-arranged signal added the offending words, either with the intention of discrediting our country in the eyes of the world, or of embarrassing C.C. Himmelfarber who with his giant enterprise, Consolidated Holdings, had always been a stalwart champion of the progressive forces for political change in the country, or both. None the less the malicious legend lingers on and so when you come across a South African drinking not beer but brandy in a bar at Heathrow airport, as Blanchaille and Kipsel did as they waited to be called for their flight to Geneva, even if one does not particularly wish to meet another fellow South African at the time, a feeling of patriotic pride and relief suffuses the frame.
The so-called ‘kaffir beer’ scandal was a typical example of the concerted campaign waged by overseas dissidents, hostile forces and illegal organisations such as the Azanian Liberation Front, against the honest efforts of the Regime to offer justice to all its population groups. Such black propaganda was in turn just another adjunct of the universal campaign to destroy the white man in Southern Africa, which came to be known as the Total Onslaught.
It was to counter this campaign that the new minister of Ethnic Autonomy and Parallel Equilibriums, Augustus Kuiker, vowed to devote himself when he was appointed Deputy Leader of the Party by the President, Adolph Bubé. It had been Kuiker who replaced Hans Job when that decent man was driven from office by a scurrilous whispering campaign soon after he had succeeded the flamboyant but ailing merino millionaire, J.J. Vokker, when sudden ill health forced him to step down. This change had been the subject of a very cruel joke. ‘Who will replace a Vokker?’ went the question. ‘Only a Hansjob!’ came the reply and the whole country doubled up with ribald laughter. Even those who should have known better held their sides. It was then that the formidable Kuiker was appointed and the laughing had to stop. ‘Our Gus’, people called him, and shivered. The face of granite, the lips of a cement-mixer. It was Kuiker who had appointed Trudy Yssel to the newly formed Department of Communications with the brief to put our country’s case abroad with all the punch she could muster. It was regarded as a brave move.
It was a very curious combination; Kuiker the granite man at home, but curiously, even distinctively, colourful abroad, with his taste for bright Hawaiian shirts aglow with orange sunsets and rampant palms, and the new Secretary to the Department of Communications, Trudy Yssel, young, pretty, tough as hell, shrewd and decidedly modern. There was always something stubbornly old-fashioned about Gus Kuiker. He was large, lumpish even. Trudy was svelte and auburn. He looked like a prize fighter, with a big bone-plated forehead, cauliflower ears, a doughy nose, fleshy and rather sensuous lips. But they were a formidable team, it was widely agreed, and of their determination to change the face of internal and foreign propaganda there could be no doubt. As far as Gus Kuiker was concerned, Trudy Yssel could simply do no wrong. What’s more she was funded to the hilt. She seemed unstoppable.
As Blanchaille and Kipsel arrived at Heathrow Airport the newspapers they bought told a very strange story. DEPCOM MYSTERY DEEPENS. WHERE IS TRUDY?
Kipsel studied the paper. The Kuiker/Yssel affair was now making international news. The English papers printed an account of an interview given by a spokesman in Kuiker’s Department.
Reporter:
Can you give us any idea about the location of Trudy Yssel?
Spokesman:
It is not in the public interest to disclose any further information.
Reporter:
Would you comment on rumours that she has left the country?
Spokesman:
The rumour is without foundation.
A few days later, after Trudy Yssel had been sighted in Philadelphia, another news conference was given.
Reporter:
Will you confirm that Miss Yssel is now in Philadelphia?
Spokesman:
I cannot confirm or deny that report.
Reporter:
Do you admit that she is abroad?
Spokesman:
I have not said that she is abroad.
Reporter:
But she’s in Philadelphia. Therefore she must be abroad.
Spokesman:
You should learn a little more about your own country before leaping to conclusions. There are other Philadelphias nearer home.
Reporter:
Whichever Philadelphia she may be in, what is she doing there?
Spokesman:
I will not be cross-examined like this.
Well, of course, the invitation was impossible to resist and a search was immediately launched and indeed another Philadelphia was found, closer to hand, in the Cape province, a small town consisting of no more than the usual bank and church and a few hundred puzzled inhabitants who lined and cheered when the reporters from the nation’s press arrived in their Japanese estate cars and their big Mercedes to interview everyone from the mayor to the town’s oldest inhabitant, Granny Ryneveldt, aged 103, who declared that she hadn’t seen such excitement since Dominee Vasbythoven ran off with his gardener and joined the gay community in the Maluti mountains. However, there was no trace of Trudy. Everybody had heard of her, of course. But nobody had seen her.
It didn’t matter. The Regime made capital out of the reporters’ double discomfiture. Journalists, they said, should get to know their own country better and not always look overseas for glamorous stories. Various sanctions were hinted at if the newspapers did not take up this suggestion. Then ministers of the Dutch Reformed Church expressed their outrage that the affair of the renegade minister, Vasbythoven, had been dragged up once more. For their part, several liberal English clerics preached sermons against the hounding of the unfortunate minister, reminding their congregations that homosexual practice between consenting adults was widely regarded as acceptable in the outside world and they lauded Dominee Vasbythoven who had shown his bravery not only by taking as a lover one of his own sex but someone of another race which showed him to be not only sexually liberated but racially balanced and they pointed out that this was no small feat for a man whose great-great uncle had been Judge-President of the Orange Free State, when it had still been a Boer Republic. Here again the Regime waded in with warnings to the opposition press against attempts to slander the memory of the Boer Republics when, led by Uncle Paul Kruger, the Boer Nation with God’s help had fought for its freedom against the wicked imperialist colonialist oppression of the British. Anti-Government papers were warned for the last time to put their house in order.