Kruger's Alp (37 page)

Marie Hertzog spoke in a low, angry growl. ‘It was my feminist investigations that took me to the Misses Unterjohn and Schapp because they came and complained to me that their houses were being raided by the police. Imagine my horror one Sunday morning when I discovered a photograph on the back page of the paper. This photograph purported to show what was described as “an illicit love-in” in a house of sin. It showed leather-clad women scrabbling suggestively, and among the tangled legs and tongues and other phantasmagoric elements I glimpsed my own face. No names were printed beneath the photograph, I wasn't identified. But then it was hardly necessary. Those who printed the photograph knew I would recognise myself. Quite obviously someone had decided to discredit me and since they were unable to do so publicly – my uncle was after all Attorney General for many years, and my connections with the Party were good – they had turned to this means. Naturally I suspected the Bureau, for what reasons I couldn't be sure, but it smacked of their taste and planning. Naturally I said so, right out
loud. I had no intention of keeping such news to myself. The Bureau immediately denied it and to prove their good faith to a loyal daughter of the Party, offered to investigate themselves. They did. And they produced the culprit.' Marie Hertzog's head drooped, she found it difficult to continue. ‘It turned out to be my own domestic servant, Joy, whom I'd invited to the party believing that she was as much entitled to go as I was. It seems she took along a camera, just because she thought it might come in useful. And it was. The picture she took turned out to be worth a lot of money and poor Joy needed money. She had a sick mother, she was a working girl. What else was she to do?' Marie Hertzog threw back her head. ‘Friends and colleagues, everyone of you has lived through a similar experience. That isn't what's brought us here. No, I'm afraid the trouble with us is that we've all expected to win. We're on the right side, we said, so we've got to win. Well that sort of dreaming is all right I suppose provided you win. You can say a lot of things about us. You can say we've been foolish, that we've been sentimental, we've been misled, we've been badly treated. Maybe all these things are true, but truer than them all, simpler, ordinary, horrible, is the truth that given the way things are – we've been dead wrong.'

Many were the stories they heard that night, terrible, heartrending. Consider the tragedy of Maisie van der Westhuizen, a singer synonymous with local opera, a well-loved soprano, ‘Our Maisie', a familiar figure, somewhat bulky in flowing electric blues and acid greens, with elaborate black bangs and her huge sapphires, a wonderfully successful artist, best known of our singers abroad, making regular appearances with the Vienna State Opera. Fame and a soft heart and an excellent command of German; thereby hung her tale and her downfall. For Our Maisie was one of the chief supporters of the Benevolent Fund for Forgotten Germans, which, as everybody knew, was a front organisation for the support of elderly Nazis, a group of demanding old pensioners for whom, generally speaking, holidays were difficult to arrange. To this end Our Maisie had founded a group of sunshine homes on the South Coast to which these loyal old soldiers could be flown for a few weeks, to bask in the sun in the evening of their lives. Maisie told her story:

‘One day a party were turned back at the airport when they arrived. And the reason given? Because they were National Socialists. I couldn't believe my ears! So were half his Government, I told Gus Kuiker, who had signed the exclusion order against my
old gentlemen friends. It did no good, they were turned back, flown out, sobbing some of them, back to their little flats in Düsseldorf and Frankfurt, to die of disappointment. And if this wasn't enough, when I returned to the country some while later to open the new opera house in the great University of Christian National Education I walked out onto the stage to discover all the front rows were crammed with Jews, wearing yarmulkas and carrying placards: SAY NO TO MAISIE'S NAZIS! My voice snapped like a pencil, I stormed off the stage, I walked to my dressing room, I fetched my car, I drove to the airport and here I am, as you see, finished . . .'

Then there was the pathetic little tale of Hans Breker, the long-service South African spy who had worked for years in London under cover of a stringer for Dutch and South African newspapers, passing back information, mostly pretty low-grade stuff, to Pretoria, without interruption for almost two decades. His material had been rather pedestrian, nothing in comparison to the jewels of information achieved by the likes of Magdalena. Breker had culled the newspapers for reviews and articles by South African exiles, photographed them secretly at political rallies, looked up information on suspect organisations, kept his eye on peripheral figures, supplied biographies, checked addresses, filed descriptions and generally carried on the boring everyday business of undercover surveillance. This loyal agent lived in a flat in Hackney and in the normal course of events could have expected to see out his time and return home and spend the rest of his life in a special settlement for retired spies on the South Coast, with his pension sufficient to keep him in gin and cigarettes. Alas, Breker had fallen in love with an artist. She taught him to paint. The results were fatal. He sold his large flat in Hackney and took a room in Chelsea. He began to be seen in art galleries. His shoes were hand-made. He entered paintings for the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, he even began learning French. By this time the woman had left him, but the damage was done. Breker was seen around town frequenting the oyster bars, he even signed his name in a letter to
The Times
about the fate of the Turner paintings.

‘In short, I committed the worst sin of an agent – I became known. When the Government ordered me back I refused. I said I wasn't going back to some holiday home for senile spies in Bronkhorstspruit. Well, that did it. I was as good as dead. I came here – where else?'

And many more were the stories they heard that night. Too many to be recounted here, though mention must be made of the odd little history of Bennie Craddock, C.C. Himmelfarber's nephew, whom Blanchaille had last seen in a photograph weeping in Red Square. No wonder! He spoke briefly and movingly of his arrest in Moscow and of his eventual freedom which was achieved when Popov was exchanged for several agents who had been held in the Soviet Union, to wit a Briton, two Frenchmen, an American and a German. This young man, with his thin face and shaking hands, gave no indication that he had once been on the board of Consolidated Holdings, his uncle, Curtis Christian Himmelfarber's right hand. He produced copies of the Regime's propaganda magazine
Southern Comfort
(free to all foreign embassies, colleges, doctors' waiting rooms worldwide), its cover-story the exchange of Popov in Berlin and he pointed to his uncle, Curtis Christian, among the smiling observers of what was widely regarded to be a sensational coup for the Western intelligence services and not least, of course, for the Regime.

It would be unfair not to mention also the appearance of the former opposition leader, Sir Glanville van Doren who didn't in fact tell his story at all but instead gave a repeat performance of his farewell speech to Parliament, the one he made before he disappeared. The speech ran as follows: ‘With happy memories of a full and useful life, conscious of having fought the good fight, I leave this House now to return to my farm, Morsdood, near my hometown of Glanville, which those of you who know your history will remember was named for my grandfather – and there I plan to devote myself, as a good dairy farmer, to rebuilding my herd.'

Matron gave a little bow when she heard this. ‘Brave words, and absolute utter nonsense. What he was saying was that he was a shattered man. It was only a question of time before he left his cows and came to us.'

So it was, in the silence that followed the recounting of these cruel events that Blanchaille had time for reflection. He remembered what Kipsel had said about the plants and flowers growing in the garden; it was that most of them were found only in Africa and some were extinct. Was there something on this mountainside, in the quality of the air, or the soil, or some strange trick of climate that enabled them to survive here and only here? He found himself remembering the balcony of Uncle Paul's other house in Clarens,
his heart went out to the old prophet, sick and tired, sitting on his front veranda staring blindly at the blue mountains across the water, those mountains which looked so curiously African. How sharply they must have reminded him of home! And then he found himself studying the waiters, or stewards, or whatever they were (he didn't really like to give them any other titles or descriptions). Waiters would do. Waiters sounded safe. They stood there against the wall in their white jackets and trousers, observing the diners. He knew there was nowhere else to go now, this was where the Last Trek ended, in this refurbished bathing establishment, this decrepit onetime spa on a Swiss mountainside attended by a matron and surrounded by Happies . . . They had indeed come home, they had all come home. They had come home with a vengeance.

Now let it be remembered that in this great dining-room there were many hundreds of people; that Blanchaille and Kipsel were excited, disturbed and that the alcohol had had some effect on them; and let it also be said that the stories they'd heard moved them very deeply and unsettled them more than they wished to admit. For one thing it was quite clear that they too would be expected to tell their stories, if not that night, then soon. It was in this unsettled, bewildered state that one must treat Kipsel's extraordinary claim, made in a choked whisper to Blanchaille, that sitting in a small group of men near the door, a group who he had not noticed until they got up to leave the room, hadn't wanted to notice, hadn't looked at really, who were partly masked by the fountain anyway and had their backs turned. . . that in this group of men he had recognised Ferreira.

It was a claim which Blanchaille dismissed out of hand. And a short angry conversation was conducted between the two men in whispers which the matron pretended not to hear.

‘Perhaps you were mistaken. It's the light. There were a lot of people in here. It could not have been Ferreira.'

‘I tell you it was.'

‘How do you know?'

‘What do you mean – how do I know? Of course I know! I know Ferreira. As well as you do. I'm telling you it was him!'

It clearly excited and delighted Kipsel to think he'd spotted his friend. The implications were astonishing! If Ferreira was here then why not others? Why not Father Lynch (only to be expected, surely?), Mickey the Poet, Van Vuuren? Or any of those who had gone before.

The possibility excited Blanchaille too. If Kipsel had been right
then they would find their friends here. Now a second realisation occurred to him which he preferred not to contemplate, which he put out of his mind almost as soon as it had made its insidious, chilling entry. For if Ferreira was here it told them something about themselves which Kipsel hadn't thought of yet. Because the point about Ferreira which really alarmed was not that Ferreira was there – but that Ferreira was dead.

Despite the implication of this he couldn't stop himself from scrutinising with ever great intensity the faces of his fellow diners.

‘You are perhaps looking for somebody?' the matron asked.

Blanchaille nodded. ‘A friend. A friend I knew once.'

‘I'm sure you'll find many of your friends here.'

‘Her name was Miranda, I knew her some years ago. She – she went away. Do you know if she's here?'

Matron blew jets of steely smoke from her nostrils. ‘Regret I can't answer. I'm not at liberty to disclose the names of our patients. That's up to them. Rights of privacy are paramount in our little community. It's up to people themselves to decide whether they want to be known, or whether they want us to know who they are. And if they do, they tell us their story. In fact it's very often by telling us their story that we find out who they are and they find out why they're here.'

Then I heard Kipsel ask Matron a question which went to the heart of the mystery. ‘Where did Kruger hide the gold he brought with him?'

On this subject she was forthcoming. ‘Oh yes, the gold. Do you remember the scenes you so often enacted, where you played the old President in the railway saloon waiting to be taken to the coast and the ship which was to carry him off into exile? Well most conveniently he had with him a number of Bibles. They were big family Bibles. Very heavy. Each capable, I suppose, of holding a few pounds of gold – once the pages had been removed of course.'

Kipsel shook his head incredulously. ‘He would never have done that! Never! Not in the Bibles.'

‘Why not?'

But Kipsel would not bandy words, simply shouted, red in the face, ‘Not in the books!'

She shook her head. ‘You don't understand. You see for him the gold was no longer money, treasure. It was his sacred trust. He wasn't stealing it. As far as he was concerned he was safeguarding it. And where better to do so than God's holy book? Nobody would have thought of looking there, nobody would have thought of
searching an old man's Bibles. Of course many realised that the gold had gone. The British knew it had gone. And when he was out at sea, on board the man-of-war, the
Gelderland,
a curious incident occurred. As they steamed between Cairo and Corsica five British men-of-war were sighted and they gave every impression of being about to attack. Certainly the Dutch captain thought so. He prepared to fight. But at the last moment the British ships turned away. The story is that somebody big in London decided to let it go. Perhaps even Chamberlain himself. They called it off at the last moment. It wasn't worth an international incident. It would have looked like the worst sort of bullying. “Let the old man have his few dubloons which he's tucked into his socks,” Chamberlain is supposed to have said.'