Kruger's Alp (38 page)

‘So he got his millions after all?' Kipsel asked.

‘Not exactly. The amount has been grossly exaggerated. He collected a few hundred thousand in total when the gold was sold but hardly the fortune of myth and popular imagination. I hate to spoil a good story but the money didn't amount to that much. Not even with the sums flowing into the house at Clarens from Boer sympathisers and charities from all over the world. But it was enough for him to do what he had to do. Enough for him to buy this place. And remember he was a man of simple faith. He believed that once he had the place, the funds to keep it going would follow. And he was right.'

Blanchaille said softly, ‘Then there never were any Kruger millions.'

She looked at him now, and she laughed, broad and rich. ‘Oh yes, there were Kruger millions all right. Just that they weren't the sort you think. You see, we are the Kruger millions.'

And then I saw the whole company of diners stand up and quite spontaneously sing several verses of the National Anthem; after which I watched the Happies going around drawing the curtains of the great dining-room with its living fountain and its lost souls and I wished, as the curtains closed one by one, that I too was inside with that strange company of story tellers before I woke from my dream to find myself, as of course I knew I would find myself, alone in Father Lynch's ruined garden beneath the Tree of Paradise waiting for the earth movers to close in.

Perhaps one last thing should be added. Unknown to Blanchaille and Kipsel, a traveller arrived at the big wrought-iron gates and was met by the gardener. Looksmart Dladla produced his slip of paper
ceding him the strip of land for his new colony in Southern Africa. The gardener took his piece of paper and asked as well for Looksmart's passport, and his pass, and his book of life, documents which contain between them every single item of information about what are often otherwise quite unremarkable existences. Looksmart innocently handed these over, explaining to the gardener that he wished to enter and make a short address to the inhabitants of
Bad Kruger.
Asking him to wait, and promising him speedy attention, the gardener made a telephone call while Looksmart confidently anticipated admission and ran through the speech he had prepared.

But instead, clattering out of the sky came a police helicopter and Looksmart was arrested. For what was he in the cold light of day but an illegal immigrant, a black man without papers of any sort, a refugee from justice, an African lunatic abroad on Swiss soil, a man suspected of a variety of currency offences, a man who gibbered incomprehensibly of freedom and liberation. The lips of the policemen tightened when they heard this tirade.

I saw Looksmart frog-marched to the helicopter and watched as the machine took off and headed down the mountain. And then I knew that poor Looksmart though he had read Jefferson the philosopher of the American revolution, and Franklin and others, was beyond saving. He had fallen into the extraordinary delusion that given energy, ingenuity, bravery and just a modicum of goodwill, a people of sufficient determination can survive and prosper, even in South Africa. And as I saw him turned away from the gates of Uncle Paul's great white location in the sky, expelled from the sacred Alp, I realised that it's a long way down at the best of times and that the pit may wait at the end of the American rainbow, or open beneath the feet in some seeming Swiss paradise just as surely as it does in the city of destruction where I was born.