Kruger's Alp (7 page)

CHAPTER 3

Now in my dream I saw Blanchaille set off early in one of those typical highveld dawns, a sky of light blue plated steel arcing overhead. He wore old grey flannels and a white cotton jacket, grunting beneath the weight of his three bulky tartan suitcases well strapped, belted around their fat middles in thick-tongued fraying leather. He slipped quietly out of the house and set off down the dirt road. But Joyce, who was sleeping rolled in a blanket by the embers of the night fire, had sharp ears and shouted after him. This woke Makapan who was dozing behind the wheel of his motor car. Both came running after Blanchaille: ‘What's this? Where are you going?'

‘Somewhere where you won't be able to bother me.'

‘But are you going for good?'

‘For good.'

‘You're running away then?' There was a jeering note in Makapan's voice. His eyelashes were crusted with sleep.

Blanchaille nodded. ‘As fast as I can.'

Joyce said; ‘Father won't get very far, those cases are too heavy. He'll have to walk slowly.'

‘I expected you to stand and fight at least,' said Makapan.

‘Where are you going?' Joyce asked.

‘I don't know yet.'

Joyce became rather excited. Grasping one of the heavy suitcases Blanchaille held she tried to help him, half hobbling and half running alongside him. ‘Are you going overseas?'

Blanchaille nodded. ‘Perhaps.'

Makapan lumbered up. ‘That's nonsense, man. You're starting to talk politics again. We're not that badly off. We're not finished. Even the Americans think there's life in us yet. I saw only yesterday in the paper how their Secretary for State for Political Affairs came all this way to tell us that it will come right in the end, that we're getting better all the time, that we will give political rights to other groups when the time is right, that we will be saved. There is no threat, not outside nor in, that our armed forces cannot handle. Even at the time of the Total Onslaught we hold our own. I assure you myself, and I am a captain in the Signals Corps. You do your
military duty – even if it does sometimes harm your career prospects. My fight with you is religious, not political . . .'

Blanchaille understood this qualification.

In the time of the Total Onslaught of course everyone was in the armed services. For many years a quarter of a million young men capable of bearing arms were on active service or on reserve or in training. All immigrants were called up. However, the Regime decided this base was not sufficient and announced a plan to push this figure to one million men, by drafting individuals, old and young, who for various reasons had been overlooked in the years of the huge defence build-up. In a total white population of little over five million, this force represented a great army, at least on paper, able surely to withstand the Total Onslaught. However, it was also a considerable drain on the available workforce. The army had an insatiable appetite for more men because even the best strategic planners could not predict where the attack would come from next. The chief problem lay in guarding the borders which were thousands of miles long and growing longer all the time. There were, besides the national borders, the borders around the new Homelands, the former reserves in the rural areas which the Government declared independent and sovereign, and guaranteed that sovereignty by fencing them off. New countries meant new borders. New borders meant new fences. Entire battalions spent their period of military service banging in fence poles. Of course the Total Onslaught might also show itself from within, and as a result the huge black townships had to be encircled with wire and the resettlement camps fortified with foot patrols and armoured cars. Then there were Government buildings, the railheads, the power stations, the factories. Since these were frequently the targets of incendiary bombs and limpet mines, they required the strictest protection and the young men on active training might spend months on end sweating in desolate railway sidings or freezing by night outside the oil refineries waiting for something to happen. It seldom did, but then Total Onslaught required total preparedness.

The sons of the middle classes managed to defer their call up by going into university. Some emigrated, a few deserted and a tiny number pleaded conscientious objection and went to jail. But the great majority of young men went into the services and found the tedium quite lethal. Deaths from drink and drugs rose steadily; motor car accidents became more and more frequent and the number of deaths through careless, one might say carefree,
handling of fire-arms, a form of suicide traditionally associated with the police in the old days, grew so alarmingly that the annual mortality rates actually overtook those inflicted by the Total Onslaught. In a notorious case, a young man named Gussie Lamprecht, a draftee lance-corporal in a coastal barracks, was enterprising enough to draw attention to this problem by telephoning a local newspaper, giving his name, rank and number, and promising that if their crime reporter would come to the beach he would see ‘something very interesting'. As the reporter walked along the pier, he related at the inquest, he saw before him a figure on the beach, whom he now knew to be the deceased, lift a pistol to his temple and fire. He remembered that the incident had terrified an Indian fisherman catching shad nearby. He had taken a picture which his newspaper was refused permission to publish, photographs of Defence Force property being forbidden, and young Gussie Lamprecht though deceased was still regarded as Defence Force property. The case caused an outcry, worried mothers of draftees demanded that the Government take action. The Regime responded by forbidding publication of any further figures relating to accidental death caused by firearms and a delegation of mothers thanked the Minister concerned from the depths of their hearts.

A problem more intractable was the increasing shortage of manpower. To ameliorate the imbalance caused by the giant call-up, the Regime suggested a new deal, a kind of leaseback of uniformed labour at army prices. The army would liaise with various businesses and industries and Government bodies which would state their requirements which would then be assessed in terms of manpower available and then where possible specialised labour would be leased back to organisations in need. Contingents of soldiers were deployed whose training in civilian life approximated to the skills required. The word ‘approximated' covered a wide range and so cooks and engineers might find themselves spending the period of their military training working through files in the Department of Inland Revenue and young accountants could spend years knocking in fence posts to take the electrified wire surrounding the Independent Homelands in which the ethnic identity of each black tribe was so fiercely protected.

‘Is it true, in that place called Overseas, that white people and black people can meet as they please? You come and go when you like? No one tells you what to do? Everybody is equal?' Joyce asked.

‘I have never been there, but I believe so,' said Blanchaille.

‘Stop and consider, Blanchaille,' Makapan was pleading with him now, ‘We haven't got on well, I know that. But if you stayed maybe we could work something out.'

‘What do you fear, Father?' Joyce demanded.

Blanchaille's answer was intended to be brutally direct: ‘Destruction.'

He saw the shadow shift across her eyes like a bird dipping across still water, felt her dissatisfaction at his answer, for it told her nothing, or rather it told her what she already knew, what everyone knew. What he had been expected to say was in which scenario he anticipated that destruction. There were three main scenarios with which every South African was by that time so familiar that they referred to them by numbers, rather as Americans will talk of ‘taking the Fifth', meaning the Fifth Amendment, or university students will say they're hoping for a ‘good second', South Africans would commonly talk of ‘going for One', which translated meant that they favoured the first scenario for the end of things; this envisaged black hordes from the North sweeping down, joining the local Africans and obliterating the whites. While this view was still accorded some respect by traditionalists, being the most ancient of the nightmares, it was widely discounted. More people believed in the Second, in which the hordes would still sweep down, the local population would revolt but the whites would resist, fight them to a standstill and some sort of uneasy truce would prevail – until the next eruption. A minority of daring dreamers contemplated what they called No.3, which imagined the unimaginable, a defeat for the white forces who would retreat to the sea burning all behind them and die on the beaches, shooting their women and children first. It was this scenario which appealed so directly to the Azanian Liberation Front that their so-called Strike Kommando added No.3 to their designation. More recently another vision of the future conflict had begun to circulate in whispers and rumours and this scenario was doubly terrifying since it gave credence to No.3 while seeking to reassure the population that the white nation had found a defence against its possible defeat. Known as the ‘Fourth Option' or more colloquially as ‘the Smash', it suggested that nuclear weapons were being secretly prepared and if the worst came to the worst would be deployed, destroying the entire Southern Continent in an instant. Whispers of the Fourth Option had first begun to circulate at the last congress of the ruling National Party at which President Adolph Bubé had declared in his characteristic throaty growl: ‘We wish to live in peace – but if attacked we will resist and we shall
never surrender. We will never leave this Africa we love but if by some misfortune we are forced to go, rest assured we shall not go alone . . . This is not a threat but a promise!' The promise was met with wild applause from the party faithful and the newspapers interpreted the speech in the usual imaginative fashion with headlines ranging from P
RESIDENT PLEADS FOR PEACE
! to B
UBÉ TALKS TOUGH
! ‘W
E
'
LL TAKE YOU WITH US
'
WARNS PRESIDENT
, to S
OUTH AFRICA HAS NO NUCLEAR STRATEGY – OFFICIAL
! This last referring to an off-the-record meeting between Bubé and various reporters after the speech in which he categorically denied that the Republic possessed nuclear weapons, or intended to manufacture any. The fact that he pronounced the first and the last
b
in bomb was regarded as highly significant and analysed at some length. Some papers suggesting that by putting peculiar emphasis on the word ‘bomb' the President was signalling to hostile states to the north that they shouldn't take his denial too seriously, while still others argued against attaching too much importance to peculiarities of pronunciation pointing out that Bubé had been talking English, which was not his first language, and he had, in any event, an emphatic, gutteral way of speaking. Subtle observers reported that the fact that he had used English showed that he intended his warning to carry as far as possible. He had closed the meeting by consulting with a flourish his gold hunter, a time-piece of great beauty and fabled accuracy manufactured in Cologne, closing the case with a decisive snap which left no one in any doubt of his determination to protect the country's security at any cost.

Blanchaille's second answer to Joyce and Makapan at their dawn meeting was more specific. ‘I am retiring.'

‘Father is weak now. Joyce must carry his bags.'

Blanchaille was aghast. ‘You want to come with me? When things got tough you went over to this man here. Now you've thought better of that and you return to me. What sort of behaviour is that?'

Joyce was not in the least abashed. ‘I didn't know Father was going overseas.'

Makapan turned round and stalked off shouting: ‘Overseas! What the hell do you know of overseas? No good can come of this. And you Joyce – don't make a fool of yourself. Stay with us. We will look after you. This man is mad. Don't listen to him. Don't go with him.'

But Joyce had now actually wrested one of Blanchaille's cases from him and was carrying it down the road. She took no notice of Makapan.

And so I saw how Blanchaille and the woman went on together. And in my dream I heard Joyce question Blanchaille, saying: ‘Mr Makapan is a good man, but he is thick. He is thick in his head. He said Joyce must come to his side. If Joyce comes to his side then Father Rischa will come back and we will be happy again. Every night I sleep out in the cold waiting. I am tired of waiting. Why is Father going overseas?'

‘I believe I will find a better place there.'

‘And who told you of the better place?'

‘It is written in a book.'

‘Ah,' Joyce seemed pleased. ‘In the book of the Lord?'

‘No, it is in the book of the President.'

‘Of the President Bubé?'

‘No, of another President, of old President Kruger.'

‘Has he also been overseas?'

‘Yes. He was the only President who had been overseas until President Bubé went.'

‘I have heard something of him. And the words in this book – are they true?'

Blanchaille hesitated. ‘I cannot say if they are true, indeed it is said by some that this book does not exist. But if they are not true, these words, then they are interesting.'

‘And what do they speak of, these promises in the book?'

‘It is written that there is a place for hopeless souls who are tired of too much wandering. Good souls, African souls, who seek rest will find it in this special place.'

Joyce seized his elbow with such a powerful grip that he gasped. ‘And what else?'

‘There all people will be equal, there will be no segregation, no pass laws, no black and white skins, no separate lavatories, no servants' quarters, no resettlement camps. In that place friends who have disappeared will be found again and even some we thought were dead will greet us. There will be no police stations, no torture, no barbed wire, no guns, no soldiers and no bombs.'