Chapter 2

Kommandant van Heerden had few illusions about himself and a great many about everything else. And it was thanks to his illusions that he found himself in charge of the Police station in Piemburg. It was not a very onerous position. Piemburg's mediocrity was not conducive to more than petty crime and it had been felt at Police Headquarters in Pretoria that, while Kommandant van Heerden's appointment might push the city's crime rate up, it would at least serve to lower the waves of violence and theft that had followed his posting to other more enterprising towns.

Besides, Piemburg deserved the Kommandant. As the one town in the Republic still to fly the Union Jack from the Town Hall, Piemburg needed to be taught that the Government could not be challenged without taking some revenge.

Kommandant van Heerden knew that his appointment was not due to his success in the field of criminal investigation. He fondly imagined it had come to him because he understood the English. It was in fact due to the reputation of his grandfather, Klaasie van Heerden, who had served under General Cronje at the Battle of Paardeberg and had been shot by the British for refusing to obey the order of his commanding officer to surrender. He had instead stayed put in a hole in the bank of the Modder River and shot down twelve soldiers of the Essex Regiment who were relieving themselves there some forty-eight hours after the last shot had been fired. The fact that Klaasie had been fast asleep throughout the entire battle and had never heard the order to cease fire was discounted by the British during his trial and by later generations of Afrikaans historians. Instead he was accounted a hero who had been martyred for his devotion to the Boer Republics and as a hero he was revered by Afrikaans Nationalists all over South Africa.

It was this legend that had helped Kommandant van Heerden to his present rank. It had taken a long time for his incompetence to live down the reputation for cunning that had been bequeathed him by his grandfather, and by that time it was too late for Police Headquarters to do anything about his inefficiency except put him in command of Piemburg.

Kommandant van Heerden imagined that he had got the post because it was in an English town and certainly it was just the post he wanted. The Kommandant believed that he was one of the few Afrikaaners who really understood the English mind. In spite of the treatment the British had meted out to his grandfather, in spite of the brutality the British had shown to the Boer women and children in the concentration camps, in spite of the sentimentality the British wasted on their black servants, in spite of everything, Kommandant van Heerden admired the British.

There was something about their blundering stupidity that appealed to him. It called out to something deep within his being. He couldn't say exactly what it was, but deep called to deep and, if the Kommandant could have chosen his place of birth, its time and nationality, he would have plumped for Piemburg in 1890 and the heart of an English gentleman.

If he had one regret, it was that his own mediocrity had never had the chance to express itself with anything like the degree of success that had attended the mediocrity and muddle-headedness of the rulers of the British Empire. Born an English gentleman in Victorian Britain he might well have risen to the rank of field-marshal. His military ineptitude would surely have been rewarded by constant and rapid promotion. He was certain he could have done as well as Lord Chelmsford, whose forces had been massacred by the Zulus at Isandhlwana. Stormberg, Spion Kop, Magersfontein, might have been even more appalling disasters had he been in command. Kommandant van Heerden had been born out of nation, time and place.

The same could not be said of the Kommandant's second-in-command, Luitenant Verkramp, nor of Konstabel Els. That they should never have been born at all, or, if their births could not have been aborted, that their nation, place and time should have been as distant as possible from his own, was Kommandant van Heerden's most fervent and frequent wish.

Luitenant Verkramp hated the English. His grandfather had not suffered as had the Kommandant's for the sake of the Boer Republics. Instead he had proclaimed peace and friendship for the British Empire from the pulpit of his church in the Cape and had made a small fortune on the side by supplying the British Army with the Basuto ponies it needed for its mounted infantry. Verkramp's childhood had been spent in the shadow of that pulpit and little Verkramp had inherited a marked eschatological bent from his grandfather and a hatred for all things English from his father who had spent his life trying to live down the name of 'traitor' which had clung to the Verkramp family long after the Boer War. Luitenant Verkramp brought both inheritances with him to his work. He combined his inquisitorial tendencies with his antipathy for the English by becoming head of the Security Branch in Piemburg, a post which allowed him to send reports on the political reliability of the citizens of Piemburg to his superiors in BOSS, the Bureau of State Security in Pretoria. Even Kommandant van Heerden was the subject of Luitenant Verkramp's suspicions and the Kommandant had taken good care to read the reports about himself that Verkramp had submitted. In one of these he had detected the innuendo that he was insufficiently active in pursuit of Communist cells.

In the week following, the Kommandant had sought to rebut the accusation by a series of lightning raids on likely Communist groups. A playreading of Shaw's "Arms and the Man" at the Piemburg Amateur Dramatic Society had been interrupted by the entrance of the Kommandant and his men who confiscated all copies of the play and took the names of all present. _Black Beauty_ had been removed from the shelves of the Public Library on the Kommandant's orders. The showing of the film "The African Queen" had been banned at the local cinema, as had an article on weather forecasting in the Piemburg News entitled 'Red Sky at Night'.

All in all the Kommandant felt satisfied that he had made significant moves to combat the spread of Marxism in Piemburg and the public outcry that followed would, he felt, go a long way to convince BOSS that he was not as soft on Communists as Luitenant Verkramp's report had suggested. Besides he had Verkramp's report on Konstabel Els to fall back on.

The gulf that separated fact from fiction in all the Luitenant's reports on political life in Piemburg widened to a cosmic abyss in the report he had submitted on Konstabel Els. In it Els was described as a regular attendant at the Dutch Reformed Church, an ardent member of the Nationalist Party and a determined opponent of 'liberalistic and communistic tendencies to pollute racial purity by social, economic and political methods of integration'. Since Els neither went to church nor belonged to the Nationalist Party and was a living exponent of mixed sexual intercourse, Kommandant van Heerden felt that he had Luitenant Verkramp's reputation for accuracy by the short hairs.

With Konstabel Els matters stood rather differently. For one thing Els constituted no sort of threat to the Kommandant though a very considerable one to nearly everyone else in Piemburg. His natural aptitude for violence and particularly for shooting black people was only equalled by his taste for brandy and his predilection for forcing the less attractive parts of his person into those parts of African women legally reserved for male members of their own race. Kommandant van Heerden had had to speak quite severely to him about the illegality of this last tendency on several occasions, but he had put Els' taste for black women down to the undoubted fact that the Konstabel was of mixed race himself.