‘I believe there is,’ said Blanchaille.
Van Vuuren joined his hands together in a pious gesture of the altar server of long ago. ‘Let’s hope so.’
CHAPTER 9
Van Vuuren loaded Blanchaille’s cases into a small, powder-blue Volkswagen Golf. There wasn’t room for the cases in the boot and he put them on the back seat. ‘Don’t worry about the car, just leave it at the airport. Its owner, I’m afraid, has no further use for it. It comes from our pool.’
‘Goodbye,’ Blanchaille said dazed by all he had learnt.
‘Good luck,’ Van Vuuren replied. ‘I take it you see things a little differently now?’
Blanchaille felt embarrassed. Van Vuuren had made himself difficult to dislike. ‘Why do you stay on?’
Van Vuuren looked uncomfortable. He shrugged. ‘Duty, perhaps.’
‘Duty? To what? To whom?’
Again Van Vuuren was silent but he gave Blanchaille an odd, rather mocking glance and waved him away. ‘You’re under police protection. It’s about as good as being anointed.’
In order to reach the airport one takes the national highway, a great curving road much of it a long, gentle climb. It was getting dark. A stony, glittering moon rose swiftly, glared briefly and was gone. Just as he cleared the city it began to rain. Rounding a bend he found his way blocked when three men in orange oilskins stepped into the road and flagged him down. His bright lights reflected back off the brilliant orange plastic and dazzled him so that he had to shield his eyes. The men stepped up to the window: ‘Theodore Blanchaille?’
‘What do you want?’
‘Please get out of the car,’ said the first policeman.
‘We’re giving you something,’ said the second policeman.
‘Please take off your clothes,’ said the third policeman.
The door was opened and Blanchaille was helped out. A large green and red golf umbrella was unfurled and held over his head. The first policeman reached into the car and dragged out Blanchaille’s three cases.
‘What are you doing with those?’
‘We’re relieving you of them.’
‘But it’s all my stuff.’
‘You won’t be needing it where you’re going. Now in return we have three things to give you. A change of clothes, good advice and proper papers.’
The first policeman went over to his car and returned with a large cardboard box. This he unpacked carefully and took from it a white suit. There in the pouring rain, standing beneath the umbrella, Blanchaille was forced to remove his clothes and don the new white suit. There was a red woollen tie to go with it, silk shirt, a crimson spotted handkerchief for the breast pocket and slim, pale, pointed Italian shoes with cream silk socks.
The rain stopped, the wild moon reappeared. Blanchaille gleamed coldly in its light.
‘That’s better,’ said the first policeman. ‘Now you look like somebody.’
‘I am to give you some advice,’ said the second policeman. ‘You’re going out, you’re leaving, you’re going to visit the outside world, you will need to be prepared. Remember things aren’t quite so simple there, people worry about different things, about inflation and unemployment. They worry about whether to have their children vaccinated against whooping cough. They argue about the environment and the rights of women and they fear the extinction of the world by atomic explosion.’
And then the third policeman stepped closer to the now resplendent priest looking like a plump, prosperous riverboat gambler in his white suit and after checking his passport, handed him his exit permit. ‘Although we all know you are leaving, the point of this permit is to ensure that you take a one-way trip. There is no return.’ Then stepping even closer he whispered in the fugitive’s ear in a voice so low I could not catch them, the directions he was to take once he arrived safely at his final destination.
They put him back in his car, they stepped away from it in unison and they waved him on, three wet policemen, shining in the fierce moonlight.
I saw in my dream how Blanchaille went very little further that night but pulled over onto the side of the road and with his head swimming with all that had happened to him that day, and having first carefully folded his new jacket and put it on the back seat, he slept.
In the first light of the new day he started the car and set out to complete his drive to the airport. This gently rising country he knew well, here it was where the huge army camps were situated with their big red notices warning of electrified fencing and the regular watch towers. And on the other side of the road lay the military cemeteries, entered by way of giant bronze gates cast in the form of wagon wheels through the spokes of which he could glimpse the orange crosses on the graves. Orange crosses were a particular feature of the military graveyard. No other colour was suitable. White, brown, pink, black, yellow and even red, all carried racial or political connotations which were judged to be undesirable. After all, since the Total Onslaught began it had not been only Europeans who gave their lives for the mother country. People of many colours including large contingents of black storm-troopers, Indian cooks, coloured drivers, Bushmen trackers, served in the armed forces. So it was orange, the dominant colour of the national flag, colour of the original Free State, the substantial feature of the African sunset, that was found in military memorials.
Here was the Air Force base which they had visited as boys with Father Lynch, when the priest had worn his beret as a mark of cordiality to celebrate the French connection, ‘an entirely appropriate symbol, I think, and a gesture of esteem for one of our most faithful arms suppliers, the old Sabre Jets are gone and the new French fighters are in.’
‘Not swords into ploughshares. Sabres into Mirages…’ Blanchaille muttered.
Along these perimeter fences he saw the early morning Alsatian patrols, the dogs held in a U-shaped metal lead with their trainers running behind them. It was rather reminiscent of guide dogs leading the blind. Here were endless miles of military suburbs named Shangri-La, Valhalla, El Dorado, Happy Valley.
The first of the great national monuments was the burly granite sarcophagus raised to the memory of the early Trekkers, grey and powerful on a low green hill and looking like nothing so much as an old-fashioned wireless, a giant Art-Deco piece, a great circular window intersected by deep parallel grooves where the loudspeaker would have been, hidden behind its wire and wicker screen. The monument sat in its massive bulk on the hill, forever.
Next, the monument to the dead of the concentration camps which the British ran in the Boer War, a huge, weeping, gilded Boer mother dipping her poke bonnet over her starving children who buried their faces in her ample lap.
Next, the monument to the first invasion of Angola, the bronze soldier posed behind a captured Russian artillery-piece mounted on a lorry, everything precise in all its details, the 122-millimetre rocket launcher, the famous ‘Stalin organ’, capable of firing salvos of forty rockets at a burst. The soldier and artillery-piece and lorry were on a raised grassy bank surrounded by a mass of flowers, a kind of floral gunpit, banks of white madonna lilies bloodily speckled here and there with clumps of red hot pokers.
Here was the monument to the dead of the abortive Mauritian landings, perhaps the first military invasion organised by private enterprise, the money having been put up by the large mining companies which had found themselves under fire for lack of patriotism and wished to provide assurances of good faith to the Regime. It had been a monumental error, the soldiers had come ashore from their landing craft under the most terrible misapprehension that the way was clear and that a coup would simultaneously topple the Government. Came ashore at the wrong time on the wrong day, and under the very guns of a section of the army out on manoeuvres who had observed the seaborne invasion with incredulity from their fortified emplacements and then opened fire with gusto laying the invaders face down on the beach in a grotesque and bloody mimicry of holiday sunbathers. The dead were remembered by a towering block of marble. The early morning sun hit the golden orange lettering in which their names were incised, row upon row.