‘Was,’ Blanchaille contradicted her. ‘Was once.’
‘Well, anyway, why tell you? You’ve seen more of infant mortality than I ever will. But that’s my piece and you’re welcome to it. Now it’s Happy’s turn. She’ll give you a different view of things.’
Happy, tall, black, appeared with Visser leaning gratefully on her arm. She took a seat between Freia and Blanchaille and ordered a highball. Her hair was drawn up in a great dark crown and seeded with what looked like pearls. Her fingernails were painted pink. Her manner was strident, even aggressive and Blanchaille shifted uneasily. Freia caught his eye and winked. Takes all sorts,’ she whispered sympathetically, ‘that’s the trouble.’ Happy glared. Freia fell silent. Blanchaille sighed and turned to Happy. He was being punished with parables.
‘I worked in the house of my Minister from about the age of fourteen onwards. Because my Minister was powerful I learnt things and because I learnt things I went places. My Minister’s department decided that it was no good dealing with our northern black neighbours as we’d done in the old colonial times with the white men lording it over blacks. In the new age black must speak to black and so I became a negotiator, that’s to say I dealt with heads of state and political officials in the enemy states to the north. Since as you may know, they buy the works from us — power, food, transport, arms, everything from nappies to canned fruit — I used to say to them, look, this is our price, take it or leave it. Sometimes I’d get a lot of opposition. Some big hero of the African revolution, chest clinking with medals, would meet me at the National Redeemer Airport and say: “Jesus Christ! You’re black, Happy, you’re one of us, how can you help them to bleed us to death?” And I’d say, “Man — we take forty thousand mine workers a year from you, and if you don’t like the arrangement and the price per head we’re quoting then fine — don’t send them. Or maybe you’d prefer that instead of remitting their salaries to you in toto, direct, we might consider paying the poor bastards individually and in that case half your national income goes out the window…” Allow me to present you with a photograph of my Minister.’
Before he could refuse Happy thrust a photograph in his hands. Involuntarily he glanced at it: ‘Kuiker, of course.’
This delighted his audience who clapped their hands and echoed him: ‘Kuiker, of course.’
The face of a pugilist, of an all-in wrestler. The flesh kneaded into thick ridges around the jaw-line, eyebrows and lips; nose flat and wide, a bony spur run askew and bedded down in thick flat flesh. The full lips in their charateristic sneer, even when compressed. MINISTER KUIKER WEARING HIS SARDONIC SMILE, the papers said. Thick dark hair combed back from the forehead in stiff, oiled ridges running over his ears and down the back of his neck. He had a taste for shiny suits and bright ties and a paradoxical reputation for unyielding conservatism combined with modern pragmatism. He was solid, powerful and dangerous, this man, the marbled eyes, the petrified hair, the enormous capacity for Scotch, the truculent ties and the cheap fashion jewellery, gold tie-pins with their diamond chips, the skull rings with red-glass bloodshot eyes he affected on both hands. Gus Kuiker was widely tipped to succeed President Bubé when the old man went. His only rival, young ‘Bomber Vollenhoven’, was seen as too inexperienced and too liberal. Kuiker was the mastermind behind President Bubé’s lightning foreign tours and the man responsible for plucking a young statistical clerk by name of Trudy Yssel from a lowly job in the President’s Department for Applied Ethnic Embryology and appointing her to the post of Secretary to the Department of Communications: YSSEL NEW SUPREMO AT DEPCOM, the papers said. KUIKER’S PROPAGANDA OFFENSIVE!
In the picture Kuiker gazed belligerently ahead. It might have been a police mug shot.
‘Where was this taken?’
‘Here.’
His eyes must have held the question which of course there was no need to ask, and his hosts were too tactful to answer. There was only one reason why anyone stopped at the Airport Palace Hotel. Blanchaille felt conscious once again of his naïvety. Well, he could not help that. He had been raised to believe such things were impossible. Only Lynch had disagreed. But then Lynch had been mad. Now it seemed increasingly that Lynch’s madness was being borne out. It also, and this was ironic, seemed to bear out the charge of the Old Guard within the Regime, that the New Men, of whom Kuiker was a leading representative, would cut and run when things got tough.
The Old Guard believed in shooting. The New Men believed in certain adjustments. ‘I was one of these adjustments he had in mind,’ said Happy, ‘when he talked about necessary adjustments to racial policies. He talked of ethnic autonomy, of equalised freedoms, of positive tribalism, of the thousand subtle easements of policy which, my Minister Gus Kuiker would say, were necessary to relax the corset of rigid white centralism and to allow us to reach and embrace the future, as we must if we were to survive. Did the white man think — our Minister would ask — that he had a right in Africa because he had been there for three hundred years? Nonsense! The Portuguese had been in Africa for five hundred years, and where were they now? They were back in Lisbon on the dole. Therefore, in answer to the question — what shall we do to be saved? — the Old Guard would have replied, shoot to kill. But ask the New Men and they would tell you, do anything necessary. What kills them is to be condemned for acting for reasons of expediency when they believe as much as their predecessors, the Old Guard, that they act out of divine necessity. Watch out for Minister Kuiker, in whatever guise you find him. He has been abused by his own people and that has made him crazy.’
Now I saw in my dream that a pretty Indian arrived and took her place at the bar. She wore an apricot silk sari. Petite and teetotal, she drank only orange juice and announced herself to be a Moslem and a Marxist. Her name was Fatima. She spoke so softly Blanchaille had to strain to hear the words. Soon he wished he hadn’t.
‘I hope to replace the present Regime with a people’s democracy,’ Fatima said mildly. ‘And as a result of my beliefs I was placed in preventive detention. My interrogators, who were all men, at first found themselves unwilling to inflict pain. That is to say, they didn’t like to beat me since it flew in the face of beliefs deeply instilled into them that large men do not go around hitting women, and perhaps because of the fact that I am particularly small boned, they were actually unable to raise their fists to me. However, after a certain time they stripped me, secured my hands and legs, and attempted to torture me by introducing various objects — pen tops, broom handles and finally fingers — into my vagina and anus. The reasons why they did this were complicated. I presume that since they weren’t attempting to extract any information from me, they must be trying to humiliate me, I being a slender girl and they being large and muscular white men and I suspect that they had read that Asian girls were naturally reticent and modest. But I wasn’t prepared to allow myself to be humiliated and this put them in a difficult position. I also pointed out to the men assaulting me that without exception they had large erections which were quite discernible beneath their blue serge trousers. Perhaps for this reason I was returned to my cell and later discharged. It seemed to me that sexual excitement had begun to replace serious political discussion. This was some time ago. By now these interrogators have probably done away with prisoners and replaced them with perverse solitary sexual acts. Not only did the revolution I envisaged seem impossible, but it had become impossible to even pose the question or the threat. I came here where at least I can help people to leave this world behind them.’