And so I saw them carry the prisoner into the cellar, in the chair, like some mutant pope, and there they beat him, stamped on him, stabbed him. Though whether he died when they stabbed him or was dead when the knives went in, I cannot say. Also they pissed on him, as Kramer had sworn they would do, showing that he had not been speaking metaphorically. They actually, together or singly, urinated on him as he lay in his blood among the broken whisky bottles the fumes of which were suffocating in the small room and the air soon became fetid — which I agree is not really surprising when you remember that there were several strong men taking violent exercise in a small space; a crude, enthusiastic, messy, bludgeoning assault of boots, fists, bottles. It resembled nothing so much as the violence which passes for pleasure in the lower divisions of the rugby league. Even in this instance they reverted to type. They whooped, stamped, yelled. It was foul play. It was the foulest play imaginable. But it was damn good sport! Those who speak of rugby as a game believe they are making a joke. I can tell them they’ve seen neither the game or the joke — for neither is involved. What we are talking about are matters of life and death, not of who should live, or who should die, but who should decide! We are talking of sacred matters.
All this I saw through Blanchaille’s eyes. He watched the men come out of the liquor store, smelt the spirits on them and imagined in his naïvety that they had been drinking and this accounted for their strained, pale faces, their laboured breathing, the slightly giddy looks, and the stains on Oscar’s blue suit. He watched as the money was paid ‘for the hire of the hall’, as Momzie called it. A handful of small gold coins on the bar counter.
‘Who else but these guys pays in Krugerrands?’ he asked proudly, scooping up the hoard. ‘But then again, who better? Ain’t they got the market cornered?’
It was only when Dudley from Malta complained about the heat that they realised something had happened.
Minto went over and tried the handle.
The explosion blew off the door of the liquor store and carried away Minto, still attached to the handle. Momzie and Dudley from Malta screamed as they tried to beat back the flames with their jackets. The bottles of booze shattering like brilliant bombs. The body on the floor glowed like a lamp, and exploded, lighting up its own disfigurements, the smashed face, the knife wounds. A hot gust of alcohol, sweat and, yes, urine, hit them. And Blanchaille, finding himself unattended, took the dead man’s earlier advice and ran.
CHAPTER 15
And so it was that I saw Blanchaille retrace his steps and I saw how despite his terrifying experience, once back in Magdalena’s flat he cooked eggs. In the midst of tragedy, of bereavement, scorched by the fiery vision of Van Vuuren’s pricked and broken body, he had not expected to feel suddenly, ravenously, hungry. But there it was. The fleshly appetites were unrelenting, the Margaret Brethren had warned their boys, which if not constantly beaten into submission would command the frail human creature and bend him to their will.
Now we know that the stories of how Van Vuuren met his end were eventually to differ widely. The Regime acted quickly to claim him for their own. He became the faithful detective murdered by agents for the Azanian Liberation Front. The Front further complicated matters by admitting responsibility for the ‘execution’, declaring that the police-spy’s fate was a warning to any other agents of the Regime who attempted to subvert the forces of liberation. The Regime in turn announced that brilliant undercover work by Captain Van Vuuren had revealed a deep split within the Azanian terror group resulting in the demotion of its president, Kaiser Zulu. The Front in a statement called this a typical lie of fascist adventurers and claimed that President Zulu was enjoying a well-deserved retirement in a home for high state officials ‘in the country of a friendly ally’, somewhere on the Caspian Sea. The Regime then posthumuously awarded to Van Vuuren its premier decoration, the Cross of the Golden Eland with Star, an honour previously accorded only to visiting Heads of State, that is to say, to General Stroessner of Paraguay, the only Head of State to pass that way in living memory. The national poet composed an ode in honour of the dead policeman. This was the former radical poet, Pik Groenewald, who after years of self-imposed exile in Mexico City plotting the destruction of the Regime had a vision one night of a lion attacked by army ants and returned home immediately and joined the tank-corps where besides valiant service in the operational areas he composed a series of laments upon his previous treachery which he dedicated, with apologies, to President Adolph Bubé. Groenewald’s ‘Ode to an Assassinated Security Branch Officer’ played cleverly on the flammable connotations of Van Vuuren’s name, in the celebrated line Flame to the fire they fed him/Blade to the vein they bled him… And it was quoted in Parliament to spontaneous applause.
Blanchaille of course, as I saw, knew the true story, knew that by some peculiar chain of logic both the Regime and the Front derived profit from the death of Van Vuuren. That this knowledge did not drive him to anger or despair but left him ravenous is testimony to the toughness of human nature or to the growing self-awareness of the fat ex-priest from the camps that nothing was what it seemed.
What a place this England was! Blanchaille stared at the English eggs, they were not like African eggs, they were pallid, waterish little things by comparison with the garish orange, cholesterol-packed bombs from the hot South. But he cooked three or four, even so, and a mound of bacon and ate without stopping, shovelling the food into his mouth and plugging it there with chunks of thin white bread, running a very fine line between sustenance and suffocation. In the cupboard beneath the sink he found half a bottle of Chianti and finished it off directly. It was as if there were spaces inside him he must fill, not simply hungry spaces but vulnerable sections which he must protect.
Afterwards he lay in the great white tub, soaking there beneath the benign gaze of the Duke of Wellington upon the wall, beneath Magdalena’s stockings, hanging above him from a cunning arrangement of lines, and looking, through the steam, like skinny vultures perched upon telephone wires. Magdalena’s depilatories, her soaps, her shampoos, some sort of nobbled glove affair, presumably meant for rubbing dry skin from the body, her back brush and sponge and bubble bath, all waited with the air of things that know their owner will not be returning. He lay in the bath and let the grime of the past hours float from him and begin to form a brown ring around the bath. Strangely comforting, this evidence of life, human dirt.
As he sat on the side of the bath drying his hair the doorbell rang.
Beside the door hung a photograph. It showed Magdalena in Moscow. She wore a white fur hat and a white fur coat. Beside her were the onion towers of the Kremlin. She was smiling radiantly. The photograph was a trophy. It showed how far and how successfully Magdalena had gone in the service of her cause. The picture was unassailable proof of her credentials as a radical, as a leading member of the Front, as one of the prime enemies of the Regime in exile. It insisted upon this achievement. And yet there were certain matters unexplained, certain questions he wanted to ask Magdalena which could not be answered by that photograph. ‘I have been to Moscow’, the photograph trumpeted. ‘Few of you have been further than Durban!’ True. But not enough.
It took him a few moments to recognise the man at the door. The hair was still as unruly as ever, growing now even more thickly above the ears. The eyebrows were more bushy than he remembered but the lips were the same. Oh yes, they were the same rather bulbous lips, wet from continuous nervous licking, the nose broad, the eyes soft waterish brown, and there it was, the characteristic pout with the lips pushed outwards into a little ‘o’, surrounded by soft white down. A fish pout. Kipsel!