‘Hello Blanchie, long time no see.’

That was that. No apology, no cringing and fumbling explanation, no sign of regret or mortification. Merely — ‘Hello Blanchie, long time no see.’ Blanchaille stood back from the door and let Kipsel enter. And there he was in the room, that same Kipsel who had grievously betrayed everyone he knew, had fled the country in utter despair, the man who had had the gall to go on existing after the treachery, which even those who benefited from it had condemned. Why had he not done the only decent thing and slashed his wrists or hanged himself from a stout beam? Instead Kipsel had gone out and got a job, in a northern university, and taught sociology. Of all things, sociology, that quasi-religious subject with its faintly moralistic ring. Perhaps more than anything the choice of the subject he taught had scandalised friend and enemy alike.

‘Why have you come?’

‘Because there was a question I wanted to ask Magdalena. I’ve turned it over in my mind for so many years now but I can’t come up with an answer. There is something I don’t understand. I’m not sure she’s got the answer. Or if she’d tell me if she knew. Or if I want to hear it. But I know I want to ask the question.’

‘You can ask me if you like.’

‘That’s kind. But in the first place I didn’t expect to see you. And secondly, you won’t do.’

‘I’m all you’ve got. Magdalena isn’t here. I don’t know where she is. She met me at the airport yesterday morning. She brought me here and then she disappeared.’

‘What are you doing here?’

‘Just passing through. My ticket gave me an unrequested stopover in London and I fly out tonight. Is that your question?’

Kipsel shook his head. His eyes were large and liquid. ‘No, that was plain curiosity. The real question goes back much further. To the days I spent in jail, and before that to my interrogation in Balthazar Buildings, after the business of the pylons. The official story is that I gave the police information about everybody connected with the explosions. I told them everything. In exchange I got a deal, I got immunity from prosecution. Only I didn’t! Do you hear, Blanchie? And for one bloody good reason. I didn’t have to tell them. They knew! They knew already! About me, Mickey, Magdalena, Dladla — everyone! For God’s sake, they even knew what brand of petrol we used, they had copies of the maps, recordings of our phone conversations… You name it, they had them. So I changed tack. I accepted everything — except where it concerned Magdalena. I confirmed everything they had was right — and dammit, it was! — except for the girl. She had known nothing of our plan, of the bombs, of the Azanian Liberation Front. She had been duped. She came along for the ride. She was only there because she loved me. That’s what I told them. I tried to save Magdalena. I am not Kipsel the traitor. But if not me, then who?’

Blanchaille looked at the pale, trembling creature before him. The round, downy cheeks quivered. Kipsel’s extraordinarily thick eyelashes rose and fell rapidly and his round mouth shone as his tongue licked the blubber lips. His hands flapped. He looked more like a fish than ever. A fish drowning in air.

‘I understand your question. If you didn’t tell the police, who did?’

Then the two friends flung their arms around each others’ necks and embraced. Lost in the world, how they rejoiced in each other’s company. Blanchaille told Kipsel of his arrival in London, of his meeting with Magdalena, of the visit to the Embassy, of the encounter with Father Lynch in a Soho street, of his warning and of Van Vuuren’s brave death in a Soho cellar. At this news Kipsel broke down and wept unashamedly. I heard, too, how Blanchaille told his friend of the two watchers outside the fishmonger’s and their strange name: Apple Two.

‘I also have a question,’ said Blanchaille. ‘Who is Apple One?’

And Kipsel replied. ‘Perhaps when we answer mine, we will answer yours.’

CHAPTER 16

Blanchaille knew the man at the airport bar as a fellow countryman from his accent. But he could also identify him from a picture he had just seen which showed him strolling along a Paris street. It had been printed in the English newspaper he bought on arriving at the airport. He was relieved to see that he drank brandy.

Is not the choice of strong drink one of the easiest, not to say one of the most pleasant ways of rising painlessly on the social scale, of impressing friends and confounding enemies? Or for that matter, of refuting the notion, lamentably widespread even in this day and age, that South Africans are only interested in beer and shooting kaffirs, and in either order. There is even a calumny, sadly current still, that a famous South African lager I must not name (suffice it to say that the beer in question is a product of a brewery owned by the Himmelfarber empire) is supposed to have run an advertising campaign with the slogan SHOOTING KAFFIRS IS THIRSTY WORK. Now the truth is not (as some Government apologists maintain) that the campaign in question was run many years ago and is now thoroughly discredited. Nor that Curtis Christian Himmelfarber himself led the campaign to deface the posters, altering the wording to something less likely to incite racial hostility and with his own hand struck down the forgotten manager who first coined the infamous slogan, although it is a satisfying tale. Misunderstandings abound. There is even argument about the precise wording of the slogan. There are some who maintain that what it really said was: IS SHOOTING THIRSTY KAFFIRS’ WORK? Whilst others say it read: THIRSTY KAFFIRS IS SHOOTING WORK. Whereas in fact the truth is that the original slogan read simply: SHOOTING IS THIRSTY WORK, but unseen enemy hands across the land at a pre-arranged signal added the offending words, either with the intention of discrediting our country in the eyes of the world, or of embarrassing C.C. Himmelfarber who with his giant enterprise, Consolidated Holdings, had always been a stalwart champion of the progressive forces for political change in the country, or both. None the less the malicious legend lingers on and so when you come across a South African drinking not beer but brandy in a bar at Heathrow airport, as Blanchaille and Kipsel did as they waited to be called for their flight to Geneva, even if one does not particularly wish to meet another fellow South African at the time, a feeling of patriotic pride and relief suffuses the frame.

The so-called ‘kaffir beer’ scandal was a typical example of the concerted campaign waged by overseas dissidents, hostile forces and illegal organisations such as the Azanian Liberation Front, against the honest efforts of the Regime to offer justice to all its population groups. Such black propaganda was in turn just another adjunct of the universal campaign to destroy the white man in Southern Africa, which came to be known as the Total Onslaught.

It was to counter this campaign that the new minister of Ethnic Autonomy and Parallel Equilibriums, Augustus Kuiker, vowed to devote himself when he was appointed Deputy Leader of the Party by the President, Adolph Bubé. It had been Kuiker who replaced Hans Job when that decent man was driven from office by a scurrilous whispering campaign soon after he had succeeded the flamboyant but ailing merino millionaire, J.J. Vokker, when sudden ill health forced him to step down. This change had been the subject of a very cruel joke. ‘Who will replace a Vokker?’ went the question. ‘Only a Hansjob!’ came the reply and the whole country doubled up with ribald laughter. Even those who should have known better held their sides. It was then that the formidable Kuiker was appointed and the laughing had to stop. ‘Our Gus’, people called him, and shivered. The face of granite, the lips of a cement-mixer. It was Kuiker who had appointed Trudy Yssel to the newly formed Department of Communications with the brief to put our country’s case abroad with all the punch she could muster. It was regarded as a brave move.