‘You’ve got it,’ Himmelfarber beamed, clearly believing that in Kipsel he had found a recruit, ‘I appeal to you. Leave off this foolish travelling. Come back with me. Come back home and make the new changes work for us. The old consensus is smashed. The bastards are on the run. They say they’re being modern. In fact they’re merely terrified. They say they want to look ahead. In fact they daren’t open their eyes.’
‘Join them,’ said Kipsel, ‘join them and then destroy them — isn’t that it?’
‘Exactly.’ Himmelfarber was clearly exulted by the thought. ‘You understand.’
‘Indeed I do. I have friends who did the same thing once. To me,’ Kipsel said. He stood up. ‘Come Blanchie, it’s time we were on our way. I’m sorry but I suppose by rights I belong to the Old Guard. I will never be a New Man.’
And Blanchaille, his heart pounding with relief and gratitude, followed his friend through the french windows and down the drive before the astonished Himmelfarber could collect his wits.
‘Thank God!’ muttered Blanchaille. ‘For a few moments I thought he had you. You see what he does to people, don’t you? You see his own miners on the wall and how he’s destroyed them. You think of the bright-eyed idealists who go to work for Consolidated Holdings in its Art-Deco palace in the capital with their new suits and their dreams of multi-racial progress. Of how they will become personnel officers and drive their new BMWs proudly home to the townships at night to show that they have succeeded in a white man’s world because they work for kindly, liberal, rich, decent Curtis Christian Himmelfarber.’
‘Think of his nephew,’ said Kipsel.
Behind them C.C. Himmelfarber stood in the window screaming: ‘Preachers! Prudes! Sermonisers! My God, if there’s anyone worse than racists — it’s people like you!’
‘Of course we should never forget what Himmelfarber gets from this for dealing on behalf of the Regime,’ said Kipsel, unexpectedly revealing how sure his grasp of the complexities of the mine-owner’s position had been. ‘What he gets out of it is increased clout with the Regime and he gets business put his way. Perhaps most important of all, he gets a number of channels for exporting his own funds abroad, currency regulations hold no fear for him, if they ever did. Since he’s doing business abroad on behalf of the Regime, secret, valuable business, he can transfer as much capital abroad as he wishes. He can build up his interests in Europe and in America. Should he ever have to leave his native country he wouldn’t have to pack more than a travelling bag. It’s just another option, you see.’
‘You know,’ said Blanchaille as they neared the end of the drive, ‘it’s always the same with the Himmelfarbers. I suppose Julius, the founder of the whole firm, was all right. But C.C.’s great-grandfather, Julius Himmelfarber, kept on best terms with the Boers right throughout the war, kept supplying them with gold. And when the British marched into Johannesburg he was on best terms with them too. Now you have C.C. with his liberal politics and his Government contacts. He really does mean to destroy them. And if he does, he wins.’
‘And if he doesn’t?’ Kipsel asked.
‘He still wins.’
A grey Mercedes travelling at speed spat gravel at them as it raced up the drive. It carried Ernest Nokkles and Chris Dieweld, Emil Moolah and Koos Spahr.
‘For a moment back there I thought Himmelfarber was getting through to you,’ Blanchaille said.
‘I suppose it’s betrayal that sticks in my gullet. We’re old-fashioned, Blanchie. That’s why we’re finished. We never got the point of it all. As true as God sometimes I think we knew about as little as Mickey the Poet. It’s a joke, really.’
‘Yes, I think it is a bit of a joke,’ said Blanchaille sadly, recalling his lost love, remembering Miranda’s words. ‘I’m beginning to get it now. If it’s any consolation, you can say you were betrayed by your enemies. Now the New Men can expect to be betrayed by their friends.’
Kipsel gave him a strange, twisted look. Blanchaille did not know whether he meant to laugh or cry. ‘But, Blanchie, that’s just it! The joke. There are no New Men.’ Then he laughed. ‘O.K. now where?’
Blanchaille remembered Lynch’s last words,‘… to the left and above the town…’ but the beginning, as the girls at the Airport Palace had told him, was Clarens and the official Kruger house by the lakeside, preserved as a national monument by the Regime. ‘Where Uncle Paul finished seems as good as a place as any to begin.’
Kipsel continually turned back to stare behind them, though Blanchaille implored him not to do so. Himmelfarber was best forgotten. He was even then presumably pouring punch for his new guests.
‘The men in the Mercedes, Nokkles and others, who were following us,’ Blanchaille said.
‘I thought we’d lost them,’ said Kipsel.
Blanchaille shook his head. ‘People like that will always find their way to Himmelfarber.’
What proposition the mine-owner put to Nokkles and his colleagues can only be guessed at — whether they returned to work in South Africa on Himmelfarber’s behalf, or remained abroad to look after the Swiss end of his operations, or were dispatched on secret missions to buy coffee plantations in Brazil, or weapons systems in Germany, or computers in Silicone Valley, or excavation equipment in Scotland on behalf of shadowy Panamanian companies, I cannot say. But having entered into Himmelfarber’s employ, certainly it was the last that anyone ever saw of them.
CHAPTER 18
She stood upon a platform, dais, podium, rostrum, elevation of some kind, he could not tell precisely what it was, looking back, as if petrified by the bright light which hit her. Raised above her adoring public clamouring to touch her, she was surrounded by dignitaries who sat in gilt chairs in rows behind her on the stage. Of course she was not petrified. She was loving it! Smiling proudly, radiantly.
It took Kipsel a moment before he recognised her photograph in the French newspaper in the Café of The Three Poets, where they paused on the road to Clarens. (He did not know it then but she was in fact standing upon the stage of the newly-completed Opera House on the Campus of the University of National Christian Education which had so recently eaten up the defunct parish of Father Lynch.) That too he did not know. Nor did he know that at that same venue, some nights before, at the official opening of the Opera House with a production of Madame Butterfly in the presence of the new President, young Jan ‘Bomber’ Vollenhoven, terrible scenes had been witnessed when the famous soprano, Maisie van der Westhuizen, ‘our Maisie’, appearing in the title role, arrived on stage to find the front rows packed with orthodox Jews in yarmulkas waving placards reading SAY NO TO MAISIE’S NAZIS! and she rushed from the stage in tears and disappeared forever. But that was another story.
In a stunningly low-cut evening gown with plaited shoulder straps, aglitter with diamonds, she wore a high choker around her neck, as well as some sort of ribbon and medal, an official military decoration pinned below her right breast. Her head was turned away from the camera, chin slightly raised and the frozen look was no more than a pose she had struck. And for what possible reason? Not vengeance, as with Lot’s wife, who also looked back, but fame! And yet it could be said she stood so still, she seemed so studied in her stillness that she might have been stone, or a pillar of salt. Kipsel had the impression he was witnessing some tableau in which an actress impersonated a woman he knew, or had once known. Among her adoring audience were men in uniform, saluting. Others, in evening dress, were raising glasses to her in excited acclamation. The women present were wearing big picture hats identifying them immediately as wives of Government ministers. They gazed in rapture at their heroine upon her raised platform and she half-turned graciously as if she had been on the point of leaving this gathering or reception or perhaps tumultuous welcome, or whatever it was, and stopped for a final wave, turned once again, perhaps to acknowledge the applause of the crowd and it was in this half-turn that the flash caught her.