the retreat. They had a big enough majority in Parliament, the National Parly, but by-elections counted. The most recent by-elections had shown the subsidence of the Party's vote and the increase of the pulling power of the Conservative right. The State President was enjoying the greasepaint and the television lights and his broadcasts via satellite to the American networks where he spoke earnestly of reform. The ministers, the donkeys, they were the ones who legged it down to the grass roots to explain that everything that was traditional and taught from the mother's knee was now subject to revision.
The Minister of Justice had a long day in front of him.
Public meetings at breakfast, midday and late afternoon.
The by-election was to be held in twenty-seven days' time.
The Minister of Justice had been preceded by Water Affairs, Forestry and Environment Conservation, and by Community Development and State Auxiliary Services. In this constituency alone he would be followed before polling day by State Administration and Statistics, by Transport Affairs, and by Minerals and Energy.
The minister had slept in the back of the car for most of the drive from Bloemfontein to Petrusburg. He woke when they were three miles short of the town. His secretary passed him a battery shaver. The secretary sat in the front beside the police driver. In the back of the Mercedes with the minister was the local area Chairman of the Party, a fellow Broederbonder.
'What'll they be like?'
'Cool.'
'Which means iced.' The minister strained his chin upwards to get the razor's teeth against the skin of his jowl.
'We all want to know what the future holds.'
'Change.'
'You won't find this audience applauding talk about change. They like the old ways. They want reassurance that we're running our country, not American bankers.'
'I'll get them laughing… '
'You'd have to get your trousers off to get a laugh.'
'What do they want?'
'To know that our government is not abdicating its responsibilities in the face of overseas pressure, and Black pressure. Persuade them and we might just win.'
'It's rubbish to talk of abdication.'
The Party man shrugged. 'Fine when you say that to me.
Tell your audience that and they'll shout you out of the hall, I promise you.'
'What'll satisfy them?'
'You know the name of Prinsloo?'
'Should I?'
'Gerhardt Prinsloo.'
'Don't know him.'
'His parents live in Petrusburg.'
'Don't give me riddles, man,' the minister snapped.
They were coming into the town. One street on a main road, low buildings, a small shopping arcade, a decent church.
'His father runs a hardware store. His mother teaches in the nursery school. You should go to Gerhardt Prinsloo's grave.'
'If I knew who he was.'
'Everyone in Petrusburg knows the name of Gerhardt Prinsloo. He's the nearest thing they have to a genuine South African hero.'
'Tell me, man.'
'If the people here thought that you didn't know who Gerhardt Prinsloo was and what he did, then I assure you our vote would be halved.'
'What did he do?'
'Warrant officer Gerhardt Prinsloo gave his life to save others. He smothered the terrorist bomb in the Rand Supreme C o u r t… '
The minister bit his lip in anger. 'You caught me cold, early in the morning.'
'I've heard it said in this town that our government of today is so preoccupied with foreign opinion, with the shouting of the liberals, with appeasement, that the men who murdered Gerhardt Prinsloo might receive the State President's clemency.'
The minister leaned forward, tapped his secretary's shoulder. 'Give me my speech and your pen.'
Resting the speech on his knee he made a long addition to the back of the first page.
The car came to a stop. There was desultory applause from a small group of the faithful out to greet the minister.
'Straight after my speech I will visit the grave. I will lay some flowers there, and I want a photographer.'
• •*
A tiny cramped cell, Jeez's home for thirteen months.
In the top half of the heavy door was an aperture covered by close mesh, too close to get the fingers through. Beside the door, and looking out onto the corridor of C section 2 was a window of reinforced glass. Against the far wall to the door was the flush toilet, and beside that, set in a cavity, was a drinking water fountain. If he sat on his bed, at the far end of the pillow, then his legs fitted comfortably underneath the work surface area that jutted out from the wall. He had brought no personal mementos with him to Beverly Hills, there were no decorations on the walls, no mementoes of any previous condemns. Eight feet above the floor a heavy metal grille made a false ceiling. The cell was sixteen feet high. On the corridor wall, above the grille, were slatted windows, and the guard who patrolled the catwalk above the corridor had a clear view down through these windows into the cell. In the ceiling the light burned, bright by day, dimmed by night, always burning. No daylight could reach the cell. Natural light came from windows above the catwalk, and then by proxy into the windows above Jeez.
From his cell he could see no blue sky, could never see the stars. The windows onto the catwalk and into the cell were always open, so the temper of the seasons reached him.
Stinking hot in high summer, frosty cold in winter. Now the cool of the autumn was coming. He doubted that he would shiver again in the winter cold.
He had eaten his breakfast, he had shaved under supervision, he had swept out his cell. He waited for his turn in the exercise yard. Other than his turn in the exercise yard, this day would go by without him leaving his cell.
He was the celebrity, the first White political to face death by hanging since John Harris and that was more than twenty years before. No one who worked in Beverly Hills had ever before handled a White political who was condemned. Many times in each day he would look up from his bed to the corridor window and see the flash of a pale face, the face of a watcher. They might have had a camera on Jeez for all the time they watched him. They watched him while he slept and while he ate and while he read and while he sat on the lavatory. He knew why they watched him, and why his shoes were slip-ons and without laces, and why he had no belt, and why there were adhesive tabs on his prison tunic in place of buttons.
When he had first arrived at Beverly Hills he had been told why they would watch him. One guy, a White, had once stood on his bed and nose-dived onto the concrete floor to try to cheat them out of his appointment. No chance that they would provide Jeez with an opportunity not to show for his appointment.
Because Jeez was a political he was allowed no association with the other two White condemns in C section 2. They were new boys. One had moved in three weeks before, and one had been there for four months, and three had gone because their sentences had been commuted to imprisonment. The other White condemns were permitted to exercise together in the yard leading off C section 2, but Jeez was only taken out when they were back and locked in. Jeez's cell was at the far end of the section corridor. The cells of the other two condemns were opposite each other and beside the door that led to the main C section corridor; there were empty cells separating the White criminals from the White political. He had never seen their faces. He had heard their voices in the corridor. He knew they called him the 'bleddy commie' or the 'bleddy ter'. These two bastards wouldn't be singing
