Christopher Hope - Jimfish

Jimfish wheeled on him, yanking his pistol from its python-skin holster.

‘Aryan?’ he said. ‘What nonsense! Your family probably descended from slaves and pirates, and Hottentots, Malays and Bushmen. If there is any German or Dutch blood in you it’s from the press-ganged scum of the Berlin gutters and the dross of the Amsterdam pot-houses. Rogues who sailed to the Cape of Good Hope, slept with their slaves and told themselves they were the master race. You leased my dearest Lunamiel to a brace of black Congolese cabinet ministers and a naked Liberian brigadier, without thinking twice. Well, I saved your life in the Comoros and brought you home. I’ve already shot you dead once and I’ll happily do it again!’

But Soviet Malala stepped between them just in time and took Jimfish aside.

‘I have a better use for him,’ he said. ‘Yes, he’s an unreconstructed racist of the old school: cynical, meretricious and stupid. But the old white mindset aside, since his recent transplant he has an African heart. In the new South Africa we need people able to speak out of both sides of their mouths. His combination of boneheadedness and ubuntu would make him an excellent ambassador.’

And so it was — after Soviet Malala dropped a few words in the ears of his powerful friends in the governing party — that Deon Arlow was appointed ambassador to Rwanda, where terrible massacres had begun. There it was that the founder of Superior Solutions would come face to face with the wholesale murder of the minority Tutsis by the majority Hutus, and witness the racial cataclysm that those of his kind had been ready to risk — and promote — in South Africa, where, for decades, one tribe ruthlessly ground all others into the dust and where bloodshed of Rwandan proportions was about to happen, had not the miracle of messy compromise arrived at the last moment.

Everyone praised the brilliant idea of sending Deon Arlow to Rwanda — except Zoran, who thought it might make matters worse.

‘At the moment in that sad place Tutsis are being slaughtered by Hutus,’ he said. ‘But what if the tide turns and the Hutus are stopped and defeated? Won’t Tutsis take their turn at the top table and make life hell for the Hutus? They will need arms, advice and military contractors. That’s when Ambassador Arlow’s former skills as Commandant of Superior Solutions will come in handy.’

Soviet Malala announced that he was shocked by such cynicism.

‘Why call me cynical when I am just being Serbian?’ Zoran wanted to know.

‘Because there are things people don’t want to hear,’ said Jimfish.

‘Or to say,’ said Zoran the Serb. ‘And when that happens you know the new regime has started shutting down debate.’

Soviet Malala, who was rising fast in the ruling party, was deployed to warn Zoran that while positive criticism was welcome and essential and the democratic right of every citizen, if he insisted on sowing discord the Serb should not complain if some patriot gave him (and here Soviet Malala used a local word that covered everything from a slap on the wrist to a bullet in the heart) a good ‘ klap ’ and bundled him back to Belgrade. There was no room for a sceptical Serb — or anyone else who failed to applaud the miracle of peace and harmony that was the Rainbow Nation. Negative thinking must be monitored, just as the press, which had been showing signs of irresponsible behaviour, would be made to put its house in order. The beloved country was a miracle in the making and that was official.

Zoran was amused in his gloomy way. ‘Just one miracle in the making? Why so shy? I can give you a few more. Here’s Miracle Number Two: nowhere can you meet any white person who will admit to backing the old system of locking people in the prison of their skin. People who stewed in murderous racial hatred now lose themselves in a haze of sentimental self-congratulation and officially endorsed national amnesia. Next comes Miracle Number Three: a ruling party with a massive majority, claiming the right to rule until the day of judgement, turns overnight into a fractious bunch of finger-wagging scolds, frightened of their own shadow, terrified of dissent, seeing enemies everywhere and threatening to shut them up.’

‘Foreigners are always frightened at the way we do things in this country,’ said Soviet Malala.

‘I’m not a foreigner, I’m a Serb,’ said Zoran. ‘And what I’m feeling is not fear, it’s déjà vu.’

Soon, when Soviet Malala began leading marches of youthful supporters chanting their promise to kill for the Party, Zoran decided it was time to pack for Belgrade.

‘So God works in mysterious ways in many places,’ he said. ‘But He is at the very top of His game in the new South Africa.’

‘I’m really sorry to see you go back to the violence, corruption and hatred of war-torn ex-Yugoslavia,’ said Jimfish, hugging his gloomy friend.

‘Don’t give it a thought,’ said Zoran the Serb. ‘When I see where you guys are heading, I think maybe we’re not doing so badly, after all.’

Port Pallid, South Africa, 1994

Jimfish and Lunamiel married and returned to peaceful Port Pallid on the Indian Ocean, where, in the mad mid-1980s the trawler skipper had one day found a boy on the harbour wall. They bought the old man’s house and took over his boat, the Lady Godiva .

Port Pallid had remained what it had always been, a rocky knoll jutting into the Indian Ocean, a thumb poked into a cerulean eye, where no one now was to be found who had ever in their lives believed in the old religion of race and colour; and no one remembered their pledge to the former leader, Piet the Weapon, ‘to die for you till kingdom come’. But everyone believed instead in the saintliness of the man who had spent all those years on Robben Island.

Jimfish often sailed to the fishing grounds of the Chalumna river mouth, where the old skipper had seen his first coelacanth, and, as the boat rocked on the water, he knew that deep down in the ocean there lived a beautiful blue fish with four legs that could stand on its head and swim backwards.

‘A very queer fish indeed. Just like me.’

The thought gave him comfort and pleasure. The coelacanth had kept going when everyone had taken it for dead. But Jimfish knew now that it was being hunted and desired, and if this went on, the creature that had been alive milions of years before humans were even thought of, would disappear again, and this time there would be no miracle return.

Jimfish would ask Lunamiel: ‘If the coelacanth knew this, what would it think?’

Lunamiel said maybe it would think that it had not been a good idea, many millions of years ago, for an early relative to have struggled ashore on its four legs and stayed.

‘Because here we are,’ said Lunamiel, ‘and that is not good news for the coelacanth.’

In the deep calm of the little fishing port there seemed room for everyone, and Jimfish and Lunamiel were very happy.

It was quite an event, then, to see a column of Mercedes slide into town one day, each as long and as big and as shiny as the one in which Jimfish and Lunamiel had fled Zaire. A platoon of young men jumped from the cars and began marching down the main road of the town, led by none other than Soviet Malala. In place of the Lenin cap he had once worn long ago, he now sported a cherry-red beret and T-shirt emblazoned with the letters FFF. As they marched, they sang to a tune Jimfish thought he remembered:

Soviet Malala, he’s the one!

We’ll fight for him till kingdom come!

And die for him, in due course!

Viva the Fiscal Fighting Force!

‘What’s left to fight for?’ Jimfish asked his old teacher. ‘I thought you had won?’