Riotous Assembly (18 page)

“What?” screamed the Bishop, struggling to his feet with a clanking of chains. “You want
what?”

“Only your heart,” said the Kommandant. “I need it for a transplant.”

“I’m going insane,” shouted the Bishop. “I must be. It isn’t possible. Do you mean to
tell me that you’ve gone to all this trouble just so you could have my heart for a transplant
operation?”

“It was no trouble,” said the Kommandant. “I hadn’t got anything to do this
afternoon.”

“I’m not talking about this afternoon,” the Bishop screamed. “I’m talking about the
murders and the trial and having me condemned to death for crimes you knew I couldn’t have
committed. You did all that just so that you could hoik my heart out of my body to stick it
in your own? It’s incredible. You’re a ghoul. You’re…” The Bishop couldn’t find words to
express his horror.

Kommandant van Heerden was horrified too. He had never been accused of anything so
disgraceful in his life.

“Good God,” he shouted back. “What do you take me for?”

He could see it was the wrong thing to ask. It was perfectly obvious what the Bishop
took him for. For one terrible moment it looked as if the manacled and chained prisoner
was going to hurl himself on him. Then quite suddenly the Bishop’s fury evaporated and
the Kommandant saw that he was staring up at one of the stained-glass windows. Following
the Bishop’s gaze he found himself looking at the particularly grisly portrayal of a
martyr in the process of being hanged, drawn and quartered. To Kommandant van Heerden
the change in the prisoner’s demeanour could only be explained by miraculous
intervention. In some strange way the stained-glass window had communicated a sense of
peace and tranquillity to his soul.

And this in its own way was true, for Jonathan Hazelstone had suddenly realized that
the second verse of “The Forerunners” needed revising. It wasn’t his brain they wanted.
It was his heart.

 “Good men ye be, to leave me my best room,

Ev’n all my heart, and what is lodged there.”

 Turning back to the Kommandant, the Bishop was a picture of truly Christian
generosity.

“Yes,” he said quietly. “If you want my heart, of course you can have it,” and without
another word he turned from the altar rail and clanked down the aisle towards the door. And
as he went he composed the lines afresh.

 “Bad men ye be, to pilfer my best room

Ev’n all my heart…”

 The Bishop smiled happily to himself. It was extraordinarily appropriate,
he thought, and he was still smiling beatifically when Kommandant van Heerden caught up
with him and overcome with emotion grabbed his manacled hand and shook it as vigorously
as the handcuffs would allow.

“You’re a real gentleman.” he gasped, “a real English gentleman.”

“Noblesse oblige,” murmured the Bishop, whose heart had been chronically weak since he
had suffered from rheumatic fever as a child.

The Bishop was still in a cheerful frame of mind when Hangman Els visited him to weigh
him for the drop.

“You can smile,” Els said as he dragged him out of the cell and shoved him on to the
weighing machine. “It’s all right for you. You don’t have to do anything. I’m the one who
has to do all the work.”

“Each of us has his little part to play,” said the Bishop.

“Play?” said Els. “I don’t call what I’m doing playing. I’m having to work my guts
out.”

“Just so long as you don’t achieve the same result in my case,” said the Bishop
uneasily. “By the way, how are you getting on with those sacks?”

“I’ve practised with them till I’m fit to drop,” Els said, “and I still don’t seem to get
it right. It’s got to do with the weight how far you have to fall.” He tried to read the
scales. “I can’t make these things out at all,” he said finally. “What do you make your
weight out to be?”

The Bishop came to his assistance.

“Three hundred and ninety-eight pounds,” he said.

Els consulted a little black book entitled, The Hangman’s Handbook, which he had
borrowed from the old warder.

“You’re too heavy,” he said at last. “It only goes up to three hundred pounds. Are you
sure that’s what the weighing machine said?”

The Bishop checked. “Three hundred and ninety-eight pounds exactly.”

“Well I don’t know what I’m going to do. It doesn’t look as if you need any drop at
all.”

“That’s a nice thought,” Jonathan said, adding hopefully. “Perhaps fat men don’t commit
murders.”

“Well, if they do, nobody seems to hang them,” said Els. “Perhaps they shoot them.” On the
whole he much preferred shooting. It was quicker and involved a lot less effort on his
part.

“No, no,” said the Bishop hurriedly. “They definitely have to be hanged.” He thought
for a moment. “What does it say is the drop for a man weighing two hundred pounds?” he
asked.

Els consulted his little compendium. “Six feet,” he said at last.

“Then three feet should be just about right,” said the Bishop.

“Why?” Els didn’t like the sound of a shortened drop at all. It smacked too much of an
attempt to avoid death.

“Double the weight and halve the drop,” the Bishop explained.

Els wasn’t fool enough to fall into that trap. “Double the weight and double the drop,
you mean.”

The Bishop tried to explain. “The heavier someone is the shorter the fall needed to
break his neck. The light man needs a much longer drop to achieve the necessary
momentum.”

Els tried to work it out. He found it very difficult.

“Why is a momentum necessary?” he asked. “Nobody told me to get one.”

“Momentum is the product of a moving body’s mass by its velocity.”

“I thought death was,” said Els.

“Yes, but you won’t get death without momentum. It’s not possible.”

“Oh, isn’t it?” said Els. “Well, I’ll have a bloody good shot at it, don’t you worry.”

Alarmed by the constant reference to shots, the Bishop tried again.

“When a man is hanged, how does he die?” he asked.

Els thought about it. “By hanging,” he said finally.

“And hanging means doing what to him?”

“Dropping him down a hole with a rope round his neck.”

“And what happens then?”

“He dies.”

“Yes,” said the Bishop patiently, “but what does the rope do?”

“Holds him up.”

“No, no. It breaks his neck.”

Els knew better than that. “Oh no, it doesn’t,” he said. “I’ve been practising with sacks
and it doesn’t break their necks. Their bottoms drop out. It makes no end of a mess.”

The Bishop shuddered. “I’m sure it must,” he said. “Now we don’t want that to happen to
me, do we? That’s why we’ve got to get the length of the drop right.”

“Oh, it wouldn’t happen to you,” Els assured him. “The old warder says it’s the other way
round with you. He says your head would…”

The Bishop didn’t want to know what the old warder had said. He had had enough of his
morbid interest in anatomy already.

“Look, if you’re really so keen to get a permanent job as a hangman, you’ll have to
make a success of this execution. Nobody is going to employ you if you don’t make a go of
your first hanging.”

Els looked pathetically at the Bishop. “I know that,” he said, “but what can I do if
your weight isn’t in the handbook?”

“You could make me lighter,” the Bishop suggested looking at his manacles and
chains.

“Done,” said Els delighted. “I’ll have you put on a nil diet at once.”

“I didn’t mean that,” said the Bishop who couldn’t imagine anything niller than the diet
he was already on. “What I had in mind was taking all these chains off and weighing me
without them. I think you might find me a lot lighter.”

“I doubt if I’d find you at all,” said Els.

“Well, if you won’t take these chains off I don’t see how I can help you,” said the Bishop
wearily.

“If I were to take them off, I’m damned sure you would not help me either,” said Els.

“In that case I don’t know what to suggest. You’re not going to find my proper weight
with the chains on and if you won’t take them off …” He paused as he remembered another
scene in the chapel window. “You don’t surely intend to hang me in chains?” he asked.

“No,” said Els, “there’s a special set of leather straps and a cloth bag for your
head.”

“Dear God what a way to go,” murmured the Bishop.

“I’ve put boot polish on the straps and shone them up. They look quite smart,” Els went on.
The Bishop wasn’t listening to him. He had suddenly thought of a way round the problem of
weight.

“I know what we can do,” he said. “You go and get another set of chains and manacles and
bring them here, and we’ll weigh them by themselves.”

“I don’t see how that’s going to help,” said Els. “I’ve just told you we won’t be using
chains on the day. You don’t think I’ve been polishing those straps for nothing, do
you?”

The Bishop was beginning to think that he would never be able to get Els to understand
anything.

“Once we know how much the chains weigh by themselves we can subtract their weight from
three hundred and ninety-eight pounds and then we’ll know how much I weigh by myself.”

Els considered the proposal for a moment, but in the end he shook his head.

“It wouldn’t work,” he said.

“Why on earth not?”

“I could never do subtraction at school,” Els confessed finally.

“Never mind,” said the Bishop. “I was very good at it and I’ll do the sum myself.”

“How do I know you won’t cheat?”

“My dear Hangman Els,” said the Bishop. “I can think of two good reasons why I am as
anxious as you are that this hanging should go with a swing. Possibly three. One is that if
you make the drop too short, I shall strangle to death and I really don’t want to. Two is
that if you make it too long you’ll probably decapitate me.”

“I won’t,” said Els. “Your head will come off.”

“Quite,” said the Bishop hurriedly. “Nothing like calling a spade a bloody shovel, is
there?”

“What’s three?” asked Els, who didn’t care what a bloody shovel was called.

“Oh yes, three. I had almost forgotten three. Well three is that you are obviously a
born executioner and while you’ve got a lot to learn about hanging, I like to see a man
make use of the gifts he’s been given. Yes, I know about the cloth bag,” the Bishop
continued, as Els tried to interrupt with the news that he wouldn’t see anything on the
scaffold, “but I am speaking metaphorically, and speaking metaphorically I hope you’ll
go on to greater things, one might almost say to the top of your profession.”

“You really think I’ll make a good hangman?” Els asked eagerly.

“I’m sure of it,” said the Bishop. “I can feel it in my bones that you will make a name for
yourself among executioners the world over,” and having given the hangman the
reassurance Els so desperately needed the Bishop went back to his cell while Els went
off to fetch another set of chains and manacles. In the end they discovered that Jonathan
Hazelstone weighed one hundred and eighty pounds and needed a seven-foot drop.

 If the Bishop was having difficulty persuading Els to kill him properly,
Kommandant van Heerden was finding it almost as difficult to persuade the surgeons at
Piemburg Hospital to undertake the operation he needed to save his life. They seemed to
insist on raising quite irrelevant objections, and the Kommandant found particularly
irritating their insistence that there was nothing wrong with his heart. When he had
disposed of that difficulty by threatening to charge them with attempted murder if
they didn’t agree with his diagnosis, they spent another hour discussing the ethical
problems involved in transferring the heart of a murderer into the body of a man, who,
as they pointed out, was so manifestly non-homicidal. The Kommandant soon set their
minds at rest on that score, and it was only when they raised the technical problems of
tissue typing and rejection and tried to explain how unlikely it was that the condemned
man’s tissues would match those of a purebred Afrikaaner, like Kommandant van Heerden,
that he lost his temper.

“Are you telling me that I’m not a human being?” the Kommandant yelled at Dr Erasmus
who led the transplant team. “Are you telling me I’m a bloody baboon?”

“I’m not saying anything of the sort,” Dr Erasmus protested. “You don’t seem to
understand. Each human being has a different type of tissue and yours may not be the
same type as that of the donor.”

“You’re telling me I’ve got coloured blood in me,” the Kommandant yelled. “You’re saying
I can’t have an Englishman’s heart because I’m part-kaffir. Is that what you’re
saying?”

“I’m not saying anything of the sort. There’s no reason at all why you shouldn’t have a
kaffir’s heart,” Dr Erasmus said desperately. He found Kommandant van Heerden’s
violence positively unnerving.

“There you are. You said it. You said I could have a kaffir’s heart,” shouted the
Kommandant.

“I didn’t mean that you had to have one. There’s no reason why a black man’s heart should
not be put into a white man’s body any more than there is any reason why a white man’s
organs shouldn’t be transferred to a black man.”

Kommandant van Heerden had never heard such a flagrant violation of the basic
concepts of apartheid in his life.

“There’s every bloody reason,” he shouted, “why a white man’s organs shouldn’t be put
into a black man. No white man is allowed to put any portion of his body into a black man.
It’s against the fucking law.”

Dr Erasmus had never heard of the Fucking Law but he assumed it was police slang for
the Immorality Act.

“You misunderstand me,” he said. “I wasn’t referring to sexual organs.”

“There you go again,” bellowed the Kommandant. “I’ll charge you with incitement to
inter-racial homosexuality if you don’t shut up.”

Dr Erasmus was silenced.

“Calm yourself, Kommandant,” he said soothingly. “For goodness sake calm yourself.
You’ll do yourself an injury carrying on like this.”

“I’ll do you an injury, you bastard,” yelled the Kommandant who wasn’t going to be
ordered about by any pig of a doctor who told him he had coloured blood. “I know your sort.
You’re an enemy of South Africa, that’s what you are. You’re a bloody Communist. I’ll have
you in under the Terrorist Act and we’ll soon see how you like organ transplants.”

“For the sake of your health, please stop shouting,” the doctor pleaded.

“My health? You talk about my health? It’s your health you should be worrying about if you
don’t do as I say,” the Kommandant screamed before he realized just what Dr Erasmus had
meant. With a tremendous effort of will he calmed himself. Now he had not the slightest
doubt that his heart needed changing. Dr Erasmus had admitted it in so many words.

In a quiet voice and with the authority he still possessed under Emergency Powers,
Kommandant van Heerden gave his orders to the surgical team. They were to make all the
necessary preparations for the transplant operation and were ordered not to divulge
any information to the Press, the public or their families. The whole operation was to
be conducted in the utmost secrecy. It was the only welcome piece of news the doctors
could glean from the Kommandant’s brief.

The only other consolation was the knowledge that Kommandant van Heerden’s body
would almost certainly reject the new heart. As Dr Erasmus pointed out to him, he was
probably committing suicide. The Kommandant knew better. He had been eating in the
police canteen for years and if his stomach could keep down the food they served there, he
couldn’t imagine that his body would reject a perfectly good heart.

 Leaving the hospital still smarting at the affront to his origins and the good
name of his family, but pleased with the way he had handled the situation, Kommandant van
Heerden decided the time had come to pay a visit to Fort Rapier. His interest in the
fortunes of Miss Hazelstone was undimmed by the events of the past month and his respect had
if anything been increased by the old lady’s remarkable resilience in the face of the
misfortunes which had overtaken the Hazelstone family. The reports that had reached him
from Fort Rapier indicated that Miss Hazelstone had maintained her dignity and sense of
social prerogative in a situation which would have induced a feeling of despondency
if not of inferiority in a less vigorous woman. Miss Hazelstone had succumbed to none
of the temptations of madness. She neither shuffled lost in some interior wilderness
nor imagined herself to be other than she was.

“I am Miss Hazelstone of Jacaranda Park,” she insisted in the face of attempts to turn
her into a model patient with problems amenable to psychotherapy, and instead of
conforming to the indolence that marked the lives of the other patients, she had found
plenty of interest to occupy her time. The history of Fort Rapier and the part played
by her ancestors in the creation of the garrison particularly fascinated her.