Kruger's Alp (2 page)

Blanchaille had heard from Ferreira very shortly before his death. Of course his line had been tapped. The call had come out of the blue, but he knew instantly the familiar flat vowels and the unemotional voice: ‘I'm sending you some money, Blanchie.'

‘I don't need your money.'

‘Oh, come on, of course you need money. I don't care what you use it for. Say some masses for my soul if you like, but I'm off. I'm
through. Lynch was right, Blanchie. Something has been going on all these years. I've seen the books.'

Blanchaille did not wish to talk to Ferreira. He didn't like Ferreira. Ferreira had gone to work for the other side. He'd represented the country at the International Monetary Fund, he'd been co-opted into the office of the Auditor General. His speciality was currency movements, exchange control and foreign banking.

‘You'll need this money, you'll need it to get where you're going. Don't be stubborn, Blanchie.'

‘I'm not going anywhere.'

The eavesdroppers bugging the call handled their appliances in the customarily inept way. So many telephones, so many listeners needed. It was rumoured they took on students wishing to earn cash in their vacations. An unpleasant hum increasing in pitch and volume covered their piping exchanges. Ferreira's voice shrilled tinnily through the growing fog of interference. He was probably yelling his head off. ‘I've had a revelation, Blanchie! I've found it – I've found the City of God!'

‘Of what?' Blanchaille shrieked.

It was hopeless, the humming noise made the ear quiver. He knew then that the line had not merely been tapped, their conversation had been jammed.

The money came. There were hundreds, thousands perhaps. He hadn't counted it, wrapped in plastic film, crisp notes held tight with rubber bands. He hid it in a great tub of ice-cream in the freezer, scooping out the middle and sealing it with a plug of the peppermint chip and pistachio. It was the only food left in the house since Joyce had left, not counting the beans.

Now Ferreira was dead. The item itself in the paper was small, it might have been lost amongst the lists of divorces and the spreading columns of troop casualties on the Borders. The news of the Ferreira killing might not have been much but the stories surrounding it made clear the interest that it aroused. The young Secretary of the new Department of Communications, or Depcom, dynamic Miss Trudy Yssel, put out a statement deploring speculation about price falls on the Exchange and pointing out that the press must take a more responsible attitude and that this wasn't, after all, the Bubbles Schroeder murder case. This last a reference to one of the most celebrated murders in the country in which a pretty young whore named Bubbles Schroeder, who had slept with a number of people of note, was found lying in a grove of trees one morning with
a lump of limestone thrust into her mouth. And Yssel's boss, Minister for Parallel Equilibriums and Ethnic Autonomy, the formidable Augustus ‘Gus' Kuiker who held, besides, the important portfolio of Cultural Communications, the Government's propaganda arm, took the opportunity to warn the press once again that the Government's patience was not limitless, that freedom was a privilege to be earned, not a licence for personal or political rumour-mongering. A further story reported the deaths of three brokers, Kranz, Lundquist and Skellum, and quoted the Chairman of the Exchange, Dov Solomon, as saying that an investigation had shown that these unfortunate accidents had no connection with one another, or with any other event. Blanchaille paid no attention to these attendant stories. It is probable that he detected no connection – but I saw in my dream that he would remember them later, when his investigative talents flowered as of course Father Lynch had prophesied they would.

Ah, the prophecies of Father Lynch! What is one to make of them?

Father Lynch had prophesied that Tony Ferreira was a natural visionary. Consequently he received the news of his interest in accountancy with what seemed like astonishing composure. He had taken to figures, he told Blanchaille once, because it kept his mind off his bruises. Now that was fair enough. Ferreira had been beaten since he was a baby. Indeed one of Blanchaille's earliest memories was seeing Ferreira arrive to serve early morning Mass with two eyes so swollen, so bruised, he could hardly see where he walked and had to take Blanchaille's arm as they made their way from the sacristy into the church, along the altar rail, through the gate and up the five grey marble steps leading to the altar. He could remember counting, ‘here's one, now two coming up, here is three . . .' then they crossed the flat grey granite expanse and knelt together on the top altar step where Ferreira remained for the rest of the Mass too blind to move.

His father had been a bricklayer. Big head and a jutting lower lip. He drove a powder blue Pontiac with a pink plastic butterfly on the bonnet. Mrs Ferreira was white-faced, plain as a gate-post, cracked and peeling, whom Mr Ferreira carried everywhere with him like a club and used with terrible effect on his son when his own arm tired. Looking at them in their pew, the Ferreiras senior, he with pale hair on his sun-tanned arms and she solid, straight, wooden, with a blankness in their eyes as the Mass progressed, like two strangers who have darted out of the rain into church only to find they have
strayed into some foreign funeral service and must now patiently wait it out, masking their incomprehension in a slumberous passivity intended to suggest the appropriate demeanour. Hard to imagine them flinging themselves fist and boot on their only son. But Tony bore the marks.

Hemmed in on both sides his only escape was upward. Tony grew tall and elegant as if to repudiate his father's squat energy and outstrip it. With his father's thick pale hair and his mother's immobile features he was delicate, sensitive, smart. A war of attrition began as Tony set out deliberately to bait his father into extending himself by making plain his open contempt for his bricklaying business. Mr Ferreira responded, fighting back by opening branches, getting draughtsmen into his office; soon he denied he was a bricklayer and described himself as a quantity surveyor. He went on to employ other quantity surveyors and his picture even appeared in the papers as a man on the move in ‘our thrusting, dynamic economy'. Father Lynch remarked on Ferreira's father's success, at which Tony nodded pleasantly: ‘Yes, he's fully extended on all fronts now. His order books are bursting and he has substantial credit lines. The banks are falling over each other to lend him money.' When the big crash came Tony explained the reasons for it with gentle composure. ‘It happens every day. He'd stretched himself to breaking point. Simply couldn't service his debts. Nailed by his own ambition. Crucified by his own success.' And then the final twist of the knife, elegant and terrible, Tony attended his father's bankruptcy hearing wearing a rich red tie and a glossy, heavily scented rose in his buttonhole and listened with rapt attention as the quantity surveyor's empire was dismantled brick by brick and thrown to his creditors.

Even Lynch heard of the crash.

‘It seems your dad has been under fire, Tony.'

‘Yes, Father. I'd say he's taken a good knock.'

‘Snapped his head back, did it?'

‘Decapitating.'

But why had Lynch described Ferreira as a visionary? The priest explained: ‘They will tell you, the people who run this country, that they built the New Jerusalem in this brown, dry, prickly land. To see the lie behind the boast requires the eyes of the seer.'

Again: ‘They will proffer the moral principles on which their empire is built, the keepers of the uneasy peace. Refuse their invitation. Ask instead to see the books.'

And: ‘We are dealing here with questions of faith,' a favourite
opening, ‘which in the neo-Calvinism followed by the Regime is in fact a matter of money. There's been no question of faith since Kruger left and his heirs forsook morality for power. We know this to be true. The difficulty will be in proving it.'

Father Lynch always had a line, a view. Mad he was, but reliable. I saw how desperately Blanchaille needed to consult the old priest long forsaken by his altar boys who not unnaturally believed they had outgrown him. The man I saw in my dream was cracking up. He wept and raved. Things were closing in. He sat in the empty house. Waiting, or hoping? His bags had never been unpacked since he arrived to take up his incumbency as parish priest in the new suburb of Merrievale. They waited for him now, by the door, three heavy tartan suitcases reinforced with leather straps. He had packed them when he left the camp and went to the priests' home in the mountains for rest and recuperation. He had carried them to his new post as parish priest in Merrievale. They contained clerical suits he never wore; books he did not read; boots, brushes, toiletries he no longer used; they were in effect the relics of a life he no longer led. Now and then he bought a new toothbrush, a pair of shoes, a couple of shirts whenever he needed them and left them behind when he moved on. But the cases he carried with him. Heavy, useless, but all he had to remind him of what, and to some extent where, he had been. He hadn't lasted long in Merrievale. His tenure as parish priest could be measured in three sermons and a siege. Outside his window his parishioners bayed for his blood. They waved banners and shook their fists, led by big-knuckled Tertius Makapan, the brick salesman. Word had it that Father Lynch was dying, but then Lynch had been dying ever since he'd met him. He'd made a profession of dying. ‘I'm not long for this world, my boys!' he would shout from the shade of the Tree of Heaven. ‘Get a move on!'

Lynch's love of easeful death wasn't quite what it seemed; it was rather as if he saw in it the chance of the transfer the Church had always denied him. Death might be the far country from whence no traveller returned – and if so he was all for it. Anywhere must be better than this. Hence the constant warnings: ‘Hurry, my boys, I am not much longer for this life . . .' and ‘Listen to these words of wisdom from a departing soul – the idealism of the Boer freedom fighters died with Kruger's flight into exile. What followed was not a success for Calvinist nationalism but a policy of “get what you can and keep it” – only remember to call it God's work.'

This urge to depart was more to be pitied than feared. Lynch knew that short of a miracle, or his own defection (and that meant air tickets and where was he to find the money?), he was condemned for life to this wild African place.

He suffered from dreams of money. Perhaps a rich relative would die and leave him a legacy? No, he was a practical man. But then again perhaps one of his altar boys would one day be rich enough to make a present to his old priest and mentor – enough to enable him to escape to what he called some serious country.

Perhaps this was the source of his fascination with the last days of the old Boer leader of the Transvaal Republic, Stephanus Johannes Paulus Kruger. Father Lynch knew the
Memoirs
very well, and he owned also what he claimed was the last surviving copy of
Further Memoirs of a Boer President;
a fat, red leather-bound book of reminiscences and prophecies apparently dictated by the exiled president to his faithful valet Happé in the old man's few remaining months of life in his rented house by the lake in Clarens, Switzerland, as the desolate, near-blind old lion mused over the future of his country and his people, broken by war and scattered in defeat to St Helena and Patagonia, Ceylon, Malaya, Madagascar, Mozambique, Angola and Tanganyika – a diaspora of Boers, the African Israelites, blown by history around the globe.

. . . And I shall use the short remaining time the Lord has been pleased to grant me to labour mightily, though conscious of my frailty and infirmity, to bring His people home to Him [Kruger promised in
Further Memoirs
], and since He has entrusted to my care the means whereby His will shall be accomplished I shall not rest until I find that place, ‘the land', as the Lord said to Moses, ‘which I have given unto the children of Israel' . . .

Father Lynch would interpret this for his altar boys, saying that by that ‘place' Kruger undoubtedly meant a physical location, a home for dispossessed and faithful Boers who would not return to serve under the hated English, and by ‘the means' Kruger certainly meant the treasure which had accompanied him into exile, the famed Kruger hoard, the gold millions of legend (taken in the form of ingots, bullion-bars or dust, who could say?) – from the inexhaustible mines of the Reef and smuggled out when the President fled.

This obsession with the millions came to outweigh all of Lynch's religious duties and the
Further Memoirs
became his daily office, his
‘familiar bible' he called it, though it was widely believed among the altar boys he had written it himself.

It was precisely these unexpected ideas, combined with a complete lack of any religious scruple, which attracted to Father Lynch the boys from the nearby boarding hostel who were to form his little group of altar servers.

That Father Lynch was in disgrace with all the orthodox clergy appealed enormously to the wayward boys, handed by their parents into the care of Father Cradley, rector of the hostel: Ferreira, Blanchaille, Van Vuuren, Zandrotti, little Michael Yates, and, for a brief period, even Ronald Kipsel (afterwards the infamous Kipsel), these were the altar servers in Lynch's little guild. The boys detested the Church and yet were drawn to Father Lynch, for, after all, did the Church not hate Father Lynch? Wasn't it Father Lynch who insisted on integrating the two dozen black servants, washerwomen and gardeners who knelt in the two final pews on either side of the nave, into the white congregation? Until ordered by Bishop Blashford to restore segregation immediately, because, desirable though a certain mixing might be in an ideal world and certain though it was that such things would one day happen – though not in our lifetime – the move was premature.