Kruger's Alp (4 page)

These were the days before ‘African renewal' or ‘the mission to the townships', or ‘the solidarity with our black brothers and sisters in Christ', with which Blashford was so closely associated in later years – it was before, in short, as Lynch said, ‘the powers-that-be had looked closely at the figures'.

In those days then, on Sundays, there was in Lynch's church an occasional High Mass with enough priests to go around and of course Van Vuuren would dominate the altar as Master of Ceremonies, adroit, self-possessed; taller than most of the priests before the tabernacle, this smoothly assured MC moved, bowed, dispensed and disposed with expert precision. His command of the most technical details of the High Mass, the air of brooding concentration with which he overlooked the three concelebrating priests, his grave air of commanding authority and his expert choreography, moving between epistle and gospel sides of the altar, between chalice and the water and wine, between tabernacle and communicants, between incense bearers and bell boys, between altar and rail, was a marvel to see. His hands joined before his chest, the fingers curving in an elegant cathedral nave so that the tips almost touched his straight nose. The professional hauteur of it, the utter oiled assurance with which Van Vuuren managed such matters, always struck Blanchaille as a wonder and as being utterly at odds with the way he used his fists back in the dormitory in the hostel when he was about Father Cradley's business.

Thick creamy aromatic smoke rose from the bed of glowing charcoal on which they scattered the incense seeds, the smoke entered the nostrils like pincers, pierced the sinus passages and burst in a fragrant spray of bells somewhere deep inside the cranium. You never coughed, you learnt not to cough. Only the new ones coughed in the holy smoke. The new ones like little Michael Yates, who was Blanchaille's boat boy and was afterwards to become Mickey the Poet, martyr and victim of the traitor Kipsel, so tiny then that he came up to Blanchaille's hip and stood beside him holding the incense boat, the silver canoe with the hinged lid which closed with a snap upon the spoon at the flick of a finger. Father Lynch spooned incense from the incense boat, spreading it on the glowing charcoal in the thurifer where it crackled and spat and smoked. Van Vuuren, standing directly behind Lynch, sighted down his perfectly touching forefingers during the ladling of the incense and then with a contained nod, satisfied, dismissed Blanchaille
and his boat boy. Both backed away slowly and bowed. Then Blanchaille adjusted the thurifer, lowering its perforated sugar-shaker cap down through the billowing incense, adjusting its closing with the complicated triple-chain pulley and then returned with little Yates to his place, swinging his smoking cargo before him slowly in a long lazy curve over his toe-caps. The fat puff of incense to left and right marked the furthest reaches of the swing. Van Vuuren wearing his elegant, economical, sober black and white cassock and surplice seemed in his plain costume almost a rebuke to the priests in their gaudy emerald-green vestments who lifted their arms to show the pearl-grey silk of their maniples, and turned their backs on their congregations to show the sacred markings, the great jewel-encrusted
P
slashed by the silver and oyster emphasis of the magic
X.
Van Vuuren carried more authority than all of them and it was about him, around the strong fixed point, that the other holy flamboyancies revolved like roman candles in the thickening aromatic fog of incense. Lynch had something of the truth in his prophecy about Van Vuuren because when you looked at Van Vuuren you knew, you said, he could have been a priest already. It was, Blanchaille supposed later, the air of authority that impressed, the sense of knowing what to do and when you had grown up among flounderers, it was an impressive sight.

All Father Lynch's boys, with the exception of Ferreira, lived in the hostel across the road from the Catholic High School of St Wilgefortis, a curious saint much celebrated in Flanders and generally depicted with a moustache and beard which God in his grace had granted to her to repulse the advances of would-be suitors. The school was run by the Margaret Brethren, a Flemish teaching order of brothers who, for reasons never known, took as their model of life the example of their medieval patroness, the formidable St Margaret of Cortona, who after a dissolute early life repented of her sins and began whipping into saintliness her flesh and the flesh of her flesh, her illegitimate son, the fruit of her seduction by a knight of Montepulciano.

Frequent and savage beatings she no doubt felt were deserved by this walking reproach to her saintly aspirations. At the same time she went about calling on the citizens of Cortona to repent, and given the lady's determination it was a call that would not be denied. As Margaret in the thirteenth century so did her Brethren in the twentieth, they beat the devil out of their boys with tireless piety and unstinting love for their souls and if this sometimes resulted in certain injuries, a simple fracture or bleeding from the ear, why
then the Brothers laid on the strap or stick once more, happy in their hearts they were drawing close to their beloved patroness.

Education was not their aim but salvation. Their job was to unveil the plots and stratagems by which unsuspecting boys were led into mortal sin, to sudden death and to eternal damnation. Improper thoughts, loose companions, tight underwear, non-Catholic girlfriends, political controversy, these were the several baits which sprung the trap of sudden death and broke the neck of Christian hope. Yet they could be beaten, they were beaten, daily.

The boys of the Catholic school endured their years under the whip with sullen obedience. Like some small unruly, barbarian state crushed by an occupying army, they paid lip service. They bided their time. They worshipped the gods of their conquerors in public, and spat on them in private; sat, knelt or stood stonily through the obligatory daily prayers and Masses with heads bowed only to return to the worship of their own horrid deities the moment the school gates closed behind them. The gods of their underground church were genuinely worthy of worship. They were lust, loose-living, idleness, tobacco, Elvis Presley, liberalism, science, the paradise called Overseas, as well as those bawdy spirits whom some held were hiding in girls' brassières and between their legs and of which strange exhilarating legends circulated among the hidden faithful in the bicycle sheds, the changing rooms and lavatories. And of course what made these native gods more powerful, more adorable than any other, was the fact that they so clearly haunted and terrified the Margaret Brethren. The Margaret Brethren taught the knowledge of death, they cultivated the more advanced understanding of dying, of judgement, of hell and heaven. Education for them was the pursuit of a reign of terror. The dirty little secrets of the native gods which promised fun, excitement, escape, horrified them and they fought them tooth and nail.

If this strengthened the boys' sense of coming doom, of impending Armageddon, that was because they were so naturally adapted to it. They grew up with it, it came as no surprise to learn that the end of the world was at hand, though there was no way they could have explained this to the uncomprehending Flemish immigrants who simply couldn't understand how it was possible to be hated by anybody, except perhaps the French. The Margaret Brethren taught lonely, sudden violent death as the Wages of Sin. But white children of a certain sort, born in South Africa, then as now, knew of a wider and more general catastrophe, that the world was very likely to end in violence and sooner rather than later. One noted at
one's mother's knee that the end of the world very probably was at hand and it was only a question of time before the avenging hordes swept down from the north.

Whether this was true or not didn't matter. It was believed. It was an article of faith.

And then there was the deep loathing which the Margaret Brethren instinctively felt for the wayward and disreputable Father Lynch, another of the highly impressive qualities about him that attracted to him his altar servers.

Blanchaille was among the first. Blanchaille's mother lived three thousand miles away and sent him to the hostel when he was seven. She had been destitute and so the hostel, and the Margaret Brethren across the road, waived their fees and took him in in the name of Catholic charity. Blanchaille's father, a Mauritian sailor, had deserted his mother when she fell pregnant and never returned and yet she kept his name and passport, drew one for her son later which she renewed religiously, placing her faith in the French connection, clearly determined that her son would one day return to his motherland in triumph, like Napoleon. This foreign document embarrassed Blanchaille and he hid the passport for years. No one else had one. It looked strange and besides he wasn't going anywhere. No one was going anywhere. The others teased him about it, calling him Frenchie. But after he'd hidden it they forgot about it and began calling him Blanchie instead, a name that stuck. Trevor Van Vuuren appeared to have no parents but he had an elder brother who worked on the whalers and drove a bottle-green MG sports, which was all terrifically exciting. Zandrotti's father was a crooked businessman, a building contractor handling large commissions in the Government road programme. He made it his business to add rather too much sand to his cement and eventually catastrophe overtook him when bridges began collapsing across the country. A huge hulking man, he'd arrive in his blood-red Hudson Hornet to visit his skinny knock-kneed little son with his spiky hair and his ghostly pallor. Zandrotti Senior made these visits specifically for the purpose of abusing and ridiculing young Roberto. This so impressed the Margaret Brethren that they presented Zandrotti Senior with his very own scapular of the Third Order of St Francis, a devotional association to which they were vaguely attached for reasons never made clear except that Margaret of Cortona had been fond of it. His father, as Roberto later explained, had absolutely no culture and repaid the honour by making his mistress dance naked on a table for a visiting delegation of Portuguese Chianti merchants
wearing the scapular as a G-string. This story so delighted Father Lynch that he suggested that since the scapular had bounced up and down on what he called ‘the lady's important point of entry', they should return it in the same wrapper to the Margaret Brethren challenging them to touch it to their nostrils and try to identify the fragrance, providing the helpful clue that they inhaled that very perfume which had so excited the saint's knightly seducer back in the bad old days when she was plain Margaret, just another unmarried mother of Cortona.

This love of the blasphemous jest was one of Father Lynch's appealing characteristics. Another was the conviction that he was dying and hence everything must be done in a hurry, a conviction repeated often but without any apparent sign of alarm since haste did not preclude style.

Kipsel seldom came to Mass and never to the picnics. Perversely as ever, Lynch praised his loyalty and predicted that Kipsel would go far in life.

Last in the group but first in martyrdom, poor Michael Yates, later Mickey the Poet. If there was any epitaph for him it was that he never knew what was going on. It might have been inscribed above his lost gravestone – ‘He never had the faintest idea.' He was only to write one short poem, four lines of doggerel, which led Lynch to call him Mickey the Poet, and the name stuck. Lynch went on to discern in him, in that wild prophetic way, ‘some gymnastic ability'.

Now I saw in my dream how Blanchaille grieved at the death of Ferreira. I saw him shaking his head and muttering to himself repeatedly: ‘What shall I do? What shall I do? First Mickey the Poet, then Miranda, now Ferreira.'

Naturally he detected in these violent deaths real signs that the end was near, this fuelled his anxiety, deepened his general feeling of doom, of approaching extinction. It is common enough at the best of times in beleaguered minorities in Africa, this feeling of looming apocalypse. Blanchaille's people, a despised sub-group within a detested minority waited for the long-expected wrath to fall on them and destroy them. They didn't say so, of course. They didn't say anything unless drunk or tired or very pushed – and then they would say, ‘Actually, we're all finished.' Or ruined, some of them said, or washed-up, or words a lot worse.

This was what in my dream I heard Blanchaille say again and again as he stared into his occupied garden. He knew, as I know, that as the years have passed more and more people have felt this
and they knew it to be true and the greater their perception of truth so greater became the efforts to disbelieve it, to push it to the back of their minds, to discredit it until at last, at the time of the Total Onslaught, it became a punishable offence to admit to the possibility. You could be punished, arrested, beaten up, imprisoned for defeatism in the face of the enemy, for after all there was by then a war going on. In my dream I saw Blanchaille place his hands on the window-sill and bow his head, his whole body bent as if something heavy pressed down on his back and he leaned forward rolling his forehead against the window-pane and staring into the garden, the very picture of a man oppressed, weighed down. He thought only of ways of escape. But from what and in which direction remained dark to him.

CHAPTER 2

And when in my dream I saw how Blanchaille stood at his window looking out across the garden towards the small knot of angry folk outside the front gate, I knew them to be his parishioners. They were the stony ground on which his seed had fallen. He had preached, he had warned, but the lambs would not hear, instead they banded together and drove their shepherd out. Tertius Makapan, in a mustard suit and luminous magenta tie, leaning against his dusty Toyota. A colossal man, a brick salesman, responsible for co-ordinating the attack on him; there were, too, his storm-troopers, Duggie and Maureen Kreta, Makapan's willing creatures, formerly the treasurer and secretary of the Parish Council (before the Council was reconstituted into the Parochial Consensus Committee, the consensus being that Blanchaille must go); and poor Mary Muldoon, mad Mary, who knew no better, or at least he had thought so until she had tricked him out of his key to the church and so allowed the Committee to lock and bar the place against him; and there, hanging back, his black housekeeper, Joyce, who had joined them quite suddenly one night. Simply abandoned the dinner she was cooking for him and left his steak smoking on the stove and went over to his enemies. Maureen and Duggie Kreta carried a large banner: PINK PRIEST MUST GO! They waved the poles and flapped the banner at him when they saw him at the window.

PINK PRIEST MUST GO!
Priest?
The use of the singular case annoyed him. Not that it was intentional, but merely echoed the Kretas' way of speaking. Maureen, round and determined with thick, rather greasy dark hair, and Duggie, some years younger, sharp face, thin mouth and full, blond hair. They rode everywhere on an ancient Puch autocycle wearing white peaked crash helmets and dark blue macs. They spoke to him as if he were a not very intelligent puppy. Thus Maureen: ‘Father want to watch out for some of the guys in this parish who don't give a button on Sunday, look at the plate like it was something the dog brought in. In fact some of 'em only look in it at all like they're wondering what they can pull out. Father got to watch 'em like a hawk.' And Duggie, parish treasurer's briefings about lack of funds: ‘Not two cents to
rub together most times. You have to raise some funds. The father before Father was a hot shot at raising funds. Charity walks. Charity runs. That was Rischa. Running priest.'

PINK PRIEST MUST GO!

Blanchaille wished to pull down the window and shout at them: ‘Yes, pink priest going! White priest come, pink priest go. Green priest yes, black priest no!' It was like living in a bloody nursery. Well, he was going to oblige. With pleasure.

He was getting out just as fast as he could.

The need to escape had become for Blanchaille an obsession: if he asked himself what it was he wanted, he answered – rest, peace. Now at the time of the Total Onslaught this feeling was naturally strong, as it always is at the time of killing and much blood, among people of all colour and political persuasions, sad to say. The dead were to some extent envied. They were out of it at least. Those who had disappeared were considered to be fortunate also. Nobody knew where they had disappeared to and no one cared. It was whispered by some that those who had vanished were perhaps also dead but this was widely discounted – they were said to have ‘gone pilgrim', meaning they were believed to be travelling overseas, thus distinguishing them from the truly dead soldiers who were said to have ‘joined the big battalion'. In war time, said Father Lynch, morphine for the wounded, euphemisms for the survivors. So people bravely pointed out that in war time casualties must be expected and it was best not to question too deeply. It was devoutly to be hoped that the dead and those who had disappeared had gone to some happier place where they would at least be at peace. Now, when asked where this place was, some would have replied vaguely that it was somewhere overseas, others would have given a religious answer and pointed to the sky; a few very brave souls would have whispered quietly that perhaps they'd gone to ‘that shining city on the hill' or to ‘that colony of the blessed'; or to that ‘rest-home for disconsolate souls', which legend held President Paul Kruger established for his homeless countrymen somewhere in Switzerland early this century. Despite threats of imprisonment issued regularly by the Regime, the legend of Kruger's heritage persisted, a holy refuge, a haven, funded with the golden millions he had taken with him when he fled into exile. The Regime scoffed at these primitive, childish beliefs and punished their public expression with prison terms. They were joined by the academic historians who regularly issued bulletins exploding the ‘myth of the Kruger millions'. People you met were similarly dismissive, in fact it was not unusual to begin
a conversation by remarking, apropos of nothing at all, ‘Naturally I don't believe a word about the gold Kruger stole from the mines. Not a bloody word of it.' But everyone, people, historians, perhaps even the Regime itself, continued to trust in and hope for the existence of that much dreamed of distant, better place. Some became obsessed and fled. So it was with Blanchaille.

When he could stand it no longer Blanchaille applied for a long leave of absence. The Church of course, through a number of unhappy experiences, knew the signs. Bishop Blashford sent Gabriel Dladla to find out the reason.

‘Is there a girl, we wondered?' Gabriel asked gently.

‘There was a girl. But not here.'

‘Yes, we thought there was a girl. Somewhere.'

The ease with which Gabriel followed him into the past tense chilled Blanchaille.

‘There was a girl, a nursing sister, a Canadian. Miranda was her name. I met her years ago soon after I went to work in the camps or what she called the new growth industries, the growing heaps of unwanted people springing up everywhere in the backveld.'

‘I would hardly call that an industry,' said Gabriel with a gently disapproving frown. ‘The camps are a scandal, an affront to human dignity. A sin. The Church condemns the camps and the policy of racial Hitlerism which creates them.'

‘It was one of her jokes,' said Blanchaille. ‘She had a distinctive brand of humour. She had what she called a traditional job, a nursing sister in the township. She refused to dramatise the job. “I could be doing something similar in Manitoba,” she would say, “It's nothing special.” The difference between us, she insisted, was that I was doing something important but she was just doing a job. “Don't build it up. I'm not giving a performance,” she said. She said I was at the forefront of things in the camps, learning how to process the people who had been thrown away; “Soon the whole country will run on this human garbage,” she said. It was another of her jokes.'

‘I don't see the joke,' Gabriel replied tightly.

‘Nor in a sense did I. “That's your problem, Blanchie, you don't see the joke,” she said.'

‘The camps are an obscenity. Your work has been crucial in showing that,' Gabriel persisted.

‘What about the townships?'

He shrugged. ‘They're institutions. At least they're peaceful now. But the camps. . . !'

‘And yet the Church goes in and supports them, cleans them, strengthens their existence.'

‘Supports the people in them. An enormous difference. The camps are there. They're real. We have to work in the real world.'

‘Look Gabriel, once there were no camps and that was the real world, and the Church lived in it; then there were camps and that was the real world and the Church lived in it. One day, please God, there will be no camps again and that will be the real world and the Church will live in it. No wonder they call the Church eternal.'

‘I think it might be better if we left the Church out of this and talked of carnal matters.' Gabriel's tone was mild.

‘What about the girl?'

‘She seduced me.'

Gabriel smiled, ‘Now, now, you mustn't try to shock me.'

‘We made love several times in her car, an old Morris Minor, in the township after dark. It was rather like a tickbird mating with a crow, she in her white starched uniform and I in my cassock. Or like being locked in a room full of curtains fighting towards the light. After several experiments we discovered that the best way was to remove her underwear and lift her skirt to her chin and then I settled myself on her first lifting my cassock to my waist and dropping it gently so it floated around us, covering us, and we made love as it were in this warm, black tent, within the more intense darkness of the African night. It was a very private affair. Anyone walking past the car and shining a bright light on us would have seen nothing but a kind of Siamese twin, black and white and contracting strangely.'

Gabriel held up a hand. ‘What ended it?'

‘She was murdered.' Now he had the satisfaction of seeing the astonishment crease Gabriel's smooth face. ‘She was pulled from her car in the township one morning as she drove to her clinic, and stoned. It seems mainly large pebbles were thrown. There were some half bricks as well, I believe. I went to identify the body. They pulled the big tray out of the fridge, and it wasn't her. The skull was crushed, you see, or perhaps you don't – unless you've examined head injuries on that scale. The features had shifted, slipped to the side like a floppy rubber mask. The face hung. It was so covered with blood, so smashed, she was unrecognisable. I remember thinking it was almost as if the mob that stoned her had wanted especially to destroy the head. The rest of the body carried very large bruises. I couldn't identify her in the strict sense but I knew, as one would know. And then the point began to get to me. You see, I realised that, Jesus! there must have been some of her patients in
the crowd who stoned her. People whom she had nursed, saved their children maybe, and this was what they had done to her! And all around me I could hear the outrage beginning. Here was this woman who'd given her life to these bastards and here's what she got in return. Then a funny thing happened. I laughed. I faintly got the point. Miranda might have expected this official reaction. This predictable outrage. And I knew – she would have opposed it. In her book nurses died, like everyone else. Sometimes they got murdered, not merely here but in New York, or Blantyre, or Tokyo, and yes it was tragic but it was not special, it didn't happen for mystical reasons. But we wouldn't believe that. In our superiority, Miranda's death had to be notable. It had to mean something really nasty. In fact Miranda was too important to be allowed to suffer her individual death, she wouldn't be allowed to die, she had to live, for the sake of the propaganda we fed ourselves to enable us to go on saying that this sort of thing should not, ought not,
must
not happen. In our war of words Miranda's death was a big event. But in terms of her own spilt blood, hell, it didn't matter a damn. What mattered were the detonator words, “should,” “must”, “ought”, which we can use to blow up the enemy. The enemy wants us little, ordinary, human, while we want to be big and important. We care about our position relative to the audience. We want to put on a good show. Everything depends on how things are looking on the stage. Making a performance. . ..'

‘It's a pity in the way there is no woman – any longer,' Gabriel said. ‘The Bishop is sympathetically disposed, in the new enlightenment which prevails after Vatican II. The sexual problems of his priests deserve loving consideration. Perhaps you read his piece in
The Cross?
However, in your case you might be better advised to apply for a transfer.'

‘Right! I apply for a transfer – to the world next-door. Kindly inform His Grace.'

PINK PRIEST MUST GO!

Blanchaille did not consider himself particularly pink and he certainly no longer thought of himself as a priest, but he was in full agreement with the sentiment expressed in the crudely lettered banner the Kretas waved so enthusiastically – he was fully prepared, indeed he most devoutly wished, to go.

Gabriel Dladla had returned with the Bishop's reply soon after the siege began.

‘I'm afraid it can't be done, Blanchie. This is your place now.'

‘I'm finished here.'

‘Finished? For heaven's sake, you've barely started.'

Gabriel had arrived wearing what he called his second hat. This wasn't a hat at all but referred to the car he was driving, a sleek black Chrysler belonging to the Papal Nuncio, Agnelli, whose secretary he was, as well as serving as Bishop Blashford's chaplain, choice appointments both indicating to a sceptical world that the Roman Church in Southern Africa took to its heart its black followers, indeed did more than that, set them soaring into the firmament, rising stars. Gabriel had come a very long way from the picnic basket in Father Lynch's garden when the two brothers, Gabriel and Looksmart, sat flanking the little priest. ‘My two negro princes', he called them, as they sat watching the altar boys struggle with the weeds. Gabriel's was the only entry into the priesthood which had been approved. His brother Looksmart's attempt had failed when the new black theology took hold of him and he burnt the Bible on the steps of the seminary as ‘the white man's manual of exploitation' and joined the political underground. Blanchaille's vocation had been derided and ignored. Only Gabriel's decision to become a priest had been applauded.

‘He is only doing what any intelligent boy would do who wishes to rise. His behaviour would be entirely logical in Spain, or Portugal or Ireland. May we skip any tiresome talk of faith or morals? Gabriel intends to get ahead.'

Father Gabriel Dladla in his beautifully tailored dark suit and its pristine dog-collar, in his soft black fedora which he did not remove in the course of their interview, his chunky gold watch which he consulted with elegant economy in an unmistakable signal that the interview was nearing its end, with his whole air of intelligent, assured concentration with which he listened to Blanchaille but which did not suppress the faint air of impatience of a busy man with other, more important things on his mind. This was once the barefoot boy on the blanket translated in what seemed like a wink of time into a personage of weight and responsibility in the Church hierarchy. And it was with a wink surely that Blanchaille could move him back again to the blanket in the garden. He tried and failed. His eyelid fluttered. Gabriel remained the elegant, deft, important young person he was.