Kruger's Alp (9 page)

‘Don't mention it. Couldn't leave a guy sitting by the side of the road outside a bloody township. Normally I put my foot down and go like hell when I pass a township. You never know what's going on inside. Gee, you took a risk!' He examined Blanchaille's bloodstained, muddied clothes with interest.

‘My bags are heavy and I can't go very far at a stretch.'

‘Well, keep away from the townships.'

‘It's a funny thing,' said Blanchaille, ‘but I always believed that the townships were peaceful now.'

Breslau nodded. ‘Well it depends on what you mean. If you mean the townships are peaceful except when there are riots, then I suppose that's correct. So I suppose you could say the townships are peaceful between riots. And I must say they're pretty peaceful after riots. If we need to go to the townships that's usually when we go. They have a period of mourning then, you see, and you got time to get in, do the job and get out again.'

‘I suppose then you could also say that townships are peaceful before riots,' said Blanchaille, trying to be helpful.

Breslau thought this over and nodded approvingly. ‘Yes, I suppose that's right. I never thought of it that way. But leaving all this aside, the truth is you can never be sure when the townships are going to be peaceful. You can drive into a township, and I have no option since I do business there, and find yourself in the middle of a riot. You can find yourself humping dead bodies or driving wounded to hospital. You can find yourself dispensing aid and comfort.'

‘Aid and comfort?'

‘Sure! That comes after the riots, usually, when they've laid out the victims and the relatives come along to claim them. It's an emotional time, as you can imagine. What they usually do these days is to get the priest up from the church and he gives each relative a blessing. Well one day I arrived just as the blessings had started. They didn't seem to be comforting people very much so the police officer in charge commandeered me and my vehicle and all my samples and he suggested that each relative should also get a sample of my shampoo, plus a blessing. Of course they weren't my samples to give, but on occasions like this you don't argue. Well, I stood next to the priest and he gave the blessing and I handed out the sample. Of course there was no question of matching hair types. I mean you can't stop the grieving relatives and ask them whether they suffer from dry, greasy or normal hair. I mean that's not exactly the time and place to start getting finicky. Can I drop you somewhere in town?'

Blanchaille mentioned the suburb where Bishop Blashford lived.

‘Sure. Happy to help.'

‘What disturbs the peace in the townships?'

Breslau shrugged. ‘Everything – and nothing. Of course the
trouble is not having what they want, and then getting what they want. Like I mean first of all they don't have any sewage so the cry goes up for piped sewage and they get it. Then there's no electricity, so a consortium of businessmen organised by Himmelfarber and his Consolidated Holdings put in a private scheme of electrification. Then a football pitch is asked for. And given. And after each of these improvements there's a riot. It's interesting, that.'

‘It's almost as if the trouble with the townships is the townships,' Blanchaille suggested.

‘You can't not have townships or you wouldn't have any of this,' the salesman gestured out of the window at the blank and featureless veld on either side of the road. ‘Cities have townships the way people have shadows. It's in the nature of things.'

‘But we haven't always had townships.'

‘Of course we have. Look, a township is just a reservoir. A pool. A depot for labour. I mean you look back to how it was when the first white settlers came here. You look at Van Riebeeck who came in – when was it – in 1652? And he arrives at the Cape of Good Hope – what a name when you think how things turned out! A bloody long time ago, right? What does Van Riebeeck find when he arrives in this big open place? He finds he's got to build himself a fort. He finds the place occupied, there are all these damn Hottentots swanning around. Anyway he sees all these black guys wandering around and he thinks to himself – Jesus! This is Christmas! What I'm going to do is sit in my fort, grow lots of vegetables and sell them to passing ships. And all these black Hottentots I see wandering around here, they're going to work for me. If they don't work for me they get zapped. So he sits there at the Cape and the black guys work for him. Afterwards he gets to be so famous they put his face on all the money. It's been like that ever since.'

‘But he didn't have a township.'

‘What d'you mean, he didn't have a township? The whole damn country was his township.'

Ever cautious Blanchaille got Breslau to drop him not outside Blashford's house, but at the foot of the hill on which the Bishop lived. The salesman drove off with a cheerful wave, ‘Keep your head down.'

Blanchaille picked up his cases and began the slow painful ascent of the hill.

Puzzled by this conversation, in my dream I took up the matter with Breslau.

‘Surely things aren't that bad? That's a very simplistic analysis of history that you offered him.'

‘Right, but then it's a very simplistic situation. There is the view that we're all stuffed. We can fight all we like but we're finished. The catch is that if anyone takes that line they get shot or locked up or whipped. Or all of those things. That's how it was. That's how it is. Nothing's changed since the first Dutchman arrived, opened a police station and started handing out passes to the servants.'

‘Can nothing be done to improve conditions in the townships?' I persisted.

Breslau laughed and slapped the steering wheel. ‘Sure. As I told the traveller. Lots can be done. Lots is done. Ever since the longhaired vegetable grower arrived from Holland, people have been battling to improve the townships. But after the beer halls and the soccer pitches, the electric lights, the social clubs, the sports stadiums, the literacy classes and the best will in the world, the townships are still townships. And townships are trouble.'

‘Even when they're peaceful?' I asked.

‘Especially when they're peaceful,' said Breslau.

CHAPTER 5

They walked in the Bishop's official garden. Ceres, Bishop Blashford's ample black housekeeper, had allowed him to leave his suitcases in the hall and sent him out to join His Grace with the warning that he would be allowed no more than ten minutes before His Grace took tea.

Blashford, the unspeakable Blashford, his open face ringed by soft pale curls, had in his younger days played first-class golf: no doubt clouded the sports-writers' prediction that he would have gone on to international competition had the Church not selected him first. He was that rare hierarch, an authentic indigenous bishop, born and educated in the country. By choosing a sportsman for this important appointment the Vatican had shown that it understood where the springs of religious fervour truly lay. Now his neatly shod feet pressed the grass. He was wearing what he called his gardening clothes, a fawn suit and panama hat, by which Blanchaille understood him to mean not those clothes in which he worked in his garden but walked there before tea, a trim, elegant figure with a fair complexion which reddened easily in the sun. His black, heavily armoured toe caps glistened, the double knots of his laces showed like chunky black seaweed as his shoes broke free from the bunched wave of his flannels. There was a brief gleam of polished leather with each assured step he planted on the smooth unwrinkled surface of his beautiful lawn. The end of the official garden was bound by a line of apple and peach trees and behind them a thick pyracantha hedge showed its spikes. Heads held high, wagtails sprinted through the splashes of sunlight beneath the fruit trees, their equilibrium secured by the rocking balance of their long tails. They shared Blashford's dainty-footed confidence.

‘Well, Blanchaille?'

‘I'm leaving.'

‘What?'

‘Parish, priesthood, country. The lot. I'm in a position of a bride whose marriage has not been consummated. My ministry is null and void. In short, I'm off.'

‘I've been expecting you to call. The volume of complaints from your parishioners in Merrievale these past weeks has reached an
absolute crescendo. Complaints had been laid with the police about political speeches from the pulpit. It was only with the greatest difficulty that I managed to persuade the authorities to allow the Church to deal with this in its own way.'

‘You needn't have bothered. I also have friends in the police.'

‘We all have friends in the police, Father. The question is will yours do what you ask them?'

He could feel the heat the Bishop gave off as he became angrier. He was vibrating like a cooking stove. He hissed from a corner of his mouth: ‘It's not like leaving a party, you know. Or getting off a bus. Father Lynch is behind this I'm sure.'

‘Father Lynch has never regarded me as a priest. He sees me as a policeman. I'm beginning to realise he knew what he was talking about. My relationship to the Church is that of a partner in an invalid marriage. The thing is null. I wanted to attack the Regime so I followed the only model I had – Father Lynch. I took holy orders. I would have done better learning to shoot.'

‘Father Lynch is old, ill and not a little cracked. He flips about that decaying church of his like an ancient bat. He says masses in Latin to a band of parishioners as ill and decrepit as himself. He does so without permission. He keeps up the pretence of serving a parish where none exists. The building is scheduled for demolition. We are finding our way back into the world.'

Ah yes, the world. Blashford had been Bishop for as long as anyone could remember. Years ago he had been concerned with safeguarding the Church against the Calvinist aggressor, those who saw it as ‘the Roman danger'. Then came Vatican II, and Blashford discovered ‘the world'.

‘Father Lynch always predicted that the day was coming when the Church hierarchy would be picked for their salesmanship.'

Blashford scowled. ‘The church has been sold because it's redundant. Not only is the fabric beyond repair and the garden ruined, but only a handful of parishioners remain. There is no more room for all-white parishes, holy Mother Church embraces its South African responsibilities, she embraces her black brethren. Father Lynch, as I recall, refuses the embrace.'

The embrace. How long ago Lynch had foreseen that.

‘Sitting in his garden long years ago, propped up on one arm with Gabriel and Looksmart Dladla on either side of him, he told us that the Church was ours now, we had better prepare ourselves for the embrace. Then he gathered us around him and he showed us the financial pages of the newspapers which were full of the new black
appointments being made by foreign banks. Against fierce resistance from their white managers the head offices decreed that black managers be appointed to township banks. “Very soon now,” he said, “we can expect the Church to follow suit. We have always taken our lead from the banks.”'

Bishop Blashford joined his fingers together at the bridge of his nose in a prayerful gesture and spoke with a nasal twang into the tepee of his fingers. ‘Lynch was headstrong, provocative, premature. Race relations in those days were primitive, it was only on sufferance that we allowed any blacks in our churches at all! You certainly didn't go round making a show of it, not unless you were looking for trouble. But then Lynch was always looking for trouble and you boys he gathered around him were gullible. He was an Irishman who never understood Africa, obsessed by myths and conspiracies. This madness over the Kruger millions, these holidays in fancy dress, these charades. Did you know that he continues to say Mass in Latin? Even though you boys are grown up and gone? Despite all my instructions?'

‘He used to tell us that power was in love with secrecy but showed its public face in policies which arose quite arbitrarily or in reaction to outside forces, but were always presented to people as the result of due and deliberate consideration by wise minds. It's unlikely that Lynch would have seen the changes of the Vatican as anything more than panic-stricken measures taken in reaction to shrinking congregations. It was a case of swinging the stage around where they could keep an eye on the audience and getting them to sing along whenever possible. What is presented as the will of God is very often a response to a deteriorating market position, he said.'

‘And where did it get you, this adulation of Lynch? You boys who surrounded him with your fancy dress revivals of the old Boer days and your talk of Uncle Paul Kruger? Where it got you was jail, exile, disgrace, death. That's what you got for listening to him.'

‘But we never listened to him, that was the trouble. Ferreira was supposed to see visions. Van Vuuren was supposed to be a priest. I was scheduled to become a policeman. But maybe it's not too late. Maybe now he should be taken seriously.'

The Bishop stopped abruptly, he lowered his head, straightened his wrists and shook an imaginary putter, and then with utmost concentration he stroked an imaginary golf ball along the smooth surface of the lawn. This reversion to his old sporting ways suggested a certain tension. This was borne out when the Bishop at length straightened and said: ‘There's blood on your shoes,' he
looked more closely, ‘and on your clothes,' he took Blanchaille's hand, ‘and here, more on your hands, under the fingernails.'

‘I was passing the township outside the city when I was ordered by the police officer in charge to help to remove the bodies of people shot during the riot.'

‘There are no riots in the townships.'

Blanchaille held up his hands with their blood-stained fingernails.

‘And what did he predict for Gabriel Dladla?' Blashford suddenly demanded.

‘He never prophesied for the black boys. He said they were free agents, outside his range of understanding. Work with materials you know, he said. He would lie under the Tree of Heaven flanked by Gabriel and Looksmart Dladla, looking rather like those porcelain slave boys. You know the kind in turbans carrying bowls of fruit you sometimes see in old pictures? Look at what wins and know why, Lynch always told us. Be sure you select a winner you know, where you're connected. We weren't connected to the structures of Government power, we had no input there, but by the grace of God we had an example a whole lot closer, we had holy Mother Church herself! That would do, he said, as an analogue. All power institutions could be expected to adapt in similar ways. Their trick was to forbid individual alterations to the
status quo
while presenting their own changes as a genuine response to popular demands and altered circumstances, at the same time ensuring that such changes, as and when they were permitted to occur, safe-guarded their sole reason for being, that is to say, the retention of power. The capacity to praise today what you executed people for yesterday, and of course vice versa, always vice versa, and with complete sincerity is essential for the maintenance of power. He invited us to observe that the changes transforming the Catholic Church were undertaken by the very authorities who had forbidden those changes in previous times, to notice the vocabularies used, words like “renewal” and “reaffirmation” and “renaissance”, and he invited us to apply what we learnt to the understanding of the way the Regime worked. The keywords for the Regime were “adaption”, “evolution”, “self-determination”. What the words actually said were – O.K. Carruthers let the fuzzies out of the pens but shoot if they stampede. We saw the parallels. Church and Regime believed themselves divinely inspired, both regarded themselves as authoritative and both maintained that they held the secret of salvation. The parallels weren't exact but they were the best we had, he said. We would have to make do with them. And we did. The trouble was –'

Blashford interrupted angrily, ‘The trouble was Lynch was mad and he never understood.'

Blanchaille shook his head. ‘No, the trouble was we thought it was a game. Spot the connections. We enjoyed it but we didn't believe in it.'

The Bishop paused before a large and blowsy rose. Very deliberately he took the head in his hands and shook the petals so that they fluttered and drifted in the wind.

‘This is a lovely garden. I remember it well,' Blanchaille said.

‘You know my garden?' Blashford clearly deplored this news.

‘I knew the other one better. The one behind the hedge.'

‘I never knew I had another garden.'

The Bishop's official garden was very beautiful. The roses, large and blowsy, opened up their heavy red hearts and did not care where their petals drifted. Their perfume was heavy, meaty. Their bruised beefy solidity would have looked well on a butcher's slab. Sweetpeas thronged against the further trellis, the bougainvillaea foamed and dripped and six clipped lemon trees showed bright yellow fruit among darkly gleaming leaves.

But of course it was in the Bishop's other garden that the altar servers had grown up, the wilderness beyond the spiny hedge on the far side of the fruit trees, the neglected vineyard with its harsh, sour grapes, its choked lily pond, its loquat trees, its old disused well, its blackjacks and weeds. They met and smoked cheap American cigarettes, taking as their model the expertise of Van Vuuren who smoked with quite wonderful style and aplomb and adult poise. He was expert in making deep, lengthy inhalations which hollowed his cheeks and they watched fascinated as the jets of grey smoke expelled from his nostrils met and mixed with the single thick gust from his lips. They drank from quarter-bottles of brandy and vodka and dropped the empties down the well, too deep to hear the crash.

And they took girls there. He took Isobel Turner, first and foremost, not particularly highly rated it was true, in Ferreira's opinion ‘no great shakes', but the only girl to show an interest. He walked her home from Wednesday Novena, coming to the Bishop's garden meant a lengthy detour but she didn't complain. A stocky twelve-year-old strutting by his side, her little heels clicking on the road, dark curls, large calves, short white socks, a very boyish, broad girl built like a little pony. She was known far and wide as Izzie for short, not a name to do anything for her femininity.
Somehow he summoned the courage to lead her into the garden, taking her hand and leading her beneath the trees and she following obediently with her little clip-clop. Once inside, the sharp rattle of undergrowth at their ankles and the moon high overhead, bright, severe and obtrusive like a naked light bulb in a small room, left him at a loss as to how to continue. He drew her beneath the trees where the shadows were and put his arm around her shoulders. They were so broad! He hadn't expected that. He took her hand instead and held it for long minutes, very tightly, and soon their palms were running with sweat. He was at a loss to know how to continue and in despair he said that perhaps they ought to be getting along. There was enough moonlight even under the trees to show her shoulders move in an indifferent shrug and he was conscious of having fallen below expectations. She pulled an apple down from the tree and crunched it right down to the core, ate that, then with a sigh which was more like a neigh, wheeled around and at a fast trot led the way home.

He went to the Bishop's other garden on a later occasion with Magdalena. The Magdalena who gave, the Magdalena who took up with the traitor Kipsel, who afterwards fled to London and was referred to in the papers as Red Magda, but at that time was no more than the amazing Magdalena who gave. Like crazy, without qualm, Ferreira had said. Like wow, Van Vuuren confirmed – his favourite expression of approval at the time. Blanchaille could remember him making the same response after Father Lynch had recounted the harrowing life of the great Italian composer, Gesualdo. Lynch's eyes had closed and a spasm of pain passed over his face.

‘Wow? Van Vuuren. What is
wow
! It's hardly a reaction that answers the scale of the human tragedy I've unfolded, you young devil. One makes the mistake of talking about things European to you boys. One makes the mistake of thinking because you are white you must be European. In fact you are African boys. No, not boys but bombs, and in place of minds you have drawersful of high explosives on a short fuse. Not young boys, young bombs, that's what you are. Not listening, not learning, just sitting there waiting, fizzling, until the day you blow up and shower everyone with moral outrage.'