Kruger's Alp Page 3

  He wandered down the gleaming corridors of the hostel with a curiously beatific smile on his face, scattering cigarette ash and dreaming of dinner time. His large fleshy head with its neat sleek hair seemed too heavy for his shoulders and he always carried it cocked a little to the left, the heavily veined lids lowered over the eyes. This gave him a slightly oriental, half-devious look, underlined by an idiot simper quite at odds with that meaty, pink English face. When angered he flushed from the chin up and one could watch the blood pressure rising rosily like alcohol mounting in a thermometer. He was waited on hand and foot by two little nuns from some obscure Austrian order, the name of which Blanchaille could not remember – the White Sisters of the Virgin’s Milk, or something exotic like that. Had it been? Anyway, they served and worshipped. Sister Gert, who was little and ugly, gnarled and nutty brown, looking not unlike Adolf Eichmann, and by her side the tall, plump, pretty Sister Isle, who spoke no English whatsoever but cooked, scrubbed, sewed and served with love and reverence verging on idolatory. Both of them called him ‘Milord’, and he spoke to them as one would to a pair of budgies: ‘Who’s a clever cook then?’ and ‘Father wants his pudding now – quick, quick!’ And they tittered and curtsied and obeyed. They fussed about him at the head of the table, heaping his plate with fried potatoes and bending to flick away the ash which had lodged in the broad creases his belly made in his dusty black soutane. These two sisters in their white cotton habits and their short workmanlike veils, with their tremulous lips and their soft downy moustaches, and the way they chirped and flapped about their solitary, beaming, bovine master reminded him of tick birds attending to some old, solid bull. One day he remembered being delegated to clear the dishes at the head table and he stood close up watching Father Cradley digging plump fingers into a mound of Black Forest cake rather as a gardener drills the soil to take his seedlings, and then Blanchaille thought he understood why the Boers had gone to war against the English. He told Father Lynch.

  ‘That is a misapprehension, boy. The English are capable of being lean, hard-faced killers just as the Boers are capable of running to fat. We should not judge things as they seem to be, or people as they look. If we all looked what we were the jails would be full.’

  ‘The jails are full.’

  ‘That’s because we are in Africa. The jails here are built to be full. That doesn’t remove from us responsibility for trying to get underneath the layer of illusion. Why is it, for instance, that although everyone here knows they’re finished they appear not to have made contingency plans? You do all know you’re finished? That you’re on the way out? Your small white garrison can never hold out against the forces ranged against it. The end of your world is at hand.’

  ‘It always has been,’ said Blanchaille. ‘We got in before you. We had that thought before you arrived.’

  ‘Yes, but yours is a nightmare. I’m telling you the truth.’

  Even then, young and ignorant, he felt the presumption of an Irish priest talking of apocalypse in this knowing way. What had this old leprechaun with his thousands of years of history, still green and damp from the bogs of Ireland, to tell an African child about the end of the world? You were born with the sense you’d been perched on the edge of the African continent for about two-and-a-half minutes and in that time you’d discovered that you were white and blacks didn’t like you; that you were English and so the Dutch Africans known as Afrikaners didn’t like you; that you were Catholics and not even the English liked you.

  No, there was nothing about the apocalypse which Lynch could teach him. Power was another matter. Proper Europeans, you learnt from history, had a sense and experience of power, of killing and being killed on a wide and effective scale which was quite foreign to Africa. Efficient slaughter they understood. Proper wars. Even Cradley understood that and responded to it. You saw it in his appointment of Van Vuuren to be head boy of the hostel, to keep order among steel lockers and wooden beds in the dormitories. Van Vuuren with his strong square jaw, jet-black hair combed crisply up to a great wave and sleeked back behind his ears, his hard pointed chin and his bright blue eyes, the amazing muscles and the ability to hit and talk at the same time. All this recommended him to Father Cradley as having an aura of moral leadership as a result of which ‘we have decided to elect him to this position of authority.’

  ‘We have elected him? Jesus! It’s as if the early Christians elected one of their lions as Pope,’ said Zandrotti.

  Van Vuuren administered fair-minded, fair-fisted power. It was difficult to bear him any resentment. There were certain rules and he saw to it that all the others observed them. He enforced order with a terrifying cordiality while continuing himself to flaunt every rule and regulation. He was really a law unto himself. He smoked, he drank, he slipped away with girls, drove a car without a licence, slunk off to the movies with a half jack of vodka sticking out of his back pocket and sprayed large grey streaks into his black sideburns. And this apparent contradiction never drew any criticism from any of his victims since he rested so securely on what must have seemed to him a God-given assignment to do what came best to him, drinking and whoring on the one hand, and enforcing hostel authority on the other. Father Lynch had prophesied that Trevor Van Vuuren was heading straight for the priesthood.

  A few years later he joined the police, a move which did nothing to deter Father Lynch’s faith in his own prophecies, and if asked about Van Vuuren he would say that he was engaged upon taking holy orders, that he was a man who had dedicated his life to truth. ‘His hands,’ Father Lynch maintained, despite the fact that all who knew him never thought of him as having hands but fists, ‘his hands will one day baptise children, bless young brides and succour the dying. . .’

  It was Blanchaille who had become a priest, but Lynch would have none of it. He was at police college, he maintained, and when Blanchaille called on him in a dog-collar he declared that he thought it was a wonderful disguise.

  Of Zandrotti he was rather more vague: ‘An angel of sorts though of course without angelic qualities. But a go-between, a messenger, an interpreter moving between the old world and the new.’ Angel? He was too ugly, a glance showed you that. Zandrotti was the son of a crooked builder with a great raw salami face, who wore creamy, shiny suits, had a great round head and a round body tapering to tiny pigeon-toes. The father Zandrotti came once a month to the hostel in some great American car to abuse his skinny little son, Roberto, with his long white face thick with freckles and his wild, spiky black hair.

  Everyone lived in the suburban Catholic ghetto which occupied no more than perhaps a couple of square miles and included Father Lynch’s parish of St Jude, the hostel for displaced boys, the Catholic School of St Wilgefortis run by the Margaret Brethren across the way, the bishop’s house, home of the unspeakable Blashford, with its large lawns, its vineyards and its chapel which backed on to the mansion occupied by the Papal Nuncio, Agnelli, to whom Father Gabriel Dladla later served as secretary, while also serving as chaplain to Bishop Blashford. Around this ghetto reached the long arms of the new National University, claws they were, embracing it in a pincer movement. Father Lynch used to take the boys up to the bell tower and show them how the Calvinist enemy was surrounding them, ‘Truly a cancerous growth, note the classic crab formation. It will consume us utterly one of these days.’

  And then I saw in my dream how Blanchaille remembered himself and the other altar boys in the dark sacristy of St Jude where the altar boys robed for early morning Mass, for Benediction and weekly Wednesday Novena. Cramped like the crew’s quarters of some old schooner, smelling of wax candles, of paraffin, of white Cobra floor polish, of altar wine, incense, rank tobacco, of the pungent lemon and lime after-shave lotion which came off Father Lynch in waves as Mass wore on and he began sweating beneath his heavy vestments, and the terrifically strong brandy fumes from the old drunken sacristan, Brother Zacharias, of the socks and sweat of countless frantic altar boys dragging from the cheap boxwood cupboards their black
cassocks, limp laced and always begrimed surplices, with a noisy clash of the frail, round shouldered wire hangers against the splintered plywood partitions. While from the robing room next door, so close you could hear the rumblings of his stomach knowing as it did that Mass still lay between it and breakfast, there came the smooth unceasing polished tirade of Father Lynch’s invective as he briskly cursed the scrambling altar boys next door for the dirty-fingered, incompetent and unpunctual little poltroons they were. ‘Oh, I shall die of hunger, or boredom, or both, at the hands of you little devils, far from home in this strange hot land, to be done to death by boredom and waiting . . .’ Knock-knock went his black hairy knuckles on his biretta, ‘Come along! Come along! What are you waiting for – the Last Judgement?’ Those were the weekday Masses, early morning, low and swift.

  In theory Brother Zacharias was there to assist the robing of Father Lynch. In reality he lay slumped in the chair most mornings nursing the hangover he’d got the previous evening from a colossal consumption of altar wine, cheap sweet stuff which came in thick-necked bottles with the Star of David stamped on the label, supplied by the firm of Fattis and Monis. Mass began a race between Father Lynch and his altar boys, as next door he struggled into his stole, maniple, chasuble, picked up the gold and bejewelled chalice, dropped onto his head with the finality of a man closing a manhole his four-winged biretta so that it rested on his jug ears and, swinging the key of the tabernacle on its long silver chain, he pounded on the plywood partition: ‘Where is that damn server this morning?’ And the server in question, frantically buttoning up his high collar and smoothing the lace that hung in tatters from the sleeves of his surplice, swooped out in front of him and led him down, out of the sacristy through the Gothic arch of the side chapel and on to the altar: Introibo ad altarem Dei. . . ‘I will go to the altar of God . . . to God who gives joy to my youth . . .’

  ‘– and employment to his priests,’ Father Lynch liked to add.

  On Sundays, in the olden times, when Father Lynch still had priests beneath him, before his clash with Blashford over his wish to integrate the pews, he had revolutionary dreams: ‘Black and white, one Church in Christ,’ Lynch said.

  ‘More like a recipe for bloody disaster,’ Blashford responded. ‘Your parishioners will shoot you.’

  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 ho
rrid 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.