Kruger's Alp Page 5

  ‘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.

  ‘Now I’m sorry Blanchie but I must be off. I have a party of visiting Italians to collect from the airport, guests of the Papal Nuncio. They’re flying in from Rome. Do you know Rome at all? I adore Rome. Quite apart from the obvious connections in our case, it is the most surprising, rejuvenating of cities.’

  ‘Gabriel, I cannot stay here. There must be another parish . . .’

  ‘If you ever go, I recommend to you the Piazza Navona, a square which should be everyone’s first glimpse of Rome, not even the tourists can ruin its perfect proportions . . .’

  ‘Another appointment –’

  ‘Another appointment? But this is your appointment and I am here to let you know that Bishop Blashford confirms you in this appointment. There is nowhere for you to be but here. Nowhere to go but back, back to Pennyheaven, this time for an indefinite stay.’

  Blanchaille watched him walking down the garden path. The protesting parishioners cheered when he approached. Gabriel doffed his hat, waved cheerily to them and was gone.

  Blanchaille phoned Lynch. The old priest cackled at the news of the visit. The electronic eavesdroppers chirruped and squawked along with him.

  ‘Speak up, Blanchie, and keep it short. The line’s heavily and ineptly tapped. The bastards never worked out how to use the equipment they import in such quantities from America.’

  ‘I’m thinking of moving on.’

  ‘Good. Knew you would come to your senses one day. Perhaps we should have a few words. Where are you?’

  Blanchaille told him.

  ‘My God, right in the sticks. What’s that noise? I can hear people shouting.’

  ‘Those are my parishioners. I’m under siege.’

  Lynch’s laughter was drowned in a shriek of static.

  And I saw in my dream how Blanchaille’s stay in the new periurban suburb of Merrievale as parish priest of the spanking-new church of St Peter-in-the-Wild had come to end in undignified confusion after just one month. The defection of his black housekeeper Joyce upset him particularly. She’d never got used to his arrival or the loss of the man he had replaced. How dreadfully unfavourably he must have compared with his predecessor, the youthful, energetic Syrian, Father Rischa. The Parish Consensus Committee had got to Joyce. They told her that Blanchaille was on his way out, they’d shown her the fatal mark of blood upon his lintel imprinted there by the Angel of Death who had passed that way and she’d shot off like a rabbit, an absolute winner in the Petrine stakes, in the thrice-crowing cock awards. Traitress. To hell with her!

  St Peter-in-the Wild was Blanchaille’s first parish and his last. He hadn’t been there two minutes when the complaints began.

  ‘And what is the nature of your complaint, Mr Makapan?’

  ‘History,’ came the simple if unexpected reply from the brick salesman. ‘Not only your own particular history, but your lack of understanding of the historical process in general and of our parts in it.’

  Blanchaille’s particular history – what was it? Unremarkable, really. A hostel boy, one-time altar server who had gone up to the seminary to become a priest. Why a priest? Because he wished to be like Father Lynch who understood the system of the Regime and sought to expose it. ‘You are not priestly material,’ Father Lynch had cautioned. ‘You are raised with the puritan, primitive, moralising web of the system and cannot destroy it, but what you can do is to hunt down the guilty men and bring them to book. That is your real vocation. Blanchaille, the police college waits for you – answer the call!’

  For once Lynch and the Bishop were in agreement. Blashford opposed his entry into the seminary and when the time came for Blanchaille’s ordination, continued to oppose it, avoiding the duty to perform the ceremony by being indisposed. Instead Blanchaille was ordained by a visiting Hungarian archbishop who was deported soon after the event for gross interference in the domestic affairs of the country. Blanchaille had long suspected Blashford’s hand behind the expulsion. Newly ordained, his first visit to Lynch had been disastrous. Lynch had stood him up in the pulpit and introduced him to the congregation as ‘the boy you might remember having served at this altar for many a year, and is now a policeman engaged in important undercover work in the country, hence his disguise . . .’

  Blanchaille had done no parish work. After six years of moral theology mixed with intense sexual agonies in the seminary, applying the purity paddle (a miniature ping-pong bat without the usual rubber facings) with a short, downward slap morning and night, whenever his errant member stiffened beneath his soutane, he went to work in the transit camps, the garbage heaps where the human rubbish, the superfluous appendages were thrown away; the huge shanty towns in the remote and barren veld set aside by the Regime as temporary homes for a variety of black people: there were in the camps the dependants, wives, children, grandparents of black workers in the cities; there were illegal immigrants who had taken work in the cities without proper papers; there were the aged, infirm and unemployable who had failed to fulfil the requirements of their contracts; there were shattered black communities which had been living, either by historical accident or with illegal intent, in areas designated as being for other ethnic groups, tribes, races, clans, formations laid down according to the principles of Ethnic Autonomy.

  When Blanchaille went to the camps no one had heard of them, or of him. Soon everyone had heard of him. ‘Father Theo of the Camps’ the newspapers called him. Bishop Blashford warned him to avoid political involvement. Later Blashford was to call on Catholics to ‘embrace the suffering Christ of the camps’ and the Church moved in with force. But by that time Blanchaille had gone, had written his notorious letter to The Cross with its ringing phrase ‘Charity Kills’, in which he called for the camps to be bulldozed. As a result he had been transferred for ‘rest and recuperation’ in a spirit of ‘loving brotherly concern’, and under heavy guard, to the place called Pennyheaven.

  Pennyheaven was an imposing country mansion of tall white fluted columns and heavy sash windows, red polished verandas, great oak floorboards a foot across, balding peacocks, an empty dry and cracked swimming pool, a conservatory where lizards basked, pressed against the bleary Victorian stained-glass windows. It had belonged once to Sam Giltstein, an old drinking buddy of Barney Barnato’s. An individual, this Giltstein. When many of the Jewish mining magnates went over to Christianity early in the century, Gilstein, perverse as ever, resisted the movement into the Anglican faith and opted instead for the Church of Rome. When he died he left his inaccessible summer place in the high remote mountains thirty miles north of the capital, to the Church as a ‘home for homeless clergy’. Many miles from the nearest village and halfway up the rocky mountainside at the end of an almost inaccessible dirt road, Pennyheaven had remained as remote and as distant from human habitation as Giltstein had intended it to be. No one visited Pennyheaven. To go there you had to be sent. To leave you had to be fetched.

  Blanchaille was six weeks there waiting for his new posting
. To Pennyheaven came priests for whom no other place could be found: priests not bad enough to expel, not mad enough to confine; ancient clerics awaiting transfer to geriatric homes, little trembling creatures sitting out on the veranda from dawn to sunset, trembling and dribbling, leaning over their sticks and turning weak eyes on the shimmering blue peaks; dipsomaniacs and men with strange cravings for little girls.

  Blanchaille met there Father Wüli, a huge Swiss who described himself as the last of the great African travellers, who had come ‘to rest in Pennyheaven between voyages of exploration’. What this in fact meant, Blanchaille discovered, was that Wüli was an inveterate escapee. He would stride miles across the mountains in his tough boots, his Swiss sense of direction carrying him to the outskirts of some town and there he would lurk among the rocks and kranses, leaping out to expose himself to terrified picnickers on the remote hillsides, his unerring compass on these prodigious treks, the needle that pointed him onward, leaping massively from his unzipped flies. Father Wüli would return from his distant journeys in a police landrover, blanketed against sudden display, looking very fit and quite unabashed.

  He met there, too, Brother Khourrie, a little Lebanese who’d once been sacristan in a church by the seaside and who had led a blameless life until he was granted a vision of the Redeemer. Khourrie and Blanchaille sat on the veranda of the big house staring across the baking, shimmering country which ran away into the blue mountains: huge boulders stood stark among the thick burly vegetation. The nearby hills appeared to be made almost entirely of rocks, some split from the main mass, seamed, pitted, cleft, the colour of sand, lying among the thorn trees where they had rolled thousands of years before. Christ was a boy of about eighteen, Khourrie confided, in ragged shorts, carrying the T-piece of his cross slung across his shoulders, his arms outstretched and hanging over the beams to steady it. He was tall with blond hair worn rather long, and his skin was golden. He must have been lying down shortly before Khourrie saw him because sand had covered his back and stuck in the oil with which he had rubbed himself. He was gleaming and encrusted with sand and oil and sunlight. A shining man. Very gently and diffidently Blanchaille suggested it might have been a surfer he saw, but Khourrie was firm – to those with eyes to see he was plainly the Messiah. He had proof. The proof he produced was novel. He explained to Blanchaille that the Jews too had identified the Boy Messiah. That was why they had bought flats along the beach front and why they continued to do so in such numbers. Nearly all the flats which followed the curve of the sea shore were owned by Jews. The Jews always knew, said Khourrie. Naturally he’d reported the matter to the Church. Their response had been unforgivable. They had dispatched him to Pennyheaven. The reasons he was quite clear about, the Church and the Jews were in league. Neither wished it to be known that the Messiah had returned to earth.

  After Pennyheaven, Blanchaille had been appointed to St Peter-in-the-Wild. The church was so new it still smelt of cement and the walls and ceiling were painted sky blue. The whole place was severely angular with pews of pale natural pine and a baptismal font at the back made of stainless steel, deeply shining, rather like the wash-basins found on trains. In a pulpit of steel and smoked glass with its directional microphone Blanchaille talked of Malanskop, his first camp. It had been, he said, a most terrible garden full of deadly melodies, a music of wonderful names: kwashiorkor and pellagra, enteritis, lekkerkrap and rickets. How they rolled off the tongue! How lovely they sounded! Children in particular found the music irresistible. They listened and died. Every day ended with perfunctory funerals. No less euphonious afflictions decimated the adults: tuberculosis, cystitis, scabies and salpingitis, cholera, typhoid . . . The red burial mounds grew up overnight beyond the pit latrines as if an army of moles had passed that way. Later the little graves were piled with stones to keep the jackals off and finally came the clumsy wooden crosses tied with string, the names burnt into the wood in a charred scrawl, dates recording the months, weeks, days, hours, in the brief lives of ‘Beauty’ and ‘Edgar’, ‘Sampson’, ‘Nicodemus’ and ‘Precious’.

  The Church half emptied after this first sermon. Blanchaille began to feel rather better about his new appointment. At the second sermon he tried to encourage the congregation remaining to recite after him the names of the camps and perhaps to clap the beat: ‘Kraaifontein, Witziesbek, Verneuk, Bittereind, Mooiplaats . . .’ The microphone gave a hard dry sound as he clapped his way through the litany. No one joined him. ‘I want to suggest that in the foyer of the church we build models of these camps, of the shoe-box shantytowns, the tent villages, that we show their corrugated iron roofs, the towns built of paraffin tins, the three stand-pipes on which thousands of people relied for their water, the solitary borehole and of course the spreading graveyards. Everywhere the graveyards. We might use papier mâché.’

  At his third sermon the congregation had shrunk to those few who he later realised constituted the Consensus Committee: Makapan, the two Kretas, and Mary Muldoon. Mary wore a hat with bright red cherries. Her flower arrangements, he noticed, had not been changed since his first sermon. Before the altar the hyacinths were dying in their waterless brass vases.

  ‘I wish to remember today, dear brethren, my third and final camp, Dolorosa, that tin and cardboard slum in the middle of nowhere which has since become so famous. In my day, the mortality rate for dysentery was a national record, the illness carried off three-quarters of the newborn in the first month after the camp was set up. People in their tin hovels with their sack doors died of despair, if they were lucky, before the more regular infections removed them. Dolorosa, as you know, is important because it caught the imagination of the country and the Church. It was called, in one of those detestable phrases, “a challenge to the conscience of the nation.” Individuals arrived there in their private cars with loads of medicines and milk. Rotary Clubs collected blankets and bread. This charitable effort grew and teams of doctors and nurses, engineers and teachers made their way to Dolorosa. But more than anything else Dolorosa became the camp which the Church took up. It became, in the words of Bishop Blashford’s episcopal letter, “the burning focal point of the charitable energies of the Catholic Church. . ..” A hospital was opened. Then a school. And a fine new church in the beehive style, this being judged as reflecting best the tribal architecture of the local people, was erected and dedicated. What was sought . . . What was sought? Oh yes, I remember, what was sought was “a living, long-term commitment” – they actually said that! Farsighted superiors in distant seminaries saw the potential. Could not such a place, these wise men asked themselves, provide a training ground for their priestlings? Give their chaps a taste of real poverty, they said, by billeting them on me for short periods. The spiritual directors of these seminaries took to visiting me by bus and helicopter. They brought tales of increasing interest among their novices. Inspired by the new direction the Church had found, these young men wished to live, for short periods, a sympathetic mirror existence with their brother outcasts, to embrace Mother Africa. A small pilot scheme was begun and proved to be extremely popular. It was likened to young doctors doing a year of housemanship. Parcels of young priests arrived simply crackling with a desire to do good and discover for themselves the vision of the suffering Christ of the camps. Well, of course, the word got round and before long other sympathisers and wellwishers asked if they too could take part in this scheme in a more practical way. It was one thing to drive down every weekend with a load of powdered milk in the back of the Datsun – but that was no substitute for actually “living in” . . . And if the priests were doing it, then why not the laity? The Church, keen to involve the faithful, agreed. Rather than to drive down to Dolorosa once a week with a fresh supply of saline drip, maybe people should get a taste of dysentery for themselves? A conference of bishops recognized the desire evident among the laity, and in their famous resolution called on them to “make living witness of their deep Christian concern for their dispossessed brethren by going among the
m, even as Our Lord did. . .” Well, you can imagine what happened. The accommodation problem at Dolorosa, and I believe at other camps, became suddenly very acute. Sociologists, writers, journalists, health workers, students, nuns, priests, all began crowding in. I found I had to ration the shanties, the lean-to’s and huts. I had to open a waiting list. Soon we were doubling up on our volunteer workers, five or six to a hovel, three or four to a tent, up to half-a-dozen in the mobile homes donated by the Society of St Vincent de Paul on the proceeds gathered from a number of sponsored walks. Even so it wasn’t enough. It became increasingly difficult to separate the races as the laws of the Regime required that we do, and harder still to keep the sexes apart, as morality demanded. Who hasn’t heard of the tragic case of the Redemptorist Brother accused of raping an African girl behind the soup kitchen run by the Sisters of Mercy? Of the nurse who died of dysentery? Of the Dominican novice taken to hospital suffering from malnutrition? Of the infestation of head lice among a party of visiting Canadian clergy? For a while it seemed as if the whole project of “embracing the poor” was in serious doubt since the faithful seemed unable to resist the very diseases they came to relieve. As a temporary measure all inhabitants, both victims and volunteers, had to be moved into tents miles away from the infected zone while the entire shantytown was fumigated by volunteers from the Knights of Columbus wearing breathing apparatus supplied free of charge by a local firm. At the time the problem seemed insurmountable but with that particular genius which has triumphed through the ages, the Church found a solution. The answer, as we now know, was the careful demarcation of areas of infection. This was achieved by driving sanitary corridors between the healthy volunteer forces on the outside and the infected slum people within; these were the so-called “fire breaks against infection”, a kind of Hadrian’s Wall of Defensive Medicine buttressed at strategic intervals by the SST’s, camp jargon for the scour and shower ablutions, obligatory for all personnel passing between secure areas and infected zones. It was, according to the Bishop’s Conference, a pioneering effort in disease control, a highly imaginative protective health measure sufficiently flexible to take into account the varying degrees of resistance (or lack of it) existing among the ethnic plurality of groups which made up the rich diversity of Southern African peoples . . .’