Kruger's Alp

by Christopher Hope

  ‘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 chee
ks 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.’

  But with Magdalena, wow! seemed just about to cover it. He had invited her to Bishop Blashford’s vineyard, his other garden, and she had nodded with complete enthusiasm. She had streaked blonde hair. Her face ended in a pointed chin. Her eyes were blue-grey.

  He led her through the darkness with a churning stomach feeling rather like a young man who has come into a large fortune and has no idea how to begin spending it. She looked like a model, Van Vuuren had promised. So this was how a model looked! Clearly there could be no holding hands this time. He would grapple her to him. Kiss her. Remove her bra and fondle her breasts, maybe take them in his mouth. Why not? He was fifteen, it was about time. They would lie on the grass afterwards. It happened to be raining softly so perhaps they wouldn’t, but if it stopped raining they could lie on her mac. That she wore a mac was evidence of her practicality and added to her charm. Would he try and take off her pants? He doubted it – but nothing was ruled out. They stood beneath the dripping trees and Magdalena drew him towards her and said: ‘You’re a pretty boy.’ Her thin plastic raincoat crackled as she pressed him against her. There was something so practised in the kiss she gave him. Her lips were wet. With a stab of despair he noticed that the buttons on her mac were large and stuffed tightly through their buttonholes. This presented a smooth and shining armoured front. But she was well ahead of him and had no similar problems. Her hand reached up behind him under his shirt pressing into the small of his back. The other hand expertly opened his fly – smooth, fast, deft movements, and then she had his penis in her damp fingers and was lifting it over the elastic band of his underpants which slid painfully upwards to trap his testicles. But then she rubbed and rubbed and soon things grew warm and better. Then he groaned and spurted and all at once she laughed delightedly. ‘But you’re quick! The quickest I’ve ever met.’ Not quite scorn in the laugh, but tones of someone pleased at their own handiwork and still willing to continue. He knew the matter wasn’t closed as far as she was concerned. He also knew he’d come before he’d even kissed Magdalena. There might be more if he liked, he could feel it. It was up to him, he could feel that too. But of course it wasn’t. What was to come had been and gone. The elastic cut more cruelly into his testicles. ‘You’re really nice,’ Magdalena said, ‘we’ll do this again.’ His own incompetence baffled and enraged him. Afterwards he picked a small bunch of the Bishop’s grapes. Magdalena declined saying they were too sour, but he finished them anyway, sour or not, punishing himself. The perfectly ordinary, reasonable and agreeable reactions of human beings seemed closed to him. A few, like Magdalena, dwelt happily among them. And there was that girl he’d met when he was very much younger, somebody’s big sister, whose he couldn’t remember. He went to play with her, at her invitation. They played in the empty garage. Postman’s knock and spin the bottle.

  ‘How do you play?’

  ‘If your number comes up you pay forfeits.’

  ‘What forfeits?’

  ‘Well, for instance, kisses or feelings, if you like. Otherwise hair-pulls and toe-stamps.’

  He won a lot and took hair-pulls and toe-stamps and it was very many years later that it occurred to him what was being offered and why there was that strange, softly appealing note in her voice.

  There was no possibility of normal, natural, obvious behaviour for him.

  Instead he had, as Lynch said, moral crusades.

  ‘You on our side believe in the multi-racial paradise in which Boer and Zulu lie down together like lambs. There are no longer any Kaffirs, coolies, Jew-boys, coloured bastards, hairies, rock spiders, Dutchmen, all the rich store of invective so vital to political debate – I mention too Rednecks and English swine – and no one notices what colour you are. You believe God is behind you in this. They, on the other side, believe that everyone has their own identity. Everyone deserves separate lavatories and if the crunch comes they will fight to the death, to the last man who will blow his brains out on the last beach, preferring death to dishonour and will go to heaven where there will also be parallel toilet facilities. We are all superior people, on both sides.’

  Lynch spat on these dreams, sat beneath the Tree of Heaven spitting with amazing accuracy also into an old brass spittoon. Kruger had spat, with embarrassing frequency, he said, and he enjoyed learning how to do so. ‘This society is one of deep criminality, its ministers have a tough job laying down the law, that’s why if you want to be a priest, join the police force.’

  The Bishop’s other garden had been closed to Lynch’s altar boys without warning. Three strands of barbed wire slanting inwards were fixed above the hedge and a great new lock appeared on the gate. Gabriel was given the key. The Garden of Eden had been closed, Father Lynch said, and the sinners ejected therefrom. The Archangel barred the way.

  ‘We don’t care a damn,’ Van Vuuren said, ‘he’ll have to clear up our mess.’

  ‘He’ll have to pick up the french letters, the old cigarettes and clear the well of about a hundred vodka and brandy bottles.’

  ‘He’s ending up as just another garden boy,’ Blanchaille said.

  Father Lynch had listened t
o all of this with a faint smile. ‘But he’s in the Bishop’s employ, isn’t he? At his age and already an episcopal appointment! You keep an eye on Gabriel. That boy will go far.’

  Bishop Blashford yawned and stretched. The interview was over.

  ‘Perhaps Gabriel is around? I thought I might say goodbye,’ Blanchaille said.

  Bishop Blashford beat a retreat to the house where Ceres was waiting at the french windows. She held them open as he approached and once he’d slipped inside she quickly closed them to all but a few inches. Obviously Blanchaille was not invited to tea. ‘You go up and see Gabriel,’ Blashford shouted through the crack. ‘He’s our legal eagle. He’ll get you whatever papers you need to make the application. There’s no more I can do for you. Be it on your own head. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I must go and wash my hands.’

  ‘Your bags are outside by the front gate,’ Ceres said and closed the french windows with considerable dignity.

  CHAPTER 6

  Blanchaille walked down the hill struggling with the heavy cases. He regretted vaguely having brought them. Books, socks, clerical suits he had never worn; the blue barathea blazer he was wearing when he entered the seminary, big lapels and double vents – quite out of fashion now . . . the weeds of yesteryear.

  The sky above the crest of the hill was dark grey and becoming blacker with every moment. There was something huge and flamboyant about a highveld storm, an occasion of relentless melodrama. The sky grew heavy and crowded in over you. As the storm built, the air became more highly charged. The trees shook themselves. Birds would swoop and flee. The hush would begin to weigh. Occasionally a small wind would drift a few leaves past your ankles or slide past the eyebrows carrying a faint watery scent. The first flash would come, white as a slash of chalk across a blackboard and a crash that split the ear-drums. But it did not necessarily mean rain, something might happen in the atmosphere and the storm would wheel and miss you leaving you only with prodigious explosions, blackness and vivid fractures of light. All show, impressive but empty bluster, truncheon weather, crash, bash, wallop. Your hair stood on end but you didn’t get wet. Yet you felt the threat, looked with respect at the towering darkness above. Not for nothing did the Regime sometimes broadcast important policy statements on radio and television during electrical storms, the words interspersed by static and thunder. When it did rain, the relief was palpable.