Christopher Hope - Kruger's Alp

‘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.’