Christopher Hope - Kruger's Alp

This was what in my dream I heard Blanchaille say again and again as he stared into his occupied garden. He knew, as I know, that as the years have passed more and more people have felt this and they knew it to be true and the greater their perception of truth so greater became the efforts to disbelieve it, to push it to the back of their minds, to discredit it until at last, at the time of the Total Onslaught, it became a punishable offence to admit to the possibility. You could be punished, arrested, beaten up, imprisoned for defeatism in the face of the enemy, for after all there was by then a war going on. In my dream I saw Blanchaille place his hands on the window-sill and bow his head, his whole body bent as if something heavy pressed down on his back and he leaned forward rolling his forehead against the window-pane and staring into the garden, the very picture of a man oppressed, weighed down. He thought only of ways of escape. But from what and in which direction remained dark to him.

And when in my dream I saw how Blanchaille stood at his window looking out across the garden towards the small knot of angry folk outside the front gate, I knew them to be his parishioners. They were the stony ground on which his seed had fallen. He had preached, he had warned, but the lambs would not hear, instead they banded together and drove their shepherd out. Tertius Makapan, in a mustard suit and luminous magenta tie, leaning against his dusty Toyota. A colossal man, a brick salesman, responsible for co-ordinating the attack on him; there were, too, his storm-troopers, Duggie and Maureen Kreta, Makapan’s willing creatures, formerly the treasurer and secretary of the Parish Council (before the Council was reconstituted into the Parochial Consensus Committee, the consensus being that Blanchaille must go); and poor Mary Muldoon, mad Mary, who knew no better, or at least he had thought so until she had tricked him out of his key to the church and so allowed the Committee to lock and bar the place against him; and there, hanging back, his black housekeeper, Joyce, who had joined them quite suddenly one night. Simply abandoned the dinner she was cooking for him and left his steak smoking on the stove and went over to his enemies. Maureen and Duggie Kreta carried a large banner: PINK PRIEST MUST GO! They waved the poles and flapped the banner at him when they saw him at the window.

PINK PRIEST MUST GO! Priest? The use of the singular case annoyed him. Not that it was intentional, but merely echoed the Kretas’ way of speaking. Maureen, round and determined with thick, rather greasy dark hair, and Duggie, some years younger, sharp face, thin mouth and full, blond hair. They rode everywhere on an ancient Puch autocycle wearing white peaked crash helmets and dark blue macs. They spoke to him as if he were a not very intelligent puppy. Thus Maureen: ‘Father want to watch out for some of the guys in this parish who don’t give a button on Sunday, look at the plate like it was something the dog brought in. In fact some of ’em only look in it at all like they’re wondering what they can pull out. Father got to watch ’em like a hawk.’ And Duggie, parish treasurer’s briefings about lack of funds: ‘Not two cents to rub together most times. You have to raise some funds. The father before Father was a hot shot at raising funds. Charity walks. Charity runs. That was Rischa. Running priest.’

PINK PRIEST MUST GO!

Blanchaille wished to pull down the window and shout at them: ‘Yes, pink priest going! White priest come, pink priest go. Green priest yes, black priest no!’ It was like living in a bloody nursery. Well, he was going to oblige. With pleasure.

He was getting out just as fast as he could.

The need to escape had become for Blanchaille an obsession: if he asked himself what it was he wanted, he answered — rest, peace. Now at the time of the Total Onslaught this feeling was naturally strong, as it always is at the time of killing and much blood, among people of all colour and political persuasions, sad to say. The dead were to some extent envied. They were out of it at least. Those who had disappeared were considered to be fortunate also. Nobody knew where they had disappeared to and no one cared. It was whispered by some that those who had vanished were perhaps also dead but this was widely discounted — they were said to have ‘gone pilgrim’, meaning they were believed to be travelling overseas, thus distinguishing them from the truly dead soldiers who were said to have ‘joined the big battalion’. In war time, said Father Lynch, morphine for the wounded, euphemisms for the survivors. So people bravely pointed out that in war time casualties must be expected and it was best not to question too deeply. It was devoutly to be hoped that the dead and those who had disappeared had gone to some happier place where they would at least be at peace. Now, when asked where this place was, some would have replied vaguely that it was somewhere overseas, others would have given a religious answer and pointed to the sky; a few very brave souls would have whispered quietly that perhaps they’d gone to ‘that shining city on the hill’ or to ‘that colony of the blessed’; or to that ‘rest-home for disconsolate souls’, which legend held President Paul Kruger established for his homeless countrymen somewhere in Switzerland early this century. Despite threats of imprisonment issued regularly by the Regime, the legend of Kruger’s heritage persisted, a holy refuge, a haven, funded with the golden millions he had taken with him when he fled into exile. The Regime scoffed at these primitive, childish beliefs and punished their public expression with prison terms. They were joined by the academic historians who regularly issued bulletins exploding the ‘myth of the Kruger millions’. People you met were similarly dismissive, in fact it was not unusual to begin a conversation by remarking, apropos of nothing at all, ‘Naturally I don’t believe a word about the gold Kruger stole from the mines. Not a bloody word of it.’ But everyone, people, historians, perhaps even the Regime itself, continued to trust in and hope for the existence of that much dreamed of distant, better place. Some became obsessed and fled. So it was with Blanchaille.

When he could stand it no longer Blanchaille applied for a long leave of absence. The Church of course, through a number of unhappy experiences, knew the signs. Bishop Blashford sent Gabriel Dladla to find out the reason.

‘Is there a girl, we wondered?’ Gabriel asked gently.

‘There was a girl. But not here.’

‘Yes, we thought there was a girl. Somewhere.’

The ease with which Gabriel followed him into the past tense chilled Blanchaille.

‘There was a girl, a nursing sister, a Canadian. Miranda was her name. I met her years ago soon after I went to work in the camps or what she called the new growth industries, the growing heaps of unwanted people springing up everywhere in the backveld.’

‘I would hardly call that an industry,’ said Gabriel with a gently disapproving frown. ‘The camps are a scandal, an affront to human dignity. A sin. The Church condemns the camps and the policy of racial Hitlerism which creates them.’

‘It was one of her jokes,’ said Blanchaille. ‘She had a distinctive brand of humour. She had what she called a traditional job, a nursing sister in the township. She refused to dramatise the job. “I could be doing something similar in Manitoba,” she would say, “It’s nothing special.” The difference between us, she insisted, was that I was doing something important but she was just doing a job. “Don’t build it up. I’m not giving a performance,” she said. She said I was at the forefront of things in the camps, learning how to process the people who had been thrown away; “Soon the whole country will run on this human garbage,” she said. It was another of her jokes.’