Текст книги "Kruger's Alp"

Автор книги: Christopher Hope

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Christopher Hope
Kruger's Alp

Pray, did you never hear what happened to a man some time ago of this town (whose name was Christian) that went on a Pilgrimage up towards the higher regions?

John Bunyan, Pilgrim’s Progress

They took the hill (Whose hill? What for?)

But what a climb they left to do!

Out of that bungled, unwise war

An alp of unforgiveness grew.

William Plomer, ‘The Boer War’

We knew nothing of the theatrical element which is part of all revolutionary movements in France, and we believed sincerely in all we heard.

A. Herzen, Childhood, Youth and Exile

CHAPTER 1

As I walked through the wilderness of what remained of the world of Father Lynch and his ‘little guild’, I saw much to disturb me. Here was the last vestige of the parish garden where the bulldozers, earth-movers, grabbers and cranes had frozen into that peculiar menacing immobility giant machines assume when switched off; left as if stunned, open-mouthed, gaping at the human foolishness of wishing to stop work when they are strong and willing to continue. They stood silent, it being Sunday, resting from their merciless preparation of this new site for one of the enormous hostels of the huge University of National Christian Education, widely declared to be the largest in the southern hemisphere. I looked around me and found the work nearly complete. However, the machines had stopped eating for the moment; ours is a holy land and even the destruction of redundant churches halts on the Sabbath.

The advance of the university over the years had been slow but inexorable; at first, parcels of the extensive grounds of St Jude’s had gone and, wisely, Lynch had not fought against this but had preserved his energies for guarding the church itself and his garden. His community of priests and lay brothers had been whittled away one by one. Bishop Blashford had conducted negotiations with the university so as to safeguard what he called ‘an orderly withdrawal’, with a skill which had won him the admiration of municipal councils across the country – and the commendation of the Papal Nuncio, Agnelli.

I stood in the destroyed church with the gaping roof. All religious ornaments had been removed, the sentimental paintings of lambs in emerald meadows, the wooden stations of the cross, the stained-glass windows of obscure martyrs, the baptismal font, the giant crucifix which had swung above the altar, the doors of the confessionals torn off so that now the little chambers gaped like disused lavatories. All gone – the golden tabernacle, the candles, the altar stone, the plaster Virgin in her sky-blue drapery and her brass circlet of stars, the wooden St Joseph with his surprising paunch, his bluff good looks and his blue sea-captain’s eyes; all the gaudy, inappropriate prints of Italianate saints, all gone; the ruby glass altar lamps in which the tiny flame glowed perpetually, the wooden altar rail at which Blanchaille had stood with his boat boy, Mickey the Poet, beside him, fumigating the first few rows of the congregation with pungent incense, the sacred cardboard hosts that stuck to the roof of the mouth for half an hour after Communion, the chalices, the sweet and rather yeasty smell of the cheap Jewish wine Lynch favoured for the Mass, the ciborium, the copes and chasubles stiff with gold thread, all the intoxicating plumage by which ordinary, irritable, balding men transformed themselves into birds of paradise and paraded to the strangely comforting sound of brass bells; all the absurdly delightful foreign paraphernalia with which a diminishing band of Catholics in a not very notable parish chimed, chanted, blessed and perfumed the start of each bright indifferent African morning. Only the pews remained now, the dark, polished mahogany pews, on the last two of which, at the rear of the church, I could make out still, small oblong patches of lighter wood where the brass plates had been; they were marked RESERVED, thus delicately designating the seats for the handful of black servants who used this church until Father Lynch had the plates removed, in the face of considerable opposition, in the days when these things were regarded as perfectly normal and fully in accord with the will of God and the customs of the country.

I saw that only Father Lynch’s favourite tree, from beneath which the dying master of altar boys once conducted his famous picnics, was still standing. The Tree of Heaven, we called it, or Ailanthus altissima Father Lynch taught with desperate pedantry. Like Buddha, beneath the sacred Bo tree, Father Lynch sat – though there had been nothing Eastern about Father Lynch, who was small, thin and elfish and who told his boys that the name of the tree was highly misleading since its male flowers smelt pretty damn awful and its roots were a threat to the foundations of the church. It was beneath this Tree of Heaven that I lay down around noon and slept. And while I slept I dreamed.

In my dream I saw Theodore Blanchaille and he was not particularly well-dressed. But then he’d always been rather a sloppy character, old Blanchie, or Father Theodore Blanchaille as we learnt to refer to him, or Father Theo of the Camps, as he was known in the old days, or plain Mr Blanchaille as we must refer to him now, I suppose. He was wearing an old pair of khaki shorts, baggy, creased and much too big for him, and a weird kind of sailor’s top of jagged dark blue stripes, squared at the neck. He was barefoot and sat in an empty room on a plastic chair. He was a big fellow carrying too much weight, but then he’d always been heavy, and I could see his belly pushing at the thin cotton shirt, and the plastic bands of the garden chair he sat in pressed against his lower back and made rolls of flesh protrude, meaty and tubular, stacked one above the other like bales of cloth. He was leaning forward with his elbows on his knees and reading a paper which was on the floor in front of him and turning the pages with his bare toes. He was holding a can of beans and occasionally he’d spoon a few of these into his mouth. No ordinary spoon this, but a square-tongued sugar spoon, silver-plated and made for the last visit of their Royal Majesties, King George VI and Queen Elizabeth, whose crowned heads in blue enamel tilted lovingly together above their coat of arms. As he read he wept and the tears landed on his knees and ran down the thick hair of his legs and stained the newspaper.

This struck me as extraordinary. A fellow who had been educated by the Margaret Brethren did not weep easily. But he was crying. Great shuddering sobs made the sailor shirt ripple and the tears glittered upon the thick hairs of his legs. His rather pear-shaped face wore a crumpled hopeless look, the big forehead creased. He bent his chin closer to his knees and with his free hand he clutched his hair which was dark and full of curls and strongly suggested his French blood given him by a Mauritian sailor father who left home shortly after his birth and never returned.

I saw the headline of the paper he held: FISCAL OFFICIAL IN MYSTERY SLAYING.

I knew he was reading about the death of Tony Ferreira who had been his friend in the old days when they were altar boys together under Father Lynch. This was to say in the time before Ferreira showed the signs of mathematical and financial abilities which were to carry him into the Civil Service and then to a high position in the Auditor General’s office. It was extraordinary, given the advanced political education these boys received from Father Lynch, that any of them should ever go to work for the Regime, and yet two of them had done so. This boy whom Father Lynch in one of his wild prophesies had seen as a future visionary. Instead he became a Government accountant, of a very special and rarefied sort, but an accountant all the same. Someone had once asked Ferreira how he found it in him to go and work for the Regime and he simply shrugged and replied that he followed figures wherever they led. Figures were value free, they kept him out of politics and he found that a tremendous relief. Naturally his answer was received with considerable disgust by those who knew him in the old days. Of course this was before an even more shocking betrayal when Trevor Van Vuuren joined the police.

The altar boys of Father Lynch were Theodore Blanchaille, Tony Ferreira, Trevor Van Vuuren, Roberto Giuseppe Zandrotti, Ronald Kipsel and little Michael Yates, afterwards Mickey the Poet. And I saw in my dream how in the old days they would occupy this very garden while Father Lynch sat beneath the Tree of Heaven; beside him on the picnic blanket two black boys, Gabriel and his brother Looksmart, the children of Grace Dladla, his housekeeper. I saw how Father Lynch reclined on an elbow and sipped a drink from a flask while he and the two black boys watched the white boys slaving in the sun, pulling up weeds, cutting back the bushes, raking, watering and desnailing Father Lynch’s impossible parish garden. Gabriel and Looksmart Dladla were given bottles of fizzy orange to drink while Father Lynch leaned at his leisure, sipping iced cocktails from an aquamarine thermos flask. It did black boys good to sit in the shade and watch white boys work. It did white boys good to be watched. The mutual educational advantages of the experience should not be underestimated. This was among the many principles enunciated at Father Lynch’s famous picnics.

Another was that it was given to each of us to discover the secrets of our own particular universe – but we should expect to be punished for it.

Another, that President Paul Kruger when he fled into exile at the end of the Boer War had taken large amounts of money with him – the missing Kruger millions. A glimpse of the purpose to which he had put these millions would be like a view of paradise – or at least as close to it as we were ever likely to get.

Another, that the Regime was corrupt, weak and dying from within – this at a time when our country was regarded as being as powerful as either Israel or Taiwan, had invaded almost every country along our border and even a number across the sea, some several times, always with crushing military victories.

Another, that destruction threatened everyone – this at a time when President Adolph Gerhardus Bubé had just returned from his extensive foreign tour of European capitals and initiated a new diplomatic policy of open relations with foreign countries which was said to have gained us many friends abroad and continued support in the world at large.

Father Ignatius Lynch, transplanted Irish hothead who never understood Africa, or perhaps understood it too well, had been sent into this wilderness, he would say, indicating with a gesture of his small shapely hand the entire southern sub-continent of Africa, by error, misdirected by his boneheaded supervisors in Eire. A man with his gifts for the analysis of power, and the disguises which it took on, should have been retained at home as one who would recognise and appreciate the close bonds between clergy and rulers in his own country, or should have been posted to some superior European Catholic parish in Spain, or Portugal, or even to Rome, where his gifts might have been acknowledged. Being deprived of an adult, mature European culture where even babes and sucklings understood that the desirability of morality could never replace the necessities of power, and despite the realisation that Africa was not going to live up to his expectations, he worked hard at giving his boys a lively political sense.

Then, too, Father Lynch had alarming gifts for prophecy; he prophesied often, with tremendous conviction, of the future which lay ahead for his boys; prophecies truly imaginative, but magnificently inaccurate.

There was, too, this strange addiction to South African history, or at least to one of its distant and probably mythical sub-themes, the question of the missing Kruger millions, the great pile of gold which according to some legends Paul Kruger, President of the Transvaal Republic and leader of the Boer nation in the great war of freedom against the British imperialists at the turn of the century, had taken with him when he fled into exile as the victorious English Rooineks marched into the capital. This must have begun as a faint interest, a hobby perhaps, back in the mists of time, but what had been once a gentle historical investigation into a legend, which was very widely discounted by authorities, academic and political, became a passionate investigation into something which would supply the answer to the mystery of ‘life as we know it’, and was absolutely vital to their salvation, he told his boys – ‘at least in so far as salvation could be defined or hoped for in this God-forsaken Calvinist African wilderness’. Father Lynch would express his belief with great finality, reclining on his elbow and sipping from his iced thermos beneath the Tree of Heaven as he watched his boys dragging at the leathery weeds.

I saw in my dream how Blanchaille sat in an empty room, with its bare parquet flooring and a few bad pieces of orange Rhodesian copper hanging on the walls, kudu drinking at a waterhole, and similar trifles, weeping as he read of the death of Ferreira, shaking his head and muttering. From somewhere outside the house, perhaps in the garden, I could hear angry voices raised, baying as if demanding to be let in and in my dream I saw who these angry ones were – they were Blanchaille’s parishioners demonstrating against their priest.

Clearly unable to contain himself any longer, Blanchaille burst out with a choked cry: ‘What shall I do? What the hell shall I do?’

And I saw in my dream four lines in small smudgy newsprint from the Press Association which reported that Dr Anthony Ferreira had been found dead in his ranch-style home in the Northern Suburbs. Police were investigating. Dr Ferreira had been his country’s representative with various international monetary organisations abroad. Certain messages had been found written on the wall near the body.

It was possible to date this newspaper to the final days before the Onslaught because on the opposite page was a huge photograph of a darkened car window in which could be glimpsed the white blur of a man’s face, and I knew at once that this was the picture of our President (our ex-President as he became), Adolph Gerhardus Bubé, on his celebrated foreign tour, the one which opened a new chapter in our international relations with the outside world. Ten countries in six days. It had been hailed at the time as a diplomatic triumph as well as a speed record. Photographs had appeared in the press: a man shielding his face outside the Louvre; an elderly gentleman in a hat on a bridge in Berne, a shadowy figure, back turned, feeding the pigeons in Trafalgar Square; a dim white face peering from the darkened windows of a black limousine speeding past the Colosseum… proofs of a triumph. It was the first time a president had been abroad since President Kruger fled to Switzerland in 1902. But Bubé’s tour, alas, did not open the new chapter in foreign relations which the Government promised. He came home and we began digging in for the long siege. The Total Onslaught had begun.

Blanchaille had heard from Ferreira very shortly before his death. Of course his line had been tapped. The call had come out of the blue, but he knew instantly the familiar flat vowels and the unemotional voice: ‘I’m sending you some money, Blanchie.’

‘I don’t need your money.’

‘Oh, come on, of course you need money. I don’t care what you use it for. Say some masses for my soul if you like, but I’m off. I’m through. Lynch was right, Blanchie. Something has been going on all these years. I’ve seen the books.’

Blanchaille did not wish to talk to Ferreira. He didn’t like Ferreira. Ferreira had gone to work for the other side. He’d represented the country at the International Monetary Fund, he’d been co-opted into the office of the Auditor General. His speciality was currency movements, exchange control and foreign banking.

‘You’ll need this money, you’ll need it to get where you’re going. Don’t be stubborn, Blanchie.’

‘I’m not going anywhere.’

The eavesdroppers bugging the call handled their appliances in the customarily inept way. So many telephones, so many listeners needed. It was rumoured they took on students wishing to earn cash in their vacations. An unpleasant hum increasing in pitch and volume covered their piping exchanges. Ferreira’s voice shrilled tinnily through the growing fog of interference. He was probably yelling his head off. ‘I’ve had a revelation, Blanchie! I’ve found it – I’ve found the City of God!’

‘Of what?’ Blanchaille shrieked.

It was hopeless, the humming noise made the ear quiver. He knew then that the line had not merely been tapped, their conversation had been jammed.

The money came. There were hundreds, thousands perhaps. He hadn’t counted it, wrapped in plastic film, crisp notes held tight with rubber bands. He hid it in a great tub of ice-cream in the freezer, scooping out the middle and sealing it with a plug of the peppermint chip and pistachio. It was the only food left in the house since Joyce had left, not counting the beans.

Now Ferreira was dead. The item itself in the paper was small, it might have been lost amongst the lists of divorces and the spreading columns of troop casualties on the Borders. The news of the Ferreira killing might not have been much but the stories surrounding it made clear the interest that it aroused. The young Secretary of the new Department of Communications, or Depcom, dynamic Miss Trudy Yssel, put out a statement deploring speculation about price falls on the Exchange and pointing out that the press must take a more responsible attitude and that this wasn’t, after all, the Bubbles Schroeder murder case. This last a reference to one of the most celebrated murders in the country in which a pretty young whore named Bubbles Schroeder, who had slept with a number of people of note, was found lying in a grove of trees one morning with a lump of limestone thrust into her mouth. And Yssel’s boss, Minister for Parallel Equilibriums and Ethnic Autonomy, the formidable Augustus ‘Gus’ Kuiker who held, besides, the important portfolio of Cultural Communications, the Government’s propaganda arm, took the opportunity to warn the press once again that the Government’s patience was not limitless, that freedom was a privilege to be earned, not a licence for personal or political rumour-mongering. A further story reported the deaths of three brokers, Kranz, Lundquist and Skellum, and quoted the Chairman of the Exchange, Dov Solomon, as saying that an investigation had shown that these unfortunate accidents had no connection with one another, or with any other event. Blanchaille paid no attention to these attendant stories. It is probable that he detected no connection – but I saw in my dream that he would remember them later, when his investigative talents flowered as of course Father Lynch had prophesied they would.

Ah, the prophecies of Father Lynch! What is one to make of them?

Father Lynch had prophesied that Tony Ferreira was a natural visionary. Consequently he received the news of his interest in accountancy with what seemed like astonishing composure. He had taken to figures, he told Blanchaille once, because it kept his mind off his bruises. Now that was fair enough. Ferreira had been beaten since he was a baby. Indeed one of Blanchaille’s earliest memories was seeing Ferreira arrive to serve early morning Mass with two eyes so swollen, so bruised, he could hardly see where he walked and had to take Blanchaille’s arm as they made their way from the sacristy into the church, along the altar rail, through the gate and up the five grey marble steps leading to the altar. He could remember counting, ‘here’s one, now two coming up, here is three…’ then they crossed the flat grey granite expanse and knelt together on the top altar step where Ferreira remained for the rest of the Mass too blind to move.

His father had been a bricklayer. Big head and a jutting lower lip. He drove a powder blue Pontiac with a pink plastic butterfly on the bonnet. Mrs Ferreira was white-faced, plain as a gate-post, cracked and peeling, whom Mr Ferreira carried everywhere with him like a club and used with terrible effect on his son when his own arm tired. Looking at them in their pew, the Ferreiras senior, he with pale hair on his sun-tanned arms and she solid, straight, wooden, with a blankness in their eyes as the Mass progressed, like two strangers who have darted out of the rain into church only to find they have strayed into some foreign funeral service and must now patiently wait it out, masking their incomprehension in a slumberous passivity intended to suggest the appropriate demeanour. Hard to imagine them flinging themselves fist and boot on their only son. But Tony bore the marks.

Hemmed in on both sides his only escape was upward. Tony grew tall and elegant as if to repudiate his father’s squat energy and outstrip it. With his father’s thick pale hair and his mother’s immobile features he was delicate, sensitive, smart. A war of attrition began as Tony set out deliberately to bait his father into extending himself by making plain his open contempt for his bricklaying business. Mr Ferreira responded, fighting back by opening branches, getting draughtsmen into his office; soon he denied he was a bricklayer and described himself as a quantity surveyor. He went on to employ other quantity surveyors and his picture even appeared in the papers as a man on the move in ‘our thrusting, dynamic economy’. Father Lynch remarked on Ferreira’s father’s success, at which Tony nodded pleasantly: ‘Yes, he’s fully extended on all fronts now. His order books are bursting and he has substantial credit lines. The banks are falling over each other to lend him money.’ When the big crash came Tony explained the reasons for it with gentle composure. ‘It happens every day. He’d stretched himself to breaking point. Simply couldn’t service his debts. Nailed by his own ambition. Crucified by his own success.’ And then the final twist of the knife, elegant and terrible, Tony attended his father’s bankruptcy hearing wearing a rich red tie and a glossy, heavily scented rose in his buttonhole and listened with rapt attention as the quantity surveyor’s empire was dismantled brick by brick and thrown to his creditors.

Even Lynch heard of the crash.

‘It seems your dad has been under fire, Tony.’

‘Yes, Father. I’d say he’s taken a good knock.’

‘Snapped his head back, did it?’

‘Decapitating.’

But why had Lynch described Ferreira as a visionary? The priest explained: ‘They will tell you, the people who run this country, that they built the New Jerusalem in this brown, dry, prickly land. To see the lie behind the boast requires the eyes of the seer.’

Again: ‘They will proffer the moral principles on which their empire is built, the keepers of the uneasy peace. Refuse their invitation. Ask instead to see the books.’

And: ‘We are dealing here with questions of faith,’ a favourite opening, ‘which in the neo-Calvinism followed by the Regime is in fact a matter of money. There’s been no question of faith since Kruger left and his heirs forsook morality for power. We know this to be true. The difficulty will be in proving it.’

Father Lynch always had a line, a view. Mad he was, but reliable. I saw how desperately Blanchaille needed to consult the old priest long forsaken by his altar boys who not unnaturally believed they had outgrown him. The man I saw in my dream was cracking up. He wept and raved. Things were closing in. He sat in the empty house. Waiting, or hoping? His bags had never been unpacked since he arrived to take up his incumbency as parish priest in the new suburb of Merrievale. They waited for him now, by the door, three heavy tartan suitcases reinforced with leather straps. He had packed them when he left the camp and went to the priests’ home in the mountains for rest and recuperation. He had carried them to his new post as parish priest in Merrievale. They contained clerical suits he never wore; books he did not read; boots, brushes, toiletries he no longer used; they were in effect the relics of a life he no longer led. Now and then he bought a new toothbrush, a pair of shoes, a couple of shirts whenever he needed them and left them behind when he moved on. But the cases he carried with him. Heavy, useless, but all he had to remind him of what, and to some extent where, he had been. He hadn’t lasted long in Merrievale. His tenure as parish priest could be measured in three sermons and a siege. Outside his window his parishioners bayed for his blood. They waved banners and shook their fists, led by big-knuckled Tertius Makapan, the brick salesman. Word had it that Father Lynch was dying, but then Lynch had been dying ever since he’d met him. He’d made a profession of dying. ‘I’m not long for this world, my boys!’ he would shout from the shade of the Tree of Heaven. ‘Get a move on!’

Lynch’s love of easeful death wasn’t quite what it seemed; it was rather as if he saw in it the chance of the transfer the Church had always denied him. Death might be the far country from whence no traveller returned – and if so he was all for it. Anywhere must be better than this. Hence the constant warnings: ‘Hurry, my boys, I am not much longer for this life…’ and ‘Listen to these words of wisdom from a departing soul – the idealism of the Boer freedom fighters died with Kruger’s flight into exile. What followed was not a success for Calvinist nationalism but a policy of “get what you can and keep it” – only remember to call it God’s work.’

This urge to depart was more to be pitied than feared. Lynch knew that short of a miracle, or his own defection (and that meant air tickets and where was he to find the money?), he was condemned for life to this wild African place.

He suffered from dreams of money. Perhaps a rich relative would die and leave him a legacy? No, he was a practical man. But then again perhaps one of his altar boys would one day be rich enough to make a present to his old priest and mentor – enough to enable him to escape to what he called some serious country.

Perhaps this was the source of his fascination with the last days of the old Boer leader of the Transvaal Republic, Stephanus Johannes Paulus Kruger. Father Lynch knew the Memoirs very well, and he owned also what he claimed was the last surviving copy of Further Memoirs of a Boer President; a fat, red leather-bound book of reminiscences and prophecies apparently dictated by the exiled president to his faithful valet Happé in the old man’s few remaining months of life in his rented house by the lake in Clarens, Switzerland, as the desolate, near-blind old lion mused over the future of his country and his people, broken by war and scattered in defeat to St Helena and Patagonia, Ceylon, Malaya, Madagascar, Mozambique, Angola and Tanganyika – a diaspora of Boers, the African Israelites, blown by history around the globe.

… And I shall use the short remaining time the Lord has been pleased to grant me to labour mightily, though conscious of my frailty and infirmity, to bring His people home to Him [Kruger promised in Further Memoirs], and since He has entrusted to my care the means whereby His will shall be accomplished I shall not rest until I find that place, ‘the land’, as the Lord said to Moses, ‘which I have given unto the children of Israel’…

Father Lynch would interpret this for his altar boys, saying that by that ‘place’ Kruger undoubtedly meant a physical location, a home for dispossessed and faithful Boers who would not return to serve under the hated English, and by ‘the means’ Kruger certainly meant the treasure which had accompanied him into exile, the famed Kruger hoard, the gold millions of legend (taken in the form of ingots, bullion-bars or dust, who could say?) – from the inexhaustible mines of the Reef and smuggled out when the President fled.

This obsession with the millions came to outweigh all of Lynch’s religious duties and the Further Memoirs became his daily office, his ‘familiar bible’ he called it, though it was widely believed among the altar boys he had written it himself.

It was precisely these unexpected ideas, combined with a complete lack of any religious scruple, which attracted to Father Lynch the boys from the nearby boarding hostel who were to form his little group of altar servers.

That Father Lynch was in disgrace with all the orthodox clergy appealed enormously to the wayward boys, handed by their parents into the care of Father Cradley, rector of the hostel: Ferreira, Blanchaille, Van Vuuren, Zandrotti, little Michael Yates, and, for a brief period, even Ronald Kipsel (afterwards the infamous Kipsel), these were the altar servers in Lynch’s little guild. The boys detested the Church and yet were drawn to Father Lynch, for, after all, did the Church not hate Father Lynch? Wasn’t it Father Lynch who insisted on integrating the two dozen black servants, washerwomen and gardeners who knelt in the two final pews on either side of the nave, into the white congregation? Until ordered by Bishop Blashford to restore segregation immediately, because, desirable though a certain mixing might be in an ideal world and certain though it was that such things would one day happen – though not in our lifetime – the move was premature.

And was it not Father Lynch some years later who refused to introduce the new form of the Mass with its responses in English and its furtive handshakes and blushing kisses of peace, saying that although he understood the move was designed to counter dwindling congregations by giving the laity the idea that they were a vital part of the service, a move which he understood was known among theatre people as ‘audience participation’, he and his congregation were too old to change and he would continue to say Mass in the old Latin rite? Threats were made. They were ignored. And eventually the point was not pursued. After all, Lynch was an old man ministering to an elderly and diminishing congregation served by a little band of altar boys so bound by loyalty to the obstinate priest that they were probably beyond salvation.