Kruger's Alp (3 page)

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.

And of course it was Lynch who, some years later still, when Blashford announced the Church's discovery of its new mission to Africa which meant reaching out to embrace its black brothers and sisters in Christ, retorted that having been ordered by his bishop to reverse his own attempt at integration some years before, he was not prepared to shame and humiliate his remaining black parishioners by ordering them back into the white pews from which they had been barred for so long. ‘It is the nature of all power structures,
whether armed or not, to present changes, however contradictory or cruel, as necessary progress towards the light,' Father Lynch, Parish Priest of St Jude's, taught his boys beneath the Tree of Heaven.

The church of St Jude, gloomy Catholic stronghold built of rough-hewn local stone with a wide-eaved heavy roof of grey slate, was set right next door to the young and rampantly spreading Calvinist university, a rock in a Rome-devouring sea, Lynch declared. It was from the nearby hostel for homeless boys that Father Lynch recruited his altar servers, for whom he promised many surprises in the years ahead, terrible surprises for his little guild. This was Father Lynch's way of dignifying his unpromising rag-bag of altar servers.

The hostel was presided over by another import, Father Benjamin Cradley, who came from England. He was soft, pink and mildly mannered and had come to them, as he so often said, from the Oratory. Of course they hadn't the faintest idea where that was. Some deep note in the resonant openness of the vowels suggested to Blanchaille a giant orifice, echoing cave or great clanging iron canal down which ships were launched. The Oratory! What a round, empty ring it had, that Oratory which had sent Benjamin Cradley to this wild hostel full of discarded boys in ill-mannered Africa. When you saw how little he understood of it all you realised how much the early white missionaries must have mystified and terrified the natives. What crusading ignorance was there! He sat up at high table, this fat man, happy to be on top of his little heap, this hostel for the children of the destitute, dead, divorced, distant and decamped families. It was a magnificently incongruous appointment. Cradley was not interested in where he was, or who these boys were, but gazed out into the middle distance through narrowed eyes, faint watery blue, continually screwed up against the cigarettes he chain-smoked, a few wisps of hair greased over the big forehead, the brass crucifix behind the belt moulded into the big belly pushed out before him, meditating not upon God but on the meal to come.

He wandered down the gleaming corridors of the hostel with a curiously beatific smile on his face, scattering cigarette ash and dreaming of dinner time. His large fleshy head with its neat sleek hair seemed too heavy for his shoulders and he always carried it cocked a little to the left, the heavily veined lids lowered over the eyes. This gave him a slightly oriental, half-devious look, underlined by an idiot simper quite at odds with that meaty, pink English
face. When angered he flushed from the chin up and one could watch the blood pressure rising rosily like alcohol mounting in a thermometer. He was waited on hand and foot by two little nuns from some obscure Austrian order, the name of which Blanchaille could not remember – the White Sisters of the Virgin's Milk, or something exotic like that. Had it been? Anyway, they served and worshipped. Sister Gert, who was little and ugly, gnarled and nutty brown, looking not unlike Adolf Eichmann, and by her side the tall, plump, pretty Sister Isle, who spoke no English whatsoever but cooked, scrubbed, sewed and served with love and reverence verging on idolatory. Both of them called him ‘Milord', and he spoke to them as one would to a pair of budgies: ‘Who's a clever cook then?' and ‘Father wants his pudding now – quick, quick!' And they tittered and curtsied and obeyed. They fussed about him at the head of the table, heaping his plate with fried potatoes and bending to flick away the ash which had lodged in the broad creases his belly made in his dusty black soutane. These two sisters in their white cotton habits and their short workmanlike veils, with their tremulous lips and their soft downy moustaches, and the way they chirped and flapped about their solitary, beaming, bovine master reminded him of tick birds attending to some old, solid bull. One day he remembered being delegated to clear the dishes at the head table and he stood close up watching Father Cradley digging plump fingers into a mound of Black Forest cake rather as a gardener drills the soil to take his seedlings, and then Blanchaille thought he understood why the Boers had gone to war against the English. He told Father Lynch.

‘That is a misapprehension, boy. The English are capable of being lean, hard-faced killers just as the Boers are capable of running to fat. We should not judge things as they seem to be, or people as they look. If we all looked what we were the jails would be full.'

‘The jails are full.'

‘That's because we are in Africa. The jails here are built to be full. That doesn't remove from us responsibility for trying to get underneath the layer of illusion. Why is it, for instance, that although everyone here knows they're finished they appear not to have made contingency plans? You
do
all know you're finished? That you're on the way out? Your small white garrison can never hold out against the forces ranged against it. The end of your world is at hand.'

‘It always has been,' said Blanchaille. ‘We got in before you. We
had that thought before you arrived.'

‘Yes, but yours is a nightmare. I'm telling you the truth.'

Even then, young and ignorant, he felt the presumption of an Irish priest talking of apocalypse in this knowing way. What had this old leprechaun with his thousands of years of history, still green and damp from the bogs of Ireland, to tell an African child about the end of the world? You were born with the sense you'd been perched on the edge of the African continent for about two-and-a-half minutes and in that time you'd discovered that you were white and blacks didn't like you; that you were English and so the Dutch Africans known as Afrikaners didn't like you; that you were Catholics and not even the English liked you.

No, there was nothing about the apocalypse which Lynch could teach him. Power was another matter. Proper Europeans, you learnt from history, had a sense and experience of power, of killing and being killed on a wide and effective scale which was quite foreign to Africa. Efficient slaughter they understood. Proper wars. Even Cradley understood that and responded to it. You saw it in his appointment of Van Vuuren to be head boy of the hostel, to keep order among steel lockers and wooden beds in the dormitories. Van Vuuren with his strong square jaw, jet-black hair combed crisply up to a great wave and sleeked back behind his ears, his hard pointed chin and his bright blue eyes, the amazing muscles and the ability to hit and talk at the same time. All this recommended him to Father Cradley as having an aura of moral leadership as a result of which ‘we have decided to elect him to this position of authority.'

‘We have elected him? Jesus! It's as if the early Christians elected one of their lions as Pope,' said Zandrotti.

Van Vuuren administered fair-minded, fair-fisted power. It was difficult to bear him any resentment. There were certain rules and he saw to it that all the others observed them. He enforced order with a terrifying cordiality while continuing himself to flaunt every rule and regulation. He was really a law unto himself. He smoked, he drank, he slipped away with girls, drove a car without a licence, slunk off to the movies with a half jack of vodka sticking out of his back pocket and sprayed large grey streaks into his black sideburns. And this apparent contradiction never drew any criticism from any of his victims since he rested so securely on what must have seemed to him a God-given assignment to do what came best to him, drinking and whoring on the one hand, and enforcing hostel authority on the other. Father Lynch had prophesied that Trevor Van Vuuren was heading straight for the priesthood.

A few years later he joined the police, a move which did nothing to deter Father Lynch's faith in his own prophecies, and if asked about Van Vuuren he would say that he was engaged upon taking holy orders, that he was a man who had dedicated his life to truth. ‘His hands,' Father Lynch maintained, despite the fact that all who knew him never thought of him as having hands but fists, ‘his hands will one day baptise children, bless young brides and succour the dying. . .'

It was Blanchaille who had become a priest, but Lynch would have none of it. He was at police college, he maintained, and when Blanchaille called on him in a dog-collar he declared that he thought it was a wonderful disguise.

Of Zandrotti he was rather more vague: ‘An angel of sorts though of course without angelic qualities. But a go-between, a messenger, an interpreter moving between the old world and the new.' Angel? He was too ugly, a glance showed you that. Zandrotti was the son of a crooked builder with a great raw salami face, who wore creamy, shiny suits, had a great round head and a round body tapering to tiny pigeon-toes. The father Zandrotti came once a month to the hostel in some great American car to abuse his skinny little son, Roberto, with his long white face thick with freckles and his wild, spiky black hair.

Everyone lived in the suburban Catholic ghetto which occupied no more than perhaps a couple of square miles and included Father Lynch's parish of St Jude, the hostel for displaced boys, the Catholic School of St Wilgefortis run by the Margaret Brethren across the way, the bishop's house, home of the unspeakable Blashford, with its large lawns, its vineyards and its chapel which backed on to the mansion occupied by the Papal Nuncio, Agnelli, to whom Father Gabriel Dladla later served as secretary, while also serving as chaplain to Bishop Blashford. Around this ghetto reached the long arms of the new National University, claws they were, embracing it in a pincer movement. Father Lynch used to take the boys up to the bell tower and show them how the Calvinist enemy was surrounding them, ‘Truly a cancerous growth, note the classic crab formation. It will consume us utterly one of these days.'

And then I saw in my dream how Blanchaille remembered himself and the other altar boys in the dark sacristy of St Jude where the altar boys robed for early morning Mass, for Benediction and weekly Wednesday Novena. Cramped like the crew's quarters of some old schooner, smelling of wax candles, of paraffin, of white Cobra floor polish, of altar wine, incense, rank tobacco, of the
pungent lemon and lime after-shave lotion which came off Father Lynch in waves as Mass wore on and he began sweating beneath his heavy vestments, and the terrifically strong brandy fumes from the old drunken sacristan, Brother Zacharias, of the socks and sweat of countless frantic altar boys dragging from the cheap boxwood cupboards their black cassocks, limp laced and always begrimed surplices, with a noisy clash of the frail, round shouldered wire hangers against the splintered plywood partitions. While from the robing room next door, so close you could hear the rumblings of his stomach knowing as it did that Mass still lay between it and breakfast, there came the smooth unceasing polished tirade of Father Lynch's invective as he briskly cursed the scrambling altar boys next door for the dirty-fingered, incompetent and unpunctual little poltroons they were. ‘Oh, I shall die of hunger, or boredom, or both, at the hands of you little devils, far from home in this strange hot land, to be done to death by boredom and waiting . . .' Knock-knock went his black hairy knuckles on his biretta, ‘Come along! Come along! What are you waiting for – the Last Judgement?' Those were the weekday Masses, early morning, low and swift.

In theory Brother Zacharias was there to assist the robing of Father Lynch. In reality he lay slumped in the chair most mornings nursing the hangover he'd got the previous evening from a colossal consumption of altar wine, cheap sweet stuff which came in thick-necked bottles with the Star of David stamped on the label, supplied by the firm of Fattis and Monis. Mass began a race between Father Lynch and his altar boys, as next door he struggled into his stole, maniple, chasuble, picked up the gold and bejewelled chalice, dropped onto his head with the finality of a man closing a manhole his four-winged biretta so that it rested on his jug ears and, swinging the key of the tabernacle on its long silver chain, he pounded on the plywood partition: ‘Where is that damn server this morning?' And the server in question, frantically buttoning up his high collar and smoothing the lace that hung in tatters from the sleeves of his surplice, swooped out in front of him and led him down, out of the sacristy through the Gothic arch of the side chapel and on to the altar:
Introibo ad altarem Dei
. . . ‘I will go to the altar of God . . . to God who gives joy to my youth . . .'

‘– and employment to his priests,' Father Lynch liked to add.

On Sundays, in the olden times, when Father Lynch still had priests beneath him, before his clash with Blashford over his wish to integrate the pews, he had revolutionary dreams: ‘Black and white, one Church in Christ,' Lynch said.

‘More like a recipe for bloody disaster,' Blashford responded. ‘Your parishioners will shoot you.'