‘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 to 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.
A large black car came bowling down the hill and stopped beside him with a shriek of brakes. The window descended with smooth electrical precision, and there was Gabriel. The interior of the car smelt of its blue vinyl coverings and the refrigerated whisper of its air conditioning. Gabriel didn’t switch off the engine. The car waited, hissing faintly. Gabriel massaged his jaw, smooth, golden, smiling, a model of casual elegance.
‘What’s this, Blanchie? You’ll be soaked if it comes down. You’re a long way from home.’
Blanchaille nodded. Maybe he should ask his question now?
‘I’d give you a lift but I’m meeting the Rome plane. Vatican bigwigs. Visiting firemen. Ah well — no rest for the wicked.’
‘No.’
‘Never be a bishop’s chaplain.’
‘No,’ said Blanchaille, ‘I won’t.’
Blanchaille watched the big black car go purring down the hill. He hadn’t asked his question. It was this: Looksmart Dladla had been warned to get out of the country by his brother. Fair enough. So then, if Gabriel told Looksmart the cops wanted him in connection with the Kipsel business, who told Gabriel?
As he reached the bottom of the hill the first drops fell but he was lucky enough to find a bus stop and gratefully took shelter beneath the corrugated iron roof, swung his cases up on the bench and himself up beside them while the rain sheeted down and ran rivers of red mud and gravel beneath the spindly metal legs of the shelter. Highveld rain was like no other, the drops were large and would sting the hand and batter the head, drilling into the earth, beating and upbraiding it. The highveld rain had weight and made each drop count, was a battering of the country, brief but overwhelming. The earth, so dry, was soon saturated in great pools everywhere, joining up into streams carrying off the top soil, rough brown surges hurtling down the gutters and thundering in the storm-water drains, and everything which had been settled was fluid and running. It never lasted of course. After the deluge the sun would come out and everything dried away to sticky mud and then to dust. But while it lasted the world ran free, and the mind with it.
Now in my dream, as the storm began tapering off, a figure stepped out of the rain and sat beside him on the bench. ‘God Almighty, Blanchie! Did I not direct you to the Airport Palace?’ Father Lynch’s black raincoat was a sheen of wet cloth; rain gathered in the brim of his hat; when he spoke a hundred droplets exploded in the air before his mouth. ‘You delayed. And now you may find the going harder. Bubé is gone!’
‘So?’
‘What do you mean — so? This is the most extraordinary news. At last the truth is beginning to emerge. Bubé has gone. Of course this affects your travel plans.’
‘Why should it?’
‘Why? Because the roads will be full of police. Theodore, for the first time since Paul Kruger’s departure, a president has fled! Adolph Gerhardus Bubé has fled!’
Adolph Gerhardus Bubé, father of the nation. An intellectual who studied in his youth in universities in Holland, Germany and Belgium. One of the original founders of the old policy of ethnic parities, as it was then called, with his thesis ‘Racial Separation with Justice’, which became the Ur-text, the philosophical underpinning of the racial policy of equal freedoms or concomitant responsibilities, the vision of ‘ethnic heartlands’ each reflecting its distinctive tribal rhythm, each tribe breeding to its heart’s content. It was from this thesis that many of the crucial ideas of modern South Africa originated, regarded as revolutionary once but now outmoded, its once striking maxims absorbed into everyday language, sentiments such as: ‘There’s no such place as South Africa’, or as Pik Honneger, his most distinguished disciple put it, ‘What’s ours is ours, and what’s theirs is what we are prepared to give them.’