‘There is no hopping here,’ said Blanchaille briskly. ‘Here I get the feeling that they do everything by the book. Unless you go into the baths you can’t join the others.’
‘It reminds me of Lynch’s thoughts on salvation. Do you remember his Clean Living Fallacy?’ Kipsel said.
Who could forget it? This was Lynch’s answer to the morbid teachings of the Margaret Brethren on sudden death and inevitable damnation. The Margaret Brethren taught them that by going about in a state of sin knowing not what the day brought forth they risked the wrath of God: a motor car accident, a sudden electrocution, asphyxiation, choking, or one of the hundred hidden ways in which God might strike and send the sinner to judgement unshriven, unprepared and irredeemable. Death in the state of mortal sin would deprive the sinner of any chance ever again of heavenly bliss, and even a venial sin would plummet the sinner to purgatory where sufferings were just as bad and the period of confinement so vast that by comparison all the time which had passed since the creation of the cosmos to the present day seemed no longer than a millionth of a second. Lynch savaged this doctrine by pointing out that precisely the same fear possessed people who hoped, if knocked down by a motor car, to be wearing clean underpants. In the eschatology of the Margaret Brethren, Lynch explained to them, God was reduced to a bad driver, the human being to a hit-and-run victim and the soul to the status of an article of underwear.
This mere mention of Lynch made them both wonder and look around them as if hoping that they might spy the little priest lurking about. Perhaps they might ask him whether he thought people here lived by the book and if so whether the book was any good and life lived by it worth the trouble?
They were in the dining-room now, a magnificent iron and glass pavilion which looked rather like a huge bird cage. There were many tables and many diners. Obligatory portraits of President Kruger hung on the walls. In the centre a fountain kept its awkward watery balance in a great stone basin shaped like a giant baptismal font. All the diners wore the same creamy towelling robes and all looked freshly scrubbed. A short, square, capable looking woman in a dark blue uniform which gave her the look of a nurse, though there was also something vaguely military about her, stepped forward. There were black epaulettes on her uniform and silver stars that served as buttons and her bearing was upright and disciplined. Clearly someone not to be trifled with. But her smile was open and genuine and her welcome warm. She was smoking a short, thin black cheroot.
Though there were none of the faces they half-hoped, dared perhaps, in their wildest imagination to find, there were all around them familiar countenances. Surely that grey-haired old gentleman was a former prime minister who was said to have retired to his farm in Swellendam to raise bees? And was that a necklace of golden coins he was wearing threaded on a piece of string around his neck? (As they were to discover it was not string, but fishing tackle that served best for this purpose.) Here surely was the origin of the legend of the golden crowns which all who reached the last refuge would receive. Some of the women, with considerable ingenuity, had designed jewellery, elaborate harps or butterflies made entirely of gold coins, and some of the rougher looking men, perhaps farmers or rugby players in former lives and who could hardly be expected to go in for bodily decoration or for fancy jewellery, had fashioned their coins into large gold rings, chains, and chunky medallions which nestled in the thick black hair of their chests. A few held golden flutes and some played on them, rather badly but with great enthusiasm.
The matron followed their glances. ‘Patience. We have such a wide variety of people in Bad Kruger. We are many things to many people — a club for retired gentlefolk, an old folks’ home, an old boys’ reunion, a retirement village, a sheltered accommodation scheme, a hospital, a shelter for the incurably desolate and an asylum for patriots. You are perhaps looking for people you know? It will take a while to recognise all those who are here, and not everyone comes down to dinner. Some stay in their rooms. You’ll have time enough to look for them. Bad Kruger was never built to hold our present numbers. We must arrange two or three sittings for each meal — just as they did on the trains.’
The food was served and the wine went round. The meal was good, if rather heavy. Soup, followed by veal in a thick cream sauce, fried potatoes and solid wine which they took from a carafe at the table. The waiters wore black trousers and rather grubby white bunny jackets fastened with a single brass button, their black bowties were scruffy and they lounged against the walls and muttered things among themselves in the manner of waiters the world over, bored between courses. They looked as if they had once worked on the trains, Blanchaille thought. They had that characteristic air about them, a truculent and a rather rough bonhomie. Also there was a slight roll to the way they walked, as if the room were moving.
In the centre of the room the fountain played. Matron explained: ‘The fountain is known as the Afrika Stimme, or the African Voice. When Uncle Paul arrived here with his valet Happé he found the place in ruins. It had been a spa once, it was to have been a palace of health visited by the crowned heads of Europe and was founded by one Pringsheim with casinos above, baths below. Built in 1875 at a time when the great spas of Europe were beginning to draw the rich and famous to them, Pringsheim knew of the link between wealth and power as well as the incessant interest aroused in rich and successful people by their bowels, their colons and their irrigation systems. He understood their obsession with health. He understood that the rich and beautiful and powerful needed to purge themselves of the grime which inevitably accumulated in mastering the world. This spa was founded upon an incredible hot-water spring. Such was its heat that it was known to the locals as the Afrika Stimme. You’ve seen the bathing halls below, those enormous, moist, echoing places. The curative properties of the steaming, radioactive waters were believed to be miraculous and have been known since Roman times when legionaries were said to have bathed here in the reign of the Emperor Diocletian. Pringsheim planned for these healing waters to wash away the sins of the worldly. Pringsheim was ambitious. He built wonderful new bathrooms, steam rooms, mud rooms, inhalatoriums. There were nozzles and sprays and dunk baths, plunge pools, massage rooms, radon chambers. There were waters for drinking, for irrigation, for warming, curing, strengthening, purging, saving. Alas, tragedy struck. The great casino was no sooner built, where we now sit, than the spring died. Stopped dead one day and would not flow again. Pringsheim shot himself. For a time the place was empty and I believe after that an asylum was established for a short while. However it was quite unsuitable for lunatics who drowned in the mineral water swimming pool, choked in the mud baths, strangled one another with inhalant tubes. The building fell into disuse, into ruin — and that is how Uncle Paul and his valet Happé found it.
‘Uncle Paul did not hesitate. He knew the curative properties of the water, these had been analysed and found to contain various chemicals: lithium, manganese, phosphoric acid, fluorine, caesium, and even a tiny touch of arsenic, besides, of course, being radioactive. Fifteen mach units of radon was the measurement, good for the blood, for breathing problems, for arthritis, rheumatism, for just about anything you care to mention. He knew this, but that wasn’t the main attraction. The main attraction was the hot spring, the African Voice. It seemed fated. Intended by God. It was a sign. Of course they told him that the spring had failed. That it would never flow again. The old man is reported to have said nothing, merely to have asked Happé to help him over to the base of the fountain you see there, and proceeded to strike it with his walking stick. And the spring flowed again. Those around him understood the significance of that gesture, they read their Bibles regularly, they knew the story of Moses striking the rock in the desert and finding water. They knew of the wanderings in the desert of the Israelites in search of the Promised Land. They knew the old man had made his choice. In a sense he had come home, he had realised his dream. The spring flowed again. He had made a home for others to come home to.