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.’
‘I don’t see the joke,’ Gabriel replied tightly.
‘Nor in a sense did I. “That’s your problem, Blanchie, you don’t see the joke,” she said.’
‘The camps are an obscenity. Your work has been crucial in showing that,’ Gabriel persisted.
‘What about the townships?’
He shrugged. ‘They’re institutions. At least they’re peaceful now. But the camps…!’
‘And yet the Church goes in and supports them, cleans them, strengthens their existence.’
‘Supports the people in them. An enormous difference. The camps are there. They’re real. We have to work in the real world.’
‘Look Gabriel, once there were no camps and that was the real world, and the Church lived in it; then there were camps and that was the real world and the Church lived in it. One day, please God, there will be no camps again and that will be the real world and the Church will live in it. No wonder they call the Church eternal.’
‘I think it might be better if we left the Church out of this and talked of carnal matters.’ Gabriel’s tone was mild.
‘What about the girl?’
‘She seduced me.’
Gabriel smiled, ‘Now, now, you mustn’t try to shock me.’
‘We made love several times in her car, an old Morris Minor, in the township after dark. It was rather like a tickbird mating with a crow, she in her white starched uniform and I in my cassock. Or like being locked in a room full of curtains fighting towards the light. After several experiments we discovered that the best way was to remove her underwear and lift her skirt to her chin and then I settled myself on her first lifting my cassock to my waist and dropping it gently so it floated around us, covering us, and we made love as it were in this warm, black tent, within the more intense darkness of the African night. It was a very private affair. Anyone walking past the car and shining a bright light on us would have seen nothing but a kind of Siamese twin, black and white and contracting strangely.’
Gabriel held up a hand. ‘What ended it?’
‘She was murdered.’ Now he had the satisfaction of seeing the astonishment crease Gabriel’s smooth face. ‘She was pulled from her car in the township one morning as she drove to her clinic, and stoned. It seems mainly large pebbles were thrown. There were some half bricks as well, I believe. I went to identify the body. They pulled the big tray out of the fridge, and it wasn’t her. The skull was crushed, you see, or perhaps you don’t — unless you’ve examined head injuries on that scale. The features had shifted, slipped to the side like a floppy rubber mask. The face hung. It was so covered with blood, so smashed, she was unrecognisable. I remember thinking it was almost as if the mob that stoned her had wanted especially to destroy the head. The rest of the body carried very large bruises. I couldn’t identify her in the strict sense but I knew, as one would know. And then the point began to get to me. You see, I realised that, Jesus! there must have been some of her patients in the crowd who stoned her. People whom she had nursed, saved their children maybe, and this was what they had done to her! And all around me I could hear the outrage beginning. Here was this woman who’d given her life to these bastards and here’s what she got in return. Then a funny thing happened. I laughed. I faintly got the point. Miranda might have expected this official reaction. This predictable outrage. And I knew — she would have opposed it. In her book nurses died, like everyone else. Sometimes they got murdered, not merely here but in New York, or Blantyre, or Tokyo, and yes it was tragic but it was not special, it didn’t happen for mystical reasons. But we wouldn’t believe that. In our superiority, Miranda’s death had to be notable. It had to mean something really nasty. In fact Miranda was too important to be allowed to suffer her individual death, she wouldn’t be allowed to die, she had to live, for the sake of the propaganda we fed ourselves to enable us to go on saying that this sort of thing should not, ought not, must not happen. In our war of words Miranda’s death was a big event. But in terms of her own spilt blood, hell, it didn’t matter a damn. What mattered were the detonator words, “should,” “must”, “ought”, which we can use to blow up the enemy. The enemy wants us little, ordinary, human, while we want to be big and important. We care about our position relative to the audience. We want to put on a good show. Everything depends on how things are looking on the stage. Making a performance….’