The rector seemed to think that my answers were too glib. He also knew that I knew that he did not know who had carried out the attack. He resented the fact that he could do nothing to extract a clean confession from me or from anybody else.
“If you hear anything, come and tell me. This kind of appalling behavior cannot be allowed to go on. The seminary cannot be allowed to degenerate into anarchy like some secular school. This is in your interests too. If priests get attacked, seminarians will be attacked as well. And if such people escape, what kind of priests will they make? Who would want to serve in the same parish with them?”
I wanted to say that every newcomer had been the subject of physical attacks for a whole year, and had been forced to jerk off at two or three in the morning at one time or other when the priests were in bed enjoying wet dreams. I wanted to say that maybe a priest getting attacked was just a case of chickens coming home to roost. I was aware that I could not say that without getting expelled. I pitied the man for underestimating me. I was nobody’s stool pigeon.
“Oh, some other matter,” he said, showing me the letter I had written to Aunt Lwandeka. “Why did you seal this letter? Is it a bad letter?”
“No, Father. I just forgot. I must have been absentminded at the time. The addressee is my maternal aunt. There is nothing bad or secretive in the letter.”
“You forgot? Do you often forget to post your letters through the right channels?”
“No, Father.”
“What is in this one?”
“Amin’s men arrested her once and she gets nightmares about them. I wrote to advise her to say novenas to St. Jude Thaddeus.”
“Should I open it?”
“You are welcome,” I said, putting on a brave face. There was nothing in it about the notorious St. Jude Thaddeus, but I took my chances.
“All right, you can go. But if you hear anything, don’t hesitate to inform me. I am relying on you, son.”
“I will do my best, Father,” I said as a way of telling him to cut out the father-son bullshit.
I was very relieved. Thank God it was not a letter from Lusanani. How would I have explained my relationship with a married Muslim girl in this most Catholic of places?
Starved of rumors which could give us a clue as to what was going on with the bursar-cum-discipline master, the boys started targeting individual staff members. They asked them leading questions during lessons. The black priests, veterans at this kind of trickery, left us high and dry. I interpreted that as a sign of solidarity with their suffering colleague. It was also revenge on us, for surely they knew that whoever had punished Fr. Mindi had come from within our fakely smiling, open-faced ranks.
It was Fr. Kaanders who came to our rescue. After the usual bon/mauvais/méchant nonsense, when his mind was clear of its formidable fogs, boys lurched in and asked him what was going on. After much sweeping back of the few strands of hair on top of his domed head, he said, “Oh boy, boy, boy … Father Mean-dee is going away, boys.” Naturally, there was an inquiry as to where the bursar was going. After a series of “Oh boy, boy, boy”s, he informed us that Mindi had been transferred to the parish. What intrigued me was that the old man seemed to be in some anguish over the question. I kept wondering whether he had learned the details of the grisly contents of that plastic bag and was just wondering who among us had planned and executed the attack. We tried to ask him who was going to replace the bursar, but he would not tell us.
A week later, the vicar general paid us a surprise visit. He was a tall, fat man with a hanging belly, large buttocks and a clumsy gait. He spoke too quickly, disguising a lisp and a stammer, and it was hard to hear what he had to say. Despite his less than satisfactory locution, he loved the sound of his own voice. He slapped us with a fifty-minute sermon, to which we listened woodenly and throughout which Kaanders slept soundly. We were inundated with the same drivel about our vocation and what it meant to be a priest, how special we were, how we had to preserve our honor and the like. Many of us agreed that the vicar general had sweet, albeit empty, words to say, but we were irked that our breakfast had been terrible — thin, wormy porridge with dry bread — while the staff had feasted on goodies that had filled the corridor with wonderful smells. Here, the importance of a visitor was gauged by the changes his presence effected on our table. When the bishop came, the bursar gave us the best meals, because the big man often came to look in on what we ate. We wondered if he was dumb enough to believe that what he saw us eating was what we usually ate or if he just wanted to see whether we were grateful for not eating the usual hog feed. This guy, though, had not bothered to look at what we were being fed, and for that reason most of us did not care a damn about the wise words he had to say in his lispy, stammering sermon. The chapel came alive only once, when he failed to wrestle down the word “boss” and slid precariously: “Jesuth is the both, I–I mean the bosh, er, th-the boss of this inshtitution.” After that he spoke very slowly. We were overjoyed when the mass ended.
During such visits, the priests were also on their best behavior, punctually holding mass, wearing their cassocks everywhere, abstaining from smoking in public and putting on a show of being the most docile and most exemplary priests in the whole diocese. They had personal files at the diocesan headquarters which they wanted to keep as clean as possible, because the cleaner the file, the better the chances of being posted in the best parishes.
The vicar general disappeared after mass and left incognito. Eventually we learned that Fr. Mindi had been transferred. The big man had come to meet the staff and introduce the name of the new bursar because, being a controversial move, it needed a bit of sugar-coating. All we learned was that a white missionary was coming to replace Fr. Mindi.
For a while there was feasting, and for the first time the boys looked cheerful. There were no more spyings, no more police checks, no more fear of lurking stool pigeons. The truants enjoyed the time of their life. Now their contacts came and brought the contraband near the football fields behind Sing-Sing and traded pawpaws, sugarcanes and anything else they had. This was what I had intended to happen, and I was happy that it had worked. A lot of food was being thrown away now, the euphoria of wonderful meals in the offing sharpening the rebellious edge even in the truly docile.
I watched everything from a distance, wondering why the night watchman and the priests were letting things rip. At the height of the frenzy, I saw a symbolically violent act taking place one hot afternoon. Somebody had somehow procured an enlarged picture of Fr. Mindi, pasted it on manila paper and nailed it onto a tree trunk. A group of boys with sticks were hurling accusations at it and beating it. I left after the face had become mere bits of torn paper. The euphoria of change had stirred pools of reservation, even misgiving, in the pit of my stomach. What would happen to all this emotion if the new man failed to deliver? I did not want to speculate too much. I felt I would cross that bridge when I came to it. So far, the only reflection in the water coursing under the bridge of change was the dull, disappearing image of the former bursar, who seemed to sleep by day and pack at night.
Fr. Mindi’s replacement was Fr. Gilles Lageau, a French Canadian missionary from Quebec. Far from being the stereotypical bearded greaseball missionary, Fr. Lageau was a good-looking, straight-nosed, blue-eyed man with a keen awareness of his looks, his power, his influence and his fail-safe mission. He arrived with a decent suntan, which did nothing to disguise his ruddy complexion and matched his reddish hair and the golden fluff on his thick, meaty arms. One could detect in his walk the swagger of American silver-screen heroes. The fluid movement of his well-tended body was a lucid announcement of naked power, in whose perquisites every optimistic seminarian hoped to share. If the priest had arrived looking faded and woebegone, with the years trickling down his face, every seminarian would have been disappointed, but the combination of American power and French arrogance made the man seem the personification of the anti-lethargy cure everyone had been hoping for. His reputation had travelled far ahead of him. By the time he arrived, we knew that he was a financial whiz kid who had all the tools to fish us out of the quagmires of poverty, malnourishment and the opportunistic diseases that fed off underdevelopment. This made him an instant hero, and his arrival an event awaited with the anxiety of a conquering messiah.