Blanchaille gripped the edge of the pulpit. His words no longer seemed to carry through the church. He tapped the microphone. Dead. The bastards had cut his mike. He peered at Mary Muldoon, the red cherries on her hat pulsed in the gloom. The rest of the parishioners stared back at him sullenly. ‘It was at this time that I composed my letter to The Cross,’ Blanchaille yelled. ‘Perhaps you’ve heard of it? In it I said that if the people in the camps prayed for anything they should pray for the bulldozer. Enough of these smooth and resonant phrases, of plump churchmen talking of people living in a manner consonant with human dignity. Disease kills but so does charity, more slowly but just as surely. Flatten the camps, that is freedom! Release their inhabitants to a decent beggary, let them wander the countryside pleading for alms, calling on us to remember what we have done to them!’
It was his last sermon. After that the siege began.
And Makapan’s second and general objection?
‘You don’t understand our role in history. We are not simply crude racialists of the sort you think — may I say perhaps even hope — that we are. We don’t hate, despise, spit upon black people, not any longer. We recognise our failings. We reach out to embrace them.’ He reached out his big, dusty hands towards Blanchaille’s neck, he flexed the knuckles with the sound of distant rifle fire. ‘You want to condemn us, but the prisoner has left the dock. The old charges against white South Africans have no force anywhere. Everywhere there is change. We are changing.’
Blanchaille shook his head. ‘We are ruined. It’s too late to change. It is time we left, got out.’
‘Got out? But Father Blanchaille we have nowhere to go.’
‘There are numbers of places — abroad.’
‘Lies.’
‘And stories of people who have disappeared.’
‘Filthy slanders.’
‘There is even talk of the formation of a government in exile.’
Makapan’s hands descended on his shoulders. ‘No more. Only your dog-collar protects you. There is no other place, no better place this side of the grave, than our country here. I will die for that belief.’
The thumbs, kneading his throat now, suggested that he would kill for that belief too. But Blanchaille was past caring. ‘That is quite probable, Mr Makapan.’
Then in my dream I saw Blanchaille open the window and fix his eye on the figure in white; long white flowing robes like a nun, and a nursing sister’s head-dress. Try as she might to hide herself behind the others she could not evade his eyes. This was his former black housekeeper, Joyce Nkwenzi. She had served Blanchaille’s predecessor, the muscular Father Rischa, long and loyally, but she’d lasted with Blanchaille only until trouble struck and then left him, abruptly one evening.
Father Rischa had been popular. He had also been extremely fit. He’d left Blanchaille in possession of a house, empty but for a couple of pieces of very bad Rhodesian copperware and a larder full of inedible food: bean sprouts, soya-based products, nuts, grains, seaweed and porridge. It turned out he’d spent a lot of time organising footraces and sponsored walks and testing country runs along the rutted veld tracks from Uncle Vigo’s Roadhouse to the African location several miles away.
‘At first we looked at Rischa a little skew, if you know what I mean. We could hardly help it. When he was appointed here he seemed to spend hours in his tiny blue running shorts, his big thigh muscles sticking out, pounding up and down the sanitary lanes behind the houses. Thick black hair he had, and well oiled, the way they wear it, you know? He got a few stares in passing I can tell you, at least to begin with, but he was a good sport.’
The brick salesman’s hands were big, square and yellow and he had a habit of knocking them together when speaking, perhaps developed over years of handling the samples stacked on his back seat, knocking off the brick dust. He evidently expected Blanchaille to be something of a good sport… ‘When he left, he preached a sermon saying that he was happy to be going to the townships because he was going to search for those Africans who hadn’t been ruined yet by the white man’s diet of Coca-Cola and white bread and he was going to turn them into runners, he said. Look at the Kenyans, he said. Look at the Ethiopians. Aren’t they excellent long-distance men? Well is there any reason why our tough boys in the bush shouldn’t do just as well? He was going to organise camps for training them right there in the bush.’
‘Why not? The bush is full of camps, Mr Makapan.’
‘He was a fighter, was Father Rischa. He stuck up for his country.’
‘And the camps are full of starving people.’
‘You don’t have to tell me about the camps. I’ve done the weekly run like everyone else. The milk run, the medicine run. We know all about the camps.’
And then I saw the embattled priest, Blanchaille, glaring at the demonstrators at the bottom of his garden and he raised his hand pointing at the black woman: ‘God sees you, Joyce Nkwenzi! You cannot hide.’
At the garden fence, Maureen and Duggie Kreta rattled their big banner. ‘Shame! Leave her alone!’
‘God sees you have deserted his minister!’ roared Blanchaille. ‘He will send you to hell, Joyce Nkwenzi.’
The girl’s nerve broke and she threw herself down on her knees lifting clasped hands beseechingly towards her accuser in the window.
‘There you will fry, faithless servant, like a fish in boiling oil — forever!’