‘Don’t mention it. Couldn’t leave a guy sitting by the side of the road outside a bloody township. Normally I put my foot down and go like hell when I pass a township. You never know what’s going on inside. Gee, you took a risk!’ He examined Blanchaille’s bloodstained, muddied clothes with interest.
‘My bags are heavy and I can’t go very far at a stretch.’
‘Well, keep away from the townships.’
‘It’s a funny thing,’ said Blanchaille, ‘but I always believed that the townships were peaceful now.’
Breslau nodded. ‘Well it depends on what you mean. If you mean the townships are peaceful except when there are riots, then I suppose that’s correct. So I suppose you could say the townships are peaceful between riots. And I must say they’re pretty peaceful after riots. If we need to go to the townships that’s usually when we go. They have a period of mourning then, you see, and you got time to get in, do the job and get out again.’
‘I suppose then you could also say that townships are peaceful before riots,’ said Blanchaille, trying to be helpful.
Breslau thought this over and nodded approvingly. ‘Yes, I suppose that’s right. I never thought of it that way. But leaving all this aside, the truth is you can never be sure when the townships are going to be peaceful. You can drive into a township, and I have no option since I do business there, and find yourself in the middle of a riot. You can find yourself humping dead bodies or driving wounded to hospital. You can find yourself dispensing aid and comfort.’
‘Aid and comfort?’
‘Sure! That comes after the riots, usually, when they’ve laid out the victims and the relatives come along to claim them. It’s an emotional time, as you can imagine. What they usually do these days is to get the priest up from the church and he gives each relative a blessing. Well one day I arrived just as the blessings had started. They didn’t seem to be comforting people very much so the police officer in charge commandeered me and my vehicle and all my samples and he suggested that each relative should also get a sample of my shampoo, plus a blessing. Of course they weren’t my samples to give, but on occasions like this you don’t argue. Well, I stood next to the priest and he gave the blessing and I handed out the sample. Of course there was no question of matching hair types. I mean you can’t stop the grieving relatives and ask them whether they suffer from dry, greasy or normal hair. I mean that’s not exactly the time and place to start getting finicky. Can I drop you somewhere in town?’
Blanchaille mentioned the suburb where Bishop Blashford lived.
‘Sure. Happy to help.’
‘What disturbs the peace in the townships?’
Breslau shrugged. ‘Everything — and nothing. Of course the trouble is not having what they want, and then getting what they want. Like I mean first of all they don’t have any sewage so the cry goes up for piped sewage and they get it. Then there’s no electricity, so a consortium of businessmen organised by Himmelfarber and his Consolidated Holdings put in a private scheme of electrification. Then a football pitch is asked for. And given. And after each of these improvements there’s a riot. It’s interesting, that.’
‘It’s almost as if the trouble with the townships is the townships,’ Blanchaille suggested.
‘You can’t not have townships or you wouldn’t have any of this,’ the salesman gestured out of the window at the blank and featureless veld on either side of the road. ‘Cities have townships the way people have shadows. It’s in the nature of things.’
‘But we haven’t always had townships.’
‘Of course we have. Look, a township is just a reservoir. A pool. A depot for labour. I mean you look back to how it was when the first white settlers came here. You look at Van Riebeeck who came in — when was it — in 1652? And he arrives at the Cape of Good Hope — what a name when you think how things turned out! A bloody long time ago, right? What does Van Riebeeck find when he arrives in this big open place? He finds he’s got to build himself a fort. He finds the place occupied, there are all these damn Hottentots swanning around. Anyway he sees all these black guys wandering around and he thinks to himself — Jesus! This is Christmas! What I’m going to do is sit in my fort, grow lots of vegetables and sell them to passing ships. And all these black Hottentots I see wandering around here, they’re going to work for me. If they don’t work for me they get zapped. So he sits there at the Cape and the black guys work for him. Afterwards he gets to be so famous they put his face on all the money. It’s been like that ever since.’
‘But he didn’t have a township.’
‘What d’you mean, he didn’t have a township? The whole damn country was his township.’
Ever cautious Blanchaille got Breslau to drop him not outside Blashford’s house, but at the foot of the hill on which the Bishop lived. The salesman drove off with a cheerful wave, ‘Keep your head down.’
Blanchaille picked up his cases and began the slow painful ascent of the hill.
Puzzled by this conversation, in my dream I took up the matter with Breslau.
‘Surely things aren’t that bad? That’s a very simplistic analysis of history that you offered him.’
‘Right, but then it’s a very simplistic situation. There is the view that we’re all stuffed. We can fight all we like but we’re finished. The catch is that if anyone takes that line they get shot or locked up or whipped. Or all of those things. That’s how it was. That’s how it is. Nothing’s changed since the first Dutchman arrived, opened a police station and started handing out passes to the servants.’
‘Can nothing be done to improve conditions in the townships?’ I persisted.
Breslau laughed and slapped the steering wheel. ‘Sure. As I told the traveller. Lots can be done. Lots is done. Ever since the longhaired vegetable grower arrived from Holland, people have been battling to improve the townships. But after the beer halls and the soccer pitches, the electric lights, the social clubs, the sports stadiums, the literacy classes and the best will in the world, the townships are still townships. And townships are trouble.’
‘Even when they’re peaceful?’ I asked.
‘Especially when they’re peaceful,’ said Breslau.
CHAPTER 5
They walked in the Bishop’s official garden. Ceres, Bishop Blashford’s ample black housekeeper, had allowed him to leave his suitcases in the hall and sent him out to join His Grace with the warning that he would be allowed no more than ten minutes before His Grace took tea.
Blashford, the unspeakable Blashford, his open face ringed by soft pale curls, had in his younger days played first-class golf: no doubt clouded the sports-writers’ prediction that he would have gone on to international competition had the Church not selected him first. He was that rare hierarch, an authentic indigenous bishop, born and educated in the country. By choosing a sportsman for this important appointment the Vatican had shown that it understood where the springs of religious fervour truly lay. Now his neatly shod feet pressed the grass. He was wearing what he called his gardening clothes, a fawn suit and panama hat, by which Blanchaille understood him to mean not those clothes in which he worked in his garden but walked there before tea, a trim, elegant figure with a fair complexion which reddened easily in the sun. His black, heavily armoured toe caps glistened, the double knots of his laces showed like chunky black seaweed as his shoes broke free from the bunched wave of his flannels. There was a brief gleam of polished leather with each assured step he planted on the smooth unwrinkled surface of his beautiful lawn. The end of the official garden was bound by a line of apple and peach trees and behind them a thick pyracantha hedge showed its spikes. Heads held high, wagtails sprinted through the splashes of sunlight beneath the fruit trees, their equilibrium secured by the rocking balance of their long tails. They shared Blashford’s dainty-footed confidence.