‘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….’
‘It’s a pity in the way there is no woman — any longer,’ Gabriel said. ‘The Bishop is sympathetically disposed, in the new enlightenment which prevails after Vatican II. The sexual problems of his priests deserve loving consideration. Perhaps you read his piece in The Cross? However, in your case you might be better advised to apply for a transfer.’
‘Right! I apply for a transfer — to the world next-door. Kindly inform His Grace.’
PINK PRIEST MUST GO!
Blanchaille did not consider himself particularly pink and he certainly no longer thought of himself as a priest, but he was in full agreement with the sentiment expressed in the crudely lettered banner the Kretas waved so enthusiastically — he was fully prepared, indeed he most devoutly wished, to go.
Gabriel Dladla had returned with the Bishop’s reply soon after the siege began.
‘I’m afraid it can’t be done, Blanchie. This is your place now.’
‘I’m finished here.’
‘Finished? For heaven’s sake, you’ve barely started.’
Gabriel had arrived wearing what he called his second hat. This wasn’t a hat at all but referred to the car he was driving, a sleek black Chrysler belonging to the Papal Nuncio, Agnelli, whose secretary he was, as well as serving as Bishop Blashford’s chaplain, choice appointments both indicating to a sceptical world that the Roman Church in Southern Africa took to its heart its black followers, indeed did more than that, set them soaring into the firmament, rising stars. Gabriel had come a very long way from the picnic basket in Father Lynch’s garden when the two brothers, Gabriel and Looksmart, sat flanking the little priest. ‘My two negro princes’, he called them, as they sat watching the altar boys struggle with the weeds. Gabriel’s was the only entry into the priesthood which had been approved. His brother Looksmart’s attempt had failed when the new black theology took hold of him and he burnt the Bible on the steps of the seminary as ‘the white man’s manual of exploitation’ and joined the political underground. Blanchaille’s vocation had been derided and ignored. Only Gabriel’s decision to become a priest had been applauded.
‘He is only doing what any intelligent boy would do who wishes to rise. His behaviour would be entirely logical in Spain, or Portugal or Ireland. May we skip any tiresome talk of faith or morals? Gabriel intends to get ahead.’
Father Gabriel Dladla in his beautifully tailored dark suit and its pristine dog-collar, in his soft black fedora which he did not remove in the course of their interview, his chunky gold watch which he consulted with elegant economy in an unmistakable signal that the interview was nearing its end, with his whole air of intelligent, assured concentration with which he listened to Blanchaille but which did not suppress the faint air of impatience of a busy man with other, more important things on his mind. This was once the barefoot boy on the blanket translated in what seemed like a wink of time into a personage of weight and responsibility in the Church hierarchy. And it was with a wink surely that Blanchaille could move him back again to the blanket in the garden. He tried and failed. His eyelid fluttered. Gabriel remained the elegant, deft, important young person he was.