Kruger's Alp Read Free Page B

Merrievale. They waited for him now, by the door, three heavy tartan suitcases reinforced with leather straps. He had packed them when he left the camp and went to the priests’ home in the mountains for rest and recuperation. He had carried them to his new post as parish priest in Merrievale. They contained clerical suits he never wore; books he did not read; boots, brushes, toiletries he no longer used; they were in effect the relics of a life he no longer led. Now and then he bought a new toothbrush, a pair of shoes, a couple of shirts whenever he needed them and left them behind when he moved on. But the cases he carried with him. Heavy, useless, but all he had to remind him of what, and to some extent where, he had been. He hadn’t lasted long in Merrievale. His tenure as parish priest could be measured in three sermons and a siege. Outside his window his parishioners bayed for his blood. They waved banners and shook their fists, led by big-knuckled Tertius Makapan, the brick salesman. Word had it that Father Lynch was dying, but then Lynch had been dying ever since he’d met him. He’d made a profession of dying. ‘I’m not long for this world, my boys!’ he would shout from the shade of the Tree of Heaven. ‘Get a move on!’
    Lynch’s love of easeful death wasn’t quite what it seemed; it was rather as if he saw in it the chance of the transfer the Church had always denied him. Death might be the far country from whence no traveller returned – and if so he was all for it. Anywhere must be better than this. Hence the constant warnings: ‘Hurry, my boys, I am not much longer for this life . . .’ and ‘Listen to these words of wisdom from a departing soul – the idealism of the Boer freedom fighters died with Kruger’s flight into exile. What followed was not a success for Calvinist nationalism but a policy of “get what you can and keep it” – only remember to call it God’s work.’
    This urge to depart was more to be pitied than feared. Lynch knew that short of a miracle, or his own defection (and that meant air tickets and where was he to find the money?), he was condemned for life to this wild African place.
    He suffered from dreams of money. Perhaps a rich relative would die and leave him a legacy? No, he was a practical man. But then again perhaps one of his altar boys would one day be rich enough to make a present to his old priest and mentor – enough to enable him to escape to what he called some serious country.
    Perhaps this was the source of his fascination with the last days of the old Boer leader of the Transvaal Republic, Stephanus Johannes Paulus Kruger. Father Lynch knew the Memoirs very well, and he owned also what he claimed was the last surviving copy of Further Memoirs of a Boer President; a fat, red leather-bound book of reminiscences and prophecies apparently dictated by the exiled president to his faithful valet Happé in the old man’s few remaining months of life in his rented house by the lake in Clarens, Switzerland, as the desolate, near-blind old lion mused over the future of his country and his people, broken by war and scattered in defeat to St Helena and Patagonia, Ceylon, Malaya, Madagascar, Mozambique, Angola and Tanganyika – a diaspora of Boers, the African Israelites, blown by history around the globe.

    . . . And I shall use the short remaining time the Lord has been pleased to grant me to labour mightily, though conscious of my frailty and infirmity, to bring His people home to Him [Kruger promised in Further Memoirs ], and since He has entrusted to my care the means whereby His will shall be accomplished I shall not rest until I find that place, ‘the land’, as the Lord said to Moses, ‘which I have given unto the children of Israel’ . . .

    Father Lynch would interpret this for his altar boys, saying that by that ‘place’ Kruger