Kruger's Alp by Christopher Hope Page B

colour of sand, lying among the thorn trees where they had rolled thousands of years before. Christ was a boy of about eighteen, Khourrie confided, in ragged shorts, carrying the T-piece of his cross slung across his shoulders, his arms outstretched and hanging over the beams to steady it. He was tall with blond hair worn rather long, and his skin was golden. He must have been lying down shortly before Khourrie saw him because sand had covered his back and stuck in the oil with which he had rubbed himself. He was gleaming and encrusted with sand and oil and sunlight. A shining man. Very gently and diffidently Blanchaille suggested it might have been a surfer he saw, but Khourrie was firm – to those with eyes to see he was plainly the Messiah. He had proof. The proof he produced was novel. He explained to Blanchaille that the Jews too had identified the Boy Messiah. That was why they had bought flats along the beach front and why they continued to do so in such numbers. Nearly all the flats which followed the curve of the sea shore were owned by Jews. The Jews always knew, said Khourrie. Naturally he’d reported the matter to the Church. Their response had been unforgivable. They had dispatched him to Pennyheaven. The reasons he was quite clear about, the Church and the Jews were in league. Neither wished it to be known that the Messiah hadreturned to earth.

    After Pennyheaven, Blanchaille had been appointed to St Peter-in-the-Wild. The church was so new it still smelt of cement and the walls and ceiling were painted sky blue. The whole place was severely angular with pews of pale natural pine and a baptismal font at the back made of stainless steel, deeply shining, rather like the wash-basins found on trains. In a pulpit of steel and smoked glass with its directional microphone Blanchaille talked of Malanskop, his first camp. It had been, he said, a most terrible garden full of deadly melodies, a music of wonderful names: kwashiorkor and pellagra, enteritis, lekkerkrap and rickets. How they rolled off the tongue! How lovely they sounded! Children in particular found the music irresistible. They listened and died. Every day ended with perfunctory funerals. No less euphonious afflictions decimated the adults: tuberculosis, cystitis, scabies and salpingitis, cholera, typhoid . . . The red burial mounds grew up overnight beyond the pit latrines as if an army of moles had passed that way. Later the little graves were piled with stones to keep the jackals off and finally came the clumsy wooden crosses tied with string, the names burnt into the wood in a charred scrawl, dates recording the months, weeks, days, hours, in the brief lives of ‘Beauty’ and ‘Edgar’, ‘Sampson’, ‘Nicodemus’ and ‘Precious’.
    The Church half emptied after this first sermon. Blanchaille began to feel rather better about his new appointment. At the second sermon he tried to encourage the congregation remaining to recite after him the names of the camps and perhaps to clap the beat: ‘Kraaifontein, Witziesbek, Verneuk, Bittereind, Mooiplaats . . .’ The microphone gave a hard dry sound as he clapped his way through the litany. No one joined him. ‘I want to suggest that in the foyer of the church we build models of these camps, of the shoe-box shantytowns, the tent villages, that we show their corrugated iron roofs, the towns built of paraffin tins, the three stand-pipes on which thousands of people relied for their water, the solitary borehole and of course the spreading graveyards. Everywhere the graveyards. We might use papier mâché.’
    At his third sermon the congregation had shrunk to those few who he later realised constituted the Consensus Committee: Makapan, the two Kretas, and Mary Muldoon. Mary wore a hat with bright red cherries. Her flower arrangements, he noticed, had not been changed since his first sermon. Before the altar the hyacinths were dying in their