As for the children, perhaps Blanche has tucked the worst cases away out of sight, but she is surprised at how gay even a dying child can be. It is as Blanche said in her book: with love and care and the right drugs, these innocents can be brought to the very gate of death without fear.
Blanche takes her to the chapel too. Entering the unpretentious brick and iron building, she is struck at once by the carved wooden crucifix behind the altar, showing an emaciated Christ with a masklike face crowned with a wreath of real acacia thorns, his hands and feet pierced not by nails but by steel bolts. The figure itself is of near life size; the cross reaches up to the bare rafters; the whole construction dominates the chapel, overbears it.
The Christ was done by a local carver, Blanche tells her. Years ago the station adopted him, providing him with a workshop and paying him a monthly wage. Does she want to meet the man?
Which is why, now, this old man with the stained teeth and the overalls and the uncertain English, introduced to her simply as Joseph, is unlocking, for her benefit, the door of a shed in an outlying corner of the station. The grass is thick around the door, she notices: a long time since anyone was here.
Inside she has to brush away cobwebs. Joseph fumbles for the switch, clicks it up and down fruitlessly. 'Bulb is gone,' he says, but does nothing about it. The only light comes from the open door and from cracks between the roof and the walls. It takes a while for her eyes to adjust.
There is a long, makeshift table down the centre of the shed. Piled on the table, or against it, lie a jumble of wooden carvings. Against the walls, stacked on pallets, are lengths of wood, some with the bark still on, and dusty cardboard boxes.
'Is my workshop,' says Joseph. 'When I am young I work here all day. But now I am too old.'
She picks up a crucifix, not the largest, but large nevertheless: an eighteen-inch Christ on the cross, in a heavy reddish wood. 'What do you call this wood?'
'Is karee. Karee wood.'
'And you carved it?' She holds the crucifix out at arm's-length. As in the chapel, the face of the tortured man is a formalized, simplified mask in a single plane, the eyes slits, the mouth heavy and drooping. The body, on the other hand, is quite naturalistic, copied, she would guess, from some European model. The knees are raised, as if the man were trying to relieve the pain in his arms by putting his weight on the nail piercing his feet.
'I carve all the Jesus. The cross, sometimes my assistant make it. My assistants.'
'And where are your assistants now? Does no one work here any more?'
'No, my assistants all gone. Too many crosses. Too many crosses to sell.'
She peers into one of the boxes. Miniature crucifixes, three or four inches high, like the one her sister wears, scores of them, all with the same flat mask-face, the same raised-knee posture.
'Don't you carve anything else? Animals? Faces? Ordinary people?'
Joseph pulls a face. 'Animals is just for tourists,' he says disdainfully.
'And you don't carve for tourists. You don't carve tourist art.'
'No, no tourist art.'
'Why do you carve then?'
'For Jesus,' he says. 'Yes. For Our Saviour.'
'I saw Joseph's collection,' she says. 'A bit obsessive, wouldn't you call it? Just the one image, over and over again.'
Blanche does not reply. They are having lunch, a lunch she would under normal circumstances call exiguous: sliced tomato, a few wilted lettuce leaves, a boiled egg. But she has no appetite. She toys with the lettuce; the smell of the egg nauseates her.
'How does the economics of it work,' she continues – 'the economics of religious art, in our day and age?'
'Joseph used to be a paid employee of Marianhill. Paid to do his carvings, and some odd jobs as well. For the last eighteen months he has been on pension. He has arthritis in his hands. You must have noticed that.'
'But who buys those carvings of his?'
'We have two outlets in Durban that take them. Other missions accept them as well, for resale. They may not be works of art by Western standards but they are authentic. A few years ago Joseph did a commission for the church at Ixopo. That put a couple of thousand rand in his pocket. We still get bulk orders for the small-size crucifix. Schools, Catholic schools, buy them for prize-givings.'
'For prize-givings. You come top in Catechism and you get one of Joseph's crucifixes.'
'More or less. Is there anything wrong with that?'
'Nothing. Still, he has overproduced, hasn't he? There must be hundreds of pieces in that shed, all identical. Why didn't you get him to make something else besides crucifixes, crucifixions? What does it do to a person's – if I dare use the word –
Blanche gives her a steely smile. 'A
