The Praying Nun

by Michael Smorenburg

  “…you…you…” his jaw worked in fury, “…you’re like a bunch of terrrrrrorists!” His thick accent rolled those r’s over and over so that it sounded like an execution drumroll mustered ahead of a firing squad.

  We’ve been hauled into his office, the three of us, and forced to stand to attention for an epic dressing-down.

  I couldn’t risk a glance, but I doubt Jacques even has a top button on his shirt. With my peripheral I could see that his poorly made tie was nowhere nearly pulled up snug into his throat as it should be.

  Even in a backwater, this was pushing the boundaries and courting trouble, but his state of undress was far worse than that. His blazer bristled with dog hair where his mutt, TC, had slept on it.

  I saw the Master focus on these details and then his face began to twitch in disbelief and rage.

  My mind recalled the old Pink Panther movies in which Clouseau’s boss, former Chief Inspector Dreyfus, was driven to become a homicidal psychotic by extended antagonism. Jacques had this miserable little man heading down that same path.

  Thing is, I was implicated; and there Jacques stood, openly grinning at the Master, evidently supremely proud of being called a terrorist—a compliment in his opinion.

  In the face of doom, I confess; I went blank.

  I wish I hadn’t. I wish I could relate quite how it happened—perhaps the Master finally went over the edge with it all, because suddenly we were in a sea of calm and Jacques had the man apologising to us for the inconvenience of being shat upon by him.

  He very meekly suggested that if we would just stay out of his way for the next few months until we got our clearing-out papers, he’d turn a blind eye to our earnest wish to not be on the base at all.

  A blind eye is one thing, but not showing up for more than a week is quite another.

  “MPs finding me?” Jacques repeats and scoffs. “Let them try.”

  “Why push it?” I ask. “Just show your face tomorrow.”

  “Naaagh, I’m meeting with a guy who has a side-scan sonar.”

  It’s something we’ve chatted about; towing a recently invented piece of technology behind a boat we couldn’t afford.

  And, guess what… Jacques has a plan.

  It’s all worked out, he tells me. We’ll tow the torpedo-like sonar behind this non-existent boat that we don’t yet own. We’ll run a grid search back and forth between the coast and the horizon, from Table Bay to Cape Point.

  Within, oh, maybe a decade or two of effort, we’ll find our bounty. Somehow, he has me believing this is possible in spite of our coast’s legitimately earned by-line, ‘Cape of Storms’.

  “And this cannon?” I gesture to the iron lump.

  “Toss it over the fence,” is his solution.

  He has a long-running dispute with his neighbours, and their garden on the other side of his wall is overgrown. It serves as the perfect dumping site for anything that’s too much trouble to carry down the stairs to the bins.

  Chapter 7

  Monday brought no Jacques to the base.

  As the closest thing on hand to a next of kin, I am interrogated by the Master as to his whereabouts.

  “I haven’t seen him since he was here last week,” I assure, crossing my fingers against the lie. “I think he’s moved, or something,” I add lamely, hoping weakly that it might throw the hounds off his scent.

  The Master makes a call and stamps a docket, and it’s official…my mate is now AWOL—absent without leave—and the boere are after him.

  Two days later, a different set of boere did succeed in nabbing him. A Sea Fisheries Inspector spies him slipping out of his wetsuit next to his buggy on a parking lot down the coast.

  The guy doesn’t know what he’s in for, though. He makes Jacques go retrieve a sack of crays he saw him stash under a rock shelf, then books him for poaching.

  Jacques laughs in the guy’s face.

  “You don’t have a chance,” he tells the cop. “Where were you watching me from? There is nowhere along this whole coast that you could have seen me take a bag out of the water. It’s circumstantial,” he challenges. “You’re framing me. You’ll see, in court.”

  And two weeks later, Jacques gets his day in court to prove his point.

  Well. It should have been a day in court, but it turns into three. The tired old magistrate finds to his peril how unpleasant it can be to challenge this master of manipulation.

  At one point, the entire machinery of the judicial inquiry is hauled off down the coast to the venue in question, to the place of arrest, to test the Inspector’s version of events.

  Jacques holds fast that the man has made the whole thing up. The bag of lobster wasn’t his at all. It’s all an unlucky circumstance, he argues, that he—the holder of a salvage permit and therefore registered treasure hunter—was just taking a look at the wreck of the Antipolis where it ran aground in 1977.

  That same stormy night in 1977, the Romelia also went aground near Llandudno, very close to the wreck of the Maori we’d just dived.

  Unfortunate happenstance, Jacques argues, just caused him to emerge from the water close to a stash of contraband that is now being unfairly pinned to him.

  The magistrate sinks steadily into a migraine of confusion, repeatedly having to retreat in recess to his chambers to gather and fortify himself for a new siege by the accused.

  It’s on the third and last day of trial when—just before judgment is given and the whole affair thrown out of court in acquittal—two Military Police Officers traipse in and take their place at the back of the room near the only exit.

  Jacques, summing up his defence, acting as his own attorney, sees them and optimistically decides that they must be here for the next case to be tried.

  As he moves to leave the court a free man, he is duly grabbed, thrown against a wall and manacled by the wrists, frog-marched out to the waiting van, and whisked off to detention barracks at Simonstown’s notorious hellhole military prison.

  A regime of punishing PT is part of the routine at the place, and most ordinary ratings—who have the lowest naval rank—can barely cope with that. They are quickly cowed, their spirit broken and brought to heel.

  But for Jacques, the authorities are dealing with a strange character, and when his shackles are removed at the jail, he punches one of the arresting officers in retribution for the manhandling he’d received back at the court.

  That costs him an extra two weeks in solitary confinement.

  This is the news I’m getting from friends on that base. The most hilarious part is that he’s frustrating the guards by asking for extra PT so he can stay in shape for when he’ll be released and will have to make a living from the sea once again.

  I can only imagine that it is a thankless task to deal with someone like this and try to enforce your authority. I can well understand why and how the guards quickly come under his spell.

  Even before his two weeks of isolation have come to an end, I hear that the guards are drawing scuba equipment from the adjacent diving school and actually driving Seaman Jacques off the base and down the coast, where he harvests lobster on their behalf and for their tables.

  No doubt the detention barracks are—during this period—a far happier place, where the rank and file guards eat especially well and everybody is generally more cheerful; convinced by our intrepid non-conformist that they needn’t follow orders with too much vigour.

  At his court martial, he somehow talks his way down to only a suspended sentence and is, unbelievably, sent back to us at SAS Unitie.

  The only words I ever get out of him about the ordeal is how impressed he was with the pomp and circumstance at the trial. He’s quite amused that the officers take the military court so seriously, wearing their finest, festooning themselves in the insignias of their rank: thick golden hoops around their sleeves and racks of medals on their breast.

  The gravity of the ceremony of sentencing predictably escapes him. He seems thrilled that they brought along
swords that they ceremonially cross on the table before them ahead of pronouncing no effective outcome.

  I imagine that the old magistrate could have warned these poor bewildered officers weeks before not to waste their efforts.

  While all this was going on, I’d visit our wreck.

  Well as I know every bottom feature here, and good as diving conditions are, I just cannot find the crack that hides my knife, the perlie, or the treasure that it’s keeping pinned in place for me.

  This is the problem with this dive location. We are subject to the whim and in the gift of nature here.

  The shifting sands of the area have both covered and protected the scant artefacts of the wreck from complete obliteration, but they also come and go with the fickle moods of the Atlantic.

  There is a pattern to it, though. Big surf tends to denude the area of covering sand, stripping it down to the bedrock where fragments of the wreck are lodged into the boulder field. But periods of small wave conditions together with prevailing offshore winds tend to have the opposite effect, and cover the area with sand.

  I have a hypothesis that the offshore winds are to both blame and thank for the sand covering. As they blow, they move a top layer of warm water out of the bay. The bay cannot of course keep emptying, so the warm water is replaced by cold water running in along the bottom of the ocean, tumbling sand ahead of it.

  It’s an inbound conveyor, grain by grain, steadily filling the bay with frigid water and topping off the nooks and crannies with pure white beach sand, covering over our wood and steel wedged down there.

  It’s a pointless task without proper pumps and costly equipment to attempt to dig down through a meter or more of the deposit to bedrock, but I doggedly keep trying.

  Over the days, I find other conglomerate and bring it home where I excavate it and find assorted porcelain pieces, handmaid copper nails of different types, and an iron cannonball that quickly starts to disintegrate in the oxygen.

  It is hard to explain what it is like to be the first person to hold in one’s hands a sphere of iron shot that was last touched by a human of a very different sort from a very different time.

  I am apt to be lost in thought: Who laboured, I ask myself, with this piece of metal, up a gangplank, and down between the wooden decks into the hold of the doomed ship?

  I can sit for hours, studying the rough and disintegrating hunk of metal, imagining the stevedore or grizzled old seaman who last touched it in some unknown European port city centuries ago. He’d surely have placed it in a container of sorts, ready to defend the ship against pirates or enemies.

  This artefact knows where it comes from. That’s a romanticized view, as I’m aware. It is silly to personify a hunk of iron, but I can’t help myself. This thing has been witness to a ship, to its crew and cargo, to its business and its fate here. And it is a peculiar thought to know that it is now lying at the end of my garden.

  How would that man who lugged it aboard react if he were to pop through time into my world?

  I imagine his shock at how easily in our era, we can drift down through the depths to the site of his watery grave with a source of air strapped to our backs and a rubber suit to insulate us against the cold, that no doubt played a part in his demise.

  What would he think of this bay as it now looks, so very different from its wild state when he came in here, presumably fighting against this ocean for life?

  How could he envision these monuments of concrete, these mansions that grew up around here while his wreck slumbered just a stone’s throw off the shore? How could he comprehend the motorbike I have just ridden, carrying this thing home in my dive bag strapped to the pillion seat? The electrical wire brush I’ve clumsily used to remove the growth and expose the metal core?

  The romance of my wandering thoughts overtakes me, but it also inspires me to suit up again and head out there one more time to seek that elusive tooth that’s so obsessed me.

  The next few days bring another winter storm. The powerful waves visibly stripped the beach, exposing rocks that lie hidden throughout the summer months.

  The same, I know, is happening offshore and I’m itching to grab my equipment and go take another look.

  Chapter 8

  It’s a peach of morning and, try as I might to convince him, Jacques has lost all interest in his wreck.

  Since he discovered that it’s from the wrong era to be his payday bullion carrier, he’s chasing other leads and working every angle to get that side-scan sonar device and a boat.

  But not me. I’m still very much interested in the back-story to what went down off Cherry Rock. I care as much about the treasure of the story as anything glinting.

  Approaching the site, I’m thrilled to see that the giant timber, thick as my chest, is once again jutting from between the naked boulders. It means that the sand is gone.

  I have no trouble locating my quarry and quickly extracting both my hunk of mystery and that hidden perlie that locked it in place. My knife is gone, but that’s a fair price to pay.

  With the better part of an hour’s worth of air strapped to my back, I hold back from heading right out of the water to begin excavating the amalgam of a tar-like substance. Instead, I spend a bit of time scratching around till I find three more abalone to make a rich dinner for my folks.

  My dad will complain bitterly when he gets home to find I’ve harvested the delicious white fleshy plugs that abalone are when removed from their mother-of-pearl shell.

  As a kid growing up dirt-poor in this bay, abalone was a staple diet that kept his family alive when the money ran out. The taste of it holds no special place in his desire and is not his idea of a delicacy.

  Today I don’t feel like going through the stress of adding lobster to the platter and having to dodge the boere to sneak it out of the water. So, I ignore the dozen or more poodle-sized lobster that I could easily snatch.

  It’s mildly amusing to see them swagger on stiff legs to the entrances of their various hidey-holes, posturing there with territorial outrage, waving feelers toward me as they watch my perlie harvest.

  Because perlie are not protected by the sanctuary and only restricted to a five-per-day bag limit, I exit the water on the right side of that law.

  The summer throngs have already abandoned the insipid sunshine of fast approaching winter.

  I wander through the thinning numbers of beachgoers and head past my upturned dingy on the whale-like rock, up the stairs heading for home.

  Back home, I set out my workbench with everything I’m likely to need.

  A plastic-lined bin is ready to receive the cast-off tar-like substance that holds the conglomerate together. An assortment of tools pillaged from the old man’s toolkit is lined up. An old toothbrush, a wire brush, ear buds, thinners and turpentine. My mom’s donated her dishwashing gloves, steel wool and a scrubbing foam thing; I’m sure she’ll neither notice nor mind.

  All I know about the task ahead is that one is supposed to take it easy.

  Suspecting that I’m dealing with a tooth or bone, I’ve gone through the Encyclopaedia Britannica volumes collecting dust on a shelf at my girlfriend’s house. There were notes on the “Removal of Soluble Salts” from bone in shipwreck salvage, so I snuck the volume out and have it propped up to one side, out of the way of the mess I’m expecting to make.

  Evidently, according to what I re-read, the salt crystallization will make the surface of the tooth flake away, and can destroy the object entirely.

  The advice quickly gets more technical than my impatience can handle. “…in some cases when bone and ivory suffer ossein loss due to hydrolysis, it leaves a calcareous substance; the calcareous substance can cause the materials to fossilise and once… blah blah blah…” I skim ahead, “…with these types of material it is recommended to remove all the soluble salts with the use of water.”

  “Right,” I say aloud, as if everything I’ve just read meant much of anything to me.

  Rubbing my hands together i
n keen anticipation, I read on, itching to get going already.

  “…use mechanical methods over chemical treatments, if chemical treatment is inevitable always make sure that the material is thoroughly wetted with water before any chemical is applied. If the object has iron stains, oxalic acid is used to remove it. If the object has sulfide stains, oxalic acid is also used.”

  The advice delves into the details of “Impregnation and Drying”.

  A quick scan through that section reveals that it involves some kind of alcohol bath. With a smile, I decide that this is a treatment that I can approve.

  But I figure that those details about what I’ll have to do once I’ve liberated my prize from its dirty black capsule can wait. One thing at a time.

  I pick up a pointy tool comparable to the kind a dentist might use on a large beast and begin to chisel gently.

  An hour later and I’ve reduced the football-sized lump to half its original volume. Three handmade copper nails, a piece of tatty and threadbare black and crumbling copper sheathing, and the motherload I’m really after—the tooth still impregnated into black muck—are still on the desk. Everything else that was holding the lump together is in the garbage can.

  I turn the yellowed tooth, still somewhat hidden by detritus, over in my hands. The tooth itself does appear to have those sulfide stains the book yapped on about. They’re going to need a dose of that oxalic acid—whatever that may be.

  I’ll look it up when I get more of this rough excavation done.

  From what I can tell, I’m going to wind up with something about the size of a pinecone. It seems to be bowed with very similar proportions to a pinecone.

  I take a closer look in good light and can see a finely crafted hash pattern worked into it which suggests a refinement in the finish. This, in turn suggests many hours of much more intricate tool work than I’m used to or possibly capable of.