And so, with nothing particular in our minds except to travel away from the city for a few hours, we found ourselves on a dirt road on the edge of the Magaliesberg, the City of Gold dimly visible through the autumn haze behind our backs.
We were looking for something — a quiet spot to retreat to, perhaps, in days to come, where friendship need not necessarily be an intense interlude in a Melville eating house or a coffee shop adjoining the Cinema Nouveau complex in Rosebank. A fantasy of life far from the madding crowd.
Yeah, right.
The thing is, as we have all told ourselves so many times in the past, life outside the invisible city walls could have so much more to offer. The city can stifle you like a trap. And yet, less than an hour away, there is unbounded Africa, scrub and aloes climbing up the sides of craggy hills, mountains almost, where, bar stumbling across yet another new squatter camp around the next bend, you can get up there where the air is fresh, and the taste of it is like the sky (I’ve got Duke Ellington on the brain, as you can tell).
What happened around the next bend defied all expectations, and threw us into completely another gear. Perhaps it was a sign.
The sign said: ‘Monastery of the African Orthodox Church.” The sign, we thought with seeming clarity after the event, appeared to be the primary colours of Rastafari. The simple, hand-painted board stopped us in our tracks, obliging us to forget all sense of adventure and enter the narrow, rutted track, in search of an African Zion in the veld.
Although the sign at the entrance said that the monastery would be closed between 2.30pm and 5.30pm (I thought monasteries were closed at all times of the day and night anyway) the pull was too strong to resist. Besides, the gate was wide open. In fact, there was no gate at all.
So we drove into the silence of the empty monastery compound, to be greeted by two medium-sized, somewhat lacklustre dogs, and nothing else but what we presumed to be a monastic silence.
There was what looked like a newly completed church to the right, small to middling in size and respectfully unprepossessing on the highveld, the ground sloping down into a valley with its unseen river, and those tantalising blue mountains in the middle distance. To the left and straight ahead of where we drew to a halt, a collection of equally unprepossessing prefabricated structures, not much bigger than outhouses on the average Magaliesberg smallholding.
In and out of the narrow concrete tracks between the outhouses. And finally, almost at the point of despair, two pairs of cheap plastic sandals staring at each other at the open door of yet another prefabricated hut. We felt like the shepherds come to find the baby Jesus — although it was nowhere near Christmas, and still a couple of weeks shy of the bunnies of Easter.
A cautious tap at the door produced a not quite instant response. In fact we were on the point of giving up, of letting sleeping dogs lie (the dogs were sleeping in the dust by this time) and getting back into the jeep to let the monastery protect its well-earned secrets, when a curtain at the back of the hut was thrust aside. A pale, bespectacled face framed in long black hair on the turn to grey, and a long grey beard on the turn to white, preceded the black cassocked figure who emerged from the inner recesses of this humble establishment.
The monk didn’t miss a beat, greeting us in a lilting Canadian accent as he hastily pressed a square skull cap on to his head, rearranging himself, you might say, into the proper demeanour of a Greek Orthodox priest of reasonable pedigree.
His swift arrival was mirrored almost immediately by the appearance, through a second curtain to one side of the prefab hut, of a second black-clad figure. A younger man with piercing, blue-green eyes, long black hair and beard (not too far from the popular image of the young Rasputin, but much more handsome) and a stare in our direction that might have been fierce and unwelcoming, had it not been for the serene and inwardly directed smile contained in the silence of his gaze.
These were the monks who welcomed us at the end of our brief quest up the rutted path from the dusty highway. Nothing Rastafarian at all about them. Just missionaries of the Greek Orthodox Church proselytising almost off their own bat, so to speak, to bring another version of the word to the Dark Continent (the ‘African” in the Orthodox church proclamation on the painted board outside was merely a way of saying that the word of God in their translation belongs to everybody).
And so we came back two weeks later to join them in their celebration of Easter Sunday — although being Orthodox, as they were, Easter itself, the highly commercialised bunny moment, was still a few weeks down the road.
But it was a moving event for a pair of agnostics, in a jeep with Gauteng plates, all the same. The monks (and we had to take their word that they really were monks, for all their worldly friendliness) put on a good show with the backing of the small, mostly black, congregation from the neighbouring Atteridgeville near Pretoria. The voices of these early converts to an ancient faith soared gently into the rafters of the simple church adorned with carefully reworked images of the saints and the journey of Christ at Easter rendered in the classical Orthodox style out here in the bush.
It was a surprising, uplifting, heart-warming moment away from the turmoil of our unnatural day-to-day ways of survival in Sodom and Gomorrah. It was just one of those moments in time.