Kitchen Boy (13 page)

Their friendship grew over blistering lunchtime curries and tables stained with rings from Rabindranath’s beaded glasses of Coke and J J’s cold Castles. They shared an admiration for Churchill and Gandhi, and talked politics with the enjoyment of men unconstrained by the presence of wives. As Rabindranath prospered and grew more rotund, J J began lecturing him on keeping fit – doing yoga perhaps – and abandoning the Cokes to which he had become addicted.

J J was waved away by Rabindranath, ‘Suka, John. Yoga is for women and ascetics.’

Now he sits at J J’s funeral thinking, I’m still here, Kitchen Boy, and I’ll miss you. Where have you gone to, eh? In Nirvana you might be absorbed into Brahman, which could be a terrible shock for a white man.

Rabindranath ignores the scrawny priest’s voice barking from the altar, and instead considers Shirley, who sits hunched in unbecoming black two pews ahead. White women don’t understand drapery that flatters a woman’s body. The young ones in their short, tight skirts and revealing boob tubes and visible thongs are even worse. No class. No common sense. His granddaughters are schooled in Indian dance, and at Durban Girls’ College and the university, and he encourages their social advancement in the right circles with the help of discreet matchmakers.

His grandfather may have been an indentured labourer sweating and weeping in the cane fields, but after a hundred years of toil, unflinching purpose and careful strategy, the Pillay family bow their heads to no one.

‘Every man therefore is but vanity!’

Reverend George hurtles into the closing verses of Psalm 39 with another accusation, but there are stirrings among the Moths. Several of the old men are wondering if they can last out the service without going for a pee.

St Ethelbert’s has curious acoustics. From the front-row pew where he sits with the other Moths, Ed Usher has heard the altercation in the organ loft. He remembers how he and J J joined the Torch Commando together, so long ago, and so irrelevant now. He owes his life to J J and Kenneth, who’d kept him going on the Long March from Sagan to Moosburg at the tail end of that last savage German winter, buggered feet and all.

He also knows J J’s secret, and tries to push the knowledge down into the labyrinth where it belongs. Today his fellow prisoner of war – and victim, he reminds himself – is being honoured as a hero and sportsman. Ed pays his own tribute with the memory of ex-soldiers rallying by torchlight, mobilised by an ideal of brotherhood that didn’t include many of the men who had served beside them.

He doesn’t know of any black Moths.

In fighting politicians you think you are winning and
suddenly you find you have lost.

– F
IELD
-M
ARSHAL
L
ORD
M
ONTGOMERY
(‘Monty’)

In 1952, Ed had stood next to J J in that extraordinary gathering outside the City Hall in Durban. He recalls the swarming beehive excitement of men marching together with a high purpose, pavement crowds of silent watchers, torches with darting tongues of fire, the oily reek of black paraffin smoke.

The call had gone out to ex-servicemen to fight the Nationalist government’s plan to put coloured people on a separate voters’ roll. In 1948, the Nats had squeaked in with a majority of five because of weighted rural constituencies, ousting General Smuts. Later, when they lost two key seats in the Cape provincial elections to Smuts’s United Party, the Nats blamed the setback on the coloured vote. It made sense to shift the inconvenient Non-Europeans off the common roll. Hardly any of them paid tax, anyway.

Ex-servicemen like Ed missed their wartime brotherhood in the aftermath of fading public interest. People longed to forget about destruction and death, and wanted to live it up again. The girls he met at parties did the London Jive, but he didn’t know the steps.

The appeal from the War Veterans’ Torch Commando had come like a trumpet call. Marching men formed rivers of flame through dark streets and gathered in crowds of thousands to listen to speeches by their leaders, men with a mission who felt important and needed again. It was a way to show their patriotism and honour the memory of the general who had brought them through the war, only to be cheated of his parliamentary seat. They had to get rid of the Nats, who’d been pro-Hitler and still seemed so.

Ed remembers the cheering and whistling when J J was called up to speak from the top of the City Hall steps, under the Torch banners: Natal’s own war hero and rugby Springbok, stern-faced in the spotlights. ‘Kitchen Boy! Kitchen Boy!’

‘I’m with you, men!’ he boomed over the loudspeakers. ‘We’ll fight for justice!’ Hearty cheers. ‘We’ll fight for the fellow South Africans who served with us!’ Louder cheers. ‘We’ll fight to win our country back from the Nats!’

The Torchmen were ecstatic, stamping and yelling their heads off in the muggy Durban night, ignoring the policemen muttering orders in Afrikaans. Already the English-speakers were being weeded out.

After hours of standing and cheering, Ed went home with battle cries ringing in his ears, the pain in his feet a reminder of the flesh he’d lost under one heel during the Long March. He was a history teacher with some afternoons free, and so he volunteered. Torchmen were told to concentrate their efforts on the 1953 election, working for the United or Labour Party, according to preference. Morale was high. They were at war again. But this time they weren’t on the winning side. The Nationalists got in with a clear majority and began to fine-tune apartheid.

Ed is an old man now whose hindsight has been perfected. He remembers people saying that the United Party broke the Torch after they lost the election, having no more use for it. But it wasn’t that. They’d lit their firebrands too late. They’d allowed those damned hairybacks to get in when they should have rallied behind the general and supported the black blokes who’d gone Up North with them: the batmen and cooks, the stretcher-bearers and latrine-diggers …

Ed forgets that he’d hardly noticed the men on the lower decks of the troopships, and those serving in the messes. This new concern of his has been roused by recent newspaper articles exposing the scandalous neglect of black ex-servicemen who’d disappeared into the cities and native reserves when they were demobbed.

Today in St Ethelbert’s, Stanley Magwaza is their only representative.

‘After we’ve loaded it up, then what?’ Nobody wanted to think that far. Chivvied by the guards, they rolled tapestries, swaddled paintings in blankets, bundled small arms and shotguns in layers of embroidered linen.

R
EVEREND
G
EORGE HEADS FOR THE PSALM
’
S FINISHING LINE
. ‘Hear my prayer, O Lord, and hold not your peace at my tears.’

How long can I hold my peace? Rick is still fuming at being called Kaffir by the oaf sitting next to him. He’s sick and tired of the stupid nickname. Doesn’t the wanker know that journalists are always on the lookout for skinderstories they can blow up into major shit in the newspapers? Coach has drummed into them that Springboks have to be ultra careful. They represent their country at all times, not only when they’re overseas or singing the national anthem on TV before matches with their right fists clenched over their hearts. At
all
times.

He personally goes out of his way to toe the line and be friends with the black guys on the team, conscious of his responsibilities as a Springbok. His father Ian was so proud when he made the team. He’d said, ‘Your grandfather would have claimed it’s in the Savidge blood, but I know it’s more than talent. It’s also major effort and training. Well done, man.’

‘Thanks, Dad. But it was Grandpa Percy who taught me the secret of success.’

‘And what is it?’

‘Get the fuckers first, before they get you.’

‘I don’t remember him saying that.’

‘It was just before he died, when you took me to meet him. He was talking about the Hun and the Jap. I just psych myself up to think of the other team as Huns – specially the All Blacks. Tackled the hell out of them in the Tri-Nations.’

‘So you did,’ his father said, adding, ‘It’s all modified warfare.’

‘What do you mean?’ Rick is not given to reflection.

‘Sport. Competing to see who’s better. How else would we channel young men’s testosterone? Trouble is, speed and money are becoming addictive and skewing the contests, along with drugs. I hope
you
aren’t taking any.’

‘Me? No chance.’ Rick knows his body is a temple and nourishes it with the high-energy diet prescribed by the Sports Science Institute, filtered tap water, and the occasional Windhoek Light – though never before matches. On top of the training sessions, he goes to gym every day. He’s sorted.

Ian Savidge thinks: This generation believes so naively in logic. They’ve never had an irrational crisis like war. He remembers his old man’s letters from Up North before he was captured, cheery scribbles decorated in the margins with sketches of camels and pyramids and Egyptian mummies. Grandpa Percy’s sense of humour is one great gift Rick hasn’t inherited. Pity that the boy only knew him as a morose loner who didn’t like anyone touching him.

Ian has come to St Ethelbert’s to pay tribute to the confident father who marched off to do his duty, rather than the broken man released from a POW camp. He is sitting two pews behind the Moths and studies each of them in turn, wondering how they were damaged by the war. The old guy with crutches is holding papers in a wizened hand like the end of a stick of biltong. Yet he too must have clumped up a gangplank to board a troopship that steamed out of Durban Harbour, with Perla Siedle Gibson standing on North Pier belting out ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ through her megaphone.

Percy Savidge had written home that he would never forget the Lady in White singing her boys off to war with the wind whipping her dress and one hand holding onto her hat. ‘She gave us hope all right. What a dame! And here we are sailing up the Red Sea towards the Suez Canal. Look after your dear mother whilst I’m away, Ian boy. Won’t be long. They say it’ll all be over by Christmas. You can bet your boots we’ll have a party then. Love, Dad.’

There’d been a second letter for his mother that made her cry. But when his father came home after four years, he was someone different: a husk of a man shrunk round a bitter core.

‘Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost. As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end.’ Reverend George gallops up the home straight, reaching the finishing line with a triumphant neigh: ‘Amen!’

And thank God for that. Bishop Chauncey gives him a nod and waves him back into his place. There will be two eulogies before the lesson, limited to three minutes each. On paper, anyway. In the bishop’s experience, people get carried away, lavishing praise on the dead despite its being too late for them to hear it.

All glory is fleeting, he reminds himself, smug in the knowledge that he is quoting General George Patton.

Are you here trying to crawl back into the skin you had before they pushed you through the mincer?

– J L C
ARR
,
A Month in the Country

Udwayi Dent swore blind that women choose husbands for their ability to father healthy children and provide enough money to support a family in idle comfort. ‘You wouldn’t catch me being the goose expected to lay golden eggs.’

One of the others would say something like, ‘That’s because you’re a bloody hadedah. A girl would be bonkers to even look at you.’

‘Fuck ’em, anyway. They’re just after what they can get.’

Apart from him, the Survivors B Team were united in their quest for willing women, preferably nymphomaniacs. Herman voiced their feelings when he said, ‘If only we
could
fuck ’em. All that lovey-dovey-mybrave-hero stuff during the war has gone for a burton. Now it’s a ring and a wedding or nothing doing.’

‘No loss. Wives and kids are more trouble than they’re worth.’

Udwayi spoke with a venom they didn’t understand until someone heard how his fiancée had waved him off to war, then married someone else. Long after they had all succumbed to the lure of sanctioned sex and were busy fuelling the baby boom, Udwayi was still bromming in the changing room before matches, each year with younger rugby players, teaching them poker and trying to breed misogynists. He said the togetherness that everyone was preaching about was for sissies.

When the Survivors B Team had reunion braais, he’d sit scowling at the knots of kids tumbling on the lawns, and mumble about people having litters. After a while, they stopped asking him to the braais. It was like having a hand grenade in their midst; they couldn’t tell when he’d blow up. And the wives didn’t like the way he kept saying, ‘You can never be sure of anything.’

‘Udwayi’s a bad influence,’ Shirley said. When he died in the Douala plane crash, none of them were surprised. It was as though he’d courted disaster by expecting it all along.

Kenneth had gone out onto a balcony to pee over the railing when J J went into a side room to collect more things to pack. A guard stood next to an open drawer, stuffing gold coins into a bag.

I
T
’
S TIME FOR THE EULOGIES
. The bishop gestures to the mayor, who rises from the VIP pew and sails down the red carpet in the centre aisle, an intrepid dhow in her brown shweshwe robe. She is a former company director who was chosen for her forceful personality and ability to command a predominantly male town council. When people ask why she left high-level commerce for the hurly-burly of a municipality, she tells them, ‘My grandmother called me to this position,’ which stops any more questions. Her grandmother was a celebrated herbalist.

When she reaches the dais with its banks of flowers and wreaths, the mayor ignores the lectern and turns to face the congregation, spreading her hands, palms forward. The mayoral chain glitters against elaborate embroidery. The altar spotlights make her orange headwrap glow like a Halloween pumpkin. There is an expectant hush. She makes rousing speeches. People say she has her eye on national politics; maybe even the presidency.