Kitchen Boy (22 page)

The mass slowed at the front, though the rifle butts kept slamming into the prisoners at the back who stumbled and fell forward in struggling scrums.

‘Go or die!’ screamed the Kommandant.

‘Right. Fall in, men.’ The OC’s order rose above the confusion. ‘We’ll show the swine that we’re disciplined.’ He added, ‘Those are the Russians you’re hearing. Hitler can’t take the chance that they’ll liberate us to fight again.’

It was the beginning of the Long March: more than five hundred kilometres trudging along back roads in arctic wind, snow, sleet and mud. Faces, hands and feet went numb; their malnourished bodies froze to the bone. J J and Kenneth were among the lucky ones with reasonable boots and Red Cross greatcoats, though, lacking a balaclava, J J had to wind a strip of blanket round his head to keep his hair and beard from icing up. Sometimes there was a barn or deserted building to sleep in; one memorable night it was a pottery factory where the marchers slept clustered round blissfully warm kilns. Otherwise it was in the lee of hedges or huddled against walls. They were close to starving on a scant ration of sour black rye bread and oats or potatoes, washed down with ditchwater.

After a number of days – they lost count – J J and Kenneth found Ed Usher, also from Durban, collapsed on the side of the track with his feet wrapped in bloody rags, the flesh on one heel red and raw. With the help of some sappers, they made a sledge of branches and grain sacks and dragged him in teams. Every day, men gave up and fell exhausted or wandered off, sometimes to be shot by the guards, their bodies bleeding red poppies in the snow.

Increasing numbers of civilians began to overtake them, fleeing next to horse-drawn carts and wagons piled with mattresses lashed across beds and chests, or pushing bicycles laden with bundles. Often there’d be swaddled children or crates of dazed fowls staring out from under the furniture. J J lost count of the people he saw lying moaning or dying or dead, and how long the sub-zero hell lasted. When they reached a railway siding with a line of snow-covered cattle trucks, he sank into the icy mud with the others and never wanted to walk again.

But it was the beginning of a new hell: another shunting journey, jammed together for a day and a night, sitting with muddy knees under their chins in a nauseating slosh of faeces and urine and vomit, thirsty, hungry, unable to move, barely able to breathe, banging in vain on iron doors that didn’t open until they reached Stalag VIIA at Moosburg in Bavaria. It was a camp designed for ten thousand into which over a hundred thousand POWs were being shoehorned to sleep on hut floors, in tents, on shelves, dozens to a bunk.

The kaleidoscope had stopped shifting, the shards stilled in a grim new pattern of prison-camp grey, filthy khaki, bruise blue, mud brown, forbidding forest green and bubbling gangrene black.

‘That one.’ He pointed to Kenneth.

The Kripo man in the dark suit had kicked him in the balls and smashed the fingers on his right hand with a hammer before the British Vertrauensmann – the officer who negotiated with the camp staff – could put a stop to it.

T
HE VESTRY DOOR HAS OPENED AND CLOSED SEVERAL
times since Reverend George went in, but there is still no sign of him. The bishop’s blood pressure is building up. It’s bad enough having this televised funeral service starring St Ethelbert’s sabotaged by thugs hammering at the doors, but it’s intolerable to be abandoned halfway through by a township Bible-thumper wearing what looks like a home-made tablecloth.

He clutches the Bible and continues, ‘The first man is of the earth, earthy –’

Retief Alberts nods his old turtle’s head. Earthy, that’s what people called my Anna. But I always think of her as a life force. She could give birth to a baby and be up hours later seeing to all the things she needed to do on the farm. Checking the new calves. Bottling the Methley plums. Setting bowls of lukewarm milk near the Esse to sour into maas for breakfast. Bandaging farm workers’ injuries. Feeding the urgent lambs. Balancing the books and paying accounts. Tramping through mud in her gumboots to measure the rainfall.

He remembers the lovely flexing of muscles in her arm as she turned the handle of the cream separator and cradled the heads of crying children. Side by side they worked as a team for more than sixty years until the day she woke with a headache, and was dead by nightfall.

It was Anna who named the farm Helpmekaar, a good word the English can’t match. Living in Natal for so long – ekskuus, KwaZulu-Natal now – has made him proud of the youthful vigour of his home language compared with the ramifications of a tongue older even than the cave paintings up in the kloof behind the farmhouse.

Retief wanders in his mind to the herd of eland and striding hunters on the cave walls. He has been told by his archaeologist great-granddaughter, also Anna, that the images depict the visions of trance-dancing shamans. When he asked in his trembly voice what they were, she’d answered, ‘Kind of witch doctors, Groot-oupa. I’m writing my doctorate on aspects of iconic hallucination.’

The world has moved on so fast and so far. He doesn’t understand those words or the laptop she writes on, and she isn’t interested in making rusks or having babies with a fine upstanding man like the ones he’d led onto the rugby field. Like J J Kitching. His eyes falter to the blurred colours of the flag. Underneath it are the mortal remains of a man driven by war demons who trained harder and ran faster than other men, flying down the wing, barrelling into rucks, known for his aggressive tackling, but always a team player. One of the very best.

Retief shifts on the rubber ring to ease his lower back, which aches when he’s in the wheelchair too long. Who are seen as the very best now? Who are the heroes? And heroines too, skat, his Anna would have said. Fillum stars. Singers like prostitutes. Snake women in costly clothes.

The world is going wrong, he mourns, and I’m too old to do anything about it. While young people pit themselves against raging rivers and giant waves and destroy deserts in 4×4s to show how brave they are, the sun burns hotter and the ice melts and the world shudders.

Earthy, that was my Joyce, Lofty exults. All tits and bum, with the hoarse voice and wrinkles and brown stains of too many cigarettes, and the laugh that started in her belly and erupted like lava. Who would have thought I’d end up luckier than Mr Ultra-Suave Naylor, SC, to have such a woman in my life? Even for a short time. Luckier, too, than Ed Usher in his beachfront flat.

He went back to the place with Ed once. The flat is so high that it only has a view of the sea’s horizon and Ed is trapped with crippled feet and no lifts working during power cuts; a shaky old man in a glass-walled coffin. If you lean out the window and look down, the umbrellas on the beach could be thumbtacks and the people ants.

Give me my golden shower stoep and the trains any day, thinks Lofty. Even if my leg squeaks and I can’t afford brandy any more, I had Joyce and I’m part of the world. Truly lucky bastard, eh?

The vestry door opens again and Lin comes through, followed by Theodora who slips in next to Mtshali in the second pew. Lin hurries back to her place between Shirley and Sam, who smiles at his aunt in relief at being released from his grandmother’s grasp.

‘Have you pulled yourself together?’ Shirley accuses.

‘Yes.’ Lin exchanges a look with Bridget. What’s got into her mother?

Don’t know, Bridget signals back. Her eyelids are pink and damp too.

‘Now this I say, brethren,’ thunders the bishop, ‘that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God –’

Rabindranath Pillay thinks, There he goes again. This really is a very domineering religion. The concept of sinning is anti-humanity, if you ask me. Valuing life and respecting others should be the human motivators, not terror at displeasing a tyrant. Though J J could act the tyrant sometimes, barking at his wife and son. A big man’s family puts up with a lot.

‘Behold, I show you a mystery,’ the bishop is saying, raising his voice on the last word in the hope that it will snag the interest of his increasingly restless audience. ‘We shall not all sleep –’

Half of us
are
sleeping, Kenneth thinks. Get a move on.

‘But we shall all be changed. In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump, and the dead shall be raised –’

I hope J J doesn’t hear. He couldn’t resist temptation. Kenneth hides a smile behind his gnarled hand.

‘And we shall be changed,’ promises the bishop, raising his head in triumph. But few eyes are on him now. The people gathered to honour J J Kitching are either dozing or wandering down avenues of thought that have little to do with their immortal souls.

I’ll skip a few verses and get to the nub, he decides. That’ll wake them. He hurries on: ‘Death is swallowed up in victory. O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?’ ‘– ry – ry – ry – ry –’ cry the microphones.

Victory. Stanley Magwaza shifts in his pew, remembering what this meant to his battle-numbed medical corps after the sixteen days of hell that were El Alamein: mangled bodies, craziness and dying. J J had told him of a TV programme where a medic explained, ‘Sulphonamides killed infection, plasma saved lives, morphine stopped the screams.’ The screaming went on in Stanley’s head for years. They had all been fighting for control of a desert where nobody lived. It was hard to understand white men’s wars.

Victory. Herbie Fredman remembers the stars and stripes fluttering on Sherman tanks clanking into the labour camp, and packets of chewing gum being tossed by well-fed Yank hands to feebly cheering prisoners who lacked the strength to catch them.

Victory. Barbara recalls one of her finest hours when more than half the recitation winners at the Durban Eisteddfod were her students and she was called up to the stage in her Marimekko caftan to acknowledge the applause.

Victory. Rick Savidge thinks back to the last game against the Cheetahs in Bloemfontein when he’d chipped the ball ahead, accelerated through a gap, caught it on the bounce and scored the diving try that nailed the match. Surely he won’t be dropped from the Springbok team?

Victory. Purkey has slipped into one of his favourite daydreams where he has laid out Mr Digby Senior in the ebony casket inlaid with rosewood. Mrs Digby is on her knees begging him to become managing director with shares in the business, because Mr Digby Junior isn’t up to it. And Charmaine, the blonde receptionist with nails like silver teaspoons, is leaning against the door in a tight skirt just short of her fanny, giving him the eye.

Victory. Reverend George strides in through the vestry door, having quelled a crisis and found a minibus to take Groth and his disabled cohorts home.

‘Thanks be to God, which giveth us the victory. Therefore, my beloved brethren’ – and I don’t mean you! Bishop Chauncey glowers at the assistant priest – ‘be ye steadfast, unmoveable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, forasmuch as ye know that your labour is not in vain. Here endeth the lesson.’

It is a melancholy state. You are in the power of your enemy … The days are very long, the hours crawl like paralytic centipedes … Companions quarrel about trifles … You feel a constant humiliation in being penned in by railings and wire, watched by armed guards.

– W
INSTON
C
HURCHILL
, quoted in
The Melancholy State
, by S G W
OLHUTER

Stalag VIIA, Moosburg, March–April 1945.

J J, Kenneth and Ed shared a straw pallet on the hut floor with a mumbling sergeant who should have been in the sick bay for mental cases. When one of them moved, the others had to grab onto the coarse ticking so as not to roll off. Outside, the ice and snow had turned to rain and mud. There was no room for any other activity than plodding through the mud, brushing past other fed-up men, fists thrust into the pockets of sagging greatcoats, telling stupid jokes to mask their dread.

Even in this isolated forest camp, they knew that the Nazis were under siege. Exhausted men straggled in every day from the east to swell the POWs who came from Britain and its dominions, the US, Poland, Russia, Czechoslovakia, Greece, Serbia and Yugoslavia. Men were sardined on bunks and hut floors; as the weeks dragged on, more were billeted in freezing army tents. Rumours fizzed like jumping-jack firecrackers: the Yanks had crossed the Rhine; Hitler was losing his marbles and Goering – no, Goebbels – no, Admiral Doenitz – was running the show; unmanned rockets were bombing London; a Romanian prisoner had typhus; Roosevelt was dead.

The guards, many still in their teens, were nervous and easily rattled – angry boys with high-coloured cheeks and gas-jet eyes. The let’s-keep-our-peckers-up spirit of earlier camps dwindled to stoic resignation. Life had narrowed to a bleak fable by the Brothers Grimm about a defeated tribe of men abandoned to their fate in a forest with wolves.

By the middle of April the camp was teeming, the hospital barracks crammed with the sick and crazy. No Red Cross parcels came through. Meals were black bread and thin soup. Kenneth muttered one morning to J J as they suffered the agonies of the dysentery queue for the latrines, ‘Things are moving. OC asked me to look over a legal letter he wants to hand the camp Oberst.’

‘What about?’

‘Gross overcrowding. OC thinks they’re getting desperate. Allied Forces have taken the east bank of the Rhine. Patton’s on his way.’

Hope surged. ‘Did he tell you for sure?’

‘Yes, but keep it under your hat. There are a hell of a lot of officers here. Jerry may be holding us as hostages or for reprisals.’

Next morning, the guards roused everyone in their hut and ordered them to assemble outside, leaving their kit and blankets and Ed – still hobbling – behind. ‘This is it, boys! Say your prayers,’ someone yelled.

‘Thinning us out, you reckon?’

‘Weeding.’ The gaunt inmate shivered.

Watched by hundreds of silent men, they were led by guards and their hut commander Major Irving through the camp gates and past a wagon with sloping sides covered by a tarpaulin. Feet in worn shoes were sticking out the back.