The Power of One

by Bryce Courtenay

  It was pretty depressing to think of poor old Granpa slowly dying of a broken heart. That was, if Adolf Hitler didn’t arrive first. If he did, I knew Granpa wouldn’t have the strength to make escape plans and then what would become of me?

  Maybe I could live with Nanny in Zululand? This thought cheered me up a lot. Adolf Hitler would never look for a small English person in the middle of Zululand. Inkosi-Inkosikazi would hide me with a magic spell. As for Granpa Chook, Adolf Hitler would never be able to tell an English-speaking chicken apart from all the other kaffir chickens. I decided I would put this excellent plan to Nanny when I got back to the farm.

  From what we could gather from the Judge, who was allowed to listen to the news on Mr. Stoffel’s wireless, the war was going pretty badly for the English. Adolf Hitler had taken Poland, which I took to be a place somewhere in South Africa, like Zululand, but where the Po tribe lived. The Judge made it sound as though Hitler could be expected any day now in our neck of the woods.

  I had no idea that South Africa was on England’s side. From where I sat the English were most definitely the local enemy.

  Most of my information came from the regular war councils the Judge held behind the school shithouses. All the senior hostel boys were storm troopers and Danie Coetzee, as head of the small kids’ dormitory, was also allowed to attend. As the official prisoners of war, Granpa Chook and I were dragged along for the purposes of interrogation and torture.

  I was blindfolded and tied to the trunk of a jacaranda tree with a rope around my chest and waist, leaving my arms and legs free. Most torture sessions began with the iron bar, which I was required to hold out in front of me while the Judge timed each session. I would have to hold the bar up longer than the previous time before dropping it.

  The second main torture that required my hands to be free was “shooting practice.” Every storm trooper carried a catapult as his deadly weapon. Farm kids all have catapults for shooting birds and grow very skilled at using them. All the senior boys had one stashed away and they would wear these around their necks at Nazi Party meetings.

  For shooting practice I was required to stretch my arms out on either side of me with my palms open and turned upward. An empty jam tin was placed on either hand and each of the storm troopers was allowed two shots to try to knock the tins down. The six best results for the day earned the right to beat me up on the next occasion it became necessary.

  I must say this for those Nazis: while they hit the tins from twenty feet often enough, only once did I collect a stone which thudded into the butt of my left hand, which I was unable to use for several days.

  Granpa Chook would fly up onto a branch of the jacaranda, where he would keep a beady eye on the proceedings. He was known to the Nazi Party as Prisoner of War Kaffir Chicken Rooinek. As Mevrou’s leading kitchen insect exterminator, Granpa Chook was pretty safe. Tough as the Judge was, he wasn’t willing to take Mevrou on. Granpa Chook had it easy up there in the jacaranda tree, while I was the one who suffered at ground level.

  The Nazi Party sessions were held twice a week. Although they would leave me trembling for hours afterward, the physical damage wasn’t too bad. I only got hit if I dropped the iron bar too soon or failed to answer one of the Judge’s ranting questions fast enough for his liking.

  “What are you, Pisskop?”

  “A piece of shit!” I would respond.

  “Not shit! Dog shit!” they would all chorus back.

  Halfway through an interrogation I would be blindfolded. Then, sooner or later, someone would throw a bucket of water over me. Knowing it might come but not knowing when meant that I would get an awful shock. The imagination is always the best torturer.

  Or they would release half a dozen red ants down my shorts and watch me frantically trying to find them as the ants bit painfully into the soft inner parts of my legs. If I tore my blindfold away it would mean a double clout from every member of the Party. I soon learned that a red ant tends to bite only once if you leave it alone. But, let me tell you something, that one bite isn’t a very nice experience.

  If some new trick, like the red ants, worked, they would yell with laughter as my legs pumped up and down and my hands searched frantically to rid me of the ants.

  One thing got to all of them more than anything else. They couldn’t make me cry. I suspect they even began to admire me a bit. Many of them had little brothers of my age at home and they knew how easy it is for a five-year-old to cry. In fact I had turned six but nobody had told me, so in my head I was still five.

  In truth, my willpower had very little to do with my resolve never to cry. I had learned a special trick and, in the process, had somehow lost the knack of turning on the tap.

  Behind the blindfold I had learned to be in two places at once. I could easily answer their stupid questions, while with another part of my mind I would visit Inkosi-Inkosikazi. Down there in the night country I was safe from the storm troopers.

  As they tied the dirty piece of rag over my eyes, I would take three deep breaths. Immediately I would hear Inkosi-Inkosikazi’s voice, soft as distant thunder: “You are standing on the rock above the highest waterfall, a young warrior who has killed his first lion.…”

  I stood in the moonlight on the rock above the three waterfalls. Far below I could see the ten stones glistening and the white water as it crashed through the narrow gorge beyond. I knew then that the person on the outside was only a shell, a presence to be provoked. Inside was the real me, where my tears joined the tears of all the sad people in the whole world to form the three waterfalls in the night country.

  The last term of the year had come to an end; only one more day remained, just one more interrogation, then freedom.

  The Judge had pleased Mr. Stoffel with his efforts in the final term. He was top of his class by the time term ended. He showed me his report card, which said, in black and white, that he had passed.

  Therefore I had no reason to expect anything but a light going-over at the last interrogation and torture session before the Judge would disappear from my life forever. After all, he owed me something.

  Prisoners of War Pisskop and Kaffir Chicken Rooinek were marched off to the jacaranda tree for the last session. This time I was blindfolded immediately I was tied to the tree. I could hear Granpa Chook squawking away above me. I was about to visit the night country when the Judge’s voice rang out harshly.

  “This is the last time, English bastard!”

  With a sudden certainty I knew today would be different. That, in his mind, the Judge owed me nothing. The bad times were back. I tried to get to the safety of the night country, but the fear rose in me and I was unable to detach myself from it.

  “Today, Englishman, you eat shit.” His use of the word “Englishman” rather than the familiar, almost friendly “Rooinek” added greatly to his menace.

  “Hold out your hands.” I held them out, palms upward. He grabbed my wrists and held them so tightly I couldn’t move them. “Bring it here, Storm Trooper Van der Merwe,” I heard him say.

  A soft object was dropped first into one hand and then into the other. “Close your hands, bastard,” the Judge commanded.

  The pain in my wrists was almost unbearable. Slowly I closed my hands. “Take his blindfold off,” the Judge commanded again. The rest of the Nazis had grown very quiet and one of them unknotted the blindfold. My nose as well as my eyes had been covered and a terrible smell rose up at me. My hands were sticky and I opened them to see that they contained two squashed human turds.

  The Judge released my wrists. “Now, lick your fingers,” he demanded. “I am going to count to three. If you haven’t licked your fingers I’m going to knock your blerrie head off!” The Judge stood pop-eyed in front of me and I could see he was trembling.

  I was too deeply shocked to react.

  “Een … twee … drie!” he counted. I remained with my hands held out in front of me, quaking with terror. He made a gurgling sound deep in his throat; then he gra
bbed me by the wrists and forced my hands up to my mouth. My teeth were clamped shut in fear, and the shit was rubbed all over my face and close-cropped hair.

  Then he grabbed the tree trunk about two feet above my head. First he tried to shake the tree. Then he began beating at it with his clenched fists. Suddenly he threw his head back, so that he was looking directly upward into the tree.

  “Heil Hitler!” he screamed.

  In the tree high above Granpa Chook dropped a perfect bomb of green and white chicken shit straight into the Judge’s open mouth.

  Granpa Chook had waited until the last day of term to give his opinion of the Nazi Party.

  The Judge spat furiously, bent double, racing round in circles clutching his throat and stomach, and finally throwing up. He raced for the tap and filled his mouth and spat out about six times.

  “Run, Granpa Chook! Run, man, run!” I screamed up into the tree. “The bastard will kill you!”

  But Granpa Chook had done enough running for one old kaffir chicken. Sitting up there among the purple blossom, he sounded as though he were laughing his scraggy old head off.

  Then, to my horror, he flew onto my shoulder. I grabbed him, but as I lifted him to throw him on his way, there was an explosion of feathers in my face. Granpa Chook let out a fearful squawk as he was blasted from my hands and fell to the ground. The Judge stood with his empty catapult dangling in his left hand.

  Granpa Chook made several attempts to get up but the stone from the powerful catapult had broken his ribcage. After a while he just sat there, looked up at me and said, “Squawk!”

  “No blerrie kaffir chicken shits on me! Hang him up by the legs next to Pisskop,” the Judge commanded. He was still wiping his mouth on the back of his hand. Two storm troopers slung a piece of rope over a branch and Granpa Chook soon hung upside down just beyond my reach.

  “Please, sir. I will do anything! Please don’t kill Granpa Chook!”

  The Judge, his eyes cruel, bent down and looked into my face. “Now we’ll see who’ll cry,” he said, grinning.

  I was seized by panic. “Kill me!” I begged. “But don’t kill Granpa Chook!”

  “You’re shit and your kaffir chicken is shit. Did you see what he did to me? Me, Jaapie Botha!”

  Still dazed, I tried another desperate tack. “I’ll tell Mevrou!” I shouted.

  The Judge turned to the storm troopers. “Prisoner of War Kaffir Chicken Rooinek will be executed, two shots each!” He moved to take his place in the shooting line as the storm troopers loaded up their catapults.

  “I’ll tell Mr. Stoffel how I did your arithmetic for you!” I screamed at the Judge.

  I heard the pfflifft of his catapult at the same time as I felt the stone slam into my stomach. The pain was terrible. The shock to my system was enormous; my eyes bugged out of my head and my tongue poked out in involuntary surprise, tasting the dry shit on my lips.

  “Fire!” A series of dull plops tore into the fragile bones of Granpa Chook’s breast. Spots of blood dropped into the dry dust and among the fallen jacaranda blossoms. Granpa Chook, the toughest damn chicken in the whole world, was dead.

  The Judge untied the rope from around my waist and I dropped to my haunches at his feet. He placed his bare foot on my shoulder.

  “What are you, Englishman?”

  “Dog shit, sir.”

  “Look at me when you say it!” he barked.

  Slowly I looked up at the giant. High above him I could see a milky moon hanging in the afternoon sky. We had got so close, Granpa Chook and I, to making it through to the end, just a few more hours.

  I spat at him, “You’re dog shit!”

  He pushed violently downward with his foot, sending me sprawling. Then he let out a howl, a mixture of anger and anguish. “Why don’t you cry, you bastard!” he sobbed, and started to kick blindly at me.

  The storm troopers rushed to restrain him, and the Judge allowed himself to be led away. Granpa Chook and I were left alone behind the shithouses under a white moon set in a pale blue sky.

  I untied his broken body and placed him on my lap. We sat there under the jacaranda tree among the fallen purple blossoms and I stroked his bloodstained feathers. No more early cock-a-doodle-doo to tell me you are there, my faithful chicken friend. Who will peck my ear? Who will be my friend? I sobbed and sobbed. The great drought was over, the inside man was out, the rains had come to Zululand.

  After a long, long while, when the crying was all out of me, I carried Granpa Chook to the orchard and laid him in the place I had made for him. Then I climbed through the dormitory window to fetch my red jumper.

  I gathered as many rocks as I could find and then I pulled my red jumper over Granpa Chook’s body; his wings poked out of the armholes and his long neck stuck out of the head part and his feet poked out of the bottom.

  He looked the best I’d ever seen him. I took the jam tin I had used for his water and collected twenty little green grasshoppers, which are the very best chicken scoff there is. I placed the tin beside his body so that he’d have a special treat on the way to heaven. Finally I covered his body with the stones.

  I sat there on my haunches beside the pile of stones as the sun began to set. Now the sun was passing beyond Zululand, even past the land of the Swazi, and now it leaves the Shangaan and the royal kraal of Modjadji, the rain queen, to be cooled in the great, dark water beyond.

  The bell for supper sounded. I moved to the tap and began to wash away the blood and shit. The last supper. Everything comes to an end. Tomorrow I would be going home for Christmas and Nanny. Wonderful, soft, warm Nanny. Only hours remained before my liberation; nothing the Judge, Mevrou and, for the moment anyway, Adolf Hitler could do would alter that.

  But life doesn’t work that way. I, most of all, should have known this. At supper Boetie Van der Merwe told me Mevrou wanted to see me in the dispensary. “If you tell about this afternoon, we’ll kill you,” he said through his teeth.

  I didn’t know then that what seemed like the end was only the beginning. All children are flotsam driven by the ebb and flow of adult lives. Unbeknown to me, the tide had turned and I was being driven out to sea.

  FOUR

  I waited for Mevrou outside the dispensary. “Kom!” she said as she brushed past me. I entered and waited with my hands behind my back, my head bowed in the customary manner.

  “Why is there blood on your shirt, Pisskop?”

  My shirt was stained with Granpa Chook’s blood and a biggish spot where the stone had torn into me.

  Mevrou sighed. “Take off your shirt.”

  I hurriedly removed my shirt and Mevrou made a cursory examination. “Ag, is that all?” She prodded at the wound the stone had made and I flinched.

  “Please, Mevrou, I fell on a rock.” Mevrou removed the cork from a bottle of iodine and upended it onto a wad of cotton wool.

  “Yes, I can see that.” She dabbed at my wound and the iodine stung like billy-o and I hopped up and down in dismay, wringing my hands to stop the burning pain. “You can’t go getting blood poisoning on the train,” she said.

  “What train, Mevrou?” I asked, confused.

  “Your oupa called on the telephone from a dorp in the Eastern Transvaal called Barberton. You are not going back to the farm. He says Newcastle’s disease had made him kill all his chickens and he has sold the farm.”

  My head was swimming; my whole world was coming apart at the seams. If Granpa had sold the farm and was making telephone calls from some town in the Eastern Transvaal, where was Nanny? Without Granpa Chook and Nanny, life was not possible.

  Mevrou reached into her bag and held up an envelope. “In here is the ticket. Tomorrow night you will catch the train to Barberton. Two days and two nights. I will take you to the train.” She dismissed me with a wave of the envelope.

  As I reached the door Mevrou called me back. “You can’t take the chicken, you hear? South African Railways won’t let you take a kaffir chicken, not even in the goods van. I wil
l take the chicken, he will earn his keep.”

  “He is dead, Mevrou. A dog ate him today.” I managed somehow to keep the tears out of my voice.

  “That is a shame, he was good in the kitchen. I’m telling you, man, a kaffir chicken is no different from a kaffir. Just when you think you can trust them, they go and let you down.”

  I had never owned a pair of shoes. In the Northern Transvaal a farm kid only got boots if he had rich parents or if he had turned thirteen. That’s when the Old Testament of the Bible says a boy becomes a man.

  On the last day of term Mevrou summoned me. After lunch we would be going into town to buy a pair of tackies at Harry Crown’s shop.

  “What are tackies, Mevrou?”

  “Domkop! Tackies are shoes made of canvas with rubber bottoms. Make sure you have clean feet.”

  From the old mango tree, I watched the kids leave. Parents arrived in beaten-up bakkies and mule carts. The Judge left in a mule cart. He made the black servant sit on the tailboard; then he took up the reins and the whip and set off at a furious pace. I breathed a huge sigh of relief. As my mother used to say, “Good riddance to bad rubbish.”

  Finally everyone had gone and I climbed down and crossed the playground. It wasn’t the same without Granpa Chook. It wasn’t ever going to be the same again. I saved the need to grieve for a later time. I had enough on my mind with the prospect of going to buy a pair of shoes and catching the train. I’d never owned a pair of shoes and I’d never been on a train. Two nevers in one day is enough to fill anyone’s mind.

  After a lunch of bread and jam with a mug of sweet tea, I hurried to meet Mevrou, stopping to give my feet a good scrub. The same shower that had been dripping that first night when I thought I was in a slaughterhouse was still sounding drip, drip, drip, like a metronome. It all seemed such a long time ago; I sure had been a baby then.

  Mevrou arrived wearing a shapeless floral cotton dress and a funny black straw hat with two cherries on it. A third wire stem stuck up where a cherry had once been.