Kitchen Boy

by Jenny Hobbs

  In the vestry where choir surplices hang on a row of hooks, Lin has sunk down into a chair. Theodora hovers over her saying, ‘What can I do?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘I’ll find a glass of water.’

  ‘It wouldn’t help.’ Lin’s swollen eyelids leak tears like taps with worn washers. ‘It’s not just Dad going. My whole life is shit.’

  ‘Hayi-bo, Linnie. You’ve got a good job and a family who loves you.’

  ‘Half a family and a cat.’ She breaks down again.

  There is a sudden thump on a door leading outside. Theodora looks up to see a bearded man in faded military camouflage fling it open so it bangs against a cupboard. ‘Who are you?’ she asks.

  ‘Darius Groth. Let me into the church.’

  ‘The man we heard shouting?’

  ‘Men. Ex-recces. I’m going to make a statement in there if it kills me.’

  He stumbles towards them and Theodora backs towards the inner door to divert him from Lin.

  ‘Let me into the church.’ There are bulges in his pockets that could be handguns. He has the look of a man in a perilous rage, an unvented pressure-cooker about to blow.

  She has no way of stopping him and says, ‘Okay,’ hoping the rugby players in the congregation will be able to tackle him.

  He shoves her aside just as the door opens again and Reverend George sweeps in with a patronising ‘Can I help?’ followed by a surprised ‘Oh.’ A snarling mercenary is not what he expected on his mission of mercy.

  ‘Get out my way.’ Groth tries to shove him aside too.

  Reverend George is a township priest with streetwise skills. He blocks the move, closing the door and holding down the latch behind his back. ‘No. There’s a service on. What do you want?’

  ‘Justice. Open up.’

  ‘I can’t. It’s being televised.’

  ‘Fuck that. We should be there. We suffered too, on the border.’

  ‘But these people aren’t responsible for –’

  ‘Government is responsible! We fought for our country, for what? To be treated like polecats? It’s wrong, man.’

  ‘Ah, yes.’ Reverend George seizes the opportunity to practise his mediation technique. ‘Absolutely wrong, I agree. You deserve a hearing. I will personally help you put your case to the mayor on Monday.’

  ‘You?’ Groth eyes the tunic embroidered with Zulu motifs, not bothering to disguise his scorn. He is twice the size and heft of the township priest.

  ‘I have the ear of the bishop too. We can help, I assure you.’ Rever end George sticks out a manly hand and adds, ‘My word of honour.’

  ‘You take me for a bloody fool? What’s honour? Shit! Life is shit. We’re tired of promises. Move, priest. I’m going in.’

  Lin is startled to hear her despairing words repeated. Her focus changes to wide-angle as she lifts her head and says, ‘Who let you down?’

  Groth swings round and sees a woman with swollen eyes that demand an answer. ‘Everybody. Angola veterans are treated like scum. Look at these.’ He holds out calloused hands with two missing fingers. ‘I have to work like a dog just to eat. And there are plenty of us. Some in loony bins. Some with buggered faces. Some in wheelchairs. Not even forty-five, and fucked. Jesus, that border stuff was ugly. The enemy was like shadows in the dry grass. Just kids, some of them.’

  Reverend George says, ‘But you could have been a conscientious objector.’

  ‘I didn’t object! I wanted to defend my country against the communists. We didn’t know anything else. We just went and did our duty like we were told. Yet now we’re garbage. And that dead old man –’ he jerks his head towards the door into the church, ‘he gets hallelujahs for something he volunteered for sixty years ago. He wasn’t ordered. He volunteered. Asked for it.’

  Lin says, ‘That dead old man was my father. He was a boy when he went to war. He didn’t ask for the horrors he had to live through.’

  ‘We were boys too.’

  ‘He was a good man. Worked hard and played Springbok rugby and gave to charities. He had friends of all –’

  ‘Colours? Do you believe all that rainbow-nation kak? Don’t make me laugh.’ He spits at her feet. ‘It’s a rubbish dump where the hamerkops pick out all the good things and leave nothing for us.’

  ‘Dad wasn’t like that. He was a good man,’ Lin insists.

  Darius Groth folds his massive arms and plants army boots with a long hard history on the vestry flagstones. ‘So? He’s gone. We’re here. We’re suffering. Had enough.’

  He’s gone. And I’m here, Dad’s representative. What would he have done in this situation? Lin asks, ‘What are you really saying? What do you need?’

  ‘Help. For God’s sake.’ The fury dissolves to sudden tears that spill from eyes as inconsolable as hers. ‘We’re desperate, man.’

  This desolate invader is far worse off than she is, so wrapped up in her own sorrows. Buck up, girl, Dad used to say. Get your skates on. Do something constructive. She says, ‘I’ll try and help,’ and means it.

  ‘How?’

  ‘I’ll find a way. Dad was a Moth. They have funds.’

  ‘That lot? Forget it. We’re pariahs.’

  ‘You did what you thought was right at the time. Like they did.’

  ‘Only it wasn’t. We were tricked. Now we have to eat dirt.’

  ‘It doesn’t sound right. I’ll try and help,’ she says again.

  He scans her face and when he nods acceptance, he means it. There is no more blustering as he wipes his eyes with the back of his hand. The stumps of his missing fingers are puckered white scars.

  After Reverend George has ushered him outside to join his men, making reassuring promises about meetings with the bishop and the mayor and people from welfare, Lin says to Theodora, ‘We should go back inside.’

  ‘You sure, Linnie? Okay now?’

  ‘Sure, thanks. I need to rescue Sam.’

  Boots were so precious that an otherwise placid man whose boots were stolen could be driven to violence.

  – MAXWELL LEIGH, Captives Courageous

  January 1945.

  In the icy jaws of that bitter winter, the monochrome kaleidoscope of prison greys and blacks shifted twice: once in Bankau bei Kreuzburg when the camp OC came stamping into the hut one morning and told them to pack up. ‘The Russians are coming and Jerry’s railing us to Stalag Luft III near Sagan. Wear everything you’ve got. It’s bloody cold out there.’

  ‘So it’s bye-bye Poland and Heil Hitler, sir?’

  ‘Out of the frying pan,’ he confirmed, and went on to inform the next hut.

  ‘At least we’re going in style,’ one of the tin-bashers said.

  ‘Fuck off, chirpy. It’ll be cattle trucks.’

  ‘Moo-hoo.’

  The jokes didn’t last. They trudged through knee-deep snow to a railway siding and were herded into trucks with slatted sides to stand in a tight swaying pack for hours as the train jerked and shuddered forward. At the new camp, edgy guards expected instant obedience and punishments were frequent. In what was later called The Great Escape, seventy-six Allied airmen had escaped from Stalag Luft III through tunnels ten months earlier, though only three got away. Fifty of those caught were shot on Hitler’s orders, mostly in the back of the head on lonely roads, then cremated on the spot to erase the evidence.

  Of the few weeks there, J Jß remembered little more than sentry boxes on tall poles along high barbed wire fences, and the dense conifers beyond. A rugby match was played on frozen gravel by men with the concentration of hyenas fighting over the remains of a kill. The reward for the winning team was an extra mug each of watery cabbage soup that stank of old socks. Endemic farting kept morale up and the hut in a noxious fug.

  The bleak kaleidoscope shifted again in late January when camp guards burst into the barracks at first light and ordered the sleepy men out. ‘Raus! Raus! Schnell!’ In the scramble to pull on kit and grab belongings, J J mislaid his balaclava and Kenneth could
n’t find the flour bag of chess pieces he had spent weeks whittling out of a broom handle. When all the POWs had gathered, stamping and puffing in the piercing cold, the camp Kommandant announced on a loudhailer that they were being moved out. His voice was a tinny thread over the distant thump-thumpthumpa-thumpa-thump of heavy artillery.

  ‘Where to?’ the OC demanded.

  ‘You march west.’

  With blows from their rifle butts, the guards drove them in a jostling mass towards the camp gate until the OC shouted, ‘Stop! We’re officers. We don’t march. Geneva Convention.’

  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.

  · 21 ·

  THE 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 blo
od 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.