Whitethorn

by Bryce Courtenay

  We never did hear if that Englishman ate the barbel. But afterwards we all agreed he couldn’t have, because nobody, not even an Englishman, could eat such a stinking fish as the barbel. But now the Dominee was talking about fish he clean forgot about the Germans in Russia until it was too late, and then he made a very bad sermon message connection. After talking about the barbel-eating Englishman sleeping under his ouma’s goosefeather quilt, he made the point that Jesus is the ‘Fisher of men’. If we are not caught hook, line and sinker by his precious gospel bait telling us to confess our sins and be saved, then we going to be condemned to eternal hellfire.

  Still on the fish theme, the Dominee also told us how Jesus had done two miracles concerning fish. The first was when some of his disciples, who were fishermen before they met Jesus, were out fishing one day on the Sea of Galilee and they looked up and there is the Lord Jesus coming towards them and here he is walking on water! ‘Follow me and I will make you fishers of men,’ Jesus says to them when he gets close enough for them to hear above the roar of the waves. Now, it’s not every day that you’re to hellangone out to sea and there’s waves splashing about everywhere and it’s deep water, and all of a sudden you look up and here’s somebody coming over to you walking on the water with his bare feet. Next thing, he steps into the boat and his feet and the hem of his garment are not even wet. So, of course, they decide to follow him and become his disciples. You couldn’t say no, even if you wanted to, with something like that happening.

  The next fish miracle is when Jesus is preaching to the multitudes on the slopes of some mountain in the desert, and everyone’s walked a long way to hear him preach and they’ve forgotten to bring any food. Except for this one man who’s got a few loaves of bread and another, maybe a woman, who’s got a few dead fish in a basket. ‘Bring them here,’ Jesus instructs and waves his hand over the bread and suddenly there’s loaves of fresh-baked bread piled up everywhere. He does the same to the fish and then there’s more fish than the people can eat and it’s already cooked with the bones taken out! But what I want to know is this. There’s no water in the desert, right? So how come all of a sudden this woman’s got fish in her basket?

  Now, I suppose you’re wondering what this has to do with Hitler going to Russia instead of England? Well, as far as I could work it out, it was God working in mysterious ways. The Dominee got himself on the subject of fish and he suddenly remembered about Russia, so he had to get back to that subject again. This was because he always liked to talk to a theme and have a ‘rounded message’ that always ended up where he’d begun.

  This is how he got back to Russia. He claimed that everyone could make a mistake, even Adolf Hitler, and being in Russia was definitely a mistake and he should have been in Britain. Now the Dominee had talked about two miracles and we had to pray for two more miracles. A walking-on-water miracle and a feeding-the-multitudes-bread-and-fish miracle, but it all had to happen in Russia. The Dominee pointed out to the congregation that it was a well-known fact that snow, that you couldn’t walk on or drive tanks in it, could easily turn into ice that you could walk on and drive tanks over. That’s what we had to pray for, snow turning into ice in Russia.

  So that was how he turned the Jesus-walking-on-water miracle back into Russia. But the feeding of the multitudes wasn’t so easy. First he said aeroplanes could land on the ice to bring in flour and stuff from Germany to bake bread. Then the Dominee made his big mistake. ‘With ice you can see where the rivers run,’ he explained. ‘You look through the ice and there’s a river called the Volga running underneath your feet, so you drill a hole and there’s lots of fish you can catch. The Eskimos do it all the time,’ he explained. He leaned back from his pulpit. ‘A person as clever and resourceful as a German soldier would soon be eating all the fish he could catch,’ he concluded, happy that he’d finally pulled Russia, Britain, English captains with red hair, his ouma’s quilt, two fish miracles and back to Russia together all in the one message.

  Even to me this fishing through a hole in the ice didn’t sound too practical, especially as, according to Die Vaderland, lots of the Germans were still wearing their summer uniforms and thousands of them were freezing to death, and everyone knows ice is even colder than snow. So, by praying for an ice miracle instead of snow we were condemning even more German soldiers to death. As for German soldiers being resourceful and catching all the fish they could eat through a hole in the river, in my opinion all the fish they would catch was none! But, like I said, you couldn’t argue with someone as high up as the Dominee. As far as I was concerned it was a bullshit sermon and he’d just done it so he could get back to Russia and have his ‘rounded message’. Later, when Gawie and me were talking about this Gawie said, ‘Ag, it doesn’t look as though you’re going to go to Madagascar, Voetsek.’ He added graciously, ‘I’m glad, man, because now we can grow up together and always be maats.’

  I was naturally very pleased to hear this, but a person can’t just go around showing your feelings, so I said sympathetically, ‘But now you won’t get your gold and diamond mine from a dead Jew.’

  ‘Ag, it doesn’t matter, man, I’ll get one on my own because when I grow up I have to be rich.’

  ‘And have a hundred pounds,’ I remembered.

  ‘Ja, maybe even more,’ he said.

  That night, as I lay in bed in the dark, I hugged myself. This was because Britain was beginning to look like they were going to win the war because the Americans were coming in to help, which was very disappointing for a lot of people around the place. But for me, at least two good things would happen. I wasn’t going to starve to death and then get sent to Madagascar, and I now had Gawie who I could grow up with, and who would always be my friend. Maybe if I gave him my ten shillings we could have the gold and diamond mine together.

  You see I still hadn’t spent my ten shillings because every time I did something with the money things would go badly wrong. So I kept it between the pages of the red book because of all the books I now owned nobody would ever look inside that one, not even Gawie. Not that I didn’t trust him. By now I was able to memorise whole chapters and knew all about how, under English colonial jurisprudence, which is another name for law, magistrates had to deal with disputes between the indigenous natives and Boer burghers in the courts in Natal and the Cape of Good Hope in 1812. Most of it had to do with cattle, grazing rights and punishment because Boere could no longer have slaves, so black people, who could now only be servants and farm workers, had some rights for a change. But I don’t know if they still have them here in the Transvaal. Only Sergeant Van Niekerk, or someone like him, would know for sure.

  Now, I’m afraid I have to take you back to church. Because if you think of all the other things the British did that upset the Dominee, this thing was the worst ever. The funny thing was that it didn’t even have anything to do with the Boer War or what the British did to the Afrikaners or his grandmother’s goosefeather quilt or even about the war that was going on. It was all about a book. The book that got him really, really angry was called The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin. Dominee De Jager didn’t say how he got hold of it or even if he’d ever read it, but judging by what he said about it, a preacher wouldn’t be allowed by God to read a book like this. I would later find out that this particular book had been around longer than my red book. The way the Dominee talked in church, he made it sound like it was the latest wicked thing done by an Englishman.

  ‘This morning we going to talk about wicked books,’ he said, opening his sermon. ‘Ungodly books that serve the Antichrist and are written with a pen that’s been dipped in the devil’s scarlet ink. Before I tell you about this particular devil-written book I want you to know that Adolf Hitler himself knows about the existence of wicked books, and has done his best to stamp them out in Germany. This is yet another sign showing that deep underneath he is a God-fearing man and a good Lutheran.’ He stopped and opened the large Bible resting on the pulpit. ‘Here in the Bible it is cle
ar as daylight, God tells us about words, good words. “In the beginning was the word, and the word was good!” ’ he read. ‘You can’t get plainer than that, only good words can be tolerated, you hear?’ He slammed the Bible closed and the sound of the covers coming together echoed through the church, then he patted the gold-embossed front cover. ‘Never a truer word has been said,’ he declared. ‘In this book, the Good Book, are all the words we need to lead a fulfilling and God-fearing life. But Satan knows how powerful and everlasting God’s word is and that he can never write the book of evil that can begin to match this book of good. Make no mistake, the devil is very clever. He has a satanic plan. If he can’t write one big book of evil that’s the opposite to God’s good book, then he puts a little evil here, a few poisoned words there, until the world is filled with evil books. Everywhere you look it’s evil books. A person has to think before they read a book and ask themself, “Is this the work of the devil or not?” Maybe you are halfway through a book and it’s going along nicely when all of a sudden buried there in the middle is the devil’s work. An act of fornication is suddenly planted in the pages in front of your very eyes! A blasphemy against the teachings of God appears. That’s why the Führer is so clever. In Germany he got Herr Joseph Goebbels to read all the books. Magtig! What a clever man is this Joseph Goebbels. He can smell a degenerate book, even if it’s hidden in a whole library! When he discovers the evil in them Adolf Hitler takes that book and puts it on a big pile of books and burns them in the city square, where everyone can see it happening. In one burning they burnt 20 000 books! Can you imagine that? Twenty thousand bits of evil and filth that the devil has planted in those pages, and that’s only the beginning. They had to do it again a bit later because the evil books started piling up again. The books were by Jews and Bolsheviks, Anarchists and Roman Catholics – all the terrible filth cleansed by the fire of truth and the smoke of righteousness!’

  But we haven’t reached the end of the Dominee’s sermon yet because now he went back to the book The Origin of Species and held it up. From where we were sitting you couldn’t see if it was the actual book. But if it was, then later, after he’d told us what was in it, I wouldn’t have been surprised if it had burst into flames right there in front of our eyes.

  ‘In the beginning was the word!’ the Dominee shouted out again, this time so loud we nearly jumped out of our skins. ‘But this book says in the beginning was nothing but germs that eventually, after millions of years, become people and all the creatures on earth. It’s called evolution, and it’s blasphemy! This is true evil. The devil’s masterpiece! God tells us seven days and everything is finish and klaar, but Charles Darwin, the Englishman, tells us millions of years and from germs!’ He looked around. ‘Now who you going to believe, hey? God’s masterful creation in six days and then Sunday for a good rest, or germs growing up to be people and trees and animals? It’s truly laughable that somebody could have the cheek to write such rubbish and expect people to believe it!’ The Dominee paused. ‘But that’s where the devil is clever, you see, because inside he has put a Christian truth, it is called “survival of the fittest”. God has said the white man is superior and must dominate all the inferior dark races, and we know also that the Afrikaner is one of his chosen people because we survived among the savages in the wilderness and we are definitely the fittest. So be careful when you read a book, sometimes there are truths written in evil books, just so you can be fooled. But Hitler wasn’t fooled and in Germany there are no more evil books. But in England, the whole place is full of them, you can hardly read a book that isn’t. I don’t suppose many of you will read books in English, but if you do, beware, the devil is very clever and lurking on pages, and before you know it, you’re trapped. God tells us that to think evil is the same as doing it, so I want you all to watch out, you hear? Better still, don’t read anything in English, that is my final warning!’

  Well, I must say, I didn’t think much of the Dominee’s walking-on-ice and fishing-through-a-hole-in-Russia sermon. But this one, where this Englishman says God definitely didn’t create the earth in six days and it was germs all the time, was different. This was sheer blasphemy, as plain as the nose on your face. In all the books Miss Phillips sent I hadn’t seen anything like this. Perhaps in the future I’d have to look a bit closer for evil lurking between the pages because the devil was so clever. The fact that the English allowed it to happen and hadn’t burned any books to make everyone safe like Hitler had done was a big worry. In life there’s always something you’ve got to watch out for, and I still wasn’t sure about recognising Jews and Roman Catholics and now, all of a sudden, there were Bolsheviks and Anarchists as well.

  Then, on the following Saturday after the germs-versus-creation sermon we were working in the vegetable garden when I looked up and there was smoke coming from the direction of the library rock. I dropped my paraffin tin bucket, and Tinker and I started to run. Gawie must have seen me, then the smoke, because he did the same. But we arrived too late, and all my Miss Phillips books had been taken out of the old paraffin tins and thrown on a pile that was now just leaping flames. On top was the red book, and maybe because the cover was made of leather it hadn’t burnt yet. Without thinking, I stuck my hand into the flames and pulled it out. The red book was very hot and one corner was alight, but I got it out and threw some sand on it to stop the flames. My hand was burning like billyo. Gawie tried to kick some of the books clear on the edge of the flames, and some of the lighted pages separated from the covers and flew up in the draught caused by the disturbance and got into the grass and dry thornbush on the edge of the library rock, and now the grass was alight and the thornbush was crackling and exploding around us. Gawie and me tried to stamp it out but it was burning in too many places, so I picked up the red book and called to Tinker, who was barking like mad, and to Gawie and we scrambled up the side of the library rock to safety and stood on the top watching the fire spread. Soon the surrounding bush was nothing but flames leaping high as a house and dense smoke everywhere.

  We could hear people shouting from the direction of the vegetable garden and orchard but there was no way they could get over to us or see us through the smoke. Through a momentary clearing of smoke I saw something too terrible for words. The fire was heading for Mattress’s old hut and the pigsty and dairy. Next thing the pigs were squealing in terror and I knew we were in the all-time deepest of deep shit. It was getting hard to breathe because the fire was eating up the air around the library rock. There was a narrow unburnt corridor to the left of us that led to the creek about 300 yards away, and I decided we had to try to get through.

  ‘Gawie, we’ve got to run over there!’ I shouted, pointing towards the creek. He was beginning to cough so he nodded, and we climbed down the library rock and ran through the smoke towards the safety of the creek. To this day, I’ll never know how we made it. The flames were closing in fast and there were even patches of grass and whitethorn alight ahead of us where sparks must have been carried in the wind that had come up with the fire. Tinker was barking like mad and trying to protect me, running ahead and showing us the way around the burning patches. We both ran straight into the creek, panting like mad, and Tinker stayed on the creek bank barking. I realised that I was holding the red book under water and the cold creek water was soothing to my fiercely stinging hand.

  From where we were sitting we could now see the fire had reached the dairy and the pigs were still squealing. Later, everyone said you could smell the roast pork for miles. I looked at Gawie and his face was black, and I suppose mine was too.

  ‘What now?’ he said.

  ‘First, wash your face,’ I replied. Why I would say a stupid thing like that I don’t know, but he dipped his hands in the water and splashed his face clean.

  ‘You too, Voetsek,’ he said.

  ‘I can’t because I’m holding this,’ I said, producing the red book from under the water. My other hand was too sore to splash with.

  ‘Ag, thro
w it away, man! It’s all burnt and wet.’

  ‘No, I can’t,’ I said, and stood up and walked to the creek bank where we both sat down on the black shiny pebbles. The fire had stopped short of the creek, but was still raging everywhere else, making a sort of roaring sound.

  ‘We in the deep shit, man!’ Gawie said.

  ‘I know,’ I answered.

  ‘So, what are we going to do? They going to think we started the fire and it’s Pretoria for sure.’

  I could see Gawie was on the edge of tears. I felt the same way myself but I knew he was expecting me to do something, though what I didn’t know.

  ‘We have to escape,’ I said.

  ‘Escape?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Where?’

  All of a sudden it was the youngest having to come up with all the answers. ‘Town,’ I replied.

  ‘Town?’

  It was getting annoying, him just saying one word in a question like that. ‘We’ve got to turn ourselves in.’

  ‘Where?’

  Another one word. ‘The police station. To Sergeant Van Niekerk.’

  ‘How come we always have to go to him?’

  More than one word at last. ‘If we go back to The Boys Farm, that is probably burned down by now, can you imagine the trouble we in, man? We’ll get a sjambokking from Meneer Prinsloo with the long cane, and him running flat out at us and that’s even before we go to Pretoria.’ I paused, suddenly remembering. ‘Oh my God! Adolf Hitler is probably roast chicken by now!’