MULTI-HUED LOZENGES OF REFRACTED LIGHT crawl up the stone columns as the sun moves towards mid-afternoon. Reverend George brays, ‘I will keep my mouth as it were with a bridle while the ungodly is in my sight.’
Lin remembers her father and other Moths talking in low voices about the ungodly when they had evening meetings in the dining room. She had a hiding place under the yesterday, today and tomorrow bush outside the window, and the sickly smell of the purple and white blooms still makes her think of ugly dark secrets, a Pandora’s box of men’s terrors. She squatted there listening to things that had happened in their war, transfixed by stories of bombings and bloody deaths and grown-up men crying. These were her father’s friends who stood around at braais drinking beers and joking, yet in that room they spilled over with the horror and rage that crawled under the surface of their lives like reptiles. One of them shot himself when she was ten and she heard her father say to Shirley, ‘He never got free of the nightmares, poor sod.’
‘And you have?’
‘Learnt to live with the buggers,’ was his answer.
Lin recalls the quizzical look on Shirley’s face. Her mother is an enigma, her intelligence seemingly satisfied by household trivia. Lin’s twenties and early thirties were so focused on living up to her father’s expectations – getting a good degree, finding a challenging job in IT, then working her way up in the organisation – that there was no space for cooking or sewing or gardening.
‘How will you survive if there’s another depression?’ Shirley said more than once. ‘If there are more atom bombs or disasters like earthquakes that change life as we know it? We’d all have to grow our own food. You’d be helpless without your computers and car and all those restaurants where you eat.’
‘Don’t be such a doom-monger, Mum.’
‘Your father and I lived through a time like that. I worry about you, darling. Being clever and competent is not enough.’
‘You don’t have to worry. I can pay people to do things.’
But her mother nagged on. ‘You need to think about your future, Linda. I wish you could find a nice steady man to marry.’
Like Dad? Lin thought. No way. Too domineering – like all men of his generation. I couldn’t stand it. But all she said was, ‘You know I’m too independent to be tied down to domesticity. My career’s important to me.’
‘You’ll be on the shelf for good if you wait much longer.’
One of Shirley’s skills was prescience. When Lin married a senior colleague who seemed compatible, it lasted a year before he started sleeping with other women, saying Lin was too bossy. After a messy divorce she had to leave the organisation and start job-hunting again. The only halfway interesting position was in the KwaZulu-Natal archives, where she is in charge of the genealogy database and photographic library. Shirley says she’s wasting her life there. Lin thinks her mother has wasted her life in the shadow of a hero.
Jesus H Christ, Lofty Munn fumes, not one of these folk dressed up to the nines knows a damn thing about what ungodly really means. They don’t realise that God abandoned us when he saw another world war breaking out, and never came back.
Lofty had been a corporal with the 5th South African Brigade overwhelmed by the tanks of Rommel’s Afrika Korps at Sidi Rezegh on 23 November 1941. The officers and wounded were taken away in vehicles. Lofty and two thousand other ranks were made to walk for almost four days in blazing sun, with no water for the first two days, and after that only half a biscuit and a brackish mouthful. Italian guards hustled them on. Staggering, delirious men collapsed all around him, their burnt faces bloating. Reason evaporated like the shimmering desert mirages. Newman Robinson of the 10th South African Field Ambulance, also on the Thirst March, wrote: ‘All the known precepts of civilised society had vanished. Men fought for water like hyenas after carrion.’
That was only the beginning. They were kept in wire cages, shouted at, slammed with rifle butts, bullied, threatened, starved, and scoured by dysentery. When they were stumble-marched to the ships that would take them to prisoner-of-war camps in Italy, so many were crammed into the holds that they could not lie down. Sitting upright, squashed together, they slept in puddles of stinking pee and shit. And that was before his leg went vrot.
Every evening for years, Lofty Munn has sat in his veranda-cave of golden shower overlooking the railway in Jacobs, remembering pain, starvation, filth, the foul smell of gangrene. After Italy capitulated and he was released and sent home to Durban, there were no jobs for one-legged men on crutches. He seldom wore the surgical pink artificial leg fitted by UDF orthopaedic surgeons because it felt all wrong, like a clumsy alien leeching on him.
He lived alone, eking out his war pension until he met Joyce on a bench in Albert Park, feeding the pigeons. She took him on, stump and all, to help run her tobacconist shop in Smith Street and to jazz up her nights. That’s what she said: ‘You jazz up my nights like a crazy cricket, Lofty, man.’ Just looking at her gave him a hard-on. She loved sex and cigarettes – and then cancer got her lungs, so he was alone again with the shop and their house in Jacobs and his war memories.
Nowadays, he finds it hard to remember more about Joyce than her body – tits like watermelons, generous hips he could grab onto, passionate smoke-sour mouth, all the delicious wobbles he plunged into, both of them laughing. But the war is still sharp and clear. He knows damn well what ungodly means.
So does Stanley Magwaza, who is sitting next to the granite column in the fourth pew on the right. By rights he should be with the other veterans, but he has never been invited to join the Moths. He was also marched through the desert, though when a drum of water and a few loaves of bread were provided, members of his Native Military Corps only got a crust each; the water had run out among the white soldiers long before it reached them.
He was in a rage for years after that war, for which he was rewarded on demob with a train ticket home, ₤2, a khaki suit and a bicycle. He took out his rage on women until he found soccer and a home with Orlando Pirates, moving on to start a business when he was too old to play. Stanley’s Place was for a while the ‘in’ shebeen for Soweto amagents – with its Italian furniture, leatherette walls, chrome and mirrors, and jukebox. Sexy girls in fishnet tights served cocktails made with cherries and imported liquor at a time when black people could only legally buy Bantu beer. The high life was sweet. He drank expensive Scotch and had his choice of choekies in high-rise minis and jeans tighter than coats of paint. Only top-class dagga was allowed, no drugs. He wore tailor-made suits, bespoke shirts, gold chains, a diamond ring, and two-tone shoes. Knew how to bribe the right policemen. Never felt the need for a family.
But the zols and the hooch got him in the end. Now Stanley’s Place is a concrete culvert, and he is a wiser man for the tribulations that got him there.
He refused J J’s offer to help him find a home. ‘I’ve got used to living with nature, nè? It’s kinder than people.’
‘But you do get a war pension?’
‘Ja. It’s small, but I don’t need much.’
‘Damn it, man, nobody should be living like this today.’ J J’s induku swished to indicate the embankment and the bush. He was sitting on an upturned bucket cushioned with a sack. ‘It’s a bloody scandal.’
‘I’m okay.’
‘You’re not okay. I’ll build you a rondavel in my garden.’
‘No. Thanks. Here I can do what I like. Nobody pushes me around.’
It was the first time J J had heard anger in his voice. He wanted to apologise for causing it – for everything, actually. He said, ‘I’m sorry. I should have known. Been blind as a bat.’
‘It’s okay, mfowethu. This is enough.’ Stanley gave him a caustic smile. ‘Now I only worry about my food and the bush growing too high.’
‘It’s a bit on the late side to come around to it, but I really mean that. I’m sorry.’ J J peered at him in earnest. Meeting Stanley had forced him to admit a painful truth: he might have suffered for his country in the war, but hero-worship had dazzled him. He had been pampered like a racehorse and was just as blinkered. ‘I’m also ashamed,’ he added.
In the evening air, the words hung like insignificant gnats under the cumulonimbus of his wrongdoing, until there was a quiet response, ‘It’s appreciated, sir.’
‘Don’t call me sir. All that’s over now.’
‘You think so?’ At J J’s affirming nod the black man chuckled and said, ‘Ja. We can dream, nè?’
Now Stanley Magwaza sits in St Ethelbert’s remembering that afternoon and thinking, Hamba kahle, John. When your daughter came looking for me to take part in this big funeral, she brought your best suit – old, but good quality – and a folding camp chair and these strong walking shoes. Rest in peace now. You can start apologising again when we meet in the paradise for war heroes.
He looks down at the new Reeboks which will carry him to the pension payout office on the first Friday of the month. J J had asked Shirley to buy them several weeks before he died, knowing he would never wear them. Small amends, he knew. But he and the friend he’d made during his last few months had agreed on the importance of shoes.
The new Springbok flank Rick Savidge, representing his team in the sixth pew, also knows about the ungodly, though at one remove. The word takes him back to his grandfather’s workshop where he’d sat on the window ledge watching the old man plane stinkwood. Aromatic shavings curled and tumbled to the floor as he made long smooth strokes, grumbling under an unkempt moustache.
‘Ungodly swine, those Huns. Heartless bastards. They’d weigh out your prison rations to the milligram one moment, then shoot you the next. Fellow went over the tripwire to fetch a ball kicked into the no-go area, and blam! Sniper in the tower and one rifle shot. Dead.’
‘But why?’ Rick at seven does not understand any of it: the war, the Huns, why his grandfather had been in prison.
‘Because he stepped out of line. Watch out for the Hun and the Jap, boy. They’re murderers.’
‘Can you really get killed for stepping out of line?’ Rick thinks of assembly in his school courtyard and one of the masters standing in a second-floor window with a rifle, ready to shoot transgressors who step outside the white lines on the tarmac.
‘At any time. It’s a merciless world. No quarter given.’
‘What does that mean?’ Rick can feel himself shrinking inside. He gets teased at school because of his surname. One of the boys nicknamed him ‘Kaffir’ and the name has stuck.
The old man stops planing and fixes him with a mad blue glare. ‘Beware the ungodly. Get the fuckers first, before they get you.’
‘Dad? Please come,’ Rick calls out to his father who has brought him because the old man asked to see him.
He is at the window in a flash. ‘I’m here, boy.’
Rick snuggles into his father’s arms and feels better, though he never forgets the old man’s furious words. He learns when he is older that Percy Savidge had played rugby in Stalag IVB at Mühlberg-on-Elbe, where the lines were scratched in icy gravel and endless kicking over sketchy goalposts helped to while away the hours. In the rugby competition of 1944, twenty teams of bored prisoners took out their frustration on one another. The camp’s handwritten wall newspaper The Observer reported after the ‘Springboks’ had beaten ‘England’: ‘Both teams played excellent rugger … Both teams are to be congratulated on the splendid spirit in which the game was played.’
Percy Savidge’s spirit had been battered to the point where he could only communicate with wood after the war, shaping and stroking it to make furniture. He ignored his wife, who soon left with their son Ian. In turn, Ian had kept his own son Rick away from the bitter grandfather in the workshop until he was dying. When Rick plays rugby, he remembers his grandfather saying, ‘Get the fuckers first before they get you.’ He is known for his robust tackling.
Now he looks at the coffin where J J Kitching lies under its bright flag, and wonders why some men are galvanised by war while others are destroyed.
The teammate sitting next to him nudges his arm and mutters, ‘Keep your trap shut, Kaffir. You’ll be snoring next.’
‘Don’t call me that!’
‘Why not?’
‘Nobody should use the k-word now.’
‘Even for a white ou? Come on. It’s a joke.’
‘For anyone. So you keep your trap shut, bru.’
He remembers his grandfather saying, ‘Watch out for the Hun and the Jap,’ and thinks, At some rugby matches men hurl ‘Honky!’ and ‘Fokken witman!’ where they used to throw naartjies.