TWO O’CLOCK, EASTERN WARTIME

by John Dunning

  At some point he began writing script again. He was back at Tanforan with his Nisei and when he looked up Becky had put a sandwich beside him: she had come and gone and he hadn’t seen or heard her. And she had left him something else, a folder with a script in mimeo. He read the title page: A Friday Afternoon, by Paul Kruger. So this is what it’s all about, he thought. All the fuss, all the death. He looked at the clock . . . an hour before rehearsal. And with time on his hands, he read it.

  ( ( ( 13 ) ) )

  FRIDAY was just another day in the labor camp at Germiston. An hour ago two children had died and half a dozen more would be dead by sundown. A day when only six died was a good day, unless one of the six was yours.

  The name of the camp hinted at something German. This was especially true today, with news of Nazi concentration camps beginning to come to light. But the play had been written in 1936. The significant year in his own struggle. The year of March Flack; the year Maitland and maybe Kidd had first arrived, however briefly; the year Mrs. Harford died and the station, having just begun work on its new office building, had folded its cards and gone into deep hibernation.

  So this was not Germany, not even the Germany of the old war. It nagged at his consciousness but he couldn’t place it. He moved on. Now he saw that what he had assumed was a labor camp was something else. It was certainly a prison camp but not a place where labor was enforced. Still, there was death. There was typhoid and measles and malnutrition. There was never enough food and what there was was wormy and poor. One pound of meal a day. No vegetables, no milk, scant meat. Children grew feverish and lay on the hard-baked earth to die.

  The heroine was a young woman named Margaret, obviously of some land far away. Her speech should sound foreign yet not be foreign, the writer directed: then, as she speaks, let the stream of English rise out of the elusive context and enhance the mythic undertone. About fifteen seconds in, the original voice should begin to fade as a proxy is potted up to speak for her. This is how the listener would be made to know, by the first voice being absorbed into the second, that it was somewhere far away.

  There were no men in the Germiston camp, at least not in Margaret’s immediate range of acquaintance. Her world was confined to a dusty earthen street of stinking tents, suffocating, infested with fleas and lice. She shared the tent with two other women, all of them strangers six weeks ago. The younger was named Dort, still a child but soon to bear a child of her own. The likelihood was great that Dort would die, and the child’s death was certain. Margaret feared for Dort but also for herself, for she too was in the early stages of pregnancy. She tried not to think of this but it was no use: in the concentration camp at Germiston there was little to do but think, so she filled the hours in the hot tent with her dire thoughts. Only occasionally did she find relief in the pleasanter dreams of a happy childhood.

  On Friday the three of them sat as the wind whipped the canvas and the sun turned their inner world orange. At noon the tent had the hue of burnt amber near the roof, retaining its black void on the floor. The three of them sat perfectly still, their faces a hellish mix of orange and black, their arms a deeper red, their bodies disappearing below the waist as if they were half beings rooted in the soupy blackness. The story took hold from the moment of the proxy’s arrival and Margaret’s first words in English: If only I could die.

  If only I could die without fear or pain, if I could die peacefully before this bastard child begins to show inside me. If I could die before Poppy comes home from the war and sees me. If I could die I would, but how can I die, God, when I haven’t even begun to live yet?

  Margaret was sixteen.

  She was a year older than Dort and perhaps half the age of Kee, who sat across the tent bobbing her head in half sleep. Kee had a volatile temper and a deep crazy streak, an ugly spirit full of meanness that kept Margaret and Dort always tense and often frightened. They never knew when Kee would open her eyes and strike out at them.

  “What are you looking at?”

  “Nothing.”

  “You were staring at me while I slept.”

  “I wasn’t . . . I really wasn’t.”

  “I could kill you, do you know that? I could smother you and no one would look twice at your corpse. They’d just throw you in a hole with all the others who die.”

  Last week Kee had threatened them with a knife and Dort had reported this to one of the soldiers. Now came the first male voice, with a slender echo-chamber effect to emphasize the flashback.

  “Give me the knife, Mother.”

  “Get away from me . . . get away . . . I got no knife.”

  “Have I got to come in there and take it from you? You know what’ll happen if you make me do that.”

  Kee had gone mad after her husband had been killed in the early days of the war. So they said, but Poppy had always believed that madness was like red hair and thick bones, in your blood from the start. A wise man, her father. She wondered if he still lived.

  In the worst part of the day Margaret dreamed of home. Before the war she had lived on a farm, two thousand acres sprawling across a brown plain with hills in every direction. She lived with her father and mother, two brothers, and a younger sister they had named Cassie in honor of her mother’s mother, who had come from abroad. Margaret’s twin brother, Jan, had been taught marksmanship by their father from the age of seven and had become a great hunter, and Poppy was also teaching their younger brother, Lar, how to shoot. They planted groundnuts and maize and raised cattle and goats and pigs and chickens. The farm was remote, the sense of isolation acute to a girl growing up there. The village was half a day’s drive by wagon and their neighbors across the hills were the Smuts boys, who they saw three or four times a year. Occasionally a traveling parson would pass their way, or a trader in livestock, who’d buy for the market at Cape Town, almost a thousand miles to the south and west.

  A few suggestions for sound effects. The jingle and squeak of a harness, the labored breathing of a plow horse. The chickens as she fed them, and at night, in the middle of a July winter, the gentle sound of a fire on the hearth.

  A few scenes to bring life to a family. Just enough to make them real. To give them faces. To make a listener care across all that distance and all those years.

  We loved one another.

  She opened her eyes. If only I could die.

  If I could just die and be like all the others.

  The music came up. The writer suggested a simple theme on traditional instruments to take it to the twenty-minute station break.

  Then, suddenly, a full orchestra to open the second act: a stark change of pace as the protagonist became Margaret’s brother Jan and the scope became epic.

  The story now followed a single commando unit fighting its way across the veld. A tattered clump of men, always on the run. The war was lost but they had become guerrillas, and they still had bitter lessons to teach these arrogant people who had colonized their country.

  They ambushed a column of soldiers at Muller’s Pass. Attacked an army on the Klip River, scattering a force so superior to their small numbers that their mettle alone sent the enemy scrambling into the water in panic.

  They came at dusk, with the pickets just going out and the officers at mess, sitting on chairs under coal-oil lamps. They killed at random—officers, men, horses—then they were gone.

  Hit and run, hit and run: north out of Newcastle and doubling back to hit again. North toward Vriede. Give them hell and then, when they muster up to fight, show them nothing but the wind on the grass and the dead bodies of their brothers.

  Out on the veld, far east of what the enemy would call a massacre, Jan sat on the ground and thought of home. They couldn’t have a fire so he warmed himself with thoughts of old times. Visions danced in the pitch at his feet and he let them go on much too long. He would often look back on this night, the night of his seventeenth birthday.

  His and Margaret’s. He wondered how she was, how Lar and Cassie and Mamma were,
and how the farm was coming through the war. In the place where the grass grew darkly around his feet he saw his sister’s eyes and his heart ached. He loved his mother fiercely but it was always Margaret he thought of, because they had shared the womb and twins are like that.

  How many men had he killed in a year? The one tonight: he saw him now. Magnificent mustaches and a full head of bright red hair. Eyes wide open and then nothing: no eyes, no face, gone like a grape crushed between his fingers. Someone’s son, someone’s brother, someone’s dear husband. These were destructive thoughts, the kind of soul-twisting stuff he’d steeled himself so well against. In thoughts of death he again thought of home. He wondered if his mother had yet been told of Poppy’s death, and this turned his mind to things that troubled him more. He knew the enemy was scorching the earth, a last-ditch campaign to root out the commandos and crush the resistance. It had begun last fall, in March or April, and from the first he had struggled to put it out of his mind. Poppy had told him on the very day he’d been killed: don’t be affected by it, this is still a civilized army we’re fighting, they won’t dare make war on women and children.

  Now they were up, hours before the dawn, trekking toward Standerton. He knew the country well for a farm boy who had never, in his first fifteen years, gone more than twenty miles from home. He knew that the hard-packed road to the left would take him to Johannesburg, the great city on the veld that had once filled his dreams with wonder. He wanted none of it now: he wanted only peace, and a chance to live out his days on the land where he’d been born.

  They skirmished with a small party south of Standerton and lost three men. Their ranks had been shredded by their constant marauding, by death and defection. Just before dawn two more men walked away and at sunup only five remained. An angry argument broke out as to direction and tactics, and most went east into Swaziland, a small country, supposedly neutral, where they might regroup and gain time to figure out what to do next.

  Jan went alone now. His war was over—never again will I fire a gun in anger, he thought. He followed a dry river bottom toward Nylstroom, a three-day trek. Another half day east to the farm. He felt the queerest mix of excitement and fear as he trekked along the river and crossed, sometime after nightfall, at the wooden bridge. Off in the distance he saw the glow of a burning house. The stench of death was all around him. In the morning he saw, strewn along the road and scattered in the fields, the bloated corpses of many cattle and sheep. Houses and crops burned to the ground. Nothing left standing, nothing left alive. Goats and pigs shot and left to rot where they fell. Chickens scattergunned in whole flocks: whatever couldn’t be eaten or carried, destroyed. A barn half burned, doused by yesterday’s rain. The scorched bodies of two horses and a mule, and the soggy remains of the hay room sagging like uncut sorghum into the earth. Tack thrown about: what had not been taken, chopped apart with axes or doused with oil and set afire. A dog beheaded, a child’s pet, its body riddled by a dozen sabers. All this and not a person anywhere. Not a man, woman, or child, dead or alive.

  He had heard about the detention camps, they all had. Much of this talk was said to be the demoralizing tactics of the enemy, but how much of that was countertactic by commandos trying to keep their men from mass defecting? You couldn’t know until you came home and saw it yourself.

  He was now within that twenty-mile circle of his childhood, a stretch of road he’d seen a hundred times in his sleep. He knew every rise and each blade of grass, but now the land was sucked dry and stripped of everything that had given it life in his heart. He stopped at the crossroads and suddenly he wept. Covered his face with his hands and couldn’t move for a long time. He quaked at the thought of climbing that last hill . . . he who had killed a dozen men before his seventeenth birthday . . . he who had been cited for valor. He stood in the road and cringed from the hill until, finally, he forced himself to move.

  A blackened cornfield rose to his right. He stepped over the ditch and walked into it and felt the soft give of the ash earth under his boots. Not recent, he knew: not like the stuff he’d seen a few days ago. Torched last summer from the look of it, probably just as the corn was beginning to ripen for the harvest. An entire army must have come through here; he could see the swath they’d cut, the litter they’d left behind. Ration tins. Newspapers bleached white by the sun. Any number of empty cloth tobacco sacks. Soon the whole nation would be black from their fires.

  He moved on up the hill and stood at the top of it and felt the breath catch in his throat. Everything was gone—the house, the barn, the outbuildings, all burned flat with the earth. Only part of one kraal left standing where the fire hadn’t quite finished with it. A mockery, he thought. An insult. He ran screaming down the hill and kicked it to pieces.

  He sat on the ground and waited for the enemy to find him.

  This was what it had come to: years of struggle and blood, and for what? England wanted our gold mines. They wanted our diamond fields and now they’d have it all. Annexed, they called it. We’ve been annexed into their bloody empire, consumed by their greed.

  A shadow passed over the boy’s head and instinctively he cringed. But the face that looked down at him was gentle and black. Kruin, the weather-etched colored man who had worked for his father forever. Suddenly he was on his feet, sobbing into the old man’s arms.

  “Young master,” said Kruin. His voice was full of shock. This was not done in a land where races were kept in strict separation, but Kruin was overcome by the boy’s distress. He patted him gently on the shoulders and said, “Young master,” again and again.

  His mother was dead. The soldiers had done things to her that could not be talked about, and one of them shot her when she clawed his face trying to keep him from doing it to Margaret.

  Kruin struggled with the words. The little master too had been shot. They had found a gun hidden in his coat and had called him a terrorist. He was thirteen years old. But this was no longer a gentleman’s war, one of them had said. The Boers with their guerrilla tactics had brought it on themselves.

  A renegade unit, the boy thought. A bunch of rogues that made him hate them all no less. But what of Margaret and Cassie?

  Kruin knew nothing of Cassie. But Margaret . . . They had done unspeakable things to her, and perhaps they’d have killed her too. But the British regulars had come and they’d rescued Margaret and taken her away somewhere. South and west they’d gone, toward the great city Johannesburg.

  A short third act: a mix of orchestra and small instruments. A sudden realization where they had taken Margaret.

  If she lives, she must be in the camp for undesirables at Germiston.

  The camp for undesirables. Where women and children are starved and thrown into filth. Where rations are doled out according to politics. If you belonged to a man on commando, you got less to eat. Starve the children, surrender the guerrillas: that was the policy and everyone knew it.

  For two weeks he was hidden by patriots who warned him not to go there. But he did go, in a British lieutenant’s uniform stripped long ago by his comrades from a fellow who wouldn’t be needing it anymore.

  His friend had warned him. “You’re taking your life in your hands. If they look at you twice they’ll know you’re too young for that uniform. If you say more than ten words your accent will give you away.”

  But on a Friday afternoon he walked boldly into the camp, a few miles south of Johannesburg, and identified himself as Lieutenant Browning. Told the guard he had to speak with one of the Boer prisoners. Her brother had defected and was giving them intelligence on Boer activity in the north, and they needed her to help establish his reliability.

  It was easy: the camp was lax and no one questioned his story. He gave her name to a guard and was led into a street of tents whipped by swirls of dust. They stopped and the guard shook a flap until an older woman stuck her head out and cursed him in Dutch.

  “A real loony bird, that one,” said the guard, moving on. “I forgot your girl’s been m
oved. She’s been infected.”

  “Infected with what?”

  “Don’t worry, you won’t catch it if you take care. Just keep well back and don’t touch them.”

  They stopped at a barbed-wire pen in the far corner of the camp. “She’d be in here,” the guard said. “You know what she looks like?”

  “I’ll find her.”

  He took down the wire gate and walked into the kraal. Scores of women and children sat on the bare earth. Gaunt faces, eyes beyond desperation. This was where they were put when they were dying.

  “Margaret.”

  She raised her head. Stared at him but didn’t seem to see. The child at her breast was shriveled and splotchy and so was she. Her hair had begun to shed and her arms and face were covered with a rash that anyone who’d been in the army knew on sight. Syphilis.

  He had a sudden impulse to snatch the bastard infant and smash its brains out. He kneeled and touched her arm. “Oh my God, Margaret!”

  She pulled away. “You mustn’t touch me, Jan.”

  They talked but he was dismayed at how little they had to say. Too much of what they’d shared was gone from their lives: the present was too cruel and to talk of happy times was beyond his endurance. Soon she too would be gone. There was no use denying it, she’d be dead in a week. No use lying, no use living, and yet, in their last moments, he found something to live for. He made her a pledge. “I swear I will kill them for what they’ve done. I promise I will never stop killing them.”