People of Heaven

by Beverley Harper

  Despite the rigid routine of rollcall, security was surprisingly lax. Joe quickly realised that his best chance of escaping was from the road-building gangs who worked outside the camp. The Germans were undermanned. Road gangs usually numbered around 400 men and they were never controlled by more than eight guards. When one of the prisoners announced he was going, the others tried to create a diversion. The Germans were fairly relaxed about it. Many tried to escape. As far as Joe knew, only one had succeeded. The trouble was the arid terrain. There was simply nowhere to hide.

  Joe had seen one man, desperate to get away, break into a run when the guard told him to stop. He was shot in the back. The Germans left him there, a gruesome reminder to others. Those caught trying to escape were punished by two weeks’ isolation, on a diet of bread and water. If conditions in the camp were unbearable, the cramped outdoor lock-up was worse. At least in the company of others, Joe knew he was not alone. However, the prospect of solitary confinement never prevented him from trying to get away. And he’d tried, God how he’d tried. One time he remained at large for two weeks. On that occasion he’d been plain lucky. The snow was falling so heavily it was thirty minutes before his absence was discovered. They tracked him down though. The French peasant farmer who had hidden him had been shot. Poor bastard!

  Towards the end of summer last year, rumours began to circulate around the camp. There were always rumours but these, coupled with the behaviour of the guards who seemed more keyed up than usual, alerted the prisoners that something big was happening. ‘Have you heard?’ one man said to Joe. ‘Paris has fallen. The Germans are on the run.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I heard two guards discussing it.’

  By then Joe was too weak to care very much but when, the next morning, everyone in camp was rounded up and told they were being moved to another prison he saw this as one last chance to get away. They left the camp an hour later. They walked two abreast, the strong helping the weak. Joe waited until the guards were busy elsewhere then simply walked off the road. The command to stop was immediate but he ignored it. He was desperate to get away. Death was preferable to the half-life at camp. That’s when he’d been shot in the arm. His right arm exploded in numbing pain before the impact registered.

  He truly thought they would kill him. He stood his ground, holding on to his shattered arm, expecting another bullet. Instead, he was roughly bundled back into line and the march continued. They marched for two days. No-one had the slightest idea where they were going. More rumours. ‘Austria. Germany.’ Speculation laced with suspicion and dread. The Germans kept up a cracking pace, not giving the men any chance to rest. Then, after two days, they reached another camp. This one was better fortified and had more guards. The ordeal of getting there was over but their captors, perhaps out of bitterness or anger over the direction the war had taken, turned against them and made no effort to accommodate the newcomers. They had to find their own places to sleep in the already overcrowded buildings. They had to fight, like ravenous dogs, for every morsel of food.

  Joe received no medical attention for his arm. The bastard Germans left the bullet there, hoping he would die of gangrene. But he didn’t die, much as he would have liked to.

  The war ended and the Germans went away. Rumours had been circulating for several days that it was only a matter of hours. The prisoners went to sleep one night in their miserable huts and woke to find their captors gone. They left behind the sick and dying. Joe was among them. The camp gates were open, he was free to go, but he didn’t have the strength.

  The following day, as the retching, pale-faced Americans picked their way through the bloated, flyblown bodies of dead prisoners, they found Joe. Fever and dysentery had him hovering on the very edge of life. They moved him to a hospital in Paris. A French doctor dug the bullet out and told him that if it had been left for just one more day the gangrene poisoning would have been irreversible. Joe could have told the doctor that. Instead, he asked how long it would be before he could use his arm.

  ‘You’ll never get full use back,’ the doctor said. ‘You’re lucky to have any mobility at all.’

  Joe had shut his eyes, telling the doctor to ‘sod off’.

  Nurses set to work on his body, clearing up the scabies and hair lice, curing the debilitating dysentery which had him bent double with pain and constantly soiling himself, cleaning out the ulcers which ate away at his flesh, washing away the grime and stench of three years in a prisoner-of-war camp. They catered for his every need and, with the good food and medication, his wasted body began to respond. The doctors said how delighted they were with his progress but their eyes could not hide the pity, or sometimes disgust, at what his body had become.

  When he was well enough, he was sent to a rehabilitation hospital in London. There, among amputees, paraplegics, burn victims and others, psychiatrists tried to heal Joe’s psyche. They asked questions and wrote down the answers. They placed broken puzzles in front of him and told him to put them back together again. They showed him ink blobs and asked him what he saw in them. They drugged him or hypnotised him and then probed his subconscious – sessions which invariably left Joe weak with emotion and fear.

  When they had no more questions or puzzles, they left him to the mercy of the generals. Joe had made a dozen attempts to escape. The generals wanted details. ‘Why, for Christ’s sake?’ Joe railed, not willing to relive the memories. ‘What good can it possibly do now? All I did was walk off.’ But the generals persisted and wrote down his answers. Joe knew they were just keeping busy, reluctant to let go of their status and return to the mundane existence they led before war put authority at their disposal.

  At last he was free of them. Joe assumed that someone would have let Claire know he was alive. But because he moved from one hospital to another, her letters, if she’d written any, did not reach him. Joe didn’t care. Filled with a sense of loss for the three years stolen from his life, he went looking for the women he had known before he’d been shot down.

  The madness which had affected everyone had, just as quickly, disappeared. The willing women had married their wartime sweethearts or returned to their husbands. Joe found it amusing that many a returning hero must have asked where on earth their loving and faithful little wife had learned such things. He wondered if Claire had remained faithful and found that whether she had or hadn’t didn’t really bother him.

  Joe did manage to meet up with one of the women he had known before. He wined and dined her and took her to bed. That was when he discovered that he couldn’t get it up. The woman was understanding, patient and very skilled. But Joe still couldn’t get it up.

  Five months after the war ended, and released from active duty with the rank of Flight Lieutenant, Joe thought it was time to go home. The doctors, psychiatrists and generals had finished with him, the fun of the war days was over. Although the beer still tasted good, whisky was better.

  So here he was. Joe King. A good deal thinner, a whole lot older, a hell of a lot wiser with a liking for whisky he hadn’t known before. ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ he thought sardonically, ‘I bring you Joe King – pilot, escapee, emotionally wrecked and riding the fucking milk train.’

  He was thirty-one years old and going home to a wife and son he did not know. Going home to a farm he’d forgotten how to work. The young man who had left, the one who was planning to make a difference to the war, was returning covered in nothing more than the lingering stink of three years in prison camp and the scars of unsuccessful escape attempts.

  Joe shifted his position on the hard seat. He was sitting on the bones of his arse, quite literally, and it hurt. He rummaged in the large pocket of his greatcoat and brought out a flask of whisky, unscrewing the lid and tipping it back. He hardly tasted it. It was the sting and the hot feeling in his belly he was after. ‘Should have shaved,’ he thought.

  South Africa did not notice his return. The tickertape, the celebrations, the hero-worshipping were finished. Not t
hat it bothered him. What did he have to boast about? Still, it would have been nice to see it. Instead of that, he’d disembarked in Durban, hoisted his kit bag and walked down Point Road towards the station. The milk train left Durban for Zululand around two in the morning. No-one knew he was coming. Good! That was how he liked it. ‘Still,’ he thought again, rubbing his hand over his chin, ‘I should have shaved.’

  It crossed Joe’s mind that he should have let Claire know he was coming. And his brothers. How had they fared? Had they all survived? Joe knew, from a letter Claire sent early in the war, that his father had died. He had read the news with total disinterest. Old man King might have divided his farm equally between his sons and he would have left each with a sizeable inheritance, but he had been a domineering and cruel father. Joe hated the old bastard.

  One of his brothers, Colin, had lost both legs in a landmine explosion within a month of going into action. ‘How would that be?’ he wondered dispassionately. ‘To go marching gloriously off to war one minute and be dragged back on stumps the next?’

  It was as black as pitch outside. Joe lit a cigarette and closed his eyes. He wondered what Claire looked like now. Without the photograph to jog his memory, he couldn’t remember her face. He remembered other things – her tinkling laugh, her long, strong legs, her breasts. He remembered she had large grey eyes and blonde hair. She hated people who drank too much, he could recall that. ‘Hard luck,’ he thought callously. ‘She’ll have to get used to it.’ Then his thoughts mellowed. She had the softest lips he had ever known. Why couldn’t he put it all together to make a whole picture? What was it going to be like, to be with one woman again? Joe thought long and hard about that. He tried to remember how she looked, all spread out under him, wide open for him to take. But although he found he could recall that part of his wife quite clearly, nothing stirred between his legs. Down there, he was dead. The doctors said it would come back.

  He thought about UBejane, his farm. When Kingsway, the original estate, had been split four ways Colin had retained the name for his share. One of the other brothers named his estate Kingsmead while the other opted for Kingston. Joe, much to his father’s ire, broke with the name King by calling his farm UBejane Estate, the Zulu word for the black rhinoceros which once roamed freely in Zululand. He thought the name appropriate in more ways than one since uBejane, translated into English, means ‘the vicious one’, which summed up his father rather well.

  Now, Joe was wondering how run-down the farm would be. Five years was a long time for any business to be without a leader. Would the farm even be solvent? A woman couldn’t run a sugar plantation. Claire would have done her best but it wasn’t work for a woman. She’d never have controlled the bloody Pondos for starters. Dirty buggers. Joe wondered if the farm still employed them, those savages from Pondoland down south, who would shit where they stood and seldom bothered to wash. A lady shouldn’t have to come into contact with them. And the Indians. They’d rob a man blind as soon as he turned his back. ‘Christ!’ Joe thought tiredly, as the day-to-day problems of sugarcane farming came back to him. ‘I don’t want this any more.’

  Mechanical breakdowns, rains that didn’t come or, if they did, came usually at the wrong time. Fluctuating prices, arguments between the native cutters and their indunas that made squabbling children look like adults, the black fungus disease smut, which affected young plant cane. And that was just on the sugar side. A large portion of the estate ran cattle, with all their attendant problems: innumerable diseases, stillbirths, fences that needed repair, fodder crops to be sown, not enough rain, too much rain. The cattle were probably breeding at will and not, as Joe had them before he left, over a two-month period. He would need at least a year to put that right. And the cane? He tried to remember. ‘Let’s see, it’s October. The mills close in December. So it’s all happening now. If we miss this season we can’t cut again until April.’

  With a start, Joe realised how different his life would be from now on. He’d run wild for those first two years in England. Then he’d been treated like a wild thing for the next three. Claire was a lady. He’d have to treat her like one. He hadn’t treated a woman like anything but a whore for five years. Claire liked all the little niceties. Opening doors for her, pulling out her chair, asking if she’d slept well or had a good day. Sex with Claire was a case of get on, get in and get off. He had been innocent and inexperienced before he left. It wasn’t going to be good enough now. He wondered, with some amusement, what Claire’s reaction would be.

  And Michael, his son. Joe had never had much contact with children. Who did he look like? Claire had written of course, recording all the milestones, trying to involve Joe in their son’s progress. It hadn’t been terribly relevant all those miles away. In fact, after a while he stopped reading her letters. Now he was coming face to face with his family. His family. His wife and the child they had created between them. His seed in her warm, moist pussy. Only he couldn’t call it a pussy. It was ‘down there’, or ‘down below’. That was how Claire referred to herself.

  Did he want this? Did he want to go home and try to pretend that nothing had changed? Because he had changed. He had changed and changed again. From idealism to recklessness. And from recklessness to hopelessness. Could he now dredge back idealism? Was it possible to go from cynic to optimist? Joe opened his eyes and sneered at his reflection. The boy had gone. There was no trace of him. ‘Dear God,’ he thought, softening a little. ‘Poor Claire.’

  Sighing, Joe rose, steadied himself with his good arm, and let himself out of the compartment. The toilet was at the end of the carriage and he needed to pee. Lurching at the erratic rocking, Joe made his way slowly down the passageway. All but one other compartment were empty. The black man who sat three compartments from Joe took no notice as Joe went past. In fact, he appeared to be in a trance.

  Joe had frowned in annoyance when the African had boarded the train. Not that the African shouldn’t have been on the train – apartheid was being bandied about even before the war started but, as far as Joe was aware, laws to prevent Africans from travelling in the same carriage as whites had not been brought in yet. However, very few of them did it. They appeared to be content to travel third class, with their own kind. At least this one was a Zulu and not a stinking Pondo. He wore the uniform of a sergeant in the Natal Mounted Rifles. Joe hadn’t known that Africans had joined up. Oh sure, something called the NMC, the Native Military Corps, had been established. Military Corps! What a bloody joke. Fancy name for training the kaffirs as stretcher bearers. Joe also noticed the medal ribbons on the Zulu’s chest. That rankled. It rubbed in the fact that while Joe had sat on his backside in a filthy prisoner-of-war camp for most of the war, this cheeky kaffir was out getting decorated.

  Joe wondered what he’d done to get them.

  Wilson Mpande was not in a trance. His eyes were open and he stared, unseeing, dead ahead. The vision was being played inside his head where no-one else could see. Wilson was watching the last few years of his life, trying to make sense of them. It was a trick his father had taught him many years before. ‘Concentrate on something close to you. It is the way to find peace when anger clouds your judgment,’ his father had said. And Wilson Mpande was very, very angry.

  Nothing had changed. In fact, it had grown worse. ‘I think you mean third class,’ the clerk said when Wilson asked for a first-class ticket.

  ‘No.’

  The white railway employee had gaped at him, taking in the uniform and ribbons. ‘What they give you those for, man? Polishing boots?’

  Wilson swallowed an angry retort, remembering he was back in the land of racial prejudice. ‘Bravery,’ he said briefly.

  The clerk shrugged insultingly and pushed a ticket under the grille. ‘Must have been a very savage boot,’ he commented, sniggering. He stared at Wilson for a moment. ‘A Zulu who thinks he’s a white man,’ he mused finally. ‘When the sons of Blood River still live among you.’

  It had been a calcu
lated insult and it hit home. It took a very brave man to speak like that of the 3000 warriors who, at King Dingane’s bidding, lost their lives without killing a single white man at the battle known as Blood River. A very brave man, or one who spoke from behind the safety of a mesh grille. Wilson made no comment, however, and climbed aboard the train. A porter, a Xhosa from down south by the look of him, stopped Wilson. ‘Wrong carriage,’ he said.

  The porter’s eyebrows rose when Wilson showed him his ticket. ‘May I pass?’ he asked calmly.

  The porter stepped aside, but he had not finished with Wilson. He followed him down the corridor and into the compartment. ‘Why are you doing this? It will bring trouble.’

  ‘If I can pay for it there is no reason why I cannot sit here.’

  ‘Why do you wear that uniform, man? Where did you steal it? You are trying to draw attention to yourself. It will bring trouble I tell you.’

  ‘The uniform is mine.’ Wilson sat down.

  The porter hovered at the doorway. ‘You fought with the white men!’ His expression showed that he found the concept disgusting.

  Wilson had had enough. Who was this Xhosa dog to question a Zulu? With an effort, he controlled his reaction. ‘A Zulu gives no mercy and expects none in return,’ he said stiffly. ‘But I would not expect a Xhosa to understand such things. We have fought the white man in the past, we have won and we have lost. We may fight them again one day. It is what is in our hearts that matters. That is the Zulu way.’ He looked the porter up and down. ‘You are not a Zulu. Do not comment on things about which you know nothing.’

  The porter smiled but it was not a friendly gesture. ‘Hau, arrogant Zulu! You pride yourself on your warrior skills and you boast that a Zulu quickly flares up and just as quickly forgives. Tell that to the white man. You might have fought for him but if whites are on the train you will be asked to leave the carriage. You may be a Zulu . . .’ he sneered the word, ‘but do not think you are good enough to share their carriages.’