stuck his index finger into his mouth like a toothbrush and rubbed his teeth and gums, took more water and spat and spat.
‘Run, Granpa Chook! Run, man, run!’ I screamed up into the tree.
But Granpa Chook had done enough running for one old Kaffir chicken. Sitting squawking up there amongst the purple jacaranda blossom he sounded as though he was laughing his scraggy old head off.
‘Please run, Granpa Chook, please, please run! The bastard will kill you!’ I screamed, oblivious to the shit on my face and in my hair.
Granpa Chook hopped onto a lower branch and then, to my horror, flew onto my shoulder and gave my ear one of his famous Granpa Chook kisses. I grabbed him, intending to throw him on his way, but as I lifted him from my shoulder there was an explosion of feathers in my face. Granpa Chook let out a fearful squawk as he was blasted from my hands and fell to the ground. The Judge stood a few feet away, his empty catapult dangling in his left hand.
‘Run, Granpa Chook, run for your life!’ I pleaded
Granpa Chook tried to get up from where he had landed but the stone from the Judge’s powerful catapult had broken his ribcage. He made several more attempts, each time falling back onto his wing. I think he knew it was useless. After a while he just sat there, looked up at me and said, ‘Squawk!’
Danie Coetzee ran over and grabbed Granpa Chook. I managed to kick him once, but then he held Granpa Chook triumphantly upside down by his legs. Granpa Chook beat his wings furiously, the pain must have been terrible. Quite suddenly he stopped and I thought he must be dead. But then I saw his bright, beady eye trying to find me from his upside down position.
‘No blerrie Kaffir chicken shits on me! Hang him up by the legs next to Pisskop,’ the Judge commanded. He was still doing little dry spits and wiping his mouth on the back of his hand. Two stormtroopers slung a piece of rope over a branch and Granpa Chook soon hung upside down just beyond my reach and at about the level of my head.
‘Please, sir. I will do anything! Anything you ever ask! Anything you want! Please don’t kill Granpa Chook!’
The Judge, his eyes cruel, bent down and looked into my face. ‘Now we’ll see who’ll cry,’ he grinned.
I was seized by panic. ‘Kill me!’ I begged. ‘Please kill me. But don’t kill Granpa Chook!’
The Judge butted me on the forehead with the heel of his hand and my head slammed against the trunk of the jacaranda, leaving me dazed. ‘Ag, shit!’ he exclaimed, some of the shit on my face had rubbed off onto his hand. Then he wiped his hand in my hair once again.
‘You’re shit and your fuckin’ Kaffir chicken is shit. Did you see what he did to me? Me, Jaapie Botha! That fuckin’ chicken shit in my mouth!’
Still dazed, I tried another desperate tack. ‘I’ll tell Mevrou!’ I shouted, trying to sound threatening.
‘
I sloughed the last of my camouflage. ‘I’ll tell Mr Stoffel about how I did your arithmetic for you!’ I screamed at the Judge.
I heard the soft ‘pfflifft’ of his catapult at the same time as I felt the stone slam into my stomach. The pain was terrible, it seemed to be happening in slow motion as though the stone had a life of its own, gnawing at my gut, burning and squirming through my intestines and into my back. A vicious, determined, alive, eyeless thing. The shock to my system was enormous, my eyes bugged out of my head and my tongue poked out in involuntary surprise.
‘Fire!’ A series of dull plops tore into the fragile bones of Granpa Chook’s breast. The first stones had set the rope swinging, but the stormtroopers were expert shots and their second shots also tore into the funny old body of that upside-down chicken. Spots of blood dropped into the dry dust and among the fallen jacaranda blossoms, the rope swinging so that no two drops landed in the same place. Granpa Chook, the toughest damn chicken in the whole world, was dead.
A tiny feather drifted towards me, it was one of the soft downy ones which grew at the very top of Granpa Chook’s scrawny legs. It stuck to a piece of shit in my face. The Judge walked over and untied the rope from around my waist and I dropped to my haunches at his feet. He placed his bare foot on my shoulder.
‘What are you, Englishman?’
‘Dog shit, sir.’
‘Look at me when you say it!’ he barked.
Slowly I looked up at the giant with his foot resting on my shoulder. High above him I could see a milky moon hanging in the afternoon sky. We had got so close, Granpa Chook and I had got so close to making it through to the end, just a few more hours.
I spat at him, ‘You’re dog shit! Your ma is a whore!’
He pushed violently downwards with his foot, sending me sprawling. Then he let out a howl, a mixture of anger and anguish. ‘Why don’t you cry, you fucking bastard!’ he sobbed and started to kick blindly at me.
The stormtroopers rushed to restrain him, pulling him from me. The Judge allowed himself to be led away and we were left alone behind the shit houses under a white moon set in a flawless blue sky.
I untied the broken body of Granpa Chook and we sat under the jacaranda tree and I stroked his bloody feathers. No more gentle African dawn folding back the night, no more early cock-a-doodle-doo to tell me you are there, my loved and faithful chicken friend. Who will peck my ear? Who will be my friend? I sobbed and sobbed and sobbed. The great drought was over, the inside man was out, the rains had come to Zululand.
After a long, long while, when the crying was all out of me and the loneliness bird had entered to build a nest of stones in the hollow place inside of me, I carried Granpa Chook to the orchard and laid him in the place I had made for him to keep him from the rain. Then I climbed through the window into the dormitory to fetch my new red jumper, the one my mother had knitted in the concentration camp and Nanny had fixed.
I gathered as many rocks as I could find and then I pulled my red jumper over Granpa Chook’s body, his wings poked out of the arm holes and his long neck stuck out of the head part and his feet poked out of the bottom.
He looked the best I’d ever seen him. I took the jam tin I had used for his water, and in about five minutes, I’d collected twenty little green grasshoppers, which are the very best chicken scoff there is. I placed the tin beside his body so that he’d have a special treat on the way to heaven. Finally I covered his body with the stones.
South Africa’s first victim in the war against Adolf Hitler was safe as last.
I sat there on my haunches beside the pile of stones as the afternoon sun began to set. Now the sun was passing beyond Zululand, even past the land of the Swazi and now it leaves the Shangaan and the royal kraal of Modjadji, the rain queen, to be cooled in the great, dark water beyond.
The first bell for supper rang and I moved to the tap and began to wash the blood and shit from my hands and face and hair.
Deep inside me the loneliness bird sat on its crude stone nest and laid a large and very heavy stone egg.
The bell for supper sounded. The last supper. Everything comes to an end. Tomorrow I would be going home for Christmas and Nanny. Wonderful, soft, warm Nanny.
But life doesn’t work that way. I, most of all, should have known this. At supper Boetie Van der Merwe told me Mevrou wanted to see me in the dispensary. ‘If you tell about this afternoon, we’ll kill you,’ he hissed. I wasn’t frightened, I knew a proper ending when I saw one.
Only hours remained before my liberation, nothing the Judge, Mevrou and, for the moment anyway, Adolf Hitler could do would alter that. Soon I would be returning to my quiet backwater.
I didn’t know then that what seemed like the end was only the beginning. All children are flotsam driven by the ebb and flow of adult lives. Unbeknownst to me the tide had turned and I was being swept out to sea.
FOUR
