away from the rail. Andrew shimmied behind Franco, jostling him with his elbows to face the harbour mouth, the gap between the surrounding hills.
Franco tried to copy their dance with a few wild kicks, and then he laughed at his own poor efforts. He gave up on the high kicks and, spreading his arms wide, stamped his heels to the same double beat. He stepped forward and across, thud-THUD, and back again.
“I too can dance!” Franco said to Andrew. “I dance like the Greek men. My papou, my grandfather he is Greek.” Franco seemed hardly to move. Just his heels beat down as his body rotated slowly.
Sipho looked around uneasily, wondering where Job was. He’d seen two men come out of the hatch and close it carefully for the night. So where was Job? It was usually easy to spot him: a tall man with striking looks, high cheekbones and an aquiline nose. But Job was not with the dancers. He was nowhere on the deck.
Sipho stood still, wondering how he was supposed to help. Andrew caught his eye and flicked his head towards three men dancing in front of the hatch, one of whom, a bit older than the others, called out through the clamour of singing, “Ndebele! Woza! Come join us here, Sipho!” He reached out a hand, clasped Sipho’s arm and pulled him towards the group so they could pack close.
So Sipho danced, crouching low and kicking high.
Franco slowly swivelled, stamping his heels and looking at each of the dancing men, and then at the men coiling the last of the ropes. His glance slid to Sipho’s tight group in front of the hatch, and for a second he paused. His eyes focused, through their legs, on the closed hatch and then he shifted round towards the open sea.
While Franco’s back was turned, Sipho scanned the length of the ship, searching again for Job.
Has Franco noticed Job is missing?
But Franco was looking out at where the breeze blew shadows across the bright water, and dancing with the beat until a prisoner of war knocked his heel against Franco’s rifle. It slipped sideways, and another prisoner of war made a grab to save it from dropping overboard. Franco panicked. Was he mad? Fraternising with POWs?
He snatched back his rifle and stood at attention. In an instant he changed back into a guard, and they were all just prisoners of war once more.
“Fall into line!” Franco ordered. “On to the barge! March!” And he led the way down the gangplank.
Someone nudged Sipho’s elbow and there was Job grinning at him, with that glint, again, in his eye.
“Time to go and watch a strange sunset, Sipho,” Job said.
The prisoners of war filed down the gangplank to the flat barge where Franco was waiting. As Job stepped on to the barge, Franco’s eyes were watching him thoughtfully, and Sipho’s stomach cramped. What did Franco know? But Job stood with his feet wide apart, balancing confidently as they rode the swells towards the dock.
By the time the barge bumped against rubber tyres on the quay, Sipho’s fingers were numb from gripping the rail, his back tense as he kept it braced, expecting for endless moments a blast behind him. At the dock, the prisoners jumped ashore and swung up onto the open lorry waiting on the wharf. No one looked back at the ship.
But there was none of the usual talk as the lorry jolted through the bombed and burnt-out warehouses and lumbered up the stony road from the harbour to the prisoner-of-war camp in the desert. Job sat back, but Sipho and the other men were quiet and tense, hugging their knees and listening, waiting. They knew an explosion would bring a visit from the grim-faced military police. And who of them would survive such a visit? Would Job?
Sipho found himself counting seconds, and then minutes, the way he had done down in the gold mine when a fuse was lit. Why was it was taking so long? Something should have happened already. The desert dust boiled up beneath the lorry’s wheels, stinging the men’s eyes and clogging their nostrils.
Sipho did not notice.
He counted as the minutes stretched out, and he longed for the quiet hills of his home.
What had brought him here? It was Job, of course, the city boy who had visited their remote valley every summer for as long as he could remember, bringing his lightness with him. Job had always seemed fearless, Sipho thought, wishing he was too.
I’ve been scared every day and every night since we left South Africa, he realised. Bombs, shells, a lion and a hyena in Abyssinia were bad enough. But people – the Askaris in Abyssinia, the guards and the military police here – they frighten me the most. And maybe I’ve always been afraid.
Pictures from his childhood slipped through his mind as minutes passed. A vivid image appeared suddenly. He was a small boy in a calf pen and he was frozen with fear.
Job had been watching, he remembered.
2
A letter from the mine
South Africa, 1930s
Sipho’s father set up his milking stool beside a white cow with a spattering of brown spots across its back. “Sipho! Bring this cow’s calf to me!”
Sipho’s older brother, Mzi, was watching with a friend, a tall boy from the city, who was visiting his grandparents down the valley.
Sipho had never fetched a calf from the pen before. He sidled through the gate into the calf pen and closed it carefully. The calves were a head taller than him. They surged towards him, bumping and shoving hard against his ribs. He battled to keep his balance. The biggest calf licked at his neck with a long, urgent tongue, hoping to find something to suckle. Sipho stood rigid with fear. He was sure Mzi had never been afraid of calves.
“Baba!” he tried to yell to his father. “I can’t!” He opened his mouth and no sound came out.
Across the pen, he saw a white calf with a few brown spots – the calf his father needed.
Mzi thinks I can do this, he thought and he made his eyes focus only on that calf as he pushed through the others. When he got to it, he wrapped his arms around the calf’s neck and tugged it out of the pen to where his father sat, ready to milk the cow.
Sipho positioned the calf so that it could suckle for a few minutes on the cow’s richest milk, and then he heaved the reluctant calf away, so that his father could milk into the bucket. And he went to fetch the next calf.
His father murmured approval. His mother, who had stopped to watch, continued on her way into their homestead. Mzi and his tall friend both nodded, and the friend gave a cheerful wave with two stout sticks he was holding. Sipho glowed.
Later that day Sipho saw the tall boy using those same sticks to fight Mzi. Holding his own two sticks, Mzi was being beaten down the hill. Sipho ran towards them. He shouted in alarm and the two boys collapsed onto the grass, rocking with laughter. Sipho started to walk away, stiff with embarrassment.
“See if you can beat me, Sipho! Your brother can’t,” the tall boy called out to him with a wide grin. “Mzi, give him your sticks.”
“Here, Sipho!” Laughing, Mzi handed him the sticks. “You have to beat Job! Our family honour is at stake.”
Sipho waved the heavy sticks wildly at Job.
“That’s
