Priest and servant wandered among the fallen people, men, women and children tumbled into heaps or sprawled alone. Blanchaille noticed the remnants of clothing, several old shoes, a petticoat and even an old kitchen chair scattered about. Most of the people had been shot recently for they were warm still and bled profusely. He’d never realised how much blood the human body could contain and how the violent perforations of heavy, close-range fire will make the blood gush and spread. And then, stranger still, there were others who showed no signs of blood, or wounds, not even a single puncture. But there was blood enough, soaking into the dust, making a pungent sticky mud which Blanchaille and Joyce stirred up still further with their feet, though they tried to be as careful as possible. The policemen from their vantage points sighted down their rifles.
‘If we pick them up together that will be easier,’ Blanchaille said.
‘Do your own work yourself,’ Joyce retorted.
Blanchaille began lifting the body of a young man, seizing his left arm and his right leg and carrying him across the stoep, hearing the blood drip as he shuffled across the open space. The man was a terrible weight. ‘I cannot do it myself, nor can you. We must help one another.’
Joyce didn’t even bother to look at him. She grabbed hold of the ankle of a plump woman with a gaping wound in her chest and simply dragged her across the ground in a slew of pebbles and dust. Blanchaille heard the woman’s head bang on the edge of the wooden stoep as she hauled her on to the bare boards.
‘Heads all the same way!’ Schlagter yelled.
After that Blanchaille followed Joyce’s example, seized a leg or an arm and turning his head away hauled the body to the stoep. Only the children he carried.
It was backbreaking labour and eventually Blanchaille could stand it no longer and went to Schlagter. ‘There are so many, this is going to take a long time.
‘Well, get on with it then.’
‘Perhaps we could have some help?’ Desperation made Blanchaille bold.
Schlagter shook his head. ‘My men are on watch.’
‘Watching for what? These people are dead,’ Blanchaille said.
The Colonel smiled. ‘When you’ve been in the police force as long as I have, you’ll learn to be very careful before jumping to conclusions. These people may look like they’re dead, I grant you that, but how do we know that some of them aren’t pretending? Lying low? They’re a sly lot these township people, I can tell you that from the years of working with them. What happens if some of them are just waiting until I order my men to put their guns down and go and start carrying the bodies? Then they jump up and attack! No man, I’m not taking any bloody chances.’
‘These people are dead,’ Blanchaille insisted.
‘Says you! I’m in charge here and I’ll decide who’s dead or not.’
Blanchaille went back to work.
‘We will never escape,’ Joyce snapped at him bitterly.
‘Why should they want to hold us? Once this is finished we’ll be out of here.’
‘You think there aren’t other townships, other bodies? They’ll take us with them. Or perhaps they’ll shoot us.’
She spat, a globule of moisture in the dust. What an odd collection of belongings littered the killing ground: there were quantities of shoes in different sizes and colours, some matching pairs as well as abandoned single shoes; there was a baby’s pushchair, rusted, in blue leather, but still usable; there was, besides, a petticoat touchingly embroidered with pink lace, pink lace finely worked; a pair of spectacles with one lens smashed; a set of dentures, the teeth clicked shut, a bizarre solitary expression of naked obstinacy, the teeth presented an air of invulnerability which reminded him of that unyielding almost jaunty bravado that skeletons wear; and then, somehow most touchingly of all, there was the up-ended kitchen chair lying on its side as if someone had leapt from it only minutes before and left in a hurry. These small domestic details were more sad, and somehow more vocal, than the torn, shapeless bodies. The work was very hard. Joyce continued to drag the bodies to the stoep. He lifted some of them despite the strain and his aching muscles but he was now moving very slowly. Things changed when he came across a mother and child killed by a single bullet. The child was strapped to its mother’s back in a red and blue blanket, tightly knotted. Their combined weight was too much for him to lift and he was forced, reluctantly, to try and separate the bodies but their blood had soaked the blanket and the knots would not budge. His hands slipped and reddened. With a snort of impatience Joyce came over and seized the mother’s hands. He took her feet and between them they carried the bodies to the stoep. Joyce would have laid the mother out, face down, with the baby above but Blanchaille was revolted by the unnaturalness of this and gently turned the woman on her side so it looked as if mother and child were curled up asleep.
Perhaps this sign of gentleness softened Joyce, for she took up the next body with a brisk nod at Blanchaille, indicating that from now on they would clear the field together. Hoping this was the beginning of better relations, Blanchaille set the chair back on its feet, as if it would preside, become a witness, over their business. Joyce seemed to understand and approve of this gesture for there is always some comfort in extreme situations in the restoration of an even temporary normality. In the course of his work Blanchaille learnt something of bullet wounds. Learnt how the entry point may be smooth, how the speeding bullet may draw threads of clothing with it into the wound and the bullet, often encountering no obstacle on its passage through the body, burst out with ugly force from shoulder or neck. Or it might take a wildly eccentric course through the inner organs rebounding off bone to emerge in unexpected places, anything up to a foot above or below the point of entry. Head wounds could be particularly severe, seen from behind.
He went to Colonel Schlagter. ‘You said that these people had been attacking your men.’
Schlagter eyed him warily, ‘Well?’
‘A lot of them have been shot in the back.’
‘Christ man, what’s that got to do with it?’
‘Well it looks like they were running away.’
Schlagter shook his head. He laughed grimly. ‘Front, sides, back — what the hell does it matter? Look, you’ve never been under attack. Let me tell you that when you’re being attacked you don’t stop to ask what direction the people are running in. Anyway, like I told you, they’re a crafty lot. I mean for all you know some of them turned round and were running at us backwards. Have you thought of that?’
Blanchaille admitted that he had not.
When at last all the corpses were laid out on the long wooden veranda in front of the police station and an armed guard posted, ‘just in case’, Schlagter came over and thanked them for their work. ‘You have been an indispensable help. You have served your country. All these people you see lying here will now be counted and photographed and their relatives will be brought to identify them, and afterwards they will be allowed to reclaim the members of their families. This is a strict procedure because the enemies of our country like nothing better than to inflate the figures of those killed and to claim that all sorts of people have been killed when they know this is a lie and a slander.’
The armed police were stood down and relaxed visibly. The Saracens left. Schlagter directed Blanchaille and Joyce to a stand-tap behind the police station building and asked them if they’d like to wash their hands.
Joyce washed first, holding her feet under the tap and then scrubbing ferociously at the blood stains on her white dress, folding handfuls of gravel into the material and rubbing it harshly, catching the water in a great scoop of her skirt like a prospector panning for gold and in this way she managed to reduce the vividness of the blood marks, but the stains remained.