Embrace by Mark Behr

Commissar Mervyn prodded Father in his back: ‘Come on, you filthy Jews, you’re going to have a shower.’ ‘Mervy, you must call us Hymies.’
    ‘Shut up, you Jewish bitch,’ he retorted; and my mother was pushed so that she stumbled from the path into the long grass.
    Into the gas-chamber at gunpoint; the metal door latched behind us; my mother grasped my father by the chest and wept: ‘This is our end, my husband! Oh, our poor son!’
    Outside, the taps moan as the commissars turn on the gas: ‘Shhhh, shhhhhh, shhhhhhhhh.’
    Soon, no longer able to hold our breaths, we are coughing and sputtering. Increasingly cruel laughter permeates the chamber where we still attempt to huddle together. We paw at our own throats, clawing against the fire rushing into our lungs. The laughs turn to vicious howling as our family’s embrace unravels into flailing spasms of slow and dramatic death.
    Then we change roles.
     
13
     
    During the dry season, on an afternoon when there was spite from the sun veiling the world in a thousand gyrating aquarelles, Bok took me to a sandbank in the White Umfolozi to fire my first shot with a revolver. Dressed in only khaki shorts, he steered his Land Rover along the track with me and Bokkie on the front seat beside him while Chaka and Suz panted in the back. I may have chattered about the week past when he had been away in the bush darting white rhino to be transported to other reserves.
    Bok pulled the vehicle deep beneath the branches of a fig, close to one of the few pools that retained its water even when the bush and veld had become a patchwork of browns and yellows as far asthe human eye could see. The previous time we were close to there, the river had been a churning torrent of muddy water dragging trees and animal carcasses along the angry route we had come to witness. Then Bok had just returned from trail with tourists after bang holed up for three days in the Ncoki caves, cut off from Mpila by the rains. From miles away we heard the roar. Bok, Bokkie, me, with Bernice and Lena back from boarding school, sat in the vehicle, agog at the volume, the movement, the speed that turned the spectacle before us to terror. Now it was an entirely different landscape we entered. At my request, Bok again told of an earlier flood — in the years we were still in Mkuzi — when two game rangers on an inflated tyre tube had seen a Zambezi shark this high up the river.
    Bokkie wanted to be in the shade. Above us in the sycamore fig’s branches, hadidas had built a nest on a shaggy clump of flood debris. Cautioned by the dogs’ erect ears, we looked upstream. Figures as if caught in dancing mirrors, a herd of zebra and wildebeest stooped to drink from another pool in the distance. Bok said we’d have to wait. He didn’t want to scare off the game with shots. Bokkie spread a blanket for us to sit where she would soon lie down to read. She took from the canvas shoulder-bag a beer for her and Bok to share and a Tupperware bottle filled with red Kool-Aid for me.
    I climbed the fig’s trunk. Sliding on my bum, I approached the nest. From below Bok told me to keep a reasonable distance, particularly if there were eggs or hatchlings.
    The game slowly retreated from the pool. Bok said we could go. He instructed Chaka and Suz to stay and they found their resting places in the grass beside the blanket. With the revolver in his holster and an empty five-gallon jerry, we moved into the riverbed. In both hands I carried a small red and black box of ammunition. Behind us, Bokkie Settled down on her stomach, chin resting on a pillow, her Mills and Boon out before her.
    Bok’s eyes scanned the riverbanks. Bokkie and the dogs under thefig disappeared behind us. We halted across from a rocky outcrop rising above the bank on the other side.
    ‘Can I take these out, Bok?’
    ‘In a minute, Philistine. I’m going to put up the target. Stay here.’
    In the pattern of shade cast by dull-green reeds I waited,