Child of the River

by Irma Joubert

  Our entire division retreated to a small station called El Alamein. It’s much smaller than our station at home so now you know. It was such a hurried operation the troops panicked and the commanders too. Now they call it the Gazala Gallop because we started at Gazala.

  General Dan Pienaar is still our commander he is very good. El Alamein is on the coast and just about 40 miles to the south lies the Qattara depression they say it’s a harsh sandy wilderness. We hold a line now from the coast up to that wilderness no one can get through anyway. But we lost a lot of ground because the Germans and Eyeties want to get to Cairo and we’re only 100 miles from Cairo now.

  We’re not fighting at all just building camouflaged shelters and having parades in the sand and digging ditches for trenches all day long. Instead of charging and overpowering them. It’s hotter than blazes here that’s why I think it’s better to fly planes.

  I saw Christine in Cairo again she’s very well and tell Ma I’m fine and I don’t know who gave old Ismail money for you again but it was definitely not me must be Father Christmas. I would have told you if it was me.

  Best wishes.

  Your brother,

  Gerbrand

  Pérsomi confronted her ma late in the afternoon. “Gerbrand told me again he’s not the one who’s giving Mr. Ismail money for me,”

  “Heavens above, Pérsomi . . .”

  “Stop saying that. I want answers. I’m fifteen.”

  Her ma pressed her lips together.

  “I know it’s my pa who’s paying the money.”

  Silence.

  “I’d like to thank him.”

  Silence.

  “It’s a lot of money. It’s just good manners.”

  “Oh heavens, child, please stop.” Her ma was almost pleading.

  “If you won’t tell me who he is, just tell me why he didn’t marry you when you got pregnant.”

  Silence.

  “Did he know about me? Did he know you were pregnant?”

  “Heavens above. Yes.”

  “Well, if he was a decent man, he would have married you.”

  “He is a decent man, Pérsomi. Heavens, child, he couldn’t marry me, or he would have.”

  Pérsomi looked up quickly. Her ma’s face had changed, become softer. Pérsomi felt tenderness well up inside her. She reached for her ma, but didn’t touch her.

  “You loved him?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Was he already married? Is that why he couldn’t marry you?”

  Silence.

  “Married men can leave their wives and marry the woman they made pregnant,” said Pérsomi.

  “He couldn’t. His wife was also . . .” She stopped.

  Pérsomi narrowed her eyes. “Also pregnant?”

  Her ma got up. “Pérsomi, stop stepping all over me with dirty feet,” she said. She turned and walked off into the veld—a thin, lonely woman in a threadbare dress and worn shoes.

  Pérsomi did some math in her head. If the man’s wife was pregnant, Freddie le Roux couldn’t be her father. Christine was his only child, and she was six years older than Pérsomi.

  “Auntie Sis, why did my ma marry a man like Lewies Pieterse?”

  “Don’t speak of your pa like that. Show some respect!” Auntie Sis scolded.

  “Why did my ma marry him?” Pérsomi insisted.

  “Your ma’s time for picking and choosing was over, Pérsomi. She didn’t have a roof over her head, she didn’t have food to eat. She was pregnant and Gerbrand was young. Lewies Pieterse was the answer. In return she looked after his children. Especially Sissie, with her falling sickness and all. Your ma was trapped, Pérsomi, she was trapped.”

  There were so many things she knew nothing about, Pérsomi thought later, on her way back to Mr. Fourie’s farm.

  So many things.

  One afternoon Pérsomi told her ma, “Come with me. I want to show you something wonderful.”

  Her ma got up from where she had been sitting at the kitchen table. “Now?” she asked.

  “Yes, come.”

  “Is it far?” her ma asked when they turned toward the mountain.

  “No, not really, and it’s lovely,” said Pérsomi.

  On a ridge some distance from the house was an enormous wild fig tree. “I hope they’re still here,” said Pérsomi as they approached. “Come and see.”

  “Look, Ma,” she whispered. “Bushveld parrots. They’re after the ripe fruit.”

  They looked up into the branches. Small birds with hooked beaks swarmed all over.

  “I see them,” her ma said softly.

  The parrots were dark on top, with green and blue undersides.

  “They’re . . . pretty,” said her ma.

  They fluttered on bright yellow wings from one fig to the next.

  “Pretty,” her ma whispered.

  Pérsomi turned her head slowly and looked at her ma. Her entire face had gone soft. Her eyes had come alive.

  “Let’s sit for a while and watch them,” she said.

  Gently they sat down among the ripe figs that had fallen. “They don’t eat the rotten ones,” her ma whispered.

  They sat, silently looking up into the tree.

  Pérsomi wanted to put her arm around her ma, or stroke her hair. But she couldn’t do it. Maybe this was what it was like to have a conversation with someone close to you.

  “Ma, everyone always wants to know where I got my name. Will you tell me?”

  “I just thought it’s a grand name,” said her ma, almost inaudibly.

  Above their heads the parrots screeched and called out, chee-chee-chee.

  “It’s the best name you could’ve given me,” she said. She kept talking softly, not wanting to spoil the moment. “No one else has a name like it.”

  “I . . . had nothing,” said her ma. She didn’t look at Pérsomi. She wasn’t looking at the parrots anymore either, but at her feet. “But I knew one day you’d be smart and pretty, because . . . he’s smart, and good-looking, see?”

  Pérsomi’s heart was thumping in her chest, in her throat.

  “And when Auntie Sis—she came to help me when it was my time—when she said, ‘Jemima, it’s a little girl,’ I just knew your name would be Pérsomi. I wanted to give you a grand name.”

  “You have a pretty name too—Jemima.”

  “Yes, I always liked it. But your pa says it’s a . . .” She fell silent.

  “Lewies Pieterse is just jealous. What does he know about anything pretty? Forget about him.”

  “Yes,” said her ma.

  The parrots twittered overhead.

  “Where did you first hear my name?”

  Her ma was silent for a long time. A ripe fruit thudded on the ground close to them. “From him,” she said at last.

  My father, Pérsomi thought breathlessly, slivers of information about my father. She kept quiet, waiting.

  “He told me about the name one evening. He came courting, just like a gentleman, in his motorcar. He’s rich. He came at night.

  “He always wore smart clothes. And he gave me a necklace, and often he brought chocolates. Then that night he told me about the play. He said everything was so beautiful, with candles and everything, and he said the man on the stage said, ‘Pérsomi, light the candle,’ and then he died. The man on the stage. ‘Pérsomi is a beautiful name, isn’t it, Jemima?’ he said. He always spoke to me like a man should speak to a girl.

  “By that time I knew I was expecting. But I couldn’t say anything.”

  Her ma was quiet for a long time. Pérsomi couldn’t let her stop talking. “Why not, Ma?”

  Her ma’s voice changed slightly. “Men, rich men, don’t like their girlfriends to be expecting.”

  Pérsomi almost said, You have to fight for your rights. A woman must be able to stand up for herself in this unfair man’s world. But she remembered her ma saying, “Pérsomi, stop stepping all over me with dirty feet,” and she remembered the lonely figure walking away acr
oss the bare veld.

  So she just nodded and said, “Yes, that’s true. And then?”

  “So I thought now I must speak, because I saw he . . .”

  Her ma just shook her head slowly from side to side.

  “You saw he loved you,” Pérsomi said softly.

  Her mother nodded.

  The smell of the fruit was all around them.

  “And then, Mama?”

  Her ma looked up. There was a deep desolation in her eyes, a loneliness like nothing Pérsomi had ever seen before.

  “Then he never came again.”

  “El Alamein is just a tiny station, even smaller than our own station in town,” Pérsomi said a week after the school had reopened.

  “If you read the papers you’d know El Alamein is an important strategic point,” Reinier said. “Do you know of the battles that have been fought there by the British and the Germans? Just yesterday I read that the Eighth Army captured more than seven thousand Germans and Italians there and—”

  “It’s still a tiny station in the middle of the desert,” Pérsomi said. “Gerbrand says so and he should know. He’s there.”

  “Bloody Red Tab,” said Reinier.

  “Oh, I thought it was his business?” Pérsomi said.

  “He’s still a Red Tab,” said Reinier.

  At the beginning of September Reinier brought a newspaper clipping to school. “Take a look at what’s going on at your tiny little station,” he said, slapping the clipping down in front of Pérsomi.

  She took her time ironing out the creases and began to read:

  During the past week Rommel launched another offensive against the strategic station El Alamein. He is estimated to have no more than 200 serviceable tanks and a few substandard Italian armored vehicles to deploy against the 700 tanks of the British Forces. It is also alleged that the Germans have very little fuel and that their food rations are almost completely depleted.

  “Poor Germans,” said Pérsomi, frowning.

  “You’re supposed to be against them,” said Reinier.

  “I’m on no one’s side,” Pérsomi said firmly. “War is a dumb game thought out by men when they became too old to play cowboys and crooks. They don’t think about the people caught up in the war.”

  “It’s a lot more than that!” Reinier cried, outraged. “There are politics involved, ideologies that—”

  “That’s what your dad says, I know. But if people are suffering because of their own ideologies, it’s dumb. Be quiet so I can read the rest.”

  “You’re impossible,” Reinier muttered.

  Allied fighter planes are constantly attacking the Axis forces,

  Pérsomi read on.

  General Montgomery had expected Rommel’s forces to advance northward to the sea and that’s why he went to great trouble to fortify the Alam el Halfa ridge—a clever strategic decision. The British 2nd Armored Brigade could therefore stop Rommel’s 2nd Panzer Division just before the ridge. On September 3 Rommel ordered a withdrawal.

  “So actually they didn’t achieve anything, except to kill a lot of people,” Pérsomi said, returning the clipping to Reinier.

  “I’ll never understand you women,” Reinier said.

  A letter was waiting for her back at the dormitory.

  EL ALAMEIN

  OCTOBER 1942

  Dear Pérsomi,

  Thank you for your letters I also get letters from Klara it’s always very nice to get news from home.

  Pérsomi we’re preparing for a major offensive that’s why I’m writing now because we’re going to be very busy. We’re going to chase the Germans and the Eyeties from El Alamein into the sea on the other side of the desert not just drive them back like at Alam el Halfa where we just stopped them. We have plenty of reinforcements and supplies now I feel certain we’re going to win because we are preparing very thoroughly it’s very good.

  This is the best time of my life because we’re all friends no matter what language we speak and we have lots of fun. Tell Ma as well.

  Sometimes we get a pass then we go to Cairo then I sometimes see Christine. I saw her in September when we were in Cairo but I don’t think I’ll visit her again even if I’m in Cairo because she’s getting to be a nuisance. She seems to think I have to come and visit her when I’m there but I’m not her boyfriend. Pérsomi if you get a boyfriend one day you mustn’t be a nuisance and don’t cry men don’t like it. But you mustn’t get a boyfriend now only later.

  Maybe I’ll be home soon maybe even before Christmas.

  Pérsomi I’m going to learn to fly planes and when the war is over I’m going to stay in the air force. One day I might even come home in a plane.

  Best wishes.

  Your brother,

  Gerbrand

  “Gerbrand may be home before Christmas,” Pérsomi told Beth that evening.

  “You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

  “It would be the best Christmas in the whole world,” Pérsomi smiled in the dark.

  Monday morning was hot. The English teacher was reading in a monotonous voice. A bluebottle buzzed against the windowpane next to Pérsomi. Reinier was leaning back, the book propped on his desk to hide the fact that his eyes were closed.

  Two rows in front of her Beth sat up straight, following in her book. Diagonally in front of her Irene was drawing hearts on her desk.

  The principal’s secretary entered and everyone looked up. She spoke to the teacher, then shrugged her shoulders.

  “Pérsomi, please go to the principal’s office with Mrs. Lubbe,” the teacher said.

  She followed the secretary. Her feet felt heavy, her heart was thumping in her chest, her mind was blank. The principal got to his feet when she entered and came walking around the desk. His eyes looked strange.

  His lips moved.

  She saw his lips move.

  His words bounced off the ceiling and the white walls and the windowpanes. Her mind did not hear the words.

  Her feet began to run.

  SEVEN

  HER MOUNTAIN WAS ANCIENT. UNCHANGING.

  Her mountain had deep crevices and tall, hard cliffs. The crevices lay sheltered in cool shadows, the cliffs stood proud and warm in the last rays of the sun.

  Her mountain was always there. Always. The river could run dry, the moon could darken, the trees could shrivel and become firewood and vanish into ashes—her mountain would remain.

  Beth had said the same about God.

  Beth had lied.

  Pérsomi had come through the veld, avoiding the road. She had climbed through paddock fences and boundary fences, she had angled toward the setting sun in the direction where she knew the farm to be. She had jogged and sprinted and stood doubled over to regain her breath. She had looked at the ground for springhare burrows and up at her mountain, a beacon on the horizon. She had drunk from reservoirs at wells and from troughs.

  Just before sunset she had reached her mountain.

  She had prayed, every night during quiet time. Only in the vacation she had sometimes forgotten.

  God hadn’t heard.

  No God of love would have taken Gerbrand.

  It couldn’t be true.

  Her mountain’s soil was under her bare feet. Her mountain’s dry grass turned into powder under her feet, its sharp stones hurt her feet. Only her feet could feel. And her bone-dry mouth and throat.

  Near the cave she sat down on the lukewarm rocks. The sun was gone.

  Her mountain was completely silent.

  Her mind knew the truth, but her heart refused to hear.

  Nothing around her stirred.

  With the dark came deeper thoughts. The Defence Force could have made a mistake. Hundreds of soldiers fell on the battlefields every single day.

  “We wear dog tags,” Gerbrand had once written, “so that the army can identify us if we can’t tell them who we are. The trouble is that sometimes the dog tag is also shot to pieces.”

  “Don’t swear,” she had replied. “
What does the army do in a case like that?”

  “They send the family a telegram saying Missing in action,” Gerbrand had answered. “But in the end the army identifies everyone, then there will be another telegram that says Fallen at the front or something like that. I don’t know exactly. I have never received a telegram like that.”

  Pérsomi knew exactly.

  The night was pitch-dark, there was a dark moon, even the stars were obscured by fleece clouds.

  The ache inside her began to overshadow every possible doubt. The ache inside her chilled her heart. Because she knew. She knew that she knew.

  Sometime in the middle of the night the cold crept up on her. Just before daybreak it was at its worst. The pain broke down all her defenses. Her heart lay stripped naked on the cold rocky ledge, helpless.

  She didn’t cry, she broke apart.

  She would get up and go to her ma, she thought just before daybreak. Her ma would open her arms and wrap them around her. She would open her arms and hold her ma tightly. She would hold Hannapat too. Their arms would make a circle around all of them.

  Her body was stiff with cold. Her heart ached and ached.

  When the sun had thawed her body, she got up and walked slowly home, down the side of her mountain.

  Her ma was a thin woman with dry, empty eyes.

  “Mama?” she said.

  “Mr. Fourie went to fetch you,” her ma’s voice spoke, “but you were gone.”

  “I walked,” she said.

  Auntie Sis was overpowering, her enormous bosom stifling hot, her eyes swollen and red, her embrace suffocating. “Child, child, where were you all night?”