The Lost History of Stars

by Dave Boling

  When I rolled over in the night, it felt as if the tent had tightened around us like a hungry stomach. I had to walk. The door flaps of the tents were cinched, since most families were sleeping, but muffled noise seeped from some of the tents. I could interpret the sounds of illnesses and veered away from certain tents. Some sounds were indecipherable. Through the canvas veil, I could not tell whether crying was coming from a mother or a child, from an elderly grandmother or an infant. Was it coughing or sobbing? Was it calm talk or prayers?

  The stars were blocked by low clouds, and the light rain angered into a storm as I was about to turn back to the tent. A jagged note, loud and distinct, rang nearby. It was certainly not a birdcall. I turned to its source and traced a path toward a tent that glowed with inner light. A Tommy guard stood by the tent flap and blew his whistle again, one long blast that knifed through the quickening rain. I popped behind the next tent to keep from being seen.

  His back to me, he shifted from leg to leg and bent over to protect his match as he lit a cigarette. He waved his hand and gave a soft whistle with just his breath this time. I thought of Janetta’s kiss. A pair of men pulled a two-wheeled cart toward him, each holding one of the wagon tongues, heads down, shuffling together like weary bullocks. They passed the door flap and then turned so that they could back the wagon toward the opening. Light escaped the tent and gilded the cart. A collection of bones in old man’s clothes was stretched still, light reflecting off the hollow face and papery skin. His eyes were deep sockets that held small puddles of rain. His lips were tightened into a ghastly smile.

  “Put something over him,” the guard said. They shrugged and pointed at the cart. They had nothing for cover.

  The three entered the tent, and a wailing escaped, the lower pitch of a mother, perhaps, and the higher tone of some children in chorus. The men emerged with a small body. I could not tell whether it was a boy or a girl. One of the men had to hold it in both arms while the other tugged at the body of the old man to make room for the new passenger. When they moved him, the rainwater ran from his hollowed eyes like a burst of tears. They aligned the child head to toe with the old man for a better fit. The guard signaled to the men to leave, and he moved off in the other direction. I could see that it was a girl on the cart, younger than I.

  The two men repositioned themselves at the front and hefted the cart shafts, pulling it down the muddy row toward the morgue tent. Within a few strides, the girl’s light body slid toward the back edge of the cart bed, her head bobbing off the back.

  I ran. . . . “Wait . . . wait . . .” The little body looked ready to fall into the mud. “She’s falling.”

  The men stopped and were back toward the girl by the time I got there.

  “Aletta?” one said.

  This man was stooped. And he was trying to lift the body with just one arm.

  Praise God . . . Oom Sarel.

  “Aletta?”

  I stepped back, startled, having been focused on the falling girl. I didn’t want her body to fall, but I didn’t want to touch her, either. And now this. Answer him? Ignore him? I stared. Rain sluiced off the brim of his hat. He did not look like the devil; he looked pathetic . . . a sad man soaked to the skin.

  He waited for a reply, studying me. I stared, blinking the rain from my lashes.

  “Lettie? Is that you?”

  He knew it was me. We looked into each other’s eyes, each squinting against the rain. But I could not speak. Oom Sarel had reached out, and I shunned him. I did not even open my mouth. Oupa would have stoned him. Moeder might have attacked him. But I ignored him. I was ashamed to be that small.

  He gave up, turned, and helped place the child this time near the head of the cart, where she would be less likely to slide off. The old man, mouth fallen open—agape—had made room for his new companion, but now his right arm hung partially off the cart. I watched it to keep from looking at the little girl. And with each step the men took, it caused the man’s arm to bounce, and his limp hand to wave. I could not decide whether it was a farewell or an invitation to follow.

  25

  July 1901, Concentration Camp

  Dear Tante Hannah,

  I have to write small and be precise to get it all on the back of this sheet of rules. After we saw you that day, Moeder was very upset. It seemed there was more than a fence between us, as if the ground had opened and spread apart. I think now that our messenger can be a bridge.

  The news about Bina struck me cold. I think of her every day, and her sayings, and her songs. I worry about the men, especially Schalk, but I know how well they can take care of themselves. But I truly owe Bina my life, and if I could repay that somehow, I would. Maybe Tuma will be taken to the same place and they can be together.

  I have to thank you for the two books. I lose myself in them every day. If I am a refugee, as they call us, the place I find real refuge is in those books. Thank you, dear Tante. You will be happy to learn that I have another book, too. Copperfield! Yes, please write when you can and I’ll do the same. I will be certain to check with the messenger often. It’s good to know it is safe to do so.

  Your Lettie

  Klaas’s cough grew jagged and persistent before he gave in to crying. He turned his head toward the canvas so that Willem would not see him. I prayed for his health, and also for the Lord’s patience, as the tent filled with a fretful commotion. I could do nothing to help Klaas other than maintain a respectful distance and not intrude. But every spoken word was heard. So I could not help being party to the things that Mevrou Huiseveldt said to try to calm him. I doubted she had slept for several days, tending Klaas through the nights. These were the first days I could recall that she did not spend time complaining about her own health.

  Crazed by fever, Klaas cried that he wanted to see his father.

  “The British have him far away,” she told him again and again.

  He persisted. “I want to go see him.” Mevrou Huiseveldt looked at the rest of us. We had no answers. His voice was so much like Willem’s that I often checked to be sure it wasn’t. What if it had been Willem instead of Klaas with pneumonia? They lived in the same tent, exposed to the same elements and illnesses. Was sickness as random as those bullets flying through the smoke of battle?

  Willem now stayed as far away from Klaas as he could, and the space we gave the Huiseveldts caused us to back into a tighter cluster. As Klaas faded, Willem hardly spoke to him, as if Klaas had betrayed him with his illness. I began taking Willem outside as often as I could, and at times I sent him on errands I thought might feel “manly” to him . . . anything to keep him occupied. I started calling him “our little soldier,” thinking he would like it and it would encourage discipline and strength.

  I worried so much that I opened up to him and told him a story that I feared would be used against me later. At times when I felt weak, I said, I remembered him in front of the line of Tommies, their rifles pointed at him. I would never forget the look on his face. It was the bravest thing I’d ever seen—brave as anything Oupa or Vader or Schalk could do. “You inspired me to be strong,” I said. And he liked to hear that. The first time, at least. The second time I told him this, he saw it as manipulation and resented it.

  Moeder asked us to pray for the sick boy’s well-being after our Bible readings, and I silently prayed that Mevrou Huiseveldt would take him to the hospital tent so we wouldn’t hear his cries. But she was told that mothers were allowed to see children for only five minutes one day a week, and Mevrou Huiseveldt felt better tending Klaas herself.

  The crying, hour after hour, through the night, ground away at my tolerance until every nerve was exposed. Mevrou Huiseveldt had given him teas and painted his chest with foul-smelling poultices. Dear God, please make him stop, I thought. Then I corrected my prayer: Dear God, please make him well.

  Klaas was worse in the morning. He had changed his repetitive wish slightly. He no longer asked to see his father; he wished that his father could see him, be broug
ht to him, right now, to the bedside. Mevrou Huiseveldt abandoned reason. “We’ll see if we can get him here.”

  I left the tent to fetch water and to search for the dominee. I walked past Maples, ignoring his greeting. I came upon a man with a large camera on a three-legged stand; he had been in camp several days selling photographs of families that they might have after the war for their men. I thought of Klaas’s wish that his father could see him. I urged the photographer to come to our tent, and we would figure out a way to pay him for it.

  I heard no coughing sounds when I returned to the tent. It had been only an hour, but he was being cleaned for burial.

  “No . . .”

  “Ja . . . he’s gone,” Mevrou Huiseveldt said without looking up.

  “There is a photographer in camp today,” I told her. “I thought he could get a picture of Klaas that you might send to his father. I got him here as soon as I could. . . . I’ll send him away.”

  Mevrou Huiseveldt straightened and wiped her face with her skirt hem.

  “Have him wait,” she said. We all turned away as she changed Klaas’s clothes.

  Moeder helped them carry the boy outside the tent, where the photographer posed them. Standing behind a chair, Mevrou Huiseveldt held Klaas upright, with a hand on each shoulder, with Rachel on the other side. She tried to pull open the lids of his eyes for the picture. After two tries, they stayed open.

  Willem and I stood behind the photographer. Willem stared at Klaas. We flinched together when the flash burst, and the brilliant light reflected pure white off the boy’s empty eyes.

  26

  1890s, Sarel Venter Farm

  Long before Tante Hannah lured me to the world that was hiding inside the covers of books, she tried to share with me her love of needlework. Reading was important to her, she said, because books made her think. But she loved her needlework projects because they made her concentrate, which was a process distinct from thinking, she said.

  “When I concentrate,” she said, “I don’t have to think.” I did not understand at the time.

  When I was small, she gave me an antique porcelain thimble for my own, with great ceremony, hoping that I would grow to love the work as much as she did. I knew she expected a stronger reaction, but I had to choke back comments and act excited when I was truly bored to tears. She always made sweets as an incentive to continue. It was time spent with Tante, and I should have been eager to learn the womanly craft, but I failed so completely to understand the appeal.

  She started with the basic stitches and mechanics. Place the needle precisely, push with the thimble, pull the floss to its natural limit, she preached. Remember, these are made to last; every stitch forever tells the story of the person holding the needle.

  In the way Oupa taught me the stars as a connection to family history, Tante Hannah told of her ancestors’ working with needles. She had learned needlework at the knee of her ouma, who learned from the Dutch matrons who monogrammed their clothing so that it would not be confused with others’ when they gathered for laundry at the canals in Holland centuries earlier.

  Her grandmother’s framed “honeymoon sampler” occupied a parlor wall in Tante Hannah’s house. She explained that young brides created these to represent their dreams for the future. Her ouma’s was simple: A step-gabled house with silken smoke weaving from the chimney, with a garden of bloodred tulip blooms and a windmill in the background. A boy and a girl in oversize wooden shoes stood holding hands in the yard. The scene hardly foretold her grandmother’s future in South Africa.

  “She told me that you may stitch your wishes, but God has his own pattern for you,” Tante Hannah said. “When I started mine, she said I should create scenes I hoped would be God’s Providence. Lettie, someday you’ll want to make one of your own.”

  Her own sampler was on the wall of her bedroom. The scene was dominated by a low, red-roofed house with two children and two sheep in the yard, and a tree abundant with colorful fruit. It looked nothing like her life.

  At times she leaned over the back of my chair, arms on either side of me, and operated my hands for me as if I were a kind of puppet. I finished it, poorly, and declared myself fully taught and ready to retire my thimble.

  Although she hovered over me most times, occasionally she stopped talking and clouded over, her lips pressing so tightly the pink parts disappeared. She would stitch intently, and when she put the cloth away, I could see a white, bloodless line marking the deep imprint of the needle at an angle across her fingers.

  Place, press, pull. The stitching, the cloth, the letters—these were her unchanging things. A design crafted with a delicate hand would be beautiful for decades, she said with such emotion I was sad for her. And a scene, or the letters of a name, might go on forever, even though they were only a thread of silk knotted into a piece of linen.

  “You can stitch a line in fabric and it will last,” she said. “This is not the Holy Scripture, but it is true just the same.”

  This woman took embroidery far too seriously. But she had so little else.

  27

  August 1901, Concentration Camp

  Dear Lettie,

  It appears it is safe to write, but we should be cautious. I’ve missed you so much and think often of our lessons together. I know you liked them better than the times I tried to teach you to stitch. You should have seen your face! But I’m not giving up on you yet. You might come to like it later. Please tell me of Willem and Cee-Cee as I’ve heard nothing about their well-being.

  I know you don’t want to hear about Oom Sarel, but he is having a difficult time, never sleeping, gone at all hours. He seems tormented. He will not speak of your oupa, but I will tell you some of the things I have heard from him about Schalk and your father. He tells of your father having been a loyal brother, and Schalk a peacemaker for them all. None had been harmed when Oom was last with them.

  I’m so happy to hear of your Copperfield book, and that you’re not holding Dickens responsible for the war. There’s probably no better time than this for reading, or writing. At least there’s that.

  Thinking of you always,

  Love,

  Tante Hannah

  Other voices intruded, crowding out my own. The struggles went on mostly at night and churned like eddies in a stream. I didn’t know whether this meant I was going insane or becoming an adult.

  Oupa and Vader appeared, speaking their favorite phrases, repeating their themes, the ones I’d heard for years, the ones I accepted without question. Oupa, clouds billowing from his pipe, proclaimed us “God’s tools of righteousness.” I pictured him on a windblown hilltop.

  The beauty of these phantom appearances was that I was unafraid to talk back to them. But if we have no dominion over our lives, Oupa, why strive to be righteous? If we have no part in our fate, what is the point?

  Vader’s voice remained forthright, as if he were standing tall beside me. The voice itself reflected his strength. It’s never wrong to do the right thing, Lettie . . . and obey your moeder. You are a Venter. Yes, Vader, but so is Oom Sarel.

  Most nights, Bina’s voice seemed to take over, with her songs and sayings, and in my sleep I was able to understand them better. A person is never gone as long as you feel her shadow beside you, she said. And that explained the sense that Janetta was still with me when I walked.

  The voice of Klaas joined in, speaking to me from his seat in front of the photographer. Lettie, dear Lettie, you finally noticed me. He had cared for me, and I had given him fewer than a dozen of my words in response. And now he was dead. I tried to push him aside . . . the sound . . . the sad end of it all . . . those eyes. How cold was I that I dreaded the idea that his shadow might follow me? How does one hold some shadows and cut others loose?

  At times, everything hurt, and the voices would pop in to explain those problems or revive the memories attached to them. The voices were sometimes consoling, sometimes judgmental. And at times now, they did not always bother to wait until I was
asleep to begin their repetitive lectures. They kept me unsettled, on the brink, unsure whether I would be in tears from minute to minute, breath to breath. Look at Moeder, I told myself. But as much as I wanted to be like her, I wanted less to be with her. The tightness in the tent . . . the power of her presence . . . something was pushing me away.

  Prayers calmed the voices, if I repeated them, time after time. Other times the voices just became more insistent when I prayed. I added another request to my nightly prayers: Help me to be strong, dear God. I considered the wording for some time, wanting to be concise and to the point. I wanted a small phrase that would cover a variety of situations; I decided the best way to reach God’s ears was to be respectful of his time.

  One morning, my legs began twitching toward dawn, and I changed positions. Since I had washed my pinafore, I no longer used it as a pillow. I stacked my shoes with toes in opposite directions so the center was level and cradled my head. I slipped back to sleep, and the voices started, all at once, trying to claw their way out of my head this time. I tried to make them stop, but they echoed in there and made my head itch, so that I wakened again as a relief from their chatter. But the itching remained, and I dug at my head with more energy.

  “Who’s doing that?” Moeder asked.

  I paused but couldn’t stop.

  Moeder struck a match.

  “Oh . . .”

  “What, Ma?”

  She reached into the bag she had taken from home and kept hanging from the back post of her cot. She handed me her mother’s fancy mirror. When she lit a match and held it toward me, I saw small trails of blood seeping down my forehead and parting on either side of my nose.

  She put down the mirror and used her sleeve to wipe the blood from my face.