by Trilby Kent
“We were told a family of five lived here,” said Ma, looking around.
“Nandi is our kaffir girl — she’s with my daughters right now.” Agnes squatted on the ground, making room for Ma to sit on one of the cots. “She was already an orphan, so they allowed her to come with us. They won’t provide food for her, though — anything she eats has to come out of our own rations.”
“How old is she?”
“Six or seven.”
I thought of Sipho, of Lindiwe and her little girls. Where were they now? Had they been vaccinated, given ration cards, and assigned to a bell-tent like ours?
I swallowed, struck by a more pressing question: was Sipho even alive? If the khakis found him guilty of murder, how long would they wait to execute him? I imagined my friend standing before a judge, struggling to understand the soldiers’ halting Dutch, and I wondered if anybody would try to defend him. I resolved to pray for him every day, harder than I’d prayed for anyone since Pa was sick. It was all I could do now.
“What’s wrong with her?” Ma asked in a voice that was almost gentle, leaning over Antjie. She touched the girl’s forehead with a tenderness I’d not seen for anyone other than Gert or Hansie.
“She’s starving: nothing will stay down.” The other woman’s tone, although matter-of-fact, betrayed lost hope. “It’s not as if we are eating like kings, but we make do with what we get. The fever is doing this.” Agnes dipped a cloth in a bucket of dirty water and wrung it with raw hands. “Because we are Undesirables, we are on the lowest rations. You visit the Merciers’ tent across the way and you’ll see a healthy family. That’s because their father surrendered.”
“They should be ashamed,” said my mother.
Agnes placed the cloth gently across her daughter’s brow and sat back on her haunches. “My husband is still out there, shooting khakis,” she said to no one in particular. “This is our punishment. They will make us pay with her life.”
While Ma set about heating some milk for Hansie, Gert and I explored the camp. It was then that I noticed the holes that had worn through the soles of both Gert’s shoes. He kept tripping over the bit where his toe had rubbed through the leather, and after a while I told him that he might as well take them off. We left them at the perimeter, next to a high fence that shut us off from the brown veld. An hour later, when we passed by on our way back to the tent, the shoes had disappeared.
Gert wanted to use the toilet, so at least there was some mission to our wanderings. After a brief search, we came upon a couple of narrow sheds lined up behind the hospital. Inside was a raised platform with plank seats covered in sacking. My brother peered into a dark hole that had been cut through the plank, and he cupped both hands over his nose and mouth.
“Eugh!”
I looked around for rags. In the outhouse back home, there had been a hook where Lindiwe would hang unwanted scraps of cloth and torn-up newspaper. With a sinking heart, I realized that each and every one of these huts was completely empty. My brother didn’t mind — little boys don’t — but I dreaded the thought of having to return here later.
When we emerged, a gang of children trundled past us, arms filled with branches and twigs that they must have collected from the edge of the camp where a few pitiful thornbushes grew within the wire fence. Every one of their heads had been shaved, and I wondered how long it would be before we, too, would be subjected to the same indignity.
“Look out, Corlie!”
My brother yanked me aside just in time to avoid being mowed down by a sour-faced khaki hauling a donkey cart. As the contraption rumbled past us, I felt the old queasiness return. Between the restless, pressing bodies of the women who closed in around us, I glimpsed a single white arm hanging from the back of the cart. It was only for an instant; then the crush of bodies squeezed us out of the group, and we found ourselves banished to the fringes.
“How long do we have to stay here, Corlie?” asked Gert when the sound of clattering wheels had all but disappeared. He was twisting the bushman arrow back and forth between black fingers.
“I don’t know. Perhaps until the war’s over.”
“I want to go home. Or back to the laager.”
“The laager doesn’t exist anymore.”
We had stopped opposite a clapboard building balanced a foot or so above the ground on raised stilts. A British soldier was sitting on the steps leading up to the door, and I guessed that this was some kind of daytime barracks. The Tommy was unwinding his leggings, revealing skin as white as lambs’ flanks underneath. He had a razor blade clenched between his teeth. As soon as both legs were bare, he took the razor in one hand and began scraping — behind the knees, around the ankles. Here and there, he used the razor to dig into his own flesh so hard that he drew blood. He grimaced each time, but he didn’t stop.
“What’s he doing, Corlie?”
I watched the soldier for a few more minutes, and then it dawned on me.
“Lice,” I said. “He’s trying to get rid of the lice.” I smirked at my brother. “Bugs don’t care for the Tommies any more than they care for us Boers,” I told him, trying to make light of it.
When we finally returned to the tent, we learned that Ma had managed to wash Hansie in one of the slop buckets. “There’s no soap,” she said grimly. “And not enough water for both of you.” She eyed us up and down before pointing at Gert. “You’ll have to stand up in the bucket and Corlie and I will rinse you down,” she said. “Agnes says that someone stole her last blanket, so you’ll have to dry in the open air. At least it’s still warm — goodness knows what happens in winter.”
She had changed out of her heavy gingham dress and stood in under-bodice and bloomers. I watched her bend to pick up the bucket and was struck by how small she looked without her usual armor of petticoats and a stiff, high-necked collar. Indeed, my mother’s body might as well have belonged to a complete stranger, reflecting surprisingly little of her severe disposition. Her hairless arms were lightly tanned, the smooth undersides vulnerable and white, and the telltale creases above her upper lip remained the only imperfections on a still youthful face. I knew the stories of two tiny scars that I glimpsed only very rarely, when she took to the barrel tub to wash after Gert and I were in bed: a white, raised V on the inside of her left armpit where a pet parakeet had scratched her as a girl, and a line of pock-marks high up on her right thigh where she had fallen on some gravel outside the church after her wedding to my father. These marks were embarrassing to me, though I couldn’t say exactly why. The well-defined muscles of her calves, shoulders, and abdomen, the folds of skin behind her knees, and the strands of hair that wouldn’t be tamed into a bun but formed little floating halos above her ears — all seemed hopelessly foreign and apart from me.
I had never felt this way about my father. There was no mystery hidden in the hatch marks of the crinkled, leathery skin on the backs of his hands or within the tangle of dark hairs that dovetailed down his shins. The hammerhead toe that was so curled it couldn’t be forced flat, the candle-taper fingers, and honest, square fingernails were as familiar to me as my own. I had memorized them long ago, and I searched daily for their echoes in my own feet and hands. Sometimes I saw them; mostly I didn’t.
Halfway through that first night, I woke up in a pool of wetness and instantly felt a chill of fear run through me: what would Ma say when she found out? Bedwetting was excusable from a child Hansie’s age, but there was no defending a twelve-year-old girl who couldn’t wake up in time to relieve herself.
Outside, the first gray light shimmered. Further inspection of my cot revealed that I’d not wet myself, after all. The water was dew: moisture that had drained in off the tent, and Gert and I were both soaked through.
That same morning, Antjie was transferred to the hospital.
HEROD’S WORK
The doctors came for her just as Ma was taking the scissors to Gert’s hair. My mother was so busy trying to hold back her welling tears she didn’t even have br
eath to curse the British nurse as Antjie was wrapped in a musty-smelling blanket and levered onto a stretcher and carried out of the tent. When they had gone — the doctors and Antjie and Agnes, who was supported by her two other daughters and Nandi — Ma snipped the last of the golden tendrils that curled behind Gert’s ears and collected the strands into a bundle.
“So much hair, boytjie …” she said wistfully. I wondered if she was going to tie his hair with a ribbon and treasure it as a keepsake, the way people did in olden times.
My brother rubbed his head with both hands and grinned.
“It feels lighter,” he said.
I told him that he looked like a drongo chick, and Ma cuffed me upside the head.
“It’s your turn next, my girl.”
Agnes had told us that there was no point waiting for the lice to come before cutting our hair; she said it made it easier to pick them out if you worked off a shaved scalp. As much as it pained Ma to shear her sons like a couple of gormless lambs, she seemed to have little difficulty tearing through my mousy locks. Gripping a clutch of hair in one hand, she managed the scissors like they were a scythe slicing through mealie shoots.
It’s just hair, I thought. And yet, the way she pulled at it made me think she hated my sandy-brown curls. Lindiwe had once observed that my hair looked red when the sun caught it, the color of tea — something that I’d taken as a compliment. But when I proudly reported this to Ma, my mother had flown into an instant rage. Lindiwe had no right to say such things, she’d said. And I was a vain and stupid girl to think my hair was anything special. She told me she’d sooner see it all cut off than tolerate such nonsense about having a redhead in the family.
She couldn’t have known then that one day she’d get her wish.
There was no mirror in the tent to inspect the results. All I could do was feel my head with astonished fingers and look to Gert for affirmation.
“You look funny.”
“Not as funny as you,” I snapped.
We hung about the tent until midday, when Agnes returned with her two daughters and Nandi. The smallest one seemed to have taken a liking to Gert, so the two of them puttered about outside while Ma and I brewed some bush tea for Agnes and the older girl. Her name was Marieta, and I thought her quite beautiful: raven-haired, with eyes the color of grass after a storm, porcelain skin, and a queen’s stately bearing. She wore a white pinafore over a robin’s-egg blue dress, and somehow she managed never to look as dusty or rumpled as the rest of us. She rarely spoke, and when she did, it was in such a low voice that I wondered what must be going through her head. I longed to be so composed, so dignified, to measure my words so carefully, to speak with such grace. Marieta was her mother’s rock. She supported Agnes with hands that were at once gentle and strong, and I struggled to imagine ever mustering the courage to do the same for Ma.
“The nurses were going to classify her as an idiot,” Agnes was saying. Her nose was red and her voice trembled, but her eyes were cold with fury. “Just because they couldn’t understand her words. Antjie was delirious; of course she wasn’t making sense. But to suggest that she isn’t mentally fit —”
“They know she is fit, Ma,” soothed Marieta. “We told them she is. They were only trying to make excuses.”
“Cruel excuses! My Antjie used to write poetry; she could paint like a dream —”
“When will she be released?” asked my mother.
“They wouldn’t say. They asked if we wanted her to be photographed, in case she dies …”
Ma struggled to conceal her surprise. “Photographed?”
“As a memento. A keepsake. For her father.”
The tea was brewed; there were only three cups. I wandered out into the sunshine, taking a moment to let my eyes adjust to the glare. A bowlegged man was staggering down the gangway outside our tent, a long laneway that cut all the way from one end of the camp to the other. Some of the women had named it Steyn Street, after the Free State president. With one hand the bowlegged man hauled a stuffed gunnysack along the path; the other brandished a pair of ladies’ bloomers at passersby.
“That’s Errol Joubert,” said a woman sitting outside the tent opposite ours. She smiled up at me from beneath her cotton bonnet, running a tip of thread across her tongue before poking it through the eye of a sewing needle. “A right skollie, if ever there was one. Never trust a man with eyes like a shore bug, my girl. You’ll see him trying to sell the darkness of Egypt next — anything for a twist of tobacco or a few drops of dop.”
“Is he a hensopper?” I asked in a low voice.
The woman’s smile spread across her freckled face. I guessed that she was younger than my mother, but older than Marieta.
“He’ll tell you that he fought alongside Theron himself just three weeks ago,” she said. “The truth is anyone’s guess.”
“I can’t picture him with Danie Theron.” Everyone knew that Lord Roberts had described the heroic young scout as “the chief thorn in the side of the British.”
“A few days ago, I’ll bet you couldn’t picture a place like this,” she replied.
“We knew there were camps,” I told her, not to be taken for a fool. “We just didn’t know it would be …”
“Hell?” The woman set her sewing aside and beckoned me forward. “Are you the girl with the little brothers?” I nodded. “You mind your Ma takes care of the baby,” she said. “Do you have milk?”
“A bit.”
“Good.” She reached into a tin obscured by the folds of her skirt and withdrew a corner of bread. Her hands were long and thin. “Here, take this.” She waved it at me as I stared incredulously at the first piece of solid food I’d seen since arriving at the camp. “Go on. It’s real. A bit stale, I’ll admit. My sister died last week, but I’m still collecting her rations. Get your brother to bring me fresh kindling in a day or so, and I’ll see to it that you don’t starve.” The smile faded as I reached out for the bread. “They took her to hospital this morning, is that right? The Biljon girl?”
“That’s right.”
“God have mercy.”
Her name was Annie Steenkamp. The next day, after bringing her a bundle of kindling scraps we’d collected from the periphery, reaching our skinny arms through the barbed wire to grab at twigs and bracken just beyond our prison, she gave us an apple that she had found among the slops behind the officers’ mess.
An apple!
It was small and shriveled, but Gert and I couldn’t have been more excited. Neither of us had tasted fruit for weeks. We took it off to a quiet place behind the toilet sheds, where I tore off a few pieces with my teeth and passed them to my brother. It was the nicest thing we’d eaten since arriving at the camp.
Over the next few days, I got to know some of the other women in our block. I made a point of targeting one tent per row: that way, they were less likely to catch wind that I was running errands for all of them. Heila Du Preez, Lynette Bekker, Sonja Erasmus — they were the most generous with their handouts. I tried to choose mothers whose children had died, as they were more likely to take pity and now had fewer mouths to feed. By the second week, I was taking food from six different women, none of whom knew that I was being fed by the others.
Maintaining that deception was just about my only pastime. Most people at the camp simply sat about waiting for the war to end. Time moved more slowly here than it did back home. It was measured differently, too. On the farm, the cock’s crow and the height of the sun had told us when it was time to rise, to rest, and to eat; here, our lives were regimented by the curfew bell and the interminable ticking of the hospital clock.
It didn’t take long for me and Gert to grow numb with boredom.
“Tell me a story,” he would say. But after a few days of telling tales about Ntombazi, my brother grew restless and whined about being bored by the exploits of the African queen who had her enemies buried alive within the high palace walls.
So I devised a fresh tale in which all of th
e characters were animals. My brother and I had seen all we needed to see of human suffering, and it was the wild beasts of the veld that helped us escape into our memories. We still talked about the vervet, and wondered what had become of him after the laager was abandoned.
“There once was a little dikkop,” I began, “that had spotted wings and knobbly knees, and a tiny voice that squeaked. He lived alone in a nest built into a koppie overlooking a huge lake, and he used to dream of going down to the water to drink and spy for fish. But the lake was guarded by great, belching hippos, who everyone knows are by far the most dangerous animals in all of Africa.”
I paused here, waiting for Gert to urge me to continue. By this point, one or two other children had stopped to listen, idly staring on with wide eyes and slack jaws.
“Even more troubling to the little dikkop were the rhinos, who would bellow and rear their horns at the slightest nuisance. You might think that the dikkop would simply fly over their heads, but he was too afraid — and when a dikkop is fearful, it can’t fly. The only thing it can do is run, but to do this it must keep its head lowered, and this causes it to lose any sense of direction and makes the animal become even more panicked. The little dikkop knew this, and so he never dared to venture off of his koppie.
“One day, a klipspringer came up the koppie, looking for something to eat. He greeted the dikkop, who at first was afraid of this four-legged creature with long, twisting horns. But the klipspringer was friendly, and said, ‘You and I aren’t so different, little dikkop: I can leap almost as high as you can fly. That makes us virtually brothers.’
“The dikkop considered this before saying, ‘But you don’t need to drink to survive: everyone knows that you get all the water you need from the leaves you eat. I, on the other hand, am thirsty but too frightened to go down to the water alone.’
“The klipspringer considered the stretch of land between the koppie and the lake, and he noticed the rhinos and the hippos sunning themselves on the riverbank.