by Trilby Kent
“ ‘I’ll take you to the water,’ he said at last. ‘Hop onto my back, and hold on tight.’
“The dikkop did as he was told, and at once they were off, bounding left and right, so that the rhinos — who have a sharp sense of smell but very poor eyesight — would not see them. At last they reached the riverbank, and the dikkop slid to the ground.
“ ‘There you are,’ said the klipspringer.
“ ‘But what about the hippos?’
“ ‘Even the hippos can use a bit of help from time to time. They won’t mind you sitting on their backs as they float through the water as long as you make sure to snap up any mosquitoes that start to bother them. That is the secret: know your enemy. Then freedom will be yours.’
“ ‘Is that why you helped me?’ asked the dikkop, suddenly suspicious. ‘Because you wanted something in return?’
“The klipspringer laughed. ‘Of course not, you silly dikkop,’ he said. ‘I helped you because you are my brother.’ And he bounded off into the sunset.”
The story failed to satisfy Gert. “That’s stupid,” he said at the end. “The little dikkop should have pulled himself together and flown down to the water on his own. If he was so afraid, he deserved to die of thirst on the koppie.” The other children murmured their agreement, listlessly nodding heads too large for their emaciated bodies. “And anyway,” continued Gert. “No klipspringer would help a silly bird just for the sake of it. Life isn’t like that.”
I scowled at him. “Lindiwe and Sipho helped us,” I said. “And they didn’t get anything in return.” I cocked my chin at the other children, daring them to contradict me. “Anyway, you’re all no better than the little dikkop yourselves. I haven’t seen anyone here try to escape — and do you know why? Because you’re all too afraid.”
At this, Gert bit his lip and stared down at the ground. After a moment, he cast his gaze up, out past the barbed-wire fences and sentry posts to where the veld stretched toward the horizon.
“General De la Rey’s out there,” he said. “Ma said that him and Botha are nearby, planning to help us escape. They’re just biding their time.”
The Lion of the West Transvaal. He of the long beard and formidable brow, De la Rey had attained legendary status in our camp. Our mothers told us that he had twelve children of his own and looked after six more who had been orphaned — that he would sacrifice everything for them, and for us.
One of the younger boys in the group turned to me. “It’s true,” he said through gap teeth. “My ma says De la Rey’s like Moses when he led the Children of Israel through the wilderness. Not even Pharaoh’s army could catch them.” He turned to the others. “He knows we’re here. The khakis want him to know: that’s the whole point. If the commandos hear that little children have died in the camp, they’ll surrender.” He flinched as Gert shot him a look. “Only De la Rey won’t let them — just last week I heard some of the khakis saying there had been gunfire near the river basin.”
“He hasn’t given up,” said Gert, looking smug. “He’s out there. He’ll come.”
I smacked him sharply. “And what does that make us? Nice juicy bait, that’s what!” I turned to the other children. Immediately the other boy lowered his eyes, monkey mouth clamping shut. “My ma says that De la Rey releases any British soldiers he captures,” I told them. “That’s weakness, that is. He should have them shot.”
We all considered the gaps in the wire fence that framed the great expanse of empty land, listening for the distant crump of shellfire. My brother stuck his thumb in his mouth, and sucked hard. It was something he had started to do lately, reverting to babyish habits, and it made my blood boil. Before I could snap at him to stop, Gert turned away and wandered slowly back to our tent.
Soon, even death became mundane. I don’t think that my brother really understood it at first, when he heard women talking about the children they’d lost. To my brother, “lost” was something that happened to children in fairy tales. It was hard to believe that healthy boys like him — and younger ones, too — could die before they’d even had a chance to fight the Tommies. Every few days we would watch a family place a new tiny bundle outside a tent, and before long we wouldn’t even think of the body swaddled inside. The lucky ones were put in soap boxes, two to a coffin.
My brothers and I didn’t join the crowds of children that chased after the death cart, and we didn’t keep a tally of invalids and deaths the way some of the others did. We all watched our mothers handle their suffering in different ways. Some would weep shamelessly, others would rage, some went mute, and a few — Ma was one of these — seemed to take a defiant pride in their predicament. In every case, numbness would finally take over. It floated in constantly from across the veld and settled in as a blanket over the camp, leaving its residue on the dusty ground beneath our feet, only to be tracked into the tents, where it infected our hair and clothes and the very air we breathed. These days, for every refugee that died, there were a dozen more waiting to be let into the camp. One morning, Gert told me that he had seen the superintendent sitting at his desk with his head in his hands just moments after the arrival of a fresh group of inmates who had been sent from the camp at Bethulie, which was now full. Because there were no more tents for them even here, the women and children had to sleep out in the open veld.
By the time word arrived that Antjie Biljon had finally passed away in hospital, none of us was terribly surprised. It was as if her death had been hanging in the air for days before it happened, by which time we’d already learned to live with her mother’s muffled sobbing and her little sister’s wide, blank stare that followed us around the tent like a shadow.
The strangest thing about being surrounded by so much suffering, so many invalids and cadavers and walking ghosts, was that my memories of Pa became more vivid by the day. I saw him in the bread queues and loitering outside the hospital; I saw him tending our small fire and rocking Hansie to sleep with all the flies buzzing around. Pa was real. Everything else was just a dream: a horrible dream from which I would wake to find myself at his side, squatting on our front porch, peeling a mango, and counting fireflies late into the night.
Ma and Agnes caught the Biljon’s servant girl stealing from the mealie bucket and locked her in a wooden trunk for three hours as a punishment. The trunk was about three feet tall, four feet long, and two feet wide: large enough to hold a six-year-old girl, though still too small for her to turn around. It made me remember my apie in the jockey box — a thought that filled me with sudden sadness. Agnes, Marieta, and Ma pretended not to hear Nandi’s screams for the first half hour or so, and eventually she went quiet. I knew that she wouldn’t suffocate, as there were a few gaps where the wood had splintered, but still I planted myself nearby so that I could whisper reassurances to her when the others weren’t looking. It seemed to me that being locked in the trunk must have felt like being buried alive.
Ma called her a snake in the grass, a cockroach that deserved to be stamped on. She told me and Gert that we were to keep saying our prayers every night if we didn’t want to hear the same voice of temptation that had led Nandi to commit such a wicked act; she said the devil would try to whisper to us at night through the wall of our tent, but that he would be frightened away if we prayed hard enough. It had been Ma’s idea to lock Nandi in the trunk as a punishment and as a lesson to the rest of us. Marieta had been the only one to protest, saying that the child couldn’t help it: all Africans were alike, more animal than human, and an animal’s instinct is to scavenge for food wherever it can.
“Sipho’s not an animal,” I’d interjected. I didn’t like to disagree with Marieta, but I couldn’t help it. “Besides, Gert and I scavenged when we were out on the veld — Ma told us to collect groundnuts. Does that make us animals, too?”
Marieta had looked at me uncomfortably. “That’s different” was all she said.
Nandi’s timing couldn’t have been worse: only the day before, three more children in nearby ten
t rows had died — two in the same family, a couple of tents from ours — and now everyone’s nerves were on edge. The three had been laid out together, each with a tiny white flower, for people to come and pay their respects and for photographs to be taken for the absent fathers.
“Murdered innocents,” people said in hushed tones. “The British are doing Herod’s work.”
None of the children had been treated in the medical tent because most people believed that children only went there to die. And since no visitors were allowed in the hospital, many of the women dreaded the thought of their little ones being taken away lest they never be seen again. Once I saw a woman prop up the half-dead body of her infant in a chair, and another time I caught sight of a mother leading a toddler on a walk around the camp while the older sibling supported the suffering child from behind — all to make it look as though the tiny ones were perfectly healthy, to avoid arousing suspicion from the matrons. Moving them kept the blowflies off their bodies and prevented the red ants from crawling into their eyes.
Our mothers used old remedies to ease the suffering of family members: swaddling an inflamed chest in dung and animal skins, treating open wounds with licorice plant leaves, and sealing the tent to sweat out a fever. It was well-known that the doctors didn’t think much of our remedies; but then, we didn’t think much of theirs. The English nurses were under-trained and overworked, and one of the doctors was a notorious drunkard.
Most of the time, it was impossible to tell if a child was suffering from malaria or typhoid or blackwater fever. Victims of these diseases all started to look the same after a while: emaciated bodies stretched out like faded flowers scattered on a bed, eyes hollow, skin clammy. A rash indicated measles or smallpox; coughing was usually bronchitis. Diarrhea was a sign of flux, though it was common enough even among the relatively healthy.
Gert twice returned to our tent with blood smeared across his upper lip, but Ma put that down to a burst vessel brought on by the dry air. In a place where several people died every week, no one paid much attention to nosebleeds — and so Gert continued to be sent out to collect kindling with the other children until the day he fainted. Even then, we assumed it was only the heat. Ma didn’t believe in headaches, so we’d not worried when he’d said that morning that his eyes were sore.
In the end, it was Marieta who first noticed the cluster of tiny red spots on his chest.
AN EGG
After two days, Gert started refusing food.
Ma said that aloes and egg whites were the best cure for typhoid, but neither was to be found in the camp. I spent an entire day wandering along the tall wire fence, gazing out at hardy clusters of spiky green aloe plants fringing the hills just a hundred yards from where I walked. Women had begged the British soldiers to let them go out to collect the plants to treat their ailing children, but permission was never granted. As for eggs, they were considered too fragile to be worth shipping to the camps. Heila Du Preez had once lured a few hens in through a hole in the fence, but these birds — apparently mangy, poor layers, anyway — had died off just before we’d arrived.
I found Heila scrubbing her nephew’s breeches over a barrel of gray water. The boy, Frikkie, squatted nearby. A few days earlier, he had been bitten by a brown button spider. We knew it must have been a brown button spider because a black one would have killed him in no time at all. The bite site was white, encircled by an ugly red rash, and today Frikkie was dabbing at it with a wet cloth.
“You need aloe for that,” I said.
Frikkie looked up at me, squinting into the sun.
“What do you think this is?” he retorted. His aunt snapped the breeches at him.
“Mind your tongue, Frik!”
I knelt at Heila’s side and lowered my voice.
“Where did you find it, Heila?” I asked. “If you tell me, I promise I won’t say a word.”
Heila resumed her scrubbing, avoiding my eye.
“Please, Heila,” I whispered. “It’s for Gert. Ma thinks it could be typhoid.”
She looked up at me, and I saw anger vanish from her gaze only to be replaced with something new. Fear.
“How does she know?”
“He has the rash. At first we thought it might be dengue fever, but Lettie Lourens thinks his nosebleeds might have been a sign.” I lowered my eyes, praying that she might take pity. “Ma says we need aloe and egg whites for a poultice.”
“The hens are dead.”
I hesitated, taken aback by the edge in her voice. After a moment, Heila Du Preez rose and disappeared into the tent. She returned with a skin flask, which she passed to me. Tilting it between my hands, I felt a dribble of fluid inside.
“The khakis thought it was only water.”
I almost extended my arms to embrace her, but something about the way she held herself stopped me.
“Thank you, Heila,” I said. “Thank you, thank you …” I turned to go back to our tent.
“Corlie Roux.”
I stopped and turned, terrified that she was going to make an impossible demand. “I’ll bring more kindling tonight; I promise,” I blurted. “And some mealie meal, too. Ma is so worried about Gert she’s hardly eating —”
“See Lynette Bekker about the eggs,” she whispered, not looking at me as she returned to her scrubbing. “The Tommies keep chickens near their barracks.”
Lynette Bekker spent one day each week working in the barracks laundry, services for which she was paid in mealie corn. Thanking Heila a second time, I hurried on.
As I made my way between the rows of tents, I said a silent prayer — not so much for my brother as for myself. Please, God, I thought, don’t take Gertie. You already took my Pa, and Sipho, and my little apie. You can’t take my brother, too.
When I had left the tent that morning, my brother’s eyes were rolled back in his head as he slept. Agnes helped Ma to change him out of his sweat-drenched breeches and into a clean petticoat that had once belonged to Antjie. I hadn’t wanted him to wear anything that had belonged to someone who was now dead, but it wasn’t the time for me to protest. Gert had been moaning and mumbling to himself all through the night, and none of us had slept well.
That morning I had crept close to my brother’s side and whispered in his ear.
“Pull yourself together,” I had said. “There will be a lot of work for us to do when the war ends, and you’ll need all your strength. The first thing we’ll do is get the farm up and running — that’s what Pa would want. The khakis can’t keep us here forever, Gertie …”
Ma had pushed me aside before I had a chance to say anything else — before I had a chance to tell my brother that I loved him, that he was my only friend in all the world besides Sipho, that I couldn’t bear to think of going back to our farm without him — and in that instant, I realized that she would have preferred me to be lying in that bed.
“Are you trying to smother him?” she had snapped.
Yes, it was true: my mother would rather I died in his place.
Ma refused to admit that he was delirious. “He’s been having bad dreams,” she said to our neighbors, to explain why we all looked even more exhausted than usual. “Night terrors, that’s all.”
But I knew there was more to it than that, and — judging by the way she watched over him — I was pretty certain that she did, too.
“I thought the immunizations were supposed to keep our children healthy,” I’d heard her mutter to Agnes in the early hours of morning. “Otherwise, what are they good for?”
“Khaki propaganda,” she replied.
I was jolted from the memory by the sounds of a scuffle behind one of the tents. Poking my head into a narrow passageway, I watched aghast as two women tore at each other like a couple of enraged cats. On the ground lay an overturned tin of condensed milk, the contents of which had already begun to seep into the yellow ground.
“Thief! Thief!” cried several other women who had also sought out the source of the noise. The two scrapper
s — a burly, red-faced vrouw with hands like spades, and a wiry younger woman whose hair had become unpinned in the fray — tumbled to the ground.
Without stopping to think, I made a dash for the tin. If I could only save a few drops of milk, it would keep Hansie fed for another day and we could give the rest of our water to Gert —
“Another one!”
A hand hit me roughly on the side of my head, and I hit the ground with a yelp.
“Scavenger! Thief!”
I was hauled to my feet and shoved to one side as a crowd of children descended upon the now empty can. When I looked up, I recognized Sonja Erasmus — one of the women from whom I had taken regular handouts over recent weeks. She glowered at me with eyes like raisins planted in a swollen, doughy face.
“Snatch and grab, will you? While the women behave like children, the children behave like animals!” She smacked me again, and despite myself my eyes smarted. “You’re nothing better than a stray, Corlie Roux. We may have fed you our scraps, but you were never welcome in our tents. Brazen greed! That’s the thanks we get for taking pity on a mongrel, for turning a blind eye to your mother’s sins …”
I wriggled away from her and ran as fast as my feet would carry me, not stopping until I reached the Bekkers.’
“Ma!” I cried, holding out Heila’s flask as I burst into our tent. “Aloe water, Ma! And Lynette Bekker promised that she would try to steal us an egg tomorrow —”
Inside, the air hung thick and heavy. For almost two days, Ma had kept the tent sealed so that Gertie could sweat out the fever. Despite our best efforts, dozens of flies swarmed about the bed. Hansie knelt next to my brother, swatting at the flies whenever they tried to settle on him.
“An egg, Ma,” I repeated. “And you know what that means: we can put the whites in a poultice and we can eat the yolk …”
My mother was standing in the middle of the tent, staring at the ground. Agnes and her daughters were not there. On my way, I had passed Nandi carrying the day’s water ration back to the tent. The tiny girl had gripped the bucket’s rope handle with chafed fingers, concentrating hard so as not to spill a single precious drop as she shuffled down Steyn Street. Had it been any other day I would have stopped to help — but in my excitement about the egg I’d rushed straight past her.