Stones for My Father

by Trilby Kent

  When Parsons was around we would talk about life before the war, and if there was no one to translate we played tic-tac-toe. Corporal Byrne drew me pictures of Canada — majestic mountains circled by handsome birds; sparkling lakes and rivers overflowing with fish; forests lurking with bears and strange, antlered horses called moose; buffalo that looked nothing like ours, with lumpish heads and handlebar horns; cabins built out of tree trunks — and I wondered if he regretted leaving his homeland for the battlefields of Africa. Once, I asked him if Canada was as beautiful as the Transvaal in the spring. Corporal Byrne had laughed, and said that it was a darn sight colder at that time of year.

  One morning, he was late. I waited and waited, eventually climbing up onto the window ledge by my bed so that I could see him when he approached.

  Outside, the camp was mostly still. Everyone seemed to have retreated into their tents, and the few British soldiers that remained on Steyn Street seemed to be in a hurry to get into the barracks buildings. I looked across the ward at all the empty beds, and realized that almost all the patients had left. Those that could walk had returned to their tents, and those that remained — two frail figures at the far end by the door — were too ill to know that the hospital was empty.

  I considered leaving, but then I remembered that I had nowhere to go. My clothes were folded in a pile by my bed. Unnerved by the eerie silence, and desperate to do something, I got dressed.

  As I laced my boots with fumbling fingers — it was as if my hands had forgotten the familiar sequence of looping, threading, and pulling tight — the hospital door was flung open to a chorus of voices.

  The nations not so blest as thee,

  Must in their turn to tyrants fall,

  Must in, must in, must in their turn to tyrants fall!

  I recognized the officer called Stevens, the doctor, and the gravediggers, as well as a cohort of young soldiers. They poured through the hospital, singing at the tops of their lungs.

  While thou shalt flourish, shalt flourish great and free,

  The dread and envy of them all!

  It was a fearful racket. Their bellowing voices echoed through the empty ward as the men stomped their feet and clapped their hands, whistling and whooping with delirious joy. They didn’t appear to notice me.

  Rule, Britannia!

  Britannia, rule the waves:

  Britons never, never, never will be slaves!

  And then, almost as quickly as they had appeared, they were gone. Their voices carried on outside, singing a different tune.

  O Lord, our God, arise,

  Scatter her enemies,

  And make them fall!

  Confound their politics,

  Frustrate their knavish tricks,

  On Thee our hopes we fix,

  God save us all …

  I listened to the voices become more distant, until at last only the wisp of a melody remained.

  Then I saw him, standing in the doorway, his handsome face creased into a smile.

  “It’s over, Corlie,” said Corporal Byrne. “The war’s over.”

  I stood up, sensing that he had said something important. Corporal Byrne came closer, his movements taut with excitement. His voice was soft, but urgent.

  “The last of the commandos surrendered yesterday at Rooiwal. There’s to be a treaty at Vereeniging.”

  I couldn’t help smiling at the way he pronounced it, garbling the guttural sounds with his crisp, clipped accent. Then I began to understand what he meant. The commandos must have run out of food, or ammunition, or perhaps both. Too many men had wives and children dying in the camps, and saw that the war was destined to be lost. They had given up.

  I sat back down on the bed, my mind racing. What would this mean for the others — for Oom Sarel, and Danie and Andries? For Sipho and Lindiwe? Where would we go? Would we be punished for having the audacity to survive?

  Corporal Byrne must have noticed that I didn’t share his excitement, because the smile faded as he perched on the bed opposite mine.

  “The republics will become a part of the Empire,” he said slowly, as if by speaking clearly I would be able to understand his English. “Die Transvaal en die Vry Staat.” He clasped his hands together, motioning a union. “Britse.”

  British.

  “But they will be granted self-government,” continued Byrne in a hopeful voice. He might as well have been talking to the walls. “They will be as good as free …”

  I shook my head in disbelief.

  Corporal Byrne stood up, and extended one hand.

  “Come, Corlie,” he said. “It’s time to leave this place.”

  THE SEA OF GALILEE

  We found my mother with a group of women preparing to board a cattle car for Standerton. There was little rejoicing: on every face, I could see grief for those they were leaving behind and grim uncertainty about what they would find waiting for them back home. I saw Heila Du Preez standing alone at the end of the line, and for a moment I thought of calling out to her. Then I noticed that Frikkie was nowhere to be seen, and realized that the spider bite must have been worse than we’d thought.

  Each family had been provided with a tent and a month’s rations. As we watched the women turn in their ration cards, I held Corporal Byrne’s hand tightly.

  “Don’t make me go with her,” I whispered.

  Corporal Byrne looked down at me. Parsons must have told him of my shameful eviction; he must have explained the bruises on my arms.

  “Which one is she?” he asked. “Jou moeder?”

  I pointed. Ma still towered over the other women, head held high. Hansie stood at her side, gripping her skirts, wide blue eyes agog at the commotion. He saw me first.

  “Corlie!”

  Ma smacked him before she even had a chance to see me; it was as if he had uttered a forbidden word, a most grievous blasphemy. When at last she picked me out, hovering on the fringes of the group, next to the Canadian soldier, her eyes narrowed.

  “I didn’t die, Ma,” I said, just loud enough for her to hear. “They wouldn’t let me die.”

  Of course, in my heart of hearts I wanted my mother to love me. But I also knew that she would never forgive me for who I was — any more than I could forgive her for betraying Sipho and Lindiwe. We were at a stalemate, just like in the war.

  My mother glanced around at the other women, as if to see if I had shamed her before the group. But no one was paying any attention.

  “They look after their own,” said Ma. “They deserve you, Corlie Roux.”

  And then, taking Hansie by the arm, she turned and pushed her way deeper into the crowd.

  “Well,” said Corporal Byrne when at last we lost all sight of her. “I suppose that’s that.”

  I looked up into his face, and I smiled.

  We said good-bye to Parsons and joined the military cavalcade that was headed for Ladysmith. When I realized that we would be stopping at Bethlehem, I begged Corporal Byrne to take me to the African camp. We had just a few hours before our train would depart, but I needed to find out what had happened to Lindiwe and her family.

  Until I saw the vestiges of the African settlement, I would not have believed that there existed a prison more deprived than ours. We were led to the camp by an elderly African known among the khakis as Old September. He remained silent as Corporal Byrne and I took in the desolate scene. Apart from some barbed wire and a few ramshackle buildings constructed of corrugated iron, there was nothing to see. Old September pointed out the abandoned packing crates, grain bags, and tarpaulins that the inmates had used to improvise shelter; he led us through the dry fields where they had been forced to grow their own food against the odds of a cruel winter and barren soil.

  I asked our guide if he had known a woman called Lindiwe, but Old September only shook his head.

  “She had two little girls,” I explained in Dutch. “And a son called Sipho. He was taken to a POW camp, I don’t know where. They were going to lay charges …”

&
nbsp; The old man’s cloudy eyes seemed to fill with light.

  “Sipho?” he said. “The lad who killed a fat Boer?”

  I felt my heart leap inside me. “Where is he?” I begged. “Do you know?”

  The light in Old September’s eyes began to fade, as if dampened by my excitement.

  “We heard of him from some Sotho fighters who were serving with the British. The whole camp heard. The boy was executed with a group of white men. He had a white man’s hanging, an honorable death.”

  I froze: it must be a mistake.

  “There was a trial,” continued Old September. “He wouldn’t apologize for what he did. He said that the only white man who ever treated him right was dead, and that his only white friend was locked up in a khaki concentration camp.” The old man considered me. “That was you, was it?”

  I nodded, unable to speak.

  Old September grunted. “Well, he said you’d understand.” The old man smiled a toothless smile, gazing over the tops of the thorn trees. “That’s what I heard, anyhow.”

  Walking back to the station, Corporal Byrne asked me to hold Moet. He had devised a sling for the monkey, who could not keep up with us on foot over the rocky terrain — even though Corporal Byrne still had to walk slowly because of his leg. I knew that Corporal Byrne thought it would comfort me, to hold the orphaned vervet close to my chest and nuzzle the soft fur on the back of his head.

  As Moet grumbled in the sling, I pressed my face next to his and wept.

  I never did find out what happened to Lindiwe and her daughters. Like so many others, their names were lost to history.

  It was only later that I found out that the English queen had died. Newspapers were so scarce that many of the Tommies themselves hadn’t known until months after the fact. There was a new king on the throne, I was told: King Edward. Now, he was my king, too.

  That was when I began to appreciate the toll that the war had taken on the Tommies, when I realized that the sadness in Corporal Byrne’s eyes — the same sadness that I read in the faces of the other men — sprung from a loss of something that they had once believed to be noble and true. As I listened to them speak, I heard admiration in their voices for their foe, the Boer guerrilla fighters. And admiration for the women in the camps, too.

  “You can’t blame ’em for giving it their best shot. If someone tried to boot me off my farm, I’d fight ’im tooth and nail,” said one young khaki over a dinner of tinned beef and flour biscuits. The others had murmured their agreement, nodding sheepishly as they pretended not to look at me — the half-English, half-Boer girl in their midst.

  There were thirty or so men in the column — combatants, mostly, freshly returned from battles at Tweebosch and Onverwacht. One arrived having just had a foot amputated; within the week, the doctor traveling with us was compelled to amputate the same leg up to the knee, and we had all listened to his muffled cries from inside a hastily constructed medical tent. Another, a bugle boy just fourteen years old, died of his shrapnel wounds that same night.

  It’s no wonder that the others did not have the energy to be rowdy or raucous during the celebrations that followed the war’s end. Enough of them had seen the horrors of the camps that no one seemed to begrudge my presence. Perhaps I reminded some of them of the little daughters they had left at home. I liked to think that we wouldn’t be so very different.

  In the evenings, splints and dressings would be refreshed around the campfire, cigars would be lit, and English songs sung. The one that was always the most popular was “Good-bye, Dolly Gray”:

  I have come to say good-bye, Dolly Gray,

  It’s no use to ask me why, Dolly Gray,

  There’s a murmur in the air, you can hear it everywhere,

  It’s the time to do and dare, Dolly Gray …

  The one who led the singing was a rosy-cheeked soldier called Broadwater. Most of the time, he was an object of fun for the rest of the troop — his pink ears stuck out like a baby elephant’s, and he was so skinny his uniform hung off him like a scarecrow’s rags — but in the evenings, he was the star entertainer. Young Broadwater had a voice like a bugle horn, warm and warbling, and as he knelt on one knee before me he would throw out both arms in a ridiculous display of mock emotion, making me blush and the other men hoot and clap with delight.

  Good-bye, Dolly, I must leave you, though it breaks my heart to go,

  Something tells me I am needed at the front to fight the foe …

  As the song built to its climax, Moet would leap in circles around us, mimicking the serenade with squeaks and howls of excitement.

  See, the boys in blue are marching and I can no longer stay,

  Hark! I hear the bugle calling — good-bye, Dolly Gray!

  Something strange was happening to me. Much as I continued to hate what the British had done to my family, I found that I could no longer hate the soldiers themselves. There had been a time when I would fill with pride listening to the women boast of their husbands’ bravery on commando. Now, things were no longer quite as clear-cut. It wasn’t just that my father had been one of them. From the Great Karoo to the East Transvaal, and from the mighty Limpopo to the Cape of Good Hope, generations had tried to claim a part of Africa. My country had been watered by the blood of men from all corners of the globe — English and Dutch, Canadian and Irish, African and Indian.

  Could I forgive them, these weary fighters, these faces around the fire? Old men, young men, who had done as their leaders bade them? The ones who killed Sipho, who watched as my little brother faded from this life, who robbed my mother of her last ounce of dignity? Could Lindiwe and her daughters — if indeed they were still alive — ever forgive us? I knew that the answer to these questions depended on the future, not the past. We would create a new country while the old one would dissolve into myth.

  One of Corporal Byrne’s comrades explained to me that many of the captured commandos had been exiled to the farthest reaches of the British Empire: to the Caribbean, to Ceylon. He said that they would only be allowed to come back to Africa if they swore an oath of allegiance to the British king.

  Andries and Danie, and Oom Sarel if he had survived, would surely be among those who were exiled. I tried to imagine them on board a heaving vessel, peering through the foggy spray of the sea, waiting to sight land a thousand miles away. I wondered if they had been sad to watch their home disappear, but then I reminded myself that it’s impossible to feel homesick for a place that no longer exists.

  From Corporal Byrne’s drawings of Canada and from what he told me of his people, who lived in places called Lacombe and Medicine Hat, I knew that home now lay somewhere else. This thought was exciting, but it also filled me with a strange loneliness. So, as I cuddled Moet in his sling at night, I told him the story I had once told Gert, of the fisherman’s son who discovered a monster washed up on the shore.

  “The boy had gone on a grand adventure,” I told the purring vervet. “He had set sail for faraway lands, to find the monster’s mythical lair.

  “One night, a storm had torn his ship to shreds, and the boy woke up alone on a strange island. The fisherman’s son didn’t know that it took both courage and wisdom to be scared, or that he had proved himself brave and wise during the long night,” I said.

  “He could have done any one of a number of things. He could have shouted out to a distant goatherd, begged for help. He could have buried his head in his arms and wept. He could have walked straight into the sea, and so sealed the watery fate that he had only just escaped. Instead, he stood up — slowly, for his limbs ached and his head threatened to explode at the slightest movement — and began to walk toward the horizon.”

  We traveled in convoy by army wagon across the scorched countryside. Out on the veld, the land smelled of men: of salt and earth and musty leather. Every farm we passed told a tale of brutal eviction and destruction. Animal carcasses bleached by the sun sat sentry along the rutted tracks where once farmers had led their cattle to pasture. O
dd bits of furniture — pieces of a rocking chair, an abandoned dowry chest, a bundle of kitchen utensils, a child’s wax doll whose arms and legs had started to melt in the heat — lay scattered across the parched plain at the spots where their owners had abandoned all but the most necessary luggage. Roofless whitewashed houses, now no more than shells, haunted the empty landscape. Many were licked black where the flames had risen around their walls.

  I wished that we could have paid one final visit to the farm that had once been my home — not to see what had become of it, but to place one last stone atop Pa’s grave. I might even have placed one there for my real father, whoever — wherever — he was. But the column was not going anywhere near Amersfoort, and we did not have enough time to make the detour ourselves. I told myself that it made no difference. When I learned to speak English well enough, I would weave Pa into the stories I planned to tell Corporal Byrne; in that way, Pa would always be with me.

  Corporal Byrne and I parted ways with the troop at Pietermaritzburg and walked the rest of the way to La Lucia. I had always dreamed of seeing the sea — of standing on the spot where land meets water, where the world as we know it becomes strange and beautiful and new again. And when I heard the first seabird’s cry, I had to swallow the tears that seemed to rise from somewhere deep inside me, dissolving once and for all my calabash armor. The ancient cave dwellers who had lived on this coast long before my people came — had they felt this same sense of wonder when first they sighted foreign ships on the horizon? When we arrived at the bluffs, I was surprised to see that the ocean stretching out before us was not blue, but a frothing gray-green color. The bouldered beach below was strewed with seaweed, broken mussel shells, and shimmering purple stones worn smooth by the tide.

  “Dit is die See van Galilëe,” I told Corporal Byrne. It was even more beautiful than I had imagined.

  Together, we walked to the water’s edge.