by Irma Joubert
“Let us pray,” said Daddy when the story came to an end. He held his hands out to Mommy and to Kobus. Gretl leaned forward and placed her hands on his big hands, and Mommy and Kobus held hands across the table. They were all holding on to one another, making a circle.
Daddy prayed for a long time, but she understood very little. He didn’t pray to Lieber Herr Jesus or the Holy Virgin, she could tell. Maybe he was praying to Oma’s God, because he said Almighty God, but she doubted it, because the Afrikaners didn’t like the Jews.
When he finished, Mommy said in German, “Daddy prayed for you too, Grietjie. He thanked God for sending you to us and he asked that you’d be happy with us.”
“Thank you,” she said to Daddy. She put the Bible away in its special place. She now had her own little task to perform in her new Afrikaans home every night.
“I won’t take her to church today,” Mommy said the next morning. “You and Kobus go; we need a little time alone.”
When Daddy and Kobus had left in the car, Mommy took Gretl’s hand. “Let me show you all the rooms in the house,” she said in German.
In the dining room Gretl ran her hand over the piano. “Do you know how to play?” she asked.
Mommy smiled and opened the lid. The white and black notes were lined up in neat rows. She sat down on the piano stool. “Sit next to me, Gretl.”
They sat together, she and her new mommy. Her mommy played German songs she knew. She sang along in German, Mommy sang in Afrikaans. “Sah ein Knab’ ein Röslein stehn” and “Komm, lieber Mai” and “Bruder Jakób.”
“Give me your hand,” Mommy said and put Gretl’s fingers on the notes. “That’s right, lift here, press down like this.” She patiently showed her.
When Daddy and Kobus came back from church, she could play the first two lines of “Bruder Jakób” and sing it in Afrikaans. They listened and clapped their hands. If they had known about her Jakób, Mommy would have chosen another song. Gretl wished with all her heart that Jakób could hear her sing and play that song.
Shortly afterward the neighbors descended on the farm to see the German child. Mommy made coffee and served cake. Gretl held out her hand to greet them, but the strangers drew her closer and kissed her. She turned her cheek, but they grasped her face and planted their wet kisses on her lips. The lump in her tummy threatened to push up into her mouth. She tried to look them in the eye and lift her chin and smile, but the nightmare went on and on. They clicked their tongues and said, “Poor little mite,” and “Ag, shame,” and wiped tears and sweat with big handkerchiefs. They drank cups and cups of coffee and tall glasses of ginger beer and ate cake.
Gretl sought shelter with the madonna in the kitchen, but a fat lady with beads of sweat on her nose and forehead found her there and carried her back to the living room. She clung to her mommy’s hand, but a big girl pulled her away and picked her up as if she were no older than Ingeborg.
The cake stuck in her throat. After a while she sneaked out through the back door and hid behind the trunk of a big tree. A feeling of desolation overwhelmed her. These people wanted her, but she didn’t want to be here. She was too pale, her accent was too strange, and it was too hot here, with too much dust and sun and not enough green grass. There were cattle but no goats, and chickens but no ducks. There were dogs and a strange mommy and daddy and an older brother. There were Oom Doorsie and Auntie Lovey and their many children in a small house on the farm, and a big stone house in which only the four of them lived, and in which she got lost. And there was a strange bedroom with a strange bed that was hers. There was a holy Black Madonna who stoked a hot oven.
But Jakób wasn’t here, and he could never, never come.
She got up and began to walk, heading nowhere, just into the veld.
Tears were streaming down her face.
She didn’t hear the horse’s hooves, so she got a fright when the big animal suddenly stopped beside her.
“I’ve come to look for you,” said Kobus. “My mother is worried.”
She didn’t know the right words to explain. “They kiss me,” she said.
“I know,” he said and got off the big horse. “It’s horrible. Disgusting.”
“Hobbirel,” she said. “Disgustible.”
“Horrible,” he said, “disgusting.”
“Dishorribling,” she said with feeling.
“Dishorribling,” he agreed. “Come, I’ll put you in front of me on the horse and take you home.”
She shook her head.
“Are you afraid of the horse?”
She shook her head again. “I’m not afraid.”
“You don’t want to go home because of those people?”
She nodded.
“Okay, I’ll show you something. But first I have to tell my mother you’re safe.”
“My mother auch,” she said firmly.
He picked her up and put her on the horse, then got up himself. She sat in front of him, and they rode until they were close to the house. She waited with the horse while he ran inside. He soon returned with a floppy cloth hat. “Mom says you must wear this so that the sun doesn’t burn you. You’re very pale,” he said.
The big horse carefully picked his way up the mountainside. She looked at her new brother’s arms. They were brown compared to her own, and much thicker, with hairs that glinted gold in the sunlight, like their father’s. She felt the loneliness of a moment ago dissolve in the sunlight. Mom says you must wear this, her brother had said. Because Mom cared.
At the top of the mountain he lifted her off the horse. Below them lay the scrubby veld as far as the eye could see. In the distance lay a blue mountain range, and the road to town snaked over the bridge and disappeared behind some trees.
“Look, Grietjie, you can see the whole farm from here,” he said. “See, there’s our house, behind the trees. And there, next to it, is the old homestead, where my great-grandfather lived. One day, when I’m grown up, I’m going to live there and run the farm with my father. See, there’s the kraal with the calves, can you see?”
“Yes,” she said.
“And there’s the reservoir and the wind pump for the house, do you see?”
“I see, very nice,” she said.
“Now look up the gorge. Do you see that dam wall?”
“Yes?”
“My dad built it himself. Now he catches all the water that used to flow to the sea. That’s why we have such good fields. We put them under irrigation. Do you understand?”
“I understand,” she said. She wished she could tell him it wasn’t just his dad, but her dad too. But he kept talking and explaining.
He showed her the fields, the new citrus orchards, the camps for the cattle, more wind pumps with water troughs. He even pointed out the family graveyard. She struggled a little with the idea of a family graveyard, but he was good at explaining.
She said, “I see,” and “I understand,” and “That’s nice,” because they were the only words she knew.
It was almost lunchtime when he lifted her back on the horse and rode home.
After lunch Kobus packed his clothes in a suitcase.
“Will you help me, please, Grietjie?” said her mother. “Put the cookies in this tin and the rusks in that one.”
There was a picture of a horse on the lid of the cookie tin. She arranged the cookies neatly. The rusk tin wasn’t round, like the cookie tin, and it was old. The flower on the lid was scratched and faded. She packed the rusks in rows. Now Kobus wouldn’t be hungry at school.
“We must put in some butter too,” Gretl said. She knew that syrup without butter didn�
��t taste very good on bread.
“They get all their food at the hostel, butter as well,” her mother assured her. “The cookies and rusks are extra.”
He won’t be hungry then, Gretl thought. That’s good.
“Would you like to come along for the drive, Grietjie?” her father asked.
She nodded and went to the car with him.
On their way to the bigger town where Kobus went to school she sat in the backseat. Kobus and their father talked nonstop, but she didn’t understand much of what they were saying. One day she, too, would speak to their father like that, she thought. She’d ask Mommy for Afrikaans books to read, and she would learn the language in no time. And their mommy would have time to help her, because there were no other children at home.
They dropped Kobus off at the hostel. It looked like an orphanage, but Kobus didn’t mind staying, because they would be fetching him again on Friday. On the way back she sat in the front seat, next to her daddy. They couldn’t talk much, but she sat next to him and breathed in his smell and looked at his big hands. Sometimes he would turn to her and smile. In bed that evening she asked her new mommy, “Are you very sorry that I’m not younger?”
“Grietjie!” her mother said, shocked. “Why would you think that? You’re perfect. You’re exactly what we wanted. We asked for a little girl of any age.”
“Why?” She wanted to be quite certain.
“We don’t have a little girl and we really wanted one.”
“Why didn’t you have one yourselves?” Monicka and Haneczka had no trouble having babies.
Her mother gave a sad smile. “Daddy wanted more children, and so did I,” she said, “but sometimes God has a different plan. Now I know why—so that you could be our little girl.”
Gretl brought her hand—the one that wasn’t holding the cross—out from under the covers and gently touched her mother’s cheek. It was soft and warm. “Then why were you in the office for such a long time before you agreed to take me?” she asked.
Her mommy hugged her tightly. “My dearest Grietjie,” she said, “you weren’t the problem. It was me. You see, the selection board had decided that the adoptive parents should be pure Afrikaners who would promote the ideals of the Afrikaner nation. But I have an English background. My mother was Afrikaans, but Grandpa John is completely British. They had to decide whether I was good enough to be your mommy.”
“You are,” Gretl assured her. “You’re the best.”
That night she slept without waking up even once.
8
At the beginning of October Kobus came home for the week-long school vacation.
“Dad, may I drive the tractor when you start plowing, Dad?” asked Kobus. He kept saying Dad while Gretl had trouble remembering to say it even once.
“We’ll wait for the first rains before we start plowing,” said her father. “In the meantime you can take the Little Gray Fergie and the trailer and dump the salt licks in the cattle camps. And on Tuesday we’ll start spraying the citrus orchards.”
Kobus looked pleased. He liked driving the tractor. “Right, Dad, I’ll do it, Dad. But, Dad, I want to teach Grietjie to swim, Dad, or one of these days she’ll drown, Dad.”
“I don’t want to learn to swim,” Gretl protested. She wasn’t quite afraid of the big round reservoir with its brown water and frogs, just cautious.
“You have to swim. Everybody swims,” Kobus insisted.
Gretl lifted her chin. “Then Daddy must teach me,” she said.
Her dad smiled. “Daddy will, Grietjie.”
After supper her father connected the flat-faced brown radio to a big battery and searched for a station. Not a train station, but a radio station. First they listened to the news and weather forecast, then to a story. On Saturday nights they listened to Your Own Choice—music like she’d heard in the cathedral, and like the music Grandpa John loved.
Before bedtime they sat on the veranda, where it was cool. In order to keep the bugs and mosquitoes away they kept the lights off.
Sometimes they played Monopoly. She knew the game, because they had played it on the ship. It was a clever game. You had to look out for someone who might land on your property. She kept her eye on Kobus, because boys like to cheat.
When she landed on Liverpool Station, her mother, who was also the banker, asked, “Wouldn’t you like to buy it?”
“No, thanks,” she said firmly. “I don’t want to own a station!”
Some nights they sat reading. Her daddy read The Farmer’s Weekly or sometimes Die Huisgenoot or Die Brandwag. Her mommy read English books while Gretl read Afrikaans storybooks. Her mommy had given her a book with stories she already knew, but now she could read them in Afrikaans. If there was an unfamiliar word, her mommy helped her. She was keen to learn because she wanted to go to school after the vacation was over. She loved it when they all sat reading together.
One evening Kobus entered the living room with a rifle in his hand.
Gretl felt her tummy contract. “What’s he doing with that gun?” she asked her mommy in German.
“I’m going to clean it,” Kobus answered in Afrikaans. “Tomorrow I want to ambush the mousebirds in the orchard.”
“You’re going to shoot little birds?” Gretl asked.
“Mousebirds, yes,” he answered without looking up.
“Birds?” She still couldn’t believe it.
“Yes, Grietjie,” he said impatiently, “birds and buck. What else does one shoot with a rifle?”
“People,” she said.
The three of them—her daddy, mommy, and Kobus—looked up quickly. She saw them glance at one another. She had said something wrong. “I didn’t know you shot birds,” she said self-consciously.
“Don’t worry, Grietjie,” said her father. “Come to Daddy.” He wrapped his strong arms around her and held her close. She didn’t really know why, but it was nice, except that it made her miss Jakób.
That night her nightmares returned. This time it was about the Gestapo with their dogs and their rifles at the station. Fiery tongues shot out of their rifles and the station went up in flames.
Saturday afternoon she put on her new swimsuit. It was made of a stretchy fabric. Her mommy plastered Nivea Creme all over her face so that the sun wouldn’t burn her and told her to keep her hat on all the time, even if it got wet. Gretl felt paler than usual. Her mommy’s skin was golden brown. She wore a big hat and dark glasses, and she didn’t put Nivea Creme on her face. Kobus and her daddy had golden skins as well, even though their hair was blond like hers. Maybe she would look like them one day and not be so thin, and people would think she was their real daughter.
She clung to her daddy in the water. It wasn’t cold, but it was brown and deep. Her feet didn’t touch the bottom at all. Her daddy held her and didn’t let her go. After a while she held on to his back while he swam. He was a very good swimmer. Kobus somersaulted into the water and jumped in with his legs drawn up to his chin. He did this right next to their daddy and splashed water all over the two of them, so that she gasped for breath and Daddy scolded Kobus. When their mommy came in too, the four of them went round and round and made a whirlpool. They laughed and floated in the current. Safe in her daddy’s arms, she slowly began to relax and enjoy the water.
When they’d had enough, they sat in the shade on the grass beside the dam. Her daddy cut open a large fruit called a watermelon. He held a long knife by the hilt and sliced round and round the melon. Then he pressed on either side with his big hands and the watermelon broke open into slices. He cut the middle part, which he called the crown, into discs and removed a piece for her mommy. “A prince
ss deserves the best crown,” he said. Then he gave a piece to her, because she was the little princess. “Taste it, Grietjie.”
She bit into the red flesh. It was crisp and sweet. “Lekker,” she said, licking the juice from her fingers.
Lekker was a new Afrikaans word she had learned, a nice word. Everything that was good was lekker—whether it was something she ate or smelled or felt or read, it didn’t matter. Lekker was lekker. It was also the Afrikaans word for the sweets they had been given on the ship as prizes for winning at their games.
When they finished, Kobus took a piece of watermelon rind and sneaked up on their mommy from behind. He held her down and rubbed her face with the sticky rind.
“Don’t, Kobus, no!” she scolded, trying to stop him. Kobus and their daddy doubled over with laughter.
Gretl saw Kobus sizing her up and knew what was coming. She jumped up and ran as fast as her thin legs could go, but he caught up with her, tucked her under his arm, and rubbed the watermelon rind all over her face.
“Don’t, Kobus, no!” she scolded, too, but it made him laugh even harder. She and her mommy had to get back into the water to wash off the sticky juice. This time she held on for dear life to her mommy. Then her daddy and Kobus dived back in. One day she would also swim like a fish, she vowed.
Kobus took the remaining watermelon to Auntie Lovey’s house. Her family lived in the small house behind the old farmstead, and Oom Doorsie helped her father on the farm.
“Why don’t Auntie Lovey and Oom Doorsie live in the old farmstead?” she asked. They had a great many kids for one small house.
“They can’t, because I’m going to live there one day,” Kobus answered as if she were stupid. “And when Grandpa John comes to visit, he lives there.”
Kobus told her a beautiful story. Grandpa John, who had been a British soldier in the Boer War, had fallen ill. Ouma Susan, who was dead now, had nursed him in the outside room of the farmhouse. But when she wanted to marry him, her father was furious because the Afrikaners didn’t like the British then. They had to flee and only many years later, when their mother, Kate, was already grown up, did the great-grandfather forgive Grandpa John and Ouma Susan.