Stones for My Father (11 page)

“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.

T
he 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 breath 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.