Stones for My Father (12 page)

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 the 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.

“ ‘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 tent 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.