Stones for My Father (17 page)

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 …”

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”:

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.

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

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. Odd 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.