Stones for My Father (9 page)

The commandant straightened, and adjusted his gun.

“Standerton,” he said, nodding at the open cart that awaited us. The commandant had peculiarly pointed nostrils, which flared each time he spoke; he wet his lips and the saliva glistened in the sun, demarcating the boundaries of an uncompromising mouth. “From there the women and children will go to Kroonstad.” He shot Andries a warning glance. “For their own safety.”

“And the men?” asked Oom Sarel.

“The men will become prisoners of war.”

Oom Sarel announced that we were to obey the Tommies or else we would be shot. At this, some of the little ones began to whimper. Their mothers muffled their sobs, as tired as they were frightened.

“Wees sterk, vriende,”
concluded Oom Sarel
.
Be strong, friends
.

The men stomped their feet and heckled the British patrol while being chained together at the ankles, until eventually they began to resemble a convulsing, many-limbed insect. My mother told me not to let go of Gert and Hansie — not even for one second. She took Pa’s gun from Gert and strode up to the commandant, head held high.

“Dis my man se geweer,”
she said.
This is my husband’s gun
. She did not drop it on the ground at the feet of horse and rider, as the others had done, but held it up toward him. The commandant considered my mother, and the rifle. He took the gun and nodded curtly.

“Thank you,” he said.

As my mother returned to us, two soldiers appeared with Lindiwe and Sipho in tow. Neliswe and Nosipho trailed behind them, escorted by a third, older soldier, one who looked almost kind.

“We found some blacks trying to escape into the forest,” said the one holding Lindiwe, the strangesounding words emerging through a bristling, gray beard. “The lad’s in bad shape, but the woman and her kids are all right.”

Sipho was hanging his head so low that the bones on the back of his neck stuck out. I tried willing him to look up, but my friend seemed determined not to meet the gaze of any of us. Lindiwe, on the other hand, fell to her knees the instant she saw my mother, beseeching us with outstretched palms.

“Please,
nooi
, take us with you!” she pleaded. Seeing
their mother in distress, the little girls broke free from the kind-looking soldier and tumbled next to her. Sipho remained where he was, motionless.

My mother opened her mouth to speak, but before she could say anything, Oom Willem’s voice rang out loudly over our heads.

“That boy killed one of our men,” he said to Oom Sarel. “I saw him stab Smous Petrus — look for a knife with an ivory handle and you’ll find Boer blood on it. The hole in that man’s stomach was not made by a bullet, any fool will see that.”

“No!” Lindiwe dug her fingers into the ground. “He is only a child. He was afraid — we are all afraid. Please,
nooi
, take us with you!”

I looked up at my mother, who had steeled her jaw and was staring intently at the ground between our servants and us.
Please
, I wanted to say.
Do something! You’re the bravest one here — tell the commandant that they belong to us
.

“I will not let our women and children travel with a murderer in their midst — so help me, God!” said Oom Willem loudly. “Over my dead body will I allow my daughter onto that cart with a Boer-hating
kaffir
.”

The rest of the
laager
murmured its approval. Even Oom Sarel nodded in agreement.

“The law says that a
kaffir
who murders a white man must be put to death,” interjected Koos Viljoen. He turned to the commandant, trying to make the soldier understand. “Even your law says so. The penalty for murder is hanging.”

I felt my stomach lurch. I could count the bones on Sipho’s neck.

“Gert,” I whispered, “I’m going to be sick.”

The British soldiers started to realize what had happened, and the commandant began to look uncomfortable. At last, he addressed the soldier who held Sipho.

“The boy shall go with the men,” he said to Oom Sarel, to translate. “Charges will be laid. The woman and her daughters will be sent to the African camp at Bethlehem.”

As Sipho was led to the wagon where the rest of the men were being settled, Lindiwe let out an anguished howl.

“Please,
nooi!
He is only a child — let him come with me, please! I beg you!”

The two remaining soldiers grabbed her and the weeping girls and pulled them away. Even though his mother continued to scream for him, Sipho did not look up once.

“Do something, Ma,” I whispered, tasting the bile rising in my throat. “They can’t kill Sipho —”

“Nooi!”

Although I could no longer see her behind the wall of soldiers and their horses, the terror in Lindiwe’s voice sent a rush of pinpricks up my spine.

“Lindiwe!” I screamed, my eyes stinging with vinegar tears. In that moment, I was overcome with a sensation of being hopelessly suspended in time and space, like a high-wire acrobat anticipating the spring
and bounce-back of the safety harness. I heard Lindiwe return my cry —
“Kleinnooi …”
—but within a few seconds her wails were drowned out by the soldiers’ jeers. By now, Sipho had been lifted onto one of the khaki’s horses and was allowing his hands to be tied behind his back. I only had time to call out his name once before Ma’s hand came crashing against the side of my head.

“Mind your tongue, or you’ll have us all killed!”

My eyes felt so hot I thought they might melt. “Please, Ma,” I begged. “Make them promise that they won’t hurt Sipho! Please, tell them that Lindiwe must stay with us — for Hansie’s sake — tell them …” But my words had begun to float away from me, like pieces of driftwood being carried out to sea. “Please, Ma, please …” I started to see blotches of color everywhere, the way you do when you close your eyes against a very bright light. Then I heard a thud — the same sound Lindiwe’s body had made when Smous Petrus knocked her down — and felt the hot surge of blood gushing between my ears as I hit the ground.

I woke up in the back of a high-sided cart, flanked by my brothers. As soon as he noticed that I was conscious, Gert shuffled closer.

“The
apie
, Corlie,” he whispered. “He’s still in the jockey box.”

“What do you want me to do?” I snapped. My temples pounded; my tongue was so dry that it felt as
if it had cleaved to the back of my mouth. Gert shrank back, biting his lip.

It served him right: imagine fretting about a wild animal when Sipho — a person, our friend — might face hanging in a faraway town? And what about Lindiwe, without whom we would never have survived those perilous days on the open platteland? I couldn’t allow myself to think of the terrified vervet huddling in its box while battle raged outside, then discovering itself abandoned and alone in the eerie silence that followed — for what was to be done? At times like these, if we didn’t harden our hearts against the little things, we would never survive.

There were twelve of us in the cart — all women and children. I noticed Tant Minna standing up at the front, straight as a rod, gripping the side of the wagon with white knuckles.

“Where are Danie and Andries?” I asked.

“With the men,” said Ma. She was standing, like the other women, steadying herself against the side of the cart as we rattled over the rocky ground. She eyed me with disdain. “What happened to you, then, eh? Fainting like a princess. What did you think you were doing, drawing attention to yourself like that?”

“You should have said something, Ma. You could have saved them —”

Ma raised her hand. “Don’t you speak to me like that, Corlie Roux. All that fuss over an idiot boy with sticky fingers …”

In an instant, my grief spun into fury. “You killed him, Ma! You didn’t say anything, and now they’re going to have him hanged —” I hauled myself to my feet, fighting against the lurching of the wagon. “I hate you!”

She slapped me so hard my head hit the side of the cart, making the others jump. My mother pressed her face toward mine, her breath hot against my skin.

“Don’t talk about things you can’t understand,” she hissed. “You’d have us locked up with a murderer, would you? There’s enough evil in our midst as it is, my girl …”

She left me slumped in the corner, cupping my head in my palms. The rocking of the wagon had already begun to make me feel queasy.

When we arrived at Standerton soon after, the soldiers herded us like cattle off the cart and into a boxcar that was waiting on a remote strip of rail tracks. It was difficult to see where we were going, and there was no time to gauge our location. Before I knew it, we’d been corralled from the cart into a dark, black box. The only light came from a couple of vents in the roof. When we were all inside, one of the soldiers slammed the door to the boxcar, making the entire thing shake. Moments later, we could hear the engines starting.

I had never been on a train before, and I wished that there might have been a window so I could watch the steam rising from the chimneys. As it was, I could barely make out the shape of my mother and brothers, who had squeezed themselves under one of the air vents. As the
train heaved forward, we all stumbled to the back, crushing into one another with shouts of alarm and confusion. It took us a long time to get used to the movement, but after a few minutes everyone became very quiet.

“Are we going to Kroonstad?” Gert asked Ma in a soft voice.

“Ja.”

“Why?” There was a long silence. “Why, Ma?”

“Because that’s where the Good Lord wants us,” replied my mother.

And so it was that we left the Transvaal, and entered the Orange River Colony.

I
t was a burly young khaki who released the boxcar door, hours later. A dazzling square of light cut blindingly into our dark prison, making us wince and shield our eyes from the glare.

“Out!”

We stumbled into the open air like zombies, dropping to the ground and gathering our belongings in a silent daze. Everything seemed to move in slow motion: perhaps because we were dehydrated and sore from the journey, or perhaps it was a tactic employed by our mothers to stall proceedings for as long as possible. They must have known that it would be a long time before we would breathe free air again.

Blinking dumbly at the expanse of veld stretching out before us, we followed the khakis’ orders to load a waiting cart with our luggage and to form a line
behind it. Then we were made to walk, twenty minutes or so, to the edge of a rocky precipice. In the distance, a winding plume of black smoke rose like a question mark over the horizon. As the cart ground to a halt, I imagined with an intense feeling of sudden dread that we would be made to jump over the edge. I flung my arms around Ma’s waist as if she were an anchor, and squeezed my eyes shut. Gert, in turn, did the same thing to me, digging his fingers into my ribs so hard that I gasped.

That was the first time I saw the camp, stretching below us for miles: row upon row of white bell-tents, the lot of them hemmed in by high barbed-wire fencing. Later I would see pictures of the other camps — sprawling prisons at Johannesburg, Bloemfontein, Bethulie, Potchefstroom, and Norvalspont, to name just a few. They all looked the same, more or less: bell-tents and barbed wire as far as the eye could see.

“What is this place?” whispered Tant Minna.

The burly young khaki planted his feet and placed his hands on his hips. Poking out from beneath long khaki shorts, his knees were pink and freckled.

“This is a voluntary refugee camp,” he said in our language. “You will be looked after here.”

“But we’re not refugees,” said Lettie Lourens.

The khaki released a bark of laughter. He had a jaw that was straight and pointed like a shovel. “You were found living in the bush,” he said. The laughter didn’t
make his voice sound any friendlier. “You have no homes to return to: that makes you refugees.”

“We didn’t ask to come here,” snapped my mother.

The khaki’s eyes narrowed at her. “You only have your husbands to blame for that,” he said.

My mother drew herself to her full height and met the khaki’s gaze.

“You do this to us because you cannot defeat our husbands on the battlefield,” she said. “That makes you cowards.”

A collective murmur of agreement rose from the other women. Before the khaki had a chance to respond, Betsie Gouws raised a thin hand.

“When may we have some water?” she asked in a feeble whisper. “The children have had nothing to drink all day.”

“There will be water at the camp.” The khaki casually indicated the vast scrubland that lay behind us, the miles of railway tracks leading nowhere, and rolled out his thick lower lip, rocking his head heavily from side to side like a boulder teetering over a precipice. “Of course, if you would prefer to dig for water yourselves, you are free to do so.” He grinned at my mother. “Otherwise, follow me.”

We were led to a checkpoint where a couple of bored-looking soldiers examined us, checking for concealed weapons, before releasing the lock on a metal gate. We passed through two more checkpoints before
the last of our group shuffled into the main enclosure.