The Lost History of Stars

  Oupa tapped me on the shoulder, and when I turned, he scooped me up with one arm under my knees and another behind my back. He rubbed his whiskers on my cheek, and I squealed. He would be disappointed if I did not.

  “Did you see Taurus, the Bull?” Oupa asked me. “It was so bright.”

  “And the Seven Sisters at his shoulder,” I said. “Almost like they were riding him.”

  “Almost,” Oupa said with another whisker rub before putting me down and moving to Moeder.

  “Too many oat heads scattered in the field. . . . You waited too long to harvest,” he said. “They fall off if they’re overripe.”

  Moeder turned toward Bina, but she was helping Tuma offsaddle the horses.

  “Gideon, welcome back to our home,” Moeder said.

  “Thought we’d be back sooner,” he said. “They called an armistice for Dingaan’s Day.”

  “Blessings to God,” she said. “We’ll celebrate the covenant together.”

  “I thought you’d have killed all the Tommies by now, Oupa,” Willem said, carrying his grandfather’s rifle, the ammunition belts slung over his shoulders now dragging on the stairs.

  “We’re trying . . . would have if it were up to your father. If it goes long enough, he’ll be an officer,” Oupa said. “And all the time we thought he was just a farmer.”

  If this goes long enough? Moeder and I looked at Vader. He smiled at his father’s comments, as if a longer war appealed to him.

  “Tell us,” Willem begged.

  “Nothing to tell,” Vader said. “That’s Oupa talking. . . . He and Oom Sarel can tell you all about it.”

  “Sarel go straight home?” Moeder asked. Vader tipped his head in that direction.

  “You seem well,” he said to her.

  “Are you eating enough?” she asked him.

  “Enough to keep us going,” he said. “Don’t have much time for it. Some of the men say our greatest strength as an army is that we starve well.”

  Moeder spent the afternoon cooking mutton and cakes. Bina helped, too, and the fields were allowed to rest. As soon as Moeder pulled the table netting off the meal, Vader and Schalk attacked the food.

  “Wait. . . . Give thanks.” Gideon spread both arms over the table.

  His grace was shorter than was customary, and the men set upon the food with the fervor of those who had been long denied. I held back, watching, fixing the memory—home again, together.

  Having dragged bread over his plate in small circles to soak up the meat juices, Oupa Gideon lit his pipe and pushed back his chair to begin telling stories. I helped clear the table and clean but was eager to hear his experiences. Different weapons had their own sounds as Oupa brought the war to our parlor: the boo-ahhh of the big naval guns (arms flailing upward from the blast), the dat-dat-dat of the Maxims. When he told of shooting at Tommies, he held his left arm crooked and sighted in an invisible rifle, punctuating the story with a dok sound and a recoil of his shoulder.

  “God and the Mauser,” Oupa said. “That’s how we will prevail. Two things the Brits don’t have.”

  Willem wanted to hear Schalk’s version of their efforts, but Schalk disappointed him, telling only how well his horse, Kroon, handled the days of riding without water or rest, and how much better suited he was to their needs than the giant, slow chargers the Tommies rode. He made it sound as if the horses were doing the fighting.

  “It’s like they’re trying to chase a leopard with an ox,” Schalk said. “It’s almost unfair.”

  Most of Oupa’s stories furthered common themes: the British were poorly disciplined and inadequately prepared, and their leaders were completely dof. In his stories, our men were never harmed, only Tommies.

  After our meal, Vader brought his boots into the kitchen to repair a few holes where the soles met the uppers. He held one up and put his fingers through the gap and wiggled them at me.

  “How has Miss Aletta behaved?” he asked Moeder so that I could hear.

  “She is helping with the chores when she can get away from her reading and studies,” she said. “Her mind works so hard you can watch it from the outside.”

  “I know that look,” Vader said. “Sometimes a dozen questions and then silence.” He mocked me with a look of wide, blank eyes.

  “I don’t look like that . . .”

  Moeder gave me the same look with a slight head tilt.

  “She’s been taking care our lammetjie,” she said. “A good little helper with her little sister.”

  Vader reached over to Cecelia and ran his fingers over the tight, white curls that had caused me to start calling her “our little lamb.”

  “Willem?”

  “Willem is a boy . . . practicing to be you. Always testing me. Sometimes with his mouth, sometimes just with his eyes.”

  “Cee-Cee?”

  “Lettie’s little girl . . . always repeating the things she hears from her all day. She has God’s spirit.”

  “The farm?”

  “Keeping to the schedule. . . . The plowshare broke and it cost three shillings to get fixed and sharpened, and a half a day waiting for it,” she said. “The apricots are fat and almost ready. We’ll put them up for when you come home next time.”

  “Pumpkins and potatoes to plant soon,” he said.

  “Lettie . . . write that down, would you?”

  “And watch for sheep lice,” Vader added.

  Another note.

  “We may be back before you need to do any of this,” my father said.

  I studied my parents, seeing how they behaved after this separation. These were the things they would talk of . . . the farm schedule? I suspected the personal things would take place in private, at night. Or maybe they each knew the other well enough that they did not have to put thought to word. They were man and wife, sharing the yoke. I wanted to know the secrets, but they allowed so little to be seen.

  The moment Gideon finished the Bible reading that evening, Vader announced his fatigue and readiness for bed. He reached out for Moeder’s hand to help her from her seat. She looked at his hand and rose without taking it, putting her own in her skirt pockets. He kept his hand out, palm up. She followed him into their bedroom. I could not recall Vader offering a hand that way. I’m sure he didn’t know why she rejected it. I suspected he’d find out about the scabs on her hands soon enough.

  OUPA GIDEON DOMINATED OUR Dingaan’s Day remembrances, filling the parlor with a story of treachery, murder, and the miracle of the Holy Covenant.

  “We were the children of God led into the wilderness,” he started, patting his leather-bound Bible like an instrument, “off to find our own land, away from British tyranny, where we could honor our Holy Father.”

  Oupa’s passion heated the still air.

  “There were more than ten thousand of us on our Great Trek . . . following different trails . . . fighting savages, hunger, illness . . . tsetse flies killing our stock,” he said. “We traveled for months in jawbone wagons, over the Dragon Mountains through narrow passes . . . wagons falling over cliffs, dragging down a dozen oxen with each.”

  Ouma Wilhelmina nodded, smoke threads rising in a loose braid above her pipe.

  “Whole families drowned at river fords . . . but we followed God’s will. When our party reached Natal, our leaders sought a treaty with King Dingaan—the Vulture—who lured them into his kraal for a celebration of peace. As they raised their cups, the Zulus slaughtered seventy men, crushing their skulls with knobkerries . . .”

  “And when they found the body of Piet Retief, he had the treaty of peace from the savages still in his pouch,” Wilhelmina interrupted. “The last time we shall respect promises not our own.”

  Oupa paused to allow his impatience with her to register. This was his presentation. She interrupted every year.

  “The Zulus then attacked one of our laagers, killing hundreds of women and children while they were asleep,” he said. “My family survived, but we lived for almost a year in hunger
and in fear that the same fate would be ours.”

  “Except for God’s great Providence,” Wilhelmina interjected again.

  He paused.

  “We prayed to God and vowed that if he would grant us victory, we would build a church on that spot and forever consecrate the memory of the day. And then the savages came, unaware that our vow to God had steeled us in our cause.”

  He raised the Bible to his lips with eyes closed.

  “There were twelve thousand of them against only five hundred of us in a circle of wagons beside the river,” he said.

  “Four hundred seventy,” Wilhelmina said.

  “Outnumbered twenty to one.”

  “Twenty-five,” she corrected.

  “My mother and sisters loaded the rifles for my father,” he said, beginning a rapid-fire description.

  “The muzzles were so hot they burned their fingers loading them . . .”

  He mimed the fast action of loading a hot rifle. Bible in his left hand, he sighted targets over it.

  “So many shots were being fired that the sky was cloudy from the powder . . .”

  He squinted.

  “They surged in for hours . . . hours. . . . Screams filled the air . . . piteous moans . . . God’s great wrath upon them.”

  I closed my eyes and tried not to hear death moans.

  “And in the heat, the bodies of thousands of Zulus lifted a stench to the heavens. . . . Yet all but three of our men still stood . . . witnesses of God’s great blessing upon us . . .”

  I felt that heat and had to lift Cee-Cee off my lap, the room was so tight and air so precious. I wheezed as if I had been smoking Ouma’s pipe, my head grown light.

  “God’s will,” Oom Sarel said. “How else could four hundred burghers defeat the Vulture except for the Providence of God? The British are nothing to us compared to that. We should make another covenant, now, to defeat the British.”

  I opened my eyes and inhaled thick air. The idea of a vow sounded so out of place in our time. The first was so long ago it seemed like a biblical tale. I wondered if God would be interested in causes purchased with the promises of men he created to be flawed and weak in the first place.

  Oupa ignored Sarel.

  “And that is why this day is holy . . . and why we must revere this solemn vow . . . and why those who forsake our covenant should be delivered to hell.”

  18

  May 1901, Concentration Camp

  Willem and Klaas created private space beneath a blanket on the far side of the tent, perhaps imagining it a fort from which to fight their imaginary foes. At times we all pulled into small spaces of our own creation, which at first seemed another level of confinement: a cocoon inside an enclosure within an encampment.

  I focused on my writing, having discovered the ability to wall out distractions almost regardless of the commotion. In time, the pressure of all the nearness seemed to squeeze words from me. But even with as many pages of rules as I could rip down, paper was dear. Instead of putting every meteor flash of thought to paper, I made them take form before they reached the page. The act of writing gave them substance, and they occupied space, and that made them real. I decided I should always write as if pencil and paper and light were scarce. When each word is valuable, you spend them with care.

  Some things that went on were impossible to ignore. It wasn’t more than twelve feet across the tent, and in the right conditions, the sounds of even whispered conversations bounced off the canvas and arrived without distortion on the other side. The discussions between those high-pitched little-boy voices came across clearly, and when I heard Klaas mention my name, I listened.

  It turned out that Klaas had taken a liking to me, an admission that sickened Willem and did me very little good. When Klaas returned to the matter, saying he would somehow come to my rescue and be my hero one day, Willem threatened to leave and never speak to him.

  They talked of the war, cataloging the stories they had heard—atrocities by the Brits, bravery by our men, and the most gruesome descriptions of war wounds; men being shot in the eye while looking through field glasses, men being shelled while in the latrine, several men standing in a row being shot through with the same bullet.

  Both decided they were ready to break out of the camp and join the men on commando. They were old enough and could ride and shoot better than the Tommies. Willem reported having killed a duiker as evidence.

  “They’re fast and very tasty,” Willem said.

  “You have to be fast if you’re tasty,” Klaas said, countering Willem’s duiker with his own claim of a bushbuck. After volleying tales of manly acts, they agreed they were both fit for duty.

  “Won’t the Tommies punish our families if we escape?” Willem asked.

  “Glory has its cost.”

  “How do we get to the commandos with no horses?”

  Reasonable foresight—rare for them—spoiled this plan.

  “Then we’ll just have to start killing guards in camp,” Willem said.

  “Ja . . . ja.”

  As the plan took shape, they would look for a lone guard. Klaas would distract him by falling down as if stricken, and when the guard bent to offer help, Willem would steal his rifle and shoot him. They would run back to the tent as if nothing had happened.

  “But what if the guard doesn’t try to help me?”

  “Then you get up and we look for another guard,” Willem said. “They won’t suspect us.”

  “But what if the guard tells on us?”

  “He won’t know it was a plot if it doesn’t work . . . and if it does work, he’ll be dead and he can’t tell anybody.”

  “And we can keep doing it until they’re all dead and the camp will be set free,” Klaas said.

  “And we’ll be heroes.”

  “Legends.”

  They sealed their agreement on the plan by alternating punches on the shoulders, each harder than the last, until Willem admitted pain.

  Maples certainly would fall for the trick. I was suddenly angry at the boys.

  And if it failed? “We’ll still be heroes,” Klaas said. “At least for a while.”

  Yes, I thought, until they were hanged.

  “Japie would have been good at this, ” Willem said.

  “Ja,” Klaas said, offering a brief eulogy for a boy they knew who had died of wasting sickness the previous week.

  “Bad way to pass,” Willem said.

  “Oh, typhoid is worse,” Klaas argued, triggering another grim debate as the two boys, in whispers, weighed the drawbacks of various deaths. After listing symptoms and miming effects, they arrived at the best way to die in camp: being shot by a guard. Quicker, less suffering, greater dignity.

  “Or,” Klaas suggested, “if you can tell you are getting really sick, then it would make sense to just attack a guard and hope he shoots you. That would save time . . .”

  “And suffering. I was almost shot by a Tommy firing squad,” Willem bragged.

  “No, you weren’t.” Klaas rejected Willem’s claim so eagerly that he raised his voice loud enough for everyone to notice.

  “I was. Six of them . . . all lined up . . . wanted to shoot me as a spy.”

  “They did not.”

  “Lettie,” Willem called to me. I looked up as if lost in thought. Both boys stared at me, blanket pulled back to their shoulders. “Firing squad . . . me?”

  I looked at Klaas and nodded my head.

  Suddenly, Willem was his hero. I started to write notes on this exchange but thought of another invasion by the commandant and knew the consequences. Still, I was saddened that boys not yet ten spent time considering their deaths and plotting the deaths of others. I was further saddened that their arguments made so much sense.

  DAVID COPPERFIELD WALKED WITH me most days; I carried his unending struggles in my hands. When it rained, I pulled my scarf over my head and shoulders and leaned forward like an old woman to make a lee to protect my book. When it was too foul to be outside, I burrow
ed beneath my blanket to make a tent inside the tent, and my shrouded place became England in the last century. I left space alongside the tent wall to let in enough light to read by, but it felt dark and misty, exactly the atmosphere I wanted for my time in England with David.

  Within a few pages, Dickens convinced me I was right there living beside the young English boy. I liked David and felt . . . what? Akin. That’s the word. And I was, in a way, since Moeder’s grandfather had been born there.

  I had pictured England as a place of palaces and wealth. So to hear of David’s difficult life came as a surprise. Our lives on the farm were hard in many ways. But not like David’s. And he seemed such a good-hearted little boy, doing his best, trying to see the good in people. I did not see how David could be an enemy of my country. But his stepfather felt like an enemy to anyone with a sense of humanity; he abused and bullied David in the way some of the Brits treated those of us in camp.

  I was so happy that I yelled aloud when David passed his threshold of tolerance with his stepfather’s beatings and bit him on the hand. I wanted to be like David. After teaching Willem and Cee-Cee one day, I asked them if they wanted me to read Dickens to them. Willem was gone before I had finished the sentence.

  “Can I come with you under the blanket?” Cee-Cee asked.

  “Of course.”

  Cee-Cee liked when David was called Master Davy. Sometimes I read for hours, my throat so sore and lips so dry that it was hard to go on. She would point at words and ask what they were. That was how I started to teach her to read. It would be my gift to her. I hoped she would always remember that I taught her, and she would think of me when she was old enough to read to her children. After a while she would just fall asleep in our little nest.

  Sometimes when she dozed, I’d hold the book to my face and smell it, thinking that it had been in Maples’s tunic, next to his chest. He’d held the cover and touched every page.

  Rachel Huiseveldt asked several times whether she could crawl under the blanket with us and hear the story. I looked at Cee-Cee for her opinion. She squinted. I told Rachel there wasn’t room. “Master Davy is for us,” Cee-Cee whispered once we were covered. And he was. It wasn’t the same as having Janetta to walk with and share womanly things. But it was warm and familiar and it was nice to hold Cee-Cee as we read how someone else’s strength carried him through a difficult life in a hostile place.