I expected the nurses would have no time for me with so many sick children needing attention. I would walk toward the hospital marquee and circle at a distance until I was able to subtly bump into a nurse going to work. Or I might see one outside the tent. I would comment on the weather, and she might recognize some symptom. I had never been to a hospital or been examined by a nurse. But I could do this.
Two guards stood near the tent, and mothers clustered nearby, waiting for word of their children. They were kept out except for short periods. My hands shook from nerves. I had heard women saying that this was a place where doctors pretended to help but instead hastened deaths as part of a plan to bring about our extermination. And the nurses, they said, were here only to find husbands, to marry an officer or a doctor.
Several nurses came out together in stained aprons, short red capes, and straw boaters atop pinned-up hair. They walked past the group of mothers while another nurse stopped to talk. I eased toward the fringe of their circle so that the nurse might walk past me when she finished her updates. She provided reports as calmly as possible. Some women confronted her, and others abused the guards; some raised howls, and others turned away, silent. The nurse nodded her head solemnly with each report, respectful of their grief but not participating.
Having worked her way through the mothers, she stepped toward me. “And you?”
“Ja . . . hallo.”
“A question?”
“I . . .”
“You’ve stopped having your cycle and you’re afraid to ask your mother about it.”
The woman was a medical genius.
“Am I dying?”
“No.”
“Oh, praise God. Am I sick?”
“Probably . . . it’s usually a sign of poor health, but it’s common here. Your cycles will probably come back and you’ll be fine.”
“I’m not the only one?”
“No . . . half a dozen a week. They all stand outside looking lost . . . like you.”
“So . . . I am not dying?”
“Not from that.”
“Why . . . why now?”
“Living here. Bad food, stress . . . happens all the time, particularly to the young girls. We didn’t know this would be something that developed in camps like this. Probably something we need to keep track of and study. Our understanding of medicine grows from times like these. I think in your case, you’re not getting enough good food. You thought all sorts of horrible things, didn’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Natural.”
“Do I need . . . what . . . an exam?”
“How are you otherwise?” She felt my neck, beneath my jaw, asked me to cough. She looked in my mouth, turning my head toward the sun. She took my face in her hands and looked in my eyes. What else can she see in there? . . . Can she read my thoughts, too? Am I that open? She looked at the edges of my kappie.
“Lice?”
“Not anymore.”
“Common,” she said.
She felt my shoulders and then my arms.
“You’re malnourished, but healthy . . . surprisingly. Think of it this way: your body knows it can’t do everything anymore, and it has to make some decisions. It is still trying to grow, in addition to everything else.”
I thought of Cee-Cee, her breath in my blood, deep in the vessels, and my obligation to carry it for her. I needed to stay healthy.
“Are you much weaker?” she asked.
I hadn’t thought about a degree of such a thing; something that happens so gradually is hard to notice. When I thought back, I couldn’t summon the small things, but only the big things, the violent storms, the floods, the dust and winds that wore me down.“I don’t know about weakened,” I said. “It’s more like I’ve eroded.”
She nodded.
“You could have come in and seen us, you know,” she said.
“I was . . .”
“Afraid?”
“Ja.”
“You’d heard we were terrible.”
“Ja, the women at the reservoir said . . .”
“. . . children only come here to die.”
“Ja.”
“Most children aren’t brought here until they’re about to die and it’s too late for us to do anything about it.”
Cee-Cee.
“Or they’ve been treated by some folk remedy or witch-doctor cure.”
“Muti.”
“What . . . yes . . . some tribal medicine, folk treatments. Some of it seems helpful. . . . Some of it is ridiculous.”
Her accent was different from Maples’s, making every word with an r turn into a lengthy growl. I found I kept saying “pardon” . . . forcing her to repeat herself.
“I’m sorry, I have a hard time understanding,” I said.
“Many do. . . . I’m from Scotland.”
She pulled a hard candy from her apron and gave it to me. I took it without thinking. She opened one for herself, too.
“Are you with the Undesirables?”
“I don’t like that word.”
“Little wonder . . . how’s Irreconcilables?”
She pronounced the word in more syllables than I could count, and it rattled the hard candy against her teeth.
“Better.”
“Don’t like any of the names, do you?”
“No.”
“I just wish this would be over,” she said.
“Me, too.”
Neither one of us took sides on the outcome, only craving an end.
“Would you tell me something? The truth?”
Oh, God, what could she want of me? I had to be careful. This might be how they get information: we get sick and frightened, and they make us talk. Maybe that’s what happened with Oom Sarel. They don’t do it with things in the food or with firing squads; they use our fears against us.
“That depends.”
She laughed.
“What do you think would happen if the nurses tried to make rounds of the tents . . . to do exams?” she asked. “We don’t have enough medicine for everybody, nor enough nurses, really, but I was thinking we might give it a try. Experiment, so to say. It’s not like we have a great deal of time, but we could answer questions like yours pretty quickly. That kind of thing could settle a lot of anxious minds.”
I thought of my mother’s most likely response. She would not allow this woman in the tent. I turned my head, not wanting to insult her.
“Right . . . that’s what I thought. Have you lost family?”
I thought of Cee-Cee, blood of my blood, but said nothing.
“I’m thinking about becoming a nurse,” I said, although I had not considered it until it sprang from my mouth. Maybe it was her uniform, or the powers she seemed to have, or her helping nature. It seemed as if she had cured me with only a few words. It would be a calling that was helpful, compassionate.
She took me seriously.
“Wonderful,” she said. “You can start right away.”
“Truly?”
“Yes . . . not as a nurse . . . but as a helper.”
“Really?”
“I could let you start training as a volunteer if you wanted,” she said. “We can use all the help we can get. To be honest, I think you should do everything you can to stay out of this place. You’re healthy now, more or less. You should try to stay clean. Stay out of crowds of children. But if you’re serious, come back. Or if you have any troubles, come back. What’s your name?”
“Aletta Venter.”
“Mine is Agnes. Nice to meet you.”
“Seriously . . . I could help?”
“Seriously, yes, very seriously. But you have to see what we do first, what it’s like in there, and decide if it’s worth it to you.”
I looked past her shoulder at the door of the tent, and the women gathered near the guards. I recognized the tall woman coming out from the tent, heading our way.
“Tante Hannah?”
31
October 1901, Concentration
Camp
“My sister died,” I said without allowing Maples to get out a word. “She was the most wonderful little person.”
I described her hair and her voice and the way she would sit on my lap when I read to her. My bottom lip quivered so much that I had to repeat some words. “Dickens . . . yes . . . Dickens . . . I was reading Dickens to her. And I wrote stories for her and we sang . . . sang . . . songs together. She had such a pure little heart. And it all came on so fast it just ate her up.”
By the time I finished, I had to suck in a breath to push out each word, and I then cried myself empty.
“I hate this camp,” he said.
“I hate this camp, too,” I said.
Three women walked near, and I turned my back to them; Maples pointed at the fence as if scolding me for a violation.
“I’m sorry,” he said when they had passed.
“Nobody’s fault,” I said. The words tasted false, and I realized I had said them only because he looked so upset.
“It is our fault,” he said. “I hate it here.”
“Can you go back?”
“Home? No.”
“No . . . out there.”
“No, no.” He stepped back from me. “They won’t let me.”
“Tell me.”
“I can’t.”
“I told you . . . about Cecelia.”
“I’ve never said any of this . . .”
“I need to hear about it all.”
He turned and walked down the fence line. I followed.
“Yes,” I said to his back.
“Not this.”
I still couldn’t decide whether he was the enemy or just another person who had been pulled into something he hated as much as we did.
“Not now . . . your sister . . . you’re grieving.”
“I need to know it all.”
“I hate being a part of this. ”
“I want everything horrible out at once,” I said.
He looked like Willem after being caught in mischief.
“The first thing I ever saw killed was a horse. . . . I could not believe somebody could shoot a horse,” he said. “First day under fire. It makes sense that if they were shooting soldiers, a horse might get hit. But this one crumpled. . . . Legs just stopped running. . . . Body kept flying forward. It let out this horrible scream. The first man I saw killed just dropped cold on the spot . . . not a peep . . . small hole in his chest. But that horse kicked and wailed. It was pitiful.”
Maples turned away, and I just looked at the back of his helmet and his thin shoulders. The hem of his tunic trailed loose threads.
“More,” I said.
“Horses just kept getting shot. At every skirmish. And they’d heat up out in the sun and bloat and turn black and stink to heaven’s gate. And then they’d die in the river by the dozens and we’d be so thirsty the men would drink the water and then be racked with dysentery.”
He turned, his face tightened as if drying out.
“The horses . . . you’re bothered by the horses?”
“I love horses,” he said.
“What about the men? What about the farms?”
“Yes . . . exactly . . . I saw it all.”
There it was. He was one of them after all.
“Did you burn farms and houses?”
He dropped his eyes.
“You did, didn’t you?”
I could see only the top of his helmet now.
“I could have killed those men who came to our farm. . . . They took joy in it.”
“I know. Some in my column did, too. Something got into some of them.”
“The devil.”
“Maybe. Yes . . . the devil . . . it felt like that when they lost control.”
“Nobody invited them.”
“I know. . . . No, I don’t know. . . . War is one thing. . . . This was something . . . else.”
“Why didn’t you stop?”
“I tried. . . . I asked for a transfer. . . . My major assigned me the stock. He put me in the squad that had to kill the sheep or cattle or pigs . . . all of them. Had to stab them with bayonets. Hundreds a day. Blood and squeals all day. I could hear them all night. And then we took the dead sheep and threw them down the wells to foul the water for any of the commando units that might come through later and think they could get fresh water.
“Let the water and the blood,” I said without melody.
“Sometimes the kaffirs would come fighting to the family’s defense and we’d have to push them back or chase them down. . . . Sometimes they were happy to turn on the Boers and help us in any way. You never knew.”
He leaned even closer to continue his unburdening.
“There were times when we were practically starving, too,” he said. “Marching thirty miles in a day, burning sun, beyond supply lines, living without rations.”
“You shouldn’t be here,” I reminded.
“I know . . . but we are.”
“Leave.”
“One day, a squad of us were sent to a small farm,” he said. “Just a woman inside . . . old . . . her men gone, no one else at home. She said we looked awful and offered us milk. She had one cow and apologized that it hardly produced anymore.”
“Fine Christian.”
“More than that . . . a saint,” he said. “She said her husband was dead and she just had one son on commando. . . . She hadn’t seen nor heard from him for months. She spoke his name and asked if we had seen him, as if we were all introduced to each other at the start of the war. She said she prayed every day that God held him in his protective hand. She held her hands like a cup, or a little nest.”
“And you burned her farm . . .”
“There were only seven or eight of us, and she brought milk for all of us.”
I feared the rest of the story.
“Our orders were to burn the farm and bring any stock back to the garrison. But she had only the one cow.”
“You burned her farm . . .”
“Without even threatening her, she said we could slaughter her cow for food . . . even though we were the enemy, we were God’s children and we were starving.”
“So you slaughtered her cow and then burned her farm . . .”
“We asked her about her kindness . . . unbelievable kindness. And grace . . . such grace. She said she imagined if her son was fighting in England. If he was starving . . . she hoped that some Englishwoman would have the heart to sacrifice her last cow to help him survive.”
I knew women like that. Tante Hannah would probably do that. But I also knew many who would have shot him between the eyes. Moeder, for one.
“And then you burned her farm . . .”
“No, we didn’t. We thanked her. Some of the men even gave her little things from home that they were carrying. And we took the cow back to the main column.”
“You didn’t burn her farm?”
“No, we did not.”
“Good.” A thimbleful of my faith in humankind was restored.
He tightened his mouth, words caught on the threshold of speech.
“Ja?”
“The following day . . . another troop scouted in that direction . . . and burned the woman out.”
I thought I was beyond being sickened. It turned out I was not. We were silent for several moments, looking out through the fence.
“So how did that get you into this camp? They didn’t think you were savage enough?”
“That’s what they decided. I kept getting sick at every farm; the men kept mocking me, but I couldn’t stop. I kept telling them it was stomach trouble from bad water. They finally sent me to the doctor and I told him the truth. He told the major to get me out of there . . . didn’t want me around the other men.”
“So now you guard women and children.”
“I don’t like this, either . . . but it’s not”—he searched for the word—“as savage.”
“How do you live with this?”
He considered it and
shook his head a time or two before answering.
“I can’t.”
WILLEM HAD GONE SILENT. He had lost his playmate and then his sister, and he was unwilling to invest in me anymore. I made no attempt to teach him. Concentration was difficult for all of us, and it seemed pointless. He had solved the most important mathematics problem of his life, in the face of the commandant, so the teaching he had received was considered a success already.
He had his back to me, to all of us, his hat pulled low, but I could see his ears moving, betraying the motion of his jaws. He was chewing, slowly, like a cow.
“What do you have?” I whispered.
He would not turn.
“Are you hiding food?”
Silence.
“Willem?”
“Mmmm?”
I crawled closer.
“Willem . . . you can tell me. I won’t take it. . . . I won’t tell Moeder. You can trust me.”
He turned and opened his mouth, showing a thick gray bolus, and some blood at his gum line.
“What is that?”
I couldn’t understand what he said.
“What?”
“Riempie,” he said.
“From where?”
“Stool.”
“From your stool?”
“Ja . . .”
I looked for his little stool in that wedge of the tent that he had claimed as his area. Half the tanned ox-hide strapping had been peeled from it.
“You can’t eat that.”
“Not eating . . . chewing.”
“Does it taste good?”
“Hmph-um.” He shook his head.
“Why?”
He moved the mass to one cheek to speak: “Feels like eating.”
I groaned, but no one looked our way.
“Biltong,” he said.
“Like biltong?”
He nodded.
“But what about your stool?”
He lifted his shoulders up to his ears.
“It will make you sick.”
“Hmph-um.”
He pulled a short piece from his pocket and held it out to me.
“No . . . you keep it. But thank you.”
I would write this in my journal. Willem, now nearly as thin as the legs of his stool, gnawed on ox-hide strips to be reminded of chewing meat. Were boots next? Leather? Tent canvas? Anything to give him the feeling that he was eating? I felt the opposite; I had such little appetite.