The Lost History of Stars

  “I wanted to let you get out . . . meet girls your age . . . walk . . . read. . . . I felt you earned that . . . but this?”

  “I did walk and read, and I met Janetta.”

  “The British are the enemy. . . . Have you forgotten? Think about what they’ve done . . . what they’re doing.”

  “Moeder, he hates his army and this war as much as we do,” I said. “He says so all the time. He sympathizes with us.”

  “We don’t want his sympathy. We want him gone. He has a rifle, doesn’t he? He’s a camp guard, isn’t he?”

  She stopped, inhaled so deeply her chest rose, and turned in a slow circle around me, like an animal studying my weakness.

  “I want you to answer this: What would your father say? What would your brother say?”

  “I know . . . and Oupa.”

  “The British are trying their best to kill your father and brother,” she said. “This man, this boy, this guard . . . he would shoot at them . . . and probably at us.”

  I looked into her eyes, my own as wide as I could make them, trying without words to communicate how sorry I was. But getting to know Maples had been the only good thing about this camp.

  “He gave me the potato,” I said. “He gave us the potato.”

  I thought it would calm her, but she looked stricken.

  “Ma, the potato . . . remember the potato? . . . He didn’t have to do that. . . . He took a risk . . . to help us. . . . He could be an . . . an . . . ally.”

  “He’s the enemy,” she shouted. “We don’t take anything from enemies.”

  “He might help get a message to the men if we needed . . . get more food for us.”

  “Or he could report us.”

  “He wouldn’t.”

  “If it was to his benefit, he would.”

  “The potato . . . he could have eaten it.”

  “But you said you visit with him for the culture . . . books. . . . Is that what you’re telling me?”

  “Ja . . . Moeder . . . ja.” She knew. What point lying, now? “Mostly.”

  “How long?”

  “Not long.”

  “If you know so much about his character, you’ve already spent too much time with him,” she said. “If you’ll lie about this, how can I trust you anymore?”

  “I’m being smart, Moeder. Maybe he could help us get out, or help us get transferred to a better camp . . . or a better tent. . . . They can do those things. . . . It happens,” I said, slanting my eyes toward Mevrou Huiseveldt. “It’s smart to use him. It’s what the men are doing . . . outfoxing the British at every turn. We should, too. We have to be smarter than them. Use them for our good. It’s their weakness, not ours.”

  I had not even rehearsed these points; they were born of pressure. I could tell Moeder listened when I mentioned using them, outsmarting them.

  “I have to think,” she announced, and she went back to her sewing. She looked up a time or two and shook her head at me. I should have told her sooner. It would have been different if I could have worked into it. She would have respected my honesty. Maybe.

  “And did you visit with him when you were fetching water?” She broke the silence with an accusing tone.

  “I was getting water. . . . I was . . . always . . . but I sometimes walked past him. . . . We started talking about books and things.”

  She didn’t speak for hours. I stewed in bubbling guilt, thinking about all she had done, all she had been through. She had believed in me; she had trusted me. Can a person ever regain that?

  “Where is he?” she said. It had been so long since she had spoken that it took me a few moments to understand.

  “Who?”

  “Show me.”

  “What?”

  “Him . . . the guard.”

  “I don’t know. . . . How would I know?”

  She glared.

  “Fine.”

  I prayed he would not be at his usual station as I led her in that direction.

  He saw us coming.

  “Peace,” he said.

  “You teach him that?” she asked me.

  “Private Maples . . . this is my mother.”

  “Mrs. Venter? Hello, I’m Thomas Maples,” he said. “Pleased to meet you.”

  “I see no reason for you to talk to my daughter.”

  “I only—”

  “I don’t want to hear your explanations. Stay away from her.”

  “We only—”

  “I don’t want you talking to her.”

  “Ma, I thought—”

  “Did Aletta tell you that your men threatened to shoot her younger brother? Did she tell you about her little sister?”

  “I know. . . . I’m so sorry.”

  “Did she tell you about the commandant threatening us for no reason? Stay away from my daughter. You see her coming, you walk away.”

  “But I have places I have to be,” Maples said. “Or I’ll get brought up.”

  “Fine, stay here then. It means I will have no trouble finding you if I need to come after you. You should be ashamed.”

  “I am,” he said. “I am ashamed. I hate it. I hate being here. I hate guarding women. I hate everything about it. Nothing you could say could make it worse than it is.”

  He brought both hands to his chest.

  “If I could go back and not join . . . yes . . . I would do that,” he continued. “I would never come here. I would work in a mill and never pick up a rifle my whole life.”

  He took the rifle off his shoulder and held it out to her as if to make it a present: “Take it.”

  Moeder was speechless, disarmed. I knew he had shot at our men and he had burned farms, but he was just a boy. I felt sorry for him. God may grant forgiveness, but I doubted Moeder was of that mind. I was surprised when she did not take the rifle and shoot him dead.

  “I don’t want you talking to her,” she said. “Do you understand?”

  She took my arm and turned us back toward the tent.

  “Moeder, he said I remind him of his little sister.”

  “You’re Schalk’s little sister, and you’re only fourteen.”

  “Moeder, I’m not thinking about—”

  “You’re lying again, but it doesn’t matter what you’re thinking. It matters what he’s thinking.”

  “Moeder, he has a girlfriend back home . . . Betty. . . . He loves her, he told me. . . . He tells me that all the time.”

  “He’s not a boy, Lettie, he looks like a boy, but he’s not a boy, he’s a soldier, and he’s away from his home and his girl. And he’s British. . . . You cannot trust him.”

  She held my face and spoke words between pauses: “He . . . is . . . the . . . enemy.”

  “But he told me he would try to help us if he could. Anything. In any way. He has said that often. Any way. And I have proof that he can be trusted.”

  We walked without discussion until we neared the tent.

  “Go inside,” she said. “And stay there. I have a few more things I need to say to Private Maples.”

  I considered following her, sneaking up on them, trying to hear what she was saying, and watching to see whether she would take his rifle and shoot him down and then try to free the camp somehow. Would she finally go mad? Had she already?

  IT FLOWED WITHOUT THOUGHT, word after word, another lengthy guilt-fueled confession that was straight from the heart and mostly true. It started with “Moeder, I vow to be better. There are some things I have to tell you . . .”

  She responded with the look I’d seen when I was about to pour turpentine on her bloody hands.

  I told her about going to the hospital and how I now wanted to become a nurse. I said some idealistic phrases about wanting “to help our people in a time of great need” and “doing God’s work.” And by the way, I would be seeing Tante Hannah there because she was also “doing God’s work.” And I went there in the first place because I had “a health problem that made me think I was dying but I’m not.”

  She
listened without remark.

  “Tante Hannah is not the devil, she’s just married to him, and she is family, and Oupa Gideon taught that nothing is more important than family . . . and . . . I will never again betray your trust.”

  “Fine,” she said. One word. I was certain I heard it, but I did not even see her lips move.

  “It’s all right?”

  “Fine,” she said. “Health problem?”

  “Every month.”

  “You went to the hospital?”

  “Ja, I’m fine . . . just . . . not as fine as I might be.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  I opened my mouth to answer but did not. We communicated in silence, just looking into each other’s eyes for a minute. Or maybe it was an hour.

  “It’s good they could help you,” she said.

  “They just talked to me,” I said. “I met a nurse who was nice and she asked if I wanted to help. Can I help? It would be helping our people . . . helping our little ones.”

  “Ja.”

  I rushed to her before she could finish, and pressed my cheek to her cheek.

  “And if you want to talk to your guard . . . about books . . . that’s fine . . . just not long . . . and only where people can see, but not where too many people can see.”

  Was this her first attempt at a joke?

  “Wait . . . Ma . . . have you given up on me?”

  “No . . . you’re growing up. . . . That happens with or without my permission.”

  I WAS PROUD TO defend Tante Hannah to my mother. I could not imagine Tante Hannah’s life with Oom Sarel and the shame she must have felt, all the while knowing that the contempt for him painted her with a stain that might never be washed clean.

  If we are who we are through others, as Bina said, who are you when you have no “others”? Who did Tante Hannah have? Oom Sarel? Not really. He had paid her so little attention even before the war. She had no children, no friends. The hospital was a chance to work in the place of greatest need during our most desperate time.

  Tante was at the far end of the tent when I entered that afternoon. Nurse Agnes told me she was cleaning the mouths of typhus patients and I should stay away. But I approached and watched from a short distance. She had a pleasant tone with them, as she always did with us. And when they opened their mouths for her to examine, the sight was hideous, lips cracked, gums bleeding, teeth hanging by their nerves.

  She saw me and smiled but said nothing until she finished the row and aggressively washed her hands in a basin.

  “Hallo, dear.” She hugged me with both arms. “You’re so tall.”

  “I just seem that way because I’m thinner,” I said.

  “No . . . you’re growing, too.”

  She hugged me again and we stepped outside the tent and away from the guards.

  “Your note about Cecelia broke my heart,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”

  “Your note broke my heart, too,” I said.

  Guilt surged again; I no longer had the chance to be close to Cee-Cee. I hugged Tante hard.

  “You can talk about it if you want,” she said.

  “Not yet.”

  She gave me the same look I had perfected in those cases when words were not strong enough to carry the weight of sympathy.

  “I didn’t tell you about my working here in a note because of what you might have heard about the hospital tent. We do good here. And I’m glad you’re going to help.”

  “I might want to be a nurse.”

  “What about being a writer?”

  “Maybe . . . still . . .”

  “You can do it if you want. . . . You have more to write about now.”

  I looked toward the tent.

  “Does your mother know you’re here?”

  “Ja. She approved it.”

  “She did?”

  “Said it was fine.”

  “That was the word she used? Does she know I’m here?”

  “Yes, fine.”

  “I’m glad you told her the truth.”

  “Of course.”

  We nodded in unison. Both of us were afraid of Moeder.

  “How is she?”

  I tried to think of the perfect description. Grieving silently. Planning. Plotting.

  “Unbowed,” I said. That was the word I’d arrived at years ago, and it was only more fitting.

  “Always,” Hannah said. “But you’re still worried about her?”

  “I shouldn’t talk about it.”

  The tent emitted a groan, and we moved farther from the door.

  “No, you shouldn’t,” she said. “But I should.”

  I considered how important Tante Hannah was to me, and how much had been shared through our brief notes, but I would always defend Moeder.

  “I love your mother. . . . We were very close. . . . Did you know that?”

  More than a year in the camp had drained from me the capacity to be stunned, but this was a surprise.

  “We were. . . . We talked all the time . . . two young wives,” she said. “And every time she had a child, I felt worse for not having one . . .”

  “And Oom Sarel blamed you . . .”

  “I’ll shoulder it as my fault . . . my failure . . . my resentment.”

  I wished I could cry for her. I wanted to show her how sorry I was, but it took so much now.

  “Lettie, I didn’t know about what happened with Oom Sarel until I got here. I didn’t know you were all taken from home until I saw the smoke. . . . You were gone when I got there and Bina told me.”

  “Bina?”

  “She came to our house that night, but the Tommies were there for us the next morning. . . . They ran her off.”

  “Did they burn your place?”

  “No . . . I should have known something from that. They took everything of value, but they didn’t burn it. When I got here, they led me to a tent, and Oom Sarel was already inside. That was the first I heard of what had happened.”

  “Can you tell me?”

  “I’m not sure I really know. . . . He was hurt. . . . They brought him in . . . and he signed the paper so he could get treatment.”

  “He put his hands up and left Vader and Schalk and Oupa out there to fight.”

  “Yes . . . but he . . .”

  Again, we nodded at each other. I hated that it sounded as if I thought Tante Hannah was responsible.

  “Lettie . . . if I had known, I would have run . . . gone with Bina to live in the caves, or somewhere on the veld. I would not have come here. I would have left earlier with my mother. I should have listened to her . . .”

  I wanted her to blame Oom Sarel; I would have felt better if she had laid it all at his feet. But she did not.

  “Or I should have come here . . . but with you.”

  I wondered how Moeder would have reacted to that and how that might have changed things. The currents pulled at me again. Was I betraying Moeder by even talking to Tante Hannah? By being sympathetic? By even considering Oom Sarel’s reasons?

  Enough.

  “Do you like working here?”

  “I do . . . very much. I keep telling the doctors that if they need anybody to do any fancy stitchwork to close wounds, I’m the one for the job.”

  We both laughed.

  “What about the British . . . working with the British?”

  “One doctor is good and one is horrible; most of the nurses are wonderful. You met Agnes; she’s the best . . . very compassionate, and so strong. They’re good to me because they know I’ll work around the clock.”

  “Doesn’t it wear?”

  “There is so much need.”

  I knew that was true.

  “I wasn’t able to find anything about who might be watching you or informing,” she said.

  “Oom?” I said it in a whisper.

  “No . . . no . . . I’m certain. He loves you.”

  “I don’t care who it is anymore,” I said.

  A nurse called her: “Sister Hannah???
? She smiled at the sound. She held up one finger.

  “Are you sure you want to help here?” she asked.

  “I think so.”

  “Lettie . . . I think you should know what happens in here.”

  “I know. . . . Some die.”

  “Lettie . . . you have to know before you decide. . . . Eighteen passed in one night.”

  I could not imagine. Eighteen souls. Eighteen burials. I closed my eyes and everything felt heavy, as if the moon had suddenly stopped pulling at me, only the earth. Tante Hannah lifted her stained apron to her face. How could a person say such a thing in a normal voice and another absorb the fact with an accepting mind? What kind of place was this that such things could be said without needing to be screamed? Where was the rage this would trigger in any other part of the world? What had happened to us, to our weary, weary souls, that eighteen deaths in one night caused no hysteria, no wild ravings? I remembered being sickened to the core when the Tommies killed a dozen of our chickens. But now I could hear of eighteen children dying in one night and just nod my head.

  “One night we lost only two and we felt as if we should have a celebration,” Tante Hannah said. “A young lady should not see that. Some of the nurses, grown women, have to leave. Doctors, too. We’ve gone through several. . . . The work is too much, or they feel helpless.”

  “I’m a woman . . .”

  She looked at me.

  “So you are. . . . Nurse Agnes said you are welcome to help anytime you can. And I know I will love to see you whenever you do.”

  I had one question, but it would not have been fair to ask, and I would have been afraid of the answer: Would Cee-Cee have lived if we’d brought her in?

  I FETCHED WATER AND changed bedding and fought tears. I tried to smile when I brought water or tea to children, and I concentrated on their eyes when I changed bedding so that I would not stare at the way their skin clung to their bones, because it reminded me of Cee-Cee. But when I started seeing her in each one of them, my spine went soft.

  Tante Hannah was there the whole time, but we talked only later, and she brought Nurse Agnes to me. She had been right: the hospital might have been too much. At least for this first day.