The Lost History of Stars

  As much as I despised the mud and the food, and the flies at the latrine, they were all just unavoidable parts of being in this place, and I had no choice but to adapt and to do so in a manner befitting the mature, thirteen-year-old adult I’d become.

  3

  Early October 1899, Venter Farm

  Silent as a spirit, Oupa Gideon would steal me from my bed to take me outside and teach me the wonders of the sky. I was seven or eight the first time. I startled when he touched me; he sealed my lips with a rough finger. His eyes said, Quiet . . . trust me. He scooped up the blanket around me and carried me in a warm bundle. The scratch of his whiskers convinced me it was not a dream. He turned sideways to slip me through the bedroom door and somehow avoided furniture as he navigated the dark parlor.

  “Can you see?” I whispered.

  “You’re safe,” he said, and I was convinced I was.

  The night air on the stoep always cleared my head. And on nights when it was cold enough to see my breath, I would exhale “smoke” from the corner of my mouth just as Oupa did, opposite the side where he held his pipe with clenched teeth.

  Oupa Gideon was so forceful during the day that I feared him at times. But he lifted me from bed with such a tender hand and spoke to me with such a peaceful voice on these nights that he seemed a different person. No one discovered us exchanging whispers during those many nights together, and we told no one. It was my first conspiracy.

  He passed along the lessons of the sky that he learned from his grandfather, the captain of a Dutch merchant ship. From a sky iridescent with stars, he would point out specific points of light, and they brightened at his mention. When he spoke a constellation’s name, it took shape, and the stars connected so that I could see a cross or a bear or a throne. He had the power to make the sky come alive.

  “And God made two great lights, the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night . . . and God set them in the firmament of the heavens to give light upon the earth.”

  The first time he said “firmament,” it sounded like a mix of “firm” and “permanent.” That was how I came to think of Oupa, firm and permanent. No one could be stronger or more reliable. Except maybe my father. Or my mother. They were the living firmament of my world.

  “Look . . . ,” he said on one of the first nights, opening his arms wide, pointing long, knotty fingers from horizon line to horizon line. “The sky is as wide here as it is on the seas, but we are a mile closer to it on the high veld. A mile closer to heaven. Think about that: we’re closer to God here.”

  “Can he see us better here?” I whispered.

  “He can see you everywhere,” he said, raising his unruly eyebrows.

  He often propped me on a chair and returned moments later with cups of coffee and hard-baked rusks for us to eat. I shook my head to help choke down the bitter drink, but he taught me to soak and soften the oblong biscuits so that they would fall apart in my mouth. Oupa would not even blow on the steaming coffee but just brought it to his mouth and drank it down. I was certain he could breathe fire if he wanted. When others were around during the day, I pretended never to have tried coffee and to be disgusted by it. I wanted Oupa to know that I was a trusted guardian of our secrets.

  The sky is always changing and the change is wrought by God’s hand, he said, and that made this an opportunity for mortal man to watch God work miracles every night. Who is so unwise as to sleep through God’s miracles?

  With wide eyes and uplifted palms, I always answered, “Not I.”

  I was proud that he singled me out to share these lessons. It was my duty, he said, to memorize my ancestry, back through the line of sailors and captains who had fought wars against the British and explored the world’s seas.

  “That is your cargo,” he said. “You will carry these stories to your many children. You will be like your mother . . . God’s chosen vessel.”

  Most of the stories came from his oupa, recalling storms and perils, and travel to exotic lands, and settling in the Cape to handle trading for the Dutch.

  “Through the centuries, their two constants were the Bible and the stars. . . . Both taught us to navigate through life. Both guided us to this place . . . our own place . . . away from others.”

  He introduced me to the moon first.

  “Twice a day the seas swell in the direction of the moon,” he said, using one fist to symbolize the earth and the other the moon as they moved through space. “The moon always shows us the same face, and it pulls at the oceans.”

  “I’ve only seen oceans in a book.”

  “I know, skattebol, but you can see the sky from everywhere,” he said. “There’s your connection. It’s the same sky my oupa taught me.”

  His stories built such a powerful connection to my ancestors that I believed it my destiny to be a ship captain. I would learn the stars first, then navigation, and the seas and the ships later. I would stand behind a giant wheel to steer a ship, guiding the family legacy across the seas.

  “Can women be ship captains?” I asked.

  “No.” He took a sip of coffee. “Don’t be silly.”

  Well, I would be the first. I would surprise Oupa and make him proud. People around the world would know my name. So I studied the moon. I thought about its strength, pulling the oceans toward it, making the earth go lopsided. And when I concentrated on that power, I was certain I could feel it pulling at me, too, almost lifting me from my chair. After all, how could it be strong enough to pull the ocean but not raise up someone as little as me?

  “Some of the tribes believe the moon is a god,” he continued. “Unbelievers—that’s what kaffir means—they can’t think as we do because of the Curse of Ham.”

  “Bina and Tuma are cursed?” I asked.

  “Blackened for their sins . . . destined to serve even the lowest peoples,” he said. “That is the Holy Word.”

  “Bina saved my life . . . killing a snake . . .”

  “She did, but some of their kind throw animal bones on the ground rather than read the Bible.”

  On the first night he took me out, I asked about the brightest stars, the three in a perfect straight line. He put his arm around me and pointed so that I could follow his line of sight.

  “Some call it Drie Susters. I learned it as Orion, the Hunter,” Oupa said. “The three stars are his belt, and those four at the corners are his feet spread and his arms raised for battle.”

  Oupa stood, taller than any man I knew, legs apart and arms open as if he were drawing a bow. The stance of the Hunter came into focus.

  “And there is the Pleiades, the Seven Sisters.” He pointed to a cluster of blue stars that seemed nearer to us. “It is written in the Bible: ‘Seek him that makes the Pleiades and Orion, and turns the shadow of death into the morning,’ ” he said.

  On an October night not long before the men left for war, Oupa plucked me from my bed. I had long been old enough to walk to the stoep, but his carrying me was the first part of the ritual. Rains had blown through in the early night, leaving the air moist and the sky looking as if the stars had been scrubbed clean.

  “We’re leaving soon,” he said. “You and I won’t be able to do this for a while.”

  The coffee scent chased the sleep from my head. He relit his pipe, drawing the flame into the bowl, flicked the match to the dirt, and started the evening’s lesson. This night, he told of the most amazing sky he’d ever seen, when he and his young wife traveled by wagon to buy horses. He called it the Southern Lights.

  He described the colorful display, but I wanted to hear more of my ouma.

  “Will you tell me about her?”

  He repacked and relit his pipe.

  “She died when your father was young.”

  “How?”

  “Your oom Sarel killed her.”

  I had never heard this and was stunned.

  “Killed her?”

  He moved on without answer.

  “It was just the three of us a
fter that . . . me raising the boys.”

  “By yourself?”

  “We had a girl who looked after them, who cooked for us.”

  “Before Bina?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where is she now?”

  “She left.”

  “What was her name?”

  “I don’t remember much about her.”

  “And then Bina and Tuma came?”

  “That was later. Look, a meteor.” He spotted a long, bright flash.

  “What was Vader like when he was my age?”

  “Good boy . . . but your father and his brother always scrapped.”

  “Fought?”

  “Brothers always do. . . . The younger always wants to overtake his older brother, so Sarel always tested your father. . . . It was good for them. . . . I encouraged it. And then Sarel grew jealous of him, of course.”

  His story was interrupted with pointing and then wordless scanning of the bright pinpoints.

  “Enough,” he said, taking our cups to the kitchen to wash and put away, to hide the evidence of our secret ritual. Back in bed, I considered Oupa’s stories of our family and realized how much I didn’t know and how little I understood. From the life of the adventurous ship captain all the way to our living on the remote veld, the message was this: There is a giant and exciting world out there, but we seem driven to get as far away from it as we can.

  4

  October 1900, Concentration Camp

  Oom Sarel slouched in without sound or statement. He was smaller and bent, as if his bones had gone soft. He looked twenty years older than the man we’d seen eagerly ride to war a year earlier.

  “Out,” Moeder shouted, rising and pointing to the tent flap so quickly it seemed a planned response.

  Within our first few days in camp, we had heard that Oom Sarel had not only surrendered but was working for our keepers. Moeder declared him a traitor, putting him at a level of shame lower even than the British.

  “He’s family,” Willem argued at first. “You always say family is the most important thing.”

  “That, seun, is what makes it worse,” she said. “That’s beneath the lowest.”

  “But—”

  She slapped a red mark on his cheek and forbade the speaking of his uncle’s name.

  Oom Sarel had not approached us in our few months in camp, nor had we seen him on our side of the fence. Not until this day. He instantly thrust a palm toward Moeder as if to hold her back.

  “This is for you, Lettie, from Tante Hannah,” he said, handing me a small sack.

  “Let me explain,” he said to my mother. “Give me one minute.”

  Even the Huiseveldts quieted to hear.

  “I was injured . . .”

  “We don’t care,” she said.

  “I was captured and they took me to their doctors.”

  He opened his collar and pulled back his shirt to unveil a scarred and misshapen shoulder, still discolored, with knots raised like tiny fists under the skin.

  “This is not a camp for prisoners,” she said. “You’re not a prisoner. We respect prisoners who were taken. . . . You surrendered.”

  “I was injured,” he said. “This arm is almost useless now.”

  He lifted his right arm like a broken-winged bird. It was withered to half the size of the other arm.

  “Were you shot?”

  “The doctors said they had never seen anything like it. Bones were sticking out of the skin. I got separated and was captured. I tried fighting with my left arm but couldn’t load my rifle. The pain . . . I can’t . . .”

  “Are you saying that your father and brother left you behind? Of course not . . . they would never leave you.”

  “I was scouting, and they didn’t know what happened to me.”

  “And the Tommies brought you here?”

  “This is where they could tend my shoulder.”

  I had no idea how such things worked, but I was surprised that a fighting man would be taken to a camp for the families of those burned from their homes.

  “Liar . . . you surrendered . . . didn’t you?” Moeder shouted now. “Didn’t you? You gave up . . . didn’t you?”

  “I had to get to a doctor. . . . I was dying.”

  “Nobody dies from a broken bone. . . . You signed the oath, didn’t you?”

  “I couldn’t lift my arm.”

  “But you surrendered.”

  “I would have died.”

  He paused, awaiting her next assault. She stared.

  “I fought . . . but they have half a million soldiers. . . . We have a few thousand farmers.”

  “And fewer once the cowards give in.”

  “More Tommies are dying of disease than from our rifles. They’re bothered more by lice than by our commandos.”

  “You lie. . . . The British lie.”

  “It’s only a matter of how many have to die.”

  “You disgraced us.”

  He sagged, shrinking into his boots.

  “I want this to end before everyone is dead. . . . The God of Hosts has turned against us.”

  “That’s a sin . . . sinner.”

  “We’re all sinners. . . . This is my redemption. . . . This is the right thing. You can see God’s will in all this. . . . His will is that we stop now . . . to save lives . . .”

  “What about the others? Are they quitting? Your father, at his age? That old man you’re always trying to impress? Schalk, at his age, a young man, is he quitting? Is Matthys quitting, your brother, your rival? . . . Is he going to surrender? Never.”

  “They weren’t wounded. . . . They weren’t captured,” he said.

  The two were a foot apart; their breathing sounded like horses after a gallop. I inched forward to help my mother in case of blows.

  “Men fight with arms shot off,” she started up again. “Matthys would . . .”

  “I’m a farmer, not a soldier,” he said.

  “There is only one reason to stop fighting,” Moeder said. “Because you are dead. I wish you had died out there so we could have been proud instead of ashamed. At least we would have mourned you. How can Hannah live with this?”

  “She is my wife.”

  “She vowed to marry a man . . .”

  “When this is over, we’ll get our land back. . . . We’ll start over again. . . . They don’t want our farmland . . . just the gold mines. It will be like before.”

  I knew that was the wrong thing to say to her.

  “There are women who have escaped camps and are chasing down cowards like you . . . forcing them to go back,” she said. “And if they won’t go back, the women shoot them. . . . That saves their husbands from having to waste ammunition on them. There are even some women on commando, fighting to their death while you give up. Women fighting, but not you. Old men fighting, but not you. Young boys fighting, but not you.”

  I had not heard of the women fighting but had no trouble imagining Moeder leading a column of avenging women. I knew of boys as young as twelve and men in their eighties who were on commando.

  “I’m not . . . a soldier . . .”

  “That’s an excuse, not a reason. . . . Get out of here. . . . Get out of here, coward. I can’t stand the sight of you. Don’t go near my children, they shouldn’t have to look at you . . . to be reminded you’re of their blood.”

  “This is why I came,” he interrupted.

  He held out a pencil and some paper. He explained in little more than a whisper: the women were being allowed to write to their husbands and tell them about life in the camp. “A man deserves to know what his family is going through.”

  “How would you know what a man deserves?”

  “They promise the messages will be delivered,” he said. “You can tell him how the children are.”

  Moeder’s eyes flared as if she had heard the voice of the devil. She stepped closer, tilting her chin toward his face.

  “Matthys would gut you if he saw you.” She made a motion of a knife
starting low on his stomach and rising up to his breastbone. She stepped forward so quickly he flinched and raised his good arm.

  Mevrou Huiseveldt shouted for her to stop, and her children cried from behind her.

  Moeder paused and then reached for the paper. “Yes, I have a message.”

  She wrote a few words and gave it back, careful not to touch his hand.

  “Read it,” she demanded.

  “Susanna.”

  “Read it.”

  He read aloud: “Matthys, better to die in battle than return in defeat. Susanna.”

  He folded it and put it in his pocket.

  “I worry about you . . . and the children.”

  Moeder inhaled for such a long time she seemed to swell. She looked at his right arm, which hung limp at his side. She moved the pencil to her left palm, with the point forward, and then closed her fingers around the base of it. She stared at his face—no, specifically at his right eye. Taking aim.

  Mevrou Huiseveldt shouted again and began crying herself. Moeder turned to her. “Quiet . . . woman,” she shouted.

  Oom Sarel had slipped from the tent by the time Moeder turned back. She seemed stunned that he had run off. She tilted her head back and growled toward the peak of the tent—not a word, not a scream, just a sound from deep inside. And when she had emptied her lungs, she inhaled and turned to me with unexpected calm.

  “Here, Lettie . . . this is for you.”

  She handed me the pencil to keep. I later used it to write about the day, and my mother’s hatred, and the way it was turning her into someone I had never seen.

  5

  Early October 1899, Orange Free State

  The soil smelled of old bones baked by the sun; I imagined them the dusty remains of the natives who had lived here long ago, although they could have belonged to animals, since bones are all the same once they’ve been gnawed bare.