The Lost History of Stars

  It was my first time sleeping on the ground in the bush, and I strained to conform to the uneven earth. A steady drumbeat, soothing as a mother’s pulse, calmed the night. But drums from other native villages soon alternated, as if questions posed by booming, deep-chested men were being answered by distant women with rattling wood-on-wood voices. A night of tribal passages, I assumed. I pictured frenzied dances by firelight to celebrate someone’s coming of age.

  The hypnotic rhythms surrendered to a rumble that seeped from the core of the earth and rolled in waves across the veld until it clenched a deep, vague place low in my gut.

  “Pa . . .”

  “Go to sleep.”

  “But Vader . . . what’s happening?”

  My father sat up in his bedding and leaned toward the campfire, his face emerging shadowy gold from the darkness.

  “Lions,” he said.

  “More than one?”

  “Yes, Aletta, it usually is.”

  Several roared at once, knotting that place inside me.

  “They’d probably go for us first,” said my brother Schalk, so calm he didn’t roll over. “You would be . . .”

  Another roar muffled his words of comfort.

  I would be . . . what . . . safe from harm?

  I would be . . . what . . . in no danger?

  “Schalk . . . I would be what?”

  “You would be their little dessert.”

  “Dessert?”

  “A sweet melktert after they made a meal of Pa and me,” Schalk said.

  Only my brother would laugh at the possibility of being eaten before dawn.

  “They won’t get you,” my father said, “or us.”

  “What do we do?”

  “Go back to sleep.”

  Given the pace of my heartbeats, I believed myself capable of running the many miles to the safety of home or springing to the very top of a tree if necessary. But the one thing I knew I could not do was fall asleep. I told myself to be brave; I had promised not to be a bother if they allowed me on this hunting trip, which was expected to be the last for a while, as the British were said to be gathering at our borders.

  A lion punctuated a roar with several deep coughs and a softer grumble: Yesssss, I thought it said. Sleep, sleep, sleep . . . if you dare.

  “May I sleep by you, Pa?” I was already on my feet when he answered.

  “No . . .”

  I froze in place. My face chilled.

  “Stay there,” he said.

  “But—”

  “Aletta . . . we’ll be gone soon; you can’t be such a little girl.”

  “I’m not, Pa, I’m twelve.”

  “Aletta.”

  “Fine.”

  Schalk could tell by the tone of that single word that I was about to cry.

  “Be brave, little one,” Schalk said.

  “Schalk . . . ssstttt.” My father silenced him with a whistle through his teeth. “They won’t come near the fire.”

  With a poke stick he speared the coals at the core of the fire, and it flared bright and angry. I stared into it and it made a crackling laugh at me, and ghosts dancing in the smoke waved their wispy gray arms. I tried to look beyond the radius of the firelight, but the night was as I’d never seen: not merely black, but thick and textured, like the felt of my father’s hat. And as I squinted, spots flashed . . . reflections off the great cats’ yellow eyes.

  The spots moved. They circled. Stalking outside the curtain of light. Pacing, waiting for the fire to fail, patient, quiet and patient, until the moment they could pounce. I pulled myself tighter. I gasped and blinked with force. They scattered.

  “They’re here, Pa, I see them.”

  “No, they’re not, Aletta. Go to sleep.”

  I blinked again, as hard as I could. They withdrew. Waiting.

  “What if . . . the fire goes out?”

  Several lions roared, each louder in succession. They were not within striking distance of us after all. At least not the ones we could hear.

  “Lettie, those may be, what, Pa, five miles away?” Schalk asked.

  “Maybe.”

  “You can hear them that far?” I asked.

  “Sure, I almost wish one would attack me sometime,” Schalk said. “Men who live through it always say the same thing.”

  “Praise God Almighty for his salvation?” I whispered from the tight ball I had become.

  “All they talk about is the lion’s breath,” Schalk said. “They say you’ll never smell anything so awful. You’ll never forget the stench. More than anything else, they remember the sickening breath.”

  I looked at my father for his confirmation that Schalk was insane. But he only stirred the fire.

  “Lettie . . . it’s fine to be afraid,” my father said. “The Book says: ‘The lion hath roared . . . who will not fear?’ ”

  He pulled his small Bible from his chest pocket but by firelight could not find the passage.

  “In the morning, I’ll read from Peter . . .”

  “Be watchful, the devil is a roaring lion . . . ,” Schalk said, quoting the line Father referenced.

  “The devil ‘prowls’ like a roaring lion,” my father corrected.

  “Except if they’re stalking you, they often don’t do you the favor of offering a warning,” Schalk said.

  “Neither does the devil,” Father said.

  “So I’m to be frightened when they roar, because the Bible says it is to be so,” I said, “but I should be frightened even more when I don’t hear them?”

  I vowed never to leave the house again.

  “But,” my father said, “the rifles make us the dominant animal.”

  My grandfather Oupa Gideon preached the “dominant animal” theme for many occasions. You stand taller and you assert yourself. You let them know that taking you will come at a dear cost.

  Two lions roared, then more as a group, as if challenging one another. Perhaps it was a night of passages for them as well. They continued much of the night. I wiggled closer to Schalk once I knew he was asleep. I gasped when the roars were loudest, but my heart beat so hard it threatened to bruise my ribs when the time between roars lengthened.

  I grew light-headed gulping air scented by the old bones in the cold soil. I stared so hard at the fire that I was certain none had ever been brighter. I pulled my wool blanket close: it was abrasive to the point of pain. I strained to hear every sound in the clamoring night. But it was more than just listening; I was so alert it was as if I could feel the sounds. I was intoxicated by it all and was no longer bothered that I could not sleep.

  Ah . . . so this is fear.

  A RED DAWN PALED to pink when we began stalking. I was exhausted from the sleepless night, but I worked to step in the exact footsteps of Schalk as he inched through the bush. I had never been so concerned with the direction of the wind nor so fretted over the snap of a single branch. With each of my impatient mutters, Vader and Schalk both squinted threats; this was serious. They expected it to be their last chance for game before they would be hunting foreign invaders.

  Bored, bloodied by thornbushes, and asleep on my feet, I finally picked a flat spot and sat. I plucked stickers from my legs and watched the hunters’ strategic gestures to each other and the way they disappeared so gradually it was as if the bush had time to grow up around them.

  I picked a cochineal beetle off a prickly pear and squeezed the bright red dye out of it as Schalk had shown me; it could stain your fingers for days. I used it to put my initials on a big rock. I watched the sky and imagined animal figures in the clouds. I finally leaned back and slept. The shot woke me and I ran a jagged path through bush, ducking branches as I could. The men stood at the edge of a clearing, looking down at an animal nearly the size of Vader’s horse. Vader and Schalk removed their hats and said a prayer of thanks and then a prayer in praise of the animal.

  Stalk it. Kill it. Pray for it.

  They both set about the gutting, reaching elbow-deep into its cavity, s
team rising from within. From the tangled gore, Schalk carved out a purple organ and held it in my direction.

  “Liver . . . take a bite,” he said. Blood traced a thick path down his arm.

  “No . . . Schalk . . . please . . . no.”

  He savaged a bite with exaggerated enjoyment, blood painting his chin. He handed it to Vader, who also bit and then twisted his head to rip loose a piece of raw meat. He held it toward me, the scallops of their bite marks at the edge.

  “No.” I turned away, stomach rising.

  The cleaning and quartering took most of the morning. Vader led the loaded pack mule at a slow pace, leaving Schalk and me in a private tandem ahead, riding together as we had on many afternoons. Schalk always filled the outings with his veld lore. He showed me the annoying gray lourie, the goaway bird, which would screech a warning to the prey he might have stalked for an hour. He often fished for barbel, which were giant fish that could, he claimed, wiggle up out of the water and travel on land for miles if they sensed the stream they were in was going dry.

  I loved riding together, the way we moved with the horses’ stride and how the tall grasses reached our stirrups and spread like a wake in a golden ocean. The springboks pronked in front of us, giving off a honey-musk scent from the white fin of fur on their backs. We often spent the time sharing and confiding. He surprised me once with the story of his misguided courting of Mijnie de Bruyn.

  “I rode Kroon in circles outside their house until her mother finally came out and asked me if I wanted to come in for dessert.”

  “Then what?”

  “I went in and sat down . . .”

  “And . . .”

  “We ate.”

  “Did they know why you were there?”

  “Of course.”

  “What did you say?”

  “They were clearing the table and I asked if I could sit up with Mijnie. And everybody disappeared. They didn’t even finish with the table. Just vanished.”

  “Oh, Schalk.”

  “And they lit the candle . . .”

  “Oh, Schalk.”

  “It was the biggest candle you’ve ever seen. And Mijnie started talking about how her sister Rosina got married after sitting up through only one candle with Fredrick Coetzee, and they had a baby within a year.”

  “What did you say?”

  “I just kept looking at the candle—it seemed to be burning fast . . . and hot.”

  “Did you kiss her?”

  “No . . . couldn’t if I wanted. She never stopped talking . . . about her sister . . . how much she wanted to be the next one to get married . . . how much she wanted a family . . . babies. . . . She kept talking about babies. And living with her family.”

  “Did you say anything?”

  “Finally . . .”

  “What?”

  “Thanks for dessert.”

  “Thanks for the dessert?”

  “That’s all I could think of.”

  “And then what?”

  “I don’t know. . . . I just remember jumping onto Kroon and kicking him hard for home.”

  6

  December 1900, Concentration Camp

  Warm weather made it easy to escape the crowded tent and walk during the day. Moeder accepted my absences when I told her of having stopped to help someone with the burden of heavy laundry or trouble harnessing a wild child. She warned me against “borrowing sorrow,” but I convinced her that it was God’s work. And truly, I was excited to meet so many new people.

  At first I felt the energy created by the nearness of so many. But I was a plague of curiosity, introducing myself to all who passed, asking their names, how they were, and where they lived and then telling them about my family. Everyone backed away with suspicious looks. Several times, women just interrupted with, “What is it that you want?”

  I expected that we would feel an us-against-the-world togetherness, that we’d be united by the bond of our shared condition. But the bulk of those I passed seemed to prefer staying at arm’s length rather than linking arm in arm against our fate. After a few weeks, though, I was walking with my head down like the rest, eager to hear no more stories of sad displacement and loss. Soon I could tell which people were new to camp when I recognized in them the unwelcomed openness I had once shown.

  I was not less sympathetic, just more practical. I started focusing on one of my books to keep me from assessing the needs of each person I passed. I had read it through several times by then, so I did not have to concentrate, nor did I have to hurry. My walking was rarely with intent or direction, just going row to row, tracing a grid at a pace barely above stationary. I considered it ambling, amble being one of my new words.

  The sack Oom Sarel had tossed to me when he confronted my mother in our tent contained a small Chambers’s Dictionary. Tante Hannah had written a note on the first page: “To help your writing.”

  I was already very comfortable with English, but I decided I would put the time in camp to good effect by learning every word in the book, start to finish. So many were not practical, though, particularly the long ones that others did not understand. I decided that going around using big words would seem supercilious.

  But I loved the short ones that captured the perfect meaning with just a syllable or two. Deft. Adept. Dank became a favorite, as it exactly described the air inside a crowded canvas tent after days of rainfall. I wrote the words on scrap paper and then committed them to memory. Each time I smelled wet canvas, I mentioned to someone that it certainly was dank. Sometimes they gave me long looks, impressed by my intelligence, I assumed. So on this day, I ambled, and if anyone asked, I would edify them.

  I learned to glance over the edge of the book to be sure I was not about to collide with someone or trip on a tent rope. I was startled back into the moment by what sounded like a barnyard of warring hens. More than a dozen women were at the fence line between our side of the camp and the Hands-Uppers and Joiners on the other side.

  Two guards sought to bring order to a pack of women straining to reach a small clutch on the other side. Some of the insults were so profane I’d never heard words combined with such hateful imagination. I did not write them down but committed them to memory in case I ever needed a vile condemnation. We take our lessons where we may.

  Several of those on our side spat comets of fluid at the other women’s faces. A woman on our side reached through the fence and grasped the dress of a struggling woman and pulled her tight against the wire. That made it easier for others to claw at her, too. They tore at her dress, shouting each time they came away with a piece of ripped fabric, waving it about like a trophy of war.

  The taller of two guards pried women from the fence with the butt of his rifle, and when he broke their grip, he shoved them backward. The shorter guard contributed nothing by holding his arms extended, since the women merely ducked beneath.

  An old woman fell and dragged down several others. In a tangle, they screamed even louder and tumbled in their attempts to rise. A rifle fired, freezing the women as if in a photograph. By the time the echo faded, the women on the other side had retreated. The last of the group to get away was the woman with the shredded dress, the back of her white underskirt showing like a flag of surrender.

  Even in victory, our women remained agitated, and the taller guard kept his rifle readied. The shorter one tried to help them to their feet, although each shrugged him off, and several slapped his face. One of the women scrambled up despite another’s standing on her skirt, ripping her hem, but she did not seem to notice. She was one of the spitters, and she unleashed a full charge at the tall guard, who slapped her before wiping his face. It was Mevrou Prinsloo, the quiet woman from the wagon that had brought us to camp.

  The shorter guard intervened and sorted through the fallen women, who cursed his existence and the fertility of his mother. Those near me aligned their clothing, shouted their contempt one last time, and dispersed to spread word of their victory.

  “Are you all rig
ht?” the short guard asked me as I turned away. “I’m sorry about this.”

  He was not worth the breath it would take to form an answer. Besides, he had red hair, which I had never liked. That night I tried to write about the drama and the looks on the faces of the women. I sorted through the dictionary for better descriptions and came upon the word ire. But that didn’t capture the savagery of the women on our side, nor the look on the faces of the Joiner women, which was something like fear but more fragile. Maybe no one had yet created words to describe the kind of things seen in places like this.

  I THINK I WAS drawn to Janetta Maartens as a friend because I saw myself in her. When we walked past her in our first month in camp, Moeder pointed her out, saying she could be my twin, slender, with wide eyes and light brown hair. Perhaps that made it prideful to see myself in her, but it helped start a friendship.

  “Ma . . . ,” I complained when she stopped to make Janetta and me stand next to each other to reinforce our similarities. But I was soon delighted that she had, and we were inseparable after the first day. I embraced the idea of having a twin sister, or any sister who wasn’t still a child like Cecelia. As much as I loved little Cee-Cee, we could share time but not thoughts. Having a girlfriend my age was one positive to come from being taken into camp, since our farm’s remoteness prevented close friendships. It was interesting when we first spoke to learn that Janetta actually did have a twin, her brother Nicolaas, who did not resemble her as much as I did.

  When anyone was nearby, Janetta and I talked about our families and the things we missed from home. And when we were by ourselves, we talked about boys to the exclusion of all else. We lowered our voices, looked around to be certain of privacy, and spoke quickly for fear of interruption. Benefiting from the closeness of her brother, Janetta was an expert on boys. It was as if she were fluent in a foreign language or had spent time as a spy in an enemy camp. I confessed that boys confused me.

  “They’re simple . . . and all the same,” she said. “They have no idea who or what we are, and no matter how much noise they make, they are afraid of you.”