The Lost History of Stars

  “They certainly are not afraid of me.”

  “Oh yes, they are,” she said. “They may just be too simple to realize it. You must assume they are three years less mature than a girl their age. That’s why girls need to marry boys at least three years older.”

  From the first day, I could ask her things I never dared ask Moeder, and put my thoughts into words I had never voiced. To my great relief, she felt many of the same things I did. I had been certain the devil himself planted sinful thoughts in me, luring me personally into the fires of hell. It calmed me to discover I was not the only one wrestling with powerful forces. Of all the concerns we had in the camp—thoughts of the war and hunger and health—none ever came close to overtaking the discussion of boys as our most important topic.

  I told her about the few boys from the nearest farms at home or those we would see several times a year when we gathered for the Nachtmaal services. Either they weren’t the right age for me or I didn’t think much of them. She easily decoded their behavior for me. She asked about my brothers, and she wanted to know all about Schalk, but not Willem, of course. She had lived close enough to a town that she went to a schoolhouse, so she knew a number of boys. I begged her to tell me about them so often and in such detail that it came to feel as if I knew them.

  She tired of my questions about her twin, Nicolaas. He was one of the few boys in the camp who was my age. I expected he was old enough to be with the men on commando, but he had not been well, she explained, not strong, and her mother would not permit it. I saw no shortcomings in him and was happy he was here, even though he paid me no attention.

  “No . . . no . . . he would never be interested in you,” Janetta said. “You would remind him too much of me and that would feel strange.”

  “Strange?”

  “We’re so close,” she said. “We know what the other is thinking.”

  There were so few boys in camp that we found ourselves debating the attractiveness of the old men, the ones who had been unable to go with the other men and were brought in with the women and children. Most of them scared me; they were so thin, with hollow cheeks and long beards that hung in gray strands or were bunched up like storm clouds. They spoke almost completely in scripture, as if in final preparation for meeting God.

  I grew heartsore when I thought how it must feel to be a man unable to fight. It was a reality they had not had to face until the war started. At some moment during their dignified aging they must have recognized they could no longer ride for long periods, or even mount their horse, or sleep on the ground. How it must have wounded them one day to realize they would be left behind with the women.

  I thought them lucky to be safe from bullets, at least. But as a woman, I did not understand old men any better than I understood young men or boys. What happened to them, I asked Janetta, when all that they had was taken?

  “They are once again young boys, but bent and gray, and a lot less happy.”

  7

  December 1899, Venter Farm

  Once the men left, the farm duties were redistributed among the rest of us. But whenever time permitted, Moeder urged Willem and me to go to Tante Hannah’s house for schooling. Willem spread his feet and refused.

  “What if the British came when I was there? What would Pa say?”

  I sensed she was about to retrieve Oupa’s sjambok to adjust his posture. “Ma . . . please . . . if he doesn’t want to be there to learn, he’ll just be a distraction.”

  She stared at me, then at Willem.

  “Fine, Aletta, then you’ll be responsible for passing along everything to Willem afterward.”

  “I’d rather chew rocks.”

  “What did you say?”

  “Delighted.”

  Willem thanked me as I left. “You are without hope, anyway,” I told him.

  I was not keen on the idea, either, as I wanted to do more things at home with Moeder. Mostly, I wanted to learn to cook. But since the men had left, suppers had become quick gatherings for simple foods: little preparation, no variety, and quiet eating before cleaning up for nightly Bible readings and psalms. I decided that after I learned to cook, I would like to start lessons on the organ so that I could play the way my mother did. But work allowed none of that now.

  Willem was saddled and “patrolling” a radius at dawn the morning after the men left. The third time that he charged the house in alarm, certain that British forces were bearing down on us, Moeder forced him to get down and help with the daily chores. The family could not afford a full-time sentry, she said. It was hard to remember that only a few months earlier he had been a little boy who spent his days shaping toy animals from mud.

  Before the men left, Moeder schooled us in the late afternoons as Bina started meal preparations. She stressed the importance of our mastering English, with bits of time spent on history and general knowledge. And after supper, Oupa Gideon would conduct Bible studies and quiz us on the smallest things, things we couldn’t possibly remember.

  I feared Tante Hannah would try to force embroidery on me as she had when I was younger, which I viewed as torture in small stitches. But when I arrived, she had turned her kitchen into a classroom. She made her mother, Ouma Wilhelmina, sit in the parlor or on the porch during our classes, where she smoked her pipe and grumbled to herself. The table was filled with books, and I discovered I could not keep my hands off them. Some had shiny covers with pictures from around the world. I most favored the ones that were weathered, as I imagined how many people had read them before me. I sensed their presence in the smell of the dusty pages.

  “We can travel through these books,” Tante Hannah said. “I’ve never been out of the Free State, but I feel like I’ve seen the world.” She opened a book to a picture of Cape Town. “Can you believe how beautiful this is? I have a sister there.”

  The first day, we “visited” cathedrals in Europe, palaces of India, the beaches of the South Pacific, and the mountains of the American West. When I saw pictures of oceans and sailing ships, I wished Oupa Gideon were home so that I could borrow the book to show him. Instead I wrote descriptions so that I could tell him about the “whitecaps” that rose like menacing teeth from the stormy sea. It would feel as if I were teaching him something for a change.

  When my mother instructed us, it was by strict schedule, half an hour of one thing and then half an hour of another, in cycles measured precisely by the mantel clock. With Tante Hannah, one topic led to another, guided by my curiosity.

  When I asked Moeder questions about the war, she most often told me to ask Vader and Schalk when they came home. I think she was afraid I would worry too much about them if we talked about it. Better not to think of the possibilities. But Tante Hannah brought newspapers from town, and we read reports from them, even some that contained bits of coverage from British papers. The news was spotty and delayed, but it still made the war seem more real.

  “Some are afraid of the news,” she said. “I think we should study every bit of it we can get. History is happening in our country. . . . The world is watching our two little republics taking on the mighty British Empire.”

  “Nobody can say ‘British Empire’ without the word ‘mighty’ attached,” I said. She brought out a map and showed the span of British influence across the world. “Mighty” seemed an inadequate description.

  “The British reporters label us, too, always calling our men the ‘wily’ Boers,” she said.

  She read details of early battles as well as editorials. She showed me one English paper that contained rude cartoons portraying the Boers as simpletons led by a froggish President Kruger.

  “Do you think they really know much about us?” she asked. “No, so they believe what they’re told. So then, ask yourself: How much do we really know about them?”

  I had not thought of their view, nor of the British being anything but an army of mindless bullies marching for their frumpy queen. A local paper criticized the British greed for our gold and diamonds. I almos
t laughed when I heard of “our” gold and diamonds. No one I knew had gold or diamonds.

  “The mines are mostly owned by international bankers already,” Tante Hannah said. “Many of them are British.”

  I was confused. Then why the war?

  “Because that’s what empires do.”

  News reports explained that the British had “the greatest fighting force on earth” and would overpower us with sheer numbers. But we surprised them with tactics and determination.

  We read that the British could sometimes see across great distances by sending men into the skies attached to balloons that rose because they were filled with hot air. One paper had a picture of two men in a wicker basket suspended from a balloon so high it had to feel as if they were flying. Tante Hannah then spent fifteen minutes teaching the “laws of physics” that caused warm air to rise and allowed such a miraculous thing to work. How could we win a war against an enemy that could fly?

  Bold headlines read, BLACK WEEK FOR BRITISH: BOERS WIN SUCCESSIVE BATTLES, AND ENTRENCHED BOERS REPEL ADVANCEMENT.

  One dispatch from a British reporter praised the commandos: “The individual Boer mounted, in a suitable country, is worth four or five regular soldiers. The only way of treating them is to get men equal in character and intelligence as riflemen, or failing the individual, huge masses of troops.”

  When we read of our men being taken prisoner and sent to Ceylon or Saint Helena, Tante Hannah pulled out maps to locate those places. The mention of Saint Helena led to research on the island and a discussion of Emperor Napoleon and his exile there. He was undone by his power hunger and arrogance. Did that sound like the British now? she asked. “Shouldn’t they have learned from that, and shouldn’t we now learn from this so there are no more wars like this a hundred years from now when it’s almost the year 2000?”

  Even the news accounts of our victories were disturbing. She showed me a clipping in which a British reporter described the Tommy lines after the battle: “Corpses lay here and there, many of the wounds were of a horrible nature. The splinters and fragments of the shells had torn and mutilated them. The shallow trenches were choked with dead and wounded.”

  I could not believe they would put such things in newspapers. Still, the words came only one at a time, and the reader could absorb them in bits. But this story was illustrated with a photograph, and it rose up and struck me like a mule kick. Men lay like jackstraws in awkward positions in the bottom of a trench, many dozens of them. It showed their faces, their arms and legs twisted like broken dolls.

  “I know it’s upsetting,” she said. “But this is what is happening. People need to know this. No war in history has had such news coverage. Think how much better informed the public is about what is actually going on in battle. We can see the horrors of it. . . . It’s not just numbers of dead anymore. . . . It’s the actual faces of the dead.”

  8

  January 1901, Concentration Camp

  Janetta and I often held hands when we walked; the same size, the same clothes and kappies . . . we must have looked like the dolls cut from folded paper that I used to make for my little sister, Cecelia.

  “Sisters taking a stroll?”

  A Tommy guard leaned against a post in front of us, watching people pass, nodding and offering comments as they did, most drawing no response or chilled looks. It was the shorter guard from the skirmish between the ladies at the fence. The one who’d tried to talk to me.

  “Friends,” Janetta said.

  I had ignored guards for the several months we’d been in camp, turning at the sight of them or grunting at their existence, resentment my only weapon.

  “Do you have names?”

  “Janetta,” she said. “And this is Aletta.” I stepped back, ready to leave. I would not be seen talking to one of the guards. When she tried to pull me forward, I wrestled against her.

  He was not much taller than either of us. He pushed back the brim of his helmet. He was freckled and pink, unequipped for our sun, and probably not much older than Schalk. He was literally a rooinek, as Moeder called them . . . their red necks burned by our relentless sun. The uniform and rifle seemed just a costume.

  “Did you know each other before camp?”

  “We met here. We’re the same age.” Janetta backed up a step to stand beside me, in the same posture, to emphasize our similarities.

  “It must be nice to have a friend here.”

  “I have a twin brother . . . but he’s a boy . . . of course.”

  Dear God, our Heavenly Host, what is she doing?

  “My brother was born just before midnight on a Friday night, and I was born only minutes later, but on Saturday. So we’re twins with different birthdays.”

  I had not known that, and as I stored that unique fact, the guard turned to me.

  “Well . . . how about you? When’s your birthday?”

  I would not waste a single word on him, but then I thought of Bina’s telling me how words can be stones. I would practice; I would see whether I could wound him with words.

  “None of your business.”

  “No,” he laughed. “Fine, I’ll cancel the celebration. What family do you have here?”

  “That’s not your business, either,” I said.

  “I understand. . . . Your mother would not like you talking to a guard . . .”

  “It has nothing to do with her not liking it. I don’t like it. . . . I don’t like you. . . . I don’t like this camp. . . . I don’t like the British. And you can stand me in front of a firing squad, but I won’t tell you my birthday.”

  He stepped back and put his hands up, laughing as he pretended to surrender.

  “And you don’t like being friendly, either?”

  I pointed to the rifle slung over his shoulder. I raised arms to both sides and gestured to the enclosure. How dense can the British be?

  “Dolt.” I projected the word as much like a stone as I could. “Noun, meaning a dull or stupid fellow.”

  He looked at the rifle as if he had forgotten it was there. “Oh, they make me carry it . . . for appearances.”

  “The last Tommy I talked to put a rifle in my face and threatened to kill me. . . . He killed our animals and burned our house . . . burned my things . . .”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I am sorry.”

  His apology disrupted the series of comments I was readying.

  “What’s your name?” Janetta asked. I could not believe her, but since she knew more about boys, I assumed she was positioning him for an insult or had devised a way to use him to our benefit.

  “Thomas,” he said. “But they call me Tommy.”

  Janetta laughed. I stared her down.

  “The humor?” he asked.

  “We call all the British soldiers Tommy . . . or Khakis,” Janetta said.

  I tugged at her hand, pulling her halfway around.

  “Yes . . . the mythical Tommy Atkins . . . but I’m the real Tommy Maples.”

  “Maples?”

  “Yes . . . like the tree.”

  There was no excuse for this. I pulled hard enough to get Janetta turned.

  She struggled against me but relented rather than let me create a scene. She punished me with a lecture as we walked away.

  “We should have asked how old he is,” she said. “Not much older than us, I don’t think. He’s just a boy, really. A man . . . but a boy. I like his eyes. What color would you say those are? Green? Green blue?”

  “Janetta, I didn’t notice his eyes. . . . I saw his red hair,” I said. “Is there anything worse? He’s so . . . pink . . . pale.”

  “His hair looks good with his skin,” she said.

  “What is wrong with you? He is just another of the devils who burned our houses.”

  “It wasn’t him doing the burning,” she said. “He’s in here, too, just guarding fences.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I looked at the men who burned our house. . . . I don’t recognize him.”
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  “The devils all look alike.”

  “I don’t think he’s the devil at all.”

  “He’s hideous. . . . He’s spotted and his teeth are . . . askew.”

  “Askew?”

  “Ja . . .”

  “You mean, what . . . crooked?”

  “Ja, askew, one of my new words.”

  “Lettie . . . think about it. . . . You saw his teeth because he smiled at us,” she said. “How many other men are smiling at us in here?”

  9

  October 1899, Venter farm

  As she had since discovering I could not say the word she used for a greeting, Bina always said “peace” when she saw me approach. I liked it. This morning, she had finished collecting the oxhide riempies that Vader had hung over a tree branch to stretch into flexible strands to be woven into banding for chairs and furniture.

  “Can I help?” I asked.

  “I’m done; maize next.”

  I knew others thought me a pest with my questions, but Bina said she didn’t mind because I was the only one who asked her things. She would sometimes use just a few wise words to respond to a story I might have taken many minutes to tell. I often wrote down the sayings she shared.

  She told me once that a person’s face tells everything about them, and I had an “open” face. Another time she said that my wide eyes and long lashes reminded her of an ostrich. She held the back of her hands to her eyes and waved her fingers like long-lashed blinks. I liked it best when she said that I was as smart as a grown-up “but still made of soft clay.”

  The one thing she did better than anyone else was this: listen. When I spoke, she looked in my eyes and listened until I was finished. I thanked her for it once, and she said it was a sign of respect, one I always should show others.

  “We are who we are through others,” she said, and then she repeated it while looking straight into my eyes.

  I wrote that down later, and I thought at the time that Oupa Gideon would have objected, as he always said we were created and driven by God’s will. Other people have nothing to do with who we are, and even we can’t change God’s will for us. The path he has charted is already writ, Oupa said.