The Lost History of Stars

  I came to believe that the things Bina said were closer to whatever might be the real truth than most grown-ups told me. I asked her about her parents. They had been apprentices for farmers, but she did not explain.

  I asked about her daughter, Tombi, and Bina told me that she was a happy girl and smart. Tall. A woman now, and gone to live with her husband, taking with her a piece of Bina’s heart. When Tombi was born, she said, the men in the village poured water over Tuma as a lesson that a daughter must learn to change shapes, like water. I asked what they do if the baby is a boy. “They beat the father with sticks, as a reminder that boys are of war.”

  Bina hoisted the basket of maize to the top of her head to carry it to the chairs beneath the blue gum tree at the side of the house. Sometimes when she sang, it sounded like shouting; other times, it was a soft chant. It was almost always repetitive, and in rhythm with the physical motion of her chore.

  “My name means ‘to sing,’ ” she told me. “When I’m happy, I sing. When I work, I sing. When I cook, I sing. My mother said I sang when she carried me at her back.”

  I tried mimicking the words. It made no sense and it made her laugh, but the sound was nice. I was probably saying something stupid in her language, but that was fine with her, as nothing seemed so serious when we sang. “Did you look up into the branches before you sat down here?” Bina asked.

  “Yes . . . every time.”

  “You were too young to remember.”

  “Only the stories. How long was the snake?”

  Bina held her hands at least four feet apart.

  “Really?”

  “Maybe bigger . . . green and black . . . nearly fell on top of you when you were crawling . . . a boomslang . . . would have killed you with one strike . . . and you were laughing like you had a new plaything.”

  “And you saved me?”

  “I was there with the big knife, snatched it by the tail . . . cut its head off.”

  “I’m sorry you had to kill it.”

  “I’m glad it didn’t kill you.”

  She sang another song. It rose and fell like gentle waves and was soothing.

  “What’s the song about?”

  “About a boy who kills a lion to become a man and marry the chief’s daughter.”

  “Did Tuma kill a lion to get you to marry him?”

  “Gave my father ten goats,” she said.

  “Ten?”

  “If you don’t pay for something,” she said, “you don’t know its value.”

  I would write that down.

  “He wanted you more than anything?”

  “He was young.”

  Bina stopped her song and looked into my eyes so deeply that it felt as if she entered my mind.

  “Your time is coming,” she said. “We celebrate it . . . not hide it.”

  As with many of her comments, I didn’t understand but nodded and smiled as if I did.

  “I don’t think my father had to pay for my mother . . . not goats or anything. . . . He said God brought her to him.”

  Bina started to sing again.

  “They don’t say much in front of us . . . but they don’t get cross, not like Oom Sarel and Tante Hannah.”

  She pulled more maize from the basket.

  “Do you think Oom Sarel gave goats for Tante Hannah?”

  She shrugged.

  “They almost never talk to each other.”

  “Words can be stones.”

  I tried to picture Tante and Oom throwing rock-hard words at each other, and each ducking as they neared.

  “Tante Hannah is nice to me, but I don’t think she likes Moeder.”

  Bina resumed her song.

  “Do you think she does?”

  Bina sang for another moment and then answered the question with one of her sayings.

  “Some women—your mother—can make it rain.”

  I imagined that her next line would have been that Tante Hannah was dry, but it went unsaid.

  “I made a doll . . . for under her pillow . . . woman’s muti . . . to help with babies,” Bina said. “Oom Sarel threw it in the fire.”

  “Oom Sarel threw away a doll you made?” He had better never throw away my doll, I thought.

  “Do you fight with Tuma?” I asked.

  “No.”

  “Never?”

  “A little, before Tombi.”

  “What made you stop . . . do you remember?”

  “His mother.”

  Cicadas hummed so hard it added to the heat of the day, and sweat seeped into my skirts. I waited for more explanation from her. I checked the tree limbs above me again. Sometimes she gave in when I waited.

  “Threatened us with the marriage tree. . . . Stops fights.”

  I loved her stories of these strange practices. I passed them on to no one else but always remembered them.

  “How?”

  “They tie you under a kind of tree with special fruit.”

  “How long?”

  “Until you’re done fighting.”

  “No food or water?”

  “Just fruit, if it falls,” Bina said. “Baboons love the fruit. . . . It sours in the sun. . . . They eat it and get drunk. Elephants, too.”

  “And they leave you tied to the tree? With drunken baboons? Drunken elephants.”

  “Hmm. They say.”

  “What if a lion comes to chase the baboons? Or scorpions crawl on you?”

  “Yes . . . yes . . . better not to go there. My mother told me . . . be like the river,” Bina said, dragging a hand slowly in front of her to show gentle waves.

  I looked up in the tree again.

  “You were brave. . . . You saved me,” I said.

  “You won’t forget.”

  “No . . . never.”

  “Do you know why you’ll remember?”

  I was alert for pending wisdom.

  “Deeds live,” she said.

  I turned those two words over to look at all sides of them. They applied whether the deed was good or bad; people were affected by it, and they didn’t forget. It helped me understand the saying about how we are the person that others see. I was all at once Mother’s helper, Father’s little girl, Schalk’s little sister, Oupa’s star-watching friend. I was a bright light to Cee-Cee but a bother to Willem. And at least as far as Bina saw it, the things I did would be remembered. I know her deeds lived with me. So did her words.

  10

  February 1901, Concentration Camp

  In an otherwise ordinary conversation, Janetta voiced a thunderclap sentence: “The first boy I kissed smelled of the cold meat he’d eaten for lunch.”

  I should have acted as if such a comment were common and natural, so I wouldn’t seem such a backcountry cousin, but she could not have shocked me more if she’d said she had tea with the queen of England. Before I completely turned into stone, I must have made some kind of sound that caused her to look at me as if I were a sad little girl.

  Janetta was more than a friend: she was my mirror. Our images matched, but we were reversed in many ways. She had been exposed to towns and people and . . . life. I grew up in the middle of an ocean of scrubby grass. I’m sure she saw the innocence in my eyes and heard it in my stories.

  “What kind of meat?” I asked. I was so uncomfortable even saying the word “kiss” that I asked about the meat. Who was the dolt, now?

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I couldn’t actually taste it. The kiss was just on his cheek.”

  When I could shape words again, I began the interrogation.

  “Who was it?”

  “Koos du Toit.”

  “What did he look like?”

  “Like a frightened boy.”

  “Why did you pick him?”

  “I wanted to try it and he was there.”

  “Did you like him, at least?”

  “Maybe . . . not really.”

  “How did you make your lips go?”

  “You’ve never kissed a boy?”


  “No . . . almost,” I lied. “How do you make your lips go?”

  “Like you’re about to whistle.”

  I whistled.

  “Like you’re about to whistle . . . not actually whistling.”

  I tried it again and couldn’t do it without going ahead and whistling. Fool. I would need to practice.

  “What did he do?”

  “He was just standing there.”

  “Then after . . . what did he do after?”

  “He ran away.”

  “Really . . . he ran?”

  “Like his hair was afire.”

  I felt embarrassed for her.

  “What about your eyes?”

  “Closed . . . you’re supposed to do that.”

  I thought that was terrible advice. . . . You might miss . . . or go too slowly or too fast. Wouldn’t seeing it be part of the experience?

  “Like this . . .” She leaned toward me, eyes closed. Her breath touched me first, and her lips settled lightly on the apple of my cheek.

  “Now you,” she said.

  I stared at her cheek, estimating the range before closing my eyes and easing in. I felt softness and warmth, and tiny pale hairs against my lips.

  “That’s right,” she said. “But soft, and keep your eyes closed.”

  I leaned in again, softer.

  “Like that,” she said. “Good.”

  “Jan . . .” I stopped.

  “What . . . say it.”

  “I am just surprised.”

  “That I’ve kissed a boy?”

  I nodded.

  “Aletta, there are girls from my town who get married at fifteen or sixteen. . . . That’s not unusual at all,” she said. She was right. I hadn’t thought of it that way. “And we’ll both be fourteen soon.”

  We went back to her tent because it was less crowded and her mother and brother were often out. At the time, they had no other family sharing their tent.

  “Praise God we’re in this camp,” she said.

  I had never heard that comment before. “What?”

  “It is much better than the one we were in before,” she said. “I’ve seen problems here, but not cruelty. I haven’t seen that here. Not yet. Not like the other place.”

  “You’re serious?”

  “Yes. The first one was in a bog, never dried out, so there was malaria and typhus,” she said. “The pumps didn’t work, so water had to be brought in by wagons, so there was never enough to drink . . . so forget laundry or washing.”

  “What did everyone do?”

  “Got angry . . . a lot of them,” she said. “Women would fight . . . pull hair . . .”

  “Against Joiner women?”

  “Our women, against each other,” she said. “It was horrible . . . bloody fights. Lettie, some would steal your rations. . . . Some would report others to guards to try to gain favor.”

  I shook my head, disgusted but doubting.

  “Worse . . . our commandant beat my mother.”

  Another shock. “Beat her . . . physically?”

  “Ja, we were allowed outside the camp to collect sticks we might burn. We’d spent the whole afternoon, and when we got back, the commandant struck Moeder with his sjambok and took the sticks from us for his own fire.”

  “Struck your mother?”

  “Ja, and then joked that he’d have to pay for it on Judgment Day,” she said. “He joked about it, but I hope he does pay for it, in hell. There won’t be a shortage of fuel for him there.”

  I had not heard of such a thing in our camp, although I did not discount it.

  “How could they get away with that?” I asked.

  Janetta laughed at me. “How old are you?” she asked. I was embarrassed by the tone of her question and felt as if I were shrinking in her eyes. She knew how old I was.

  “How did you get sent here?” I asked.

  “Ma had a few gold sovereigns sewn into the hem of her skirt,” Janetta said. “She found somebody who could get us out of there and she bribed him.”

  “How lucky she had that.”

  “Smart, not lucky. Here’s what Moeder says: You can only count on what you have and what you carry.”

  “All I brought was my book and some clothes.”

  “Not just what you can actually carry in your arms, but what you have, your brains, your backbone.”

  I was frightened and so confused I could not stand still. I needed to go back to our tent.

  “I forgot to tell you,” she said. “I talked to the guard—Tommy Maples—he asked about you.”

  She had seen him when I wasn’t around? Had she gone without me on purpose? What could they have talked about?

  “Lettie . . . did you hear me? I saw the guard and he asked about you, told me to tell you hello.”

  “I don’t care,” I said.

  “Oh, really?”

  “Fine, what did he say?”

  “I told you . . . he said to tell you hello.”

  “That’s all he had to say?”

  “Thought you didn’t care . . .”

  I WAS OF TWO minds when Mother first asked that I take over as “teacher” to Willem and Cee-Cee.

  “Teach Willem?”

  “Yes.”

  “Could I scrub the latrines instead?”

  “Aletta Marie Venter.”

  “I will try.” I sincerely did. I stayed patient and calm. I knew that none of us needed more stress in the tent. But Willem was impossible. My choices were to find a solution or strangle him lifeless. The solution came from my notebook, where I’d reread Bina’s wisdom about living through others. I decided that the problem with Willem was my shortcomings as a teacher rather than his as a pupil. This was a matter of communication: I had to speak a language he understood.

  He would stare me down as if in front of a firing squad if I gave him mathematics problems, but he would lean close and focus if I framed the question properly: “If the British had fifteen pieces of artillery and the commandos capture five, what percentage remains from the original amount?”

  “Oh, God, don’t talk about the war,” Mevrou Huiseveldt interrupted. “Don’t bring that war into this tent.”

  “Think hard, Willem, this could be important if you’re called up to fight,” I said, ignoring the woman and noticing that Klaas had suddenly drawn close and become attentive. Men are so easily manipulated.

  Cecelia was a dream to teach, as she had been in every other way. I spent our time with letters and songs, and she took it all in so quickly that I believed she might catch up to Willem. And I still made up stories for her at night, which gave me a closeness I felt nowhere else. One night I told her a story about a little girl who looked like a lamb; Cee-Cee wanted to hear it again and again. I began adding chapters to it—the adventures of a little girl living on an imaginary farm. As the story went, the little girl had a beautiful big sister who always came to her rescue whenever her life became troublesome.

  “That’s you,” Cecelia would say when I mentioned the big sister.

  At times, the big sister would take the little girl sailing on trips to the great cities around the world. If Cee-Cee asked questions about the war, I left her open to imagine that a heroic big sister would arrive at the moment of greatest danger and save them all. I fashioned a false but powerful image of myself, discovering the beauty of fiction.

  11

  December 1899, Sarel Venter Farm

  “I declare an armistice from war,” Tante Hannah announced as I arrived at her farmhouse for another afternoon of study. I was reasonably certain she did not have the power to cause the war to halt, even temporarily.

  “No talk of war today.”

  The usual array of sweet treats was on the table. I no longer needed them as incentive to visit, but I did not think she had to be told. My mother had not baked much since the men had left, and I missed the smell of it in the house. Beside the cakes was a package in bright wrapping paper.

  “This is for you.”

&nbsp
; I tore into it to find two notebooks and a book.

  “You need to read more,” she said. “And to start keeping a journal.”

  I scanned the cover: The Story of an African Farm.

  “An African farm?”

  “On the Great Karoo,” she said. “Written by a woman named Schreiner.”

  A woman wrote this book? From the Great Karoo? I thought the Karoo was the most desolate place in the world, in the gramadoelas, as Oupa Gideon used to say—near to nothing, far from everything. There was nothing there but prickly pear cactus and empty horizons.

  “What kind of a story does somebody tell about living on the Karoo?”

  “Read it and see.”

  “Have you read it?”

  “Yes.”

  “What did you think?”

  “I don’t want to say. I want you to form your own opinion.”

  “Is it like . . . real?”

  “It’s about people, fictional people, but real in their way.”

  “A woman wrote this?”

  “Yes, Aletta, a woman . . . a woman from South Africa who may have been a lot like you at your age. I thought you’d enjoy it, and it might give you ideas.”

  I turned the book over, front to back, and then opened to the first page. “Ideas for what?”

  “Writing.”

  “Me?”

  “I’ve heard stories you tell Cee-Cee, and they’re wonderful. And I’ve never known anyone more curious. That’s a start. Write about your life.”

  All I knew about was my family and our life on our farm. My story had characters but didn’t seem to have a plot.

  “I don’t see how I could make a story.”

  Tante Hannah’s mother, Ouma Wilhelmina, came into the kitchen, and Tante Hannah quieted.

  “Let’s walk,” Tante said, leading me to the path in front of the house.

  “If nothing else, you should keep a journal . . . the things that you see and do. . . . Memories change too much otherwise.”

  I kicked an egg-shaped rock off the path with the tip of my shoe.

  “I wouldn’t know where to start.”

  “Like your stories for Cecelia, you let your imagination take over. I know you have great imagination.”