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.