“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.