“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.”
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.”
And she had no idea the things that came to my mind when I dreamed. “Tell me how.”
“I don’t have your imagination, but you can start anywhere.” She pointed at the rock I had kicked.
“Do what you naturally do. . . . Ask questions. How did that rock get here? Whose hands have touched that rock? Maybe a man centuries ago stalked an animal to this spot. He picked up that rock.”
I saw the man, frightened, wearing just a cloth.
“What was going through his mind in that moment, the most dangerous moment of his life, not knowing if he would kill the animal or the animal would kill him?”
“What happened?” I wanted to know: Did he live or die? I was already interested in his fate.
“You decide.”
“I decide?”
“Yes, you.”
“That seems like . . . power.” I had no other power that I could think of. I suddenly embraced the idea.
“Yes, you control it all.”