And that was all. Janetta said nothing. I left and did not go back, hoping that she would reappear one day during my walk and we would be close. I wanted to tell her of the commandant and his threats, and how I now feared we’d been targeted by some informant in camp. Her experiences at the other camp might help us now. But I would have to wait.
Without my companion, I went back to my pattern of read-walking, idling along the camp perimeter with my face in my book or my dictionary. It was a way to occupy my mind. During my walks, the space beside me felt empty, and sometimes I would start to say something as if Janetta were there. I worried about her as I would my own sister. I suppose that drove me deeper into my books, so much so that I almost never looked up from them when I walked.
I came across guards a time or two with each trip around the camp. “Away from the fence,” they would say, and I would veer a few steps until I was out of sight. I sometimes saw the guards who stormed through our tent with the commandant. I avoided their eyes but sensed menace in their nearness. I thought of Schalk’s stories of how the animals could sense threats, and I tried to grow alert to those who might be watching or following as I walked. I passed the latrines, the hospital tent, the reservoir, each with its own sounds and smells so that I could identify my position without looking up. It was most quiet along the eastern fence line, especially in the afternoon, so it was there that I felt the safest. Until . . .
“What have you got there?”
The pink-faced guard occupied my path.
“Aletta, right? What’s your book?” The guard knew my name. How? Was he looking through British paperwork? Keeping files on us? Snooping . . . monitoring?
“How do you know who I am?”
“Your friend told me, remember?” he said. “You were standing right in front of me. You were so angry you made your face look like a fist. Remember?”
I hoped it would bother him that I could dismiss the memory of him so quickly. I did not even shake my head in response.
“Where’s your friend?”
I tried walking past.
“What are you reading?”
“Are books outlawed here?” I adopted the tone Oupa Gideon sometimes used with Tuma.
“Just curious what you’re reading. . . . Must be good, you almost ran into me.”
“Who are you?” I asked without looking at his face.
“Tommy Maples . . . I told you. . . . Let me see.”
I held it away from him so he could see the title but not touch the book.
“Chambers’s Dictionary,” he said.
“You can read,” I said, acting surprised.
“Yes, the queen taught me.”
I kept my focus on the pages, skimming for a full definition of the word fence.
“Fence, noun, a wall or hedge for enclosing animals or for protecting land,” I read, and then I said, “Enclosing animals . . . yes . . . the proper use for a fence. It doesn’t say anything about enclosing humans.”
He ignored my comment. “Do you have any books to help me find gold or diamonds?”
“You haven’t taken enough?”
“Haven’t found any. . . . Recruiters promised us we’d be trippin’ over nuggets and gems,” he said. “Have you ever found any?”
I turned around to get away from him, but he continued beside me.
“You should have seen the men when we’d set up a camp, they’d start pawin’ at the dirt,” he said. “They told us about a gent who just bent over and picked up a diamond that was one hundred seventy-five carats.”
I had no idea how big that was. I turned again, but he stubbornly followed.
“Something like that had to be the size of a cricket ball,” he said. “Men find more snakes than nuggets. Nobody told us about the black mambas that rear up and drop you with one bite. They’ll crawl into your bedding at night to stay warm and then you roll over on them and wake up dead. Scare the life out of me.”
I had dealt with snakes all my life and had not been bitten . . . thanks to Bina. I considered telling him that story but clamped my jaws. Who was he to come into our country and then complain about our snakes? But his fears seemed a strategic opening. Who knows how I might disrupt the British plans if I started a rumor that spread to their troops in the field?
“We have spent years training our snakes to kill you British in your sleep,” I said. “Thousands of them, at our command: they’re coming for you. An army of them. Crawling into your bedding. No fence can stop them, you know.” I pointed to the fence and made a wiggling motion with my hand, showing how a serpent could slither through.
“You’ve taught them well, then,” he said, adding a shiver. “They’re everywhere. . . . Hate the bleeders.”
It was worth a try; if it kept some of them awake at night, they might be sluggish in battle. But he was not as simple as I had hoped.
“You should go home, then.” I pointed to the north.
“Right . . . yes, I’m all in favor of that. I asked about that very thing, but it turns out they won’t let me. I still have more than four years to go. I thought it might be a few months here and then some soft duty somewhere else.”
I sneered.
“They had some bad times before I got here, I guess, Spion Kop and the like. But when we marched into Pretoria, everybody had a big party, and they stood up there and told us that the war was over. Major said exactly that . . . said we’d accomplished our mission in South Africa.”
He bobbed his head so that it caused his helmet to slide down on his brow.
“Did you know that I saw you before I met you with your friend . . . that day with all the crazy women at the fence? I didn’t want to go near them.”
I stopped walking to make a point: “You had to protect your dirty helpers on the other side.”
“We hate them the most,” he said. “If they turn on their own, they’ll surely turn on us. That’s the first thing the officers told us; they could be spies working against us from the inside. If we see anything out of line at all, we’re under orders to shoot ’em down. Or put together a firing squad.”
“My oom Sarel is on the other side.” I pointed to the far side of camp. “He’s a traitor, but I miss my tante Hannah . . . his wife.”
“Members of your own family?”
“A traitor’s heart cannot be trusted,” I said. It was one of Moeder’s opinions.
“True, but they may end up benefiting,” he said.
“Did Judas benefit?”
“I don’t know. You tell me.”
“For a very short time,” I said.
“Well . . . maybe that’s the case with them,” he said. “At least your uncle is safe. He won’t be anybody’s favorite, but he’ll be alive and able to start over.”
“Not after we win.”
The guard tilted his head. “Could happen.”
“You don’t know my father and grandfather,” I said, pointing a finger at his chest. “They’ll never quit.”
“Bitter-Enders?”
“To the finish.”
“Wish them well,” he said. “Just hope we can all go home soon.”
“Keep your wishes and take them home with you,” I said.
He pulled something shiny from his tunic, a tin box, red and gold and blue.
“Queen sent it to me. . . . Got her likeness right here on top, with her signature.” He held it out for me to see.
“Igghh . . . she looks like Kruger without the beard.”
“Speak well of the dead.”
He was right; that was unchristian.