Oupa did not ask about us.
“Help me.” Schalk pulled at my elbow, and I went outside as he tended Kroon and walked him to the barn. Schalk smelled, and his shoes made sounds when he walked, the soles tearing free from the top leather.
“Tell me . . . is Vader all right?”
“He’s fine; the veldkornet asked for him and he went. Be proud of him.”
“I am. . . . We miss him.”
“How’s Moeder?”
“She hurt her back, but she didn’t act like it. She wanted to tell Vader about it, but . . .”
We gathered in the kitchen for cold meats. Gideon asked the blessing and talked briefly about stock and crops. There were no war stories. He went to the stoep with Willem in his footsteps. Moeder sat between Schalk and me. . . . Cee-Cee never awakened.
“How are you, seun?”
“Well . . . and you?”
“Well.”
They looked at each other, and Moeder turned away.
“Is his arm healed?” I asked.
“His arm?”
“Where he stitched it.”
“Oh . . . I think so. . . . It must be. . . . That was a long time ago.”
“There have been other things since then?” I asked.
“There are always other things. . . . Don’t worry.”
“Don’t worry?” Moeder opened her hands.
Schalk startled.
“It just . . . does no good,” he said. “Not about Vader.”
She knew that better than any of us.
Their stay was so different, almost silent. So few words were exchanged. Even Oupa had no stories to tell. And Moeder said very little even to Schalk. A short night, a quick breakfast, and they were gone at dawn.
When we neared the finish of the next day, Moeder urged me to go to Tante Hannah’s for a class. I could hear an argument inside by the time I reached her stairs. I knew I should turn and go home, and even tried to step away, but my curiosity froze me and then drew me closer. Tante Hannah said only a few words at a time, and it wasn’t until I stood near the door that I could hear Ouma Wilhelmina.
“. . . weakness . . . mistake . . .”
I listened closer.
Tante Hannah coughed and cleared her voice. “Wives must submit to their husbands as they submit to the Lord,” she said.
“Stitch that,” Wilhelmina shouted, “on a pillow.”
A noisy wind crossed the stoep and muted all but the words that were stressed.
“. . . vow . . .”
“. . . a man . . .”
The house vibrated. I looked away. With the windblown dust, the blank veld blended into the gray sky. I had to go. But if I left, they might hear me, and it would be obvious I’d been listening. I knocked. As the argument paused, I entered, acting out of breath, as if I’d just hurried to the door.
“Lettie . . . hallo. . . . Go into the kitchen, and I’ll be there in a minute,” Tante Hannah said. “Have a rusk.”
Ouma Wilhelmina, now eye to eye with me, followed.
“Good-bye, Aletta . . . I’m leaving . . .”
“Leeee-ving?” I stretched the word. No one in our family had ever just left. I hadn’t known it was possible.
“Cape Town, to live with my daughter Grieta and her husband . . . a good man.”
“I’d like to go to Cape Town,” I said. “I’m dying to see the ocean.”
“Come along,” she said.
“I can’t,” I said. Moeder would not allow that.
“You should come, you all should come. Hannah should come,” she said. “Get away from here.”
I could barely bite through the crunchy rusk. I studied the pattern on the plate, the delicate flowers on the edge. I ran a finger across them as I tried to be quiet.
“I’ll smoke all I want,” she continued in fragments. “He shouted at me . . . disrespect. . . . It’s not his tobacco. . . . He can bully her, but not me. No more.”
It was not my business.
“I’m packing,” Ouma said, spinning toward her room as if she could not tolerate another minute.
Tante Hannah set out the old newspapers she had collected in town.
“Thank you for the food,” I said.
She smiled.
“They don’t get along. . . . You know that,” she said. “The visit last night did not go well. Oom Sarel was upset . . . the war. And she . . . she’s always upset.”
“Schalk and Oupa did not talk much. . . . Vader didn’t come home at all.”
“Is he all right?”
I’d been lectured so often to say nothing about their condition and location that I hesitated.
“Lettie . . . is he all right?”
“They needed him on a mission.”
“Your oom said nothing about it. What did Oupa say?”
“Oupa said they asked especially for Vader . . .”
“Didn’t ask for Sarel?”
“Vader helped plan it, they said.”
Hannah took a moment.
“Did they say anything else?”
“No . . . very little. Did Oom Sarel?”
“Yes . . . and we should talk about it today . . . as a lesson.”
She handed me a paper but summarized it before I could read.
“The Tommies walked in and took over both capitals without a fight.”
This seemed impossible. “Does that mean the war is over? . . . They won?”
“No, it’s not over,” she said. “It was a strategy by our men. . . . We just walked away. . . . Better to fight them out on the veld instead of around the cities.”
“I can’t imagine our men backing from a fight.”
“The papers are calling them ‘guerrilla’ tactics,” she said. “It means ‘little war’ . . . picking their places to fight small battles. The Tommies want to fight like pieces set in place on the chess board, to benefit from their power. The commandos want to hit and run so that they benefit from their mobility and knowledge of the country.”
I could see Vader and Schalk stalking game in the bush. They could make themselves invisible. I thought of an entire army creeping about the country in silence.
“So we can win that way?”
She gestured with uncertainty.
“The British are using new tactics in response,” she said, explaining a plan by Lord Kitchener for dealing with the commandos.
“Since it’s not the way they’re used to fighting, they’re calling us all spies, just for giving support,” she said.
“Spies? Us?”
“They want to try to stop the men from getting supplies from their homes and farms,” she said.
“How?”
“They’re burning them.”
“Burning them? Burning what?”
She nodded. “Yes, homes and farms.”
“Where?”
“Here.”
“What are we supposed to do?”
“I don’t know.”
24
June 1901, Concentration Camp
Maples concentrated on stitching a button on his tunic while still wearing it. It allowed me to look at him again, longer. He was better looking from a distance, and he was always more attractive in my thoughts than he was in my presence. I vowed at night not to risk talking to him, yet when I set out, it was in his direction. Half the time I would turn back toward the tent, only to retrace my steps toward his post. After Willem had been snatched up and threatened, I needed to be more vigilant. But here I was.
“Can you give me a hand?” he asked. “I was hoping to see you today.”
I looked down the fence line and toward the tents. I closed Mr. Dickens but walked on. “I shouldn’t.”
“Good thing I’ve got my hussif,” he said.