The news about Bina struck me cold. I think of her every day, and her sayings, and her songs. I worry about the men, especially Schalk, but I know how well they can take care of themselves. But I truly owe Bina my life, and if I could repay that somehow, I would. Maybe Tuma will be taken to the same place and they can be together.
I have to thank you for the two books. I lose myself in them every day. If I am a refugee, as they call us, the place I find real refuge is in those books. Thank you, dear Tante. You will be happy to learn that I have another book, too. Copperfield! Yes, please write when you can and I’ll do the same. I will be certain to check with the messenger often. It’s good to know it is safe to do so.
Your Lettie
Klaas’s cough grew jagged and persistent before he gave in to crying. He turned his head toward the canvas so that Willem would not see him. I prayed for his health, and also for the Lord’s patience, as the tent filled with a fretful commotion. I could do nothing to help Klaas other than maintain a respectful distance and not intrude. But every spoken word was heard. So I could not help being party to the things that Mevrou Huiseveldt said to try to calm him. I doubted she had slept for several days, tending Klaas through the nights. These were the first days I could recall that she did not spend time complaining about her own health.
Crazed by fever, Klaas cried that he wanted to see his father.
“The British have him far away,” she told him again and again.
He persisted. “I want to go see him.” Mevrou Huiseveldt looked at the rest of us. We had no answers. His voice was so much like Willem’s that I often checked to be sure it wasn’t. What if it had been Willem instead of Klaas with pneumonia? They lived in the same tent, exposed to the same elements and illnesses. Was sickness as random as those bullets flying through the smoke of battle?
Willem now stayed as far away from Klaas as he could, and the space we gave the Huiseveldts caused us to back into a tighter cluster. As Klaas faded, Willem hardly spoke to him, as if Klaas had betrayed him with his illness. I began taking Willem outside as often as I could, and at times I sent him on errands I thought might feel “manly” to him . . . anything to keep him occupied. I started calling him “our little soldier,” thinking he would like it and it would encourage discipline and strength.
I worried so much that I opened up to him and told him a story that I feared would be used against me later. At times when I felt weak, I said, I remembered him in front of the line of Tommies, their rifles pointed at him. I would never forget the look on his face. It was the bravest thing I’d ever seen—brave as anything Oupa or Vader or Schalk could do. “You inspired me to be strong,” I said. And he liked to hear that. The first time, at least. The second time I told him this, he saw it as manipulation and resented it.
Moeder asked us to pray for the sick boy’s well-being after our Bible readings, and I silently prayed that Mevrou Huiseveldt would take him to the hospital tent so we wouldn’t hear his cries. But she was told that mothers were allowed to see children for only five minutes one day a week, and Mevrou Huiseveldt felt better tending Klaas herself.
The crying, hour after hour, through the night, ground away at my tolerance until every nerve was exposed. Mevrou Huiseveldt had given him teas and painted his chest with foul-smelling poultices. Dear God, please make him stop, I thought. Then I corrected my prayer: Dear God, please make him well.
Klaas was worse in the morning. He had changed his repetitive wish slightly. He no longer asked to see his father; he wished that his father could see him, be brought to him, right now, to the bedside. Mevrou Huiseveldt abandoned reason. “We’ll see if we can get him here.”
I left the tent to fetch water and to search for the dominee. I walked past Maples, ignoring his greeting. I came upon a man with a large camera on a three-legged stand; he had been in camp several days selling photographs of families that they might have after the war for their men. I thought of Klaas’s wish that his father could see him. I urged the photographer to come to our tent, and we would figure out a way to pay him for it.
I heard no coughing sounds when I returned to the tent. It had been only an hour, but he was being cleaned for burial.
“No . . .”
“Ja . . . he’s gone,” Mevrou Huiseveldt said without looking up.
“There is a photographer in camp today,” I told her. “I thought he could get a picture of Klaas that you might send to his father. I got him here as soon as I could. . . . I’ll send him away.”
Mevrou Huiseveldt straightened and wiped her face with her skirt hem.
“Have him wait,” she said. We all turned away as she changed Klaas’s clothes.
Moeder helped them carry the boy outside the tent, where the photographer posed them. Standing behind a chair, Mevrou Huiseveldt held Klaas upright, with a hand on each shoulder, with Rachel on the other side. She tried to pull open the lids of his eyes for the picture. After two tries, they stayed open.
Willem and I stood behind the photographer. Willem stared at Klaas. We flinched together when the flash burst, and the brilliant light reflected pure white off the boy’s empty eyes.
26
1890s, Sarel Venter Farm
Long before Tante Hannah lured me to the world that was hiding inside the covers of books, she tried to share with me her love of needlework. Reading was important to her, she said, because books made her think. But she loved her needlework projects because they made her concentrate, which was a process distinct from thinking, she said.
“When I concentrate,” she said, “I don’t have to think.” I did not understand at the time.
When I was small, she gave me an antique porcelain thimble for my own, with great ceremony, hoping that I would grow to love the work as much as she did. I knew she expected a stronger reaction, but I had to choke back comments and act excited when I was truly bored to tears. She always made sweets as an incentive to continue. It was time spent with Tante, and I should have been eager to learn the womanly craft, but I failed so completely to understand the appeal.
She started with the basic stitches and mechanics. Place the needle precisely, push with the thimble, pull the floss to its natural limit, she preached. Remember, these are made to last; every stitch forever tells the story of the person holding the needle.
In the way Oupa taught me the stars as a connection to family history, Tante Hannah told of her ancestors’ working with needles. She had learned needlework at the knee of her ouma, who learned from the Dutch matrons who monogrammed their clothing so that it would not be confused with others’ when they gathered for laundry at the canals in Holland centuries earlier.