“What do you think would happen if the nurses tried to make rounds of the tents . . . to do exams?” she asked. “We don’t have enough medicine for everybody, nor enough nurses, really, but I was thinking we might give it a try. Experiment, so to say. It’s not like we have a great deal of time, but we could answer questions like yours pretty quickly. That kind of thing could settle a lot of anxious minds.”
I thought of my mother’s most likely response. She would not allow this woman in the tent. I turned my head, not wanting to insult her.
“Right . . . that’s what I thought. Have you lost family?”
I thought of Cee-Cee, blood of my blood, but said nothing.
“I’m thinking about becoming a nurse,” I said, although I had not considered it until it sprang from my mouth. Maybe it was her uniform, or the powers she seemed to have, or her helping nature. It seemed as if she had cured me with only a few words. It would be a calling that was helpful, compassionate.
She took me seriously.
“Wonderful,” she said. “You can start right away.”
“Truly?”
“Yes . . . not as a nurse . . . but as a helper.”
“Really?”
“I could let you start training as a volunteer if you wanted,” she said. “We can use all the help we can get. To be honest, I think you should do everything you can to stay out of this place. You’re healthy now, more or less. You should try to stay clean. Stay out of crowds of children. But if you’re serious, come back. Or if you have any troubles, come back. What’s your name?”
“Aletta Venter.”
“Mine is Agnes. Nice to meet you.”
“Seriously . . . I could help?”
“Seriously, yes, very seriously. But you have to see what we do first, what it’s like in there, and decide if it’s worth it to you.”
I looked past her shoulder at the door of the tent, and the women gathered near the guards. I recognized the tall woman coming out from the tent, heading our way.
“Tante Hannah?”
31
October 1901, Concentration Camp
“My sister died,” I said without allowing Maples to get out a word. “She was the most wonderful little person.”
I described her hair and her voice and the way she would sit on my lap when I read to her. My bottom lip quivered so much that I had to repeat some words. “Dickens . . . yes . . . Dickens . . . I was reading Dickens to her. And I wrote stories for her and we sang . . . sang . . . songs together. She had such a pure little heart. And it all came on so fast it just ate her up.”
By the time I finished, I had to suck in a breath to push out each word, and I then cried myself empty.
“I hate this camp,” he said.
“I hate this camp, too,” I said.
Three women walked near, and I turned my back to them; Maples pointed at the fence as if scolding me for a violation.
“I’m sorry,” he said when they had passed.
“Nobody’s fault,” I said. The words tasted false, and I realized I had said them only because he looked so upset.
“It is our fault,” he said. “I hate it here.”
“Can you go back?”
“Home? No.”
“No . . . out there.”
“No, no.” He stepped back from me. “They won’t let me.”
“Tell me.”
“I can’t.”
“I told you . . . about Cecelia.”
“I’ve never said any of this . . .”
“I need to hear about it all.”
He turned and walked down the fence line. I followed.
“Yes,” I said to his back.
“Not this.”
I still couldn’t decide whether he was the enemy or just another person who had been pulled into something he hated as much as we did.
“Not now . . . your sister . . . you’re grieving.”
“I need to know it all.”
“I hate being a part of this. ”
“I want everything horrible out at once,” I said.
He looked like Willem after being caught in mischief.
“The first thing I ever saw killed was a horse. . . . I could not believe somebody could shoot a horse,” he said. “First day under fire. It makes sense that if they were shooting soldiers, a horse might get hit. But this one crumpled. . . . Legs just stopped running. . . . Body kept flying forward. It let out this horrible scream. The first man I saw killed just dropped cold on the spot . . . not a peep . . . small hole in his chest. But that horse kicked and wailed. It was pitiful.”
Maples turned away, and I just looked at the back of his helmet and his thin shoulders. The hem of his tunic trailed loose threads.
“More,” I said.
“Horses just kept getting shot. At every skirmish. And they’d heat up out in the sun and bloat and turn black and stink to heaven’s gate. And then they’d die in the river by the dozens and we’d be so thirsty the men would drink the water and then be racked with dysentery.”
He turned, his face tightened as if drying out.
“The horses . . . you’re bothered by the horses?”
“I love horses,” he said.
“What about the men? What about the farms?”
“Yes . . . exactly . . . I saw it all.”
There it was. He was one of them after all.
“Did you burn farms and houses?”
He dropped his eyes.
“You did, didn’t you?”
I could see only the top of his helmet now.
“I could have killed those men who came to our farm. . . . They took joy in it.”
“I know. Some in my column did, too. Something got into some of them.”
“The devil.”
“Maybe. Yes . . . the devil . . . it felt like that when they lost control.”
“Nobody invited them.”
“I know. . . . No, I don’t know. . . . War is one thing. . . . This was something . . . else.”
“Why didn’t you stop?”
“I tried. . . . I asked for a transfer. . . . My major assigned me the stock. He put me in the squad that had to kill the sheep or cattle or pigs . . . all of them. Had to stab them with bayonets. Hundreds a day. Blood and squeals all day. I could hear them all night. And then we took the dead sheep and threw them down the wells to foul the water for any of the commando units that might come through later and think they could get fresh water.
“Let the water and the blood,” I said without melody.
“Sometimes the kaffirs would come fighting to the family’s defense and we’d have to push them back or chase them down. . . . Sometimes they were happy to turn on the Boers and help us in any way. You never knew.”
He leaned even closer to continue his unburdening.
“There were times when we were practically starving, too,” he said. “Marching thirty miles in a day, burning sun, beyond supply lines, living without rations.”
“You shouldn’t be here,” I reminded.
“I know . . . but we are.”
“Leave.”
“One day, a squad of us were sent to a small farm,” he said. “Just a woman inside . . . old . . . her men gone, no one else at home. She said we looked awful and offered us milk. She had one cow and apologized that it hardly produced anymore.”
“Fine Christian.”
“More than that . . . a saint,” he said. “She said her husband was dead and she just had one son on commando. . . . She hadn’t seen nor heard from him for months. She spoke his name and asked if we had seen him, as if we were all introduced to each other at the start of the war. She said she prayed every day that God held him in his protective hand. She held her hands like a cup, or a little nest.”
“And you burned her farm . . .”
“There were only seven or eight of us, and she brought milk for all of us.”
I feared the rest of the story.