by Irma Joubert
Carefully she folded the letter, put it back in the envelope, and unfolded the second letter. The handwriting was also round, but smaller and easier to read, though it was harder to hear the words. Boelie sounded more formal than her brother.
KOFFIEFONTEIN
10 OCTOBER 1941
Dear Pérsomi,
Thank you very much for your letter that I received yesterday. I’d appreciate it if you write again, it’s good to get news from outside the camp.
We are treated well. The food is reasonably good, a lot like the food you get at school.
Yes, Pers, I might have been expecting it, but it was still a shock when the police arrived. The trial was unpleasant. Because I believe in the Afrikaner cause, because I fought for my convictions, I was treated like a criminal. Not only me—thousands of other Afrikaners, many in the highest positions in our country, were arrested and locked up like criminals.
But we are not bitter, Pérsomi. We talk a lot—there’s not much else to do—and we inspire each other.
Today was Kruger Day. One of the men here, John Vorster (he’s an attorney in Port Elizabeth and very involved with the Purified National Party), wrote a short play that we put on tonight. Some of the men recited poetry and we even have a choir. Tonight I realized again what our people are made of. Like the men behind barbed wire in camps in Ceylon forty years ago who refused to take the Red Oath of allegiance, our national pride will never allow us to be forced to swear allegiance to the enemy’s dynasty.
I want you to know, Pérsomi, that I am not ashamed, or sorry for what I did. I do regret the grief I’ve caused my family, but if I had a choice today, I would do it all again. I can’t do anything else.
I’ve been interned because I’m an Afrikaner and I’m proud of it.
Your friend,
Boelie
He wrote to her as if she were a grownup, though she was only fourteen. He talked to her as if she knew what was happening in the world away from the farm.
She missed Boelie, too, she realized. She had seldom seen him during her vacations but she had always known he was somewhere on the farm. Yes, she missed Boelie, just as she missed Beth and Reinier. Because he was her friend.
But most of all she missed Gerbrand.
One sweltering morning in the second week of the vacation, Auntie Sis, breathless from her walk to the house, plopped down on the old car seat and announced, “Christine le Roux has enlisted in the war.”
“Christine?” Pérsomi’s ma asked. “To the war? Heavens, but she’s a girl!”
“She won’t fight, they don’t give girls guns, I know that,” said Oom Attie, arriving behind his wife. “When I was in German South-West during the Great War, where I nearly lost my knee, the girls were nurses.”
Pérsomi’s ma pressed her hands to her face. “Heavens, what does Freddie say, and Old Anne?” she asked.
“Well, what can they say? Christine is twenty-one, and girls don’t know their place anymore,” Auntie Sis answered. “Freddie le Roux walks around like a dog that’s lost its tail and Old Anne lies in a darkened room all day with a wet cloth on her forehead. What’s the use of being rich if you’re going to lie with your eyes shut all day?”
“Do you think Christine will see Gerbrand at the front?” Hannapat asked.
“There are thousands of people at the front,” said Oom Attie. “The chances of their running into each other are probably small.”
“But still,” said Hannapat.
“Ye-es, maybe.”
“Look at this,” said Reinier about two weeks after school had resumed. He handed Pérsomi an article he had torn out of the paper. “Police Force Cleaned Up,” said the headline.
January 20 a special police parade took place at Marshall Square. The National Volunteers’ Brigade was summoned to help. The names of police members who were being interned were read out one by one.
Then the Minister of Justice, Dr. Colin Steyn, made a public announcement.
“It is with great regret that I announce today that we have had to relieve a large number of policemen of their duties because of their treacherous actions,” Steyn said. “But now we know: the police force has been purged, the people of South Africa can sleep easy.”
“Hundreds of policemen, my dad says,” Reinier whispered.
“What now?” she asked.
He shrugged.
“Boelie said hundreds of policemen support the Stormjaers,” she whispered. “He said about half the force—”
“Shh.” Reinier motioned with his head in the direction of the teacher’s table.
She lowered her voice. “I think you must believe in a cause and fight for it if it’s expected of you.”
He nodded earnestly, but said nothing further.
Just before lunch he said: “I want to talk to you, about something else.”
“Well, go ahead.”
He took his time to secure his satchel on the carrier of his bike before turning to her. But still he said nothing.
“Speak. I don’t want to miss lunch.”
“It’s hard,” he said, blushing.
“Hmm,” said Pérsomi, “so it must be a girl.”
Reinier gave her a lopsided smile and nodded, embarrassed.
“And I must play Cupid?”
He nodded again.
“Is the girl Beth?” she asked.
His jaw dropped. “Beth?” he asked. “Beth? Pérsomi, she’s a real goody two-shoes, and besides, she’s fat! Have a heart!”
Pérsomi felt annoyed. “Don’t speak that way of Beth! She’s a lovely girl!”
He shrugged.
She felt like leaving right away. But she wondered who the girl could be who had Reinier in such a state. “Well, if it isn’t Beth, who is it?” she demanded.
“Irene,” he said.
“Irene!” she exclaimed. “Reinier, have you lost your mind?”
“She’s beautiful,” he said. “She’s small and . . . very pretty, and cheeky as well. And she’s not afraid of anything.”
“Irene! You don’t know Irene!”
“I’d like to get to know her better.” Reinier smiled.
“Well, it’ll be without any help from me.” She turned and headed for the dormitory.
“Pérsomi!” Reinier called after her.
She stopped. “What?” She put her hand on her hip.
“Please?”
“You won’t get any help from me.” She turned and hurried back to the dormitory.
Letters came for Pérsomi frequently. Most were from Boelie, impersonal accounts of what they were doing in the camp and how he felt. Pérsomi wrote back every time. Klara had given her a pile of envelopes and stamps, probably under the impression that Pérsomi would be writing to Gerbrand. In her letters to both Boelie and her brother she wrote about school and athletics and how dry the bushveld was this year.
Klara didn’t know Boelie was writing to her. Neither did Irene. Only Beth knew. Oh yes, and Reinier.
But best of all were the rare letters from Gerbrand.
Dear Pérsomi,
I am near Tobruk that’s in North Africa. We have to guard the harbor which is full of oil from the sunken ships and a railroad that gets supplies and things to our men further along. The only reason why we’re fighting in the desert is the Suez Canal. At night it is ice cold and by day it is very hot. It’s winter now in summer we’re going to die and not because of the bombs. There are many snakes and scorpions here just like in the bushveld but no buck to shoot so we eat Spam. There are swarms of flies buzzing around us and crawling up our nostrils looking for moisture. There is very little water but we have to shave every morning even if we’re going into battle the army has strange rules.
We do nothing all day long it’s very boring. I get really burnt by the sun because you know I’ve got red hair not like you who don’t mind the sun.
At Christmas I went to visit Christine le Roux in Cairo it was very nice. You know she’s here too. I hope she can mak
e it in the war and here in the desert but I don’t know. She’s soft and really fair.
The leader of the Germans and the Eyeties is a German called General Rommel and our leader is General Montgomery he’s our commander he’s an Englishman from England but good. There was a battle at Sidi Rezegh where they captured more than 3 000 of our guys and sent them to camps in Italy or Germany. Pérsomi I’ll die if they put me behind barbed wire or in a prison behind bars like Boelie then they must rather shoot me.
I’m finding out what to do to learn to fly planes. It seems I need to have passed matric but I’ll study to get it because it’s what I want to do. You must also learn hard.
Did you know America is also in the war now well now you know.
Give my best wishes to Ma and tell her I’m fine.
Your brother,
Gerbrand
Her longing for Gerbrand flared up and burned behind her eyelids. When he came home again one day, she would talk to him. Really talk, the way she talked to Reinier, or sometimes to Boelie. She was bigger now. She could talk to Gerbrand now, almost like an equal.
After he returned, the two of them could live together in Joburg and find jobs and both pass matric. Gerbrand could look after her and she could cook for him and help him with his schoolwork. He could help her figure out how to become a lawyer.
She read the letter over and over before she folded it and started with her homework.
The war became a series of loose incidents somewhere distant where the sun always shone and where her brother lay behind rolls of barbed wire, shooting, with a steel helmet on his head. The war was fragments of reports from a week’s newspapers, scraps of stories from Gerbrand’s unpunctuated letters, frozen images from newspaper photos, flat sounds from a visit to the movies.
“I can’t imagine what the war is really like,” Pérsomi whispered to Beth late at night.
“It must be terrible,” Beth whispered back. “We must pray for them, for our men.”
“Depends on where you are,” said Reinier the next day. “I think there’s a big difference between being in the Sahara desert, or in Russia, where the soldiers freeze to death in the snow, or at sea, where a submarine can move in under your ship and sink it.”
“There are terrible sandstorms in the desert, dust storms,” wrote Gerbrand in one of his letters. “You have to wear a dust mask or you die. Everyone looks like meerkats, or aardvarks with long blunt snouts. But inside the mask you suffocate anyway.”
In the paper Pérsomi read about thousands of Italians taken prisoner. Some of them were sent to the Union. She read about air strikes in Europe and North Africa. She read how the German Stuka dive-bombers and the Messerschmitts strafed the Allieds from the air.
“It’s terrible,” she wrote to Gerbrand, “in the desert you must have nowhere to hide.”
“Yes,” he replied, “but after a while you get used to being scared. The sun is actually worse than the planes, at least the planes go away sometimes.”
“It’s not too bad in the camp,” Boelie wrote. “I help some of the older men with math and science. Many of them are using the opportunity to write matric. You won’t believe it, Pérsomi, I play in the camp orchestra.”
In his next letter Boelie wrote that he had taken up boxing. In fact, he was the camp champion.
“Boxing!” Pérsomi said to Reinier. “That’s rather brutal.”
“Well, you think men are brutes anyway,” he said.
He might be released before the end of the year, Boelie wrote shortly before the June exams began. But he’d be confined to the farm, which meant he would have to stay on the farm and report to the police every day.
At least he would be home.
She was at the point of heading for the dormitory to fetch her sandwiches when Reinier said, “Pérsomi, please, you have to help me.”
“I don’t have to do anything,” she warned him. “What do you want?”
“Please don’t bite my head off like last time,” he said.
“Reinier, what are you talking about?”
He sighed. “Irene.”
She gave him an earnest look. “No,” she said.
“Pérsomi . . .”
“No.”
She turned and set off for the dormitory.
“Stubborn mule,” he said to her back.
After break she ignored him. At the end of the day she didn’t say good-bye.
The vacation of April 1942 was still sizzling hot and dry, and Persomi felt beaten. Boelie remained in the camp. Gerbrand had not written recently.
The house on the farm was in a worse state than ever. The dung floor was worn through in places. It hadn’t been plastered in months. Fly specks covered the mouldy curtain separating the front room from the bedroom.
Pérsomi stared at the filthy mattresses, the dirty gray blankets. “We must plaster the floor,” she said the first day, “and wash the bedding.”
“Oh heavens, Pérsomi,” said her ma.
“I’m not going to plaster the floor with dung,” said Hannapat.
“I’ll do it if you’ll wash the blankets,” Pérsomi offered. “We really can’t live like this!”
“Just listen to Miss High-and-Mighty!” Hannapat sneered. “If our house is no longer good enough for you, why don’t you stay at the dormitory? It will suit me.”
“Oh heavens above,” said their ma.
It was probably better that Gertjie and Baby had been taken away and not returned.
She pulled herself together. Tomorrow she would go to the kraal to collect dung for the floor. She would wash everything inside the house. She would hoe the little field next to the house and remove the weeds and sweep the yard.
When everything was spick-and-span, Ma’s and Hannapat’s spirits might lift a little.
In the second week of the vacation Pérsomi went to the bywoner house on Freddie le Roux’s farm. Oom Attie wasn’t home, and before Auntie Sis could start talking, Pérsomi came to the point.
“Auntie Sis, I know Lewies Pieterse is not my pa.”
“Child, don’t say such a thing!” Auntie Sis wiped the sweat from her round face with her gray hankie. “Your ma told me you said it in court. You shouldn’t have done that. What must people think of her?”
“I have to find out who my pa was . . . or is.”
“Let it go, Pérsomi. Winter is a long time coming this year. Strange, isn’t it?”
“Auntie Sis, it’s important to me.”
“It’s still so hot.”
Pérsomi took a chance. “You know who my pa is.”
Silence.
“Auntie Sis?”
“Pérsomi, you’re looking for trouble.”
“You must know who was courting my ma at the time?”
“I don’t know who your pa is, Pérsomi. It’s no use snooping. I wasn’t living at home then. I was married, with children of my own.”
“But you and Oom Attie always lived nearby. Surely you know something?” Pérsomi persisted.
“Child, I don’t know a thing, and your ma never spoke, of that I’m sure.”
A kind of despair took hold of Pérsomi. “Ma must tell me, Auntie Sis. I have a right to know who my own pa is. Do you promise you don’t know?”
“I know nothing, child. And your ma won’t tell. The cows will come home before she’ll say anything. I knew when she began to show and our pa beat the living daylights out of her. She refused to talk even then. He thrashed her so that she had to stay in bed for three days. I thought both she and you would die protecting some good-for-nothing bum.”
Pérsomi drew a deep breath and closed her eyes for a moment. The picture in her mind wouldn’t go away.
“The only people in the house at the time,” Auntie Sis said, “were your late oupa, your ma, and Gerbrand. Gerbrand was just a little boy, but he must have seen something. Someone who came to fetch your ma, or something.”
Her ma must have loved the man. Her ma must have loved her pa so much that she
protected him with her life.
“Auntie Sis, I wonder if Oom Freddie might be my pa.”
Auntie Sis looked the other way. “You’re looking for trouble.”
Pérsomi waited. Sometimes waiting led to answers.
Auntie Sis gave a slight nod. “You said it, not me.”
“What do you think?”
“No, I’m not saying a word,” said Auntie Sis, and sniffed loudly. “I like living on this farm, and Freddie le Roux is a good man. I’m not saying a word.”
“Someone gives Mr. Ismail money for me, Auntie Sis, so I can buy soap and stuff, and even school shoes when mine are worn through.”
“Must be Gerbrand,” said Auntie Sis.
“No, I know it’s not. I think it might be Oom Freddie. I’ve seen him give Ma money.”
“I’m not saying a word, Pérsomi.”
“But you agree, don’t you, Auntie Sis, that it could be Oom Freddie?”
“Pérsomi, stop prying. I don’t know who your pa is.”
“Oh, by the way, a letter came for you,” Klara Fourie said when Pérsomi went to the back door of the Big House to collect the old newspapers for the new longdrop. “It’s Gerbrand’s handwriting. He must know you’re on vacation. I had a letter from him yesterday. Does he write more often now?”
“Yes, he does. He probably misses home,” said Pérsomi.
“I hear the troops are given a pass when they’ve been at the front for eighteen months,” said Klara. “Maybe Gerbrand will be home before Christmas.”
“That would be nice.”
Pérsomi walked to the river with the letter in her hand and the pile of old papers under her arm. She sat down on the warm rocks and stretched her legs in front of her before she carefully opened the envelope.
30 JUNE 1942
Dear Pérsomi,
Thank you for your letters when I read them it almost feels as if I’m home.
I’ve just written to Klara and told her about the Gazala Gallop but it’s too much to write again so if you see her ask her to give you that letter then you can read about the Gazala Gallop to Ma. It was bad with bombs and planes overhead and tanks. We started out with 300 tanks after two days we had only 70 left now you know how bad it was. Then they told us to retreat then there was terrible chaos getting back to Egypt because Tobruk is in Libya. Then during the night a terrible thunderstorm came up the storms are terrible here like in the bushveld but there’s no place to hide from the lightning. But we could see a little because of the lightning in the dark and so we got out.