The Lost History of Stars

by Dave Boling

  Fighting through a depth of sleep, I forced open my eyes. It really was Oupa.

  “Go wake your mother. I don’t want to frighten her.”

  “Oup—” I started to shout in excitement, but he stopped me.

  I opened her door and whispered. She awoke at once.

  “They’re home.”

  “I didn’t hear . . .”

  “We sneaked in, Susanna,” Oupa said as she entered the still-dark parlor.

  “Light a lamp,” she said.

  “Just one . . . in the kitchen,” he said.

  “Where’s Matthys . . . with the horses?”

  “Not here,” he said.

  “What?”

  “No . . . be calm. . . . He’s fine,” Oupa said. “He went with another unit. We were told we could break off for a day.”

  “I thought you stayed together.”

  “He helped plan a mission and they needed him,” Schalk said, squeezing in the front door and closing it quietly. “He wouldn’t let me go with him. I tried.”

  “Could he have come home?” Moeder asked. “I need to tell him—”

  “They needed him,” Oupa said. “They follow him. . . . They don’t follow just anybody.”

  “But I—” Moeder started.

  “Settle, woman,” Oupa said. “This is important. . . . He’s important. . . . If it wasn’t, he’d be here.”

  “Did Sarel go?”

  “They didn’t need him. Do you have supplies ready? We can’t stay.”

  “Bags are there,” she said, tilting her head toward the false wall. “But smaller.”

  “Did Tuma go with him, at least?” she asked.

  “No, went straight home.”

  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 tactic
s 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.

  “Your what?”

  “Housewife,” he said more clearly. “My sewing kit. That’s what we call it, our things for mending. I keep my needles and thread and extra buttons in my empty chocolate tin now.”

  “Oh.” I had stopped and rooted at the mentioned of a housewife. “I thought . . .”

  “I hope Betty will have me when I get back. . . . We haven’t had that talk. Her father scares the wits from me. He’s a butcher, with forearms like a stevedore. Huge mitts. I think he just pulls the meat apart with his hands. He almost crushed my fingers when I came to get Betty for our first night out.”

  “Have you sat with her?”

  “Sat?”

  “Here, the custom is to sit together, with the candle burning.”

  “Never heard about this.”

  I turned and backed toward the fence so that I could scan for anyone who might be watching. I explained our opsitkers tradition—the parents lighting a candle and leaving the room to give the boy and girl privacy until the candle burned out.

  “They just leave ’em be in the parlor? By themselves?”

  “Ja.”

  “How big are those candles?”

  “Depends on how well they like you.”

  “Have you done this?”

  “Schalk, my brother, has.”

  “How old was he?”

  “Almost sixteen . . . then.”

  “So young.”

  “I’m almost old enough, but there are no boys here . . . and few candles.”

  No boys. No boys until the war was over. The words made it real. Would there ever be boys? Would I be too old? Would they all be taken? I looked at Maples again. He was not so homely. I asked the Lord’s forgiveness for sinful thoughts. But asking to forgive the thoughts made me rethink those thoughts. I tried to shake my head quickly, and hard, in hopes that the physical action would stop the cycle.

  “Are you all right?” he asked. Oh, dear God, he noticed. He must think me daft. Thoughts returned. I asked for forgiveness. The cycle spun in my mind like a dust devil.

  “Is there something wrong?” he asked.

  I shook again. Forgive me, dear God.

  “Aletta?”

  “What? How did you know what I was thinking?”

  “I don’t. . . . What happened . . . I mean, with your brother?”

  “Nothing, he got frightened and rode off,” I told him. “Only time he’s admitted to being afraid.”

  “Just left her there?”

  “When he got home, he was shaking. A month later the war started.”

  “Well, then going to war was better for him than getting locked up with a gal too young; he might have ended up cursing that candle,” Maples said. “She might look better to him now. He’s had some long, cold nights to think about her. If he can’t wait to get back to her, he’s in love. The way I am with Betty.”

  “Do you long for her?”

  “Do I long for her? Where did you hear that?”

  “My book.”

  “I didn’t see that.”

  “Not Copperfield . . . the other one . . . from our country. One of the characters said she felt an ‘unutterable longing.’ Unutterable means she couldn’t even talk about it.”

  He laughed and my face went hot.

  “Well, you can’t know what it’s like from a book. You know it when you feel it. When you’re older.”

  “How old are you?”

  “Nineteen,” he said.

  Nineteen. Schalk is seventeen, I thought.

  “I’m almost seventeen.”

  “You are not.”

  “Almost . . .”

  “You are not. You told me you were fourteen.”

  I’d lied so often I was losing track.

  “You’ll know when you’re older. . . . You sometimes feel so empty.”

  I usually felt the opposite, so filled with feelings that I did not have room for them all, and that caused them to wrestle in a small space. I decided I had heard all I would need from Private Maples. I would walk on the other side of camp; I would not risk getting caught talking to him by my mother or anyone else. As I stepped back to turn from him for the last time, Maples put his hand out to me—his right hand, offered as if to lead me onto a dance floor. He didn’t want me to leave. He wanted me to stop. The gesture implied more: Come closer. My fingers fluttered as I held my palm toward his for this first touch. I wished I had known it was coming; I could have prepared, at least washed my hands. I looked at my nails, jagged from biting, surrounded by a U of dirt. His fingers closed lightly around mine, his palm rough.

  “This is for you,” he said, so softly I could scarcely hear. “Read it. . . . Destroy it. . . . Don’t let anyone see it.”

  He squeezed my hand harder so that I could feel that there was something cupped in his palm. I circled a fist around it as I withdrew. He tilted his head toward the tents, shooing me away. I settled my left hand in the pocket of my pinafore, but I didn’t walk toward the tent, where there would be no privacy. I dared not look down when others were around. It felt like paper: a folded note. I moved my fingers across it to try to sense the words within. A love note? He was one of those boys who could not say the things he felt, so he wrote them instead. I liked that quality. Coy was the word for it.

  For the first time since being in camp, I went to the latrines when it was not a necessity, and I felt none of the usual nausea. Seated at the far end, I unfolded the note slowly, like a present.

  It wasn’t from Maples. But I wasn’t disappointed. It was from someone very important to me, someone I’d missed but didn’t know how much until I read the note. And the reconnection with this person would make it impossible to stay away from Private Maples as I had just decided I must.

  Dear Lettie,

  I hope this gets to you. The messenger sought me out after you told him I was on this side of camp. He said you told him that you missed me, and that was the best news I’ve had since I’ve been here. He told me you were well and said he could get a note to you from time to time. I won’t say much this time in case our messenger is not reliable. I know we could all be punished, but he seemed genuine. I wonder whether his interest is to help us or to trap us. But I thought it worth the risk.

  I hope you will feel comfortable writing back so that we can catch up with each other. If not, I will understand. You are my closest family. I have no one else. But I know how your mother feels, and I understand that, too. I don’t want to pressure you or make it awkward with your mother.

  I will only s
ay in this note that Tuma was captured by the British. The after-riders were taken when a column of Tommies came up behind them. Sarel said it was likely they were taken to one of the camps that have been set up for the natives. Before he was taken, Tuma heard that the British found Bina in a cave with others. She was put to work in one of the camps. I know how important Bina is to you, so I will say prayers for her well-being, just as I do every day for you and our loved ones.

  Love,

  Tante Hannah

  I craved liver. My body was changing so much that I was at times a stranger to myself. Liver had always tasted like rusty metal to me, and the slightest thought of it had caused my stomach to clench. I was so revolted by the way Schalk would bite into it like a predator, and he enjoyed it all the more because he knew it disturbed me.

  Yet I found myself growing obsessed with it to the point that I believed I could have eaten it raw, as the men did, still warm from a fresh kill. Who was this person that used to be me? I mentioned it to Moeder, who claimed the urge was my body’s telling me I needed whatever it was that liver best provided.

  “Sometimes you must listen to your body,” she said. “And sometimes you must ignore your body.”

  This was a riddle I understood only later.

  “I remember when you wouldn’t touch it . . . almost cried at the sight of it,” she said. “You were spoiled. Now you’re a woman.”

  She had never said such a thing to me. That single comment made me feel the duty to behave like one, to do womanly things, to prepare to do womanly things with the dedication with which Willem thought of hunting and fighting and being a man.

  “Would you teach me how to cook?” I blurted to Moeder.

  She didn’t hear me or at least did not stop what she was doing.

  I asked again.

  “Lettie, we have nothing to cook.”

  I thought of my favorite meals and could almost smell her springbok pie. She would shred the deep red meat of the leg roasts and bake them in pastry. She put so many things in there, in a certain order, with special spices; it seemed impossibly complex. I remembered its being sweetened with apricot jam. I moved my tongue around when I thought the words apricot jam. I tried to remember the smell, but I was losing that memory, if not the sense itself. I tried to think of the ingredients and had trouble with the names of some of them. There had been no need to speak of vegetables or fruit since we’d come to the camp, and the words for them had faded with disuse. I worked to remember them. Potatoes, beans, onions—oh, praise God—onions. But when I fell asleep, it was to thoughts of liver.