The Lost History of Stars

by Dave Boling

  “That’s enough for now,” Agnes said.

  “Do I not look well or something?” I asked. “You’re both staring at me.”

  “You should sit,” Tante said.

  “I can do this.”

  Agnes led me to a chair.

  “You look wobbly,” she said. “It takes time, and it’s hard work, and the first day is the hardest.”

  “I can do this,” I said, and I tried to stand. Tante Hannah held me in place.

  “You might be able to do something else more important outside the tent that I can’t do, and your tante can’t do,” Agnes said. It took seconds for her to expel the short word “do,” and it came in waves, and I felt I could ride it, float on it . . . and I slumped forward.

  “Put your head down, Lettie,” Hannah said.

  As I lowered my head toward my knees, Agnes spoke near my ear. I answered toward my boots.

  “Would you like to be my assistant?”

  “I would. . . . Doing what?”

  “Would you talk to girls in the camp for me?”

  “I would. . . . Talk about what?”

  “Would you ask them how they are doing, whether they’re having troubles, whether they might be having the same kind of troubles that you were having, and tell them they don’t have to worry?”

  “I could do that. . . . wait . . . say those things to strangers?” I shook my head slightly but that made the ground shift beneath me.

  “I know . . . it might be hard at first . . . but it is important. You don’t want others to be as worried about their health as you were, do you?”

  “No, I don’t.” Deep breaths brought some clarity. “Would they talk to me?”

  “Would you have talked to another girl about your problems? More likely than talking to your mother, am I right? You’d do it sooner than you would come in here and talk to us.”

  I smiled at the ground.

  “We’ll talk about it more in a day or two. . . . I’ll tell you everything that you would have to tell them. . . . It will be very important. The more they’ll talk to you, the more likely they’ll be to trust us if they come down with something more serious.”

  Tante Hannah leaned down. “You could help save lives, Lettie.”

  I told Moeder that I was to be an important nurse’s assistant, and she asked a number of questions with genuine interest and no judgment. For all the disappointment and times I had been unworthy of her trust, she still had the strength to say these words to me: “I’m proud of you.”

  I felt like singing. But I spared them.

  33

  November 1901, Concentration Camp

  Maples charged at me at a gallop, rifle slung and clattering behind his back. Women walking past stopped to be certain I was not in danger. My memory flashed to the soldiers who charged into our house . . . how long ago?

  “Look.” He held out a letter; the writing wasn’t Tante Hannah’s.

  “From Betty?”

  I reached to take it, but he pulled it back and started reading.

  “My dear Tommy.”

  He closed it in thirds as if he could no longer look at it. He bent his head, composing himself.

  “Yes?” I said.

  Head down so his helmet bill covered his eyes, he opened the letter again.

  “She starts out with the usual ‘hope you are well’s’ and then tells me that we are over. Finished.”

  “No . . . why?”

  “She has read all the things in the newspapers and said she’s disappointed in me,” he said. “She said she could understand me fighting but couldn’t see how I could guard women and children. Didn’t mind me getting shot at, but can’t tolerate my standing guard.”

  He deserved better. “I could not imagine one of our women turning her back on a man fighting for his country,” I said. “I can understand leaving him only if he did not fight for his country.”

  It was another example of how our women were superior to British women. I would stress this point another day. But this was a time for understanding.

  “Yes . . . exactly. She doesn’t think I’m the man I was. Of course I’m not; who would be?”

  “She doesn’t understand you.”

  “Not at all.”

  “Have you told her about . . . everything?”

  “Not much . . . I’m not proud . . . getting transferred . . . no . . . I didn’t explain that to her.”

  “She has no idea what you’ve been through. You’re better off without her.”

  “Better off?”

  “This was her chance to show her loyalty. How long did it last? She turned away at the first sign of hardship.”

  “She must have somebody else. I would wager anything.”

  He needed compassion. I put down my buckets and came close, closer, and hugged him, feeling the rifle and its steely mechanisms across his back.

  He pulled back and shuffled the pages of the letter until he got to the end. “Look. . . . Read the last line.”

  I read aloud: “Best of luck in the future.”

  “Can you believe that? Like I was some stranger who was trying to find work. Best of luck? Best of luck stayin’ alive? Best of luck fighting a war . . . living without her? What future? What future do I have?”

  He asked as if I was supposed to answer, but I had no idea of anybody’s future.

  “What future?” he asked again.

  “Here . . . let me look.” I studied the note.

  I tilted my head from side to side, taking time to show I was considering a response. “She writes in a pleasant hand.”

  He leaned his head back so I could see his moist eyes, and I wished I could take back the last remark. He put the letter back in his tunic and dragged his nose across his sleeve.

  “After all I’ve gone through . . . now what?” he asked.

  “You’re asking me?”

  “You’re a woman . . .”

  What could I tell him? No, I’m not heartsore she broke it off? It was the best news I had heard in a long time. I was so happy I had to force myself not to show it.

  I had two empty buckets and had to get to the pump. But when I tried to step around him, he stopped me.

  “Can you stay a little longer? I don’t want to be alone.”

  “All right.” I put down the buckets again.

  “I don’t think your mother will mind.”

  “You talked?” I pretended ignorance.

  “We did . . . handsome woman . . . delicate features,” he said.

  “Delicate? She’s made of iron.” I was offended; I was the one who was delicate. He did not sense my offense. “I thought she hated you.”

  “I’m looking into some things for her.”

  I waited.

  “Fine, but don’t tell her I told you. . . . She wants me to ask around for information on your uncle Sarel,” he said. “And then she wants me to find a way to get her over to the Joiners’ camp.”

  “She wants to go there?”

  “Very much.”

  “Why?”

  “It seems she wants to find your uncle.”

  “And . . .”

  “And she wants to kill him.”

  “She said that? She told you? Why would she tell a British guard something like that?”

  “Because she wants me to help her do it.”

  I STUDIED MOEDER AFTER Maples’s remark, trying to sense murderous intent. I knew she could generate the necessary rage, and she also had the ability to craft a plan. She had withdrawn from us for some time, I realized now, but had done so in a clever way that we didn’t notice. By giving me more rein to walk whenever I chose, and easing back on some of Willem’s rules, she earned more private time for herself. Loosening her hold on us was a way of gaining separation while staying in the same place.

  But morally? She was absolutely devout, but “righteous vengeance” was a term I had heard her use several times, as if laying out a biblical excuse. She might consider it her “bounden duty,” as she u
sed to say, to cleanse the family name. I thought of the way Willem and Klaas had made wild plans to kill guards. They were just boys at play, but Moeder would be an actual threat. She might have been listening to their plans while pretending to ignore them at the time. I shuddered at the risk she took in not only telling Maples but enlisting his help.

  I couldn’t ask or even hint that I knew. She was pulling back and hardening over with a shell, and I suspected her of working through options in her mind with the same tenacity that Willem chewed his riempies.

  She needed my help. Not with her plans for Oom Sarel, but in avoiding a family disaster. I did not care what happened to him. I had no respect for the man. Tante Hannah would be freed by his absence—whatever the cause. But I feared an attempt would only get Moeder in trouble and leave Willem and me in this camp on our own. Then I would have to be Willem’s mother and someday have to explain it all to Vader and Schalk. How could I take over? I didn’t even know how to cook.

  I needed to draw her out, to occupy her mind. I could not talk about the men, it would fuel her anger. Family was out of the question. The past? The future? No topic seemed safe.

  Someone was playing the concertina again, another dirge, slow and mournful. Even muted by canvas, it came from close enough that we could follow the melody, but it was still far enough away that it seemed carried by wind from a distance. Once again, a few bars of light dance music were added, as if the concertina were playing itself just for a moment to remind everyone that it was not only an instrument of mourning.

  “Would it be all right if I tried to find who is playing?” I asked Moeder. Maybe I could persade whoever it was to play something joyful.

  She did not consent but did not forbid; she might not have even heard me. By the time I stood and wrapped the blanket around my shoulders, the music was finished and there was no point.

  “I wish we could hear more,” I said.

  She looked up.

  “Ma, do you think you could play the concertina?”

  The question breached her wall of thoughts; her expression softened.

  “I don’t know . . . maybe . . . once I figured it out.”

  “I miss your playing the organ. . . . You play so wonderfully.”

  At times I saw her fingers move as if dancing upon invisible keys.

  “What is it like when you play music, Ma?”

  “No . . . Lettie . . .”

  “You can remember songs even without the music, can’t you?”

  “Um-hmm.”

  “You could play even without the keys in front of you, can’t you?”

  “Um-hmm.”

  “Could you play one with your fingers in the air and hum the notes?”

  “No.”

  “Please . . . imagine the keys. . . . They felt so smooth and cool whenever I touched them. . . . I can only guess how wonderful they felt to you. The way they responded to your touch, the way you controlled the mood of everyone in the room with just the touch of your fingertips.”

  “Ma, please,” Willem said.

  “It was always so perfect, even when you didn’t have music . . . like your fingers had their own memory. . . . You must have played for a long time, since you were young. . . . Do you remember, Ma?”

  She put her hands out in front of her, fingers bent, so thin now.

  “Play it, Moeder, I want to remember the way it sounded in the parlor. . . . Only you can do that.”

  She moved her head with the silent beat. And then hummed softly.

  “I remember those nights, Ma . . . the hymns and the other songs you played afterward. . . . I loved them most in the evenings when it rained and the house was cool and smelled fresh . . . or when we could smell koeksisters and were waiting to eat them once you finished playing. You had such power to make us happy.”

  She moved her feet now, up and back, as if on the bellows pedals. I hummed breathy notes along with her.

  “I remember once . . . when the men were gone, Moeder . . . you played a song you loved. . . . You leaned against the edge of the organ, your stomach against the keyboard, and it looked like you were a part of the instrument, like you were taking the music in, feeling it deep inside you.”

  She stopped. I had said the wrong thing. I was trying to help, to take her mind from the tent, and I had said something wrong.

  She opened her eyes; they were gray again and cold.

  “Ma . . .”

  “Ja.”

  “Close your eyes a moment.”

  She looked, closed them, opened them suspiciously, and then closed them. I leaned in and kissed her on the forehead, exactly in the middle, and then once on each cheek.

  I HAD BEEN A woeful big sister to Willem. I think I was jealous of him and whatever that quality was that sometimes allowed young boys to have the strength of grown men. He was so absolutely fearless. Fearless and defiant. He made such an effort to be a man that I came to expect it of him, even though he was so young. I’d seen him stand up to British rifles, and later he never complained even when teeth fell from his head. But I was so impatient with him whenever he acted as he should, like a little boy. He had always been thin, but now he’d become prickly as a sweet-thorn branch, and it seemed he forever speared me with his elbows and knees, and the bone-against-bone contact was painful enough to bring tears.

  But when he was defiant on my behalf . . . I loved him so, and never more than the night he tore into Mevrou Huiseveldt in a way we all wished we could. It was so inappropriate and disrespectful, and all the more glorious because of it. The little man rose up for us all.

  At some point in the usual hour of crying and sobbing before Mevrou Huiseveldt commenced her noisy sleep, Willem walked to her cot and shouted one word: “Stop.” He could not have yelled louder; it might have awakened those sleeping in tents several rows away.

  I could see only shadows from the moonlight seeping through the canvas. I saw Mevrou Huiseveldt sit up, curious and then stunned.

  “What?”

  “Stop . . . woman . . . stop . . .”

  “Who do you—”

  “We’re all sad . . . we’re all tired . . . but none of us can sleep because of you.”

  She slapped his face.

  Willem laughed. He tilted his head back and laughed as if roaring.

  She slapped him again, with her palm cupped, so that it sounded even louder. It knocked him back a step, but he laughed again, equally loud, and stepped back within her range to invite another.

  Moeder was there before a third slap could land.

  “Don’t you touch my son.”

  “He can’t speak that way to me.”

  “No . . . he can’t . . . but I’ll take care of that . . . not you.”

  Mevrou Huiseveldt began shouting incoherently, waving her arms at Moeder. “Hunger . . . Klaas . . . my Jan . . .” Words emerged between wails and violent inhalations.

  Rachel backed away from her mother.

  “Beef . . . mealie . . . you . . .” She pointed at me repeatedly, as if with a knife, shouting nonsense. “You . . .”

  Moeder lowered her volume but hardened her tone.

  “If the men were this weak, we’d have lost the country in the first week. . . . Don’t you think the rest of us have suffered?”

  “Suffer . . . suffer . . .”

  “A year in this tent . . . when have you ever thanked Aletta for carrying your water every day? Not once. Not a single time. If you’d even said a word one time about it, that would be enough.”

  “Lettie . . . water . . . photo . . .” She held both arms open to me now. Her mind was gone.

  “It’s hard enough . . . without your crying and snoring,” Moeder said, cutting with controlled comments. “Praise God, your snoring could shake him from his holy throne. Roll over. Roll over, woman. I pray at night for you to roll over.”

  Moeder sounded like Oupa, so stern she overpowered the woman’s wails. It was the only way to get her attention.

  “But he . . . he can�
��t talk . . .” Mevrou Huiseveldt pointed at Willem.

  “Willem, come here. . . . Apologize,” Moeder said.

  “Will not.”

  “Willem . . . now!” He looked so tall as he strutted to her cot again.

  “Sorry.”

  Mevrou Huiseveldt broke out sobbing again.

  “Now . . . don’t touch my son again,” Moeder said. She moved Willem directly in front of the woman’s cot and slapped him hard across the back of the head. And then did it again. His head snapped back on his reedy neck both times. I knew that Willem would not allow himself to cry. It must have embarrassed Mevrou Huiseveldt to see him take the beating without a sound.

  “And don’t think you got away with it,” Moeder said, causing the woman to soften her cries. “I had been so sure my brother-in-law was the informant that I overlooked the obvious. I should have known from the start.”

  “What?”

  “It was you lying to the guards . . . the informant . . . the one who made up the stories for the commandant that we were sending letters to the men. That Willem was making plans to kill guards. . . . He was just playing with Klaas.”

  I leaned as close as I could. I needed to hear this.

  “What?” Mevrou Huiseveldt said.

  “It was you . . . trying to get us shot or hanged or at least taken out of this tent,” Moeder said.

  “No . . . I wouldn’t . . . why would you think—”

  “Because the commandant said an informant told him that letters to spies were coming from this tent.”

  “Ja . . . but . . . I didn’t—”

  “But they only searched through our things,” Moeder said. “They didn’t touch a thing of yours or your family’s.”

  The woman answered with a series of coughs.

  “So be quiet . . . and go back to sleep,” Moeder said.

  It was several hours before she started snoring again. I remember the night because Moeder’s shadow seemed to glow in the darkness, her figure vibrating with rage.

  A NIGHTMARE WOKE ME to the sound of snoring. Willem’s outburst had accomplished nothing except to earn him a headache from repeated blows. As I did every time I woke now, I felt my head, tracing rows through my hair like raking tender grass sprouts. Any irritation? Blood? Detecting the nits early might prevent another outbreak. Perhaps that was one piece of advice I could give other girls in camp that might help them, and help me get to know them; it would earn their trust, and they would feel more comfortable with other topics. They would tell their friends and seek me out, and maybe they’d call me Sister Aletta. Eating? Nutrition? There was not much I could say. They had no options. Cleanliness? Ja, keep yourself clean. Oh, no, so sorry, we don’t have soap.