The Lost History of Stars

by Dave Boling

  Moeder asked about my well-being, and when I assured her I was fine each time, the questions came less often. She continued to look into my mind through my eyes. I was not fine, of course; I had many things to think through, and she seemed to trust that I could.

  Perhaps a week after the shots, Moeder and Hannah met at the fence. I stood back, outside the range of their voices. Tante Hannah gestured with her arms, first out wide, then folded at her chest. I saw the back of Moeder’s kappie move slowly. Then Moeder gestured, hands upraised. They continued, nodding like guinea fowl. Tante Hannah pointed in my direction the way Oupa used to point to constellations, and Moeder turned to look.

  I imagined they were filling in the parts of Oom Sarel’s death that the other could not have known. I doubt either knew how Sarel got caught with Maples’s body, or what he might have said by way of explanation. I thought of all that had happened that night, and wondered how Moeder could explain to Tante our part in it. She might be honest but not tell the truth, or present a truth that was not honest. I’d learned the two were not the same.

  Tante kept touching her chest with crossed hands, as if trying to assure Moeder that every word was rooted in her heart. This was far more than the solemn exchange of grief and condolence that had become so common for us.

  They talked for so long across the wire that I needed to sit on the ground. They bent closer to each other. Moeder looked to me and then turned back to Hannah. She folded her hands low on her stomach. Tante Hannah’s face softened and she teared up. She reached a hand through the fence, and Moeder accepted it with interlaced fingers. Their shoulders then bobbed as they cried. When the bobbing stopped, each turned away.

  “Ma?”

  “We’ll talk later.”

  But we did not talk about those things. Not for the remaining few months in camp, and not for years after that. I did not know whether Moeder had found some peace with Tante or just could no longer shoulder the weight of hatred. Whatever settlement they had reached, it was obvious that Tante Hannah knew she would be welcome when she arrived at our house that morning.

  “Please . . . come stay at my place,” she said to Moeder. “We can keep out the weather, at least. We can all come back and work to rebuild yours in time. You are welcome in my home.”

  Moeder stood.

  “Thank you,” Moeder said, dipping her head. I studied her face, reading the emotion in those words.

  Moeder turned to each compass point, looking at the debris in full daylight. It seemed worse than it had the night before. But the crunching sound did not frighten me in the light, as it was clear that there was nothing among the things at our feet that could not be done without. The past two years had proved that.

  “This much remains . . . ,” she said. “His will be praised.”

  “His will be praised,” Tante Hannah repeated.

  When I went to the open place that had once been my room, I found only one thing unbroken and worth keeping, the thimble that Tante Hannah had given me. I had thought it so meaningless when we left that I didn’t bother to take it.

  I DIDN’T WRITE IN my notebook the final month in camp, in that uncertain time after the war had ended but before we could make our way home—the only time I truly felt like a refugee. The last entries were made the Sunday morning we got the news. When Moeder had prayed on the night of the shots, she must have made promises that included our attendance at camp services, so we had started gathering with others for sermons by the dominee.

  On this day, he read a poem that I wanted to study later—“The Reaper and the Flowers.” It could have been written about the camp, he said, referring to the way the innocent children had been taken from us, harvested to heaven by mistake, like pretty little flowers among grain stalks. It was beautiful, better than most of the psalms we recited or sang. He was trying to make us feel better, but I did not think we needed reminders of our losses.

  Before he finished the poem, the commandant stomped in and whispered to the preacher, who closed his eyes, bowed his head, and retreated from the cartridge-box pulpit that held his Bible.

  “Peace is here,” the commandant said.

  “We won!” I said.

  I could tell from the profile of Moeder’s face that we had not won.

  The commandant knew no specifics of the agreement except that it meant that our leaders had surrendered. “We are no longer enemies,” he said.

  Moeder mouthed a few words I could not hear.

  “What?”

  “A prayer.”

  Willem stood and moved from my side to directly in front of Moeder, looking up into her face.

  “We’re not going to die?” he asked.

  Moeder dipped her head but did not answer. I suspected she did not want to make promises.

  “But the war is over, Ma,” I said.

  “This part of it,” she said.

  The dominee returned and finished the poem, but I no longer liked it. There was something about angels taking the little flowers. I saw no angels come for Cee-Cee and could not see angels being any part of this place. The vision of angels flying in and lifting her away was beautiful. But it was an insult to the way she had really died, with such fear in her eyes. I thought of her last breath and hoped it was still in my blood, but I knew that it wasn’t and that this fact didn’t really matter as long as I held tight to her spirit.

  The announcement caused me to think of Cee-Cee in ways I hadn’t in months. When she died, I took my cues from Moeder. Be strong, in control. Do what you must to get through the day. Take the pain and put it away for later. I’d done that. But when the war had ended and the preacher finished the poem, “later” had arrived.

  I’d thought of her death as the product of random illness rather than of war, as if it would have happened regardless of where we had been. But the war killed her as surely as any soldier who fell from bullet or bayonet. It killed her just as it did the others, without explanation or apology, and definitely without the involvement of angels.

  It took Janetta’s brother but not Janetta; Klaas but not Willem; Cee-Cee but not me. Some lived, some did not, and others just disappeared. Near the end, I walked past the Van Zyls’ tent on my way for water, and it was gone as if taken by the wind. No word. No good-byes. Nothing but a circle worn in the soil.

  MY ROOM AT TANTE Hannah’s was larger than the tent in camp that had held seven of us, then six, then five. I had the room to myself, with a palette on the floor and an old quilt Tante had found. The space overwhelmed me at first; even the sound of my breathing echoed in the emptiness. I spent an hour each night getting comfortable, thankful there was no mud on my blanket, no wet canvas, no disease. A quilt in a dry, quiet room seemed like an unimaginable gift. I never wanted to speak the word “dank” again. And if others coughed, it was in another part of the house and I did not cover my nose and mouth and turn from them. But it took time before I stopped worrying that each sniffle or sore throat was the first symptom of a grave illness.

  I dragged my bedding near the window so that I could sleep beneath it and smell the land and see the night sky, which I had started looking at again. It led to predictable thoughts, but I needed to invite good memories to return, if only to balance those unwanted ones that intruded on their own.

  Willem stayed in Ouma Wilhelmina’s old room. We had not heard from her, but Tante Hannah did not expect she would be moving back. Tante asked if I might like to go with her to visit her mother in Cape Town once we were “back on our feet,” and I was excited by thoughts of the ocean and the ships in the harbor. We could ride the electric tram and maybe walk to the top of the flat mountain that overlooked everything. It would make our little kopjes seem like ant humps.

  Moeder and Tante Hannah slept in the same bedroom. I could hear the sound of their voices at night but not their words.

  And when the weather kept us from work on the house or in the fields, I sat with Tante Hannah at the kitchen table for “school.” We tried sorting through the war�
�s confusing aftermath. We studied the treaty, which so obviously ignored the question of the natives’ standing. We tried to anticipate what that could mean. There were so many of them, and now so few of us. What would happen when the British went home?

  “Instability?” Tante questioned. We talked for hours about it, trying to see into the future, and never could find a path that seemed untroubled. And we read how the treaty granted us eventual self-governance over our republics, causing me to ask: Could the whole war have been avoided if they’d done that in the first place?

  But all of Tante Hannah’s books that I had loved were burned. So were mine, I told her. I did not tell her how. It made me wonder what happened to Maples’s things. Would Betty be curious what had happened to her David Copperfield? Had they sent all his belongings home to his mother? Would they include the letters that Betty had sent him? I pictured them being shipped back to England inside the fancy chocolate tin with Queen Victoria on the top. How embarrassing that would be for him to have his mother see what Betty had written. I shook my head against foolish thoughts. Maples would not be embarrassed. He was nothing anymore.

  It was only then that I remembered that he had a little sister, Annie, and I felt close to her. Somebody would have to tell her about her big brother, to shape words to say that he had died in the war, which was true but not honest. The family would presume he was a hero, and maybe the army would tell them that on purpose. The army probably said such things to the families of every dead soldier in every war. That’s how they kept fooling men into signing up. It was part of the bigger untruth. No one would ever join again if mothers were told that their sons had died in a bloody stack of men in a ditch, or that they’d been stabbed by the mother of a girl they were assaulting in the night. I knew nothing of little Annie except that she deserved better.

  We burned David Copperfield in thirds to heat three dinners. I tore the pages out quickly, and I thought of the meal as a present from little David, a brave little boy. He was British, but the war had not been his fault.

  We knew it would take time to rebuild our little libraries. Without reading as a diversion, I was open to Tante Hannah’s offer to teach me to stitch again. And this time I concentrated on doing it the way she suggested. When Moeder was working at our place one afternoon, Tante showed me a few of the stitchings she had carried with her for the duration of camp.

  “These are my secret,” she said. “I’ve never shown anyone . . . not even Oom Sarel.” There were four of them, all with golden thread on white cloth, the stitching like beautiful handwriting. They bore names of people I did not know. Her unborn children.

  I looked into her eyes, dry and clear, reconciled.

  “You named them?”

  “I did,” she said. “Silly, maybe, but I had nothing else. As bad as it was for your mother to lose an unborn, she had you all when she lost hers.”

  “My mother? Cee-Cee wasn’t an unborn.”

  “No, of course not, the child she lost when she sent you to my house—when she was butted by a sheep or something.”

  “She hurt her back. . . . It was her back. . . . It wasn’t a baby. . . . She said she hurt her back.”

  “Lettie . . . I’m sorry. . . . I thought she told you,” Tante Hannah said, pulling me close. “I’m sure she didn’t want you to worry.”

  “But she told you?”

  “That day when we met at the fence to talk about Oom Sarel; we got into so many things. She hadn’t known how many times I had been through it, and what it had done to me. And I didn’t know she had experienced that grief herself. It was part of what brought us together, I think.”

  One evening, Tante Hannah took down her “honeymoon” stitchery and removed it from the frame. With a small knife, she undid the knots and pulled out much of the scene of her imagined life, which had proved to be so very far from reality.

  “I’ll leave the children in the front,” she said. “Because we can say they are you and Willem now.” She stitched a new scene over the top on the same cloth, the home simpler and smaller. But the pattern of the old stitch marks showed in a shadowy outline. It always would, and I think it was important to her that it did.

  She gave me a fresh cloth in case I wanted to start a piece of my own, but I did not, not yet. I wanted to spend time with her mastering the stitches first.

  WE WORKED UNTIL COLLAPSE most days as we planted and hoed, and tore down parts of the house and barn that were beyond salvaging. Moeder outlasted us all.

  As we worked, we fretted over our men. We had still not heard word of them, and our worries were the only thing that grew quickly on the farm. Nature had overtaken the land and was reluctant to turn it back, slamming us in succession with stormclouds of locusts and then a severe drought. It would be many growing seasons before things were right, and the losses from that time would never be recouped completely. Not only had plants died, but no seeds had been planted, no seedlings sprouted. As I heard from other families in our region, it seemed that nearly three years of war had had a similar effect on all our lives. Half a generation had perished; another half was unborn.

  I found myself looking forward to the farm work, even the most tiring, and was eager to get to it in the mornings. And I surprised myself by taking pleasure in the simple act of working alongside Moeder, shoulder to shoulder. At times we’d race. When I looked at the farm, and what we accomplished each day working it, I felt even more a part of it all.

  Restlessness gripped me more than fatigue some evenings, and I walked as far as I could in one direction, trying to tear down even the memory of boundaries. A breeze tickled the hairs of my neck on one evening walk, and when I looked up I could see a horse shuffling at a speed slower than a man would walk. I asked myself whether it was my imagination again.

  I turned in that direction and then ran faster than I thought I could. And the figure did not disappear; it was Schalk. His clothes were ripped and patched and hanging loose. Slumped in the saddle, his hat pulled low, he looked like an old man, but I could see the still-wispy beard clinging to his jawline. His pony did not even twitch its ears as I raced at them.

  “We didn’t know about you,” I said. “We had no word.”

  “Ma? Willem? Cee-Cee?”

  “Moeder and Willem . . . not Cee-Cee.”

  “No.” He slumped on the horse’s neck. “When?”

  “September. Vader?”

  “Yes . . . not Oupa.”

  “We heard. But Vader’s fine?”

  “He’s unhurt.”

  I hugged his leg harder and could feel that some lean muscle still protected his bones. He had made it through. He put his hand on my head and petted my hair. He dismounted the strange little horse I did not recognize, and we held each other without a word until the horse nudged Schalk with its muzzle.

  I told him Oom Sarel was gone, too. He stared hard, reading my face. Sharing had always been so easy between us, but like everything else, that would take time to rebuild. He led the horse by its bridle, and we took many strides before he said, “Later.”

  His skin was covered in sores. He saw me examining him.

  “From having no salt, they say,” he explained. He wore a burlap mealie sack over his shirt as a jacket.

  “When is Vader coming home?” I asked.

  “Later,” he said again.

  “What?”

  “Let me say it once, when we’re all together,” he said. “Lettie . . . I don’t think I want to do it more than once.”

  “You said he’s all right.”

  “He is.”

  “And Tuma captured?”

  “Ja . . . he was with the after-riders watching horses, and a unit got behind us and took everything . . . almost a year ago . . . nothing since . . . work camp, probably.”

  “We’re at Tante Hannah’s now . . .”

  “Everyone?”

  “Um-hmm.”

  “With Tante Hannah? Moeder, too?”

  “It’s good.”

  “Let�
��s go there.”

  The saddle slipped as he tried to remount. He had to tighten the cinch on the withered pony. He pulled himself up and then took my arm and swung me up behind him. The knots of the horse’s spine dug at me with each slow step. I felt guilty to be its burden and thought of getting down, but it was so good to be close to Schalk that I could not bring myself to pull away. I leaned in tighter, the rough burlap on my cheek, my fingers laced against the ladder of his ribs.

  “Ma,” I shouted as we neared, and I swung down from the horse to announce Schalk’s return.

  Willem appeared first, then Moeder. They held him in a bundle.

  “Come inside,” Tante Hannah said from the door, and she gathered him in.

  Moeder looked past us, toward the trail. But she did not ask the question. Schalk waited until we quieted.

  “They brought us in to turn over our weapons and sign the oath . . .”

  Moeder shook her head and turned away.

  “It said that we had to agree to acknowledge the terms of the surrender and become British subjects,” he said. “Surrendering wasn’t enough. . . . We had to sign that we would be British subjects . . . an oath. Vader stood right behind me. . . . I signed it. . . . He shook my hand. . . . He said he could not. By then I had no choice.”

  “He’s not coming home?” Willem asked.

  “In time. . . . I’m not sure when.”

  “Where is he?” Willem asked.

  “He said he thought some men would try to regroup in Madagascar.”