Tessa had snuck out, hiding in the back of Andrew’s car as he drove to the mines in the early hours. It took half a day for someone to find her. One of the miners noticed her among the mine heaps on his way back to the hostel after his shift. The bosses were called. Andrew had to face uncomfortable questions, his mood dour as he delivered Tessa to a frantic Sarah. They’d had no choice. Either they had to move again, or send Tessa to school. They began the charade.
The prospect of meeting other children and having friends had made Tessa feel giddy, despite Andrew’s admonitions. She should have realized that it could never live up to her expectations, especially after the day Sarah took her to town to buy a school uniform. A saleslady had thundered up to Tessa and Sarah moments after they entered the store, putting her plump frame directly in their path, her lips curling with distaste. “Yes? Can I help?”
“Askies, Miesies. The little mies needs to get a uniform. For the school.”
Tessa had felt confused by the sudden shift in Sarah’s speech and manner. She was subservient, dumbed down, unfamiliar.
The saleslady glared at Sarah over her horn-rimmed glasses. “Why are you here?”
“The baas sent me, Miesies. He can’t come.”
“Wait outside, then.”
Sarah didn’t protest. She touched Tessa’s shoulder, a look passing between them, and went to stand outside the store, her hands folded in front of her, her eyes trained on the ground. Tessa suddenly hated the saleslady, with her tight gray hair and stupid fat face, fidgeting and measuring, pulling at the uniform, talking to Tessa in a proprietary tone.
“Why isn’t your mother here, girl?”
“She died.” Tessa delivered the coached words with a deadpan expression.
The saleslady didn’t miss a beat. “You tell your ousie that she has to shorten the hem. We don’t stock anything smaller than this.”
Tessa nodded and took the package from her. The woman shorted her on the change, probably thinking that a six-year-old and a black woman would be too stupid to realize that they’d been cheated. Tessa didn’t care, she wanted to get out of there. She grabbed the money from the woman’s hand and ran out of the store, ignoring the loud comment about how this is what happens when kaffirs and meide raise white children.
There was some kind of law now that said black people had to live outside the city limits. Even though Sarah lived with them in the house, they had to call her a domestic in front of people and pretend that she slept in the servant quarters outside. Mrs. Berman said that black people had to stay on the reserves at night because races being separate is what God intended by making people different from each other. The refrain was becoming sickeningly repetitive as with everything Tessa was taught at school. In a matter of days, she had grown bored with the simplicity of Mrs. Berman’s lessons and the childish ideas of her fellow students. Instead of making friends, like she desperately wanted, shunned by the girls and teased by the boys. Sometimes she thought she saw pure hatred in their eyes, as if they knew, instinctively, that she wasn’t like them.
Sebastian followed Tessa during break, the board thumping against his knees with each step. He kicked at her heels. “Rat! White rat!”
“Leave me alone, Sebastian.” Tessa walked faster.
“Or what? You rat again?” He shoved her from behind.
Tessa turned around, her hands balled into fists. “You are smelly and dirty,” she yelled out of frustration. “A stupid Dutchman.”
Sebastian’s face contorted in a snarl. He took the board off and flung it at her. It caught her under her eye with such force that blotches of light assaulted her. Tessa let out a primal scream and lunged at Sebastian. He turned to run, suddenly not so confident that he could fend off this girl, half his size. Tessa landed on top of him in the dirt. He rolled over, his bony elbow digging into her side, and threw a punch. Tessa bit down on Sebastian’s arm. He balled his fist in the air, but was suddenly yanked away. The vice-principal, Mr. Els, held on to Sebastian by the scruff of his neck.
“She called me stupid!” Sebastian squirmed.
“He kicked me and stole my sandwich!” Tessa yelled back. Her eyes watered and her face was covered in dirt.
“Quiet. You are both going to the office. Right now.”
Tessa pulled her dress down and made a weak attempt at dusting herself off. “I didn’t do anything. He—”
“Not another word, Theresa Morgan.”
Tessa followed meekly behind Mr. Els and Sebastian. Mr. Els spoke to Sebastian in barely a whisper, but Tessa knew he was speaking Afrikaans.
Andrew
He came up behind Sarah where she stood washing dishes at the table and kissed her neck, his hands reaching for her breasts, his hips pushing against her buttocks. In the lamplight her skin was a molten brown, her huge eyes soft and inviting as she looked back at him, telling him the news, unable to hide her joy. A child of their own after all these years. Andrew pushed the nagging concerns aside. They would find a way.
“Remember when we met?” He ran his hands over her shoulders and down her arms, stopping at the cuff of her blouse, gripping her wrist and taking her wet hands away from their task.
“You said you couldn’t take care of a child.” Sarah laughed as he turned her around, pulling at her rust-colored head scarf, running his fingers through her hair.
“When I looked at you, I knew everything would work out all right.”
“Is that so?” Sarah laughed.
Andrew searched for her mouth, her lips soft against his, the taste of cinnamon lingering. When Sarah had shown up at the British camp she hadn’t said a word. She simply showed him a note in his own handwriting—a note he had tucked into a dowry chest almost a year before. Then she told him everything about Dr. Leath and the women, barely able to verbalize the things she had seen. It had sent a chill through him. He had sworn that he would keep them safe, but the outside world was not so obliging. After the war ended, he had gone back to Vergelegen in search of Tessa’s family. Nobody had returned. The farm was for sale.
Andrew had already decided to stay in South Africa when the end of the war came. The British were in charge and there were opportunities for men like him. After he, Sarah, and Tessa had fled their farm in Unie, the Great War had extended its reach to South Africa. Andrew was called up again to help suppress an Afrikaner rebellion. Even though the South African government decided to fight on the side of Britain, many Afrikaners remembered German sympathies during the Boer War and resisted the decision. The Ossewabrandwag rebellion was easily quelled, and with his service record, Andrew could get a job at almost any British-run company. That was how he ended up in Johannesburg, in the mines. The city was a good place to become invisible, keep secrets. Andrew had helped resolve a strike and the owners liked him, so they made him a boss, overseeing the influx of workers, some of them still draped in tribal blankets when they arrived at the site.
“Ma?” Tessa stood in the doorway of the bedroom, her white hair tangled in a wild mess, her long nightdress creased. A nasty purple bruise had taken up residence under her left eye.
Sarah pushed Andrew away and refastened the knot he had loosened on her scarf.
“Theresa, why aren’t you in bed?” There was warning in Andrew’s voice. He was a patient man, but he had been short with her since she came home from school, bloodied and bruised, handing him a letter from the principal.
“My eye hurts.” Tessa walked over to the table and pulled out the chair next to his, struggling clumsily with her short legs to get onto it. Sarah stepped forward to help, but Andrew signaled her to stop. Tessa was sixteen; girls her age were being married off already. The day’s events had brought the stark realization that he wouldn’t be able to mend fences for her all her life.
Andrew lit his pipe. “I have an appointment with your principal tomorrow.”
“I’m not going back.” Tessa crossed her arms for emphasis.
“And what about your friends?”
Tes
sa shrugged. “I already know everything they teach, Pa.”
“Don’t run away because of this boy.”
“Please, Pa. You can teach me at home again.”
“You’ll need to learn more than what is written in a book, Theresa. More than you can find between four walls. I didn’t understand that before.”
Tessa crossed her arms, her chin raised in a challenge. “Like what?”
“For one thing, you need to learn that there is a reason why other people act the way they do. Sebastian’s parents are poor. That sandwich is probably the only meal he’ll have today. He’s being taught in a language he doesn’t speak at home and he probably doesn’t understand a lot of what is being said. How would you feel if—”
There was a knock at the door. Andrew put his pipe down. It was after eight. Nobody was supposed to come around this late. A second knock, more insistent this time.
“Go see,” Sarah said when he didn’t move.
“Hold on, I heard you,” Andrew yelled. He tucked his shirt into his pants and pulled his suspenders over his shoulders. He gestured to Sarah. “Go.”
Sarah took Tessa into the bedroom and locked the door. Andrew parted a slither of the curtains with his index finger. Two English lads from the mine stood outside, their clothes disheveled.
“James?” Andrew addressed the taller of the two as he opened the door.
“It’s Selborne Hall, sir. There’s trouble.”
“What trouble?”
“Those National Party Dutchmen tore down the Union Jack, sir. Pat saw ’em do it.”
The man next to James nodded. “The boys are gathering outside, waiting for them to come out. More than a thousand of them. There’s going to be a right good buggering. We thought that maybe you could organize the mine boys …”
Andrew clenched his jaw. Things had been smoldering under the surface for years now. With the Afrikaners blaming the British for their poverty and the Natives striking at the mines, he had his hands full trying to keep the men off each other. “Wait. I’ll be out in a minute.” He closed and locked the door. At the bedroom door he hesitated. “Sarah? There’s trouble at the Republican meeting. I have to go.”
Sarah’s face appeared in the slit of the opened door. “The police can—”
“The police won’t be able to handle that many men. I’m a boss. Maybe they’ll listen to me.” He pecked her on the forehead.
“Don’t go. You can’t change anything.” Tessa looked at him in that unnerving way she had, old eyes peering from a child’s pink-cheeked face.
“I have to try, Tessa.” Andrew grabbed his jacket. “Don’t go out, no matter what, hear?”
Andrew got into the cab of a beat-up truck with the two lads, the street lights growing denser as they approached the city center, houses giving way to squatter camps and mine dormitories where the black men slept, packed in rows of bunk beds. They pulled into a side street, a few blocks from Selborne Hall. The two lads jumped out.
“It started already,” James shouted as he took off.
A brand-new Morris burned in front of the hall, its innards blazing beneath a smoke column. A throng of men had gathered outside the hall, singing Tipperary over and over again, their voices taunting the Afrikaners inside. James and Pat became one with the fray. Suddenly, the hall’s doors flung open and a couple hundred burly Afrikaners burst through, raging with fists against the mob outside. Bodies flailed, slumped, fell, the mob reacting in a wave of fervid violence. Andrew noticed a small group of men watching from the balcony above, their expressions inscrutable. He weaved through the throng, dodging stray blows, finding it impossible to tell who was on which side. He had to talk some sense into the men in charge, try to stop this before it became a bloodbath. According to the papers, the National Party leader, Dr. Malan, was a Dutch Reform minister. Surely he had to see reason.
Andrew waded through the crowd to the building, still dodging blows. Once inside, he weaved through corridors to get to the main hall. Dominee Malan was onstage, conferring with a group of men. None of them was older than thirty-five, shreds of the Union Jack under their feet. Andrew made his way toward them. He had almost reached the stage when he was stopped short by a sudden blow to the stomach.
“It’s a Redneck!” A knee connected with his head.
Andrew looked up at his attacker, whose voice he recognized all too quickly. The man had aged. His beard was more white than yellow now, his skin marred by deep grooves, but it was definitely the joiner, Jooste. Somebody kicked Andrew from behind, sending him sprawling.
“What you doing here, Rooinek? You come spy on decent people?”
Andrew gasped for air. He held his hand out toward Malan on stage. “Please. We have to stop this.”
“Afraid you’re going to lose, huh?” Jooste’s fist caught Andrew in the jaw. He addressed the men around them. “He burned farms in the war. I saw him do it.”
Andrew opened his mouth to speak, but Jooste’s boot made contact with his face. Blood filled his mouth. Blows came from everywhere now in a confusion of pain. He tried not to swallow the broken tooth in his mouth.
“Broeders, our cause is just. We have suffered enough injustice, our rights, violated by his kind. It is time an example is made.” Another boot made contact with Andrew’s head, then another, until the uniform roar of male voices blurred into silence.
Jooste watched Andrew’s hospital room from the hallway, waiting for the right opportunity. He would make sure that Andrew never got a chance to talk. A small girl came out of Andrew’s room and headed down the hall. Jooste found himself staring at her, unable to believe what he was seeing. Could he trust his eyes? He had thought that the boy was the only one of them to have survived, but there she was, same pale eyes, same high cheekbones, same white hair, the resemblance unmistakable. He followed her out of the hospital, careful not to be noticed.
Jooste had had some hard years after the war. Ignored by the British and despised by the Boers, he’d had to scrape by. But memories faded quickly. He was moving up in the world again, one of Malan’s trusted men. It still amazed him how little it took to pull the wool over people’s eyes when there was a cause to rally behind. It made them blind to all else. Jooste found causes fluid, his own always trumping any other.
The British, for all their ingratitude, had paid Jooste well to clean things up at the farmhouse after Leath was marched away and shipped back to England. The dear doctor had been quite an embarrassment for some of the higher-ups in the British forces, everybody eager to sweep the whole thing under the rug, especially once they started discovering the bodies, women and mutilated infants, buried between grapevines. Jooste had discovered Leath’s journals under the floorboards in the study and snuck them out. He had thought about burning them, afraid he might be implicated, but the chance that they might be valuable was great. Curiosity, more than anything else, made him pore over the rants about human imperfection and strange formulas and correspondence with a man named Röntgen. The good doctor wanted to strengthen the stock, as it were; create a better human. The depravity the journals described fueled a strange fascination for Jooste, his obsession growing by degrees. He tracked the baby boy they had found that day at the farm to a mental hospital in Bloemfontein. Jooste had bribed one of the staff, a man named Smuts, to get access to the boy. What he found unnerved him, a scrawny little thing, his eyes all strange and too large for his head, staring at Jooste as if he knew what he was thinking. Smuts said the boy was severely retarded, that’s why he was put there. Jooste wasn’t so sure.
Jooste stayed within arm’s length of the girl, but hung back when she exited the hospital. He watched her from the doorway as she crossed the road. A black woman waited for her on the edge of the park, across the road. Jooste recognized Sarah immediately.
“So that’s what you did, my pretty? Stole yourself a white baby,” Jooste muttered. He followed the pair down the street, weaving between people, trying not to be noticed. The meit and the girl ambled towa
rd the suburbs, unable to board a bus together, their faces contracted in serious conversation. Jooste watched from a distance as they entered a working-class house with a low roof and a small garden, a smile spreading on his face.
Andrew stirred. His skin was still sallow and bruised, but at least the swelling in his face had gone down. Tessa shifted closer to his hospital bed and reached for his hand. She remembered how strong it had been the night he left, deep grooves lining the palms, dirt lodged permanently under the cuticles no matter how much he scrubbed them. He tightened his grip. Spasm or reflex, she didn’t know, but the doctors looked at her dubiously when she told them about it, condescendingly calling it a little girl’s imagination. She’d often felt hampered by her body, but this was the first time it had really mattered. When Tessa looked up again, Andrew’s eyes were open, looking at her as if he couldn’t remember who she was.
“Pa?”
“T … T …” Andrew struggled to get the sound out.
Tessa leaned closer. “Shhh, Pa. I’m here.”
“Sa …?”
Tessa glanced over at Mr. Visagie, the old man who shared a room with Andrew. He glared at her, snorting when she caught him watching, and turned around in bed, the back of his striped pajamas riding up into his bottom.
“She is good, Pa.”
“Where?”
“They wouldn’t allow her into the hospital.”
“Quiet!” Visagie’s head snapped back in their direction. “There shouldn’t be children in this ward.” He started mumbling. “Rules are only good for some people. Others do whatever they want.”
“Oh, shut it.” Tessa put her hand in front of her mouth, but it was too late.
Visagie look at her strangely. “How dare you talk to me like that, you little twit. My pa would give me a good whipping if I talked to him so. God-fearing man, he was. Knew how to keep his children on the narrow road.”
Tessa turned her back to Visagie. She put her lips close to Andrew’s ear. “You can’t do that again, Pa. You hear?”
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