by Trilby Kent
The tent was empty; it didn’t look as if anyone had lived in there for a long time. Black flies swarmed around a forlorn campaign table that must have been left when the last of the occupants died. It seemed strange that none of the neighbors had thought to claim it.
“Say something, Corlie.” Tant Minna was crouching in front of me, staring at my face with worried eyes. She wrung her hands slowly, stretching the thin, white skin over square knuckles.
“I am nothing.”
“What?” Her dense eyebrows — caterpillars, Gert used to call them — formed a peak beneath five deep lines that ran across her forehead. I counted them, too afraid to meet her gaze. “You’re delirious, girl! When was the last time you had some water to drink?”
“I’m not thirsty.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. Stay here.” Tant Minna disappeared outside for several moments before reappearing with a slop bucket and a ladle. “Drink what’s left. Go on, do as I say.”
I drank the stale water, and wondered if it had been used to rinse dishes or worse.
“Where are you staying?”
“Beneath the khaki barracks.”
“And food? Are they feeding you?”
I shrugged. Tant Minna scowled. She didn’t like me any more than Ma did, that much I knew. But I had always felt that she might have loved me just a little — enough to care whether I lived or died, anyway.
“I’ll leave something for you there tonight.”
I nodded.
“Corlie?” For the first time, I met her eyes. “He was a good boy, Corlie.”
I felt my legs threaten to buckle.
“I know. He was my brother,” I said in a low voice. Then, when my aunt didn’t reply, I ventured, “Why did Ma say I was one of them?”
Tant Minna gazed at me with a look of wonder — almost as if she were a little child and I was some miraculous creature of her imagination — but in an instant her expression changed, hardened. I could see that she, too, wore a shell beneath her skin.
“What’s past is past,” she said.
“Tell me.” I took her by the hand. “Tell me, Tant Minna.”
And then, to my surprise, she sat down and started talking.
She told me how gold had been discovered four years before I was born, at an outcrop on a large ridge thirty miles south of Pretoria — an area known as the Witwatersrand. The find attracted British interest, and a fresh crop of uitlanders — outsiders, we called them — poured in to seize the deposit. Some of these men were opportunists and short-term speculators who left as soon as they had made a tidy profit from the mines. But a few of the men stayed on, lured by the prospect of long-term gain. My aunt told me that one of the men had bought a house on the other side of the town where Ma was still living with her parents and younger siblings.
“His name was Gordon,” said Tant Minna. “Something-Gordon. There was a good six feet on him. Slender as tall grass, and fair as a daisy. Auburn hair that looked red when the light caught it. Eyes that could bewitch a young girl — and so they did. Your ma fell madly in love.”
I swallowed dryly.
“At one point, there was talk of marriage, but our pa wouldn’t have it. When he found out that your ma had been seeing an uitlander, he fair nearly tore the house down with his bellowing. But by that point, it was too late.” My aunt paused. “Your ma was already pregnant with you, Corlie.”
I felt my lips move, but there was no breath to form words.
“One night, our pa went out with a gang of his men to give this Gordon fellow a talking to — although Gordon had already fled. Your ma waited to hear from him, but soon someone would find out she was pregnant. When our pa suggested that she marry Morne Roux, she agreed — to preserve her dignity. She waited and waited, and then you were born, and she waited some more. But we never heard from that man Gordon again.”
“He left her,” I whispered.
“And she hurt — Lord, how your mother hurt.” Tant Minna bit her lip, turning the pink flesh white. “Until one day, there was a change in her. She grew strong. It was as if she had decided that she would never be hurt again.”
“She grew a calabash shell —”
“What’s that, my girl?”
I shook my head.
Tant Minna stood up. “There’s some that will say I shouldn’t have told you this,” she mused. “But your ma has done all the harm already, keeping it bottled up so long.”
“My pa —”
“Your pa loved you as if you were his own,” said Tant Minna with new firmness. “In every way, you were his child. He loved you.” He loved you even when your ma couldn’t, she seemed to say.
I nodded, and turned to leave the tent. The air inside had become stifling, and I was growing dizzy.
“Corlie —” Tant Minna pressed something into my hand: Gert’s arrowhead. I didn’t want to look at it, so I shoved it deep into my pocket. “It must have fallen off when they took him,” my aunt explained. “I didn’t tell your ma. She was so upset she didn’t even notice, kept going on about what he’d said — she couldn’t make any sense of it …”
I stopped and looked at her, almost too frightened to speak. “What did he say?” I asked.
My aunt considered me with a sad, quizzical look. “She told me he wanted to know about some lad who lived by the sea,” she replied. “ ‘What happened to the fisherman’s son?’ he asked. Yes, that’s right. Silly, I know — but your mother insists those were his last words.”
I swallowed, running my fingernail along the edge of the arrowhead in my pocket. I needed to go — now. I lifted the edge of the tent flap and left my aunt without a word.
“Stay out of the sun,” said Tant Minna behind me. But by then, her voice was already as distant as a bluebottle drumming against a closed window.
THE CALABASH SHELL
When I arrived back at the barracks, the soldier called Parsons was busy polishing a pair of boots on the stoop. I noticed that his nose was crisscrossed with red lines as fine as tiny, hatched threads. His eyelashes were golden, almost white, and the skin on his lower lip was blistered and brown from the sun.
“My naam is Corlie Roux,” I announced.
Parsons looked up from his polishing, and when he saw me he grinned. Something about the way he curled his lip as he squinted into the light reminded me of Gert, and I felt a stone drop to the pit of my stomach.
“Good day to you, Miss Roux,” Parsons said. “Got yourself into a bit of a scuffle, I see.” He nodded at the blood on my pinafore: an ugly reminder of Errol Joubert’s creeping hands.
I considered the plain gold ring on his finger, and wondered if he had children of his own. The thought occurred to me that he might even know the man who Tant Minna claimed was my real father. My vader se naam is Gordon, I might say. Easy as that.
Parsons’s eyes would grow large, and the boyish half-grin would bloom into a smile. “Gordon?” he would say. “But I know him! He’s my best friend, the only honorable man in the British Army!” Perhaps Gordon would turn out to be his cousin, or an uncle, or a neighbor from home. Suddenly, I realized that every Tommy was a potential relation: the one who hauled the death cart past the columns of tents every evening, the one who whistled as he mended holes in the fence, the one who assisted the doctor in the hospital — even the doctor himself, come to think of it. I recalled the khaki soldiers who had shot the men in our laager, the kindly old gent who had retrieved Lindiwe and her daughters from the bush, the beady-eyed commandant who had made us turn in our weapons.
And then I knew that I would never tell Parsons my father’s name: I could not risk finding out that he was the same man who had burned our farm or torn Sipho from his mother’s arms.
Instead, I crawled back under the veranda, later pretending not to hear when he returned with a bowl of scraps from the officers’ mess.
“Something to keep your strength up, Corlie Roux,” Parsons said. And then, realizing that I was far too proud to acknowledge his ch
arity, he whispered, “God seën u.”
I must have woken at some point during the night, as I remember finding a second bowl of scraps beside the one I had emptied earlier. Tant Minna had left a corner of bread in a saucer of condensed milk, the kind of treat she might leave out for a cat. Next to it was Parsons’s bowl of tepid stew and a dry biscuit. I counted two pieces of meat and a vegetable that had the consistency of cabbage. It was the finest meal I had tasted in months. As soon as I had licked every last drop from the dish, I rolled over and fell back to sleep.
When I woke up in the night, my arms and legs had marbled blue in the cold; I still had only my father’s coat for cover. Tugging this more closely around my shoulders, I dreamed that it was a shield, a shell that spread and spread until it had enveloped me entirely before growing thick and hard like the walls of a cell. At first the shell made me feel safe, and I nestled into its soft contours like a baby swaddled on her mother’s back. But then I realized that as the gaps filled in and the shell thickened, any trace of light was being squeezed out until at last I found myself alone, in darkness.
I dreamed that I opened my eyes and stared hard through the darkness, but all I could see were blotches of blue on black. I stared and stared until my eyes hurt so much I began to cry, and then the tears stung so much that I buried my head in my arms and chewed my knuckles to stop myself from weeping. I told myself that it was only a dream, that the shell was only my father’s coat, that it was dark only because I had not yet chosen to open my eyes.
I woke to English voices. That was the first thing I noticed. The second thing I noticed was that we were in darkness.
I opened my eyes, tried to turn my head. The voices were real; I was sure of it. I wasn’t dreaming.
“I can’t see,” I said. And then, because it seemed that no one had heard me, I said it again, more loudly this time. “Ek kan nie sien nie!”
I felt a hand on my shoulder, but I brushed it away and began to tear at my face with both hands. They must have blindfolded me, tied a scarf around my eyes or pulled a sack over my head. But I could feel no such thing.
My heart began to pound. “Ek kan nie sien nie!” I shrieked, scrambling onto all fours even as several hands grasped my legs and shoulders to keep me on my back. The hands were firm, but not rough: as soon as I ceased struggling, they withdrew. Only then did I realize that I was lying on a bed, a real bed, with a proper mattress and a thin sheet. I froze, thinking that perhaps by doing so I might become invisible to my captors. It also gave me an opportunity to try to make sense of what they were saying in English, a language that sometimes sounded like mine.
“It’s a vascular problem,” said one. “Burst blood vessels at the backs of the eyes.”
“There’s a rumor going round that the brat’s half-English,” said another voice. “Turned out by her own mother, the wretch. Parsons says she’s been living below the barracks for the last three days — that’s where he found her.”
“She might have hit her head,” suggested the first voice. “The thing now is to keep her still. Get some water into her, will you?”
The voices were serious, but not unfriendly. The one giving the directions sounded tired, as if he carried a great weight upon his shoulders.
“Is Parsons there? Someone should explain it to her — stop her panicking.”
There was a shuffling of feet and a whispered exchange; then, a familiar voice spoke in my ear.
“Corlie? Dit is Parsons.”
I reached out with both arms, but he gently lowered my hands to my sides. “You’re unwell,” he said in my language. “Some of the women heard you crying this morning — you were saying that you couldn’t see. The doctor has had a look at you, and apparently there’s some bleeding in your eyes. The thing now is to get some rest. I’m going to see to it that you have enough to drink, understand? But you must be a good girl, and stay quiet.” I felt him press something into my hand: something square and solid, which seemed to melt in my clammy palm. “It’s only army rations, but I thought you might like some. Go on, have a taste.”
Chocolate. It took me several seconds to be sure that that was what I was tasting: real chocolate, slightly chalky with age, but chocolate nonetheless. The last time I had eaten chocolate, my father had still been alive. After a few moments, the sticky sweetness was too much: I swallowed the chocolate with an almighty effort, feeling fresh tears form as I turned my face away so that Parsons wouldn’t think me ungrateful.
A few days later, I felt the sun on my eyelids.
The sensation of warmth soon transformed into colors — yellow and white blotches that danced across my field of vision like tiny fireballs — and slowly, painfully, through crusted eyes I began to make out the light reflecting off the steel foot of my hospital bed.
“Parsons?” I whispered.
I thought that it might be him standing there — it was a man’s figure that I could see, outlined against a window. “Pa?”
The figure edged closer, and I realized that he was leaning on crutches, with one leg tucked up in bandages. By the time he got to my bedside, I recognized the sweep of black hair, the neat mustache, and the leaf-shaped badge.
“Corlie?” he said. There was uncertainty in his voice, and — I don’t think I imagined this — fear. “Is that you, Corlie Roux?”
I rubbed my eyes. “Wie’s daar?” I asked.
There was a long silence.
“It’s me, Corlie,” he said at last.
BETHLEHEM
When at last I saw myself in the greasy reflection of a washstand mirror, it became clear why Corporal Byrne had not recognized me immediately. Where once my hair had grown in mousy curls was now only a thin layer of fuzz, sprouting like gray moss on my shaven head. My eyes were ringed with dark circles, and my lips were white. Watching the other children in the camp disappear into gaunt shadows of their former selves, I had not realized that I, too, had faded. My throat was always dry now, and my voice rasped; the words I mouthed rattled about in my head, making my ears pound and my eyes burn. My legs were covered in lice bites, and my arms were still bruised by Ma’s hard fingers.
Corporal Byrne, on the other hand, looked much as I remembered him — taller, somehow, and bronzed by many months under an African sun. But there was sadness in his eyes.
Parsons explained that Corporal Byrne had been granted leave on account of his leg — a wound that he had sustained in battle at Elandsfontein. He had heard about the captured laager and our transportation to the Free State, but he’d had to wait to join a column on its way to Bloemfontein before he could reach Kroonstad.
“He says he has something to show you,” said Parsons, as Corporal Byrne watched on from the bedside. “A surprise. But it will have to wait until later, when the doctor has left and the nurses are at supper.”
“ ’n Verrassing?” I asked.
“That’s right. But you mustn’t mention it to anyone else, understand? Hospital regulations, you know.”
It must have been a few hours before he returned, and I had just begun to doze off to the sound of sleeping noises from other patients in nearby beds. Corporal Byrne arrived cradling a squirming lump bundled in an army blanket.
“Corlie? Look, Corlie — look who’s come to see you …”
He unfurled the blanket far enough to reveal a small black face fringed with white hair. Two large brown eyes peered out at me. As Corporal Byrne loosened the blanket, a long, black-tipped tail extended and curled, and two long, thin arms stretched out to me in a silent plea. The monkey’s skin was pale blue beneath mottled gray fur.
“Apie?” I lifted my hand to touch one gray arm, and the monkey wriggled in Corporal Byrne’s embrace. It was as large as a small dog, and probably weighed as much as a sack of mealie corn.
“Easy, Moet,” whispered Byrne — but when the monkey refused to desist, he loosened his grasp and lowered him gently to the bed. The vervet scrambled toward me, pinching my arms through the sheets with his little claws, and d
rew up so close to my face that our noses were almost touching. Then, with a bark, he leaped into the air.
“He recognizes you,” said Corporal Byrne with a mystified look.
“My apie …” The vervet had climbed up onto the bedpost, where he set about examining my head for any sign of insect life.
“I found him by one of the wagons, howling at the moon,” said Corporal Byrne, who talked to me as if I understood. I liked listening to him even though I could only pick out a few words. “I figured you kids must have been with the laager, and when I saw how tame he was — well, I guessed he must have been a child’s pet.” He shook his head. The sadness in his eyes was the same sadness I saw in the parched, battle-scarred land beyond the wire fence: a lonely wilderness that had long since taken root deep inside us both. “I couldn’t find it in my heart to just leave the poor little fella, so I took him home with me. My troop christened him Moet.” Corporal Byrne pointed at the monkey so I would understand. “Moet.” He pronounced it “Mo-ay.”
“Moet,” I repeated. “Moet.”
The vervet immediately stopped fiddling with my hair and scampered to the foot of the bed. He raised himself onto his hind legs, surveying the room filled with sleeping bodies. Then he glanced over one shoulder to Corporal Byrne, his brown eyes questioning.
“He’s looking for Gert,” I whispered.
“Where is Gert?” asked Corporal Byrne. Seeing that I could not reply, he gathered the wee vervet in the army blanket and brought him close to my face so that I could kiss his soft, gray head.
“I’ll come back tomorrow,” he said.
He came back every day for two weeks. Sometimes Parsons would join him, to translate for us. He twice returned with Moet, although Parsons was clearly uncomfortable with smuggling an animal into the hospital. In the end, he convinced us that there would be plenty of time to see the monkey when I was well enough to go outside.
