River

by Shira Nayman

  The hallway was buzzing with movement and noise as children hurried here and there. An earsplitting bell clanged and everybody, suddenly silent, filed into their classrooms.

  Darlene slid into the bench of a desk in the back row. I slid in beside her. A few minutes later, an older man with a military bearing strode into the room. Tall and powerfully built, he had pure white hair that was slicked to his head with oil. His gray eyes glinted with malice.

  A hushed fear filled the room. Not one rustle, not a murmur or whisper or cough: all eyes were directed at the schoolmaster.

  “Open your books,” he said. “History, page ninety-eight.”

  There was a flurry of turning pages.

  “First, an announcement. The troops of the Third Reich are battling the Communists on the Eastern Front. We send a prayer for their victory. We pray for the slaughter of all enemies of the Third Reich.”

  The man was speaking an ugly, guttural language I’d never heard before that sounded a little like German. I realized it must be Afrikaans; I knew from my grandmother that this is what white people of Dutch descent spoke in South Africa, and that all her schooling had been in this language. Darlene and I had been speaking English; Grandma had told me she’d spoken English at home, as Jewish people did. Oddly, I understood every word the teacher said and, looking down at the textbook in front of me, I discovered I could also effortlessly read the strange-looking words.

  The lesson was about the Boer War. We began to read aloud, together. Many of the students stumbled over words; some seemed barely literate. Sitting in front of me was a scruffy boy with greasy hair whose neck was caked with dirt; he seemed only to be moving his mouth, rather than actually enunciating words. We were reading about the brave Boer soldiers and how they marched toward victory. I didn’t know anything about the Boer War; the textbook copy, though, sounded like propaganda.

  After four pages of laborious group reading, the teacher abruptly called for a stop. He then launched on a summary of what we had just read, embellishing even further on the just cause of the Boer freedom fighters.

  But then, he broke off, mid-sentence. I looked up to see that he was glaring at Darlene, who was studiously focused on her book.

  “Is there a reason you’re staring off into space, Darlene?” the master said. “Are my words, in your view, not worth attending to?”

  “But sir,” Darlene said, “I was following the story in the book.”

  “Don’t answer back, rude child!”

  The master raised his hand. Everything suddenly altered, as if transformed to slow motion. Something gray and oblong flew through the air toward Darlene. I heard a thud and turned to see Darlene’s skin, just below the hairline, split open, then watched as a trickle of blood made its way down her forehead and settled in her right eyebrow.

  “I’m listening, sir,” Darlene said. “I heard every word.”

  She sat immobile, stifling the instinct, I imagined, to reach up and touch the fresh wound on her forehead.

  “Well then, might I trouble you to return my blackboard duster?” the master said with mock courtesy. I dared not look about me; I did, though, hear several semi-suppressed snickers escape from the mouths of other children.

  Darlene bent to the floor to retrieve the blackboard eraser, then stood and walked toward the teacher with that same stiff-necked dignity I’d observed earlier. She handed back the offending object. The teacher made a sudden movement with his hand toward Darlene’s head. I thought he was going to cuff her on the ear and I let out a little involuntary gasp. He didn’t hit her, though; he only grabbed her arm and drew her close. He leaned down and whispered something loudly in Darlene’s ear. I saw her face redden.

  The teacher turned and looked at me. “And if Miss Camellia has anything to say, she can stand up and bestow her intelligent remarks on the classroom.”

  The master made no attempt to mask the scorn in his voice. He reached for a long wooden ruler that was lying on his desk and tapped it gently on his palm.

  “Is that what you wish to do?” he said, glaring at me. “Come to the aid of a Jew?”

  I looked from the teacher to Darlene, whose dark eyes seemed frozen, but also fearless. I could feel her willing me to remain silent, willing me not to bring down on myself the same fury we’d all just witnessed being directed at her.

  The Nazis will be defeated! I wanted to yell. Three months from now, Hitler will put a bullet in his head and the utter madness will come to an end! I felt myself adding something else, for myself—that it would never be over, that humanity could never recover from such evil. Instead, I simply said: “No, sir. I have nothing to say.”

  I did not, though, hide the hatred in my eyes, the way Darlene had clearly learned to do. The master seemed to notice this. I saw a flicker of spite in his face; slowly, he crossed the classroom to where I was sitting. He stood by my desk for a moment, tapping the ruler against his palm.

  “Hands out straight,” he said. I lay my hands flat against the desk. He raised the ruler and brought it down hard across the knuckles of both my hands, once, twice, three times.

  “Next time, you will keep your gasps to yourself.”

  I placed my hands under the desk and nursed my smarting fingers.

  The lesson continued for what seemed an age, if you can call the tedium of reciting dull facts and copying out pages of propaganda from a textbook a lesson. I followed the instructions automatically, as Darlene seemed to do, marveling every now and then at my fluency in this strange language. I watched with amazement as the words flowed from my pencil across the lines of the page.

  The raucous clang of the bell split the silence. The teacher announced recess.

  Everyone rose. My hands still burned and ached and my knees trembled so badly, I could hardly stand. Somehow, I managed to keep my balance and file out with the rest of the class.

  Inside, I was jangling with questions. I bit my lip to stop myself blurting them all out in a mad rush. Darlene grabbed something from her satchel as we passed the makeshift lockers, and then made her way out the back entrance of the school, heading toward the far corner of the school yard.

  I took Darlene’s hand.

  “Are you all right?” I asked, looking at her forehead, where the blood had dried.

  Darlene gave a curt little nod.

  “Can I help you wash up?” I asked.

  She shook her head. “Let it stay,” she said. “How are your hands? Hope he didn’t give you the burn whack.”

  “Not too bad,” I said. “Don’t worry.”

  We sat beneath a tree of a kind I’d not seen before. It had a skinny trunk and gnarled branches that stretched crookedly skyward, here and there sprouting sparse bunches of misshapen brownish-green leaves.

  “What did you give that boy this morning?” I asked. “When you took something from your satchel, before we went into the school house?”

  “Oh. Just a sandwich. I give him one every day. Schmaltz and salami on rye.”

  “Why on earth? He didn’t exactly look like a friend of yours.”

  “Protection. That way, no one will beat me up. They hate us Jews, but they like our sandwiches.”

  Darlene opened her hand. She was holding something wrapped in a piece of wax paper. She withdrew two sugar cookies, handed one to me and took the other for herself, and then carefully folded the paper and put it back into her pocket.

  “Joel gave me an extra one for you,” she said. I didn’t know who Joel was, but I had the feeling I’d find out later.

  “Please thank him for me,” I said. At the sight of the cookie, my mouth watered. Once again, I realized how hungry I was. The opportunities for eating on this strange journey of mine were few and far between.

  “Doesn’t that bother you?” I asked. “Having to give that awful boy your sandwich every day?”

  “I’d rather go hungry than get beaten up,” Darlene said, taking a tiny bite of her cookie. “Besides, he needs it more than I do.”

 
; “Is he very poor?”

  “He’s from the St. Augustine Orphanage. A lot of the kids here are,” she said, gesturing toward the playground where the groups had gathered again to resume their games of earlier. “Most of their parents are in the army, up north.”

  “Up north?”

  “Algeria and Egypt, mostly. But you know this as well as I do, Camellia.” Darlene gave me a hazy look. “It’s true, they’re just awful, but you only have to look at them to see how unhappy they are. There’s no one to take care of them. They pretty much raise themselves.”

  Darlene’s gaze drifted across the school yard. I turned to see what she was looking at. On the far side of the yard, beyond the wire fencing, was a group of dark-skinned children—barefoot, ranging in age from tiny infants, held in the arms of the older children, to about twelve or thirteen. Each child was wearing either pants or a shirt, but not both; bony legs or thin chests showed below or above the faded scrap each wore. Flies swarmed around their noses and eyes. Some of the children held onto the wire, pressing their faces right up against it.

  “It’s all relative, though, isn’t it,” Darlene was saying. “The St. Augustine children at least get the chance to go to school. To use the Whites Only entrances and facilities. To eat most of the time, even if they don’t love the food.”

  Darlene had stopped nibbling at her cookie. She glanced at my own cookie, which I’d not yet bitten. I passed the cookie back to her and she rose, walked to the far end of the yard, and passed both cookies through the fence. She paused there, talked, for a moment, to the children on the other side.

  As she walked back toward me, Darlene discreetly brushed her hand across her eyes.

  Hunger gnawed at my stomach. I pushed it from my mind.

  Darlene was back. She sat down beside me on the hard dirt.

  “I was wondering,” I said. “What did the teacher whisper into your ear?”

  “Oh, nothing much. The usual.”

  “What’s the usual?”

  “That Hitler will win. That he’ll make good on his promise to rid Europe of the Jews. That then it will be our turn here, in South Africa.”

  “Oh,” I said, not knowing how to respond.

  “Mr. Van Graan hates Jews, like pretty much everyone here,” Darlene said, pronouncing his name with the same heavy Afrikaans accent the teacher had. “You sort of get used to being hated.”

  I saw in Darlene’s face that same peculiar look I’d seen on Talia’s face back—well, back whenever that was in Australia (years ahead, though for me, it was some kind of yesterday).

  “But why am I telling you this?” she said. “You know about it just as well as I do!”

  The sudden clanging of the bell saved me from having to respond. We both jumped up and hurried back to the schoolhouse.

  The rest of the day passed in a fog of tedium. School for me had always been exciting and fun; the drudgery in that hot, dusty, horrible schoolroom, half a world and more than half a century away from the home I knew, bore no resemblance to education as I knew it.

  When the school bell finally clanged, signaling the end of the day, I felt immense relief. I followed Darlene out of the classroom. We grabbed our jackets and satchels and then bolted from the school-house, tearing across the yard. We didn’t stop running for about a half mile, by my calculation. It was only then, having slowed to a normal walking pace, that the discomforts assailing me rushed full force into my awareness. My feet ached in their tight boots; I could feel angry blisters blooming at every point where my skin came into contact with the leather. In my stomach, the fiercest hunger I’d ever known sent a wave of nausea through my body that found its way to my head as a pounding headache. And the heat! It bore down on my uncovered head like a vise. I looked over at Darlene. Surely, she was also suffering in the same miserable way. And the wound on her forehead, on top of everything!

  She didn’t complain, though. She was walking calmly beside me, a faint smile on her lips.

  “Do you hear that lovely warbling?” she asked. “Red-breasted robins! Don’t you adore them?”

  I was awed by how Darlene was able to muster cheerfulness after the hellish day she’d had.

  We walked for a time in silence. The dry landscape was becoming familiar. Here we were again passing the mud huts of the African village, some distance from the road; the burning sun turned their straw roofs to gold.

  “I’m going to leave this place, as soon as I can,” Darlene said.

  “Koppies?” I asked. “The Orange Free State?”

  “South Africa. The whole country, it’s rotten. Rotten to the core.”

  “Where do you want to go?”

  “It depends on my husband. On where his career will take us.”

  I gave a little laugh. “Do you already know who your husband is going to be?” I asked.

  She looked impatient. “Well no, not exactly. But the day I finish high school—three years and forty-three days from today—I will take the train to Johannesburg where I will live with my brother and attend the college for nursery school teachers. It shouldn’t take more than a few months to meet my future husband.”

  “Oh, really?”

  “Johannesburg is full of nice Jewish boys looking for nice Jewish girls. They want someone who is pretty and sweet, and who is clever at all the things they need to be clever at. It would be a bonus for me to have a certificate in teaching. That will make me a better mother.

  “All the most intelligent men go overseas to study, especially the doctors. I imagine it will be England, though we might end up in America! I’m not too concerned about where. But we’ll go. And, I’ll make certain that we never come back!”

  Darlene could not have known just how close to the letter her plan would work out. How she’d meet my grandfather, Jack, a medical student, at a Jewish singles dance. How two weeks later, she would open the door of her older brother’s house where she was living to see Jack snazzily dressed, holding a bouquet of roses and looking nervous but happy, knowing that he intended to propose to Darlene that evening, over dinner. How she would, in fact, travel across the world, but to Australia, where she’d build a new life, far from her detested homeland.

  We came to a crossroads, which appeared to be the tiny heart of the town. On one corner was a petrol station, on another, a ramshackle building with a faded sign declaring it to be the Koppies Poskantoor, which I knew from my sudden proficiency in Afrikaans meant Post Office. Diagonally across were a clothing store, its window boasting three mannequins dressed in farming clothes, and another store bearing the sign Deegwinkel—Pastry Shop. We crossed the road; Darlene paused before the window of the pastry shop and looked longingly at a plateful of napoleons.

  “Don’t they look delicious?” Darlene said. “I’ve always wanted to try one. But I’ve never had more than five cents of my own. That was a present from my brother Barry, when he came home from army training.”

  My heart flew out to Darlene; I was filled with a burning desire to help her. To put things right. I could hardly believe that, with all the hardship she clearly faced, this girl would one day become my lively, talented, and supremely capable Grandma. I thought for a moment about the lifetime of struggle and striving that lay between this lonely girl—who many years from now would give birth to my mother—and the grandmother I knew.

  Those napoleons did, indeed, look delicious, so creamy and flakey. We hadn’t eaten all day, and had walked miles and miles, and now my stomach growled angrily. I would have given a good deal for one of those pastries. The thick layer of yellow custard made my mouth water.

  I leaned over to Darlene. “One day,” I said, “I’ll buy you a great big plateful of napoleons. I promise.”

  Darlene nodded almost imperceptibly. I saw that she was biting her lip. She reached over and took my hand and together, we walked away.

  “You know, we had a traveling salesman with us for two weeks,” Darlene said. “Now that everyone but my brother Harold has moved out, my mother re
nts an extra room whenever she can. Well, this man was a prince! Mr. Krige. I’ll never forget him as long as I live. He gave me the most beautiful present—a china tea set. I’ll show it to you when we get back home. We can have a tea party with my dolls!”

  By the time we turned into the front yard of Darlene’s house I was limping—and so thirsty, I’d have lapped at a pig’s trough, had one appeared.

  The house was a rambling old farmhouse in a state of disrepair. The red roof tiles were missing in patches; in one section, the brick was crumbling, and there were cracked or missing windowpanes. The damage seemed confined to one side. I imagined the family lived only in the well-maintained section.

  Darlene took off at a sprint. “Come on!” she said, running around to the back of the house. I limped behind, following her into the kitchen in time to see her greeting a tall, middle-aged black man, a beatific look on her face.

  “Look, Joel. Camellia’s here! She’s my cousin’s cousin—all the way from Durban. She’s going to sleep over. Isn’t that glorious?”

  Joel had kind, far-seeing eyes. When he greeted me, he seemed to be looking right into my face but also somehow gazing at a distant horizon.

  “Hello, Miss Camellia,” he said. His voice was as warm and rich as his eyes.

  I was hit with an aroma so enticing, I almost cried out with joy.

  “You girls must be hungry,” Joel said. “I have your dinner ready early.”

  The spring suddenly back in my feet, I followed Darlene to the kitchen sink, where we washed our faces and scrubbed our hands with a coarse bar of soap. The dust from our long walk home had entered my pores and seemed stubbornly determined to stay there. I did the best I could, and when I was finished, I almost bounded over to the wooden table and sat down before one of the steaming bowls Joel had set there.

  “Mealie pap and chicken casserole!” Darlene said, tucking in.