Stones for My Father (10 page)

We were not the only new arrivals. Nearby, a larger group of women and children edged forward in the line for water. We filed in behind them, taking in all that we could of our new surroundings.

The ground under our feet was cracked and dusty, and I wondered how deep the wells must have been to draw enough water for all the inmates. I could not see any trace of a river for miles around. When a breeze built up it blew dust into our eyes and mouths. The tents suffered from the wind, too: they were stained a dirty yellow color from the dust. The people who wandered between them — women and children, mostly, although I did spot a few very old men — stared at us with blank expressions. Some of the women still wore their finest clothes, and it was strange to see them squatting dourly on upturned boxes, stirring soup in their Sunday best. One little child — at first I thought it was a boy, but it turned out to be a girl with sheared hair — tottered up to me, arm outstretched. She was clothed in the scantiest rags, her stomach caved with hunger, her bare feet blistered and filthy, her eyes hollow. In her other arm she supported a tiny infant. As if imitating its sister, the baby clutched at the air with curling, wrinkled fingers, its mouth opening and closing like a fish.

“Please,
meisie
,” the girl said, “Please —” Her mouth was ringed with chapped sores, and a trail of sticky goo dribbled from her nose to the point of her chin.

A woman in a starched uniform squeezed between us,
brushing the child off like a harmless pest. “Ration cards,” she bellowed. The woman had arms like ham shanks, thick ankles, and fat, sausage fingers, which she used to hand us square cards listing quantities of food and drink.

“So how much will they give us?” Tant Minna asked Ma.

The woman in the starched uniform grabbed the card from my aunt. “Last name?” she demanded.

“Rossouw.”

The woman consulted a clipboard, which hung around her neck by a piece of string. “Your husband is on commando,” she noted.

“Yes. We haven’t heard from him in almost three months.”

The woman scribbled something on the card and handed it back to my aunt. An X filled the space next to “none.”

“My husband is dead,” said Ma as the woman turned
to us. She gathered the three of us around her. “Their father. He died years ago.”

As the uniformed woman considered us, the muscles around her nose twitched and quivered as if she was trying to ignore an unwholesome smell.

“One pound a week, for the family,” she said, marking Ma’s card. “You can collect that tomorrow. There’s no more today.”

“And the baby? Hansie is only two.”

“Can’t you read? There’s condensed milk for the child.” She began to move away from our group. “Queue here to receive your rations,” she bawled. “Your ration cards must be completed before you present them at the front …”

A bucket of water was passed around while we waited for our rations. Each person was allowed just a few sips from the ladle before it was passed on to the next family in line. In a way, it would have been easier not to drink at all than to have just a couple of drops, which whetted our thirsts without quenching them. With each sip, particles of sand caught meanly in my throat, and I was almost glad to pass the bucket on to Irene Wessels.

We stood and shuffled forward for what seemed like hours before reaching a camp table positioned in front of one of the tents. A man in a khaki uniform took Ma’s card and passed it to a boy in the tent. Minutes later, we were presented with a sack of mealie meal and a box containing coffee, salt, and sugar.

My mother began to open the sack to inspect its contents when the man pushed a hand in front of her.
“You can’t do that standing in line,” he said. “Other people are waiting. Move out of the way.”

We did as we were told. When we’d found a quiet spot, Ma ripped open the sack. But almost as soon as we had gathered to peer over her shoulder, Gert and I fell back in horror.

The flour was crawling with maggots. There were so many that the bag seemed to heave with their curling bodies, and even Ma leaped with disgust. When she jumped, half of the flour scattered to the ground.

“No better than floor sweepings!” she gasped, crouching to touch the clumps of grayish matter with hesitant fingers. Before she could stand, a gang of children descended on the maggot-strewn scraps, scraping the ground with desperate fingers for every last grain. With a cry, my mother was knocked to the ground, and I shot to help her.

“Don’t touch me, Corlie Roux!”

I recoiled, watching the children disappear between the tents, my eyes stinging.

“They’ve taken most of our flour,” said Gert.

“Quiet, Gert!” snapped Ma.

We were ushered into another line; this one led into a tent that was slightly larger than the others. Gert sneaked ahead to eavesdrop by the entrance, and soon returned with news.

“There are nurses inside,” he said. I noticed how the skin on his neck just beneath the bushman arrow had remained perfectly white, like an inverted shadow. Weeks
out in the sun with few opportunities to wash meant that the rest of him had long since tanned a ruddy brown.

“It’s the surgery,” whispered a woman with a face like a peach stone. Her belly was swollen high with child, but looking into those dead eyes I realized that the baby inside her was no better than a parasite, leeching its mother of precious strength. “All new inmates have to be vaccinated.”

“My sons have never been vaccinated,” huffed Tant Minna, and we were instantly reminded of the fact that they weren’t there with us. “They’re perfectly healthy boys.” Her gruff tone belied the lost look in her eyes, although I knew she would never give the khakis the satisfaction of seeing her grief at being separated from her sons.

“Don’t be stupid. You want them to catch measles, or smallpox? Children have died of dysentery, typhoid, and bronchitis this week alone. You take the medicine.” The woman grunted at Hansie. “I’d give him a few weeks at best.”

“Mind yourself,” hissed Ma, lifting Hansie up into her arms and turning her back on the woman. As I watched her smooth his fine curls, I noticed that my mother’s hand was trembling.

Some of the other children cried when the doctor jabbed the needle into their bony arms, but I refused to give him such satisfaction. To be fair, the doctor didn’t look as if he was enjoying the procedure: all those wailing babies, all those stony-faced mothers, and the
relentless heat. But still, he was English: he didn’t have to be there. The second he pressed a ball of cotton wool to the spot where the needle had gone in, I snatched it from him and turned on my heel, holding my head high even as my arm began to throb.

Within the hour, both Gert’s arm and mine had swollen to double the normal size. The soreness was too much for my brother, who began to gasp and gulp like an infant. I thumped him on his good arm and shot him a look.

“Don’t be a baby, Gert. You want the others to think we’re soft?”

“Your arm, Corlie —” He pointed. Like his, my arm blushed an angry scarlet, and the lump near my shoulder was turning as hard as a rock.

“You don’t see me crying, do you? Or Hansie, for that matter.”

We were classed as Undesirables. This meant that we hadn’t come to the camp voluntarily and that we had uncles who were still on commando. Families that came of their own accord, and whose men had surrendered — the
hensoppers
— were classed as Refugees. They got extra sugar and real milk and sometimes even the odd sweet potato, and they were put in furnished tents. As we wandered between the rows, we peered into each tent we passed. Some of them housed up to twelve people, while others had only three or four. Nearly every tent had a sick person in it. Some contained empty cots decorated with scrub flowers or bits of black cloth.

Our family — Ma, my brothers, and I — was assigned
to a tent where a family of five was already living. The tent smelled sour, and I had to hold my breath as we were shown to our cots. The woman who lived there was called Agnes Biljon, and although you could see that she was disappointed to have to share the space with newcomers, she did her best to make Ma feel welcome. She told us that she had three children, all girls, aged sixteen, fourteen, and seven. The youngest and the eldest were out collecting rations, while Agnes tended to the middle child, Antjie, who was ill.

Only then did I notice the girl lying against the far side of the tent. Less a girl than a shadow, really: there was so little of her that you would have been forgiven for thinking there was nothing beneath the blankets. She was asleep, and with each breath a tired, wheezing sound escaped through the corners of her mouth. It was hard to say whether or not she was pretty. Her skin was so fine it was almost translucent, the tiny blue veins that traveled to her temples illuminated like branches caught in a flash of lightning. I could tell by her eyebrows that she was a redhead, but much of the hair on her head had fallen out, leaving only the thinnest tangle of flyaway wisps on her bluish scalp.

“It hurts her when I try to comb it,” said Agnes, as if she had read my thoughts.

I had expected the white tents to be cool in the midday heat, but ours wasn’t: it was suffocating. Perhaps the canvas was too thin; the sun seemed to bore straight through it. The only furniture was a trunk, black with
flies, which functioned as a larder. There were no chairs or tables — there wouldn’t have been room — and there were just two available cots, without mattresses. Gert and I would have to share one, and Ma and Hansie would take the other.

“We were told a family of five lived here,” said Ma, looking around.

“Nandi is our kaffir girl — she’s with my daughters right now.” Agnes squatted on the ground, making room for Ma to sit on one of the cots. “She was already an orphan, so they allowed her to come with us. They won’t provide food for her, though — anything she eats has to come out of our own rations.”

“How old is she?”

“Six or seven.”

I thought of Sipho, of Lindiwe and her little girls. Where were they now? Had they been vaccinated, given ration cards, and assigned to a bell-tent like ours?

I swallowed, struck by a more pressing question: was Sipho even alive? If the khakis found him guilty of murder, how long would they wait to execute him? I imagined my friend standing before a judge, struggling to understand the soldiers’ halting Dutch, and I wondered if anybody would try to defend him. I resolved to pray for him every day, harder than I’d prayed for anyone since Pa was sick. It was all I could do now.

“What’s wrong with her?” Ma asked in a voice that was almost gentle, leaning over Antjie. She touched the girl’s forehead with a tenderness I’d not seen for anyone
other than Gert or Hansie.

“She’s starving: nothing will stay down.” The other woman’s tone, although matter-of-fact, betrayed lost hope. “It’s not as if we are eating like kings, but we make do with what we get. The fever is doing this.” Agnes dipped a cloth in a bucket of dirty water and wrung it with raw hands. “Because we are Undesirables, we are on the lowest rations. You visit the Merciers’ tent across the way and you’ll see a healthy family. That’s because their father surrendered.”