The covenant - James A. Michener [475]
The two white men did not speak. Sybilla was dead, and Sara, and the twins. Johanna was lost somewhere, and Jakob prayed that the boy Detlev was with her. When he turned to look toward the direction of the concentration camp, as if to find the children, he saw the matched peaks of Sannie's Tits and they reminded him of the twins, those precious girls. He dropped his head. He had not the courage to go down the hill to that ruined farm, those vanished hopes.
General de Groot tugged at his arm: 'Come, Jakob, much work to be done.' And as the ponies moved forward, the old warrior said with clenched determination, 'We lost the battles. We lost the war. Now we must win in other ways.'
The education of Detlev van Doorn began on the day he came over the hill with his sister from the concentration camp at Chrissie Meer and saw the devastation of his home. His father and old General de Groot were waiting in the ruins, and after the briefest greetings they led him to a grassy slope where Nxumalo's five huts had stood. There he saw, sticking up from the earth at regular intervals, four wooden tombstones bearing in ill-formed letters the names: sybilla de groot, sara van doorn, sannah, anna.
'Never forget,' the general said. 'These women were murdered by the English, who fed them powdered glass.'
Detlev was seven, a little boy with the pinched features of an old man and the cautious wisdom of someone in his forties. 'They were buried in the camp. They can't be here.'
'Their tombstones,' De Groot said. 'For remembrance.'
'Those aren't stones,' Detlev said.
'Later, when we have a farm again,' his father said. 'We'll have proper stones.'
'Wood or stone,' De Groot said, 'you must never forget.'
'Where shall we stay?' Johanna asked.
'We've fixed up the old wagon,' her father said, and he led his children to that frail relic in which his father, Tjaart van Doorn, had taken his family across the Drakensberg, then north of the Limpopo, and finally back to Vrymeer. Van Doorn and the general had locked the big wheels and used boards to form a kind of shelter on the wagon bed, but it clearly could not hold a young woman like Johanna, a boy and two grown men. When De Groot saw her look of perplexity, he laughed. 'You two sleep up here. We two down below.' And she saw that under the wagon body, her father had arranged boards on the ground, where he and the old man would make their beds.
On the first wintry night that the four spent togetherno pillows, no blanketsJakob awakened at dawn, and in the dim light saw over his head, carved into the heavy wood of the frame, the rubric tc-43 and he wondered what it signified. When De Groot awakened, Jakob asked, 'What do you suppose this means?' The old general squinted his eyes, studied the marks, and remained silent, as though brooding over something. Finally he grumbled, 'One of the only two decent Englishmen I ever knew. Thomas Carleton built this wagon and he and Richard Saltwood gave it to your father. Yes, gave it.' He reflected on the enormity of having taken refuge under an English wagon, then added, I rode two thousand miles in this wagon . . . walking beside it most of the way.'
Detlev, who was already awake, called down from above, 'How could you ride and walk at the same time?'
Reaching into the wagon, General de Groot pulled the boy out and tossed him in the air. When he set him on the ground he said, 'You do what you have to do. Once I helped carry this wagon down the Drakensberg.'
'What will you do, sleeping down there, if it rains?' Detlev asked.