The Covenant (142 page)

For the first time Detlev traveled on a train alone. He carried with him four books of South African history, which he read so assiduously that when he paused for a bite to eat, a young man traveling to Cape Town asked, “What preoccupies you?”

“I am reading about the English settlement of Grahamstown. That’s where my family lived in the old days.”

“That was a bad period,” the young man said in fluent Afrikaans. “If we hadn’t allowed those extra Englishmen ashore, they wouldn’t have been able to steal our country from us.”

“One of the Englishmen, man named Saltwood …”

“One of the worst. Do you know anything about that infamous family? They rob this country blind. Offices in the cities, stealing Afrikaner money.”

“Mrs. Saltwood saved my life, I think.”

“She was all right. That I grant. But every family has to have one
decent member. Her husband, you know. The big sportsman. Cricket and tennis. He was one of Cecil Rhodes’ worst young men. Horrible spy, and all that.”

After a long and confused tirade, he asked Detlev where he was going, and when he learned about the dedication of the Vrouemonument his manner changed completely: “Wonderlik, wonderlik! And you’re to stand there representing us all! How ennobling! Oh, I do wish I could go with you!”

“Why?”

The young man, who had been so authoritative only a moment ago, could not reply. His eyes filled with tears, and when he tried to speak he choked. He blew his nose, looked out the window at the highveld, glowing in the sun, and tried again to speak. Finally he surrendered and wept for some moments. Then he muttered, “My mother. My brother. All my sisters. They died at Standerton.”

When he recovered he told Detlev about the last days, when food was scarce: “There was an English hospital nearby. Their troops wounded or knocked down by the enteric. I was sure they must have food, so I sneaked out of our camp and crept along to theirs, but they were dying too. It was a horrible war, Detlev.”

He spoke with such an unusual mix of deep feeling and wide knowledge that Detlev deemed him the appropriate person to answer a nagging question: “You don’t believe those stories about ground glass in the meal, do you?”

“Absolute rot. I just told you, the English died the same way we did.” Abruptly he asked, “Detlev, what a curious name. What’s it mean?”

“German. Along the Rhine. My mother was a very beautiful woman who had a German uncle or something.”

“Detlev! It’s not a Dutch name, you know.”

“I said it was German.”

“Why do you keep it?”

“You keep the name God gave you. Look at General Hertzog. Nobody more Afrikaner than he …”

“Now, there’s a man, not so?”

“Do you know his name? No? Well, it’s James Barry Hertzog, that’s what it is.”

“He ought to change it. With his ideas, he ought to change it.”

“It’s the name God gave him.”

“It isn’t at all. Some damn-fool English name, that’s what it is.”

The young man seemed to have so many positive ideas that Detlev wanted to know what he was doing on the train to Cape Town. “I’m going down to work in Parliament. I’m to be a clerk of some sort, and one day I’ll be head of a ministry, telling you farmers what to do.”

“How did you get the job? How old are you?”

“I’m twenty-one, and the country is hungry for bright young men who can speak Afrikaans and English. You might say that I am needed in Cape Town.” He said his name was Michael van Tonder and that one day he would be as famous as Jan Christian Smuts, but Detlev never heard of him again.

At Bloemfontein he was met by a committee of women wearing sashes; they were in charge of the ceremonies and had brought with them bold sashes for the twelve young survivors of the camps to wear. Across each was lettered in red:
CONCENTRATION CAMP SURVIVOR
, and when Detlev was handed his the woman said, “Wait here. We have to find a girl coming down from Carolina. Her father was a hero of that commando and her mother and two brothers died in the camp at Standerton.”

So he stood alone on the platform, his sash across his chest, while the committee searched for the girl; and when they found her, they placed a ribbon on her, too, bearing the same words but in blue. She was introduced as Maria Steyn of Carolina. “We’re neighbors,” Detlev said and she nodded.

For three days they were together, young people caught up in the tormented memories of the camps and proud of the performances of their mothers and their siblings struck down by disease and hunger, and especially their fathers, who had served in the great commandos. “My father,” Maria said, “is Christoffel Steyn. Of the Carolina Commando. Many said they were the finest unit in the war.”

“We all know Christoffel Steyn and Spion Kop. My father rode with General de Groot in the Venloo Commando. They didn’t accomplish much at first.”

“Oh, but they were heroic! That dash down to Port Elizabeth.”

“That didn’t accomplish much, either, from what they tell me.”

“But such willingness!”

At the dedication they stood facing each other, Maria with the young women, Detlev with the young men, and he noticed that when the solemn words of remembrance were spoken, she had tears in her eyes as he did in his.

“I wouldn’t want to do that again,” she said, but then they were taken to a church where a very old predikant delivered a marvelous oration, preaching forgiveness and the love which Jesus Christ extended to all his children:

This was followed by a sermon of a much different stripe, for at the conclusion of his prayer he announced that one of the most brilliant of Stellenbosch’s recent ministerial candidates had been asked to speak of the new South Africa that would be erected upon the spirit of the Vrouemonument. It was Barend Brongersma, who spoke in a deep, controlled voice of the dedication “which we the living must accept from the hands of those dead”:

His voice rose to a powerful thunder as he challenged every individual in that audience to do some good thing for her or his nation so that the martyrs represented by the Vrouemonument should not have died in vain. Detlev, looking across the aisle to where the young women sat, saw that Maria was sobbing, and he felt his own throat choke with patriotic emotion, so forceful had been the peroration of the predikant from Venloo.

During the final session on a vibrant spring day Detlev found himself with Maria constantly, under various circumstances, and while eating a hearty breakfast provided for the young people or
walking to a church service with her in central Bloemfontein, he had an opportunity to study her closely, as he did with all people who interested him. She was three years younger than he, but mature for her fifteen years. She was a heavy girl, not beautiful, and even though she had lovely blond hair, which she might have dressed in some attractive way, she ignored it, pulling it back tightly in the old fashion. None of her features was distinctive, each being marked by a certain rural grossness, and she moved with no special grace. She was not a lumpy peasant type, not at all, for she had a quickness of mind which showed itself constantly; she was, indeed, much like Johanna Krause, and since Johanna had served as Detlev’s mother, he had a predilection toward that type of woman. But the essential characteristic of this girl, which even Detlev was old enough to perceive, was the gravity of her deportment. She was a serious young woman in all the best meanings of that word, and any young man who came into contact with her at an emotional level would have to be impressed by her moral solidity. She was not a person forced by the tragedy of the camps into a premature adulthood, worn and withered; she was naturally adult.

Therefore, when the young couple walked to the Vrouemonument for the farewell picnic they walked together, their conversation falling into the pattern of grave thoughts. “How were you chosen for the honor?” Detlev asked as they strolled across the grassy mound. “I mean, I know about your father. We learned about him in school. I mean, who chose you?”

“I think it must have been the dominee.”

“In my case it was the schoolteacher. He’s married to my sister, you know.”

“I was not aware of that.” She spoke cautiously and in a somewhat old-fashioned way.

“What do you propose doing after we return?” Anyone talking with Maria Steyn found himself quickly falling into her stately patterns.

“I shall continue to read. And work on rebuilding the farm. My father remarried, did I tell you?”

“No.” He reflected on this, then said, “I wish mine had. I think Father has been very lonely.”

“War alters people,” she said. “Perhaps he had no further need of a wife.”

“All men need wives.” He said this with such speed that he felt
embarrassed. He had not yet touched Maria, not even by any accident, other than shaking hands one time at the railway station, and he was deeply impelled to take her hand now, but as they turned a corner in the path they came upon another young pair who were kissing rather ardently and bumping into each other, and, as Detlev later expressed it to himself, “perhaps doing other things even more awful,” so that he and Maria backed away in deep confusion. The lively eroticism of the other couple did not, as it might have done with another pair, inspire them to kiss, too; it shocked them; and they returned to the monument, in whose grim shadow they finished their conversation. They were, in other words, both puritans of an especially tenacious character: Huguenots imbued with the living spirit of John Calvin and the intellectual and moral torments that come with that persuasion. But they were also lusty Dutch peasants, close to the soil, and had they once kissed there on the mound, they would have expanded with happy love. The moment gone, they talked, reverently.

“Detlev,” Maria said. “That’s a curious name.” When he explained its German origin, she said with some force, “But if you’re to be an Afrikaner, working on the things your brother-in-law … What was his name?”

“Piet Krause.”

“Now, that’s a proper Afrikaner name. You should have one too. Detleef, that’s what it ought to be, here in a new land.”

“Do you like it as Detleef?”

“I do. It sounds proper and responsible.”

Whenever their conversation might have taken a lighter tone, the shadow of the monument fell across them, and they would study its well-carved figures and envision once more the episodes of the camps, or they would look up at the monitory obelisk rising one hundred and thirteen feet above them, summoning them back to serious matters.

“If the Germans should arrive from the west and the east, would you join with them?”

“Is there reason to believe …”

“Oh, yes! My father is sure there will be war in Europe, and that the Germans will mass their forces in South-West Africa and Tanganyika and come toward us like pincers.” She hesitated. “You’d join them, of course?”

Detlev didn’t know what to say. He’d heard such rumors frequently
in recent years, when things seemed to be going badly in Europe, but he had never believed that Germany would actually strike at South Africa. If she did, he would leap to her support, of course, because any enemy of England’s had to be a friend of his, but he was not prepared to commit himself openly.

“My father will be the first to join them,” Maria said. “We pray that they will come soon to liberate us.” Detlev understood this enthusiasm but still remained silent. “It would be rather wonderful, you know, to be a free country again,” she said, “under our own rulers, with a strong Germany on either side to protect us.”

When Detlev made no response, she changed the subject: “Will you make your name Afrikaans?”

“I’ve been thinking about that. I don’t much like it the way it is.”

“Detleef,” she repeated. “I like that.”

“Done!” he said. “I prefer all things Afrikaans. I am now Detleef van Doorn.” He was sorely tempted to take her hand, or even to kiss her to mark the solemnity of his rechristening, but the mournfulness of the monument prevented this, and they spent the rest of that meaningful day talking of sober subjects.

When he returned home he found himself something of a hero, for he was invited to speak at various communities, telling of the splendid monument which memorialized their hardships in the camps. He was asked to come even to Carolina, an invitation he accepted eagerly, since it enabled him to renew acquaintance with Maria Steyn and to meet her father. When in his talk he alluded gracefully to the heroic performance of Christoffel Steyn and the Carolina men, everyone applauded.

After his speech he shared supper with the Steyns, and in later years he remembered this affair as one of the most important in his life. It had nothing to do with Maria, and was a silly thing, really, but as he watched Mrs. Steyn, almost as plump as her husband, moving easily about the kitchen and displaying her love for her family, it occurred to him that she was a second wife, not a first, and he wondered if his childhood would not have been happier had his father married again. He saw Mrs. Steyn as the epitome of what a loving Afrikaner woman could be, and it was important that he see this.

When he returned to his own home he was struck by its bleakness, and he felt depressed, but his thoughts were diverted by a series of
mysterious incidents. Unidentified horsemen arrived at Vrymeer asking where General de Groot lived, and when they were told, they galloped off into the darkness. Excitement was caused by the appearance of an automobile containing three serious-looking men who wanted to consult with the general, and one afternoon Maria Steyn’s fat little father appeared on the stoep, asking to talk not only with General de Groot but also with Jakob. Van Doorn was now sixty-nine years old, white-haired and somewhat stooped, but still mentally alert, and after the meeting ended he was obviously disturbed.