Francois Smith
THE CAMP WHORE
Translated by Dominique Botha
Tafelberg
To my parents,
Hendrik and Grietje Mor Smith
Chapter 1
He is lying with his back to her; his head is turned towards the drab, dead still curtains at the window. In the dimness she sees just a profile from behind: the ear a dark fold on the equally dark hunk of his head. If there was light, she thought, his ear would be transparent, rosy and fine-veined against the glare, the skin peeling perhaps along its wing-like curve. This is what she has been trained to do, to see light and life. That is her purpose here. But in the gloom everything is upended. Or perhaps exactly as it should be.
She pulls her gaze away to the shoulder protruding from the sheet and the arm lying limp on the blanket, the pyjama sleeve pushed up against the limb. The hand hangs over the hip, facing the front, out of sight, but the arm, the bit that shows, is thinner than she’d expected. What had she expected? Can she remember any of it?
She glances at Hurst standing next to her; he is staring intently and blankly at the patient on the bed. There is no escape, she has to look. At the soft creases of the cotton sleeve pilling at the elbow, the petal-like collar curving around the thin stem of the neck.
And again at the ear.
She does not feel surprised. Thus spake fate. The moment she set foot on these shores she sensed, within this vast unknown an ancient familiarity, that something – someone – somewhere, behind a façade, a door, a fence, was awaiting her. And now it was as if that realisation had led her eyes directly to the ear. That is what she noticed before anything else, the ear. That notch, like the incision a farmer makes on the ear of a sheep. And where you’d expect the soft fold of the lobe, the curve fell rudely to the neck.
That is her mark.
Her tongue sticks to her palate, loosens with a smacking sound. She turns to the door that has clicked shut behind them. She takes a deep breath, holds it a while before unevenly exhaling. How did I end up here? she wonders.
This is how it happened: she’d stood in front of the door, in front of that dark unyielding surface that is now behind them with its edge against the doorframe. She’d stood in front of that reflecting surface, the tiny varnish cracks like the retina of an eye, the smell of polished wood in her nostrils, her breath against that unforgiving surface, with eyes that she tried to tear away from the white label in the metal holder – the name that she cannot utter.
Major Hurst stood behind her, and she turned around, her face to one side so that he wouldn’t see her shock, her fingertips pressed against the wood. Hurst had spoken, but what had he said? With one hand he gently pushed her aside, and with the other opened the door. Then she followed him into the dusk, the back of his smoothly ironed uniform between her and the man in the bed.
That is how it happened.
It is deathly quiet in the room. There is only silence. Until Hurst speaks. He’d stepped forward before he began to speak. He said the name of the man on the bed. The name she can’t bring herself to say. And at the mere mention of that name, she feels herself seized, shaken, as if caught in a whirlwind – and hurled down at a litter of tents on the godforsaken Free State veld.
“Sister Nell?”
What? It is Hurst who has spoken. Here, right in front of her.
This is where she is, with Major Arthur Hurst in the Seale-Hayne hospital in Devon. This is where she has to be, nowhere else; she must harness her will to remain present, here, in this moment. They are in the private rooms of one of the king’s officers. No, not the king’s – one of her own. Peering from behind Major Hurst, she can see most of the bed. The tips of two feet under a sheet. She blinks her eyes in an attempt to focus. The feet under the sheet give a nervous twitch.
Sixteen years ago she had lain like this in a twilight cave, waiting, lying and watching the shadow slowly shift across the mouth of the cave, lying and waiting and waiting and waiting for something inside her to calm down.
Chapter 2
I can see. My eyes must have been open long before I realised this. At first the light falling around me was so white that I thought it was not light, not light. I don’t know what I thought it was, but whatever it was also poured from my mouth and everything, everything inside me and around me is filled with this bitter, burning nausea. I must not look; I don’t want to know what it is, I don’t want to feel like this, no, I don’t. I don’t. Everything must just go away. I must rather not think, because when I do my mind crushes me, my thoughts shoved up against the bone. It’s the thinking that makes it crack open, makes it hurt so.
It smells of sheep. Dust and dung and stone and wool. I think I’m in some kind of cave. I’m lying in the shade, but at the open end the sun is so bright I cannot look. Speckled shafts of light, and farther on, dark people seem to be bending down and looking in, or perhaps it’s rock rabbits among the wild olives. I don’t know I cannot think my ears go deaf and all around me are paintings on the rock of people and animals and I hear the hooves of thousands of sheep on trampled earth they were the ones that stampeded over me all of them with their little sharp hooves grinding my whole body into the dirt flaying the skin off my cheeks off my ribs the hard horn in my eyes I cannot think I cannot think.
Now I know what I saw. My own thoughts. A bloody trail dribbling from my head, bubbling and gushing.
It hurts so much that I have tried to scream, but I can’t, I just lie here. This is what I saw. I am lying like a slaughtered sheep with blue seeping veins bulging over the slimy white stomach, a blade grating, grating, a dried-out rusk falling to the dung floor and disintegrating where my toes should be, my mouth stuffed with sharp, hard crumbs. I can’t say anything, because it smells of smoke and wool and sewage. Someone threw a cloth into that stinking ditch and I should rather look away, away, away because there are goats here red as soil and white like clouds they jump over each other in disarray people with sticks herd them black like mud are the people and the eland jump over me, jumping higher, higher, higher. If only I could shut my eyes so tightly that everything would vanish.
Chapter 3
The train clicketty-clacks sedately from Harwich through Devon’s rich blend of green and brown, dissolving watercolours that trickle down the pane. But her mind still heaves with the swell of the grey sea and the ship’s listless rocking, as if her thoughts lie sunken below the deep cold waters.
For most of the voyage she had stood on the upper deck of the mailboat to Harwich, one of just a handful of women among a multitude of men, mainly crew, some officials, even a few soldiers, all with a special concession to navigate the warring seas, which would otherwise be impossible. With the ferry services suspended, the mailboat was the only means of travel from the Netherlands to Britain.
The last time she’d been on board a ship was shortly before the end of the Boer War when she’d left Cape Town – ironically to get away from another war. The thought came to her there on the creaking deck of the mailboat with its wet voices and sea spray: that war was mine. Not this one. And as the boat pushed through calm seas that occasionally groaned into a swell, it occurred to her how different the North Sea was to the silver shimmer of the sea she remembered, whipped by the north-wester into thundering, frothing waves pounding against the rocks at Three Anchor Bay. She briefly tried to recall something of her war, the one from sixteen years ago. By now she’d been in the Netherlands almost as long as she had been in South Africa. With some irritation, she pushed aside these thoughts. It’s over. My war is done.
What she does think about occasionally, almost reliving it each time, is how young she was in 1902 when Cape Town and Table Mountain had slipped from view behind her. Perhaps she should rather say she was young again, because before that she was so terribly old, at death’s door. How strange the thought seems now, but that is how it was. On that day, on the upper deck of the