Suddenly Lothar snatched the pack from Hendrick's shoulder and threw it to the ground. He ripped it open angrily and snatched out the small canvas roll in which he kept his surgical instruments and store of medicines.
Take Manie, he ordered Hendrick. Wait for me in the gorge of the Gamas river, at the same place we camped on the march from Usakos. You remember it? Hendrick nodded. How long will it be before you come? As long as it takes them to die, said Lothar. He stood up and looked at Manfred.
Do what Hendrick tells you, he ordered.
Can't I come with you, Pa? Lothar did not bother to reply. He turned and strode back amongst the moonlit thorn trees and they watched him until he disappeared. Then Hendrick dropped to his knees and began re-rolling the pack.
Sarah squatted beside the fire, her skirts pulled up around her skinny brown thighs, slitting her eyes against the smoke as she waited for the soot-blackened billy to boil.
She looked up and saw Lothar standing at the edge of the firelight. She stared at him, and then slowly her pale delicate features seemed to crumple and the tears streamed down her cheeks, glistening in the light of the flames.
I thought you weren't coming back, she whispered. I thought you had gone. Lothar shook his head abruptly, still so angry with his own weakness that he could not trust himself to speak.
Instead he squatted across the fire from her and spread the canvas roll. Its contents were pitifully inadequate. He could draw a rotten tooth, lance a boil or a snake-bite, or set a broken limb, but to treat runaway enteric there was almost nothing. He measured a spoonful of a black patent medicine, Chamberlain's Famous Diarrhoea Remedy, into the tin mug and filled it with hot water from the billy.
Help me, he ordered Sarah and between them they lifted the youngest child into a sitting position. She was without weight and he could feel every bone in her tiny body, like that of a fledgling taken from the nest. It was hopeless.
She'll be dead by morning he thought, and held the mug to her lips. She did not last that long; she slipped away a few hours before dawn. The moment of death was ill-defined, and Lothar was not certain it was over until he felt for the child's pulse at the carotid and felt the chill of eternity in her wasted flesh.
The little boy lasted until noon and died with as little fuss as his sister. Lothar wrapped them in the same grey, soiled blanket and carried them in his arms to the communal grave that had been already dug at the edge of the camp.
They made a small lonely little package on the sandy floor of the square excavation, at the end of the row of larger bodies.
Sarah's mother fought for her life.
God knows why she should want to go on living, Lothar thought, there isn't much in it for her. But she moaned and rolled her head and cried out in the delirium of fever. Lothar began to hate her for the stubborn struggle to survive that kept him beside her foul mattress, forced to share in her degradation, to touch her hot fever-wracked skin and dribble liquid into her toothless mouth.
At dusk he thought she had won. Her skin cooled and she was quieter. She reached out feebly for Sarah's hand and tried to speak, staring up at her face as though she recognized her, the words catching and cawing in the back of her throat and thick yellow mucus bubbling in the corners of her lips.
The effort was too much. She closed her eyes and seemed to sleep.
Sarah wiped her lips and held on to the thin bony hand with the blue veins swelling under the thin skin.
An hour later the woman sat up suddenly, and said clearly: Sarah, where are you, child? then fell back and fought for a long strangling breath. The breath ended in the middle and her bony chest subsided gradually, and the flesh seemed to droop from her face like warm candlewax.
This time Sarah walked beside him as Lothar carried the woman to the grave site. He laid her at the end of the row of corpses. Then they walked back to the hut.
Sarah stood and watched Lothar roll the canvas pack, and her small white face was desolate. He went half a dozen paces and then turned back. She was quivering like a rejected puppy, but she had not moved.
All right, he sighed with resignation. Come on, then. And she scampered to his side.
I won't be any trouble, she gabbled, almost hysterical with relief. I'll help you. I can cook and sew and wash. I won't be any trouble. What are you going to do with her? Hendrick asked. She can't stay with us. We could never do what we have to do with a child of her age. I could not leave her there, Lothar defended himself, in that death camp. It would have been better for us. Hendrick shrugged. But what do we do now? They had left the camp in the bottom of the gorge and climbed to the top of the rocky wall. The children were far below on the sandbank at the edge of the only stagnant green pool in the gorge that still held water.
They squatted side by side, Manfred with his right hand extended as he held the handline. They saw him lean back and strike, then heave the line in hand over hand. Sarah jumped up and her excited shrieks carried up to where they sat. They watched Manfred swing the kicking slippery black catfish out of the green water. It squirmed on the sand, glistening with wetness.
I will decide what to do with her, Lothar assured him, but Hendrick interrupted.
It better be soon. Every day we waste the water-holes in the north are drying out, and we still don't even have the horses. Lothar stuffed his clay pipe with fresh shag and thought about it. Hendrick was right; the girl complicated everything. He had to get rid of her somehow. Suddenly he looked up from the pipe and smiled.
My cousin, he said, and Hendrick was puzzled.
I did not know you had a cousin. Most of them perished in the camps, but Trudi survived. Where is she, this beloved cousin of yours? She lives on our road to the north. We'll waste no time in dumping the brat with her. I don't want to go, Sarah whispered miserably. I don't know your aunt. I want to stay here with you. 'Hush, Manfred cautioned her. You'll wake Pa and Henny. He pressed closer to her and touched her lips to quieten her. The fire had died down and the moon had set.
Only the desert stars lit them, big as candles against the black velvet curtain of the sky.
Sarah's voice was so small now that he could barely make out the words, though her lips were inches from his ear.
You are the only friend I have ever had, she said, and who will teach me to read and write? Manfred felt an enormous weight of responsibility conferred upon him by her words. His feelings for her to this A moment had been ambivalent. Like her he had never had friends of his own age, never attended a school, never lived in a town.
His only teacher had been his father. He had lived all his life with grown men; his father and Hendrick and the rough hard men of the road camps and trawler fleet.
There had been no woman to caress or gentle him.
She had been his first female companion, though her weakness and silliness irritated him. He had to wait for her to catch up when they climbed the hills and she wept when he beat a squirming catfish to death or wrung the neck of a fat feathered brown francolin taken in one of his noose snares. However, she could make him laugh and he enjoyed her voice when she sang, thin but sweet and melodious. Then again although her adulation was sometimes cloying and excessive, he experienced an unaccountable sense of well being when she was with him. She was quick to learn and in the few days they had been together she already had the alphabet by heart and the multiplication tables from two to ten.
It would have been much better if she had been a boy, but then there was something else. The smell of her skin and the softness of her intrigued him. Her hair was so fine and silky. Sometimes he would touch it as though by accident and she would freeze and keep very still under his fingers, so that he was embarrassed and dropped his hand self-consciously.