The Last Formation

When I was thirteen, we drove eight hours to my grandmother’s farm in the dusty heart of the Free State. The town was a grid of gravel streets lined with pepper trees, and everyone knew everyone. On the Saturday morning, my mother and I walked to the general dealer for bread and milk. As we turned onto Cilliers Street, a woman in a floral dress dropped her bag of oranges. My mother froze. The woman was her eldest sister, Aunt Helena, whom we hadn’t seen in over a decade. Their embrace was a mix of tears and laughter, and they talked for an hour outside the shop. Aunt Helena told us she was hosting a farewell party for her son, Pieter, at the army barracks on the edge of town. He was deploying to the border the next week. She insisted we come. We went.

The barracks sat behind a rusted chain-link fence, a cluster of flat-roofed buildings that had seen better decades. The entertainment area was a U-shaped courtyard with a braai pit, a bar built from old railway sleepers, and a kidney-shaped swimming pool with a green tint. The actual soldiers’ quarters were off-limits, separated by a long corridor that smelled of floor polish and stale cigarette smoke. My cousin Dirk, my sister Marie, and I were typical kids, bored with the adults drinking and dancing to a crackling radio. We slipped away, drawn by the mystery of the forbidden corridor.

We tiptoed past a row of doors, each marked with a faded number. The linoleum floor echoed our steps. Dirk whispered that his father said there were only a dozen soldiers left, most of them reservists. At the end of the corridor, a door stood ajar, light spilling out. We peeked inside. A soldier, young and lean with close-cropped hair, sat on the edge of a cot, staring at a photograph in his hands. He hadn’t heard us. But as we began to retreat, the floorboard creaked. He looked up, and his eyes were hollow, as if he’d been crying for days. He didn’t shout. He just said, ‘You shouldn’t be here. But since you are, come in. I have something to show you.’

Dirk, ever curious, stepped in. I grabbed his arm, but he shook me off. The soldier stood and gestured to a footlocker at the foot of the cot. ‘My brother was here before me. He served his two years and came back a different man. He left this for me, said I’d understand when it was my turn.’ He opened the locker. Inside, wrapped in an old wool blanket, was a leather-bound journal and a small brass compass. The soldier, whose name was Louis, handed the journal to Dirk. ‘Read the last page,’ he said. Dirk opened it, and his face went pale. He handed it to me. The last page had a single line, written in trembling ink: ‘They never leave you. They just wait for you to be alone.’

We stood in silence. The radio in the courtyard crackled with a distant voice, but it felt miles away. Louis smiled without warmth. ‘My brother was posted to the border. When he came back, he wouldn’t speak. He’d sit in this very room, staring at the wall. One night, he handed me that compass and said, “When it points north, they’re coming home.” But the needle never points north. It points to the doors, to the dark corners. It points to the places where they wait.’ He held the compass out. The needle was spinning slowly, then it stopped, pointing directly at the door we’d left ajar. We didn’t look back. We ran, and we didn’t stop until we reached the courtyard, where the adults were laughing, oblivious.

We didn’t tell anyone what we saw. But that night, back at my grandmother’s, I woke to the sound of gravel crunching under boots. I crept to the window. The street was empty under the amber streetlight, but I could hear a faint rhythmic marching, like a distant parade. I saw a formation of soldiers, six or seven of them, marching in lockstep down the middle of the road, their uniforms dusty, their faces hidden in shadow. They moved in perfect silence, and as they passed the house, the one at the rear glanced up at my window. It wasn’t Louis. It was a face I didn’t recognize, but it had the same hollow eyes. I ducked, and when I peeked again, they were gone.

The next day, Aunt Helena called. Pieter’s deployment had been moved up; he had to report immediately. The party was cut short. My mother drove us home, and we never spoke of the barracks again. But years later, when I was nineteen and working the night shift at a factory, I heard that same rhythmic marching outside the loading bay. I looked out, and there they were, a formation of soldiers marching toward the chain-link fence at the edge of the property. One of them turned, and it was Dirk, my cousin, who had enlisted last year and died in a non-combat accident overseas. He raised his hand and pointed at me, and his lips formed the words, ‘We wait.’ I closed the door and didn’t open it until dawn.

The compass still sits on my nightstand. Sometimes, in the dead of night, I hear its needle spin. It never points north. It points at the empty spaces in my room, at the door, at the window. And I know, one day, it will point at me, and I’ll have no choice but to join the last formation.