Chapter 50 Cruel Childhood

• Little Nathaniel watched his parents fight every day and watched his mother cry every time his father was done shouting and hitting her. But every single time she forced herself to stop crying, picked him up, rocked him, and sang sweet songs in their mother tongue to calm his scared little heart. He loved his mother, to him she was the strongest woman alive. His experience growing up in a distraught, dysfunctional home made his mind mature even faster than his body. He was a beautiful boy, his father’s genes were strong in him, and his mother’s strength coursed through his veins. Even though he spent nights crying he woke up every day vowing to one day make his mother smile again. To him, no woman could ever be like his mother.
• To him, his mother could do no wrong which was why when he fell under the cruel hand of measles at age 7 he didn’t blame her when she turned to the streets to get the money needed for his treatment. If it was the first time Anja Schmidt had ever had to sell her body, he didn’t blame her, she did it for him. He saw her return to their room in the boarding house with new men every night but once he got his treatments she stopped and continued to take care of him. He slept with his hand over her heart to let her know he loved her and didn’t judge her actions. At age 9 he barely knew or saw his father anymore. The miners in the boarding house were his fathers. Olga was ailing after years spent in the humid kitchen of the boarding house.
• It was at this time that Anja had to make the hard choice of sending him out to work. There was an opening at the orphanage, they were looking for someone to clean the rooms and serve the staff. It didn’t matter that he was not a native, he was hired simply because the Administrator, Isaiah Kopano, a short pudgy man, took pity on the young mother and her malnourished son and gave him the job. Nate worked hard, he was fluent in the language and his mother tongue. His sharp gray eyes missed nothing. The orphanage had a library with sparse books of places of the world. Since the orphans who lived there barely spent their time in the library, Nate retreated there every day after his work was done to read about the places of the world where they had cars, and regular electricity – unlike the fluctuating ones they managed in the Miners Village. He read about the Titanic, read about the wars that took place before he was born, and the booming economy of the Western world after the war. After 2 months of working in the orphanage, he made a friend, Tshepo, a boy of his age. He was a tall boy with the build of someone older. While the older boys went to work or the other smaller boys played Nate and Tshepo spent their time building their friendship and equal love for books.