Earth’s joys grow dim; its glories pass away;
Change and decay in all around I see;
O Thou who changest not, abide with me!
Now everyone is transported by the power of the hymn. High rises Agaat’s descant for the last verse.
Heaven’s morning breaks, and earth’s vain shadows flee;
In life, in death, O Lord, abide with me.
Where is death’s sting? Where, grave, thy victory?
I triumph still, if Thou abide with me!
The beginning you never recorded. You couldn’t bring yourself to it. It would take too long, you told yourself. A piece of explanation while everything was already in motion. Your marriage, farming with all its ramifications. There was in any case something cryptic about the beginning. You always told yourself, one day. When you’re not so busy. When you’ll be able to focus. When you’ll be able to sit down at your leisure and try to piece together everything as it happened. The whirligigs, circling on the dam, you still wanted to look up the scientific name. As if that would help. Gyrinus natans. Excuses, all of it.
Now you understand the actual reason. Or one of them.
It wasn’t meant for the diary.
Nothing about it was meant for a diary.
It would have to be taken up into the family saga direct: Grootmoedersdrift, farm, house, man, wife, child.
First child.
From the beginning. It was never a story on its own.
Especially not the early beginnings.
You thought you could make of the whole Agaat a separate chapter. You thought you could quarantine it in this way. As if it were a thing you could tend in an isolation-pen so that nobody need experience your failures and your mistakes at first hand.
With her you never discussed any of your considerations and sentiments around her adoption. You forbade her ever to ask anything about it. You told yourself that it was best that way for her own sake, that when the time was ripe you’d rather give her the whole record so that she could read through it herself.
But you forgot about it.
There were incidents that reminded you again of your resolution. But by then it was too difficult. Once you wrote the commission in the front of the first booklet, when things were going well, just after Jakkie’s birth. Another time, a few other times, you tried to conclude it, made a last entry, till it dried up of its own accord. One day you had all the volumes in your hand, arranged them in parcels, bound them with string and stowed them away and suppressed the thought that you’d ever had such a plan, such an intention, to hand it to the one whom it most concerned. You missed your chance. Again and again you missed it. In the end you simply wanted to get the whole lot out of the way. And because you could no longer move on your own, you told her to go and burn it.
And then your deathbed became the fireplace. Crackling with ripeness the time that accrued to her. Wind-dry the material. Your eyes and your ears the hearths into which she could cram the Quink-inscribed pages of Croxley Exercise Books. In a sequence determined by her. With so many omissions and additions that nobody, not even you, would ever be able to ascertain the true facts.
You couldn’t easily improve on her timing. Nor its presentation. Parcel after parcel she fetched the diaries from the sideboard, keeping the best for last.
Timing. That should have been the second name of the Lord. Instead of Providence. Instead of Mercy.
Timing. Chance. Coincidence. From the beginning it had flowed strongly though the whole history.
That week in 1953, mid-December, Day of the Covenant. The harvest was in, there was breathing space on Grootmoedersdrift. You wanted to get away from Jak. He’d caused one delay after the other again through his negligence with the combine. You wanted to get away from the squabbles and the slaps. You wanted to go to your mother. A week you spent with her and then you were ready to leave. You’d brought out your suitcases already.
Then she started talking, out of the blue, with the good God of Timing whispering in her ear, about the labourers, families you’d known since childhood, and who’d lived on Goedbegin for generations, the Septembers, the Louriers.
Maria Lourier is still there, she said, your nanny, do you remember? Piet’s dead, from TB they say. He just suddenly went into a decline and then he died off. She’s taken another husband now, one Joppies as they call him, but his real name is Damon, Damon Steefert, a man from Worcester with a long jaw but for the rest from the dregs, swears and drinks and batters and the Lord only knows what else, and there’s been a child come from it all, the wretched Maria, I warned her, she’s well into her forties. Things aren’t at all well down there in the cottages, perhaps you should go and say something, they do bad things with the child, all of them, a little girl, something wrong with her apparently, deformed or something, won’t talk, sits inside the fireplace all day they say.
Your mother’s feigned chatter. Did she know what she was doing? Did it dawn on her while she was bringing it up? You fancied that she was talking more slowly, as if she could feel something stirring, an idea, a plan.
You could have started saying something. You could at least have opened your mouth. But you were enthralled by the tale. A bad mother, a discarded child.
That was the story she dangled in front of your nose.
Was that how she sought to avenge herself on you? To ensure that you wouldn’t escape your portion of pain in life?
You remember the day well, when you set off under your mother’s watchful eye by the back door to the labourers’ cottages.
Be careful, it’s a holiday! she called after you.
There were cicadas chirring louder and louder the further you walked, devil’s thorns sticking to your sandals at every step, prickle-grass on your hem, the white-hot sun of the noonday hour, no shadows.
It was quiet around the cottages, the hangover silence of the Day of the Covenant, a stink of excrement hanging over everything. Skinny dogs lying around with flies in their eyes.
Maria was sitting at the back against the house under the fig-tree in a tattered dress, a warp around the mouth that you didn’t know. The two sons were there, Dakkie and Hekkie, your erstwhile playmates, with scars across their cheeks that hadn’t been there when you played with them as a child. They replied to your questions sullenly. Only once did Maria come half erect, only when you were about to leave, only when you asked so where is your new husband, and I hear you’ve had another child. Almost as if she wanted to prevent you from asking it, wanted to prevent its being discussed, she got to her feet and gestured vaguely and then sank back on the bench against the wall, chin on the chest.
The back door was ajar but you walked round the front to go in, you knocked and waited and then turned the knob and pushed open the door, took in your breath and held it when the smother hit you, of rotten piss, of vomit, of old sweet liquor, of unwashed human bodies, of cold cinders and half-burnt bluegum wood. At first you could see nothing, so dark was it in the front room, then through a half-open door in another room, a mattress on the floor and a coil of dirty bedding in which you could make out a man’s lower body.
Only when you pushed open a shutter did you notice the child, crouched in the corner of the blackened hearth with the knuckles of one hand crammed into her mouth.
You went on your knees in front of the hearth. The child was bitterly thin, the little legs full of scratches and bruises, her bony body visible in patches through the rags in which she was dressed. One foot was turned in and one little arm she kept pushed in behind her back. You found the child’s eyes, but only for a moment before she jerked away her head and screwed her eyes shut as if expecting a blow.