I was nervous of being caught, but got enough read to form an idea, especially the parts underlined in red with dates in the margin in Gaat’s hand and ticked off as ‘read’, the first, the second and the third time. Some parts were read every day of the last months. Read from the wheelchair, inside the walking frame, in the hip-bath, as Gaat had noted on each page. Sung, recited, copied in block letters with a different line division on the counter-page, biblical texts, curses, indictments. All the words written out in full, the sentences provided with punctuation. As if she couldn’t tolerate the abbreviations and untidiness.
Two of the copied-out sheets were still clamped to the reading-frame.
14 September 1960, a month after my birth:
As directed by the Almighty God, Ruler of our joint Destinies and Keeper of the Book of Life, I Kamilla de Wet (neé Redelinghuys) dedicate this journal to the history of Agaat Lourier, daughter of Maria Lourier of Barrydale and Damon (Joppies) Steefert of Worcester so that there may be a record one day of her being chosen and of the precious opportunities granted to her on the farm Grootmoedersdrift of a Christian education and of all the privileges of a good Afrikaner home. So that in reading this one day she may ponder the unfathomable ways of Providence, who worked through me, His obedient servant and woman of His people, to deliver her from the bitter deprivation in which she certainly would have perished as an outcast amongst her own people. I pray for mercy to fulfil this great task of education that I have undertaken to the glory of God to the best of my ability.
Let His will be done.
His kingdom come.
For His is the power and the glory,
For ever and ever.
Amen.
Could she really have written that? My sentimental, hypochondriac mother with her head full of romantic German melodies? So force-fed with the insanity of this country? Sounded more like Pa’s language. Toastmaster bravado. But without a trace of irony.
I loved her, in my way. But that I shouldn’t have read.
Also not the epitaph. In the barn in the back Agaat went to show it to me, the headstone, neatly engraved.
Kamilla Redelinghuys. 11/3/1926-16/12/1996
Passed away peacefully.
And then God saw that it was Good.
How people can get it into their heads.
Cold I am all of a sudden. Could I be the only person awake in this plane? Moonlight on the cloud canopy. The curtain of the service galley has been drawn.
How can Grootmoedersdrift determine my idea of myself? Unavoidable. And yet, the meaning of my existence is elsewhere, always and in principle elsewhere, even if I were to stay here, in a realm of thought where the thoughts assess themselves, the region where you always listen at a distance.
Is listening enough? For how long? Before I’m forced to do something? At least my will has been lodged with the attorneys in Swellendam, the farm made over to Agaat. She can bequeath it one day to whomever she wants. Is man enough, will battle through the rest. With hand-plough and mules, with churn and sickle and harness-cask and threshing-floor if need be, like the first farmers on the land. She’s part of the place, from the beginning. Calloused, salted, brayed, the lessons of the masters engraved in her like the law on the tablets of stone, deeper and clearer than I could ever preserve it. She knows the soil. She knows the language. She knows her place. She’ll look after herself. And maintain her shrine inviolate. Going every day to beat her forehead in its white cap against the bedstead like a Jew by the Wailing Wall. With this difference: The promised land is hers already, her creator is keeping remote control. Six feet under.
It’s not a country for me to live in. To study, yes. The Fat-Anna Schotisse. The Stormberg Vastrap. Nobody has yet written up how exactly this music functioned in the identity-formation of the Afrikaner. Only ever Heimwee by S. le Roux Marais. Couldn’t with the best will in the world call that a fado.
Yesterday’s newspaper I left at the airport. Remarkable journalism. Rugby players on the front page and the back page and the centre pages, lawlessness and corruption, child rape, political denial of AIDS, middle-class sex scandals, letters from indignant creationists.
How in God’s name is it to carry on from here?
In the first place: For the execution of useful research the impulse to go and work for the Red Cross must be suppressed. That’s what I tell myself.
I just want to cauterise it all neatly now. A dry white scar, une cicatrice. Perhaps still slightly sensitive during changes of season in the northern hemisphere. Mourning is a life-long occupation, says my therapist. That is what I must do then. Must learn to do. Mourn my mother, my mothers, the white one and the brown one. Mourn my country. Pa who understood better than Ma how things worked between them, but who couldn’t help himself.
They had to lug the branch out of him, I’ve since heard, with the letter that Gaat wrote on my behalf, covered in blood in his pants pocket. Fancy the detail. Just after it happened, she wrote to me that he’d had an accident with his car in the drift, full stop.
So it was ‘my’ letter, then, that caused it. My poor father.
My poor mother.
What remains? Grieving. Grieving till I’ve mastered the hat-trick. The difficult triple sanity: Wafer, stone, and flower in turn. de Wet individuated.
Do I hear something under the engine noise, through the air conditioning? A melody? A rhythm?
Why that? Of all things? Gaat’s story, the last story that she always had to tell me before I’d go to sleep, the one she never wanted Ma to hear. Her voice close to me, her forehead bent over me, the embroidery on her cap very close, white sheep, white flowers, white, mountains and trees. .
Images behind my eyelids. High up in my nose a prickling, sooty, smoky, the ember-fire in Gaat’s room. Every word. If she left out one, I knew. If she told anything differently, I protested. Or I said, start all over, you’re not telling it right. Emphases, rhythms, repetitions, questions. Agaat’s strong arm around my shoulders, her small hand on my chest. Her voice, incantatory.
Once upon a time, long, long ago, there was a woman who was terribly unhappy. She lived with her husband on a farm at the foot of a big blue mountain next to a river. Her house stood close to a drift amongst high trees in a garden filled with flowers. It had two white gables and a stoep and many rooms inside. At night when the noises of day died down, and she heard the river flowing, the wind in the trees, the sound of the sleeping mountain, g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g, like the soughing of a shell against your ear, then she was very sad and then she cried in her bed, softly so that her husband shouldn’t wake up. He was a good-looking man with shiny black hair, but his heart was cold. In a loud voice he bragged about nothing at all, his hand was cruel and his head was filled with flippancies. He couldn’t comfort her.
The man was one reason for her unhappiness. But there was another greater reason. Can you guess what it was?
Was she as ugly as sin?
No, she was pretty enough.
Was she poor?
No, she was rich.
Was she without friends?
No, she knew lots of people.