Hannah settled herself at the dining-room table, stretching her injured leg to the side. She opened the notebook first and began to read Gisela’s account of the Badenhorsts. Gisela wrote beautifully. Her Afrikaans narrative was easy and compelling. Hannah followed the story of the Badenhorst trekboers who had settled on Silwerfontein in the 1830s, bringing their baby, Jakob.
Hannah read carefully, not wanting to miss a single detail about Jakob’s son, Danie, taking over the farm and marrying Aletta. They had four children by the time the war broke out. Hannah retraced and read the sentence again. Four children? No, there were five. Wolf, Rachel, Paul, Kristina, and Lizzie. Maybe it was a simple misprint. She kept reading. The British arrived, burnt the farm to the ground, and the family split between the camp in Winburg and the men on commando. Both girls, their mother, and Oupa Jakob died in the camp.
Paul, their younger son, was killed on commando. He had been riding behind his father on the same horse, escaping a British regiment, when sniper-fire wounded him in the side. His father caught him before he fell, and rode with him to safety, only to discover his son was already dead. Paul had been eleven years old. Hannah paused her reading. Another child dead? Rachel’s brother now? Was there no end to the despair of this family?
At the end of the war, Danie and his eldest son Wolf returned to Silwerfontein to find their lives devastated. They were the sole survivors of the war. They had no livestock, no crops, no home, and no money. Danie had some kind of breakdown. He moved to his sister in Pretoria, leaving Wolf to scrape an existence off the land. Eight years later, Wolf married a local girl, Corlie, and their son, Daniel, Gisela’s father, was born later that year.
Hannah sat back in her chair, confused and upset. Why was there no mention of Rachel? Did she die in the Goshen camp? She turned another page of Gisela’s neat handwriting and skimmed down the next page, titled ‘Memories of Ouma and Oupa’. Gisela described her grandparents who had lived with them at the homestead. Gisela remembered a strict matriarch who had ruled the house, and gentle Oupa Wolf, who had lived with an irrevocable sadness in him which even a little girl could sense.
Hannah turned the page and drew in a sharp breath. Gisela had pasted in a photocopied page, and Hannah immediately recognised Rachel’s writing. The neat, cramped words skittered across the page just like in the journal, but this was a letter. It was dated 3 June 1939.
My dearest Wolf,
Please accept my sincere condolences on the passing of Corlie, though I will not grieve her loss myself. As you know, there was much bitterness between us, but I do grieve for your loss and that of your children. She was a strong woman and, if nothing else, I respected her.
Is it not time for us to lay our past down and become friends again? At least friends, if we cannot be anything more. I have missed you, Wolf, more than I can possibly express. I have missed your children and long to see them again. May I come home?
There has been so much loss and grief in our lives, too much for one person to bear, and so I wish to be by your side. I wish to share the rest of our days, to come full circle and be back on Silwerfontein like it was in the beginning. There is no one else to remember the beginning but you and me. Do you speak to your children of the girls? Of Kristina and Lizzie? Of Paul? Should they be forgotten, Wolf? Please let me come home. Let us put right what was broken.
There was another photocopied letter pasted opposite. December 1939.
Dearest Wolf,
I have had no reply from you, and hope that the post has mislaid my previous letter. The thought that you would ignore me is too painful. All these years apart I justified because Corlie could not tolerate my being on the farm, but now she is gone. Wolf, why can we not be together again?
I know people would frown at our living together in the house but, Wolf, we have lived through so much. Survived so much. We have so little time left. Let us be together again.
I know you do not like thinking about those days, but I have to say this. When I was in the camp, I prayed every night that you would come and fetch me. I cried out to the Lord to keep you alive for me. And He did. When the camp closed and the soldiers told us to leave, the inmates looked at them bewildered. Where would they go? To what? But not me. I knew exactly where I was going. I reached the farm that afternoon. That day will be etched in my memory forever. I walked up the avenue of oaks which had remained the same and I half-expected the house to be just like it was. Seeing the blackened shell, empty of everything and everyone I had loved, brought my grief back, hot and full of rage. Until I saw you, lying as if asleep on the grass. Your horse, not familiar to me, grazed nearby. When I knelt next to you, you opened hollow eyes to mine and you said, ‘You are all I have left, Rachel Badenhorst.’
We scrounged for food, digging up what potatoes were left, and picking the last of the self-sown vegetables. We had survived the worst of times, and now we had to fight to make our lives count. For the sake of the ones we had lost.
And then came the days of work. The years of building and ploughing until we fell into our bed exhausted. And slowly, slowly, we brought life back to the land and we brought life back to the house and you loved me. We were partners.
I forgave you for Corlie. Being near you was enough. And then you let her send me away and I have forgiven you that too. I hear you have a grandchild. I long to see Daniel’s girl. Please let us make it right, Wolf.
Hannah felt wrung out. Rachel had survived the camp. Wolf had not come for her after all but she, in her determination, had made her way back to the farm and to him. Why had Wolf’s wife driven her away? Hannah frowned, skimming back through the letters. The tone was almost lover-like. Was that it? Could Wolf and Rachel have had some kind of affair? A relationship between brother and sister would explain the separation and even perhaps Rachel’s excision from the family records, but somehow it didn’t fit. There was something Hannah was missing.
She pulled the lever arch file closer and opened it. Gisela had filed documents in plastic sleeves, and Hannah began paging through them. There was the missing page from the family Bible, the births and deaths register. She ran her finger down the list and found no Rachel Badenhorst recorded. The puzzle just seemed to be spiralling tighter and tighter, making Hannah more confused, the more she found out.
As she flipped the sleeve in the file, she saw, at the back of the register, a photograph lying with its back facing out. Scrawled on the back, in fountain pen ink, was ‘Rachel and me, 1909’. Hannah slid her hand into the sleeve and manoeuvred the photo out of the plastic. Turning it over, her heart seemed to stop in her chest. Wolf sat on the step of this very house, his hair bright and his face sporting a short beard. His eyes laughed at the camera, mouth caught in mid-speech. There was a lightness to him not present in his wedding portrait. Hannah’s focus shifted to the other person in the picture. She stood with one hand curled around the pillar of the stoep and the other set on her hip. A tall, striking black woman, her hair braided in a coil on the crown of her head. She held herself proudly, a smile on her lips and her gaze direct. She was beautiful.