I cannot remember any of these tutors, only the last one that I still knew as Meester. By then Jakob had been confirmed and had stopped taking lessons, but Meester still taught Pieter, and, as he had ample time and no other way of passing it, he taught me a few things here and there in between, though it was not considered one of his duties. I doubt whether Mother really liked it much, but in the end I would have had to get a little education somehow in order to be confirmed, and I cannot remember her ever expressing outright disapproval.
Meester was a Dutchman, and I think that was all we ever found out about him. Dulsie once told us that Father had found him in the Karoo, barefoot in the road with his tin trunk on his shoulder, and had given him a ride out of sympathy and had brought him home to teach the boys, but Dulsie did not think much of Meester and this was not necessarily true, though he did indeed possess a tin trunk. He took his meals with us and before supper in the evenings his feet were washed with ours; yes, and as I have said, on Sundays he read the sermon to us, and I remember how I admired the enthusiasm he brought to the task, even though I did not understand the words in High Dutch. That, however, was as far as he was accepted by the family, for he lived in one of the outside rooms and Dulsie and Gert looked down on him as if they felt he should not be regarded as one of the white people.
The past is another country: where is the road leading there? You can but follow the track blindly where it stretches before your feet, unable to choose the direction in which you want to go. Why am I reminded now of the outside room with its meagre furniture where Meester stayed, and how as a little girl I would sometimes visit him there, and how formally he would welcome me then, as if it were a grown-up who had come to pay him a visit? Of course it was only a game, but to me it meant a lot, and for all I know to him too, for he must have been lonely on that isolated farm among strangers, far from his own country. What we spoke about I no longer remember, though I believe it was probably mostly he who did the talking while I sat listening, wonder-struck and uncomprehending, the way I listened to the sermons he read aloud on Sundays. Sometimes he showed me his books, and I remember some of them had pictures that I found pretty, for in our home there were few books, and pictures were unfamiliar to me. And once he unlocked his tin trunk and brought out a silk handkerchief and showed me what was wrapped inside, and it was something I had never seen before, a black and silver cross so tiny it could fit into the palm of my hand. It is the cross our Lord hung on, Meester told me, and then he wrapped it up again quickly and told me not to mention to Father or Mother that he had showed it to me. What it meant, I did not understand, as little as I understood the secrecy, but the shared confidence was like a bond between us and afterwards, when I visited him in his room, I sometimes asked to see the little cross once more and to hold it in my hand. In our home there were no pictures and no ornaments, and all I had in my youth was Ouma’s brightly-coloured china in the wall-cupboards, the pictures in Meester’s old books, and that tiny cross that I dared not mention, that I could not understand and about which I dared not ask questions. It must have been something Meester had brought with him from abroad that had value or significance to him in his loneliness with us on the farm.
Meester stayed with us long enough to teach me to read and write, that I know for sure, for I remember how, later, we had written each other notes that we hid in a hollow between two stones in the wall encircling the graveyard; Meester tore blank pages out of his books and tore these into narrow strips which we then rolled, and on the back of each other’s notes or between the lines we wrote our replies. It was a game, nothing more, a token of affection or trust, and what we wrote to each other was unimportant. How few were the people who ever showed even just a liking for me, not to mention love; as few as I ever loved myself. Father, Meester, Pieter, Sofie and later Maans — were these all? Yes, there was no one else and, except for Maans, they are all long dead.
Meester left us when Pieter was confirmed: he went down to Worcester with us for Nagmaal, as usual, and then he was suddenly gone. He had probably been dismissed, or possibly he realised his services would no longer be required, and to the others his disappearance was so unremarkable that they found it unnecessary to give me an explanation or even to mention it; but I had expected from him at least a word of farewell, and for days I searched for him among the Nagmaal-goers in the village and among the assembled faces in the streets and in church, but in vain. So, when we returned home I went straight to the graveyard to search for a message from him in the hollow between the stones and, groping into the narrow opening among the stones, my fingers found something, a piece of paper torn from a book, wrapped around the little cross he had left for me as a parting gift because he had known he would not be returning to the farm. I put it back between the stones, for I realised it was a secret nobody else should know about, and later I found a remnant of cloth somewhere to fold around it and a piece of sheepskin to wrap it up more securely, and so I treasured it for years without understanding the nature of the gift I had received.
2
That was when Jakob got married and Sofie came to us. Meester had left, and Pieter had been confirmed and had to pull his weight on the farm, so that he no longer had as much time for me; by then I was older and had more and more responsibilities around the house, where I spent most of my time with the two women, Mother and Dulsie. And then Sofie came; and I still remember how she stepped into our silent circle as we stood outside the house to welcome her and how, suddenly, she knelt down before me to hug me, and exclaimed, “Now you’re my little sister!” She could not have been very much older than me, despite being a married woman: her date of birth is inscribed in the Bible along with the date of her death, and one might look it up, but if the one were a lie, the other might just as well be false, so it makes no sense to take the trouble. Seventeen or eighteen I would guess now, or perhaps even younger, for girls married young in those days, and how glad she must have been to discover in that small, secluded world and in that silent circle a child in whose company she could still be a child herself.
How can I say what Sofie was like in those years; how can I even say how she appeared to me or how beautiful she was to my childish eyes, how do I know where to begin? Sofie’s face in the glow of the candlelight, yes, indeed, let me start there, for when I mention her name or think of her, that is the image rising relentlessly before my eyes in the dark, Sofie bending over the candle, her long, dark hair like a veil across her face, like a shade before the light, and then the darkness blotting out all as if it had never existed. No, not that, not that, that was not what I had wanted to remember, it was something else. Sofie with the candle in her hand, Sofie raising the candlestick slightly above her head, floating through the dark, Sofie as I saw her for the very first time; let me start there.