Agaat - Marlene van Niekerk [307]
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