Agaat - Marlene van Niekerk [320]
Only after a while noticed the Croxley booklets lying everywhere in little piles. Pages from these torn out and pinned to the curtain, filled with Ma’s handwriting. Diaries. From before my birth. Everything that Milla de Wet saw fit to bequeath her readers. In the hope that somebody would discover it. And I wasn’t the first reader. She must have reread the diary herself, several times, there were corrections in her handwriting with dates, days and even months, years later than the original entry. As if she’d had trouble rendering the whole truth in just one version.
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