THE FINAL JOURNAL

To the north of us, on the edge of the Kalahari, was a small town: Hotazel, owing its existence to the nearby manganese mine. I know the town well — at one time I had some involvement with the mine. This time of year, well most times of the year really, it lives up to its name. On the Pakhuis Pass it was even hotter than I remember Hotazel to be. A wide plain stretched below us, dotted with flat topped koppies looking like small volcanos with their tops sliced off by the swinging panga of a wandering god of war. This is the great Karoo, semidesert, khaki coloured scrub vegetation with occasional patches of olive green thorn and lemon green spekboom bushes close to dry riverbeds. 

I’d stopped our Landy, at Christal’s insistence, at the Englishman’s Grave — a soldier shot, 120 years ago, by her great, great, great uncle Pietie Van Tonder during the second Anglo-Boer War. Pietie had been out on Kommando: like many boerseuns, he was a crack shot at 1000 metres: even with his ageing Martini Henry Mark 3. I know that rifle well, (at least, now I do): polished and oiled it hangs on a wall in the voorkamer of the Van Tonder farmhouse. During the days we were there Christal taught me how to take it apart, oil it, load and fire it. Now over 140 years old and still in perfect condition.

On the long drive from Cape Town Christal had spoken of the Englishman: Lieutenant Graham Vinicombe Winchester Clews. He’d been a few days shy of his twenty-first birthday when he died.

Her interest in absolutely everything had caused her to find out more about him: it had been the end of the Victorian era, the old Queen’s demise having predated the Lieutenant’s by just eight days. Horses were the main form of transport. It would have taken a few days for the news of his death to reach Cape Town, but from there the new undersea cable would have meant the news reaching London the same day. The Lieutenant’s distraught and newly widowed mother, Ettie, left her home to travel by horse or train, (perhaps both), for Southampton and a ship to the Cape. There is no record of when she arrived in Cape Town (or maybe there is but Christal’s research hadn’t found it) but there is a record of Mrs Winchester-Clowes taking delivery of a carved granite headstone on 27th March 1901. The Lieutenant had been buried by his regiment near to where he had fallen — a quiet spot close to the top of Pakhuis Pass. The army placed a white marble maltese cross on top of Ettie’s granite stone: it reads “Brave and True”. There is just one tree along the whole length of the pass: it leans protectively over the grave shading it from the midday sun. It’s not known when, and by whom, it was planted.

Pietie had been a somewhat erratic writer and his spelling, words and phrases had changed enormously over the last century (the Afrikaans language has developed astonishingly) but still, a young and very bored Christal had read every word of his eleven journals — it was either that or the family bible. She had learnt to follow the spidery, ink blotched pages (later she showed me Pietie’s bone dip-pen, his tin box of nibs and a long dried bottle of blue ink). He had filled many journal pages on the events of that day. The day that Pietie had been lying prone behind a small sandstone boulder changed many lives, none for the better. Through his captured or stolen (and excellent) British Army binoculars, he spotted a long bright feather moving oddly. Doubly odd, he thought — birds with bright feathers don’t live long in the Cedarberg. He had plenty of time to visually range the feather before the Lieutenant’s upper body appeared above a somewhat bigger boulder than Pietie’s. The feather had been tucked into the headband of his bush hat. A single shot was all.

Christal had left home when she was just fifteen years old, recently dewormed of racism and right-wing political thought; she’d also decided that the entire faithful world had been duped by fairy tales. Her words not mine. Despite growing up in mundane soil she is super bright — a quality recognised and nurtured by her first lover, a teacher, a man intent on finding the diamonds amongst the mountains of ore in the local agricultural college: a school where students commonly shouted insults at teachers and jeered as they left in tears. None tried that with Ashley. Christal had, for him, been a dry sponge for information and for a gentle loving touch. It was he who taught her to question, to fully develop her critical intelligence. It was his teachings that prevented her from shutting down that intelligence at the family dining table.

On the dusty gravel road between Clanwilliam and Wuppertal (a Moravian Church village of small thatch cottages) lies the farm. Sheep, angoras, Boer goats (they’re the heavy ones with a white body and brown head), five cows and a rescue donkey.

The standard South African rural gate is a galvanised tubular steel frame infilled with diamond mesh. From the top rail hung a sign — white hand-painted lettering on a rusting black plate: VAN TONDER. Scattered bullet holes were gifts from passing drivers. By now Christal was antsy. Unable to speak about her feelings she wouldn’t stop talking. About the farm’s animals, about the John Deere “trekker” bought shortly before she left the family.

Once through the gate the gravel road changed into deep wheel tracks either side of a high centre mound: a challenge for anything other than my Landy and the “trekker”. Rounding a low koppie we surprised the farm buildings: the stone and thatch house and corrugated iron sheds surrounded by junk.

Christal was silent. White faced. Panicked. Ten years.   

Twin braks came running, barking, racing around the Landy in excitement, putting up a minor duststorm.

     ‘Can’t do this Joel. We shouldn’t be here — turn around now: we have to go back.’

     ‘Okay my love, just sit still, deep slow breaths.’

Too late. A woman, tall, grey, gracile as Christal, was already coming down the red painted cement steps off the stoep, running towards us. Head down, Christal had her hands over her face — I had to do something — I stepped down from the Landy to meet her mother. 

‘Hello Mrs. Van Tonder, I’m Joel, your daughter’s …..’ but she had stepped past me, had the Landy door open and Christal in her arms almost before I could turn. Both noisily weeping. 

That afternoon Gerrit insisted on taking me around the farm. I’m convinced it was an excuse to avoid, or at least delay, the inevitably, horribly awkward reconciliation with his daughter. He rode his big Suzuki quad bike like a pro: white-knuckled I hung on to the rack, breathing in hot exhaust, dust, the smells of dry straw and of green water in circular concrete tanks next to rusting wind pumps. We inspected all 8 kilometres of his boundary fencing — five strand wire occasionally decorated with tufts of dirty white wool and the spread-eagled carcasses of black-backed jackals. We didn’t talk much: Gerrit mostly turning to shout and swear about the leopards, the jackals, the caracals.

We ate early that night: most farming families do. Everywhere in the world. It would be Christmas Eve tomorrow. Kersfees. There were seven of us for dinner: the Van Tonders, Christal and myself, the Van Wyks and their adult son (who may be mentally challenged: hard to tell — he said nothing all evening). Christal hadn’t raised the “non-issue of you being Jewish” with her parents. She assumed that my name would make it obvious. But it hadn’t. Commonly in Afrikaner households the guests join hands for prayer before the meal. Gerrit looked at me and nodded: an invitation to say grace. Christal’s expression was pure panic. I grinned at her — I had anticipated and prepared for this —

‘for the meal we are about to eat,

for those that made it possible,

and for those we are about to share it with,

we are thankful.’

Gerrit raised his head, opened his eyes, smiled in approval, stood and crossed to the beautiful Yellowwood server to carve the roast lamb. Okay, first test passed.   

Christal had brought a few of Pietie’s journals into her old bedroom — we were to share her bed. I chose one: cracked, discoloured brown leather, thick yellowing paper. At random I opened it his description of baking the gemmerkoekies that his mother so often made. She’d recently died. He’d written from memory. Laid out on the page was an ingredient list and instructions. He’d baked them in the cast iron wood-burning oven that even now squatted in the kitchen. Years ago a buddy of mine had interested me in bread making and I’d since grown to love baking. In the small fenced yard amongst the onions, spinach and struggling tomatoes were tall green ginger plant canes. Unmistakeable. I couldn’t miss them: my father grated home grown ginger root every morning to add to his home-made muesli.

Tomorrow I’d bake Pietie’s ginger cookies in that old black Dover no.8. Older than the recipe. 

The farmhouse floors were wide wooden board. Teak. Over the years they’d shrunk loose from their nails and away from each other. It was impossible to walk silently in that house. Earlier Christal showed me where, as a young girl, she’s lifted a board and stored her treasures. Now I looked up to see her weeping silently, privately. I crossed to her. A loose board had been lifted: a different one. She wouldn’t look at me as she handed me a journal. “It’s a twelfth. This had been Pietie’s room. All these years, all the generations, we’d thought there were only eleven.”

In the yard a few black and white geese were sleeping, long necks tucked under their wings. Above us the Milky Way was a broad white stripe across the night sky. The Southern Cross was a misshapen kite: as childhood as the smell of hot cocoa before bed. My arms around her, she’d always wanted some communication from him. To a hundred-year future her. At fifteen she didn’t find it. Now, at twenty-five she had. She was weeping for his pain. A twenty-year old boy who had never killed anything larger than a rock hare, but then had, with a single shot, killed another twenty-year old boy. A boy far from home: dutiful to a dead Queen and to an empire that too would die, unmourned, within half a century.

Christal told me of the boy who carefully chose a young cedar growing in rocky soil, gently uprooted it and replanted it to shade the Englishman’s Grave. She was weeping for a long-lost uncle she could never have known, who filled with remorse, sat close the grave, put the rifle stock against the ground, the barrel under his chin, and squeezed the trigger.

She put the journal back where it had lain and secured the board. I held her through the night and in the morning I baked that boy’s gemmerkoekies in the same oven that he had. We ate them with moerkoffie. They were wonderful: big, soft and plump, more like cake than biscuit. Spicy. Fragrant of cinnamon and fynbos honey. I shall bake them again.

I should like to be able to tell you that Christal reconciled with her family but it wasn’t so. The three days had been strained, though there were no arguments.