An Unquiet Place

by Clare Houston

  Hannah moved slowly down the passage to the back door. She could hear Lena putting a tea tray together. Once she was outside, the sun was gloriously warm. She breathed deeply and caught the scent of honeysuckle drifting on a slight breeze. As she turned towards it, she saw that she had come out near to the little house where Karl’s mother had lived. Manoeuvring her crutches down the path, she was about to climb the single step when Karl came around the corner. Hannah felt a pang of guilt that she was there, but Karl approached her with a smile.

  ‘I’m here with Sarah,’ she said, stumbling a bit on a paving stone. Karl steadied her elbow and helped her up onto the veranda. He leant against the balustrade. ‘I’ve always loved this house. My ouma lived here. Then my mother moved in when Esme and I married. His face shadowed for a moment, and he drew a breath. ‘It must be the oldest building on the farm, did you know that? It was the original homestead. The British burnt it down during the Boer War and then the family rebuilt it after. These stone walls saw a lot. Ten or fifteen years later, they built the main house.’ He glanced at her, leaning on her crutches. ‘After all that’s happened, are you still interested in my family?’

  She nodded and he pulled the key from his pocket, unlocking the door and standing aside for Hannah to go in first.

  The house smelt exactly the same as it had those months back, dusty and closed up, but it was warm, the sun stretching on the carpet. Karl crossed the small sitting room and knelt at the display cabinet, opening the bottom drawer where Hannah had found the family Bible. ‘My mother spent years researching her family. You might be interested in her writing.’ He pulled out a black cardboard-covered notebook and a lever arch file which was labelled, ‘Tax’. ‘She collected all sorts of things, wrote off to the archives and got copies of documents. It filled her time in those last years and I was glad of it. I just was never interested in hearing about it.’ He sat back on his heels, passing the file and notebook to Hannah. ‘I regret that now. I miss her still. She was such a strong woman. My dad died when I was only ten, and she farmed by herself until I took over. I wish I had half her courage.’

  Hannah smiled at him sadly. ‘Karl, I’m sorry for my part in Esme’s breakdown. It seems like I tipped her over the edge, pushing with this stuff.’

  Karl hauled himself to his feet. ‘She and my mother didn’t get on. Esme had a troubled childhood, and I always wondered if she was abused by her own mother. She couldn’t bear anything to do with the past. She cut herself off from her family completely, wouldn’t even talk about them. And then, when Marilie died, she just shattered. I couldn’t put the pieces back together.’ He sighed, his arms hanging at his sides, the grief heavy on him. Then he pulled his shoulders back, straightening to his full height. ‘You take as long as you need with those,’ he said, pointing to the bundle under Hannah’s arm.

  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.

  Always yours,

  Rachel

  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 t
he 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.

  Yours,

  Rachel

  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.

  Suddenly things fell into place. Rachel was not a Boer woman. She was a black woman. The missing records, the separate camp, her tragic relationship with Wolf, doomed by the awful history of South Africa. It all made sense. Hannah’s mind reeled with the implications. But Rachel wrote as if she had been a member of the Badenhorst family. How had that happened in those rough days when black people had been considered savages? No white family could have formally adopted a black child then.

  Hannah went back to Gisela’s notebook and found the place where she had stopped reading. The page overleaf was titled ‘Tannie Rachel’ in Gisela’s neat handwriting.

  My father told me stories about Tannie Rachel’s baking. When he was a small boy, she lived in the Ou Huis and cooked for the family. She baked bread every morning and he would wake to that warm yeasty smell wafting through the house. She made special treats for him, ginger bread men with currants for eyes, syrupy koeksisters, and sweet biscuits which she cut into stars. He would sneak into the Ou Huis and sit with her while she told him stories about his father as a little boy on the farm. His mother didn’t like it, so they kept these times secret.

  My father said Tannie Rachel laughed a lot. She was not a maid or just a cook. He told me she was part of the family because she had come to Silwerfontein as a little girl, an inboekseling child. I did not know that word and it is only recently, when I started this research, that I found out.

  In the middle of the nineteenth century, there was a Boer practice of taking African children into their households as servants, or perhaps more accurately, slaves. Most often, children were kidnapped and sold to Boer families, though it grew into a process of exchange with African tribes, particularly in the Northern Transvaal. Children were exchanged for goods and then taken away to the farms and registered as ‘inboekseling’ with the local magistrate. They were tied to the family until they came of age at twenty-five years old, though often, as the family was all they knew, they would remain in the household. The practice had largely stopped by the end of the 1800s, but in parts of the country, like the Zoutpansberg, it still occurred from time to time. From what I can gather, my great-great-grandfather, Jakob Badenhorst, brought home a little girl called Rachel. I do not know why or how he came by her, but she was registered in 1890 in the Bethlehem magistrate court as ‘inboekseling’. Perhaps I am not cynical enough, but I would like to believe she was loved by the family. The fact that she stayed on the farm as an adult and lived in the Ou Huis rather than with the servants tells me she was different. The letters from Rachel to Wolf, which I found only recently, reveal so much more. I grieve for the pain this country has caused and endured. Love fractured and broken. People torn apart by fear. I only pray that South Africa’s future is different, that it can move beyond the barriers which Wolf couldn’t bring himself to confront.

  My father took me to visit Tannie Rachel once. I was a little girl of perhaps seven or eight, but I remember it clearly. She lived in the township outside Bethlehem called Bohlokong. Her little block house was painted yellow with a bright blue door, and she had planted tubs of flowers under the windows. It stood out on a dry, colourless street. She was a tall woman, beautifully dressed with smart shoes and stockings, her hair coiled into a scarf that looked so elegant to me. She pulled my father into her arms and I remember him lifting her feet off the floor and she laughed. She must have been in her fifties then. She had made soetkoekies for me, just like she had for my father when he was little. They were cut into stars and hearts and flowers, and dusted with castor sugar. When we left, she handed my father a letter and, as we drove away, I looked back at her standing in the street. Tears were running down her cheeks, but she did not wipe them away. My father said that ‘Bohlokong’ means ‘the Place of Pain’.

  Hannah felt she was going to burst into tears. She turned the page. Pasted alongside was another photocopied letter. Rachel’s writing had aged, and tremored a little. The letter was dated May 1942.

  Dearest Wolf,

  Life has been cruel to both of us, but we are alive and healthy. We have food in our bellies and houses to call our own. We have lived through worse times.

  I am not going to beg; I know it must distress you and I wish you no further pain. I accept you will not fetch me home and, as much as that hurts me, I want you to be happy above all else. I have always loved you, and I now wrestle with the thought that you never did love me in return. Perhaps you did once. Perhaps that idyllic time on Silwerfontein was a desperate dream born of the horror of war. Perhaps the state of our country is too heavy for you; perhaps being together would cause untold grief for you and your family. Your silence keeps me in the dark, Wolf. I can but guess.

  I will not write again but, Wolf, I am still here. You hold my heart and that is the way I want it to be.

  Always yours,

  Rachel

  Below the letter, Gisela had added a post script:

  I heard Rachel passed away in 1952, eight years after my grandfather, Wolf. They were never reconciled.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Hannah sat on her bed, her leg straight in front of her, and laptop balanced on her thighs. She was looking for cemeteries in Bohlokong. Maybe she could find Rachel’s grave at last.

  A soft knock had her looking up to see Alistair in the doorway.

  ‘You have a visitor,’ he said, standing back for Joseph to come into the room.

  Joseph perched at the end of her bed. ‘How are things? You feeling stronger?’

  ‘Every day a little bit stronger, though I’m wiped out after today. I had an interesting afternoon, which we need to talk about.’ She smiled at him, and gestured for Alistair to come in too. Alistair settled into a chair under the window and Hannah then noticed Joseph’s face, a bit awkward, like he needed to tell her something but didn’t know how to go about it. ‘What is it, Jose?’

  ‘You know we’ve been chugging away at the site while you’ve been’ – he waved a hand over her leg – ‘you know.�
� Hannah nodded, puzzled at his tone.

  ‘Remember, up on the site, I told you there was something strange about the camp? That we weren’t finding things we expected to find?’ Hannah nodded again and he continued, ‘The penny dropped for me today that perhaps we were coming to the site with one big wrong assumption, based on who we think Rachel is.’

  Hannah let him continue, though she knew now where this was going.

  ‘If we compile what we have found so far, the lack of ration tins, the lack of military buckles, shells, saddlery, the seeming absence of tent encampment, the absence of grave markers, and then the remains of a farming operation, we end up with a very different picture to the Boer camps we know about. Hannah …’ He paused. ‘This wasn’t a Boer camp.’

  ‘I know,’ she said, ‘it was a black camp.’

  Joseph gaped at her. ‘How did you know?’

  ‘I was at Silwerfontein today and I found a picture of Rachel. She was a black woman.’

  ‘But,’ said Alistair, stunned, ‘I thought you had seen a picture of her as a child with the Badenhorsts.’

  ‘So did I, but then looking back I can see now that the child was Paul, the second son. They dressed their toddlers in white smocks, boys and girls. I saw a curly-haired blonde toddler in a white dress and assumed it was Rachel.’

  Joseph was looking out the window, the back of his hand drumming on his thigh. ‘This changes everything. The old concentration camp narrative is all about the terrible suffering of the Boers. And it is true – they did suffer horribly, but I don’t think people understand how much worse it was in the black camps. They weren’t fed or given shelter. They had to work or starve. They died like flies up there, Hannah. We’re looking at a crazy-high mortality rate if our estimate is correct.’