Lynne's ponderings about Abraham

So today I am thinking about so many things. How is it that I always have so much work to do and so little time to just be? I thought that this year would be slower, that I would have time for the 'indulgences' category on my grindstone app, but it hasn't worked out that way.
I'm writing this with indulgences on, but today I have bounced between Dairy, Deloitte, Wisa and Cancer, as well as checking emails and doing general research. I have designed a meme, I have managed Facebook pages, I have tried to be trendy for Qatar Lifestyle.  It is a lot - and that's not counting the time spent thinking about Abraham.
I'm aware that I have left him in limbo... he is washing his hands prior to the execution more times than Lady Macbeth! I need to get him walking down the road, past his pottery, towards the grand parade where the gallows stands, forbidding, looming and unavoidable.
I wonder if he would walk. Would he have ridden to perform the good death? Gone in a black-shrouded carriage?
Would he have looked solemn or sad?
What would Maria have said to him when he got back? Would he have explained how he felt,or just said nothing?
His Jewishness is a secret from her,and from everyone. It brings him comfort in the task he has to perform, but he can't express it in public. I assume. Maybe he came to the colony as a member of a dynasty of executioners and everyone knew that was who he was? But the children would have been Christian, so I am sure I am correct that the Jewishness would have been hidden, kept under wraps.
The talk last night by Willem Steenkamp was interesting. How old he is getting. Those long legs so fragile now, but that looming presence and certainty of manner exactly the same as when i worked with him 40 years ago.
40 years! The time just flies by, and I wonder how much I have left.
I was interested in the length of the journey to the Cape. He was talking of a century or more after our Lumke and Abraham arrived here, but I suppose the ships hadn't changed much in that time. Leaky, creaking, manned by scurvied, smelly sailors... it must have been such a relief to set foot ashore.
And that feeling of standing on solid earth after three months on a moving deck, must have been a bit like the jarring sensation of jumping off a trampoline onto the ground.
And the scents of the land... I remember my oupa describing what it was like to come to Zanzibar across the sea and to smell the scent of cloves on the wind, long before the island was in view. I wonder if the distinctive smell of fynbos was discernable?
And I imagine the sea smells would have been much stronger? No big trucks and workers removing rotting kelp in those years!
I suppose the mountain must have seemed further away than it does now, because there would have been no roads leading up to it. No concrete. No tall buildings
When did the gun get moved to signal hill? And when was the noonday gun first fired?
I wonder if executions were performed at a particular time of day? Early in the morning to spare the prisoner a day of anguish? Late in the day to allow the crowds to come?
And what about burials? Would Angela van Bengale have been able to take her son's body for burial in the un-consecrated ground at Prestwich St? Would she have buried him elsewhere? I need to go to the Prestwich Memorial because it "commemorates the unmarked graves of slaves and executed ones of the 1600’s and 1700’s. Once executed by Dutch settlers, these ones were not deemed worthy of a proper burial, hence their being buried and forgotten," according to the website. This area was known as District One, which is also interesting. I wonder what the area where Abraham's pottery was, was called.
Would the executioner have also had to arrange the burial? Did they put people in mass graves, or one by one? I wonder what the death rate was at the time? And were all slaves buried there? They seemed to be so liberal in terms of slaves being allowed to buy their freedom, that it makes me wonder who would have had those unmarked graves. Maybe Angela went there , secretly, to mourn her son, and had a conversation there with Abraham, saying some sort of kaddish for the man he had killed? Would he have done that, to appease his conscience? Or his God?