Marlene van Niekerk - Agaat

Along the river the water table is high in winter and there you find that the soil puddles and becomes waterlogged, there we have to dig drainage troughs.

Really? Now tell me Mrs Soil Expert, what do you call the resource down below? Crumpet catch, hmmm? Banana bower? He placed his hands on your hips and drew you tightly against him.

Estcourt, Westleigh, Oakleaf, you rattled off the names, Longlands, Dundee, Avalon. You showed him the pictures in the book.

Some are shallow wet duplex soils and others are wet saline alluvial sand-loam or clay-loam. Also on the poor side.

So how are we going to get rich on poor soil, tell me that? His mouth was in your neck, you had goose pimples all over. He knew the sign.

Slowly, you said, very slowly and gradually.

He misunderstood you, had only one thing on his mind, took off his belt, said he was a hasty hound, wanted you to service him right there on the open land. But you thought the lesson would take more readily in a cool room at home.

That’s the way it is with most things when you’re dealing with men, your mother had taught you, you have to dip your demands in a dab of sugar. Remember, the truth is nothing in itself. Package it prettily.

You unbuttoned the top of your blouse and said that to get rich on Grootmoedersdrift would take years, a decade or more. You took his hand and held it against your breast and told him stories about farmers who grew too rapidly and went bankrupt just as rapidly. You took off your dress while you instructed him in the principles of crop rotation, you opened his fly slowly. Button by button you tried to get his mind round the subsurface method of cultivation. You slid your hands under his shirt and rubbed his nipples and explained to him why soil had to lie undisturbed for long periods and that rest was the best way of getting the soil structure rich and crumbly. You bowed your head over his abdomen and pleasured him and swallowed it all, because spitting out you knew he took as an insult.

Well, said Jak that morning in bed, his criterion for good healthy soil is a good healthy yield.

Regular activity, my wife, that’s all that’s necessary, on the home front as on the farming front. What goes around, comes around, or as the farmers say, eating is easy, threshing is labour.

And you lay back and for a second time let him have his way. Strike, you thought, strike your sword on the water, you think you possess me, but you don’t know me. Penetrate, you thought, invade me. What are you without my surfaces for you to break? My surfaces are merely my surfaces. Underneath I am unfathomable and you are a splinter in the void. When he rolled off you, he sighed and took your hand, squeezed it.

Just think, my little Milla, in a few years’ time there’ll be a whole string of little de Wets who can help sow and harvest one day. So we’d better make enough profit to buy some more land for them.

That was the beginning of the differences. Jakop and little Milla’s differences. He wanted to plough under the large stretches of natural veld on Grootmoedersdrift immediately for small-grain. You said it was of incalculable value, you should divide it up in camps and use it just like that, unspoilt, for rotation pasture. He wanted to plough the fallow lands five discs deep and clear them and level them with a section of rail track as he’d seen other farmers do. You said no, we break up the soil just enough to sow, with a ripper so that it doesn’t get too much air and we anchor the stubble only lightly in the topsoil. He said it looked like hotnot farming. You said it was a blanket, it preserved the moisture, it preserved the nitrogen. He wanted to sow all the fields at the same time every year with wheat. You maintained a four-stage cycle was best: Wheat, fallow, old land, wheat, with a green compost like lupins ploughed in every other cycle and dryland lucerne sown under the wheat for grazing when the harvest was in. All he wanted to concede was two-stage. Wheat, fallow, wheat, fallow. He wanted to plough straight down with the fall of the land on the steep slopes as the Okkenels had done all the years. Over your dead body, you said, there had to be contours because the soil had already eroded badly in places.

The outcome could probably have been foreseen.

He said, well, then you farm on your own.

You said, but you’re my husband, the land belongs to both of us, you promised to farm it with me.

Next thing you knew, he’d taken a loan from the Land Bank with Grootmoedersdrift entered as security and bought a large tract of adjacent hilly land to the south.

Let’s see, he said, you do as you see fit on your precious little farm and I farm the new land.

Fortune favoured him. After he had applied new fertilisers on a massive scale, he sowed double-density, new varieties of short-stem wheat on the ploughed land. He must beware of rust on the delicately bred strain of wheat, you warned. Oh my dear little prophetess of doom, he laughed. And indeed. Only goodness and mercy followed him. No summer rain to speak of, the air dry and clean, no sign of fungus. That October you saw farmers pulling off the road and clambering through the fences to walk in Jak’s lands and to feel the long fat ears and the short thick pipe of the wheat. Never again Klipkous, they said to one another. It was the last mature land in which you saw your father standing, hand on the hip, with a faraway look in his eyes.

Congratulations, my boy, he said to Jak, you’re sounding a new note here on the farm. But you could hear his heart was not in it. ’48 that was, the year before his death.

Jak imported a big New Holland grain drier from America and made doubly sure that the wheat did not rot in the bag. He brought in five bumper crops in consecutive years, bought vehicles and implements, demolished all the old sheds from your mother’s time and built big new structures with sliding doors and shiny steel roofs, and bought new stud animals to improve the cattle and sheep herds.

So what do you say now, Milla my wife? he asked. Now it’s only you who must show that you can increase abundantly.

He tapped against your stomach as one would tap against the glass of a silent clock to see if the hands won’t move.

was that the beginning? the first tangible beginning of it? good friday nineteen ninety-three the ewes of easter in the green on mountains and in dales waiting for the dropping of the lambs the distant singing of sheep in the night while the flock increases silently and in the mornings the first twins of april are standing knee-deep in the pasture in the beneficent oats stand on first legs in the underground clover stand on tiny amber paws under a mizzle under a general muzzle of blessing muzzle of bounty huddled against the slopes of hills stand tottering along with the cranes in the vleis and what is it that pricks in my fingers? i stammer i think with being undone in the lambing time it is autumn the leaves are falling but this time it is different as if i am big with something or sick with that melancholy that sickness insinuates before it like a foot my foot is heavy i falter my hand is heavy all of my right side with my lips i want to say easter agaat it’s easter the year of our lord ninety-three let us bake a cake an easter cake in honour of the lambing time yolk and white I separate the eggs and seven fall seven eggs on the ground a general egg-fall I am unhandy senile a sign of the times a melancholy of the eastertide you break the eggs gaat let me sit at the edge of the table so that i can slice jewels for the king’s crown the pineapple the cherries and the figs red and green and yellow the jewels and shards of angelica.