Marlene van Niekerk - Agaat

4 July 1960 ten o’clock morning

Specially went into town heavy of body as I am to go & arrange A.’s savings book at the post office spotted my chance when the coast was clear & put hr baptism certificate & hr inoculation records polio & diphtheria & pox in a velvet drawstring-bag & went & tucked it in under hr underclothes in the top shelf of hr wardrobe.

Checked everything once again more nobody could do & more would be wrong. J. perhaps right on this how would I know. A. mustn’t at this stage get accustomed to more he says then you just get trouble later A. will never make trouble I say J. says it’s not she it’s the other workers who’ll make the trouble because she has privileges that they don’t have. I ask how? you never know the country is restless the kffrs are already growing very brazen in the North & he doesn’t want to see a bunch of brazen htnts in the South it will be a horse of a different colour we don’t want to prepare a Sharpeville for ourselves here in the Overberg he says. I say the undrprvlgd we will always have with us. It’s no use our blinding ourselves to their need.

Beatrice is coming over to tea. Time rests too heavily on her hands the woman. Can’t she understand I’m busy? Truly don’t feel like sanctimonious prattle.

After lunch

This morning a long time in the outside room. Checked everything again if I hadn’t forgotten something.

Seven bloomers maybe two more? in case of accident & then had a thought spread undersheet & remade the bed remember how copiously one can bleed when you’re young.

Curtain in front of the clothes rail doesn’t pull nice & smoothly over the steel wire rubbed with candlewax so that rings don’t make the scraping sound put the candlewax on shelf above wash-table so that A. can re-do it will wear off quickly curtain will just have to be closed always. I had to stop Jak he actually wanted to nail shut the window says he doesn’t want to be confronted with a servant-girl’s bed every time he comes out of the kitchen door it’s not a good idea either that the other workers see how luxuriously A. has it here with the whitefolk.

Rather said nothing about its being my plan for a long time to build new houses for the workers. First for Dawid & them the hovel in which they live is still from Ma’s time & the walls crumbling badly roof leaks & and there’s a whole string of little ones as well from Dawid’s cousins who materialised suddenly. Everything gradually D. will just have to make a plan himself in the meantime will give a few sheets of corrugated iron frm the shearers’ cooking huts. Don’t know what when they come again next season sufficient unto the day.

Now everybody must first just get used to the situation with A. in the backyard.

Before supper

Strange feeling can’t stop writing about the outside room I keep on thinking of something else to add. This mrning I opened the Zion bible on the crate next to the bed & then had another thought & went & fetched the crocheted bookmark from Ma from my Bible placed it in Psm 23 the Lord is my shepherd I shall not want.

Can’t stop scrabbling around there just like a broody hen really. Put a twig of fennel in the little vase then the smell suddenly made me cry must be the hormones that are mixed up. Tears idle tears I know not what they mean.

Rinsed the kettle & boiled a bit of water on the two-plate stove. Suddenly felt I wanted to have a cup of tea there. Wanted to test A.’s mug & taste the rusks I baked I made the rooibos sweet as she would like it & dunked the rusk good batch nice rich buttermilk. Tin mug too hot to hold burnt my fingers waited for it to cool & took all A.’s other reading matter out of the crate where I had put it away & so read the introduction by Her Honour Mrs Dr Verwoerd in the embroidery book & must say was really quite inspiring: The book conceived in love for the development of the nation & the homely atmosphere that embroidery creates because it’s the mark of a culturally conscious nation underlined the words and wrote in the front: May this book provide you with much pleasure yet in the empty hours on Gdrift. It looks so dry but what else could I say? Then had another idea. Went inside and got a pencil and knife to sharpen it and empty notebook from J.’s office wrote in capitals on the cover: My own Patterns and Designs had to press hard because the cover was of glossy paper and the pencil wouldn’t bite properly and then put away the embroidery book again in the crate with the notebook on top.

The old FAK Songbook cheered me up a bit. Softly so that nobody could hear me I sat there in the back & sang songs to myself. The bridge on our farm. On the death of an owl. On my old tin guitar. By the old millstream. Will it give her comfort too? The idea that she will sit on her own in the back & sing. So then I put the songbook away again because then I just wanted to cry again.

So then I drank the sweet tea & read the chapter on hides in the old Handbook for farmers the removal of hair in bran & in manure & braying of the thongs till dressed & the cawr snow-white (‘core’? old book = full of funny words & spelling mistakes must point them out to A.) & tanning of small & large hides with vitriol & barkbush. Methods that few people know about nowadays.

Pa taught me the importance of this old knowledge he said the wheel always turns my child there will be a time again of poverty & need & the farmer who doesn’t know about the old ways then will be gone to glory & then there I sat crying over Pa’s underlinings in the parts about the deterioration of the veld in our country & the exhaustion & ill-treatment of the soil. That is what A. must also learn the old ways & the care of the defenceless earth, the little pans & the vleis & the ‘tortisses’ & how we must protect it all against the onslaughts of so-called civilisation because how many centuries does it not take for mother-rock to crumble & disintegrate to soil & then humans come along & destroy it through avarice & carelessness.

J. is actually the one who should be reading it all but it’s not as if he takes any notice of me also laughed that time when I said I wasn’t selling the donkeys that mother kept what is a farm without a donkey. If the plough broke or the tractor wouldn’t go in those first years & the parts couldn’t arrive immediately from town then one could carry on with the animals & hand-plough so that one didn’t fall behindhand too much with the work. Then one regained some respect for the blood-sweat with which Gdrift was carved out of the earth.

Underlined in pencil for A. the sentence in the Foreword that says that the Handbook will help the farmer in his material growth just as the Bible helps him in his spiritual growth & then I lay down on her bed because I was suddenly very tired & closed my eyes & prayed for my child who has to be born into this world. Must have dropped off for a while because next thing I saw a broad strip of sunlight was slanting over the linoleum. Inside the lunch was already being brought to the table J. was at the table & he frowned when he saw me & pointed at my forehead with his fork if it wasn’t one of A.’s caps that I’d tried on there in her room in front of her mirror so light it is you don’t even know you’re wearing it. What is that? asked J. is that your mothering-bonnet? Fortunately I could take it off before Somebody Else saw it.

Agaat stirs on her bed in the passage. I see the first glimmering through a chink in the curtain. It’s five o’clock on the phosphorescent hands of the alarm clock on the night-table.

Agaat doesn’t need an alarm. Every morning just before the grandfather clock chimes the hour, she awakens. By then I have been lying awake for a long time. Sometimes I pretend to be sleeping so that she can sing. Gaat sings me awake.