Marlene van Niekerk - Agaat

The child started crying frantically.

Jakkie! Jak called, his voice high with anxiety. Give him to me!

You crawled over the splinters of plank and glass to Agaat.

You’re not laying a hand on my child, Jak de Wet, you said. You’re not getting anywhere near him.

I’ll put in new fuses quickly, he said, his voice rising higher all the time, I bought new ones.

You’re not touching anything further around here, Jak. You keep your hands to yourself, and you go and sleep in your canoe in the shed, you said. You were quite calm and collected. You were furious. Your words issued from your mouth dispassionately.

I’ll have in an electrician tomorrow, we should have had new fuses installed a long time ago. And don’t worry about us, there are lamps and candles and the Aga. Agaat is here, she’ll help me. And tomorrow morning when I get up, the last shred of trash here will be cleared up, I don’t want to see one shard or splinter, not one, do you hear? And you take your car and you drive to town as soon as the shops are open and you have glass cut for the broken panes and you get putty and you put out all the tools here in a row. I’ll ask Dawid to put in the panes. Is everything quite clear to you now?

Jak stood there for a while yet before he turned around and crunched away over the glass.

Against the light of the stars you saw him clench his hands behind his head and cast them down by his sides, and he cursed three times in himself, the same curse, and shook his shoulders downwards as if he wanted to wriggle himself out of his clothes into the ground.

something’s wrong

you’re just getting old

I’m sick

not sick senile maybe who would want to bake a sponge cake in the

middle of the night

look the spasms they come from nowhere

donkey twitching under the yoke have a mustard bath

can’t get the button through the button-hole

let me help you

my shoulder aches

it’s from putting it to the wheel all your life rest for a change

that’s not funny it’s stiff

cold shoulder I know it well frozen shoulder it’s the chill of may that

gets into your bones

something’s wrong

you’re just old

I’m sick

stop complaining

my fingers prick

prick back

my rings won’t come off

use soap

it doesn’t work

shall I phone the goldsmith for you?

what can it be?

seasonal indisposition silver-leaf sickness

I’m falling

the leaves are falling soon the rain will be falling then we can plough

then you’ll see it’s all over

but I fall all the time

a falling fashion trying to attract attention that’s all

I’m sick

hypochondria

really sick

affectation

anxiety’s palsy

it’s the inbetween-time’s sickness the fallow land must come to rest

the oats has been raked in everything is holding its breath for rain.

3 September 1960 after lunch

Starting to feel halfway human again & feel like writing again even though I still cry a lot. Just after the birth I felt I should keep my diary up to date but the first weeks lame & no strength & the nightmares still carrying on. Post-natal depression says Beatrice. Comes & sits here with me sometimes when I’m playing Pa’s old records but I don’t want her here she gloats over my situation & she gets bored when I try to tell her about Brahms & his eternally unrequited love for Clara Schumann. She says no wonder I’m depressed it’s the dismal Brahms that I listen to der Tod, das ist die kühle Nacht, das Leben ist der schwüle Tag & that was apparently also my father’s problem. Then I think nothing of saying I want to lie down so that she can be on her way & A. is not behindhand & fetches her coat.

The brave little servant! how will I ever be able to repay hr? Oh moon you drift so low with constricted throat shame & Ma slipped her 20 pounds when Jak came to fetch us & an old church hat as well you can’t be confirmed without a hat she says I ask you. A. says thank you nicely & just gives the hat a long look & later on the way home she says: I’ve got seven caps what do I want with a hat as well? I see the silly little green hat is hanging there in her room from a nail in the wall with turkey feathers in the band. What would Pa not have thought up to thank her. He would have written a limerick.

A. was off to town at the first opportunity with D. to buy embroidery thread & cloth & buttons with the money from Ma & wouldn’t that woman from Eye of the Needle see fit to phone. Whether I’m aware of the two dozen imported porcelain buttons & goods to the value of altogether over sixty pounds cash that A. bought from her. Apparently she first selected everything & then went & drew some more of her own money at the post office. Had to bite my tongue not to say listen here madam thread-pedlar aware or not that little girl was my midwife & my refuge in my hour of need & no cloth of purple or thread of silk or ivory of Sheba can be too good for hr hands but then I thought better of it & said nothing otherwise the whole district would have feasted on the story again. Don’t I know how they batten upon death & birth & servants’ bugger-ups not that A. is a servant or buggers up but they draw no distinction. Seems in any case as if A. is making excellent progress with the embroidery I see washcloths & tea cloths & some of my handkerchiefs have acquired edges & roses too pretty for words. I show them to Jak but he just goes hmf. Just keep my shirts out of her hands I don’t want to look like a bloody Turk with a tulip on my shirt pocket says Jak. Don’t know what she’s got up her sleeve with the bought stuff there in hr room but I no longer go in there to check.

6 September 1960

I was reading back tonight everything that I’ve written so far in these booklets it’s quite a little pile by now & wouldn’t make much sense to an outsider who doesn’t know the circumstances. It comforts me to write up everything about home & hearth whatever Jak says. His latest is that I must sell it to Femina but he first wants to insert punctuation everywhere otherwise they’ll think his wife with her Brahms & her French can’t write properly & it’s also much too long-winded according to him I must remember he says the housewife market wants things out of the oven in a jiffy & they want joy & sorrow with capital letters & enough commas so that in-between they can have a cry & a cup of tea. Can’t understand why it irritates him so. It’s not as if I’m trying to write a history book for high schools, is it?

On the other hand when I page through the booklets like this then I wonder what’s become of me. Of my interests & my talents. Always in a hurry or sleepy or tired when I write. Just trying to keep up with myself on this farm every day. Husband child & servant over & over & that’s where it gets stuck. What on earth would Dr Blumer have made of such subjects? Perhaps I should try to write in English. Perhaps domesticities will sound better to me in a world language. Can just imagine what Friedman the little whipper-snapper of a professor in the English Department in those days would have said. Always filled the margins of my essays in his myopic little hand. You have come seriously unstuck here, Milla, what has become of your style, your wit, your vocabulary? According to the experts even psychology has to read like a thriller. Pace, remember, pace, texture & wry moments, only wry moments will satisfy my appetite. Of wry moments he would have had enough here if only he’d put on his glasses. More at any rate than in his great hero Charles Lamb. On Saying Grace. Where are the days. So vain the idea I had of myself then.