Marlene van Niekerk - Agaat

You started cleaning the head wounds. There were ugly deep cuts that were bleeding freely. Soil and grit clung to them. Agaat calmed down as she passed you the cotton wool, as she dipped the wads in gentian violet and cut the lengths of bandage for you and prepared the plaster.

You talked softly to Julies while you were working. Jakkie was sitting wide-eyed in the grass to one side. Dawid went off somewhere.

Everything will be okay, Julius, you said, I’ll take you home, the doctor’s coming, I’ll see to everything, don’t worry. You’ll have all the time you need to get better and you’ll be paid through and all the doctor’s expenses we’ll carry.

It was intended for Agaat as well, the timbre you gave to your voice, the reassuring sentences, the holding of the man’s rough hand.

Perhaps it was for yourself as well. You missed music, suddenly, which could always console you, bring you closer to yourself, make you feel closer to everything and everybody, but what had remained of your music in the midst of all the sickness and catastrophe?

Down there in the heat of the midday sun where the two of you were sitting on your knees by the groaning man with the thorns under your knees, and your and Agaat’s hands that touched each other as you passed on and received the scissors and bandages to and from each other, there everything suddenly felt too much for you.

The ambiguity of the place, your farm, where you were passing your days, the destitution of the people around you, your inability to act rightly and justly, the catastrophes that beset you day after day, the eternal squabbles with Jak, your child who with the new fine grip of his little fingers was picking lucerne stems, and around whose head all these things raged without his understanding any of it yet. He’d start crying in a certain manner when the voices were raised, got a fright when the doors slammed, his little face was concerned when tension or crises brewed. How could you protect him against it all?

Your tears dripped on the man’s face.

Agaat wiped them.

You tied the tarpaulin between the tractor and the baler to cast some shade over him. He had to lie right there until the doctor arrived, you agreed. You wouldn’t pick him up or turn him in case he had a serious back injury. His foot you wanted nothing to do with. It didn’t look like a foot any longer.

How did that day ever come to an end? How in heaven’s name did you manage after all that to sit down together at one table and eat?

You looked at Jak’s face as he sat there glaring at you. You remember the feeling, a sort of sickly equanimity took possession of you. His face was that of a stranger. How had you not at the beginning yearned to share something of your sensations and your intimate perceptions, something of the difficulty of the decisions and concerns of the farm with him? But never could you penetrate his resistance.

Jak, you said, let’s give it up and go to bed, everything’s in any case under control again, as well and as badly as possible.

That was when Gaat came in again. She had awaited her opportunity. You could always hear her calculating her entrance. Her footsteps were soft, for the first time that day.

Is the child still not in bed? you asked when she stood there again with Jakkie on her arm, in the heavy silence that hung suspended between you and Jak.

She put the child down next to the sideboard whose drawers he opened every day, the one with his favourite handles. He pulled himself up by it immediately.

She went and crouched a few paces further diagonally behind him. Jakkie swivelled back his neck. First to one side and then the other, his mouth a rosebud as Agaat had taught him.

Come, she said, come to Gaat. She held out her arms.

Terrifyingly, he turned around. The little hand let go of the handle, the first wobbling solo stance it was.

Come, said Agaat, show your father-him how well you can walk already.

His little face broke into one radiant laugh.

’Alk, he said.

Yes, walk, Agaat said, walk walk walk!

And there it was, the unmistakable independent sequential first steps.

With the last steps he let himself fall, crowing with laughter, into his nêne’s arms. She got up with him, shook him up onto her hip, laughing into his eyes.

Pa’s little bull, Jak said, and opened his arms to receive him from her.

1 October 1964

They disappear like mice nowadays. Only have to take turn away once & to call when I miss them & then I know it’s too late for searching they want to be GONE. Wind & cloud they are together fern & water. Long hours together & full of secrets. Something about it makes me anxious. They’re chronically there around the drift & the dam or they hide in the forest. A. can’t swim & there are still baboons & leopards in the kloofs & A. with only one good hand & Jakkie not yet five & so attached to her one would swear she was his actual mother. Perhaps she is. I know she would protect him with her own life & yet.

Jak has plenty to say about it says I’m abandoning my child to wrong influences. He’s just jealous. I’m the one & only influence even if it is indirect. But now I’ve stipulated that she may not disappear anywhere without telling me where to exactly & at what time they’ll be back. After all, she has hr own watch that I gave hr for hr last birthday. She says she’d rather read the time from the sun but I tell hr put on your watch so that you can be back at the prescribed time I don’t want hassles.

In fact it’s not a hassle at all. Probably just needlessly concerned. After all she just takes him to all the little old places that I showed hr myself that were my places when I was small here on the farm & that pa had shown me. The tortoise cemetery the workshop of the elves the approach of the waterbuck the island with the blackest brambles where the dragonfly comes to nest on your shoulder a brooch of sapphire if it’s blue of rubies if it’s red but in reality the embodied breathing out & in of Him who dreams Holy dreams. I know in my heart that that is really all that Agaat tells him.

5 October 1964

Light-years says Jakkie. Prospect he says year-rings & krakadouw. He asks: Do eels also feel sad why do they stand up straight like that in the stream & what do whispering poplars whisper about & where’s the brack in the brackbush what do the whirligigs write in the water & why do they wear boots? I know where he gets it from. What can I say? My father taught me & I taught A.

At full moon as a child I used to be able to see two bay horses in front of a buck-wagon with a wedding couple on their way to a place called Eendekuil. I suppose it’s all really quite harmless. But there’s something dogged about Agaat’s way with Jakkie. Something about her energy that scares me.

Dreamt that she suffocates him & bashes his head to pulp with a brick. Not something I can tell Jak. Even less Agaat. Lord help me. I must attune myself to the beautiful & the good. Must pray that everything will conspire towards good here.

23 October 1965

A. is sixteen & I want her to be confirmed. So took hr last Sunday to the mission church in Suurbraak when we ourselves were on our way to church in Swellendam. Could see when we picked her up again that it hadn’t been a good idea. Had warned her that she couldn’t go to church in her cap & apron now she says she’s not going again the people laugh at her. Spoke to Dominee van der Lught. Now she goes to church with us in town. Sits in the mothers’ room with Jakkie. At least she now hears the sermon.

10 November 1965