Agaat - Marlene van Niekerk [107]
Waited for her to get good & tired & then I said now you go & read your Handbook well where they explain the art of ploughing by hand & then you come & say your lesson to me & when you know it & explain to me why you’re struggling like that then we make a plan but plough you will the field one arm or not. D. says Ai Mies. I tell him to keep his trap shut if she wants to be otherwise she’ll find out at first hand what that means. A good servant is like a shiny share that shears with ease.
11 October 1960
A is walking with an even tread on one side of the plough with the strong hand on the handle & hr shoulder pulled up high & talks to the mule & sings to awake the echoes: Big baboon climbs the hill farmer’s wife takes a pill. Knew everything when I tested hr this morning. The whole logic of the plough-bottom. Share-point inclined to the unploughed ground. Hollow under hoof. Mould-board. Tow-line on the centre of the share. On the tips of her fingers.
Took her to the co-op & said now you choose yourself a plough here & shares that look right to you for that damp river-soil. So then she knew exactly what is what & as cheeky as you please asked me right in front of the salesman: Do we have a wire brush & grease & graphite & fine oil to soak the bolts after I’ve finished ploughing & do we have paint otherwise this plough will lie & rust just like the old one. Punish me as much as you like said her crooked back as I walked behind her.
Must think up something else. Feel terrible. But can’t stop.
13 October 1960
J. says he feels like going to live in a flat in town & becoming a lawyer he’s had a bellyful of being an extra in my concentration-camp movie. Says he’s had enough of the mess in the house & what’s happened to my wonderful house-slave she can’t even iron a shirt properly & why must she struggle with a handplough or is this now my latest design for a hotnot hobby first the flat seam now the plough furrow. Had to throw away three shirts this week with scorch marks on the collar. Made her waterproof a large tarpaulin with fat & linseed oil over & over again on both sides.
If I can’t break her with sweating blood I’ll get into her mind then we can see at the same time if she’s really as clever as she thinks.
I’m humiliating myself. God in heaven.
14 October
Instructed D. to move the McCormick seeder onto the tarpaulin in the shed & to jack up one wheel & to loosen all the gears & to put out a few bags of wheat seed. 150 pounds is what we must sow per morgen I said to A. Now you calculate how we must set this machine’s gears so that it’s going to sow the right density & how much seed we need to sow 16 morgen & while you’re about it teach D. as well & you needn’t come home & you needn’t be given food before you’ve done the sum go & read your Handbook & help yourself to pen & paper in the baas’s office. Since you tell me you know how to multiply & divide. Bless me if she doesn’t talk back & tell me it’s not sowing-time it’s almost harvest-time don’t I rather have a sum for harvest-time. I restrain myself. The labourers are watching me with eagle eyes. Tsk I hear behind my back. They look at me as if they don’t know me.
Do I know myself?
14 October 1960 1 o’clock.
A.’s light is still burning & there’s been a droning on three notes all evening. I know what she’s struggling with. They don’t say how many square yards in a morgen & how many feet to a yard. If she’s clever she’ll look on the farmer’s almanac tables behind the kitchen door.
Have dried up completely now. Jakkie full of colic from drinking cow’s milk.
16 October 1960
Heard a to-do in the shed early this morning & D. is in & out of the door. So there was the seeder sowing on the tarpaulin & A. is turning the jacked-up wheel with a piece of rope tied to one of the spokes so that she can count the revolutions & there is the Handbook & the almanac with tables & I see hr papers with the sums.