Agaat - Marlene van Niekerk [172]
16 May 1968
A. now measures Jakkie every week—Friday evenings much ado about his supposedly growing so fast. Have just again observed the operation there in the passage she calls it keeping up-to-date the ‘growth rate’. He has to take off his shoes & exhale & open his ribcage & stand with his heels against the skirting board & his back up straight & his head to attention against the ascending ladder of pencil marks from each preceding birthday.
Suspect it’s just an excuse that A. thinks up to touch him because of course he’s starting to get shy nowadays. She presses & pushes his shoulders & neck & knees as if she’s trying to stop him from changing sometimes I’m scared she’s doing him some harm & then she brings the ruler & places it square & level over his crown & makes a small pencil line. Have just seen her holding him round the throat with hr strong hand while he’s standing bolt upright against the wall with eyes shut tight. But you’re growing way past me now you’re going to get an Adam’s apple just like your father just feel this almighty thick gullet.
What are these other lines? I hear Jakkie ask there at the end of the passage. Reply: low-tide mark depth of the drift height of the time length of the shadows who can tell? it’s an old house maybe it’s your mother who was measured there or perhaps your grandmother.
Who posted letters here? asks Jakkie & he clappers the copper flap of the post-slit. Internal correspondence says Agaat perhaps there was somebody in quarantine she says. What is quarantine? asks Jakkie. That’s when you don’t know what disease someone’s suffering from then you isolate them otherwise they infect the healthy people then they communicate only in writing because talking is too dangerous because the germs live in the breath.
In passing I got an almighty look from A. What does she want me to say? What would Jakkie make of it if he knew? Does she want to protect him from the knowledge? Or does she want to protect me? Or herself? Suspect in any case J. has already told him everything. Although perhaps he’d rather hush up the past from his son.
Concerning Jakkie’s birth there are several stories. One story is that A. changed into the noonday witch & caught him on the pass & stuck his tail into a pillowslip & chopped it off with an axe before de-hairing him further. But there are also always new stories & there is the last bedtime story that must always remain the same & of which I never can make out the ending.
I suppose it’s time for the facts of life. Wonder if I should leave that to J. Perhaps A. has also in that left us far behind. Saw her the other day standing there on the front stoep with him hr little hand on his shoulder & pointing with the other hand down there by the river the stallion pawing his front legs in the air trying to get on top of the mare.
15 July 1968
A. & Jakkie’s games—something about them I find disquieting nowadays. Do so badly want him to mix with children of his own age. Time that he went to school again.
They call each other from long distances. The game is apparently to see who has the finest hearing & turns up within a reasonable time. Sometimes it’s a terrifying hissing deafening between-teeth-whistling & hammering on the yard gong in season & out of season & a sounding of the lorry’s hooter fit to wake the dead. Put a stop to that the shouting with the hands in front of the mouth is bad enough. What on earth could fascinate them so about it? The one or the other vanishes into thin air & then the agreement is apparently to leave something behind in the vanishing-place like a handkerchief or a bottle-top (as proof of how far you could hear). The latest variation is the ram’s horn. The notes don’t really vary much. Sometimes though the