Agaat - Marlene van Niekerk [186]
14 September 1974
Jakkie home for the spring holiday. Busy time on the farm. A. busy all day & Jakkie at a bit of a loose end. Come let me help you with your German I say but he doesn’t want me to. Then I said let’s sing it’s the best way of learning a language but in fact I wanted to get some idea of how the voice had broken. So I taught him Der Musensohn: Und nach dem Takte reget/Und nach dem Mass beweget. A delicate tenor as I’d suspected & still the perfect pitch & the fine sensitivity, ag it would be a sin if he didn’t develop it. The most important thing is that I made some contact with him again.
Saturday 15 February 1975 half past six
Terrible day! It’s just me here in the house, feels as if I’m going mad. What must I do to escape this hell? Seems as if everything I undertake is doomed.
By four o’clock this afternoon back already from long weekend at Witsand. Do miss Jakkie so much now that he’s at school in Stellenbosch & it’s generally more relaxed in the beach house. Thought it might be nice if we ate out for a change as a family in the hotel there at the end of the weekend but what a fiasco! Jakkie (full of enlightened ideas these days) says he doesn’t want to go if Agaat can’t go along. There you have it, said J., A. is the government of Gdrift but out there she’s a domestic & look what I’ve brought up in my wisdom & now Jakkie also has wrong ideas in his head.
Surely there’ll be facilities for the kitchen staff I thought a little table somewhere where she can sit & eat. So A. goes along in her best cap very reluctant but for Jakkie’s sake. When we arrive there she doesn’t want to know anything about the hotel kitchen & she won’t budge & she stays sitting in the car & next thing Jakkie gets up suddenly without apology or explanation & takes his plate of food with him to go & give it to A. & apparently she then scolded him so fiercely that he threw the plate on the ground. This Jak then found out because when Jakkie didn’t return to the table he went to see what was happening outside & when they eventually returned to the dining room Jakkie’s face was blood-red & he had a white ring round his mouth. Heard later that Jak had thrashed Jakkie with his belt right there in front of A. How could J. do such a thing? The child is fifteen already & very over-sensitive. Terrible atmosphere because then we still had to pack everything at the beach house & Jak shouts at everybody & goes like a bat out of hell back within two hours. When we got here he made Jakkie pack immediately & ordered Dawid to take him back to Stellenbosch in the bakkie.
A. has disappeared it’s almost dark & she’s not back yet what’s going to happen to us here? J. is out of his mind charged out of here in his running-clothes. How can they just leave me all on my own like this after all that?
15
For supper there’s spinach. For dessert there’ll be stewed prunes.
Green food and black food. 12 December. Already noted on the calendar, entered in the log book.
Puree.
In the Braun.
Zimmmm-zoommm.
And after that strained three times through a sieve.
Fine but fibre-rich.
Agaat came and stood in the doorway with her little hand folded in her big hand to tell me all this. She couldn’t control the timbre of her voice. Couldn’t spare me the details of pulping. She tried. But she couldn’t. Triumphantly. Clipped. A real elocution lesson. Lips tensed around the p’s. Breath expelled robustly as if she’d rather be singing. If only I could prompt her to perform something. A libretto for the great purgation scene. Prima donna on her Procrustean bed.
Or something of the kind.
In her present mood she’d rather call the thing by name outright.
Sometimes I wonder whether, if I were suddenly to recover