Agaat - Marlene van Niekerk [221]
In the evenings after supper when Jak had gone to the stoep, Agaat would come and sit with you at the dining room table and make recommendations and see to it that you planned it all in the finest detail until your eyes were ready to fall shut. Then she made strong coffee which in turn kept you from sleep.
Take an extra Valium she’d say if you complained.
She persuaded Dawid to help you with the big things.
Jak stood on the sidelines, now and again when you weren’t looking, lent a hand when Dawid asked him.
You had a strong pump installed at the dam and on Agaat’s recommendation had a reservoir built for the summer on the rise behind the house. She saw a small bulldozer and scraper at Barlows in town and you hired it to construct the terraces.
Of compost material there was enough. You had big heaps made up from manure and straw from the stables. Agaat pushed a length of steel wire into each one and went and felt it every morning. It mustn’t be too hot, otherwise it kills the microbes, she learnt from her book.
She reckoned that the farm hotnots, as she called them, were too idle and too few for the garden work and at her insistence you got a team of convicts from town to dig trenches, stack stone walls and dig out the flowerbeds three feet deep to improve the soil texture with additions of compost.
Agaat cooked great pots of rice and pork for the convicts and kept them lively with jugs of sweet Frisco every three hours. With a short quirt she walked to and fro behind the lines with the guard to see that there was no idling.
When it’s spring again, she taught them, and the second and third voices of the refrain, day in, day out.
She had more or less burnt herself out by the time you were ready to go to Starke Ayres in Grabouw to buy seed and bulbs and trees and shrubs.
Those were your best times together, those excursions, those long hours in fragrant nurseries with your reference books and looking at the exotic flowering-habits and feeling the leaves of all the unfamiliar plants. And the names of the roses that you translated for Agaat, crepuscule, evening twilight, and explained, Mary Stuart, queen of the Scots with her long jaw, and wine-red Mario Lanza that she knew from your record with the songs from The Student Prince. Overhead the moon is bee-a-ming, you hummed together there in the nursery avenues. For the first time you had picnics again alone together, in the rose gardens of Elgin, in parks, on a bench under the huge wild fig tree with thirteen trunks, Ficus craterostoma in the botanical gardens of Kirstenbosch.
Cold sausage, sandwiches with thick butter and apricot jam and coffee with condensed milk from the thermos flask, Agaat’s favourite picnic fare. Together you sat on the old green travelling-rug in the Gardens, after you’d shown her the statue of Jan van Riebeeck and the Castle and the fountains in Adderley Street and the flower market where the Malay women tried to speak to Agaat in their Cape tongue and she didn’t really understand them.
People stared at you, the formally clad servant and the older white woman, as if you were a psychiatric patient, they looked at you, let out in the custody of your housekeeper.
See, I told you I’d show you Cape Town one day, you wanted to say, but you thought better of it.
She read your mind.
Well, would you believe, here I am actually seeing Table Mountain, she said and swallowed the rest of the sentence.
Let’s go for a drive, you said, then you can see it from the back as well.
With the map on her lap Agaat followed as you drove across Kloof Nek and read the names out loud of the corners and the bays and the heads. Lion’s Head, Kommetjie, Kalk Bay.
Beyond Simon’s Town you stopped at a little nature reserve next to the sea and went to show her the penguins.
Agaat’s face at the sight of the waddling nestling colony, to see her face as she gazed at the great world passing her by, the tanker on the horizon, the streets, the buildings, the shifting peninsula with