Agaat - Marlene van Niekerk [249]
You’re not a mole, I say, you’re an above-ground creature, you walk in the light.
18 April ’54
Jak no longer wants to eat in Agaat’s presence in the evenings. She gives him the creeps, he says. So now I bathe her and feed her in the kitchen in the early evening and put her to bed so that he doesn’t have to have any dealings with her.
You’ll see yet what she’s going to mean for us, I say.
He says I mustn’t make him complicit in my latest project. He’s already complicit enough in my farm, in my house, in my everything. Don’t know what I must do with Jak. He takes offence if I ask him the slightest little thing.
19 April ’54
We practise facial expressions. I try to develop the mobility of the face beyond just the eyes, around the mouth, in the carriage of the body. Look friendly, look sad, look excited. Look like a full moon, a field mouse, a blossom tree, a dead wall, fresh fire. The ‘dead wall’ she does very well! I play notes on the piano for her and then I press on spots of her face and give a sound value to every spot. She’s my little brown piano I say, I’ll play her full of notes until she sounds like a concert.
21 April ’54
At last! First rhyme on the out-breath, first own independent words! The Lord is my witness, I’m thoroughly exhausted with trying to breathe life into the child. Did then make the promised big bellows-fire here in the back next to the slaughter-bluegum. Assorted woods for the best effect, wattle, bluegum, oily pine cones. A lesson in sound for two. First we lay blowing on either side of the woodpile. As the wood started ticking, snapping, popping, crackling, we imitated sounds, we stoked a blend of sounds, kips, phuit, shffiit, gh-gh-gh-gh, ts-s-s-s-k, ph-ph-ph-ut, b-hub.
Your mouth is a spark, the roof of your mouth is fire, the shaft of the flame is your tongue!
Then we danced the fire! Two flames! Agaat quite inspired. Jumps up and down, whirling the little legs, quaking with the arms. Altogether wild. I blow with the bellows under her dress. You’re the fire! I egg her on. Just had to stop her from coming too close.
Hip-up and Hop-down, I sing to her:
Climb the stairs
Hip-up falls down
And hip-down goes up
What is it?
And there it came at last, after more than three months’ trouble: A fire and its ashes and smoke! she yells and swings her arms, of her own accord she yells it, with a breath coming straight out! She grabs the bellows, all you can see are sparks flying, so hard does she work it, she presses the lower handle against her body with the weak hand and pumps it with the strong.
We extinguished it with a pail of water. She wanted to catch the white, hot, hissing whirls of steam with her hands.
Let them be, I said, they turn into clouds that bring rain again.
Clouds can’t burn, she says. She blows the bellows under them. Phirrrt, phorrrt, up in the air.
Burn, cloud, burn! she calls.
My ears were ringing with it. My blood felt too much for my veins. Now she’d made the bellows her own, I said, to keep for ever as a souvenir of how she came to talk in the world.
I hope she can calm down, perhaps just a little bit of valerian tonight at bed-time.
14 May ’54
Agaat is starting to grow. I weigh and measure her regularly. She’s catching up nicely now. Had her at the doctor’s again, easier this time, he says she’s perfectly normal except for the mechanical defect of the little arm. I make her stand against the door frame of the back room and make pencil marks every month. I write her weight on the calendar in her room. She eats everything and I no longer have