Agaat - Marlene van Niekerk [264]
And Lys sends greetings, apparently. I’m going to bake a chocolate cake tonight with six candles on it. Tomorrow is the day! Agaat’s birthday. I feel I must celebrate it so that she can start becoming human here on Gdrift. Explained to her nicely: we commemorate the day that the Lord gave you as gift to yourself and to me.
12 July half past eight
Perhaps not such a bright idea to let Agaat have a birthday. Didn’t occur to me that you need other people for such a birthday. In the end had Saar’s children come in their Sunday best. Handed out cake and cooldrinks at a little table in the backyard. Had to keep an eye all the time. As soon as I turn my back, the taunting starts. Donkey-jaw, dassie-paw. I make eye signals at Agaat. Never mind, they don’t know any better. Later just sent the children home and phoned Beatrice to come over. Made Agaat recite rhymes and tell us tales in the sitting room and clapped hands every time when she’d finished. Everything from jack be nimble jack be quick to let us shine for Jesus.
Beatrice can’t believe it, good heavens, she says, but her praise doesn’t sound genuine, she thinks I’m batty to put so much into the child, she says I’m neglecting my social life, she asks what Jak says about it all and then I’m very cautious what I say. Beatrice is at heart a head-girl. She’ll never do anything that deviates, take a risk or put herself at hazard for something or somebody else. Never take sides. I understand more clearly all the time that I’ll have to believe in this on my own, even though it’s literally what everybody is always preaching and professing. Perhaps their problem is exactly that I’m taking the Word so literally.
16 August 1954
Today we gardened all day, first plaited a garland from tulip stems and sorrel flowers and then sowed herb seeds in the backyard, I make her chew the seeds to teach her the taste of everything: coriander, dill, poppy-seed, she likes dill best. What does it taste like? I ask. Like drop, she says with a clever face, liquorice. You get drop from me when you’re good, soethout, I teach her the Afrikaans word, sweetwood because it’s sweet, Agaat because she’s good. Drop is drop, she says. So what’s a dropper? Perhaps she’s very intelligent, she must have heard us talking at fencing-time. A hanging picket, I teach her, because it’s not anchored, it just hangs in the fence.
13 September 1954
Now that the soul is awakening in her and she’s outgrown the terrors of her origins, at least in body (weight and height normal for the first time now), it’s time for Agaat to be baptised. As long as it’s a private ceremony, says Dominee, it can take place in the white church. He’ll arrange for witnesses. He agrees that it’s time for her to have the faith of her guardian beatified in her so that she can grown up in the mercy of the covenant.
14 September
Difficult to explain to A. about the baptism. Now that she’s nice and grown up and can sing and speak, I said, and is obedient and can wash and dress herself and can fasten her buttons and buckles and knows the Bible stories and says her prayers every evening, she must be branded on the forehead as a child of the Lord with water from the font.
Must I sit in a chair with my mouth wide open? she asks. Didn’t understand at first, only after a while remembered about the tooth-pulling. Must have made a big impression.
I took out the album with my own christening-photos to explain. She was fascinated by the christening-dress, went and dug it up out of the linen cupboard to show her. Moths had got into it, full of holes, will have to get rid of it, will in any case probably never be used on Grootmoedersdrift. Over and over she touched the pleats and frills and double collars of the outfit. Old-fashioned full of frills the old thing, still from Ma’s family. Why a dress like that? she asks.
Christening-dress, confirmation