Agaat - Marlene van Niekerk [294]
4 June ’55
Our best thing nowadays is to walk in the veld & learn the names of things. Insects, birds, small reptiles, small mammals, grass varieties, wild flowers, stones. I take Pa’s old reference books along in a rucksack & a notebook & a pair of binoculars & her magnifying glass & then we identify things & collect examples. I learn remarkable things myself. A. has a good eye, remembers all marks, sees things that I don’t notice, white speckled breast of a lesser kestrel in a tree, pupae in the grass & cocoons hanging from twigs, webs spun between blades of grass, lizard skeletons, droppings of hare & dassie & antelope. The hangings of the fiscal shrike interest her. That’s why its name is Johnny Hangman I explain but then of course I had to explain the death penalty & its reasons as well.
Showed her a while ago a fossil that Pa picked up way back in the mountains & now she’s got a thing about it, is forever picking up rocks & says break it open there’s something in it & then upon my word she’s been right three or four times! How do you know? I ask. Some stones are warmer than others she says. Can it be that the child has second sight? Arrived here the other day with a little frog, didn’t even know such a thing existed tiny as a match-head, micro-frog according to the amphibians book & today again the loveliest little ivory frog. First had to explain ivory & then how an elephant’s tooth made its way to the name of a frog.
Mole snake, fruit bat, horse-shoe, tapeworm, finch-grass, drift-sand, smother-crop, cannibal spider, emperor butterfly. Soon discovered compounds don’t always work in the same way, sometimes had to think up something to satisfy her.
So then I had this bright idea, a fortunate inspiration it was, or not even that, a premonition & I looked under Agate in Pa’s old minerals book & there it was! Remarkable! Cloud agate Plume agate Fire agate Eye agate Iris agate Snakeskin agate Moss agate Rainbow agate! Look, I say, all the world is in your name. The things of the world are tied to one another at all points with words I say & we know one thing through the name of another thing & we join the names together. It’s a chain & if you move one link then they all move the possibilities are endless.
She wants to go & catch that blue butterfly, she says, for hr collection. I say you don’t catch it it’s holy. She’s not scared of butterflies she says they don’t bite what is holy. I said I’d think. Full of that kind of question nowadays. Where is heaven, why do people die, where is one’s soul attached, why is a thing the thing that it is & not another thing. Heaven is a stone she says out of the blue. Yes I say precious stone walls of jasper & streets of gold. No she says that’s not what she means & she shows me the stone with the fossilised fern leaf. That’s the soul she says trapped in heaven, I ask you!
In the evenings she unpacks all our finds & arranges them by kind. Can’t keep up with dishes & bottles boxes bands & scrapbooks & felt squares, pins, thumb tacks, paper clips for all the specimens she wants to display. Remarkably precise & persistent the child, it’s exceptional I think. I give her a free hand even though it smells like a witchdoctor’s shop there in her little room. Saar & Lietja say she was born with the caul. What an adventure!
7 June ’55
This afternoon after lunch A. disappeared into thin air & returned very dirty. Had actually walked to the forest on hr own! I gave hr a good hiding. The tokoloshe will catch you, I said it’s no place for little children remember your name is Good. Good, she says crying, one good two goods, goods is loose goods she says crying & and goods