Agaat - Marlene van Niekerk [297]
Let hr listen to the radio to the classical music programmes & teach hr the names of the pieces, the tempo indications, tell her the stories of the operas. She already knows many of the FAK songs & quite a few psalms & hymns. We sing them together in the morning when I wake hr & in the evenings when she goes to bed & when we’re working in the kitchen or driving to the sheep. Teach her the second voice. Oh moon you drift so slow & Let me wander through the heather are hr best. Can carry a tune quite well the little child. As pants the hart for cooling streams she whistles there in hr room when she’s pinning her rose beetles to the felt. A whistling woman & a crowing hen is neither good for God nor men I say. What’s a hart she asks. Found a photo of a hart in the old Encyclopaedia Britannica, absorbs knowledge like a sponge. Sits there & pages in the old books in the sitting room whenever she has a chance. Reads on hr own now every day three new words & three new things as I drilled her & write it down & sticks it up in hr room. Zither, lute, tambourine. Even copies it from the drawings.
Shame, how much the wiser is she for all of it? Should I send hr to school? I don’t know what I thought would come of it. Will just have to see how things develop. She’s now varnishing all the bugs with hard shells to try to preserve them but they just dissolve all the more quickly from it. Will have to phone nature conservation to ask them how one does it.
15 April 1957
A. has now thought up a whole dance of hr own on the model of the Greeting to the Sun which she still does every morning. Decided to keep it up every day from the start because I still see sometimes the stiffness & the withdrawal into herself as soon as she’s tired or tense. The Greeting works well as light exercise for the crooked shoulder. Now there’s no stopping her now she’s even teaching me. Again this morning we had the so-called dance of the emperor butterfly that first sits dead still with its wings tightly folded, half-frozen in the morning twilight with dew on its nose & the outside of the wings pitch-black with white stars & its antennae still filmed with night & then it unfolds its wings with the dawning so she tells & she invents the dance as she goes along. Once, twice, three times slowly the wings open as soon as he catches the first rays of the sun & then he feels one wing is different & he turns his head & looks over his shoulder & he sees hey, but this wing is a heavenly blue on the inside & it tickles & it trills & it shimmers & he gets the urge to fly, quite intoxicated with his own colour in the sun that’s rising higher & higher & shining brighter & brighter & he doesn’t know if he wants the blue rather on the one or rather on the other wing he tries to have it on both.
Heaven knows where she fetches it all from. She’s never seen the Apatura iris itself it’s just what I’ve told hr about it.
A whole extended dance of the two of us it turned into this morning. First in hr room where she explained the dance & then into my room & out of my room by the door of the side stoep & round the front again & down the stoep steps & down the garden path & through the last gillyflowers & around the great oak in the middle of the garden. Even the little thin arm flutters & flaps along in the long crocheted sleeve. Then I chase hr & then she chases me