Agaat - Marlene van Niekerk [3]
Ma and her airs, Ma who dreamed: Little Jakkie de Wet, the lieder singer, famous from Hottentots-Holland to Vienna. Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen. Indeed!
And Agaat, poker-faced, her pop-eyed glare with which she could flatten you without a single word, the glance which she could switch off for days to punish you. Wooden eye. How old was she when I left the place in ’85? Thirty-seven?
Gaat, Ma’s nurse. Lord, what a piece of theatre that must be. Mourning Becomes Kamilla. Or, better still, The Night of the Nurse.
Gaat with her starched cap, distant snowy peak which she sometimes inclined towards me so that I could look at it from close by, so that I—only I—might touch it, the fine handiwork, white on white, of which I never could have enough. The needle flashing in her hand in front of the fireplace, Gaat’s left hand with which she fed logs into the Aga’s maw, stoked it so that it roared, strong warm hand on which I explored the world—pure fennel! The little hand on the wrong-way-round arm hidden further than usual when she had to serve Ma’s friends, or the dominee on his house call.
And I, having to sing to the guests, Ma accompanying. Good Lord. O bring me a buck in flight o’er the veld, Heidenröslein, depending on the audience.
What’s it like, there where you grew up? Your country? The eternal question when I first arrived. Always had Larkin’s reply ready: Having grown up in shade of Church and State . . . Took me years to fashion my own rhymes to bind the sweetness, the cruelty in a single memory. Later nobody asked any more. Only then could I fantasise about an alternative reply.
Pass under the boom, a red elbow. Parking disk in my hand, cold, smooth, obol with lead strip. Fare forward, traveller! Not escaping from the past. International Departures.
Was it on Ma’s behalf, or secretly dedicated to her, the fantasy of a song, an alternative reply to my inquisitive interlocutors?
Look, Mother, I’ve forgotten nothing of it. I’ll sing for you. Of the foothills fronting the homestead, one piled on the other, the varied yellows and greens of fynbos, pink and purple patches of vygie and heather. Or of the mountains I’ll sing, but in a sparser register, a wider perspective, the powder-blue battlements furnishing a fastness to the eye of the traveller along the coastal route.
My fantasy. Always the exordium on the rivers, the vleis full of fragrant white flowers in spring. This music crept by me upon the waters. A cantata of the great brown river, the Breede River, its catchment deep in the Grootwinterhoek, the great lair of winter, fed by the run-off from fern-tips, from wind-cut grooves in stone, to a hand’s-breadth rill, a leap-over-sluit amongst porcupine-rush, a misty waterfall where red disas sway in the wake of the water. Until all waterfalls flow together over a base of black rock, and the stream starts cutting into the dry land, finding a winding of its own making, at last becoming a waterway, wide enough for shipping, deep enough for bridges, for ferries, for landing-stages and commerce.
This stream, the first which a European would deign to give the name of river, according to Di Capelli. Afterwards Rio de Nazareth. Le Fleuve Large. Hottentot names, certainly, but what remains of those, and who still cares? The Sijnna River, possibly derived from the Nama, Quarrel River?
Who first told me that? Must have been Ma.
Quarrel country.
Cacophony.
Check-in counter. Window seat or aisle seat. Tweedledum and Tweedledee. Boarding-pass. Charon behind computer screen.
Woods. Deep mysterious woods. Koloniesbos, Duiwelsbos, Grootvadersbos, the woods of the colony, the devil, the grandfather. And mountains. Trappieshoogte, Tradouw, Twaalfuurkop, the height of steps, the way of the women, the peak of noon.
The rivers of my childhood! They were different, their names cannot tell how beautiful they were: Botrivier, Riviersonderend, Kleinkruisrivier, Duivenhoks, Maandagsoutrivier, Slangrivier, Buffeljagsrivier, Karringmelksrivier, Korenlandrivier: