Agaat - Marlene van Niekerk [325]
I am a slave but You-are-mine, she always whispered in his ear before she handed him over to his mother.
And his mother looked on at Good teaching the child to walk and talk, teaching him to swim and dance and fly.
And she listened to them calling each other by blowing on the horn, the child and his minder far over vlei and hill.
And every evening Good told him how she had rescued him from the grey cliffs and from the black river and chanted rhymes and asked him riddles and hummed songs on blades of grass between her lips by the fire in the outside room and with her little laundry-mangle hand made him shadow-pictures on the wall.
And the woman eavesdropped at the door. She could see through the chink and she could hear through the keyhole and she was jealous, but what could she say and what could she do?
And Good caught the little boy silver fish in the sea, and copper frogs in the dam and showed him the blue butterfly in the forest, and made him trousers of red velvet and a shirt of green cotton and embroidered the Good Shepherd and the Wise Virgin in white on his pillow slips.
See, you are a human being, she showed him in the mirror, and You-are-mine.
And he laughed in her eyes and played at her feet and skipped at her hand under the high trees around the house with the two white gables on the river next to the blue mountain and her heart was lightened and her insides were warmed. And her bile subsided because he was the light of her life.
Tell me more Dolores. Grimm meets Goth in the Overberg.
There’s another story here.
The world is large.
‘Suddener than we fancy it, more spiteful and gay than one supposes, incorrigibly plural.’
Where do I get that from?
‘Soundlessly collateral and incompatible.’
That I would change. Not ‘soundlessly’. Full-sounding, rather, fullsoundingly collateral and incompatible.
I’ll keep the ram’s-horn on the window sill.
Des Knaben Wunderhorn.
And the bellows by the firedog next to the JetEagle.
Blaes blaest—blaes blidt—i blinde,
blaes friskhed til min hyttes baenk
med myge, vege vinde
og regn I sagte staenk.
Blaes blaest—blaes op—fanfarer,
til natten åbenbarer . . .
North and south, a frozen interval, a butterfly on felt.
On the flight-information screen the blue dart of the Boeing approaches the great green body of Canada. Plectrum and harp.
I close my eyes to sleep.
GLOSSARY OF AFRIKAANS AND SOUTH AFRICAN ENGLISH WORDS
OED = Oxford English Dictionary, Second Edition
ODSAE = Oxford Dictionary of South African English (1996)
aitsa: hey! How now!
askoek: a dough-cake baked in embers (ODSAE)
baas: employer, owner, manager, now offensive to many (ODSAE)
bakkie: a light truck, a pick-up (ODSAE)
bloedsap: An Afrikaner supporting a predominantly English-speaking political party and not the National Party (ODSAE)
boetie: little brother, an affectionate or sometimes condescending form of address
bokmakierie: a species of shrike
Boland: an area of the Western Cape lying to the west of the Hex River Mountains (ODSAE)
braai, braaivleis: barbecue
Broederbond: An exclusive (originally secret) organisation promoting the economic and political interests of Afrikaners (ODSAE)
daeraad: a strain of wheat (literally dawning)
dagga: marijuana
Die Stem: Die Stem van Suid-Afrika (The Call of South Africa) formerly the only, now joint national anthem
dikkop: stone curlew
dominee: title of and form of address for a minister of the Dutch Reformed Churches
donga: a channel or gully formed by the action of water (OED)
drift: a passage of a river; a ford (OED)
eland: the largest member of the antelope tribe . . . much valued for its flesh (OED)
FAK: Federation of Afrikaans Cultural Associations; the song anthology produced by the Federation
frikkadel: a ball of minced meat, fried or baked (OED)
fynbos: Cape macchia, a vegetation type of small, often heath-like