Agaat - Marlene van Niekerk [36]
The old FAK Songbook cheered me up a bit. Softly so that nobody could hear me I sat there in the back & sang songs to myself. The bridge on our farm. On the death of an owl. On my old tin guitar. By the old millstream. Will it give her comfort too? The idea that she will sit on her own in the back & sing. So then I put the songbook away again because then I just wanted to cry again.
So then I drank the sweet tea & read the chapter on hides in the old Handbook for farmers the removal of hair in bran & in manure & braying of the thongs till dressed & the cawr snow-white (‘core’? old book = full of funny words & spelling mistakes must point them out to A.) & tanning of small & large hides with vitriol & barkbush. Methods that few people know about nowadays.
Pa taught me the importance of this old knowledge he said the wheel always turns my child there will be a time again of poverty & need & the farmer who doesn’t know about the old ways then will be gone to glory & then there I sat crying over Pa’s underlinings in the parts about the deterioration of the veld in our country & the exhaustion & ill-treatment of the soil. That is what A. must also learn the old ways & the care of the defenceless earth, the little pans & the vleis & the ‘tortisses’ & how we must protect it all against the onslaughts of so-called civilisation because how many centuries does it not take for mother-rock to crumble & disintegrate to soil & then humans come along & destroy it through avarice & carelessness.
J. is actually the one who should be reading it all but it’s not as if he takes any notice of me also laughed that time when I said I wasn’t selling the donkeys that mother kept what is a farm without a donkey. If the plough broke or the tractor wouldn’t go in those first years & the parts couldn’t arrive immediately from town then one could carry on with the animals & hand-plough so that one didn’t fall behindhand too much with the work. Then one regained some respect for the blood-sweat with which Gdrift was carved out of the earth.
Underlined in pencil for A. the sentence in the Foreword that says that the Handbook will help the farmer in his material growth just as the Bible helps him in his spiritual growth & then I lay down on her bed because I was suddenly very tired & closed my eyes & prayed for my child who has to be born into this world. Must have dropped off for a while because next thing I saw a broad strip of sunlight was slanting over the linoleum. Inside the lunch was already being brought to the table J. was at the table & he frowned when he saw me & pointed at my forehead with his fork if it wasn’t one of A.’s caps that I’d tried on there in her room in front of her mirror so light it is you don’t even know you’re wearing it. What is that? asked J. is that your mothering-bonnet? Fortunately I could take it off before Somebody Else saw it.
4
Agaat stirs on her bed in the passage. I see the first glimmering through a chink in the curtain. It’s five o’clock on the phosphorescent hands of the alarm clock on the night-table.
Agaat doesn’t need an alarm. Every morning just before the grandfather clock chimes the hour, she awakens. By then I have been lying awake for a long time. Sometimes I pretend to be sleeping so that she can sing. Gaat sings me awake.
There’s only one creak as she sits up on the camp stretcher. While the chimes echo in the front room, she doesn’t budge. What could she be thinking of in between the five strokes? Would she be