Agaat - Marlene van Niekerk [4]
The rivers could not be blamed. Not of thy rivers, no.
My country ’tis of thy people you’re dying. Where, from whom did I first hear that? Buffy Sainte-Marie with quaver-tremolo and mouth-bow, a musical weapon? That moment of enlightenment, the realisation! Twenty-five, not too old to start my studies afresh. Arts, music, history. Less ambitious than some of my contemporaries. The finely cultivated, the intellectuals, incredible how they elected to live after the foul-up in Angola. Attack and defence as always, one after the other self-exculpating autobiographical writing, variants on the Hemingway option. How you get to an uncivilised place in a civilised way. And stay there. A grim tussle with mother nature. I was not in accord.
Took a sheet of paper and a pencil when people here questioned me. Drew a map, lifted out a little block from the map of Southern Africa, from the lower end, from the south-western Cape Province, enlarged it freehand onto a sheet of paper. On the dirt road between Skeiding and Suurbraak, parallel to the motorway of the Garden Route, parallel to the coastline from Waenhuiskrans to Witsand, between Swellendam and Heidelberg. There. Five little crosses. Five farms in a fertile basin, nestling against the foothills of the Langeberg, the range running all the way from Worcester to eternity where it turns into the Outeniqua. Grootmoedersdrift, the middle farm, between Frambooskop to the east and The Glen to the west. There. From the middlest, inbetweenest place. Ambivalently birthed, blow, blow—that story!—waterfalls in my ears. Perhaps that was what delivered me from completedness.
Translate Grootmoedersdrift. Try it. Granny’s Ford? Granny’s Passion? What does that say? Motor cars there weren’t yet, when the farm, named after my dreaded great-great-granny Spies on Ma’s side, was given its name. And after the shallow crossing near the homestead. Dangerous in the rainy season, the bridge flooded, slippery with silt, sometimes cut off from the main road for weeks. You have to go slow there. As we all know. As we all always warned one another.
Careful on the drift!
Now I have only myself to remind. Face scanned by the passport controller. Charon behind bullet-proof glass.
Only once in my life did I see the drift totally dry. Skull-like stones, the dusty wattle bushes. No water, only rock. Just stood and stared at it, flabbergasted by the silence of the frogs, the disappearance of the whirligigs.
Gyrinus natans. The question always bothered me: What happens to the whirligigs, the little writers on water, when there is no water?
Such matters would not interest them, Mother. I could see their attention straying from the details, the topography of my first world, the thin, unsteady lines leading there, to your yard, Grootmoedersdrift. A little further down next to the drift, on the road’s side, the labourers’ cottages.
Dawid, would he still be there? Next to the turn-off to the farm, in the first of the cottages on the bank of the furrow?
Black fireplace and tin guitar. Wire-car world. White bone-whistle in exchange for a Dinky Toy. Was I inside once, twice? Gaat and I? With medicine, a little bucket of cinnamon porridge? The smell of soot and human bodies, the half-light. Shame, Gaat, but they don’t even have beds. Never mind, Boetie, let be, let’s go now, if you help one of them, you get stuck with a whole history before you know it.
A hanging bridge from Dawid’s front door into the black-wattle wilderness on the opposite bank. Rickety and full of holes. Forbidden ever to set foot on it.
Flight AC 52 to Cape Town now boarding. Voyager for the sake of the voyage. Nomad without a flock. Safer like that. A listener outside the tent, an ear, an eye, that’s all, that’s enough. But who can play the ethnographer at