Agaat - Marlene van Niekerk [5]
When the inquisitive insisted, I sometimes played the draughtsman, roughly sketched on a second sheet of paper the house in which I grew up.
The homestead of Grootmoedersdrift, half H-shaped, the left leg shorter than the right. The stoep in front and on the east, the backyard open to the south, with storerooms, a servant’s room. Gaat’s room. In front two jerkin-head gables with big windows, Ma’s room on the right, Pa’s room left. The weathered doves in low relief under the overhang. Thatch. In front of the house to the north, the strip of level river-grazing up to the river’s edge. Planted pasture for cattle, a seam of indigenous trees next to the water, wild olive—blaze at the core—(Olea africana), true yellowwood (Podocarpus latifolius).
The song. The other answer for my questioners. Fantasy for a snowed-in farmer. For reed pipe, for Jew’s harp, with sniffles, wordless. Lord, am I up to this? All these years. Please fasten your seatbelts.
Rapidly rising range of hills on the other side of the river. Deep kloofs overgrown with protected bush, the old avenue of wild figs next to the two-track road. Poplar grove—whispering poplars. Yard with sheds, stables, milking-stables and feeding-stables. Ma’s garden that she used to live for. Used to live. To the left, the dam. At the back to the south, on the other side of the drift and the dirt road, the dryland, for wheat and sheep. Smallish round-backed hills, the upper stretches cultivated, in between steep patches of rough scrub. Hills with plots of grass and soft brushwood for the sheep to overnight, and bluegum plantings around their drinking troughs.
Swill-trough. God, the word. Pa’s word if he didn’t like somebody. Swill-trough, dung-hole, choke-weed. My pompous headstrong old man, drilled the shit out of me with running marathons on farm roads. Obstacle courses through dongas and drinking troughs. Spleen-stitch. Inguinal hernia. Up and down those mountains. It will make a man of you. What would he think of me now, a woollen cap with six summer shirts in a suitcase, butterfly in the heart? Open and shut, open and shut go the wings. Are there windscreen wipers for melancholy? No electronic equipment, please.
Translations for wolfneusgewels, rûens, droëland, drif: jerkin-head gables, ridges, dry farming-land, crossing. Prosaic. Devise something: wolfnosed gables, humpbacked hills, dryland, drift. Always the laughter at the office, good-natured, collegial, at my attempts: grove of whispering poplars. I romanticise, they say. Quite a fan of the homely hymn, that’s true. Homesick for the melody and so on. But that’s only the half of it. The rest is granular precision, unsingable intervals.
Charon with passenger list. Dr de Wet, are you comfortable? Do you need assistance with your coat?
Everybody wears a coat.
Do they see through me nowadays, the older students? Do they want to set me talking, get me going? Do they think I need bloodletting, like a feverish horse, moonstruck lovers, inconsolables? What would they know in any case of such old folk remedies, a bunch of contemporary musicologists, what as much as suspect? Of the compulsion to tell? Of the subcutaneous refrains?
The bottom of the bottle.
Now ready for take-off. Please check that your seatbelt is securely fastened, baggage safely stowed away, emergency procedures in the seat in front of you.
For the most part I keep to the climate when they question me.
Sometimes drop something by accident, an impression, of the Breede River, De Breede Rivier above Malgas.
Aeolian harp.
1
It’ll be the end of me yet, getting communication going. That’s how it’s been from the beginning with her.
This morning I had to stare and stare at the black box where it’s been lying for eleven months. Eventually I managed to catch her eye, and point my stare, there, where the shiny black varnish of the box showed, under the pile of reading matter. Under the growing pile of little blue notebooks, under the Saries, under the Fair Ladys, under the Farmer’s Weeklys on the dressing table in front of the stoep