Agaat - Marlene van Niekerk [97]
It’s not an easy child. Ma says firstborns just are like that. Beatrice has all sorts of theories. He’s scared of my hands scared of my face & I have trouble suckling & as it is I have so little milk. A spring lamb says A. always has more whims than autumn lambs but with her she says he behaves himself as if it were April all the way.
She’s always cheerful & tireless. Often watch her when she doesn’t know I’m looking so tender & hr mouth so soft & hr body even though she’s no more than a child herself (have now written her name on the birthday calendar 12 July exactly one month before Jakkie. Won’t forget it again!) so protective of the helpless little creature. Feel myself in her shade her inferior by far in terms of patience & ingenuity. Feel weak in the face of the task. Still often weepy but at least somewhat less than at first. Often sit in my chair in front of the glass door feeble & listless then A. comes & lays the baby fragrant in his little white blankets & soft clothes gurgling in my arms. As if she wants me to share in the well-being she awakens in him or if she wants me to be kindled by the first little smile she gets out of him. But his little face clouds over immediately when he notices me & he frowns as if he’s seeing a dreadful problem on my face & he grimaces & he cries fit to break my heart so then I return him to A. she always has a plan. Let’s push him in his pram to the dam let’s sit there for a while in the shade of the willows let’s sing to him so he can grow human let’s go for a drive with him over the ridges so that he can feel the lie of the land up & down over the hills sikketir sikketir over drift & fields all the way to the old bridge of Vaandrigsdrift let’s take him over the plain to Malgas & sail with him over the river on the ferry so that he can get used to crossing the deep & dark places.
14 September 1960 afternoon
Allowed myself to be carried along with A.’s proposals this last week & every day today again we packed the baby-case & packed a picnic for ourselves & got into the car & followed our noses. A. doesn’t want to sit in front wants to sit in the back with the child in his crib. Watched hr in the rear-view mirror how she looks at him every now & again & rearranges a little blanket or covers a kicked-open little hand or foot & then gazes out again this side & that side over the land in its light-green spring attire the lambs playful on the dam walls the crops hand-height the fennel—her fennel!—in flower next to the road (once she opened the window to smell it & smiled with me in the mirror) the tops of the bluegums sprouted shiny-red what is she thinking? but I’d rather not ask. She rocks & she soothes the child.
I drive & show hr the world. Over the ridges over the plains over the rivers. Storms River, Breede River, Korenland, Buffelsjag, Karnemelks, Duivenhoks. We have picnics with hr favourite food cold sausage & bread with apricot jam & red cooldrink & sago pudding on dam walls & banks in the shade. Even dug up my Oxford Collected Poems & read to her & taught her a few new English words. It’s all really to console hr & to mollify hr to remind hr of the good things which should not come to nought. I look at hr & I cry secretly because I know it’s my little child in hr arms there that makes her now at times totally forget the quick steps & the stiff formal air that she affected & in unguarded moments become again as she was.
14 September evening
Reread the little books from the beginning. What is it with me this need to go over everything again now as if I’m searching