19

The sharpening of the knives.

How many hours ago? I was still asleep, if you can call it sleep, the drowsy delirium in which I drift.

Sudden swishing sounds in the dark by the bed’s head.

Mighty striking-up. Last movement. Metal on metal. Con brio.

From the movement of air against my face I could infer her position. To and fro the rhythm firmed, a rocking to the tempo of the sleeper. She was whetting without varying the angle of the whetting-rod to my bed, a duller sound close to her body, a high sibilant hiss at the furthest point of the rod. The point of the rod was on the railing at the head of the bed, a whetting-wind over my forehead.

Oh, Agaat, what else will you still think up for me? Sharpening knives over the tip of my comatose nose.

It was the big knife, to judge by the sound, the one with the three silver studs on the handle. And it was the longest whetting-rod, the heavy one with the cast-iron handle, the one that’s stored in the long bottom drawer next to the old Aga because it doesn’t fit anywhere else.

It was a culinary demonstration. How old was she? Not old enough yet to handle sharp objects.

See, you support the rod against your waist and the point you rest on the edge of the table.

But that was long ago. The point of the rod now on the top railing of my bed, close to my head. The point of support the midriff of Agaat.

Dangerous game! If the rod were to slip! If the knife were to skip! If the blade were to snap! The meaning of danger! Life-threatening!

Yes, that’s how you do it! Remind me that I still exist! No lack of imagination! Whatever else may be wanting!

How many hours ago? Perhaps she too can no longer count down my hours cleanly. Perhaps she tallies them now by the sharpening of knives, by blades of grass, by the blooms of the bougainvillea dropping with the lightest of rustlings on the stoep.

My honed, grass-light hours.

The apron bands creaked as she sharpened.

Where are you rowing me to, Agaat, to what coast, to what river mouth?

Seven knives I counted by ear, they’re all there, down to the very thin worn-down little one with the crooked blade for scraping carrots and cucumbers in the kitchen of Grootmoedersdrift. Through my chinks I could see them flashing.

Wings of herons, a stormy sky.

Where are you flying to with blades, Agaat, to which high Langeberg horizon?

The bed sang.

In my closeness she found hollows of marrow for me. What more could I want?

Come and stand here in front of me, you’re big enough to learn to handle sharp objects.

I take her hands in mine, the small hand in my right hand. I press the whetting-rod against her body, the strong hand holds the knife, I show her the stroke, it must sing, I say, come let’s make the knives sing!

Why, she asks, do my hands feel as if they’re asleep for hours after I’ve been sharpening?

That shows you’re doing it right, it means the knowledge is going into you, into your flesh and into your bones so that you won’t forget the lesson: You shall know a good kitchen by the edges of its knives, a farm by the sharpness of its shares and its scythes.

Did I imagine that I heard our whetting-song? On the in-breath?

Hey ho, hitch up the wagon.

Yes, Agaat, the wheat stands white in the fields. The front-cutter mows a swathe through the blades of wheat. Over the contours the wagon rocks with its load of golden sheaves. My bed with shiny railings, filled with Kleintrou and filled with Daeraad.

Can I still believe my ears?

Yes, I heard it, the rustling of newspaper, peels falling on a tin surface. The big enamel bowl from Ma’s time, the one with the three red roses in the base, the white one with the black riffled edge around the top, and the spreading black patches where the enamel has gone. No longer suitable for milk, but good enough for blood, for peels. I could discern it through my fissures, the great white stain catching and reflecting the light, a cloud drifting through the room.

Shall I come to rain? Shall I be brought to fruition? Sweet? A sweeter ending than one would have expected after this? How?

A lengthy peeling it was. Hours on end. A slicing, a grating. At long intervals the chunks plashed into bowls of water.

Why is she whetting and peeling here in my room? Why do I see her shadow low down there on the floor? A shadow on her knees? A cloud dripping onto a cloud?

The smell was green and sweet and raw, traces of beans, lazy housewife, of peas, sugarsnow, of cabbage, of carrots, of turnips and radishes, of freshly-pulled fennel bulbs, the whole vegetable garden below the drift, the irrigation water, the loam darkened with barrow-loads of compost.

With the thud of the boer pumpkin on the floorboards I started to understand.

I was supposed to be able to hear the kitchen. In full concert. Pull out all the stops.

Toccata and fugue.

I had to hear and smell what it would be like when I’m gone. The onset of the funeral meal, with how much conviction it would be undertaken. The preparation for the guests, with concentration, with dedication, with virtuoso fingering.

It was supposed to console me. It was supposed to reassure me. I was in the knives, I was in the peels, in the drawers, in the enamel bowls, I was the rich black compost, I was the soil, and nothing would ever grow without me. Nothing, to the end of time, without my having farmed here, and none of the people remaining here and living off the land.

My last meal. That was what she was preparing for me. For the abstemious guest of honour.

Eight o’clock. Will she come and eat it on my behalf?

The table is set. Damask, flowers, wine, candles, silver, crystal, porcelain. Four courses at the foot of my bed.

She removed the plaster from my staring eye, she splinted open the collapsed one, she put drops in both so that I could behold it all.

Here come the dishes now. Here they come one by one. The white porcelain. Here, gliding past, is the large oval platter with the leg of lamb, complete with the knuckle-bone. Garnished with rosemary, blue blooms and all. Fatty rind crisp and brown.

She’d been grazed on bushy scrub for extra taste and flavour, earmarked early on, cleansed with milk and bran, stalked from behind where she was a-dreaming in the clover, and before she knew it, before fear could bane her . . .

Ag Agaat, you would have lent a hand there with your butcher’s sleeve! You would have done it clean and fast, with respect for the wool, respect for the membranes.

She flourishes open the napkin in a single sweep, tucks it into the front of her apron, gardenia on her bib.

Forty-three years together on earth.

Her cap tilts forward. For the sake of the invisible congregation.

We’re laughing at them the merest bit, I see, Agaat.

Come Lord Jesus, be our guest, let these thy gifts to us be blessed.

Why do people want to eat when somebody’s died?

When have I seen her eating seated at a table?

In the dining room of old, at the far end of the table, Abba, Father bless this food for our everlasting good, the little silver shovel in the little hand, the little blunt silver fork in the other.

At the kitchen table, early evenings with me, an extra spoon in my hand: Come, another bite. Stories and rhymes to make it go down.

And when the clock struck twelve,

her dish was of enamel made,

her mug of tin,

her knife her fork her spoon

hidden under the kitchen sink.

Here, your things, in case of need,

They have their place as you do now,

You are of another breed.

With nail polish I painted a capital A on the underside of the plate, on the underside of the mug, so that they couldn’t get mixed up with those of the other servants.

She always packed it, her cutlery, even for a picnic, a church bazaar, for the holiday at Witsand, wrapped in a white cloth.

She eats her picnic behind a tree, her bazaar food behind the verger’s garden wall. Behind a closed kitchen door she eats when the house has fallen silent. The trunk of the tree says forbidden, the door says no trespassers. How high the wall is there under the seringas.

I went and peeped through the kitchen window one evening. Her place set with enamel, the long-pronged fork, the old bone-handled knife, the tin mug of water. The blue plate from the warming oven, the pulling-out of the chair, the sitting-down as if to boiled human flesh, the hands to the cap, if it’s settled squarely, the hands to the apron bands, if they’re running at right angles across the shoulders, the measured forkfuls, the steady pace, the spot at the furthest edge of the table where her eyes are fixed when she chews, her mouth shut tight, with scarcely visible movement of the jaws, straight back, straight head, without a sign of gulping, except for the small sip of water afterwards, as if it’s salt water, or bitter water, or blood.

She knew there was somebody, warned me, set down the knife and fork in the plate, folded her hands in her lap, and gazed in front of her, and waited. I was slow to understand, slow to get away from the window, the dogs were jumping up against me. She got up, came and drew the curtain in my face, little tugs, unhurried, as if I weren’t there, as if the only face she had seen was her own reflection in the pane. And later it was Jakkie’s riddle, the solitary dining of his nêne.

Why can’t I look when you’re eating, Gaat?

Because my teeth are so big, Boetie!

Why can’t I see when you’re drinking, Gaat?

Because I milk the kitchen snake into my mug, my child!

Why do you always sit alone?

Because I’m the one in alone!

Why do you draw the curtains?

So that my fork shouldn’t hook the lightning!

Why do you close the door?

So that my knife shouldn’t run away through the door!

What do you eat then, Agaat?

Steamed frog, baked lizard and soup made of the tears of stones!

Stop it, the child has nightmares!

Carry on, because your même must die!

Is it a song? Why does is sound so familiar?

The table is singing at the end of my bed.

The starched sheets are singing.

Death’s divinities.

The lids are removed, the steam arises.

My eye that can’t blink becomes all-seeing. No moth or rust can destroy such a sight.

Agaat carves for herself.

Agaat dishes a plateful. White and green and yellow and red.

My mouth that cannot speak, now epicurean.

Eat me a psalm of pumpkin and sweet potato, the orange and the ochre, dig a pyramid over me, an underground silo, pierce peep-holes for the stars, mill the angles of the moonbeams in the grooves.

Is the right oar in the rowlock, and the left, is it there, is it greased? What about the meat with the shiny fatty rind, has it been wrapped for me in the white muslin? Who gets the knuckle bone? Who delivers the dumplings? Where in heaven’s name to go with the cabbage rissoles? What to do with the baked bat?

The cave wall suppurates.

Pick the umbrella membranes off the wing-spokes with your teeth!

Because she must become other and roast through all the way to the pips and dispose of her whole self and selfishness must become her own master no longer hunger after otherman’s heart or liver no longer thirst after otherchild’s tears full-steam ahead to the whiter of the twin lights beware of the black and red roofs of damnation thus is it written in the Book of Death. Where did I read it?

I get between her teeth. My body, my blood. She traces the four quarters of the wind on her bib, with her fork she sounds a gong of crystal.

She gets up from the table.

Look, it is finished, she says. She unfolds it. She holds the big cloth before me. The one at which she’s been labouring all this time.

It will just have to be finished now, she says, I can’t do more than this. But before I wash and starch it, I must first put it on and go and lie in your grave with it. This very night is the trial.

My ear that can’t hear, what was that?

She holds the smock above her head like a tent. Over the white apron and over the black sleeves drapes the densely embroidered cloth. Her cap goes under, her cap comes up through the neck-hole.

Oh where did you get that frock, where did you get that shroud?

I spy with my single eye, I spy.

I spy on the frock the sea at Infanta, I spy the land at Skeiding.

In laidwork and blackwork and braiding and cross-stitch and canvas.

It’s the fire, it’s the flood, it’s the feast.

The shearing, the calving, the way of the women, a heron against the sky, a blue emperor in the forest, everything from here to the Hottentots Holland, all the scenes of Grootmoedersdrift.

They swirl before me, they twirl before me, the last merry-go-round. Ritornello.

And here my herald, who tries it on for me and displays it. The fourth dress of woman.

Out onto the gangplank she strides. The ship lies ready, the whistles blow.

Oh, my old piano, I don’t know her, her face a sorrowing ruin.

Is it good enough to be buried in? she asks with her eyes.

With her mouth she says: It’s the best I could do. Do you remember the cloth? The Glenshee linen? For one day when I’m a master, you said. First the history of South Africa you said, and then heaven.

She tightens the drawstrings around her neck.

She smiles a substitute smile. Oh, my most macabre Agaat! I see it in her eyes, only I can see it, I who fattened those eyes! The eye of the master, to the brink of the grave!

Breastwork against the worms, says Agaat’s gaze. Joke! And the hem I’ll sew shut once you’re in, then they can’t get in at the bottom either, at any rate not while your hair is growing that last little bit!

But for the time being the nether regions must remain unstitched.

For the scout goes by foot.

Two black noses of school shoes peer out. Steam rises from the cap. Diabolus in musica! She genuflects, she departs for that white-walled place. Tchi, thci, tchi, go her soles on the track.

…

The beginning of the end. That’s what you felt all the time during that last feast, that last visit of Jakkie’s. The end that is always a repetition of the beginning. A charging-around in vehicles, a sightseeing tour, a dead sheep, a live sheep, a remembered sheep, a shepherd with staff, birds’ eggs in a bowl, an aeroplane, a fire, the blue birthday-mountains, the white arum lilies in the vlei, the mother, the father, the son, the dishes overflowing, the people, the coming and the going.

And Agaat.

This time it was Jakkie who tried to get at her.

You felt the eyes of the guest scrutinising him, scrutinising the commissions and omissions of all of you.

The food nauseated you.

You felt as if you were floating above the ground all the time. Your tongue felt too big for your mouth, your jaw was numb. You tried to pronounce the proper phrases as well as possible.

Such a run-up, such momentum, so much hope, so much effort, such a wager. To catch the butterfly. And then when it’s in your hand, it’s a fluttering against your palm, the gold dust disperses on your thumb, the rainbow fades, the antennae falter against your wrist.

Paradise is lost when its boundaries come into sight.

Compose your face, Jak said, don’t be such a drama queen.

But his own face was white. And Jakkie was pale under his three-days’ stubble.

It was the first time that he’d arrived home unshaven, in a wrinkled shirt, in a borrowed car full of mud splashes. His own was broken-down in the garage in Saldanha, he said.

You were used to his arriving as if out of a bandbox. To impress all of you, you used to think.

He always brought his case full of blue and white shirts and pants and caps and tunics. For Agaat’s sake, you thought, so that she could marvel at the epaulettes and the buttons and the military-style turn-ups of the trouser legs and the sleeves, so that she could revel in the neat piles of ironing that she created out of them, every pleat ironed to a knife’s edge, all spots and stains soaked out and bleached, the buttons and pins and stripes and belts buffed to a new gloss.

That weekend he had a suitcase with him that you didn’t know, full of ordinary clothes that seemed too big for him.

Never mind, he said to Agaat when she wanted to take it, it’s all clean. And many happy returns again for the birthday that’s passed, I have something for you, but I must wrap it first. And then he asked to be excused, he had to make a quick phone call about something or other, and he took out his diary to look up a number.

Was that when you remembered?

You fetched a sheet of gift-wrap from the cupboard in the passage and slid it under his door while he was changing. You thought: I’ll say nothing, later when Jakkie has left, I’ll tell her I’m sorry.

Did you ever? Was there time to worry about Agaat’s forgotten birthday after everything that followed on Jakkie’s visit?

You looked at them leaving, Jakkie dour, introverted, Agaat with the basket of biscuits and the flask of coffee that you’d packed as of old for their walking-tour of the farm. You went to inspect his room that she’d prepared for him.

There were flowers on the table as Jakkie liked it, as Agaat had taught him to like it, as you’d taught Agaat. Reeds and grasses and foliage and yellow seedheads of fennel squashed in amongst arum lilies. On his night-table there was a midnight-blue earthenware bowl with birds’ eggs, from the collection they’d built up when Jakkie was a lad. You couldn’t think how Agaat had kept the eggs unbroken all those years. But there they were, whole and sound, a brown-flecked plover’s egg, three white dove’s eggs, blue finch eggs, the stonechat’s green egg with russet specks around the big end. And the great prize, two salmon-coloured eggs, marbled with dark-pink and purple. The nightjar’s eggs. The one squatting in the dirt road calling: Oh-lord-oh-lord-deliver-us.

At the foot of the bed was the brown foot-rug that Agaat had knitted and that Jakkie had grown up with. His pillows were covered in pillow slips on which she’d long ago embroidered white on white, The Good Shepherd, The Wise Virgin. As a child he’d always wanted everything in his room to be the same as in hers.

You went and sat on the bed, stroked your hands over the pillows, over the foot-rug to feel the textures. You remembered, Jakkie’s warm little body as you handed him to each other, wrapped in Agaat’s foot-rug when he went to sleep in front of the fire with her in the outside room. You remembered how you’d laid him down on his pillows that Agaat had embroidered for him so that he shouldn’t miss her too much at night, Jakkie’s little fingers as he felt over the pillows, over the rounded backs of sheep, over the shepherd’s staff, beside the flame of the replenished lamp.

How Agaat rubbed his head.

Sleep softly now, Gaat’s little one.

You got up and opened the windows. One of Agaat’s aprons was draped over the half-door of the outside room, she’d put on a clean one for the walk.

Jakkie’s jacket was over the chair. His diary, would it be in his inside pocket? But you didn’t look. You stood there and thought of Agaat’s letters to him that you’d intercepted. His case lying open. A book on top of the clothes. Polish poems translated into English. Zbiegnew Herbert. The poet was unknown to you, your son’s taste in literature an enigma to you.

You went looking for them in the old orchard, took along a cloth pocket for late oranges as alibi.

You entered by the furthest point of the orchard. The smell of rotten citrus in the sun was stupefying. It made you feel dizzy. Row after row you walked the orchard without seeing them. Near the quince avenue you felt their presence, but everything was dead still. You went closer, along the other side of the avenue, your footsteps camouflaged by the rushing water. They were sitting in the shade against the bank of the irrigation furrow with their feet in the water. Jakkie upended the flask in the cap, shook out the last drops, and drank. Agaat was looking in front of her. You could tell from her back that she was dejected and defeated. Jakkie screwed the cap back on.

So that’s the story, he said. There’s no turning back any more and I don’t know what lies ahead.

He looked in front of him.

They sat like that for a long time.

The sun was scorching your shoulders where you had lain down flat behind the bank. In front of you their backs were like closed doors. Perhaps they were talking softly without looking at each other but you couldn’t hear anything any more. Then Jakkie leant forward far over the furrow and turned his face at an angle to Agaat. Then you could read his lips.

What does the water sound like when the sluice opens in the irrigation furrow?

He answered his own question.

G-g-g-g-g-a-a-a-a-t.

He drew the a’s out, scraped the g’s gently against his palate.

Do you remember, Gaat? The sound of the sea in a shell? The sound of the wind in the wheat? Do you remember how you made me listen? And everything sounded like your name. Ggggg-aaat, says the black pine tree in the rain, the spurwinged goose when it flies up says gaat-agaatagaat, the drift when it’s in flood from far away, do you remember?

Ai, you were still very small.

I always wanted to know where you came from, what your name means.

Yes, you were an inquisitive one, you.

I still am. You said you’d tell.

One day, not yet.

One day when? I’m leaving, remember.

One day when the time is ripe.

It’s time, the oranges are rotten!

Jakkie turned on his side and leant against the bank. He selected an orange from the basket, took a penknife out of his pocket.

Do you remember the knife?

Do you still have it?

I never throw away anything you’ve given me. Do you remember when you gave it to me?

Yes, it was when you turned nine, on your birthday. I had to ask nicely. Your father said you’d just get up to no good with it.

He said if I wanted a knife I had to be a man and a man can dock a tail. He forced me. You too, Ma too. My own hanslam you selected for it, would you believe.

Jakkie was speaking more loudly, vehemently, you could hear that he was upset.

I’m no longer scared of him, Gaat, for that I’ve almost seen my arse too many times in the service of his pathetic National Party. Fucking Mirages that fuck out, fucking missiles around my ears. Killed hundreds of people, more than I’ll ever know. Jesus, what a disgrace! How must I live with it for the rest of my life? I’m ashamed of it, that it happened to me, that I didn’t see it sooner. Always just: You’ll do what I tell you, chappie, salute, general! I puke of it, of this pathetic lot who tell themselves they’ve been placed here on the southernmost tip with a purpose and they represent something grandiose in the procession of nations. O wide and sorrowful land blah blah blah with flag and Word and trumpet. It’s sick! Sick! It’s better that I go away before I do something rash. He’s pathetic, my father. My mother too, she’s pathetic. They keep each other pathetic, the two of them, with all their wealth and wisdom. The whole community here intoning their anthem, pee-ep, squeak the little wives, bu-urp croak the husbands, they with their stud farms breeding bulls for the abattoir and babies for the army, they with their church steeples and iron fists towering towards heaven. Who do they think they are? Blind and deaf against the whole world? How long must it still carry on? And their God, he’s one of them, half-a-head elevated above the bald pate of the local dominee, God Almighty, the Auditor of the Land Bank.

The orchard has ears.

That’s what Agaat said. You knew it was meant for you. You wormed away backwards and came to your feet carefully and walked back. You picked up a few oranges at random to have something in the pocket, a proof.

Pathetic, you thought, my child thinks I’m pathetic.

You went and changed into another dress. Nobody need know that you’d crawled on your stomach. On your back where the August sun had beaten down, it felt hot for a long time after, itchy all over the shoulders.

All the time that afternoon while Jak was taking Jakkie around on the farm to see his latest activities, you felt as if another tape was spooling in your head with commentary.

The bokbaai vygies a feverish rash, the Namaqualand daisies a knee-high blaze. The whole garden an indictment, wide and sorrowful.

Jakkie stood gazing at it.

Gaat’s work, you said.

Gaat’s and mine, Jak said. Your mother, don’t you know, had fainting fits for months on end. She went and fell into the ditch that evening after your medal parade. Agaat must have told you. On top of a rotten cow. Got such a fright she was all aquiver.

Jak held open the door of the new abattoir for Jakkie. He’d always been squeamish, he said, about the slaughtering on the block, the old axes and the knives at the draining-gutter under the bluegums, where the dogs lick, where the gauze cage sways in the wind.

An abattoir was an asset on Grootmoedersdrift, he said, solidly built, complete with shiny steel surfaces, neon lights, completely automated bearing-surfaces, industrial refrigeration plants. Jak tapped against the wall, stroked the shiny surfaces with the back of his hand.

Pale in the light of the cooler, in deep marinading dishes, lay the sheep and the suckling pigs with their legs tied together. Agaat had already threaded them along the spine on the central braai rods for the spit-braai the following day.

You stood back out of the cool-room. The dull light over the rumps, the ribs and legs, the headlessness, the disgrace.

You’d stood next to Agaat the day when the installers came to demonstrate the machinery. You couldn’t watch, the fear of the animals between the railings of the isolation pen, the swinging up onto the moving hook of the living animal, the blood in the drainage chutes, the screaming saw-blade.

See, now somebody with one hand can slaughter all on her own, Jak had shouted at her above the noise.

Jak took a sheep’s head out of the cooler, held it up by the ears before Jakkie. The head from the slaughter, belonging to Dawid and company, that they’d not collected yet. He slotted the blade into the grooves with a click and took hold of the head on either side by the ears. Slowly he guided it over the steel surface to the blade.

Now watch closely, he shouted above the din to Jakkie, no mess, no splinters, no force, as quick as breaking your neck.

It was a little year-old merino ewe, earmarked for the knife, a well-filled round fringe of wool on the forehead, the ears velvety, pinkish, the wrinkled nose of her race, the mouth already slightly crooked and shrunken under the nipple-coloured snout.

Jak pressed the head down on the neck, pushed it against the blade with his hands on either side on the cheeks. There was a jolt as the teeth of the saw seized the wool and then it was bone, a scream rising higher and higher as the fleece got thicker along the forehead.

Jak came away from the blade with the two open halves to show you. It looked like a cross-section model in a biology laboratory, the soft grey hemispheres of the brain, the white sinus chambers, the brown furrows of the nasal passages, the mouth cavity with the long halves of purplish tongue, thinner than you’d expect, from which a trickle of blood was welling, the jaw with the two front teeth sawn apart.

Easy, see, said Jak and clapped the two halves closed like a book. He turned the head at a right angle and starting from the snout he cut it up into cubes with rapid strokes, so that the outsides fell open onto the sawing surface like the pieces of a jigsaw. He switched off the machine, removed the blade and put it in the sink, and swept the blocks into the off-cuts pail with the back of his hand.

Child’s play, he said, and with his foot he pushed the pail in by the door of the cool-room.

What could have been going through Jak’s head? The logic of his sightseeing tour escaped you.

Next was Jak’s new merino stud rams. Under the direction of the stock-breeding expert of the Tygerhoek experimental farm he’d done experiments to determine the influence of the various feeds and feed supplements on the fertility of the sheep. You listened to him explaining all this to Jakkie. You could have sworn he was a stud farmer.

There were four rams, a dozen or so ewes, each in a separate pen with a number and a steel post-box in which the records of their feeding schedule were kept.

What you see here is worth tens of thousands of rand, said Jak, all the champions of Katbosch and Zoetendals Valley and Van Rheenen’s Heights.

They’re all very close already to the Super Utility Merino. That’s the objective.

Jakkie wasn’t listening. As if he were on the look-out, his eyes kept wandering in the direction of the road which one could see from the pens.

What he was looking for, said Jak, was one hundred per cent prepotency, a lambing rate of a hundred and fifty per cent, early weaning time and the greatest possible uniformity and regularity of build, plus then super-wool qualities.

You all had to examine the one ram with him.

Hannibal, it said on the tin name-tag.

If you consider, Jak said, that there were only fat-tailed Hottentot sheep with knock-knees and Cape sheep covered in tatters in this country when the white man arrived here, then we’ve come a long way.

The ram retreated slightly on its delicate little feet as you approached.

Down on your haunches, said Jak, otherwise he’ll get a fright.

He clicked his tongue and murmured reassuringly.

Finer of fleece than the Rambouillet and even than the Vermont, hardier than the Saxony, more compact than the Australian, such a South African merino. Perfectly adapted to our conditions.

Jak folded open the fleece on the back so that you could see the wool.

Four inches, very soft, not a cross-thread in sight, just see how wide is the staple, he said. Feel. Top spinning quality. Look at the deep crimp.

Jak isolated one tuft.

He took Jakkie’s hand and put his fingers on the tuft. See how it stands up, nice cauliflower tip as well. Just feel the character. Deep character.

He opened the fleece in two other places.

Just see, everywhere the same, even to the belly, and well-oiled throughout.

Jakkie was more interested in his father’s tone than in the information, that you could deduce from the way in which he started leading him on.

Just look at that head! Jakkie said. Only you heard the mockery.

Yes, now isn’t that spiff, Hannibal, Jak said, and turned to the sheep, we’re talking about your head.

Jak was on one knee next to the ram and took its jaw in his hands.

Big, strong, open face, alert and masculine.

He pulled open the mouth a bit so that one could see the gums and the teeth.

Broad mouth, free of blemishes. And just feel that silky-soft skin on the nose.

Jakkie rubbed over the nose with cautious fingers.

He’d never realised, he said, that a sheep had such a long nose.

As it should be, Jak said, long and finely-curved, and just see how wide a curve the horns make around the head and how big the ears are, lively soft ears for his baas.

Here and there and everywhere Jak touched the ram, as if he were sculpting something.

Broad in the shoulders, broad in the chest, deep ribcage. Sturdy flanks. See how spacious the leap of the ribs, how straight the topline from the neck to the tail, square across the rump, well-filled buttocks, enough place for the balls.

He squeezed the soft downy scrotum lightly.

The ram picked up its back foot and step-stepped when Jak touched its nuts. Jak caught the paw and steadied the ram by the horn with his other hand.

Wait, Hannibal, he said, we’re inspecting your feet. Straight and strong from the heel to the knee, he won’t stumble or twist, this sheep. Just look at that hoof, nice and amber in colour.

Jak got up and closed up the wool where he’d opened it.

Jeez, Pa, Jakkie said, you should become a praise-singer for sheep, that was quite a text for the prodigal son.

You weren’t surprised that evening at table when Jak got going.

So what do you say about the political situation these days? he asked Jakkie.

Really, is it necessary, you tried to intervene, we’re enjoying our meal so much.

For Agaat’s sake you said that, to console her where she was standing with a guarded expression over her dishes. Because we weren’t enjoying our meal. There was a silence around the table.

Agaat’s hand. It was impressive what she’d brought about there. Extra special just for the family, on top of all the preparations for the great feast the following day. All the old favourites, the choice dishes that Jakkie had grown up with, were on the table. A steamed river eel on spinach to start. Chicken pie, ox tongue, roast hare with field mushrooms that she’d dried the previous autumn, stewed dried peaches and roast potatoes, green beans with onion and shiny sweet-potatoes and cauliflower with mustard cheese sauce and pumpkin fritters, and a salad of baby beetroot in a vinegar reduction, and baby onions in a sweet-and-sour sauce. Everything dished up in the best porcelain and garnished with fresh parsley and chives and rosemary and mint.

She hadn’t as usual first asked permission to use the best table linen and the crystal glasses and the silver. There were two candelabra with candles and a flat table arrangement of cinerarias and creeper shoots. Around Jakkie’s plate she’d made a birthday garland of the first blue wine-cup babiana that she’d gone to gather in the fynbos-kloof.

What made you think that it was for herself as well? You tried to remember why you’d forgotten her birthday. Twelfth of July. The thought made the food congeal in your mouth. The day of the telephone conversation? Had that been the birthday?

You could find out if you wanted to. You’d be able to get Jakkie on his own, could ask him if she’d really been talking to him that day. Whether it was on the twelfth of July. But you said nothing then, you remained silent. You felt it welling up around you, the tide of things that had to be said. Your arms felt numb. You felt hot. Your whole body was itching.

I’m asking, what do my son’s politics look like these days? Jak insisted. Jak had drunk too much. You placed your hand on his, but he shook it off, gesticulated with his fork in the air.

He’s in the Air Force after all, surely he must know more than the man in the street.

Jakkie twirled his glass in his hand. You caught his eye, signalled: Be quiet, just ignore. You beckoned to Agaat to clear the table.

Jak threw his hands in the air.

Are you all going to ignore me now? Have you swallowed your tongue, Jakkie? Then answer me when I’m speaking to you, chappie. Agaat, put down the dishes, you’ll just have to hear as well what your pet says to us. Kleinbaas Jakkie here, it seems he wants away, a little bird told me, away from his beloved nursemaid with whom he speaks in secret on the telephone.

Then Jakkie let go of his glass and it tilted out of his hand, and the wine splashed a long red stain on the white tablecloth.

Pa, he managed, and then Agaat was in between with cloths and water and salt, you could see her touching Jakkie, how she was trying to calm him with her body, now this side of him, now that, now over one shoulder and then over the other. She brought a clean glass from the kitchen and poured it full of wine for him and topped up Jak’s glass. A whole bustle she organised there around the glasses, as if she were trying to distract their attention by sleight of hand.

Our beloved Gaat, Jak continued, our baker and butler, just like a hen trying to keep her chickens together. Look at this dabchick, Gaat, he gets quite out of kilter when his father wants to catechise him.

Jakkie got up, threw down his napkin. Jak leant over the table and pushed him back into his chair.

No, have a seat first so that I can tell you something, man, he said, as if he were at a congenial gathering of farmers.

He started in a roundabout way, with Elsa Joubert’s book about which people were writing letters in the press at the time. The one your mother bought and never finished, he said, ostensibly because it was too sad, as if your mother’s ever had problems with any sadness. His eyes played mockingly over you, but you weren’t the one in his sights. Jakkie must explain to him what structural violence is, he said.

Jakkie looked up and looked away, his body was quaking with the trembling of his legs under the table. Agaat tried to sidle away towards the kitchen.

Then Jak got up and pulled out the chair at the far end of the table, tap-tapped his hand on the backrest.

Come, Gaat, come and sit down for a while, this was always your place, wasn’t it, he said. You must listen very carefully now, your kleinbaas, Captain de Wet here, is going to give us an exposition. I don’t see any structural violence or any other violence against you except that little half-way arm of yours. Fucked crooked or kicked crooked, doesn’t matter. No long journeys for you, only a nice servant’s room with a fireplace, settled for life here on Grootmoedersdrift. Structural advantages, I’d say. White people’s food, white people’s language, a white apron, white sheets and here’s your little white pet who shares his little secrets with you that his own mother and father aren’t allowed to hear. They hear only the little white lies. Come on, Jakkie, tell us, what is structural violence?

Jak walked around the table and gestured to Agaat to sit down on the chair. For a moment you thought he was going to take her by the thin arm, but he didn’t, he just gestured with his head. Agaat shut off her regard. Very upright, very rigidly she sat down on the edge of the chair.

White tablecloths, white candles, fragrant white flowers, Jak said and gestured with open arms, so white is she that she plays back all the little white things as she knows we like them. Exactly what old Poppie Whatsername also did, recounted her miseries as she knew the writer wanted to hear them, a story that could be sold, it’s being translated into all kinds of languages nowadays, they say. Even shares in the profits, the kaffir-girl. Remarkable business, Afrikaners making a name for themselves with coon stories that they pick up in the backyard and spread far and wide as gospel truth.

Jak took a large gulp from his glass.

Should your father tell you what he thinks, Jakkie? He thinks the world finds us whites in this country interesting only for what we’re supposed to have done to the hotnots and the kaffirs. And then they’re going to hold it against us all over again because we dare write down on behalf of the so-called victims what we did to them. No, we should rather kindly teach the poor devils to write their own stories and package it for them. First-class export produce. Whether we’ll then see anything of the profits is another matter!

Jak’s tongue was dragging. His gestures were emphatic.

At least he’s not violent, you thought. You tried to catch Agaat’s eye in case he should become violent. She feigned blindness to you, her eyes were on Jakkie who was taking substantial gulps from his new glass of wine.

How about it, Agaat? Jak prodded, you’re the exception here after all. Your nooi has already taught you nicely how to write, hasn’t she. Dear sir, yours respectfully, if I may make so bold. More Afrikaans than the whole lot of newspaper journalists can dream of. You after all write long letters to dear gracious Captain de Wet here. He can surely not have thrown them away. Perhaps he should collect them and post them to dear Mrs Joubert so that she can brush up your Dutch a bit so that everyone can understand it. Then you’ll have a new life. Then they’ll come and interview you. That Poppie didn’t know whether she was coming or going, so, apparently, they thronged around her to make TV movies. Over and over the same story of her long journey she had to tell, she must have got bored to death, wouldn’t surprise me if in the end she started adding on a journey here and a journey there, to at least keep the matter interesting for herself.

Jakkie shook his head, covered his face with his hands.

Jak, that’s enough, you said.

Jak kept talking over your interjection. How about it, Agaat? You wouldn’t have to add on anything if they asked you. Your story is better than the back page of the Rapport.

Bring pen and paper, then I’ll give you the long and short of it, he said to Agaat.

She didn’t move, remained looking in front of her. Jak walked up and down dictating.

White woman childless steals baby woolly with one arm stop one-armed woolly catches baby boy on mountain pass stop toy aeroplane explodes stop woolly saves stop woolly gives tit/shit/bread/head.

Perhaps you’d prefer a little song, Jak said. Your mother here after all always taught you little songs. That’s what you understand.

Jak didn’t sing. Here beyond the hill on our farm, he said, the sheep get bluetongue, the wheat gets rust, wifey blubbers, hubby batters, you name it, every disaster in the book.

And then? The son grows up, he squashes his father flat on the rocks of the Huis River, he becomes a soldier, a fighter pilot, for three years he bombs every FAPLA, SWAPO, MPLA and Cuban from an Impala in the moonlight in South West.

And look at him now! Strikes a funk at twenty-five in the year of our Lord nineteen eighty-five in our beleaguered South Africa, with bugger-all to say for himself. Just when we need him most.

And the woolly just writes on.

Jak first saluted Agaat, and then Jakkie.

I’m sure you are aware, dear Captain, that Mrs de Wet, your esteemed mother, opens all her servant’s letters to her son here . . .

Jakkie glared at you for a moment, and then at Agaat. He blinked his eyes slowly, and put his head on his arms on the table.

So, Agaat, Jak said, that’s the story. Can you think us up a conclusion? After all, you’re used to embroidering!

How long did it last? Half an hour, an hour? Jak looked as if he was going to start crying. He slammed his fist on the table, but there was no strength in the blow.

Don’t you people have anything to say? he shouted.

He rocked drunkenly on his feet.

Don’t you have anything to say then! What does one have to do to make you wake up? Spineless! That’s why things will end badly for us! That’s why the enemy is sharpening its teeth on our borders! The Afrikaner women, they who should be carrying the torch, they’re useless, the Afrikaner youth, characterless, without ideals, even the Afrikaner skivvies are struck dumb! Is this what our ancestors tamed this land for with their muzzle-loaders, with the clothes on their bodies and their wagons against the barbarian hordes? Come, Agaat, where are the days when your kind cut the throats of their masters in their sleep?

Then you’ll have something to write about, instead of the sentimental chirry-chirping of yours, one two buckle my shoe, onky-bonky here’s my donkey, pat-a-cake, as if you’re in a children’s book, not exactly top secrets that you’re sharing with your kleinbaas the traitor!

Jak sank unsteadily into an armchair, mumbled something now and again, more and more slowly, like a piece of clockwork running down.

Jakkie remained slumped with his head on his arms. After a while he no longer looked up.

You looked at the head, the shape of it exactly like Jak’s, the unshaven cheek of the strange young man, your son, amongst the dishes of food and the dirty plates, his lips muttering in the salt through which the spilt wine was starting to seep pinkly. You looked at Agaat whose eyes rolled slowly from side to side like those of a chameleon without her turning her head an inch left or right. A fly settled on the cauliflower. Agaat flapped it away.

You remained sitting there, you and Agaat, long after the talking had ceased. There was only the ticking of the grandfather clock, the quarter strokes of two quarters, the bothersome fly around your heads. Then Agaat got up. She avoided your eyes, touched her cap to feel if it was properly settled.

Let’s take them to their rooms, she said.

As if it were the most ordinary thing on earth.

You put your arms around them, under the arms, between you, down the passage, first one, then the other, got them to their beds, took off their shoes.

Was it later that night, or the following night, or only after the weekend that you tried to check, emptied out the tablets on your bedspread, tried to count them, the drops, the powders? But you couldn’t remember how many of everything there was supposed to be. And in those weeks before the feast you were in any case taking more of everything. Agaat counted out your pills for you in the morning and put them out on your dressing table because you could sometimes not remember whether you’d taken them, so dosed yourself double in the evenings and then was too drained the next day to do anything.

Would she have gone so far as to doctor Jak and Jakkie’s drinks? You didn’t dare ask her. You were scared she’d say something about the letters. You went and checked in your handbag, in the carrier bags in your wardrobe, to see whether there was perhaps one that you’d forgotten to post. The one, the ode on Grootmoedersdrift, you looked for that again, but you couldn’t find it. You found nothing. You were scared. Suddenly it was important to be able to remember the smallest detail exactly. But you couldn’t remember. Things had slipped in your memory. Had you let slip something, to Jak, to Jakkie, was it from that that Jak could make out that you’d read Agaat’s letters? Or had Agaat brought it to their attention?

You remembered the diaries. After Jakkie joined the Defence Force you’d stopped keeping a diary. You collected the booklets in the top cupboard of the spare room where you’d pushed them in amongst the eiderdowns. You paged through a few. Could you perhaps have hidden some of Agaat’s letters that you’d forgotten to post in them? Your eye fell here and there on what you’d written. What of any importance could anybody read into them?

That’s what you thought but you weren’t sure. Your handwriting struck you as strange, more upright, harder than you thought of yourself as writing. You tied the booklets up in piles with kitchen string. Your hands were trembling. You locked them in the sideboard with the other documents.

There you stood in the sitting room, shaky, after you’d locked up the books. The sideboard gleaming, darker than usual. The dining-table, cleared, glossy, with a vase of flowers on top. No sign of the meal earlier or of the discord. But the dining room felt ominous. Every familiar thing was, under its surface, at its core, as if charged with dynamite.

You felt somebody was looking at you, there where you were standing with the key of the sideboard in your hand, but the curtains were drawn, the back door was closed, there was nobody. Here it is now, you thought, the last link that’s chafing through. Everything you lived for, everything that you built up, all the facades that you maintained, the whole lie that you lived. The last link.

The key was sweating in your hand.

At last you slapped it down on the table for all the world to see.

You went and sat on a chair in your room in the dark, a woman over an abyss, the coming of morning a ghastliness, the first thrush a deathly herald. Agaat bringing your coffee and saying nothing about your just sitting there in the previous night’s clothes, just raising her eyebrows over the pills that she’d put out for you and that you’d not taken.

You were scared of her. More scared of her when she was right under your eyes than behind your back. You cringed away from the brisk pace at which she kept doing her work. It was as if she’d been beating you with sticks, with irons, since the previous evening, and still now, the day of the feast. You couldn’t believe it, the calm cheerful face she put on.

Till late that night she kept it up.

Till the flying in the aeroplane.

Only then could you breathe in an odd sort of way.

Then it was her turn to be beaten.

Was it the abominations of your own family that opened your eyes to the power or impotence branded on the faces, the whitewashed disgraces of the guests who started arriving in groups or pairs the following day? Was it the lack of sleep? The pills you hadn’t taken? So that you, for the first time in how many years, were soberly and austerely aware of what was happening around you?

12 August 1985. You are cordially invited.

You suddenly saw everything so clearly through Jakkie’s eyes, pe-eep squeak the wives, bu-urp croak the husbands, the high-pitched little-girl voices in which the women twittered, the coarse bravado of the men, the children insolent or timorous, the childminders, feigning docility, but already casting long glances towards leftovers in the kitchen, bread, fat, candles and cloths and soap and matches. A pillage it would be again, as always.

You saw yourself standing in the garden mirrors, in your red dress. You heard your voice warbling. You shook the hands, pressed your cheek against the powdery cheeks of the women, kissed the slobbery mouths of the men.

My mother is pathetic, they keep each other pathetic, the whole community. Jakkie’s words of the previous day. Your child. Blood of your blood. Not impossible, surely, that his message had taken effect on you immediately. Brainwashing, another voice in you protested, that’s how subversion and brainwashing operate.

Welcome, welcome to Grootmoedersdrift! you said again and again.

Clearly I’m stuck between two cycles of brainwashing, and me without my pills as well.

You looked at Jak and Jakkie, emboldened in their display by a need to make up for the previous evening. Both ashamed of their lack of memory, they tried to tell each other what a load of crap they’d talked. Agaat rubbed it in. The Alka Seltzer and the vitamins, the big can of orange juice and the pot of strong coffee that stood ready by their breakfast plates that morning.

And then there was the moment, after breakfast, when Agaat overplayed her hand, when Jakkie had to promise her solemnly that he wouldn’t drink any more on his birthday, and that he would make a nice speech. That’s as far as you could hear, before Agaat went into her room.

He stood talking over the half-door.

On my own birthday, Gaat?! he exclaimed. He averted his face from the door of the outside room. You were looking out of the kitchen door, saw the expression come over his face, the one you’d so often seen in Jak, the desire to inflict hurt.

You saw Agaat appear in the doorway. You saw her catching Jakkie’s glance.

The next sentence you could only partially make out.

Then you can explain it! was what it sounded like, and: No, I’m not going to write anything, next thing it will find its way into the wrong hands. So you go ahead and write something! Think up something!

Was that what you heard? His face was half inside Agaat’s door. Then he pulled back his head and the sun fell on his brown curls, long, you thought, for an officer who’d only just been granted a pass.

Well, he said, his hands on the half-door, if I’m not even allowed to drink on my own birthday, and if I have to pronounce according to your precepts, you heard him say, then you, my dear Agaat, will get into the plane this evening so that I can show you what Grootmoedersdrift looks like from up there! A full moon has been requisitioned especially for you! Wonderland by Night!

Jak was coming from the direction of the sitting room, walked past you in the kitchen, out into the backyard. He heard what Jakkie was saying. They laughed together at the prospect of loading Agaat into the aeroplane. They were on their way to inspect the fuel supply and the landing strip.

Those were the movements of that morning, the voices, the sentences, the faces in doorways, the backs, the fronts, the standing still, the turning away, the walking past.

You waited as the feast continued into evening, the torches and the fires lit, the silhouettes of skewered animals rotating on spits. Grotesque it looked to you. And smelt too, the air dense with roasted flesh. Witches’ Sabbath. But who were the witches? Surely not these cordial effusive people who’d come from far and wide for your son’s birthday? Perhaps I’m psychotic, you thought, perhaps I’ve been dependent on my medication for so long that I degenerate into an enemy of the people if I skip a day. That’s what Jak always said: Take your pills, Milla, so that you can shut up while the men make war.

You tried in vain to vanquish the thoughts. But you kept looking out for the first stirrings of mischief as the great bowls of salad and the baskets of bread were carried in under Agaat’s command. You tried to keep a clear line of sight as you helped to serve the people, all the old acquaintances, and their children who were gathered there like replicas unto the third and the fourth generation. You couldn’t snap out of it. All the convivial noises sounded so false to you. Even Beatrice and Thys, your oldest friends, aroused your distrust. They were the dominee’s confidants. They would carry report of every guffaw that was too loud and every note that was false and every drop that was drunk in excess. To the nearest hundred rand they’d be able to estimate the cost of the whole thing. They’d be able to calculate the tithe that would be proportionate to the cost and submit it to the representative of God in the Swellendam district and he would in his own time and season come and claim it for the swelling of the church coffers. You could talk to them, to protect Agaat, to speak to Jak. You could try to talk to Dominee himself.

But what would they be able to do about it? About your presentiment that a slow explosion was blowing all of Grootmoedersdrift into hundreds of shards and chunks? You were alone with the sensation. You tried to shake it off, had coffee brought to you to bring you to your senses. Lack of sleep, you thought.

There were the sallow Dieners of Vreugdevol with their smooth blue-black hair, pure Malay, you realised for the first time. Pass for white, whatever that might mean here on the other side of Sir Lowry’s Pass. The heads were bowed low over the plates, the gills shone as they peered at each other around the white wrought-iron table, as if they were engaged in an eating contest. You went across to them to try to rid yourself of the odd perspective, but they were so engrossed in stuffing themselves, they hardly greeted you.

So then for want of something more constructive to do you took a jug of ice to the Froneman table. For there wife and children with woebegone eyes were sucking away at lukewarm glasses of cooldrink under the stern gaze of their teetotal father.

Ice, you said, try a bit of ice, it makes everything taste better.

Like somebody from the Salvation Army you sounded to your own ears. They smirked at you half-heartedly.

To one side at their own table were the Killjoys of Loch Maguire. This evening, you thought, their melancholy was extra evident. Pol Knoblauch, the bluebeard with the stiff neck, people said he fiddled with the farm labourers’ little boys, and his wife the soprano of the church gallery. Every week at the gynaecologist’s for indeterminate complaints, it was said.

And the rich Meyers family of Konstandhof, the seven brothers, all with the fine features and the little high-pitched voices, all of them with the glad eye and the one undescended ball as the rumour ran. And their Meyers sisters and female cousins with the mad streak, the whole lot of them, either worked up or down with pills.

Do I also look like that? you wondered. In the faint light of the marquee your red dress appeared black when you looked down. The sleeves felt too heavy on your arms. It felt as if you were moving ever more slowly.

Suddenly Gawie Tredoux was next to you. Just standing there, without a word. His voice when he spoke was tired.

Are you thinking what I’m thinking, Milla? At the best of times our people are fodder for low-brow soap operas, at the worst for old men with grand plans. And all the young ones want to do nowadays is surf and smoke dagga and play guitar.

You looked at him. He’d aged. Got dumped by his wife. His son a member of some rock group or other that toured all over the country with protest songs.

Look after yourself well, Milla, he said, you know I’m always there if you need me. He squeezed your shoulder.

Thank you for your trouble, tell Agaat as well, everything tip-top as usual, but I’ll be on my way now, not in the mood for a party this evening, you neither, it seems to me, but that’s life, old girl, just grin and bear it, tomorrow’s another day.

So as not to subside into tears, you betook yourself to the hand-picked wives of the Meyers brothers, a harem of shared resentment under the command of their mother-in-law, the painted-up old matriarch of whom it was rumoured that she’d been a photo model in her youth. In spite of her advanced age it was very clear in the candlelight where her sons’ high cheekbones had sprung from. Half maliciously, half gloatingly, her daughters-in-law sat by her and complimented you on the feast, on your son, on your husband. They were sisters under duress. Heir mares. Assessed on the hind-quarters and bought in for the purpose. Fertiliser Princesses. Co-op Queens. Style, Overberg Barbie, as Jak would say. You could easily spot the sons, the precocious lordliness with which they were appraising the girls.

And there was Jakkie amid it all, amiability itself. He’d kept to his word, it seemed to you. He greeted, served, endured. He replied to Jak’s speech, albeit not with great warmth, correctly and with the proper number of tame jokes. He expressed his thanks. My dear mother, my mainstay of a father. The only sign of a more alert, more intelligent creature under all the formalities were the special words full of double meanings to Agaat whom he had called to the front next to him during his speech.

He thanked her for the food and the garden and the planning of the whole feast. She is someone who reaches great heights, she is someone who spreads her wings wide, she showed him as a child how the blue crane becomes airborne, white-throat crows go from here to great Tradouw, she showed him what a tailwind does to the flight of a weaver, and a headwind to a gull, she named the clouds for him and taught him to read the currents in the air and told how the devil constructed whirlwinds from the dust of the hills.

And: It will be an honour and a privilege for him to take her as his first passenger on a special birthday flight.

There was loud applause. ‘Smear that mouth with jam!’ one shouted. ‘Real smooth talker De Wet!’

Jakkie handed the parcel, wrapped in your gift wrap, to Agaat. It was also her birthday recently, he said, and it’s something she’ll need for her first flight.

‘Open it! Open it!’ people shouted.

Agaat struggled with the paper, embarrassed with the little hand that didn’t want to grip properly in front of an audience. Jakkie took it out of her hand and stripped off the sticky-tape and gave it back to her.

Take it out, he gestured with his head.

It was a shimmering, shiny raw silk headscarf, plain red. It slithered and shone in the lamplight as Agaat shook out the folds.

You saw Agaat’s eyes flashing. How could she say: Blow in my face so that I can smell whether you’ve been drinking? Could she tell from his words that he was too eloquent? How far is it permitted for a servant to investigate the breath of her kleinbaas?

You thought of the scene of Jakkie five years old blowing into Agaat’s face where she was standing before him on her knees.

Stole chocolates!

Chewed fennel seeds!

Ate apricot jam on your bread! she could guess with shut eyes.

Why hadn’t you tried to talk Jakkie out of the idea of flying?

You took him by the shoulder. Hard he is, you thought, far removed from me. Even without the stiff blue serge of his captain’s uniform his body felt unyielding.

You want to make a spectacle of her. That’s all you said.

He removed your hand from his body and put it aside as if it were a marmot. You were close enough, you could smell the liquor on his breath. He had a contrary look in his eyes.

Ma, he said, what happens now, is between me and Agaat. My bit I’ve done . . .

He looked away before he carried on talking.

She’ll get into that Cessna with me and feel how it feels to be as free as a bird. Because that’s what she’s scared of. That’s what you’re all scared of. You’re more scared of freedom than you are of the communists. Even if it fell into your laps you wouldn’t recognise it or know what to do with it.

So I’m not permitted to say what I want to say. Agaat’s orders, she actually thinks she can prevent the whole assembled Overberg’s evening being spoilt for them here. Then she has to pay for it. I’m not the one who’s making a spectacle of her, she’s making a spectacle of herself. It was on her behalf amongst others that I wanted to speak. So if I may not do it, and she can not do it, better then that we go up into the air together.

Jakkie glared at you.

Perhaps she’ll be able to tell me at last up there in the clouds where she came from and how she ended up here on Grootmoedersdrift, in her stupid cap and school shoes, there in the back in the outside room, so faithful, so prematurely aged and so set in her ways, with her embroidery and her writing pads, a tyrant over others here on the farm.

They hate her, they mock her. It’s you who made her like that, Ma, you and Pa. She’s more screwed up than Frankenstein’s monster.

You sound like your father, you wanted to say, it’s a different story, but it’s the same arrogance.

But you didn’t. You were ashamed that he could say one thing and do the opposite and not notice it.

You went in the jeep to the landing strip, at speed over the drift and slip-slide round the bend on the other side of the bridge, because it had been flooded till recently. Jakkie was driving, a whole line of cars following with guests who didn’t want to miss it.

You’re not going to fly with me in that apron and with that white cap on your head, Jakkie said to Agaat.

I am, said Agaat.

You are not your apron and your cap, Agaat, Jakkie said, and turned round to her.

I am, Agaat said.

Well, then tonight you’re going to feel what it’s like for a change not being yourself, because that’s what you wanted from me and I did as you said. Where’s the scarf?

I’m not wearing the scarf, she said.

Take off that bishop’s cap of yours and tie on the scarf, Gaat. And off with that apron, this moment!

Then look in front of you, said Agaat.

Aitsa, Jak said, now the current’s flowing!

They laughed, your husband and your son.

You saw sparks, a rustling of the static electricity in the scarf as Agaat pulled it out of her apron pocket. You got out, following Jak and Jakkie.

Around the runway there was a bustle of men setting up the two rows of tractor headlights for the take-off. A few women had come along and were standing to one side chatting. Children were swarming around the plane. You turned away. There was a full moon, a clear night with the chill of the recent winter still in the air. You turned back again. The little white plane at the far end of the runway looked as if it had been glued together from planks, a splash of white paint against the black outlines of the hills.

Jakkie climbed in. Against the light you could see him checking the controls. The headlight came on, a harsh beam over the stony ground of the fallow field, and then the red and green lights on the tips of the wings. The engine putt-putted and took and when it was at full strength, the propeller started turning slowly, faster and faster till it was only a grey haze in front of the nose. A cloud of dust was slowly being churned up around the body. In the fumes you could see the tailfin waggling, first to the right and then to the left.

Then the passenger door opened, a hand beckoned. The back door of the jeep opened, the red scarf was tied round Agaat’s head, nurse-style, with a peak in front and a triangular flap at the back. How did she figure it out so soon? you wondered. Would she have practised in her room in the evenings with all the scarves that Jakkie had brought home over the years?

The children yelled. In between the men called out with hands cupped in front of their mouths.

Strap yourself in, Gaat!

Say your prayers, Gaat!

Hee, now you’re going to see a flying goffel!

God, but she’ll shit herself, the creature!

Piss in her pants!

If she’s wearing pants!

Jakkie, do you have a pee-pot in that fly-machine?

She’s going to puke!

Fly her till she pukes on the Catholics’ roof!

On the apostolics!

On the kaffir location!

Agaat looked neither left nor right. Up against the stepladder she climbed, the tip of the scarf was fluttering wildly in the slipstream. With the little hand she held it behind her head. It was half an Agaat up there on the running-board, her hips narrow without the waist-band of the apron, her shoulder crooked without the white cross-bands. She hoisted herself into the door-opening with the strong hand. The little door slammed shut. Through the window you could see her staring straight ahead, her chin to the fore, her lips a thin line.

And then they were away with a jolt and a bump, faster and faster until the head lifted at the far end of the runway. For a moment they were invisible behind the plateau. You could hear the engine labour for height. Then they arced back. Once, twice, three times the headlight dipped and the wings waggled to one side. The children waved and shouted at the salute.

A few times the plane circled over the yard, higher and still higher before striking a course in a straight line in the direction of the town.

As if he wanted Agaat to experience what it felt like to go away, you thought.

You didn’t want to drive back with Jak. You wanted to be alone to watch the tail-lights get smaller and smaller, the one white flank in the moonlight fainter and fainter. You wanted to think of Agaat in that cabin and the landscape unrecognisable from that height. You wanted to think and you didn’t want to think. You started walking back on your own along the road to the house. Some distance further down the yard was glowing and flickering with fires and torches and lit-up tents and the reflection of coloured lanterns in the dam. That’s what it would look like from the aeroplane. If you didn’t know what you knew, you could imagine that it was a fairy tale.

Your shoes, should you rather have taken them off? you wondered when you crossed the drift to the house. You had to step carefully there, so deeply rutted was the drift with car tracks. Halfway through you slipped badly and lost your balance, and stood still to recover your equilibrium, and to look and to listen. Grootmoedersdrift, you thought, how much must this crossing have seen. There were the shiny circle-tracks of insects on the water, the croaking of frogs, the distant sounds of the feast in the yard, coarse laughter at the dam. The black trunks of the wattles and the black stream in the light of the torches, the fluttering of moths around the light. If only I could read all these together, you thought, all these signs, if the meaning of everything could only be revealed to me here, a pointer for the future. The damp was starting to seep through your soles. You looked down, the polish of your shoes flickered eerily in the dark, as if your feet were packed in fire. Jak had had the torches planted there for the guests, Agaat’s orders, so that they would see the hitch in the bridge when they came around the corner. Not that that was the greatest problem. You should have had the silt hoed away there, the kerb was almost covered in it. You took off your shoes and scraped off the sticky black mud with a twig.

How long was Agaat in the air? Half an hour? Somebody charged into the garden in the jeep and deposited her at the mouth of the reception tent. A clutch of children jumped in to grab the next flip. You couldn’t see who was driving. The jeep left black soil-tracks on the lawn in pulling off. Agaat was in her white cap and her apron. The red scarf’s point was hanging out of her apron pocket. With rapid steps she walked along the yard to the house. A bunch of children clustered behind her.

What did you see Agaat? Did you nip, Agaat?

You trotted to catch up with her.

Tell, Gaat, what did you see? the children prodded.

Nothing, you heard her say, it’s night.

Baas, Agaat, you heard a male voice prompting, nothing, baas, it’s night, baas.

It was the white foreman who played chauffeur for one of the Meyers brothers.

D’you think because you were up there in the air you can now forget all about manners? I’m sure you saw something. Now tell us nicely what you saw.

The church tower, baas.

How do you know it was the church tower?

It’s got lights.

Baas.

Yes, baas.

Yes, baas, what?

The church tower has lights, baas.

Mr Lotriet, you addressed the man, your people want to leave, they’re looking for you there in the tent. And there’s strong coffee, looks as if you could do with some before you risk it on the road.

The man slunk off with a mumbled yes, Mrs de Wet, fine, Mrs de Wet.

Where are your manners? you scolded the children.

Come, Agaat, pleased to see you’re in one piece. I’m walking with you.

I’m walking alone, Agaat said to you.

You followed her. The sound of the aeroplane drowned out your voice. Low over the tops of the bluegums and the roofs of the outbuildings it sheared in the direction of the dam. You heard screams and saw the lanterns bobbing on the raft as the people fell flat to get out of the way.

A line of hired waiters with big trays full of dishes of dessert brushed past you on the garden path. The smell of baked chocolate pudding and date pudding and brandy tarts and liqueur sponges in your nose, Agaat’s puddings for Jakkie’s birthday, Jakkie who was yawing to and fro over the yard in the plane so that it sounded as if all hell had broken loose.

Twice you heard something spoken next to you before you could quite catch what was being said.

Agaat can’t come and dish now, Mies, she’s gotten behind with her work in the kitchen. It was Saar. The hesitation in her voice made you press on.

Is she fit to work?

She’s sitting there in her room in the dark, she says her head is sore.

It helped, that you had something to do. You wanted to put an end to the evening. Your actions felt sluggish, your voice muted. It was getting too late for your liking. You sent somebody to chase people off the raft, issued orders that the garden lanterns should be blown out so long and the torches extinguished. You blew out the lanterns in the marquee yourself and started emptying the ashtrays and picking up the butts from the floor. You found yourself standing behind a pudding table, faced with a horde of children of whom the bigger ones had been drinking furtively. Rudely they pointed at what they wanted you to dish up, prodded their fingers into the bowls, a feral look in their eyes.

Hey you! Back! Lietja snarled at one whose sleeve was trailing in the bowl and pushed him away with the back of a spoon against the chest. The plates of the others she heaped up with a grin, everything mixed up.

It was never like that when Agaat stood behind the tables. She preserved the order of the distribution point, gauged the local level of manners. She would have said: Adults first! and like the crack of a whip that would have made the children stand back. She would have made everybody first look at the offering, she would have told them what everything was, all the wonderful names, and then she would have dished bit-by-bit and said come back for more, there’s plenty more.

Over the chaos of the pudding table you looked into the tent.

Around the drinks table across the way the men were huddling together. It was the younger ones who, wet with perspiration from the dancing, were coming to quench their thirst. Raucously they shouted their orders at the waiters. Heads flung back they drank from beer bottles, belched, and then again heads together talked and laughed.

Early evening already you’d seen the hay barn’s door ajar and once or twice had seen a couple go in and out. Now it was evident from the men’s attitudes that they were bragging to one another about their conquests. Two of the childminders sat at one table removing straw from their hair. The women and some of the older and more restrained couples gazed at them expressionlessly.

Every now and again the aeroplane flew low over the roof of the tent, fluttering the candle flames on the tables. Everybody looked up as if they expected to see the wings gash through the tarpaulin.

You crossed the yard to the barn. A clashing of metal was audible, against the grain of the music. It was the ploughshare under the wild fig in front of the door of the barn. It was Corrie Meyers on only one high-heeled shoe. She was hammering on the ploughshare with the crowbar that Jak had hung there to summon the labourers for falling-in time. The crowbar was too heavy for her. Every time she lifted it, her wrists with the silver bangles buckled. Every time she delivered a blow she lost her balance, so that she had to clutch at the swinging share to steady herself.

Corrie’s lipstick was smudged and her mascara was running down her cheeks.

I cannot look at it, I cannot look at it for one minute longer. Hound! Fucking low hound!

Surabaya Johnny. You pretended not to see her.

The barn was murky. Somebody had unscrewed most of the yellow bulbs that Jak had had fitted round the walls. The place smelt of sweat and liquor and stale perfume. On the bales of hay couples were sitting and smooching. Most of those standing on the sidelines were young girls on the prowl and married women making use of the evening to feel some other body under their hands. The dancers were moving in a track along the sides of the barn. The music was too fast, there was something frenetic about the movements of those who could keep up, while the less fleet of foot fell about, bumping into one another and stepping on one another’s toes.

You heard swearing, fuck out of our way here, look where you’re damn-well stepping, man.

At the back of the barn the band blared on. In the dim light the musicians plucked and slapped their guitars. The drummer bullied the other instruments.

You noticed Riekert Meyers amongst the dancers. He was giving his own performance in the middle of the floor with a young blonde woman whom you didn’t know. Riekert spun the girl from his fingertips, first this side round then the other and he pulled her close into him and danced up behind her, with his hands low over her stomach and his hips against her buttocks. You could see on the woman’s face what was happening. The sly sulk, the spite, the satiated vanity that the Meyers brothers induced in all their concubines. He had a sweet little smile on his heart-shaped face. The band was playing for him. A hot little number, as it was known.

You were the first to hear what Corrie Meyers was screaming. She barged smilingly into the dancers and screamed into their faces.

As if it were their foreheads that were on fire.

As if the flames were in her own mouth.

You were outside in an instant. The hay barn was a mass of flame. Smoke and flames were pouring out of ventilation holes and the open door. Through the chink you could catch a glimpse of the inferno inside. It was August and the new lucerne hay was gassy, there were wheat-straw bales with which the stables were kept dry. Behind you the dancers were starting to cluster together with the sluggish reactions of people who have drunk too much. The people came out of the tent and pointed. Nobody did a thing.

The plane was circling about the yard. Will that be enough to satisfy Jakkie now? you thought.

Was that when Agaat appeared? In her black-and-white there in the clearing before the blazing barn? The one to whom all looked, the one who turned round, lifted her good hand for silence, and started issuing orders left and right: You and you and you do this that and the other!

The woodshed and the onion store and the petrol tanks and diesel storage first! she called. Wet the ground all around!

The ordinary garden hoses wouldn’t reach far enough, you knew.

She was the one who remembered the water cart in which water was transported for the cattle in summer, which ever since the last fire you’d always kept filled with water.

Get out the tractor, hitch the water cart, wet the ground first around the fuel tanks, she commanded. She had a bale of wheat-sacks dragged out of the barn.

Untie them! Wet them! Bring them! Jump! she bellowed.

Where’s Jak? you called. Somebody shouted that he was still over at the landing strip.

Agaat sent for the long ladders under the lean-to. She had the young men clamber up, she had the wet sacks draped over the tanks. The men responded to her commands as if she were a general.

Dawid was blundering about and looking wildly around him. Him she sent to the pump-house at the dam to switch on the pump. The pump served the garden irrigation, if it was switched on, at least the house would be safe.

But she thought up something else. She knew where the irrigation pipes ran in shallow trenches in the garden, and she knew where the pipes ran above-ground. She gathered a team of the hired waiters and the kitchen maids and showed them where they had to dig up the pipes. In line they dragged up onto the yard length upon length of black irrigation pipe with spray-heads and laid them around the outbuildings. Here and there a connection had to be made.

Agaat took the orange connectors and the knives and the clamps and the screwdrivers out of her apron pockets. Everybody stood staring amazed at the plan. Then she went and against the side wall of the house she turned the handle across to open the valve.

Lift the pipe! Hold the heads! Lift them, hold them, aim for the roofs! All together, one, two, three! Agaat shouted.

Arms akimbo, she watched her plan being put into effect. Every water-point was manned by somebody holding the hammer of the spray-head so that the jet could shoot up thick and high. In an instant the gutters of all the buildings were gushing with water. Gradually the soil of the yard grew dark and slippery.

The corrugated-iron sheeting of the roof of the hay barn started popping off from the heat with the cold water on top. There were loud reports and blows as the plates shot out and fell to the ground. Long tongues of fire licked out and a rain of sparks mizzled on everything.

The men were instructed to get the implements out of the big barn and to park them at a safe distance. Tractors and combines and valuable pieces of smaller machinery and supplies of paraffin and oil. Wet sacks were thrown over everything. Everywhere people were running around with buckets of water as commanded by Agaat. The spray-heads were directed at the gaping holes in the roof of the hay barn and you could hear the hissing as the water hit the flames. Thick clouds of steam billowed out of the roof.

You saw Agaat talking to Jakkie.

A fine time to get here! Don’t you hide yourself now! Fill with water, five empty molasses drums, you, she told him. Screw off the caps and roll them in through the door of the hay barn so that we can get right in under the fire with the water.

It was over as abruptly as it had started. Within an hour the hay barn was a black smoking shell. The people were standing around the yard in little groups, shocked sober, their clothes stained with mud and soot.

Where were Jak and Jakkie? You looked around, but you couldn’t see them among the assembled. Agaat struck the ploughshare. When everybody had assembled under the wild almond, she looked at you.

You thanked the people for their assistance and their presence at the feast.

I am sorry, you said, that it had to end like this.

Some of the older people came to look for Agaat with you to shake her hand, but she’d disappeared. She didn’t sleep in her room that night.

The next morning Jakkie was gone.

You heard doors slam in the night, were aware of car headlights sweeping over the yard, voices, but you were too heavy with your medication to get up. You thought you were dreaming. Did you hear the sideboard opening, tchick? closing, tchick? When you woke up, at ten o’clock the next morning, black scraps of burnt paper were swirling past the glazed stoep-door in front of your room.

You went to the kitchen. Jak was standing in front of Agaat. You pushed past him. She was holding one hand in the other. You went to Jakkie’s room. His suitcase was gone. His bed hadn’t been slept in.

First came the military police and then the security branch.

They questioned you and Jak about your political views. About what you knew of Jakkie’s attitude to politics, his feelings about the Angolan war and about his movements the last few months.

You both said that he’d always been only positive and correct and enthusiastic about his career in the Air Force.

They wouldn’t answer any of your questions.

They searched the house.

They found nothing.

When they’d finished, Agaat brought in tea. Not that you wanted to serve these people tea. It was she who wanted to see their faces. You knew she was standing in the kitchen eavesdropping on everything.

Whether you could provide the names of Jakkie’s confidants, they asked again and again.

You treated Agaat as if she’d been hired the day before. She behaved like a servant who came in once a week.

It’s in the national interest, said the officer, that you should immediately report every attempt on Jakkie’s part to make contact to the nearest police station, and that your failure to do so will make you accomplices.

To what? asked Jak.

It’s not possible to say at this stage, the chap replied, it could hinder the investigation.

The letter arrived a month later. Dawid had gone to collect the post in town and went to give the letter to Agaat in the backyard. You went to wait in the sitting room. It took half an hour. Then Agaat was standing in the doorway of the sitting room holding out the letter to you and saying: Read.

You read the first sentence.

Dear Gaat, by the time you get this letter I’ll have left the country, I asked somebody to post it for me in town once I’d gone, I hope it doesn’t get intercepted.

The handwriting looked different from Jakkie’s usual hand. Letters leaning forward and back at random, it must have been scribbled down in great haste.

Then Jak came in and grabbed it from your hands.

The two of you watched him reading it, his eyes racing over the lines. Jak turned white and then red and then he stuffed the letter into his pants pocket and stormed out.

You listened to him driving the car out of the carriage, hard in reverse, you saw him stopping in the mud-puddle at the gate, flinging open the gate and charging over the cattle grid so that the iron bars leapt up behind the wheels, the dogs barking in pursuit.

Agaat sat down. It was the first time, since her childhood, that she’d sat down like that with you in an easy chair in the sitting room.

But she didn’t sit back, she sat on the edge of the chair.

What does he write? I asked.

She didn’t answer you. Her hands went to her cap but she dropped them before she’d touched it. She looked as if she was listening, as if she wanted nothing near her ears in order to hear better, it looked as if she was counting.

Please, you said, how long must I still be kept in the dark?

You must have sat there for half an hour. There was a bright silence in the yard, birdsong in the September garden, the colours of crowfoot and anemones rioting in the mirror above the half-moon table, a trace of fennel.

Then you heard the crash.

Agaat remained sitting, her hands in her lap, looking straight ahead. Then she got up as if summoned to an everyday task. You remember the image, Agaat at the front door, etched against the bright frame of the spring day as she turned round to face you.

It’s down by the drift, she said, call Dawid, bring the bakkie, hurry.

You looked after her trotting down the road, one hand to the cap.

You went and struck the gong.

They were all there when you arrived on the scene. Dawid and Agaat and a whole lot of children and women from the labourers’ cottages. The Alfa’s back section was sticking up out of the water. One back wheel was still spinning. The top was down.

Jak was hanging over the water a bit further along.

A broken wattle branch had penetrated his chest in front and emerged from his back.

Agaat didn’t look at you.

Take him down there, she ordered Dawid and Julies, but in the end they had to saw off the branch. With branch and all they carried him out onto the bank. His face wore an expression of surprise. His jaw was dislocated. Agaat closed his eyes. Both of you put a foot on his chest on either side and pull with four hands, Agaat said.

One two three, she counted.

The branch came out with a glugging sound.

Sit down, Agaat said, and supported you under the elbow. You couldn’t stay upright.

So there you were lying in the green grass. You and Jak. And Jak’s branch.

The blood seeped away in the muddy water of the drift. The colour of the blood clashed violently with the red of the Alfa.

Agaat sent the women and the children home. Dawid and the other labourers had to go and fetch the tractor and a tow-rope and the stretcher. Saar and Lietja had to phone the doctor and fetch smelling salts from the medicine chest.

When everybody had gone, she bent and pulled the letter out of Jak’s trouser pocket, still as crumpled as when he’d stuffed it in there. It was covered in blood. The writing was smudged.

He wanted to go and hand it in to the police, Agaat said. And then he couldn’t get it past his conscience. And then he charged back, and then he couldn’t make the bend.

She separated the sheets of paper and smoothed them, carefully, and put them away in her apron pocket.

Let’s just revive you, then I’ll read it to you, then I’ll burn it, then we won’t know anything more about it.

Then she bent down and with a quick tug-and-push movement she reset Jak’s jaw.

Useful, you thought, she learnt to do it early with sheep emerging skew-jawed from the dipping-trough.

She came and held the bottle of smelling salts under your nose.

Just see how he skidded, Agaat pointed out.

You looked, the muddy track with the kink, the missing kerbstone from the shallow bridge.

When they put Jak down in the backyard, you heard it for the first time, under the keening from the kitchen, the formulation which they would snigger over unto the third and the fourth generation of labourers on the farm.

The baas of Grootmoedersdrift!

Aheu!

And so he saw his arse!

In the drift of Grootmoedersdrift!

…

they have not heard from me for so long they may well think I am dead it leaves me cold really I cannot deny I have let the world slip by my hand sometimes I still have the urge to call to scream to get up the need walks in waves but congeals an ocean of glassy gel noiseless salty white coast a dream but I am not sleeping am not dead am awake between me and me all hollows are silted shut a mountain without caves storeys without stairwell trapped in a lift the lift is myself no space to lift an arm sound the alarm the alarm is myself no space between me and me I fill myself fully my filling tissue-tension in a stalk would I burst? a pomegranate fall from a tree? messy but disposable? who will sweep up the pips in a scoop, who will scrape the sole of a shoe over the stain on the stone? or shall I leak from myself wind from an inner tube? carried out over an arm to the place of all inner tubes? images no longer offer solace my filling seed soil wind I am who I am impermeable no turn up or down or round possible the sight of a dead wall could relieve me but I am myself the wall am name am flour am history have occurred my damage is dense is black my tongue silts my mouth full of water oh my soul in me there is no room for you to mortify yourself

…

27 May 1955

Jak says we must make A. move in with Dawid and them and accustom her to her own people. The sooner the better he says, the child will grow up messed-up, she has no playmates. As if he cared one scrap about that. But he is right when he says the white children who come here don’t know any better, they think she’s farm stock & then they snub her.

I protest! She’s an exceptional somebody & she’s developed from the grimmest misery out of just about nothing. Every day I have reason to believe that all my trouble and dedication were not in vain & that the faith I had in the matter and every drop of sweat and tears that I put into her has now started bearing fruit. Everything has a purpose, I say to Jak, she’s been given to me to learn something about myself. To learn what it is that really matters in this life. Jak says I sound like a Jehovah’s Witness on Eau de Cologne. He says he thought I’d achieved total illumination some time ago and it’s not a matter of A. because all I can talk about is myself & and I can really spare him my sickly sentimental stories they give him a pain because all he sees in front of him is the worst case of megalomania & control freakery south of the Sahara.

That’s not true! I play with her & I teach her to sing & dance. If he were only to give her a bit of attention & to take the time to get closer to her he’d see that she’s an extremely interesting little person (perhaps that’s not the right word, rather wilful, intense, complicated, imaginative—too much so—rather a live wire than a flat tyre as Pa always used to say).

28 May 1955

Bought A. 24 new crayons & 10 jars of poster paints. This evening learnt to write & draw sheep hen donkey rooster. Good perception especially the shape & position of ears mouth etc. I teach her to mix the colours & to cover the whole page not just in the one corner. She’s managing well already but I can still see the backlog.

This evening I thought she was sleeping already, she came & showed me a picture of the farm with GROTMODERSDRUF solemnly written at the top. You have wings because you are my angel she says. I had to help with the practising of the wings on a separate sheet. Only Lucifer the rebellious angel has such spindly black wings I say. Jak has a thatch of black hair on his head & thick black eyebrows & two red spots for cheeks, is sitting on the bonnet of a red car with black wheels. She couldn’t quite get the little man into the car I had to show her & so there I was X2 with my red dress & patched-up wings & Jak X2 first on top of & then inside his car in front of the Grootmoedersdrift homestead complete with chimney & gables & green trees & blue mountains & a flower garden full of birds & lambs & butterflies.

There are two of me now & two of Jak & one of every living thing but where are you then? I ask. She’s inside she says. You’re looking for me I’m hiding from you in the fireplace. Shame the poor child can she be altogether happy? I wonder.

30 May

This morning A. jumps up & down on hr bed & suddenly manages to produce a whistle. Now she can’t stop jumping & the whistle comes more & more regularly great excitement!

4 June ’55

New habit of A.’s. She presses her head against me, you always smell so nice she says. Pushes hr head into my jersey drawer when I’m getting dressed & then just now she disappeared into thin air & I search & I search there I find her in my room, half crawled into the bottom shelf & gone to sleep there with hr head on my jerseys. Now I understand why the cupboard is always so untidy. Always find the little red jersey on top & warm from her sleeping on it. What are you doing in my wardrobe? I scold, sorry she says & my heart grows soft, I press her to me. Your body is sweet she whispers in my ear can I also smell like that one day?

4 June ’55

Our best thing nowadays is to walk in the veld & learn the names of things. Insects, birds, small reptiles, small mammals, grass varieties, wild flowers, stones. I take Pa’s old reference books along in a rucksack & a notebook & a pair of binoculars & her magnifying glass & then we identify things & collect examples. I learn remarkable things myself. A. has a good eye, remembers all marks, sees things that I don’t notice, white speckled breast of a lesser kestrel in a tree, pupae in the grass & cocoons hanging from twigs, webs spun between blades of grass, lizard skeletons, droppings of hare & dassie & antelope. The hangings of the fiscal shrike interest her. That’s why its name is Johnny Hangman I explain but then of course I had to explain the death penalty & its reasons as well.

Showed her a while ago a fossil that Pa picked up way back in the mountains & now she’s got a thing about it, is forever picking up rocks & says break it open there’s something in it & then upon my word she’s been right three or four times! How do you know? I ask. Some stones are warmer than others she says. Can it be that the child has second sight? Arrived here the other day with a little frog, didn’t even know such a thing existed tiny as a match-head, micro-frog according to the amphibians book & today again the loveliest little ivory frog. First had to explain ivory & then how an elephant’s tooth made its way to the name of a frog.

Mole snake, fruit bat, horse-shoe, tapeworm, finch-grass, drift-sand, smother-crop, cannibal spider, emperor butterfly. Soon discovered compounds don’t always work in the same way, sometimes had to think up something to satisfy her.

So then I had this bright idea, a fortunate inspiration it was, or not even that, a premonition & I looked under Agate in Pa’s old minerals book & there it was! Remarkable! Cloud agate Plume agate Fire agate Eye agate Iris agate Snakeskin agate Moss agate Rainbow agate! Look, I say, all the world is in your name. The things of the world are tied to one another at all points with words I say & we know one thing through the name of another thing & we join the names together. It’s a chain & if you move one link then they all move the possibilities are endless.

She wants to go & catch that blue butterfly, she says, for hr collection. I say you don’t catch it it’s holy. She’s not scared of butterflies she says they don’t bite what is holy. I said I’d think. Full of that kind of question nowadays. Where is heaven, why do people die, where is one’s soul attached, why is a thing the thing that it is & not another thing. Heaven is a stone she says out of the blue. Yes I say precious stone walls of jasper & streets of gold. No she says that’s not what she means & she shows me the stone with the fossilised fern leaf. That’s the soul she says trapped in heaven, I ask you!

In the evenings she unpacks all our finds & arranges them by kind. Can’t keep up with dishes & bottles boxes bands & scrapbooks & felt squares, pins, thumb tacks, paper clips for all the specimens she wants to display. Remarkably precise & persistent the child, it’s exceptional I think. I give her a free hand even though it smells like a witchdoctor’s shop there in her little room. Saar & Lietja say she was born with the caul. What an adventure!

7 June ’55

This afternoon after lunch A. disappeared into thin air & returned very dirty. Had actually walked to the forest on hr own! I gave hr a good hiding. The tokoloshe will catch you, I said it’s no place for little children remember your name is Good. Good, she says crying, one good two goods, goods is loose goods she says crying & and goods are a lot of things that don’t have a name & goods are your goods that you have in your suitcase, stolen goods. Not at a loss for words. I tell hr look out you don’t talk back at me do you want another hiding? Good is true good is beautiful good is noble.

8 June ’55

What all are you writing in your little book? asks Agaat. A story, I say, about a little girl who can whistle already! Can I too? she asks. Here she is now taking the red crayon!

I rite in my meme’s boke.

I lov hir verry mutch.

My one hand is big and the uther is smaI,

She lovs me verry mutch to.

Let’s spell properly:

write

book

love

her

very

much

other

small

too

She’s speaking good Afrikaans now. Only the infinitive of the verb in combination with preposition creates problems at times. To about laugh, she says, to about cry.

10 June 1955

I put up all the pictures she draws on the walls of her room, two eagle owls on a branch, a red princess with a crown on her head, a bristling black cat on yellow paper. The child amazes me. Looks at me the other day when we were having a picnic under the big old rock fig: Why can a tree only be a tree? Because it’s holy I say. What is holy? she asks again. I say everything that’s wild everything that’s free, everything that we didn’t make ourselves, everything that we can’t cling to & tie down. Your soul is holy. Wouldn’t she gaze at me: But you caught me & tamed me. So I pressed hr close to me, shame.

12 July 1955

Baked a pretty birthday cake with seven candles collected a whole boxful of little reading books from everybody who no longer uses them nicely wrapped in shiny paper & a ribbon but then there was another incident ai, one of the children I invited apparently mocked A. so she locked him in the outside toilet & he bawled the place down. Gave her a terrific hiding more because she refuses to tell me what he’s supposed to have said to her that made her lock him up. You tell me everything, you don’t have secrets from me I tell her, only good secrets you’re allowed that the Lord knows about.

16 September 1955

Just saw something that breaks my heart. Heard just now back there in the kitchen the red-chested cuckoo in the front garden but it carries on & on & and I go & look here on the front stoep to see where they’re nesting & all the time it was A. standing on the stoep all concentration. Every time he calls she whistles back wheet-wheet-wooee & then she waits until he replies, the little face sheer wonder, she can’t believe what’s happening. Just left again quietly because I could see it was a very private moment & thus far she hasn’t breathed a word of it to me. She goes around with I-have-a-secret written all over her face.

17 April 1956

All the drilling every day has not been in vain, A. really coming along so nicely in reading & writing. Saw her today sitting there & spelling out the stories in the Children’s Bible, asks me a big word every now & again: Righteousness, compassion, hallucination, ire, damnation, grace. I write them all down, nicely split up in syllables & put them up in her room next to her other lists so that she can absorb them. Have done memorising & summarising exercises and comprehension tests with her a few times. She’s not stupid at all, I tend to keep it to the Farmer’s Weekly & to farming matters that she knows. Hmmm, says Jak, teach the young idea how to shoot. Sarcastic as always.

3 May 1956

A. has the habit of just disappearing. Give her a hiding regularly but she carries on doing it. Had to scold like anything again yesterday. What do you do when you run off, what kind of mischief do you get up to? I dig she says. I look at the nails, I see the soil. What do you dig! I ask. Little furrows she says. What kind of little furrows? For seed, she says. Then a great light dawned for me about the fennel that’s shooting up everywhere in the garden & in the yard & next to the irrigation furrow & the orchard all the way to beyond the dirt road in the dryland I noticed the yellow heads of fennel in flower. You’re infesting the place! I say, you’re making work for yourself, you’ll pull up every last bush! I won’t she says they’re my plants. Impossible at times the child, wonder how long she’s been at it. Yes says Jak, Minister of Fennel one day.

28 June 1956

Last night a squabble with Jak again because apparently I’m spending too much time & money on A. Should never have shown him the cloth I bought. Red for a party dress for hr birthday in two weeks’ time. He says he doesn’t want a cake-gobbling here again it always just leads to unpleasantness & he’s tired of answering people’s questions about it. He says people ask him if Agaat addresses him as baas or pa or uncle. So now I teach her I’m nooi Milla & Jak is Mr de Wet. But she forgets, she still calls me Même when she’s glad or excited, & Jak of course will have nothing but baas.

10 November 1956

She remains self-conscious about the little arm. It’s too hot in summer for long sleeves but she won’t wear short-sleeved dresses & you can’t really have the child walk around with just one long sleeve.

15 November 1956

Found a solution at last. From fine crochet-cotton crocheted a pretty little jersey to wear over hr dresses, the right-hand sleeve is longer & with a cuff that covers half the little hand. Looks as if she’ll wear it like that. White ribbons in the hair as well. I make hr stand in front of the mirror. Now you look just like a snowflake I say.

18 November 1956

Crawled into bed with A. again last night & slept till the morning Jak leaves me just like that when he’s done & he’s not satisfied till I scream he’s hurting me as if that will do any good. Woke up in the early morning with A. crept up completely into me when I got up she woke up half-asleep still: I can whistle like the birds do you know? kokkewiet & johnny hangman & dikkop all of them.

22 November 1956

Got a bright idea from an old book for A.’s hair. I usually keep it cut short but can’t manage the woolly head all that well. So then we sat for hours in the backyard in the shade against the wall & I plaited her hair in little strings flat against the scalp but I couldn’t get it regular & in straight lines as in the picture. Must take a lot of practice like basket-weaving. So then the kitchen-girls laughed at the result: Now mies has just got Agaat white & then she tries to turn her into a Transkei kaffir-girl & then A. heard it & ran away when she saw herself in the mirror the fat was really in the fire & I had to undo it all & it took much longer than the plaiting itself because by now everything was properly knotted & it pulled & Agaat screamed like a banshee. A whole palaver. I suppose it’s better just to wash it every day with Johnson’s baby shampoo at least one knows it’s clean.

10 February 1957

Went to collect old arithmetic books from the school day before yesterday to work through. She multiplies & divides like anything & recites her tables to 6, not all that far behind the standard twos in town. Have started teaching hr notes & simple scales just for the one hand. The other one’s fingers can still not open all that well. We play simple tunes together I play the right hand. Must say I enjoy it tremendously. Jak says teach an ape to play chopsticks today & tomorrow he plays chop-chop with your head.

24 February 1957

Took A. up into Luipaardskloof to the bat cave she’s very fascinated by a mouse that can fly creepy & smelly the place & the swarms wheeling about our heads A. just wants to stay to look & asks how do they hang how do they sleep why do they squeak like that. Managed with great difficulty to get hold of one. Could show hr nicely the membrane between the spokes & the big ear for receiving the bounced-back squeaking sounds & the pig-like little snout-beak.

23 March 1957

Unpacked my old music books & started practising again after all these years, little Bach partitas & the old evergreens that aren’t too difficult to play. Liebestraum, Song Without Words, Largo. Gives me quite a new lease on life.

A. can’t get enough of music. Play hr Pa’s old records on the wind-up gramophone. She likes the lieder best, once I’ve told her the story & the words she wants to listen again & again, mad about the folk tunes of Mahler, St Anthony preaching to the fish & Wo die schönen Trompetten blasen. I play it until we can sing along little bits. She blows the trumpet notes through a rolled-up sheet of paper, beats the drums of ghost soldiers on saucepan lids & marches all over the house. We powder hr face white & draw a skull with charcoal on hr face & then she enters completely into it all. Kill myself laughing at all the actions. Just have to be careful always that Jak doesn’t come across it because he’s full of mockery as if he’s ashamed of playing & gentleness & laughter.

Let hr listen to the radio to the classical music programmes & teach hr the names of the pieces, the tempo indications, tell her the stories of the operas. She already knows many of the FAK songs & quite a few psalms & hymns. We sing them together in the morning when I wake hr & in the evenings when she goes to bed & when we’re working in the kitchen or driving to the sheep. Teach her the second voice. Oh moon you drift so slow & Let me wander through the heather are hr best. Can carry a tune quite well the little child. As pants the hart for cooling streams she whistles there in hr room when she’s pinning her rose beetles to the felt. A whistling woman & a crowing hen is neither good for God nor men I say. What’s a hart she asks. Found a photo of a hart in the old Encyclopaedia Britannica, absorbs knowledge like a sponge. Sits there & pages in the old books in the sitting room whenever she has a chance. Reads on hr own now every day three new words & three new things as I drilled her & write it down & sticks it up in hr room. Zither, lute, tambourine. Even copies it from the drawings.

Shame, how much the wiser is she for all of it? Should I send hr to school? I don’t know what I thought would come of it. Will just have to see how things develop. She’s now varnishing all the bugs with hard shells to try to preserve them but they just dissolve all the more quickly from it. Will have to phone nature conservation to ask them how one does it.

15 April 1957

A. has now thought up a whole dance of hr own on the model of the Greeting to the Sun which she still does every morning. Decided to keep it up every day from the start because I still see sometimes the stiffness & the withdrawal into herself as soon as she’s tired or tense. The Greeting works well as light exercise for the crooked shoulder. Now there’s no stopping her now she’s even teaching me. Again this morning we had the so-called dance of the emperor butterfly that first sits dead still with its wings tightly folded, half-frozen in the morning twilight with dew on its nose & the outside of the wings pitch-black with white stars & its antennae still filmed with night & then it unfolds its wings with the dawning so she tells & she invents the dance as she goes along. Once, twice, three times slowly the wings open as soon as he catches the first rays of the sun & then he feels one wing is different & he turns his head & looks over his shoulder & he sees hey, but this wing is a heavenly blue on the inside & it tickles & it trills & it shimmers & he gets the urge to fly, quite intoxicated with his own colour in the sun that’s rising higher & higher & shining brighter & brighter & he doesn’t know if he wants the blue rather on the one or rather on the other wing he tries to have it on both.

Heaven knows where she fetches it all from. She’s never seen the Apatura iris itself it’s just what I’ve told hr about it.

A whole extended dance of the two of us it turned into this morning. First in hr room where she explained the dance & then into my room & out of my room by the door of the side stoep & round the front again & down the stoep steps & down the garden path & through the last gillyflowers & around the great oak in the middle of the garden. Even the little thin arm flutters & flaps along in the long crocheted sleeve. Then I chase hr & then she chases me & it tripples & it leaps with extended legs over the flowerbeds. Point your toes Gaat! I call & demonstrate the ballet position with the hands & she teaches me the quick flashing-open of the wings & the tilt & the sheer ascent & the tumbling & the drop of the great forest butterfly then we both roll in the grass, she half on top of me, our limbs intertwined. Caught! she shouts. Then she puts hr arms around my neck & says: Close your eyes open your eyes my Même you’re my only mother. Now I’m crying too much to carry on writing here.

2 August 1958

Quarrel with J. about A.: What do I want to do with hr when she’s big? he asks, after all she can’t stay in the house with us for ever. I’d better make a plan, he says, it’s either she or him.

25 August 1958

All hell loose here. Went out to B. to deliver down for her eiderdowns this afternoon. When I got back A. was sitting in the corner in hr room & it’s chaos. Apparently J. got the idea into his head that A.’s stuff in her collections is infesting the house with beetles & wood-borer & mites & undesirable fungi & heaven knows what else & then he chucked out the whole lot in a heap in the backyard. Ordered A. to get rid of the rest. Apparently doesn’t want a single object or picture or list of words or feather or horn or packet of fennel seed in hr room except what belongs in a bedroom.

Helped her to rescue what could be rescued & consoled I’ll help to start all over again with the collection but she’s inconsolable over hr birds’ eggs & hr mounted insects & dried wild flowers. Even the leopard skull smashed there in the backyard. Good Lord it’s all the child possesses such innocent little playthings. Fortunately the fossil stones are unharmed.

Very sad about all the pictures that J. tore up. Thought I’d keep a few for hr from when she was small so that one day when she’s grown up she can marvel at them.

26 August 1958

A. sulking. What does she want me to do? I can’t exactly fling J. over my lap & give him a hiding for what he’s done? I know better than to scold him. Best is to stay out of his way & not to confront him. She refuses to eat sits there at table & glares at me as if I’m the one who broke her stuff.

28 August 1958

Took A. to the circus tonight to console her & then that also turned out a fiasco because we bought three tickets but then they wouldn’t let her go in with us on the white side. The man was in fact quite rude. What could I do? So then we went to the non-white entrance & then the white ticket wasn’t right & if she wouldn’t make me buy a coloured ticket & all & then she didn’t want to go in on her own but by then Jak & I already had our tickets & of course by this time he was already irritated with all the trouble with his now-do-you-see expression on his face. So I suggested that he should go in & Agaat & I would stroll around outside amongst the cages & the caravans outside & look at the animals & the artistes because it was still dusk. A whole to-do there at the entrance to the approach tent: The elephant & the ponies with plumed crests & the horse-lifter with his tiger-skin suit & the clowns starting to practise to be funny. We would then go & wait for him in the car. But that was then of course not good enough either & he grabs me by the arm there amongst all the people & he hisses in my ear: You will go in with me woman & then I had to leave the poor A. right there. Had just enough time to give her money for an ice-cream. Terrible sitting there in the tent. Could enjoy nothing so upset was I & I could think of nothing but A. who’s really not used to strange places & so many people. When we came out she was sitting in the dust next to the car in the parking lot because of course it was locked all the time. Fortunately it wasn’t cold but now she’s angry with me all over again & all I was trying to do was make it up to her.

J. has just been here glaring at me: Write! Write! with those little claw-paws of yours what good is it going to do you? There’s a life here to be lived & decisions to be taken & work to be done & next thing I see you’re sitting & churning away at your silly little books & I’m waiting for you in the room don’t forget I’m your husband & I also have my needs. When he’s like that there’s nothing to be done about it. Will just have to go so that he can have done & cool off.

29 August 1958

Crawled in behind A’s back in tears again last night. J. particularly rough after the whole circus episode & swears & scolds & abuses me to my very soul. Another dress with a broken zip. I suppose I shouldn’t turn to the poor child for refuge. In the end she was the one who comforted me. Never mind she says I don’t have to feel bad she looked through a slit in the tent & saw the ringmaster’s high hat & the antics of Tickey & the trapeze artists on the highest rung their red velvet slippers with the shiny stuff & then she stood back when the drums started ruffling to say here it comes they’re going to jump & then she could see from the shadows on the tent wall & the spotlights how they swung & let go & turned somersaults in the air & caught each other by the arms at the last minute & then she went closer again & saw the trumpets shining as they were lifted to blow. So then of course I cried more than ever & the more I cried the more tightly she locked her arms around me. Nothing to about cry she whispers in my ear, must I go & make Même a glass of warm milk? Father in heaven how am I going to resolve this matter?

23 February 1959

A. very responsible helps only too diligently with everything around the place: Stacks pumpkins pulls potatoes plucks the geese. She shines in the kitchen, can make a good white sauce already & a quite presentable stew & hr flapjacks & scones are excellent. She’s managing very well with needle & thread. Gave hr a needlework basket for hr little things. Teach hr something new every day, buttonhole flat-seam blanket-stitch. I praise hr often & she reacts excellently to praise & encouragement & tries only to excel & improve herself. She’s even been to pick blackberries & made blackberry jam according to the recipe in the book without one sticky patch in the kitchen. For the rest very perceptive came & reported that the chickens were sneezing & we could prevent an outbreak of roup. Lost only about four day-old chickens & all the others including turkeys & ducks treated preventatively. J. has this idea that he can build poultry-runs in a draught so that’s what he has for it. He says the chickens got it from me & A. we infect everything we touch & what will I do if he gets chicken flu?

11 March 1959

A. solemnly came to sing to me this morning for my birthday. Best wishes dear Même on this your birthday, That the Lord you will keep we earnestly pray. She’d baked an orange cake first thing this morning all on her own & written 33 on it with icing sugar in higgledy-piggledy letters. Then she gave me wrapped in a scrap of green velvet stitched with blanket-stitch & tied with a red ribbon hr prettiest fossil. Was with her the day she picked it up on the mountain. Haven’t yet been able to make out what it is. Some or other floating seed with membranous wing or otherwise a membrane-winged insect. A parasitic wasp perhaps. Looks exactly like a little galleon & the stone-ripples look like waves. A remarkable likeness. Can’t really believe she wants to give it to me. It’s our ship, just the two of us where are we sailing to? she asks me. What could be happening in the child’s head?

10 October 1959

Can’t abide J.’s aggression towards A. any longer. An unbearable atmosphere in the house. She’s an early bloomer he says she ogles him. What nonsense but perhaps I’m missing something. Hear the maids teasing in the kitchen: But you’re pushing tits Aspatat. She’s been moody of late. I suppose the start of the trouble.

13 October 1959

A. reads all the time went & fetched a lot of Ma’s books out of the cellar last year. Genoveva, Alone in the World, Prisoner of Zenda, Scarlet Pimpernel, In the Footsteps of the Master by HV Morton & In the Steps of St Paul by HV Morton & Late Harvest. A. knows them all by heart & asks for more books. J. doesn’t approve of hr reading adult books. What’s the difference I ask after all she reads the Farmer’s Weekly.

27 October 1959

Lay awake all night about A. She’s always been inclined to disappear but now it’s getting too bad. Saar & Lietja say they find her roaming with her reading-book down there by the labourers’ cottages but she runs away when they call hr. Must be looking for company shame. I suppose I must tackle the facts of life. Shouldn’t be difficult she knows about covering & lambing & calving & all creatures great & small birds & bees. Came to tell me the other day she’d uncoupled the terrier single-handedly when one of the labourers’ dogs got stuck in her again.

3 November 1959

Really rather put out by conversation with Beatrice this morning. Suspect she drove over on purpose to come & bring me the news. Apparently people are gossiping about A.’s situation & it seems the dominee’s wife has plenty to say on the subject. No it would appear we’re involved in ‘subtly undermining community values’ & defeating the ends of the political policy of the authorities & what would happen if everybody did what I’m doing with A.

A good question I suppose.

B. just carries on & on: Yes it will jeopardise Jak’s position in the church & the farmers’ associations & the regional branch of the party here if we don’t set our house in order & heaven knows what else.

I say Jak’s church is skin-deep anyway & the child means so much to me & even though Jak & I differ on the subject I still feel as though I’m a better wife to Jak because I have more love in my heart & can care for an independent creature. B. looks at me askance but I carry on. Through hr I see the world through fresh eyes I say & I ask: Does she Beatrice have any idea what it is to be childless?

B. sits there with a sceptical slant to hr face & drinks hr tea with her little finger aloft. That’s all very good & pretty & noble she says but I should really think very well about the long-term consequences not only for us but for the broader community & also for A. herself. At this her mouth contracts into a nasty little slit. (J. always says it’s the can’t-get-the-knot-through-the-hole mouth & he doesn’t want to know what she looks like down south.)

Must say it’s an aspect of B. that I haven’t been so aware of before but I’m noticing it more & more frequently of late. I know old Thys belongs to the Broederbond & he’s now proposed Jak but Jak feels little for the idea. I know why: They read too many books there. Beatrice says old Thys pores over the dictionary every evening it’s way beyond him.

I say I’m not sure about such secret organisations & I vote Nationalist but I’m not ashamed to object in public to such skulduggery. B. says it’s top secret & who am I now to think I can turn against the leaders & intellectuals of my people I’ll cut my own throat & Jak’s as well if that’s my attitude & I’d better realise on which side my bread is buttered & ‘they’ can make things very difficult for people who are not well disposed to the national cause & we’ll never reach the top rung if ‘they’ know Jak de Wet’s wife swims upstream however learned & refined she may be. So I went off to make tea to keep my temper within bounds & when I came in again she carried on exactly where she’d left off.

Yes, she says, A. can’t do a thing with the education that I’m giving her & what use does one in any case have for an over-educated servant on a farm. She’s not a servant I say & then B. said well she hasn’t noticed other people’s children of the same age sweeping stoeps & feeding chickens & serving tea to guests & calling their mothers Nooi. I say A. & I understand each other it’s play names & play work it’s a special relationship. B. says what’s the use the two of us thinking it’s a game & it’s special & everybody else in the country thinks it’s abnormal & a sin before God.

Will have to go & talk to the dominee myself. Can’t altogether believe what B. tells me about the judgement of the pastorie. After all Van der Lught himself named her & baptised her? How can he turn like that? Could swear it’s that wife of his that’s the real poison pusher.

16 December 1959

Period two weeks late if my sums are right. Has happened before. Perhaps the ado about A. that’s telling on my system she’s so tuned in to my moods she sees immediately when I’m depressed & always asks if it’s she who’s done something wrong. This morning I found by my bed a bunch of hydrangeas made up with red leaves of fire-on-the-mountain in the grey vase they won’t last long she says it’s too hot but it’s to cheer me up asks me if I’m feeling ill.

23 December ’59

Had blood drawn today. Dr had left on holiday already & only his partner there & he can’t tell me when the results will be available. He says with somebody who’s been trying for such a long time as I they want to be absolutely sure & it has to go to Cape Town for analysis.

26 December ’59

Walking up & down & waiting for the phone to ring or not to ring don’t know which one in case it’s bad news. Ate nothing yesterday. Almost don’t want to think it. Dear God! After all that! A. circles around me like a bothersome bee if it’s not coffee then it’s tea that she brings get off with you I say. She knows something is going on you can’t hide anything from hr.

30 December ’59

Fancy I’m nauseous all the time. Have phoned but there’s no reply. A. tries to comfort me, puts flowers in the grey vase every day. Lord they really can’t keep me in the dark like this. Festive season. Everybody gone. Was sitting there just now with my head between my knees with nausea then I felt A.’s little hand putting something in mine. Chew she says in my ear it helps for when you’re feeling sick. Fennel seed. What is Même’s wish for the new year? she asks.

1 January 1960

Too trembly to write. Too superstitious to write it down here in black & white in case it disappears! Dr happened to be in his consulting rooms & there was the result from the laboratory! Positive! I’m walking around with it like a pearl under my heart. Haven’t told J. yet. Must wait for the right moment. Tonight we’re going out to Frambooskop—big party. One of the Scott brothers is coming back to take over the berry farming the old man can apparently not keep it up. Perhaps if J. is in a good mood tonight when we get back I’ll tell him.

A. asks what are you thinking? What’s eating you? I say I’m thinking curiosity killed the cat. Why are your cheeks so red? To look prettier my child I say in front of the mirror. Couldn’t stop looking at myself today so then I caught hr eye in the mirror looking at me oddly then I clicked it was because I’d said ‘my child.’ Oh gracious heavens how unthinking of me. Now I’m going to have my own child. What will she make of that?

Perhaps it’s the Lord’s will that it should happen just now perhaps it will make things clearer & decisions easier. What are you going to wear tonight? A. asks. Take out my black dress with the wide sleeves that I last wore on my honeymoon when we went dancing. Aitsa, says A. queen of the night & she whistles the tune of the great aria from The Magic Flute all down the passage all melancholy it sounds. Ai she always whistles when she’s feeling happy & busy & to tease me because she knows she’s not supposed to whistle.

2 January 1960

Went & crawled in with A. after the scrap again last night. Was ever so miserable. Perhaps B. is right perhaps one should just keep one’s mouth shut about everything. Perhaps I angered that crowd of men with my talking about fertiliser & the soil. What on earth got into me? A. pretended to be asleep when I slipped into her bed. Had she eavesdropped & heard me telling J. about the child? Perhaps she heard what he said then? She’s downcast today she must have gone to unearth the shards of the vase J. broke last night out of the rubbish bin because I found it this afternoon all neatly stuck together. Don’t know if it will hold water but won’t throw it away for the time being to spare A.’s feelings. She looks as if she wants to cry all the time. I feel as sick as a dog.

7 July 1960

Can’t find the right book heavens things go so fast nowadays & it’s so difficult to keep one’s wits about one through it all. Would rather not page back too much here. A.’s childhood & growing up. Feels like a lifetime since I last wrote in this one. Changed into a different person in the span of six months. Lord be thanked no longer nauseous. Just swollen ankles & heartburn in the mornings.

Had a situation again with Ma this weekend. First it was J. & his dog-kicking & then Ma presumed to preach to me about men. No she says I must send the story of J.’s battering into the world via the housemaids & especially A. I ask you the child my messenger to somebody like B.! Why must I listen to a single word she says? After she kept poor Pa under her thumb all his life with hr prescriptions. The worst is that that I’d left the outside room that I’d prepared for A. open by accident after I’d shown Ma all my preparations there & that Saar of course took the gap when she came in in the late afternoon for the milk & went in there. Clearly inspected everything to the last detail & then she was prancing around the kitchen with a spiteful expression & provoking A. with a so-called ‘secret’ & that after all the trouble I’d taken to work there only at night when everybody was asleep. Had succeeded so well in hiding it from A. till now. So I took Saar aside & tried to talk to her about it. Wouldn’t she just interrupt me & answer me all cheekily: Never ever I won’t tell her anything about it Mies & if she notices anything I’ll say it’s my room. I’ll say I’ve done now with my hotnot hut down there next to the drift & its leaking roof & the mosquitoes that eat me alive at night. It’s me who’s going to stay in the back here a nice soft bed & a mirror & a stove & tea & rusks & a white cap & a white apron just like the maids in the Royal Hotel.

Lord what kind of trouble we can expect from this again. If you think you do right by one then the same thing is a wrong to somebody else.