Agaat (2 page)

‘I should dearly love to see this Handbook finding its way into every farm dwelling and coming into the hands of every person who farms
or who is interested in agricultural matters, because it is a rich mine of useful information.'

Matt-white winter. Stop-start traffic. Storm warning. And I. In two places at once, as always. Snow on my shoulder, but with the light of the Overberg haunting me, the wet black apparitions of winter, the mirages of summer. Tumbling lark above the rustling wheatfields. Twitter machine. A very heaven, the time of my childhood. How could I tell that to anybody in this city? Heaven is a curiosity here. Hereafter. Strange word in my head. My reaction to the telegram strange too. First numb, then anxious, tears later. An aperture in the skull. Now the memories are a stream, unquenchable.

For parting is no single act, it is like a trailing streamer.

That first descent here eleven years ago, stiff in all my joints. Didn't close an eye on the whole fourteen-hour flight. Fear, worry, feelings of guilt. What was I? Who was I? A ten-day beard, a vacation visa in a passport, a loose cannon without letters of accreditation. A farmer seeking asylum, as far as the Canadian bureaucracy was concerned. A deserting soldier with his training certificates, his pilot's licences, his oath of secrecy. What more could I give them? A confession?

Left home without greeting or explanation. That morning, still dark, the smell of wet soot, Gaat giving me the little key to the sideboard so that I could take out my papers. Her face grey and sad, her cap askew. Four o'clock in the morning, the only one who knew where I was headed and why. Will I ever be able to forgive myself? For saddling her with such a responsibility?

White drifts of snow banked on both sides of the road. Windscreen wipers at full speed. I can't wipe away the images. Banded watermelon under the Herrnhuter knife, Boer pumpkins nestled in hairy dark-green leaves, a brown-tipped fleece of merino wool breaking open, heavy with oil, on the sorting table. Blue lupins chest-high in flower, yellow cream of Jersey cows, the sound when you crack open a pomegranate, the white membranes gripping the clustered pips. Red and white, just like blood on freshly shorn sheep.

Lord, I sound like my mother. Melancholy over-sensitive Ma. Now dying. Will she recognise me? With the beard? Gaat will. Willy-nilly.

Have been having the same dream, over and over recently. Gaat calling me, us calling each other. Awake. Disturbance. An abyss where sleep should be. The calling with our hands cupped in front of our mouths, she in the yard down below in her white apron, visible to me where I'm hiding in the kloofs above the house. Later long whistlings that you could pick up on the dryland at the back if you were below the wind. Later still the blowing on Hubbly Bubbly bottles.

Slowly to the surface, awake to wind-borne whistlings. Sleepless in Toronto. Night music. Till I drift off again, dreaming that we signal to each other on the ram's horn, soft low notes. How careful we had to be when we were looking for the purple emperor in the woods. Grey-black, folded shut in the shadows till it opened its wings, blue on one side only, scintillating, vapoured with silver, blood shaking my heart.

Leaking heart.

On and on the blue flickering sliced by the sharp sweep of the wipers. Salt on the road, broth of snow-slush on the windscreen, on the rear window. Lapis lazuli, it flickers, the colour of the dream, a blue iridescing from moment to moment, between inhaling and exhaling, first on one wing, then on the other. Book of vespers.
Apatura iris
. The giant purple emperor butterfly.

Miracles. Catastrophes. Continent that tops up its water level with blood, and that fertilises with blood. Who wrote that?

Here the blood has long since been spilt. Cold. The massacres efficiently commemorated, functionally packaged, sanitised. Only I, more freshly cut by history, trying to find my own way in the cool archives. Cut grass lies frail. My smell attracts other vulnerabilities. Found the Sainte Marie files yesterday, Bleeding Heel, Broken Shoulder, Wounded Knee, for the new instrument studio in Toronto. A percussion theatre where the visitor will rattle seed pods, brush the tin cymbals with a handful of grass.

When I got home, there it was. On the doormat, in the snow. Post office envelope.

MÊME DYING STOP CONFIRM ARRIVAL STOP LOVE AGAAT.

Eleven, almost twelve years. Will I still recognise Ma? In the last photo Gaat sent, she was tiny amongst the panache plants in the front garden, eyes deep in their sockets. Almost completely grey. Had a book with her, index finger between the pages,
The World's Famous Piano Pieces
. Recognised it by the dusky pink cover. Always used to sit and sing to herself from the sheet. So as not to get rusty, she used to say.

Ma and her airs, Ma who dreamed: Little Jakkie de Wet, the lieder singer, famous from Hottentots-Holland to Vienna.
Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen
. Indeed!

And Agaat, poker-faced, her pop-eyed glare with which she could flatten you without a single word, the glance which she could switch off for days to punish you. Wooden eye. How old was she when I left the place in '85? Thirty-seven?

Gaat, Ma's nurse. Lord, what a piece of theatre that must be. Mourning Becomes Kamilla. Or, better still, The Night of the Nurse.

Gaat with her starched cap, distant snowy peak which she sometimes inclined towards me so that I could look at it from close by, so that I—only I—might touch it, the fine handiwork, white on white, of which I never could have enough. The needle flashing in her hand in front of the fireplace, Gaat's left hand with which she fed logs into the Aga's maw, stoked it so that it roared, strong warm hand on which I explored the world—pure fennel! The little hand on the wrong-way-round arm hidden further than usual when she had to serve Ma's friends, or the dominee on his house call.

And I, having to sing to the guests, Ma accompanying. Good Lord. O bring me a buck in flight o'er the veld,
Heidenröslein
, depending on the audience.

What's it like, there where you grew up? Your country? The eternal question when I first arrived. Always had Larkin's reply ready: Having grown up in shade of Church and State . . . Took me years to fashion my own rhymes to bind the sweetness, the cruelty in a single memory. Later nobody asked any more. Only then could I fantasise about an alternative reply.

Pass under the boom, a red elbow. Parking disk in my hand, cold, smooth, obol with lead strip. Fare forward, traveller! Not escaping from the past.
International Departures
.

Was it on Ma's behalf, or secretly dedicated to her, the fantasy of a song, an alternative reply to my inquisitive interlocutors?

Look, Mother, I've forgotten nothing of it. I'll sing for you. Of the foothills fronting the homestead, one piled on the other, the varied yellows and greens of fynbos, pink and purple patches of vygie and heather. Or of the mountains I'll sing, but in a sparser register, a wider perspective, the powder-blue battlements furnishing a fastness to the eye of the traveller along the coastal route.

My fantasy. Always the exordium on the rivers, the vleis full of fragrant white flowers in spring. This music crept by me upon the waters. A cantata of the great brown river, the Breede River, its catchment deep in the Grootwinterhoek, the great lair of winter, fed by the run-off from fern-tips, from wind-cut grooves in stone, to a hand's-breadth rill, a leap-over-sluit amongst porcupine-rush, a misty waterfall where red
disas sway in the wake of the water. Until all waterfalls flow together over a base of black rock, and the stream starts cutting into the dry land, finding a winding of its own making, at last becoming a waterway, wide enough for shipping, deep enough for bridges, for ferries, for landing-stages and commerce.

This stream, the first which a European would deign to give the name of river, according to Di Capelli. Afterwards Rio de Nazareth. Le Fleuve Large. Hottentot names, certainly, but what remains of those, and who still cares? The Sijnna River, possibly derived from the Nama, Quarrel River?

Who first told me that? Must have been Ma.

Quarrel country.

Cacophony.

Check-in counter. Window seat or aisle seat. Tweedledum and Tweedledee. Boarding-pass. Charon behind computer screen.

Woods. Deep mysterious woods. Koloniesbos, Duiwelsbos, Grootvadersbos, the woods of the colony, the devil, the grandfather. And mountains. Trappieshoogte, Tradouw, Twaalfuurkop, the height of steps, the way of the women, the peak of noon.

The rivers of my childhood! They were different, their names cannot tell how beautiful they were: Botrivier, Riviersonderend, Kleinkruisrivier, Duivenhoks, Maandagsoutrivier, Slangrivier, Buffeljagsrivier, Karringmelksrivier, Korenlandrivier: rivers burgeoning, rivers without end, small rivers crossing; rivers redolent of dovecotes, of salt-on-Mondays, of snakes; rivers of the hunting of the buffalo, rivers like buttermilk, rivers running through fields of wheat. Winding, hopeful, stony rivers. What can have remained of them?

The rivers could not be blamed. Not of thy rivers, no.

My country 'tis of thy people you're dying
. Where, from whom did I first hear that? Buffy Sainte-Marie with quaver-tremolo and mouth-bow, a musical weapon? That moment of enlightenment, the realisation! Twenty-five, not too old to start my studies afresh. Arts, music, history. Less ambitious than some of my contemporaries. The finely cultivated, the intellectuals, incredible how they elected to live after the foul-up in Angola. Attack and defence as always, one after the other self-exculpating autobiographical writing, variants on the Hemingway option. How you get to an uncivilised place in a civilised way. And stay there. A grim tussle with mother nature. I was not in accord.

Took a sheet of paper and a pencil when people here questioned me. Drew a map, lifted out a little block from the map of Southern Africa, from the lower end, from the south-western Cape Province, enlarged
it freehand onto a sheet of paper. On the dirt road between Skeiding and Suurbraak, parallel to the motorway of the Garden Route, parallel to the coastline from Waenhuiskrans to Witsand, between Swellendam and Heidelberg. There. Five little crosses. Five farms in a fertile basin, nestling against the foothills of the Langeberg, the range running all the way from Worcester to eternity where it turns into the Outeniqua. Grootmoedersdrift, the middle farm, between Frambooskop to the east and The Glen to the west. There. From the middlest, inbetweenest place. Ambivalently birthed, blow, blow—that story!—waterfalls in my ears. Perhaps that was what delivered me from completedness.

Translate Grootmoedersdrift. Try it. Granny's Ford? Granny's Passion? What does that say? Motor cars there weren't yet, when the farm, named after my dreaded great-great-granny Spies on Ma's side, was given its name. And after the shallow crossing near the homestead. Dangerous in the rainy season, the bridge flooded, slippery with silt, sometimes cut off from the main road for weeks. You have to go slow there. As we all know. As we all always warned one another.

Careful on the drift!

Now I have only myself to remind. Face scanned by the passport controller. Charon behind bullet-proof glass.

Only once in my life did I see the drift totally dry. Skull-like stones, the dusty wattle bushes. No water, only rock. Just stood and stared at it, flabbergasted by the silence of the frogs, the disappearance of the whirligigs.

Gyrinus natans
. The question always bothered me: What happens to the whirligigs, the little writers on water, when there is no water?

Such matters would not interest them, Mother. I could see their attention straying from the details, the topography of my first world, the thin, unsteady lines leading there, to your yard, Grootmoedersdrift. A little further down next to the drift, on the road's side, the labourers' cottages.

Dawid, would he still be there? Next to the turn-off to the farm, in the first of the cottages on the bank of the furrow?

Black fireplace and tin guitar. Wire-car world. White bone-whistle in exchange for a Dinky Toy. Was I inside once, twice? Gaat and I? With medicine, a little bucket of cinnamon porridge? The smell of soot and human bodies, the half-light. Shame, Gaat, but they don't even have beds. Never mind, Boetie, let be, let's go now, if you help one of them, you get stuck with a whole history before you know it.

A hanging bridge from Dawid's front door into the black-wattle wilderness on the opposite bank. Rickety and full of holes. Forbidden ever to set foot on it.

Flight AC 52 to Cape Town now boarding. Voyager for the sake of the voyage. Nomad without a flock. Safer like that. A listener outside the tent, an ear, an eye, that's all, that's enough. But who can play the ethnographer at his mother's deathbed?

When the inquisitive insisted, I sometimes played the draughtsman, roughly sketched on a second sheet of paper the house in which I grew up.

The homestead of Grootmoedersdrift, half H-shaped, the left leg shorter than the right. The stoep in front and on the east, the backyard open to the south, with storerooms, a servant's room. Gaat's room. In front two jerkin-head gables with big windows, Ma's room on the right, Pa's room left. The weathered doves in low relief under the overhang. Thatch. In front of the house to the north, the strip of level river-grazing up to the river's edge. Planted pasture for cattle, a seam of indigenous trees next to the water, wild olive—blaze at the core—(
Olea africana
), true yellowwood (
Podocarpus latifolius
).