Agaat Read Online Free

and old canvas covers. Some of them were still my mother’s. I threw out most of them in my great clearing-out. Agaat kept them. As she kept the diaries. She recited the titles as she put them back. With a straight voice, the whole list. Late Harvest , The Mayor of Colesberg , Carnival of the Carnivores , Seven Days at the Silbersteins . That was nothing. Forty-three Years with the De Wets , Floodwaters in the Fall , On Veld and Ridge , Chronicle of Crow’s Crag , Circles in a Forest , Straight Tracks in the Semi-desert , Turn-off , July’s People , As I Lay Dying , The Downhill of the Day is Chill , She Who Writes Waits , The Long Journey of Poppie Nongena , Breeders Don’t Faint , tsk, try The Midwife of Tradouw , This Life That Death , Miss Sophie Flees Forward , The Portrait of a Lady , The Story of an African Farm , hmf, rather then In the Heart of the Country . That’s what she read last, recently. Nay what, she said, she could farm up a piece of land better than the wretched old Johanna who lost her marbles for no reason at all, and she wouldn’t let a bunch of forward kaffirs get her down. That was before she read The Seed is Mine which the woman from the library brought along last time. That shut her up. I know what was in her head. Fennel seed.
    Like old acquaintances all the titles sounded as she put them back, like the names of family. She read them all to me in the last few months, or turned the pages on my stand so that I could read for myself. She’d read all the old ones herself long ago and first sampled all the new ones before reading them to me. She knew whole sections by heart. She said not one of them was as good a read as my diary, all you had to do was fill in the punctuation and write everything out in full, then you had a best-seller.
    And then on top of that there are all Jakkie’s books and magazines, sent on over the years, in which there are chapters and articles written by him. Agaat reads aloud from them regularly, very taken with her own importance, struggling over the long English words, but I’ve never really understood much of it. Private Speech, Public Pain: The Power
of Women’s Laments in Ancient Greek Poetry and Tragedy , Mourning Songs of the Dirty Goddesses: Traces of the Lamia in Orthodox Baptismal Rites of the Levant , Echoes of the Troll Calls in Romantic Scandinavian Choir Music . Terribly obscure, all of it. Another one about the polyphonic wailings of Australian aboriginal women when somebody dies off. The stuff he finds to waste his time with, the child, after all, he has a perfectly good engineering qualification in aeronautics. Chucked into the ocean. For ethnomusicology, whatever that may be.
    There was something written on the front page of the clipboard. Agaat looked to see what it was. She looked at me. She wanted to say something, I could see. She thought better of it. Ten pages she had to turn over. On every page her eyes took in the contents. Funeral arrangements to date. She wants to create work for herself. And for me.
    She opened the clip and pulled out a clean sheet from underneath and slid it in on top. She let the clip snap shut loudly, tsk-ed again with her tongue.
    Then she made a great show of burrowing in the dresser drawer for a pen, every gesture exaggeratedly emphatic. In the mirror I could see her pushing up her sleeve and testing the pen on the back of the little feeble hand. Provoking me on purpose, where was the red pen all of a sudden with which every day she underlined in my diaries, and annotated and rewrote on the counter-page? As if she were a teacher correcting my composition. As if I had to pass a test.
    It writes, she said with a long jaw.
    She placed the pen between my thumb and index finger and pressed them together as far as she could reach amongst the buckles and the leather and the screws. She pushed the clipboard in under my hand. It was a laborious arrangement. She had to push and pull and balance