Agaat (61 page)

That fire, was it in 1976? Jakkie in Standard Eight? He'd be getting a lift home for the Easter break. The rains stayed away. Warm autumn weather, gusty south-easter, everything crackling with drought, the river just about empty. Perfect conditions for a veld fire.

You were concerned about water for the sheep, about the lambs on the dry stubble-fields. About the sheep-oats that had germinated too late on account of the unusual drought in December. You were preparing to cart dry feed to the mangers. You didn't want to drive the sheep into the cattle's grass pasture because that was also rather meagre for the season. The river was too low for much irrigation. You wanted all hands on the farm to help with the lamb birthing. The ewes were weaker than previous years, one of the herds not yet altogether in condition after the acidosis poisoning the previous November. Ate too many loose grains of wheat on the harvested field.

And guess who had driven them in there?

Guess who first saw that they had all lain down?

Guess who then had to doctor them?

It was beginning to seem as if events were unfolding according to a design on Grootmoedersdrift.

In whose plan were you all?

What was being made clear to you?

You were all blind. You were blind. Your mouth was dry from tranquillisers. You stared at these things, and at the faces around you, at your own face in the mirror, but nothing would surrender their secrets. You knew one part of the reasons, the people around you another part. And everybody tried to solve the riddle for himself in his solitude.

That Easter, it was a critical time. You would have preferred Jakkie and Jak to stay on the farm and help look after it. After all, it was in the interests of all of you, you felt. Why did you always have to ask for support, plead for help?

Was it because of the nature of mixed farming that there was always too much to do, and would you really have to change it all if you wanted things to run more smoothly? Was Jak right about that?

How would you have to dismantle such a complex concern and reassemble it differently, with fewer components and fewer troublesome details to attend to? Who would help you to think up and plan such an upheaval?

And what would the farm look like then? Like green wheatfields? A monotonous summer? A monoculture with a general impoverishment?

That afternoon before Jakkie's arrival. Agaat in the kitchen preparing food. Jak on the stoep with the mountaineering equipment. You in your room with your diary. That's right, it was the Easter break 1976, you had just started a new booklet.

Writing had in any case increasingly become your way of waiting to see what would happen next. Through writing you wanted to get a grip on your times and days on Grootmoedersdrift, to scrunch up and make palpable the hours, the fleeting grain of things in your hastily scribbled sentences, connecting cause and effect in the stream of events. At least then you could later turn the pages of the diaries, forward and back, and see: This happened before that, and this and that were the first signs of a catastrophe that you wrote up only much later, and this and that were simultaneously requiring attention and not without connection, even though the connection was evident only later.

That afternoon when Jakkie was due to arrive, you were sitting and writing about your farming worries. And about how you were all waiting, each in his or her own way, for this son whom you all wanted to possess and who escaped you all, not in the first place because he was by then already becoming his own person, on the contrary, but
because he was afraid, in different ways, afraid and guilty and taunting each of you, because he didn't know how to please you all at the same time.

You wrote that you could hear Agaat rolling out flaky pastry, thud, thud, with the wooden roller on the kitchen table, for Jakkie's chicken pie. You went to investigate and her chin was pushed out all the way. She knew that Jak wanted to take Jakkie away to the mountains as soon as he arrived that afternoon. She knew that he wouldn't be granted a break to eat, she knew that Jak wouldn't allow any tasty food to be packed for the trip. And yet she was continuing, her lips pressed firmly together, with her preparations.

Were you imagining things, or had you heard her talk on the telephone every now and again the previous week, in the stealthy hours just after lunch while you were lying down?

Was she conniving with Jakkie again?

You didn't want to ask.

Whatever it was that Agaat had up her sleeve, you knew that her plan would always suit you better than anything that Jak could contrive. You were counting on her by this time. To make things happen in your family, or not happen. Or to stop things from happening. Or to predict things. Rain, wind, floods. She could read your mood like a sky, predict Jak's movements long before he himself knew what he was going to do.

The twilight was setting in already. You were starting to worry, Jak had gone for a drive in the bakkie earlier to see whether he didn't meet them on the road. Then the phone rang. It was Jakkie. To say that he'd torn a ligament in rugby and would only be able to get a lift home the following morning and he didn't think he'd be able to be very active, the doctor said the leg needs rest.

Was it all Jakkie's scheme? Thought up on his own?

Jak had just recently acquired television on the farm. Perhaps Jakkie wanted to stay at home watching sport rather than go mountaineering, or just wanted to relax at home? Perhaps Agaat wanted to watch television? Perhaps she wanted to get Jak away from there, because he'd forbidden her to watch television, didn't want her to see too much of the school riots in the north.

You give them the best that you have and just see what you get in return, he said, and glared at you as if it had been you who had stuffed Afrikaans down the gullets of the people.

Jak said nothing when he heard that Jakkie was no longer arriving that evening, and that he couldn't go mountaineering. He tightened his
headlamp around his head, filled his water bottle in the kitchen and shouldered his rucksack.

Agaat went and fetched his ropes on the front stoep and came and put them in his hands.

Oh yes, of course, I almost forgot, what would I do without you, Agaat, Jak said.

His voice was odd. He looked her straight in the eyes. He tugged at the roll of ropes in his hands.

Without any greeting he walked away from the yard in the dusk. You and Agaat watched the little light until it disappeared up into Luipaardskloof.

Perhaps it's all to the good, said Agaat, her face expressionless.

She went and fetched her best bottle of preserved quinces from the pantry shelf and said she thought she'd make some custard quickly, to be ready when Jakkie arrived the following day.

Nine o'clock that evening Jakkie phoned from Swellendam and said he'd decided after all to come that night and would you and Agaat come to fetch him please, his lift wasn't going any further. His knee was bandaged and he had a bad limp. He and Agaat greeted each other with poker faces and he said there'd better be chicken pie and quinces and custard and she said but how else.

They didn't give you an opportunity to get a word in edgewise.

You three were together that evening as if Jak didn't exist. Jakkie tucked into the chicken pie. He wanted to watch the news on television, because of the so-called situation in the country. He was in the debating society of Paul Roos he said, and he had to take part in a debate on the advantages and disadvantages of Afrikaans as medium of instruction in black schools.

He was now really getting beyond her in his education, Agaat said, but what would he say to a game of Scrabble?

The two of you helped Agaat wash the dishes and then waited for her to have her meal in the kitchen and then you sat playing the word game around the dining room table till after half past one that night.

Why can't it always be like this? you thought. Such peace, such harmony? But every now and again you intercepted a glance between Jakkie and Agaat and knew the peace would be short-lived.

‘Quick' Jakkie built. ‘-grass' you added for ‘quickgrass'. ‘Karooquickgrasses' Agaat made of this, by using a blank and spending her last ‘s' to make ‘tricks' of ‘trick' that was already in place vertically on the board. All seven letters and on a red block as well and Agaat won. But only after she'd had to show Jakkie the kind of quickgrass in the old
Handbook for Farmers
because it wasn't in Chambers. He maintained Agaat was fabricating it, there was no such type of grass. Then there was a whole argument about whether a word was valid if it wasn't in Chambers and you had to decide the matter. There's more to a language than is written in a dictionary, you said, and there would have been mighty little happening on Grootmoedersdrift if you'd had to farm only with the words in Chambers.

That was how you decided. Agaat was the winner, out and out.

Agaat always wins, Jakkie said. He winked at his packed rucksack that was standing ready on the sitting room floor. You pretended not to see anything, not to see at bedtime how Agaat double-locked all the doors and windows, not to see her signalling to Jakkie with her little hand to lock the kitchen door from the inside. Pretended not to see Jakkie walking, suddenly without a limp, across the kitchen floor to lock the door with a loud grinding noise.

But Jak's onslaught did not come at night.

You had just returned the following morning from the first round of taking out feed, busy in the garden putting in plants for winter when suddenly he was standing behind you. Dishevelled. Red in the face, a white ring around his mouth, spit accumulated in the corners of his mouth.

It was twelve o'clock and the sun was shining viciously.

Jak's mountaineering clothes were torn. It looked as if he'd wrestled in the dust with some wild creature.

You carried on with your work, thought you would keep it light, would pretend not to have noticed that he was in a state.

Home is the hunter, home from the hill, you said. You moved to the flowerbed behind the plume bushes to be out of sight of the workers on the yard or of somebody coming out onto the front stoep.

Jak hauled you upright, grabbed you by the front of your dress.

Nobody would believe me, he hissed in your face, nobody, everybody would think I'm mad if I had to tell them about you, but I know I'm right! About how you really are!

You tried to keep your voice light and removed his hand and bent down next to your flowerbed where, with the little hand-trowel, you were putting in seedlings for the winter garden. Calendula, a few sowing trays of purple pansies.

A voice crying in the wilderness? you said, you must be careful, next thing the baboons will be barking at you!

Yes, said Jak, you're right, I see it in the wilderness, I see it when I'm hanging from my ropes between heaven and earth, then I understand it, dumb retarded bastard that I am, I see it only after I've run myself to
a frazzle for miles, or when I'm clambering up sheer rock faces. Then I see it, then I see what's happening here!

Good heavens, Jak, what about the glories of nature? you asked. When last did you see a march rose, hmm? Or the great emperor butterfly of Grootmoedersdrift? You frequent such privileged vantage points, you should put it all to better use!

Jak kicked the trowel out of your hand and pushed you over off your haunches so that you landed flat on your behind in the flowerbed.

Why would any self-respecting woman put up with it? he shouted. Why? Why?

Why would she allow herself to be shoved around without phoning the dominee? Without telling a single mortal? Why? Why does she stay? Why does she have a child by such a man? Why does nothing of the fuck-up at home ever show to other people? Always only excuses! Her homestead, her farm, her birthright, her child, her reputation in the farming community? All just to be able to stay with this Jak de Wet, the poor bloody bugger who has to hear every day that he won't do, he's trash.

His eyes were staring wildly in his head, veins bulging on his forehead. With every question he prodded you with his foot, against your knees, against your ribs.

Jak, you'll have a heart attack, you said, calm down.

Bitch! As if you cared! Shall I tell you why you stay with me? You need me to mistreat you. Do you know why? That's how your mother taught you. And her mother before her taught her, all the way to Eve, to the tree in paradise.

Jak tore off his shirt so that the buttons popped. You were shocked at his body, so lean and so hard.

Don't look at me, Milla, that's what's bloody-well left of me and at least I know it. A wife-batterer with self-knowledge. What about you? Do you know what I see, Milla?

A cattle farmer, a connoisseur of sheep, a wheat and soil expert, a gardener. You keep things running smoothly on this godcursed little farm. But what do you look like? Like something out of your mother's old books. Genoveva of Suurbraak. And why? Because you feel inferior. Because you want to feel inferior.

Look at me, Milla! Look, here is your accomplice. I help you with it. Do you think it's possible to become like me all on one's own? And you can't tell anyone about it, can you? Where on earth would you have to begin? More difficult than a magazine story, I can tell you. There it's the hero who has the insight and the heroine who swallows it all whole.

I the precious, I the victim. How would you ever get something like that past your lips at your sanctified tea-drinking at a church bazaar? No, oh no, there you also have a substitute, there you prefer to worship your b'loved Jesus nailed to his cross. A pity the pictures always show him with his bloody little feet already neatly nailed together. Otherwise you could dream with your mouth full of bazaar cake that Pilate was poking a stick up his holy hole. Which would make him more worthy of your worship!