Agaat (67 page)

Agaat taps seven exclamation marks of her own. She puts down the stick. She bends her head over me, regards me, presses shut her eyes with the thumb and index finger of her left hand. And with the fingers of her small hand, mine. Her fingers are cold on my eyelids.

Rest, she says, it won't be long now, we're almost there.

 

The first letter that you intercepted was addressed to Jakkie at Langebaan, his official numbers and codes written in stiff black block letters on the envelope. You wanted to know what Agaat had been writing to him, sitting there in her room for hours on end.

The first letter, no it couldn't have been the first. There were many. When you unfolded it the change in form of address struck you. No longer Dear Boetie as when he was at school or Dear Private when he was doing his basic training. Dear Airman Captain de Wet it was now. Your heart contracted inside you, sitting there reading next to the road, pulled off into a gate entrance on the way to town.

You'd told Agaat that Jakkie was now in a high-security position and that her correspondence wasn't private. Jakkie had warned you and Jak. No searching questions about his movements, his further specialised studies, would be answered, and your private declarations and revelations might just end up under eyes they were not intended for. And here was Agaat's camouflage now. All that she thought she could hide, was how close she was to him.

The words with which she concluded that letter, were even more poignant. No longer: Your loving Nêne. Respectfully yours, she now wrote. And no longer just Gaat. Now it was her full name: Agaat Lourier.

But as your eyes wandered over the densely packed lines, it was mainly the loving that you discerned, that was undiminished. It was in her descriptions. The jackal so delicately sniffing at the twig, its wide green eye in the night, as it approaches the yard with plans of its own. It was in the specific selection of things that she named. The three pink eggs of the little nightjar on the footpath to the old orchard. The way in which she wrote up the tiniest impressions, struck you. A love letter compared to yours. What would the Defence Force censorship make of it, you wondered. Like encrypted writing it would surely seem to them, like some code or other.

Your own letter was in your handbag. On the slender side. What you had to report was really rather meagre against Agaat's epistle.

She held forth on everything that happened on the farm or didn't happen. A chronicle. With wetted finger you counted, thirty pages, all in the precise upright handwriting she'd taught herself. You were amazed at the grasp she had of everything, from piss-ups amongst the farm workers to the service schedule of farm vehicles and the number of bales of wool, the variation in the quality of the milk and the cream in the spring and the fall, the treatment of the wheat seed against fungus. A record keeper's statistics. She predicted the rains for Jakkie—a fine grey mizzle in the early morning just enough to make the eels stick out their noses—and guessed the wind for the following week for him and estimated the surge in the mountain streams and rivers for him with the naked eye and compared it with the average of the seasons. As if the farm belonged to him and to her.

What could you shore up against that? Against the number of cows covered, the report on the first signs of nasal bot among the sheep? What she left out, were the dreadful daily quarrels between you and Jak and the swearing and the tears. To judge by Agaat's letter the Grootmoedersdrift homestead was a model of peace and harmony.

Why did it infuriate you so immoderately that day next to the road? The prettification to which every paragraph bore witness, was in the best possible taste. You couldn't have done it better yourself.

You read the whole thing. At the end, for a whole paragraph, she asked questions, intimate questions from the nêne of old. What do they give you to eat there in the mess? Do you see meat in those army stews? Do you sleep warm enough? Is your pillow filled properly? Are your superiors well disposed towards you? Are you healthy? Are you safe? Do your subordinates listen to your commands? Are you getting used yet to taking off, to the blow to the heart and the horse rearing up? (rein it in) Do your ears still close up when you come down? (chew a dried peach) When are you coming home again?

The disquiet that was also in your and Jak's hearts, she formulated as:
I pray for your blessed and kept return from the distant skies.

It was herself she was comforting with the quince-mousse dessert she was thinking up for him, the roast of hare in pomegranate sauce that she would place steaming before him.

You wanted to read the letter again, you put it back into your handbag. Agaat's blue Croxley envelopes you usually licked, and pressed closed again as best you might, asked at the post office for a bit of sticky tape. Your transgressions you trusted would be covered by the far more visible and sanctioned incursions of the military security that according to Jakkie opened and stamped everything. But this letter you didn't want to let go, there was a tenderness and an obsession to these formulations after which you hungered.

Jak had his own formulae in which to clothe this new situation for himself.

How is Pa's soldier? he'd ask on the phone when Jakkie phoned.

You listened in on the second phone. Jakkie could give him answers pertaining to his number of logged flying hours, the sensation of breaking through the sound barrier, the training with the ejector seat in the simulator.

He was a body of potentials for his father, a model of endurance, of physical discipline, of drilled limbs and sharpened reflexes.

And you? What could you ask this child about whom you felt your knowledge was of the second order, of the third, after Jak with whom
he had had his baptism of fire in the mountains, after Agaat on whose bosom he'd grown up?

She was the one to whom he handed his laundry bag every time he came home, and who packed his suitcase for him when he left again.

What could you respond, what add, to the smile, the poker faces exchanged with the handing over of the bag, the handing back of the suitcase?

You knew of the little surprises with which from childhood they'd spoilt each other. Quartz pebbles, mouse skulls, tanned moleskins, under a pillow, in a shoe. Later, Agaat's jerseys and pullovers for Jakkie, a bow tie and a new shirt that she went to buy him in town with her own money, cellophane packets of fudge and taffy and fennel cookies that she hid amongst his clothes.

And Jakkie's gifts to her, boxes of fine chocolate, sachets of saffron and cardamom from the spice stores of the Boland, story books, Croxley writing-pads and envelopes, magazines, headscarves and fragrances.

Not that she ever used the perfume. The little bottles stood untouched, like an exhibition of trophies, on the shelf above her washing-table. The scarves she used as wall decorations for her room. She scrutinised them for new designs that she could embroider.

Your attention and interest you felt passed Jakkie by, unheeded. Was it for your sake that he joined the Air Force choir? He sent you their record. Side one,
The Lord is My Shepherd
. Side two,
Oh for a gun in my strong right hand
. He was more attuned to his father's ideals, to Agaat's favour than to your concern. From the sidelines you watched things develop.

As a member of the Permanent Force's elite corps of highly trained personnel Jakkie made rapid progress, just as Jak had predicted. He could study and earn a salary at the same time. He obtained a degree in aeronautical engineering. In case he won't be able to fly all his life, he said, then he can design machinery for the Air Force.

Like what? Jak wanted to know.

The plans are there, but it's classified information, Jakkie sent word. All that you got to know in that time, was that the Bureau of Mechanical Engineering at Stellenbosch was a kind of front for Armscor. You had some misgivings about this, but Jak said why could the Afrikaner's cultural headquarters not also be his arms factory, it goes without saying, that's how all honourable nations consolidate themselves.

You both knew that Jakkie wasn't really interested in politics, all he wanted to do was fly the Air Force's modern fighter planes. That was Jak's great dream. At supper table he read you and Agaat extracts and
showed you pictures of aeroplanes from
Paratus
and
Jane's Defence Weekly
, to which he subscribed.

You knew that Jakkie was flying Impalas and Mirages. You and Jak knew that it wasn't child's play in South West. You knew that it was the supreme game of heroes, that those who took part in the war against the Cubans in Angola were awarded the highest honours. You had the right to be proud, he was the child of all three of you.

But what was it that you felt there at the supper table when Agaat received a thick letter from him, thicker than that to his parents, and you and Jak asked her to read it aloud? It wasn't pride, it was loss that united the two of you there under the lamplight. As united as you could ever be. Because you and Jak were suspicious of Agaat whose eyes sometimes glided rapidly over the lines, over the bits she left out. Jakkie's letters to her you didn't dare open or intercept.

 

You were dependent upon each other's fictions about Jakkie. You were his family, but he belonged to the war, to secret operations. Later when it leaked out in the press, Jak bloodthirstily speculated about Jakkie's part in the preservation of country and nation.

Oh please just shut up! you shouted at Jak when it became too much for you.

You locked yourself in your room, went to lie down on your bed, crying. You couldn't figure out with whom you were most angry. With Jakkie who wasn't open about his activities, with the Defence Force that employed him for its own purposes, or with the government that maintained a dour silence.

But it was the scene there in the dining room that really irked you, the scene with Jak and Agaat, she standing opposite him on the other side of the table, her hands on the back of the chair, half of her face in shadow. Jak telling tales of bombed-out enemy positions, of smoking Migs exploding in fireballs. Was she flattered to serve as audience to the fantasies of the baas?

It sickened you. You tried to keep yourself going with hard work, but then there was always the apprehension, the suspicion in those years, the late seventies, early eighties.

You went to see the doctor. He prescribed a stronger tranquilliser, better sleeping draughts. That helped, but it made you feel as if you were only half alive. Agaat checked your consumption closely. She was particularly interested in your faints, in the weakness that sometimes overcame you in the middle of wool-classing or during the stamping of the wool bales. Exaggeratedly solicitous she'd be then. Irony, no,
sarcasm was in the crook of the elbow of the strong arm she offered to accompany you to your room.

After such an episode, after she'd attended to you in your room, she could go missing for hours. Stay with me, Agaat, you asked, but she closed the curtains. Stay with me, I feel scared, you said, but she remained standing there for just a moment, in the twilit room, with her hands folded under her breasts, her white cap, her white apron like nurse's clothing, before walking out tchi-tchi on her thick-soled school shoes.

Was it one late afternoon that you woke up after such a collapse, after a dream that she had run off, that you went out? You had to look very closely, with the binoculars. She was walking with her head held high. From far away you could make that out. Unimpeachable in her solid body with her even tread she approached, unswervingly, as if she were in a play. This time she wasn't on the koppie in front of the house where she always, in full silhouette, looked larger than she really was. She was approaching along the footpath in the dryland through the twilit wheatfields, her white cap like a prow above the stalks of wheat.

After half an hour she came in by the back door. All innocence, a castaway lamb under her arm, a story about a hare that had ended up in the jackal trap, a basket of lay-away eggs. That's the way it always was.

A report of a gate lying wide open, of an empty drinking trough, of a windmill that doesn't cast, of another kerbstone washed away from the bridge over the drift, of a plume of smoke in the poplar forest. But you knew that there was much more than met the eye to her walks. That evening again, when she'd brought in the food for you, she waited, emphatically and intransigently, for you to tell Jak what she'd found, noticed, suspected. And then she listened, expressionlessly, because the actual information you couldn't communicate. You didn't know what it was.

You shut your ears to your own voice pronouncing the deceitful words. You screamed at Agaat.

Stop staring at me as if I'm false! What have I done to you? What do you want me to say?

You slammed your fists on the table. Your glass broke. You put your hand in your mouth, you wanted to pluck out your tongue.

Jak looked at you askance.

My toastmistress, he said, lifted his glass, and carried on eating.

Agaat picked up the shards and took you to your room. She made you take your medicine and covered you with blankets, switched on the
night-light by your bed. You listened to her serving Jak's dessert and coffee, clearing up, closing the windows of the living room for the night.

Those sounds, that silence in which Agaat at length ate her evening meal behind a closed kitchen door, the back door that she pulled shut and locked behind her, the slamming of the screen door, the scuffing of the door of the outside room, all those black sounds to which you were listening in your room lying on your back, they were the opposite of music, they were the sounds of damnation.

Is that what's become of my paradise here this side of the Tradouw? you thought.