Agaat (74 page)

Then a salute was fired, the last post was sounded, the band played, the national anthem was sung.

After that the medals and the honourable mentions.

There was a stamping of feet, a waving of flags, a saluting. Jak cursed the heat. You were sitting at the back of the block. There were too many hats and umbrellas in front of you for you to see much. When it was Jakkie's turn, you got to your feet. He looked just like all the others, small, there on the barren surface and under the wide white-blue sky. His medal was pinned on, he stepped back, saluted, you sat down. The applause in the open air sounded like twigs snapping.

Afterwards Jakkie came to greet you. You'd last seen him almost nine months earlier. He was a different man. Clean-shaven, creaseless, a guardedness in his eyes, something around his mouth that you couldn't place.

Agaat, you wanted to say, but your mouth was numb. You wanted to take out the envelope. Your gloved fingers slip-slided over the smooth chrome clip of your handbag,

Jak flick-flicked his finger against Jakkie's chest where his medal was dangling.

Eighteen carats, he said.

Agaat, you wanted to say, but other people joined you to congratulate Jakkie. A corporal with a guest list herded you into the brick building where the lunch was to take place. The air inside was muggy with food smells and an undertone of hot metal. The ceiling was high and the hall was dusky but it wasn't cool. There were fans against the ceiling churning the warm air. You were conducted to your seats. The choir sang three little songs.
From the welter of the ages
, and then a medley with
Daisy, daisy, give me your answer do
and other songs, and, while the seafood cocktail was being served, a canon,
Come Lord Jesus, be our guest, let these thy gifts to us be blessed
. The conductor signalled to the people in the hall when to join in and sing along. You couldn't identify Jakkie's voice amongst the tenors. You couldn't even recognise him there on the rostrum, they all looked alike. There were two other pairs of parents at your table. Jak had the wine opened, poured, asked for another bottle and started chatting to the men. You looked at the other women. What was in their eyes? Nothing. Made up with eye shadow and mascara. Just like yours.

Jakkie and two other captains came to join you at your table. They exchanged glances without talking.

Next was the buffet. You noticed too late that the other women had left their hats and handbags at the tables. Again and again men's shoulders bumped and brushed against the rim of your hat. Your nose was sweating but you had the tray in your hands already. Your heels were burning in your shoes.

Give me your handbag and gloves, Ma, said Jakkie.

Was there impatience in his voice? He cast one look around and a junior materialised to take charge of them.

Your hat, madam? the little chap asked.

Jakkie gave him a look and he stepped back smartly and marched away with one arm pumping up and down and the bag and gloves on his flat hand in front of him like a cake on a tray.

Jak gave you a look. It was a hall full of furious eyes, you felt.

From the stainless steel trays you had pumpkin served for you, potatoes, cauliflower in white sauce, peas. You thought of Agaat in the hot car in the parking lot. In a flash you imagined a separate table, all seated
with servants in black-and-white uniforms. Perhaps you'd have another chance at the table to give Jakkie her envelope.

Madam? the carver asked, pork, lamb, beef, or a bit of everything?

Come, Milla, said Jak, pushing his tray into your back, the queue is long.

Lamb, you said, just a small portion.

Jakkie ate nothing. I can't fly on a full stomach, he said. He and the other two kept glancing at their watches. He was far from you. Why didn't you get up and walk around the table and give him the envelope? You looked at his uniform. It didn't have a pocket into which it would fit without a corner showing. You can't have a piece of white paper sticking out of the neat blue uniform, can you?

Jak was in his element. He'd loosened his tie and taken off his jacket. He was showing off his knowledge of fighter planes. A third bottle of wine arrived. The other women didn't drink and you were too shy to hold out your glass again. It would have helped, a bit more alcohol, you thought. How can I get out of here? you wondered.

You tried to grasp your opportunity when Jakkie excused himself.

I suppose I won't see you again, he said. He shook Jak's hand, squeezed your shoulder. You tried to get up. Are you coming home for your birthday? you wanted to ask, but you couldn't. This wasn't the place for it. He'd gone before you could pick up your handbag from the floor. You had an image of the white envelope there in the gloom of your bag. What could it contain?

Sit down, Milla, there's dessert and coffee to come, said Jak. The smell of the coffee under the hot ceiling turned your stomach. You stirred striations of chocolate sauce through the ice cream.

He can see like an eagle, that boy of mine, Jak was bragging.

You could vaguely, above the hubbub in the hall, make out the sound of the jets warming up.

He can balance on a three-strand steel wire one foot before the other, not an ounce of fear in him. I taught him from early on, in the mountains, in the kloofs, in the waterfalls, hand over hand on a slack chain with a rucksack on his back. He could keep his head in a butter-churn, that lad.

Then you were outside again in the white heat. You saw the women putting on their hats again, this time to protect their faces against the sun. But Jak stopped you.

For heaven's sake take that thing off, you know you can't see a damn thing from under that brim!

The first rending din was upon you, seven Impalas squirting orange, white and blue plumes of smoke from their tails. A self-important
voice on the public address system asked for applause. How silly, you thought, it's not as if they can hear up there in their capsules? That's the way things have been all day, you thought. The occasion wasn't for the soldiers. But for whom was it? The women trailed after the men over the tarmac, stood around where they congregated in little groups around the elephant tanks, the rooikat helicopters, the bush pigs, the bushbuck. Armoured game reserve, you thought.

Jak said, tidy up your face, it's in the national interest.

Up and down on the hot tarmac of the showgrounds Jak walked telling and retelling his little band of new-found friends, or rank strangers, or just anybody who would listen, that it was his son up there against the blue, ascending straight up to the sun. You could see that he'd drunk too much, that he was still furious. You screwed up your eyes trying to see, the flakes of steel, how they tumbled spinning downward in formation, the tiny shards on the horizon that sped closer in silent ranks, and passed in silence, the ear-splitting noise lagging them at a distance.

Whenever there was a moment's silence amongst the shrieking of engines and the commentary over the loudspeaker supplying the velocities and details of supersonic and subsonic engine capacities, Jak resumed his account to the bystanders. He gesticulated with his hands, bellowed into his audience's ears to be heard above the noise.

You caught scraps of it.

. . . then I test his reaction time . . . stabiliser muscles . . . reflexes, eye-to-hand coordination . . . exceptionally fit . . . they whisk a man in those flight simulators so that for days he thinks he's custard.

With an excuse of headache you got out of there and returned to the parking lot. You couldn't remember where the car was parked. You started searching amongst the rows and rows of cars. Your shoes were hurting you but you couldn't take them off on the hot tar. The hard roofs of the cars and their glass and their chrome and their sideview mirrors reflected into your eyes so that you couldn't distinguish colours. You became aware of walking in circles, you couldn't remember in which row you'd been and which not. After a while you became confused about the colour of your car. It was a silver-blue BMW but there were many silverish cars that at a distance looked like BMWs. Silver-grey, silver-green, silver-khaki. Then you went and stood on the top step of an electricity substation and tried to read the number plates as far as you could see. CBY, CEY, CA, CAT but no CCK. Still later you just peered through the windows of cars, through the windows of three, four cars at a time to see if you could spot somebody sitting. Sometimes you thought you saw Agaat's cap. Then you went closer but it would
turn out to be a hat, or one of those dogs with red lolling tongues that sway when you drive.

Nowhere was there any shade. As you brushed past the cars, the metal burnt you through your clothes so that time after time you started back, all the time the heat-glow from the car bodies radiated down on you, at short intervals there was the thunderous whistle of the grey needle-nosed fighter planes that sheared low over the roofs out of nowhere, and set the whole parking lot glittering and echoing before swooping away again into the blue, tilting their wings in precisely measured quarter turns, belly up, back up, perilously on the side-fins through the high masts of the loudspeakers and the wires and the towers.

Anti-aircraft avoidance nosedives below radar range for espionage photography of enemy positions, the commentary went, deafening from the loudspeaker trumpets.

This is what hell is like, you thought, this is the temperature, this is the sound of hell. Just so do you search there for someone you've lost.

Gaat! you wanted to scream, there in the deserted parking lot.

Gaat! to make her white cap suddenly materialise above the expanse of motor cars.

Here, Gaat, here! you'd call and wave your hands so that she'd come and fetch you. She'd see that you were in need but pretend that it was nothing.

That's how you were used to doing one to the other.

You couldn't find the car. You found the ablution block and felt heartened but not for long. It wasn't the same one that you'd run into quickly that morning when you arrived. That had been a red-polished cement floor, not grey. Poor Agaat, you thought, where would she have found a place to pee?

Under the flat tin roof of the ablution it was oppressively hot. It smelt strongly of Jeyes Fluid, but at least it was in the shade. You could still hear the announcements on the loudspeakers, but they were muffled now.

In the gloom you rinsed your face and wrists again and again at the basin. The water was warm. You took off your shoes and stockings. The plasters on your heels were scrunched up. You dripped water onto your chafed feet and dried them with toilet paper. You wet your handkerchief and wiped your armpits and back under your dress, and underneath your bra, from above and below.

You lowered yourself against the wall until you could sit on the cement, your legs paralysed all of a sudden. You remembered the envelope. You opened it. It was a delicately embroidered bookmark.

For your Bible, Jakkie, the accompanying card said, put it in with Psalm 23. Remember, the Lord is your Shepherd in all the dangers that you have to face. Love, Agaat.

You rested your head on your knees and wept.

Later the noise of the jet fighters abated. You started hearing other sounds, softer snoring sounds as of toy aeroplanes. It was comforting after the violence of the fighters. You felt sleepy, drifted off. Until somebody came in later and asked you if you were feeling ill and you said no, just hot. Then you got up and washed your face again, applied make-up, powdered your nose. You went into a toilet cubicle and put on your stockings again, folded bits of toilet paper and pushed them into the backs of your shoes.

Outside, hundreds of people were making their way to their cars. There were only a few of the little traffic helicopters in the air and the voice of the announcer, much softer now, interspersed with march music. You searched for the gate through which you'd entered the parking lot from the showgrounds, but you were forced back by the streams of people moving in the opposite direction. To and fro next to the chicken wire you walked trying to perhaps spot Jak or one of the table companions to attract their attention. You were panicky. What if you didn't find Jak? What if he just decided to leave without you? What if then for good measure he chucked Agaat out of the car as well? Would she have the common sense to just remain sitting dead-still in one spot until there were just the two of you left there in the empty parking lot?

You could do nothing but wait in the crush. You remained standing against the chicken wire with your handbag and your hat in your hands. Later you put on the hat in order to be more visible. People smiled at you.

How did you eventually reach the car, reach home?

There are shreds that you remember. Jak charging, swearing, past the slow line of cars on the left shoulder of the service road, Agaat tumbling around on the back seat rigid as a totem pole. You clinging with both hands to the door handle on your side. The abuse that you had to listen to as far as you travelled, the terrifying speed.

You and this golliwog of yours, I'm never taking you anywhere again! Never, do you hear? I'm not going to have my name dragged through the mud in front of the whole goddamned world. That was how Jak began. Spit showered the car as he spoke.

It's a great day in my son's life and from beginning to end you cause nothing but embarrassment! There I had to drop everybody just like that to tag along looking for you and your pet woolly-lamb, I was still
thinking after the heat of the day let's take a few people and Jakkie out for a drink somewhere in a nice restaurant overlooking the sea, but no, Milla gets lost so that I have to get the whole of Ysterplaat on red alert! Where were you in any case that you didn't hear it on the loudspeakers? Mrs Milla de Wet, would Mrs Milla de Wet please go to Gate B, her husband Mr Jak de Wet is waiting for her there. Mrs de Wet! Mrs de Wet! Everybody's laughing at me, the man who can't look after his wife, there I am for hours standing at Gate B and then on top of it all I have to explain what a wog's doing in the whites-only toilet. How do you think one explains something like that? And that after I warned you. From the start! But you won't listen! It's Agaat here and Agaat there and Agaat everywhere! Jesusgodjerusalemalmighty, I have so had enough! Do you hear me? Of you and the scum you brought into my house! Enough! Enough! Enough!