Agaat (79 page)

Come, Agaat, we must go and pull potatoes! Come, we must go and plait onions, come, the hanslammers are bleating for their bottles!

Come, little Agaat, we have to slaughter your last hanslam and the ear you may keep this time.

She'll stand there and nobody will call her.

The dogs will sniff at her hems. They'll press their wet muzzles into the backs of her legs. Jump up against her so that she'd be thrown slightly off balance.

Come, Agaat, whatever are you standing like that for.

The gate of Grootmoedersdrift. Yard gate.

Gate of Agaat's world.

She'll lift the black iron ring of the hook and then let it drop back.

The gate is closed, the road is white, the way is back and forward. And even further back to its undiscoverable beginning.

When she lets go of the iron ring, she'll bring both hands to her head. She'll press her cap closer to her head.

I'll be there, Agaat. For a moment there'll be a smell of fennel. I'll touch the white embroidered edge of your cap with new fingertips. Just so that you'll wonder, along the rippling of your gills: What Christmas breeze now?

And I tell you: To notice a breeze there where you're standing will be a new beginning, a fern-tip of courage, a thimbleful.

But what will I be able to do about the motherless dust, about the empty road beyond the gate, the barren summered world around Grootmoedersdrift, the white heat, the ashen fallow-fields, the sheep with their snouts on the scale, their lips scavenging for the dry pods of vetch? What would I be able to do about the dry little pit-dams, the black shadows of bluegums, what about the white eviscerate boulders on the Heidelberg plain, the black rocks in the Korenland River?

It will feel too large and lonely for you. You will step back from the gate. You will turn round. The yard, the house, will feel too small. Small and deserted and inexorable. You will want to shut your eyes. You will open them again. You will want to crawl into your hearth. You will crawl out again. You won't know what you're about. You'll go round the back, past the sheds to the backyard. Your feet won't feel as if they belong to you, your steps will feel too long, your legs too loose. The milk-can there next to the screen door will seem to you like a thing you've never known. You will lift its lid by the chain and let go of it again. You will push open the door of the little creamery. The smell will drain you of your strength. With the front end of your cap against the separator's cool shiny chrome you will stand for a while. Blindly you'll feel for the handle and start turning till the high keening sound is released and you feel the vibration against your forehead.

Oh, my little Agaat, my child that I pushed away from me, my child that I forsook after I'd appropriated her, that I caught without capturing her, that I locked up before I'd unlocked her!

Why did I not keep you as I found you? What made me abduct you over the pass? What made me steal you from beyond the rugged mountains? Why can I only now be with you like this, in a fantasy of my own death?

Why only now love you with this inexpressible regret?

And how must I let you know this?

See, in the twilight I lead a cow before you, a gentle Jersey cow, the colour of caramel, the colour of burnt sugar, she smells of straw and a cud of lucerne. I place your hands on her nose, your palm on her lips. You are the eye-reader. There it is, bucketfuls of mercy in those defenceless pupils. I bring you in the vlei to the whitest arum lily rolled up. Take it by its ragged edge and whistle. It will open as the poet says with star-light in its throat. Here a bokmakierie hiccoughs in the wild mallow, all love contained therein, too much to endure. Just smell the buchu, and imagine the soft wet winter that will once more penetrate the soil. Let yourself be consoled, Agaat, now that language has forsaken me and one eye has fallen shut and the other stares unblinkingly, now I find this longing in my heart to console you, in anticipation, for the hereafter.

Am I vain in thinking you will miss me? That you will long to look after me, to wash me and doctor me and dress me in my bed, your last doll with whom you had to play for four years? Who is consoled by the thought that you will long for me as I was at the very end? Which me, which one of my voices will you want to commemorate? Look well, listen well, you will know when I depart. If you are sleeping, you will be woken up by it.

Who is it that clasps the irons of the gate for one last time, that lifts the ring to go out? Who hesitates there by the bars of the cattle grid, who inclines the neck slowly there where the noonday sun falls between the rails? What hoofs are these that cautiously start stepping over the obstacle? Is it a fluttering of any significance?

Are you going to hand me your starched cap to hold for a moment before you take it back again, you who remain behind?

They shut your mouth for you, Jak and Agaat. From that night that you fell into the ditch onto the rotten cow. And by the autumn of the following year they'd started collaborating on planning Jakkie's birthday feast. A farewell birthday.

You gathered that he'd had his fill of the Defence Force, he was considering a career as a civilian pilot, but first he had to serve out his contract. Agaat knew more, you could see it on her face.

You wrote to Jakkie asking him who all you should invite. Somewhat abruptly he replied: Invite who you want to.

You were affronted. Don't be so ungrateful, Jakkie, you told him on the telephone, all we're trying to do is arrange something pleasant for you.

Then he sent a list: Gaf's Jurie, Lieb's Hugo, Flip's Erik.

Jak took out his disappointment on you. He threatened Jakkie with his inheritance to make him stay on in the Air Force. That you picked up a few times when he was talking to him on the telephone.

In the evenings after supper Jak recalled Agaat from the kitchen. She had to present her planning for the feast to him. Ostentatiously spiteful pleasure Agaat derived from this. She ignored you. And Jak ignored you. Mockingly they imitated your style of entertaining to the last detail.

The flower garden must look its best, Jak said, as if he'd ever felt anything for the garden.

With red felt-tipped markers they ticked off on their lists every task completed, a mimicry of your method of doing.

You lost your appetite during this time, mostly stayed in your room, listened to Agaat regulating the movements on the yard and in the house. Your house was filled with a clattering and a shifting and a bumping, creaking floorboards, the chirring of newspaper on the window panes, incessant footsteps, sweeping and scrubbing, the clipping of sheep-shears in the garden. You plugged your ears with cotton wool and Vaseline.

In the evening you took your place at the table when Agaat rang the bell. She avoided your eyes, carried her perfect meals to the table, filled your plates and remained standing mutely behind your chairs. You scrabbled around in the food with your fork. Little Miss Muffet is stuffed, Jak would say, stuffed with her pills and her tears. As a reprimand he would hold out his plate with a large gesture for a second helping.

Agaat was imperturbable, you can still see her, how she places herself before the table to dish up for him, her hands in the air, her face in the shadow of the lampshade. You were hypnotised by the wrists in the starched white cuffs, the strong hand carving with the knife, the weak hand, deep in its sleeve, supporting the meat platter, nudging closer the gravy boat. You couldn't look away from Agaat's hands,
the doing-hand and the helping-hand, the white and the black and the brown of Agaat's arms and hands under the bright light on the spotless damask. She never put a finger wrong.

Jak drank a lot at supper. A renewed kind of garrulousness was generated by this. No longer furious, no longer passionate, but bitter, and cynical, and despairing.

The baas of Grootmoedersdrift, he would say, with his glass in the air, drinks to Agaat.

Later you came to know his refrain.

All hail the skivvy! The baas prefers the tyranny at one remove!

Keep my glass filled, Agaat, he said, but keep your madam sober, it's her fate not to be allowed to carouse with her subjects.

And for Agaat our most total of teetotallers, Jak often said, her I shall keep topping up with words until one day she erupts in eloquence, pissed with wisdom. That's what always happens to those who know and don't say!

Agaat smirked when he talked like that.

What was to happen to you all? Something inexorable was hanging over you. The law and the prophets was the phrase haunting your mind all the time. But by that stage you'd long since given up reading the Bible.

Even for that Agaat made up. Her latest was that in the evenings she commandeered all the labourers, no, everybody in the huts, big and small, to the backyard for scripture and prayers. A kind of revivalist sermon she delivered there to them every evening, on the pattern of the broadcast services on the radio, filled with invocations of the fatherland and exorcisms of the enemy. A plot it was, you knew, she wasn't really a believer, she just knew how it worked. She wanted their co-operation for the preparation for the feast. After the sermon there was of course vetkoek, soup, cinnamon porridge. She nagged at Jak to pour the tots with a heavier hand at knocking-off time so that they should be warmly receptive to the gospel by the time they gathered in the backyard.

During the day she drove them, along with the extra labourers, men and women that Jak had allocated to her and paid to beautify the garden for the feast.

Single-handedly he transported everything she needed by lorry: soil, bark and straw for the rose gardens, fertiliser and new trees and shrubs. He went to Cape Town and bought dozens of garden torches and lanterns. He ordered a marquee tent with smart wrought-iron tables and chairs from a hiring-supply company and had wood chopped and dry-piled and had new spits welded and new braai areas built.

For the guests who'd be staying over, he hired luxury sleeping-tents with mosquito netting and bathrooms, even built a sauna down by the dam.

Jak helped Agaat like a diligent labourer. He cast himself as her foreman. His irony was bitter and full of loathing, his obedience a grotesque display directed at you. You saw the labourers laugh when Jak trotted off to execute Agaat's instructions.

She accompanied Jak to the lands to select and brand the slaughter-animals and he went and assembled extra slaughter-staff and kitchen help for the feast according to her specifications. They had the outbuildings painted and the yard tidied up.

Jak had a landing strip graded. He would rent a two-seater plane so that Jakkie could treat his friends to pleasure flips during the festivities.

He made a feint of reporting the progress with the preparations to you in the evenings, while Agaat stood by taciturn. The drunker he got, the more he wanted Agaat to play along.

Didn't he realise that Agaat was playing her own game with you?

She said not a word.

If then at length he lost his temper, he inveighed against both of you.

Ag, how stupid of me to think that the slave-girl could ever really take the master's part! After all, the slave-girl is in thrall to the mistress. They're you might say each other's extension cord. Closed circuit.

Did Jak himself understand that much about everything? At times you got that impression, as on the evening when he filled three glasses with wine and took sips from all three, kept decanting wine from one to the other.

Come Milla, he said, don't you think it's time for a little poem? What's that one that you were always so fond of quoting to me? Love is the empty glass. And then? Bitter? Dark? That holds the hollow heart? Is that how it goes?

But then, you're Siamese twins, aren't you, you two, can't the two of you recite it for me? Isn't that how your joint unholy history started? With your nonsense-rhymes, not so? There was a woolly, wonderfully, with a paw, like a claw.

Jak knocked over the gravy boat.

Agaat cleaned up without twitching a muscle, as if these were gestures and a text that she knew. As if Jak were an actor whose words she was rehearsing with him to check that he was word-perfect.

How does the rest of it go, Agaat? Don't you remember it any more, your good Afrikaner education? Jak asked. Agaat just looked at him, the cloth with which she was mopping up the gravy in her hand.

Yes, Gaat, what are you staring at me like that for? Or are you perhaps drinking in my every word? But your mouth is zipped up of course! Talking is the baas's responsibility high and dry here on his little box. You and your miesies, you can put on the nappy and cook the pumpkin and cut the roup from a chicken's tongue, but when it's a matter of judgement and interpretation then you're mute, the two of you. Not that you ever shut up, oh, no, it's an eternal chattering. Ad nauseam. About what? About nothing I'm telling you. Tra-lee tra-la. But if the shit hits the fan, he who's the baas gets to clean the fan. He must start up the whole shit-story here and explain the parable. You can lay nothing but wind-eggs, you and Madame Butterfly here.