Agaat (17 page)

And somebody must wipe my tears and somebody must see to it that I don't choke.

Because the map I must still see.

They must unroll it in the dust and place stones on its corners so that it doesn't roll shut. Four red-blue shards of shale.

They must remove the brace so that my neck can bend.

They must take my head in their hands so that it doesn't become too heavy, and lift it up and lower it as the rod points on the map and the hand points over my world, so that I can see the map of Grootmoedersdrift and its boundlessness. The blue waverings on paper of the Korenland River to the west, from the Duivenhoks and the Buffelsjag on the east, the dense contours, fingerprint-like, of the Langeberg in the north and the Potberg in the south. The square dots of the encircling places: Suurbraak, Heidelberg, Witsand, Infanta, Struisbaai, Port Beaufort, Skipskop, Malgas, Swellendam, Stormsvlei, Riviersonderend, Caledon, Bredasdorp, and Barrydale just over the Tradouw and Montagu and Robertson and Worcester.

And amongst the mountains and towns and rivers, with the straight red line of the bypass traversing its body, the extent of my farm. The dotted lines of the boundaries, the white dots of the beacons, the green of bushes and orchards and the gardens in its domain, the silver dams, the number of watering-places and stored waters on the dryland, the stables and the sheds and the kraals. The grass pasture next to the Klip River and the lands, the camps for the lambing and the summering, the plots of fallow land, the shallow basins where the sheep sleep, and the black shadow of bluegums.

Between the land and the map I must look, up and down, far and near until I've had enough, until I'm satiated with what I have occupied here.

And then they must roll it up in a tube and put on my neckbrace again like the mouth of a quiver. And I will close my eyes and prepare myself so that they can unscrew my head and allow the map to slip into my lacunae.

So that I can be filled and braced from the inside and fortified for the voyage.

Because without my world inside me I will contract and congeal, more even than I am now, without speech and without actions and without any purchase upon time.

I pile up three breaths. With my chest I create an incline. The hand-bell that Agaat put under my hand rolls from under my palm with a tinkling. First it falls against the iron railing and then further, onto the floor.

The farmers in the vicinity liked inviting you and Jak to their parties, the glamorous, chic, childless couple of Grootmoedersdrift. And if you invited them back they were all too eager to accept. There were harvest festivals, wool festivals, water festivals on Grootmoedersdrift, a festival of triplets in the lambing time, a festival for the new tower silo with automated mowing-trunk and conveyor belt. And your parties were always the swankiest in the region.

Jak was urbane and talkative at these gatherings, as always appreciative of you in front of guests. The festival fairy he called you. Not that he ever lifted a finger to help you. As a matter of fact, nobody knew how much the success of those dinner parties in the late '50s on Grootmoedersdrift owed to somebody that you could count on at all times. Everybody assumed that it was Jak who was supporting you. Nobody could have guessed that the farming didn't interest him much. And nobody knew that it was to the back room that you went for comfort when he left you on your own.

You saw how they fell for him, the flocks of twittering wives and the freshly scrubbed young farmers. He was the
pièce de résistance
at every occasion. You recognised yourself in them, in the way they couldn't get enough of him. You could see what they were thinking. How did she contrive it? How can a woman be so lucky?

Their eyelids fluttered at the sight of Jak's new cars and lorries and implements and innovations, his imported stud bulls and rams. They ogled his fine Italian shoes and the cut of his trousers, and blushed at the casual way in which he turned back his shirtsleeves once over his tanned wrists. All this while you were lightly conversing about books and music, just enough to bind the company around the dinner table while yet leaving everybody free to indulge their flights of fantasy around Pretty Jak de Wet.

That suited you fine. You didn't want to draw attention to Jak's weaknesses. You wanted to show to advantage yourself. Your job was to camouflage him. Because apart from his toastmaster's jokes he didn't have much in the way of conversation. Boast, that he could do, and wittily comment on what he'd read in the papers, the plans of the Party he could explicate, and the mechanisms of his implements, but he was too light-weight for you. Often in that sitting room resounding with laughter, you bit your lip. You wanted him stronger, more independent, less transparent, you wanted him to possess more of himself, of his own substance.

What did you want him to be? An anchor post? A trailblazer? A source of insight? How could you expect him to understand that?

You didn't understand it yourself. You could only hint and squirm. You were in the shade. That was what angered him without his knowing what was bothering him, this: That you replaced his guts with your own projects.

But when did you start to see it in this light? Not with so much clarity in those first twelve years.

You wanted a child.

And for that he was good enough.

Because that was something you didn't have. It was in him. His seed.

 

1 January 1960. The day that you heard that you were pregnant you'd been invited to a New Year's party on the neighbouring farm Frambooskop for the welcoming of one of the Scott brothers who'd returned from Rhodesia to take over his father's farm.

You didn't want to tell Jak immediately. You were all a-flutter. You put on your prettiest dress, a black one with a low neckline and bare shoulders, with sleeves that fell open when you lifted your arms. You'd last worn it on the evening of your engagement. It still fitted you perfectly. It made you blush.

You felt eyes on you, eyes that interrogated you, a face that was unsure of this new mood of yours. But you kept the secret.

Who laid a hand against your arm as if your temperature would warm her? Who touched the hem of your dress? Who twirled over and over again in her hands the tubes and jars and lipsticks that you'd taken out to beautify yourself? Was there somebody who could guess something and wanted to share in your excitement?

No, you were alone. You wanted to be alone. You became a different person. Everything altered in interest and in scale.

Twelve years you had waited, twelve times three hundred and sixtyfive days. So you made the sum for yourself over and over again while you were getting dressed. Why should it have happened now suddenly?

The doctor had phoned an hour earlier with the news.

Good news for the new year, he'd said, I had to go and collect something from the consulting room and then there was the result from Cape Town. Just be careful now, my little woman, he said, you're a few weeks gone already, remember no emotional upsets, not too much movement in the first few months, no lifting heavy objects, not too much alcohol, not too much rich food, pregnant women are inclined to heartburn.

You took your time over your make-up and you couldn't stop repeating it to yourself: After all the years, after everything that you'd had to
endure, after everything that you'd undertaken, however good or bad, long after you'd given up all hope, the reward.

You smiled at yourself with red lips in the mirror. It had been worth the trouble keeping everything together against all the odds. You caressed your neck. You lifted up your arms and spun around to feel the fall of the sleeves, the swishing of the cloth. You couldn't remember when last you'd done something so indulgent. It felt as if your limbs, the hair on your head, the nails on your fingers were inspired, as if your body vibrated, your body, always inadequate, always inferior, but now too much, too full. You were filled full with something that for once in your life you had not planned or calculated and of which the execution and the rounding off was not a laboriously artificial and forced affair, but an entirely natural process.

Good heavens, but you're tarted up tonight, what's got into you, Jak said when you came out onto the stoep where he was waiting.

You smiled.

My dear husband, you said, you look so good yourself in that tuxedo of yours and just look at the new bow tie!

You felt it coming out of your mouth. Like a noose it fell around his neck. You drew him nearer, pulled up his cummerbund slightly, adjusted one cuff link, dusted the shoulders of his jacket.

You started laughing. You couldn't believe it. You no longer needed him so badly. You needed nothing and nobody as badly as before.

What are you laughing at? Jak asked.

Because you look like a model, you said, because I can't believe it.

So, you think I look good? He inspected himself from all angles in the mirror in the entrance hall while you were grooming him.

Fantastic, you said, absolutely fantastic, you belong in a fashion magazine, in Paris.

Clay in your hands. And you could flatter him from pure generosity.

Pregnant.

He could not know it. He had caused it, but he could not know it with his body. It was your knowing alone. In you it was attached, a glomerule of cells that for three weeks already had been sprouting and dividing at its own tempo and with its own plan while you had been eating and sleeping and working.

 

You noticed that evening how other men looked at you. You looked back, nodded, smiled, felt that you had the right to enjoy yourself.

You look breathtaking, Beatrice came and whispered in your ear, is there something I don't know?

And you look stunning, you said, how are your suckling pigs?

Jak darted you a look.

Over coffee the people at your table bickered over agricultural matters. The new owner of Frambooskop excused himself, clearly didn't want to get involved in an argument at his own party. It was about profits and costs and optimal utilisation of soil.

Two-stage! Two-stage! everybody shouted and Beatrice's Thys beat out the syllables on the table with his hand. Wheat, fallow, wheat, fallow, or, better still, wheat on wheat. With the new fertilisers one couldn't go wrong, was the consensus, bumper crops every year, it was an Overberg miracle. They looked at Jak, who was living proof of the miracle, even though after five years he'd sold the land that had treated him so well to start farming beef cattle.

Jak hit the right notes. The soil analysis laboratory of FOSFANITRA had impressed him from the start, he said.

Modest enough he could be.

With his gentleman's hands he demonstrated. They could scientifically determine exactly how much phosphate, how much nitrogen, how much potassium one needed per morgen for a good yield.

Scientific or not, I don't agree, you said.

Jak looked at you, taken aback. You felt yourself blushing, took another sip of wine, but you could also see the people waiting to hear.

That's a mistake farmers can always make, you said, that they prepare a rod for themselves and their dependants with which everybody will be beaten one day when the wheel turns.

Ag, Milla, what rod and what wheel are you talking of now, my dear wife?

You laughed. He was so hypocritical. ‘My dear wife' before the guests, my dear tarted-up wife who looks like nothing unless something gets into her.

You were angry, twelve years' worth of anger. You intercepted quite a few covert glances. People didn't want to say it out loud, but everybody knew that Dirk du Toit, to whom Jak had sold the land on which he had made his profits, was as good as bankrupt. You knew why.

I'm speaking of the wheel of Lady Fortune, you said, and I'm speaking of her assistants the moneylenders, my dear husband, they who make themselves indispensable by offering certain essential services and goods on credit, and I'm speaking of monopolies.

They waited for you to continue, the guests, they couldn't believe their ears.

For farming that's always a dangerous thing, you said. Here in the Overberg we've known it since the days of the Barrys. The lessons of
history are there for those who want to take the trouble to study them.

You're telling me, said one, I'm still farming today on a little triangular slice of the original round family farm. Staked out way back by my great-grandfather on horseback, a beautiful round farm. He was mortgaged up to his ears to the Barrys' firm and when they went bankrupt, he lost all his land. From one day to the next he lost everything, he kept just a little sliver like that.

It was a freckly chap from Bredasdorp, a Van Zyl. His jacket sleeves were too short. His thick wrists covered in dense red hair protruded as he described a triangle with his hands to indicate the portion.

Oh my goodness, somebody exclaimed, a slice of pie, but that should be quite enough for you, Flippie!

People laughed at the naughty innuendo, but it didn't help. There was muted grumbling. The director of the fertiliser business was within earshot and quite a few officials of Agricultural Technical Services gathered around when they heard the subject being broached. You thought, good, let them hear for once by all means.

My point exactly, you said. My mother still has an old five-pound note of theirs. A kind of bank they were, you remember. ‘Here for you, Barry and Co.' is written on it. So much so that when the whole lot went under just about everything ground to a halt from Port Beaufort, the whole Heidelberg plain, the whole Overberg from Caledon to Riversdal and over the mountain all the way to Worcester.

Well yes, in these days I suppose one has to say Fertilise or button your flies. That was the contribution of one of the sallow Dieners of Vreugdevol.