Agaat (3 page)

The song. The other answer for my questioners. Fantasy for a snowed-in farmer. For reed pipe, for Jew's harp, with sniffles, wordless. Lord, am I up to this? All these years. Please fasten your seatbelts.

Rapidly rising range of hills on the other side of the river. Deep kloofs overgrown with protected bush, the old avenue of wild figs next to the two-track road. Poplar grove—whispering poplars. Yard with sheds, stables, milking-stables and feeding-stables. Ma's garden that she used to live for. Used to live. To the left, the dam. At the back to the south, on the other side of the drift and the dirt road, the dryland, for wheat and sheep. Smallish round-backed hills, the upper stretches cultivated, in between steep patches of rough scrub. Hills with plots of grass and soft brushwood for the sheep to overnight, and bluegum plantings around their drinking troughs.

Swill-trough. God, the word. Pa's word if he didn't like somebody. Swill-trough, dung-hole, choke-weed. My pompous headstrong old man, drilled the shit out of me with running marathons on farm roads. Obstacle courses through dongas and drinking troughs. Spleen-stitch. Inguinal hernia. Up and down those mountains. It will make a man of you. What would he think of me now, a woollen cap with six summer shirts in a suitcase, butterfly in the heart? Open and shut, open and shut go the wings. Are there windscreen wipers for melancholy? No electronic equipment, please.

Translations for
wolfneusgewels
,
rûens
,
droëland
,
drif
: jerkin-head gables, ridges, dry farming-land, crossing. Prosaic. Devise something: wolfnosed gables, humpbacked hills, dryland, drift. Always the laughter
at the office, good-natured, collegial, at my attempts: grove of whispering poplars. I romanticise, they say. Quite a fan of the homely hymn, that's true. Homesick for the melody and so on. But that's only the half of it. The rest is granular precision, unsingable intervals.

Charon with passenger list. Dr de Wet, are you comfortable? Do you need assistance with your coat?

Everybody wears a coat.

Do they see through me nowadays, the older students? Do they want to set me talking, get me going? Do they think I need bloodletting, like a feverish horse, moonstruck lovers, inconsolables? What would they know in any case of such old folk remedies, a bunch of contemporary musicologists, what as much as suspect? Of the compulsion to tell? Of the subcutaneous refrains?

The bottom of the bottle.

Now ready for take-off. Please check that your seatbelt is securely fastened, baggage safely stowed away, emergency procedures in the seat in front of you.

For the most part I keep to the climate when they question me.

Sometimes drop something by accident, an impression, of the Breede River,
De Breede Rivier
above Malgas.

Aeolian harp.

It'll be the end of me yet, getting communication going. That's how it's been from the beginning with her.

This morning I had to stare and stare at the black box where it's been lying for eleven months. Eventually I managed to catch her eye, and point my stare, there, where the shiny black varnish of the box showed, under the pile of reading matter. Under the growing pile of little blue notebooks, under the
Sarie
s, under the
Fair Lady
s, under the
Farmer's Weekly
s on the dressing table in front of the stoep door, there!

At first she thought I wanted her to read to me. She smirked. It wasn't reading-aloud time. It wasn't even breakfast time yet, before eight, right after she'd wound the grandfather clock in the front parlour, right after I'd heard the door of the sideboard go tchick and she came in here with her little book.

She'd already marked the bit she wants to read tonight, the corner of the page emphatically dog-eared.

The blue booklets on the pile all seem thicker than they are because of all the dog-ears. Sometimes she says I have to guess which bit it's going to be. Then she says she could never have guessed everything she was going to read there. But sometimes she opens the book on her lap and recites what's written there, long stretches. As if they were rhymes, or a lesson. Then she asks me if it was good like that, whether I can remember when it happened.

As if I can reply.

She always checks to see whether she's left anything out, marks it with her red pen.

How long ago would she have started learning it by heart? Or does she invent bits as she goes along?

As if I can remember everything exactly as I wrote it there. Thirty, thirty-six years ago!

She tore out my inscription in the front of the first booklet and fixed it on the reading stand right up against my nose.
As directed by the Almighty God
, it says there, next to the other text which she wants me not to lose sight of. The table of my sickness. The table of symptoms, medicines and therapies.

She never removes them from there, the two sheets.

As if the one should be a constant reminder to me of what I'm suffering from.

As if the other is proof that everything she reads to me from the little books was written by myself.

As if the two documents belong to the same order of truth.

I'm sick of staring at the two tattered pieces of paper every time she removes my book or magazine from the reading stand and packs it away. Sick of having to listen too, because she spells it out aloud for me, presses her finger on it, on the table, on the dedication.

Symptom: constipation.

Medicine: Pink Lady.

Therapy: Exercise, increased intake of fluids.

As if I can do Canadian Air Force exercises.

As if, in these barren regions, there is anything that can quench my thirst.

As if medicine can help. You take medicine to get better.

The writing on the torn-out page doesn't even look like my handwriting to me.

I was young. And it was not the first entry. The real beginning of it all I never wrote down.

Never felt up to revisiting those depths.

Not after I'd found out what I'd brought upon myself.

Where, in any case, does something like that begin? Your destiny? Where does it begin?

The ‘dedication' I thought up much later, when things were going well for a while, just after Jakkie's birth. Then I inscribed it in the front of the first booklet on the inside of the cover. Date and all, 14 September 1960.

Now she wants to come and force it down my gullet. My unconsidered writing, on an empty stomach in my sickbed, and to come and confront me with my constipation. What's the sense of that?

As if I can protest.

As if I can eat.

Breakfast.

Can one call it breakfast?

I have no choice but to swallow it.

I heard her talk in the kitchen. Dawid was there and Julies and Saar and Lietja. They were waiting for Agaat to come and issue the order of the day. At eight o'clock sharp they have to fall in. They were talking loudly. Agaat was in a hurry. She wanted to go and silence them. They fall silent when they hear her approach.

I pointed with my eyes, the box, the box.

Just wait a while now, she said, later. She didn't catch my drift.

Do as I say, I gestured.

Now who's carrying on agn so ths mrning, she said.

A new thing, the speaking without vowels. Mocking me. Nastier than Jak ever was about the diaries.

She moved the bridge closer over the bed, brought the reading stand and set it up.

Do you want to read your covenant once more? Just can't get enough of it, can one? Perhaps it will give you an appetite.

That was a good start. She thought I wanted to read myself.

No, I could signal, that's not what I want to read.

That's my technique nowadays. Progress through misunderstanding. I just had to get the misunderstandings going first. The first would lead on to another until I had reached my goal. It's a kind of retarded logic, a breaking down of each of my intentions into the smallest intermediate steps. Gone are the days of the shortest distance between A and B. Now we're doing the detours, Agaat and I. By rolling my eyes at a pile of reading matter I can see to it that she ends up at the black box. I always have to fix her attention on the surface first. It's a start. And then I have to get her delving. This morning she obliged me, she put the pile of blue booklets aside and started rummaging through the magazines.

What do you want to read, Ounooi? She paged rapidly though a
Sarie
.

Four ways of getting your husband on your side and keeping him there.

No.

No, she said, I don't think so either.

I looked again at the pile on the dressing table.

She took a
Farmer's Weekly
and opened it.

New developments in the practice of crop and pasture rotation: The south-western districts after 1994? Nay what, you know all about that. What about: The future of small-grain cultivation in South Africa? That's just up your alley, Ounooi, the future.

Lietja laughed loudly in the kitchen. There was a jingling of milk cans.

They're getting out of hand there in the kitchen, I have to go and check, said Agaat.

She clamped the magazine to the reading stand, on top of the torn-out sheet, on top of my symptomatic-treatment list, set it up more upright so that I could see, put my glasses on for me.

The future. She placed her finger under the words.

No, I signalled with my eyes, no, no, don't come with your silly games now.

Again she turned to the pile and went through the magazines.

Now where are all the
Fair Lady
s then, they were here?

She started to unpack the whole pile, fixing my eyes in the mirror.

Ounooi, you're making me late now. I don't see the
Fair Lady
s, wait, there's one here. Fine Foods for Fine Occasions.

It was the last magazine down. I forced her eyes down, still further down. There was the shiny black box now, open to the eye. She couldn't follow my glance in the mirror, had to turn round to see better where I was looking.

Tsk, she said and shook her head, no.

Yes, I said with my eyes.

She took out the contraption. It was still assembled just as she'd packed it away. She straightened my fingers and fitted it over my hand. It wasn't necessary to unfasten the buckles. All the brown leather bands were tightened to the first hole and the chrome wing nut was screwed in as far as it could go. A long piece of wire stuck up above the head of the nut like an antenna. The thing looks like a glove for handling radioactive waste. Long since been too big for me. Long since too heavy. Like all Leroux's gadgets that he comes peddling here, it works for a while and then no longer.

I looked at my hand. I braced myself. I gestured, pen please. And paper. I can't write on air.

Agaat looked about her.

Now she knew what I wanted to do but she pretended she'd forgotten where to find writing materials. It's been a long time since I wrote myself. When I made the lists, when we cleared the house, a year, year-and-a-half ago. Eventually I dictated and she wrote. Or she wrote, and with my last strength I ticked off what had to be thrown away. The blue booklets. I said throw out. She read the instruction and ignored me.

Now she's acting stupid. As if she doesn't regularly get out the clipboard to press on when making her latest lists, take out her red pen from the top pocket of her apron. And there's the pencil, hanging from
its string next to the calendar. She's always making notes. Writes them up everywhere. What do you want the people to eat at your funeral, Ounooi? Stewed tripe? So what do you want me to have inscribed on your headstone, Ounooi?
And then God saw that it was good
?

Yes or no I can signal. Or I can close my eyes.

She hauled out the clipboard from the lowest half-empty rack of the bookshelf.

Tsk.

The books fell over. She had to go on her knees to set them upright again. Shiny jackets and old canvas covers. Some of them were still my mother's. I threw out most of them in my great clearing-out. Agaat kept them. As she kept the diaries. She recited the titles as she put them back. With a straight voice, the whole list.
Late Harvest
,
The Mayor of Colesberg
,
Carnival of the Carnivores
,
Seven Days at the Silbersteins
. That was nothing.
Forty-three Years with the De Wets
,
Floodwaters in the Fall
,
On Veld and Ridge
,
Chronicle of Crow's Crag
,
Circles in a Forest
,
Straight Tracks in the Semi-desert
,
Turn-off
,
July's People
,
As I Lay Dying
,
The Downhill of the Day is Chill
,
She Who Writes Waits
,
The Long Journey of Poppie Nongena
,
Breeders Don't Faint
, tsk, try
The Midwife of Tradouw
,
This Life That Death
,
Miss Sophie Flees Forward
,
The Portrait of a Lady
,
The Story of an African Farm
, hmf, rather then
In the Heart of the Country
. That's what she read last, recently. Nay what, she said, she could farm up a piece of land better than the wretched old Johanna who lost her marbles for no reason at all, and she wouldn't let a bunch of forward kaffirs get her down. That was before she read
The Seed is Mine
which the woman from the library brought along last time. That shut her up. I know what was in her head. Fennel seed.

Like old acquaintances all the titles sounded as she put them back, like the names of family. She read them all to me in the last few months, or turned the pages on my stand so that I could read for myself. She'd read all the old ones herself long ago and first sampled all the new ones before reading them to me. She knew whole sections by heart. She said not one of them was as good a read as my diary, all you had to do was fill in the punctuation and write everything out in full, then you had a best-seller.