Agaat (62 page)

Jak, you'll burn in hell, stop it!

No, Milla. I've been there for a long time! You're the one pretending to be in heaven. Never a word in public, no, your mess is for the nest, for the inner chamber. Selected me by the balls, didn't you? Raised me to your hand! Bedtime story! Little woman whines for attention until she gets the kind that she most appreciates. Thud, bang, blood in the nostril, from ballroom to slapstick in two winks.

Backbone of the nation, bah! Thanks to you and your kind the Afrikaner deserves an early demise. You're a pestilential species!

See what you look like! You like it. Tell me: How do you rape somebody who wants to be raped?

You just wanted not to be seen by anybody. To and fro you stepped as he shoved you, just to remain behind the plume bush. The sharp leaves cut your hands every time you fell against the bush.

Fall, come fall once more, then I'll have earned some points. Then you'll notice me! An Oscar for Jack the Ripper!

He slapped your garden hat off your head with one hand and caught you on the cheek with the other hand, and as you ducked away, again on the other cheek. Left, right, left. The slaps burnt on your skin.

A healthy flush! A few good slaps! That's all you can tolerate from me isn't it? Otherwise you don't trust how much I love you.

Papa's little princess! So scared of the wolf in the dark! Au, stubbed her little toe! That's where it comes from. That's the beginning of it all. That's what you did with Jakkie when he was small. What will you say when your heir turns out a bloody faggot one day? When I was his age, I'd long since lain with girls, but where does he lie? In the outside room, I bet. What's to come of it?

Jak, you don't know what you're saying, I can't listen to this any longer.

You sat amongst the leaves of the plume bush and pulled up your knees and lowered your head. He bent open your arms, squatted by you, spoke into your face, you could smell him, his unwashed body, his bitter breath.

Sis, you said, sis, you stink, get away from me.

With all the shoving and wriggling the seeds of the plume had come loose, white itchy feathery tips that descended around your heads, clung to your arms.

What's a bit of sweat, Milla, compared with the smell that hovers here over Grootmoedersdrift?

Look at Agaat! What must she think of you when she hears you allow yourself to be shouted at and beaten up? Every day at her post. Starched and ironed. A masterly maid! She plays you much better than I do, doesn't twitch a muscle when you find fault. And she learns from it, Milla, I'm telling you today, and don't forget it, all the time she's learning from us.

You tried to get to your feet, shouted against his tirade. Then why don't you go away? Why do you stay with me if I'm so dreadful?

You grabbed at him, thought he would come to his senses if he felt a touch. But he took your hands and threw them from him.

I can't go away, Milla, even if I wanted to. I'm stuck here! You batten on me! But I'm almost done, do you hear me, almost. Then you can advance again. You've provided a reserve, after all. In the hanslam camp. Agaat Lourier. Pre-raped. Yes, don't look at me like that, it's the truth! As no man can rape a woman. She's ready for you! To the bitter end! Because that much I can tell you now, I'm not going to make it all the way with you, Milla, that I know in my bones!

Jak kicked over the seed trays, trampled the new seedlings.

Pansies! he shouted.

The two of you think you can stop me from getting to Jakkie. You think you can scheme behind my back. You think you can make him soft, you and your skivvy. With your caterwauling and your carryingson and your nods and winks. What is to become of him? What am I to tell him about his mother if he asks me? Have you thought of that? He knows more than you think in any case. And do you know how? Your skivvy tells him! Blow by blow!

Jak, you're out of your mind, you must get help, you said, as calmly and as firmly as you could.

Then he shoved you out from behind the plume bush almost into Jakkie standing there with his white bandage around his leg and a basket of dried pears that he'd fetched from the drying-trays. Jak didn't see him at first. You signalled at him with your hands behind you to be quiet, but his final sentences sounded out loud in the open. And then you saw Agaat running up the stoep steps and she was pressing her hands to her ears.

Help! What help! I'm not the one who was sick here first, Jak shouted after you, it's you, you're the one who's sick here. I'll get well, I'll get myself away from here, even if I have to do away with myself!

Jak looked into Jakkie's face for a single moment and half brushed over his eyes. Then he walked away in the opposite direction, towards the sheds, his bare upper body white in the sun.

Jakkie walked in front of you to the house. Hobbling.

Walk properly dammit, I know you're putting it on! you wanted to shout at him.

But how could you? You pressed both your hands to your glowing cheeks. A healthy flush. You looked at the palms of your hands, your forearms, criss-crossed with tiny itchy cuts all the way to the crook of your arm.

 

Agaat kept the announcement for dessert. Concentration-camp pudding. You could tell from its appearance that it hadn't been a good day in the kitchen. Baked in too much of a hurry, so that the sauce bubbled out at the sides, burnt black on the edge of the white enamel dish. All the food was burnt. She'd just disappeared in her usual manner in the afternoon and put in an appearance only after five to cook. And then she stood by while you were eating. It was a silence broken only by the rubbing of the creeper against the window frames, and now and again the chittering of a loose gutter in a gust of wind. You had a fire-red rash on your hands and arms and you were full of white streaks where the Lacto Calamine Lotion had dried on you.

You look as if you've been in the wars, Ma, said Jakkie.

Jak put his knife down hard.

Agaat carelessly slid the pudding-dish from her oven gloves onto the table.

With the back of his spoon Jakkie tapped the hard crust of the pudding.

Oops, little accident, he said.

Such little accidents will happen from time to time, you said. Why don't you rather tell us how exactly you hurt your leg? Did somebody tackle you badly, or what?

Then Agaat rammed the serving-spoon into the centre of the pudding and it stayed upright.

Just above Koggelmanklip, she said, to the left of the upper reservoir next to the kloof, there in the dry stubble and all along the protea bushes.

What about that? Jak asked.

There the foothill is burning.

I could swear I've been smelling something, Jakkie exclaimed and got to his feet before he remembered about his leg. Agaat darted him a sharp look.

Au! he exclaimed and fell back in his chair.

So why don't you speak up if you can smell it? she asked, her eyes fixed on Jakkie's face.

You ran out onto the front stoep. If that was where the fire had started, it had jumped in the meantime. There were several patches on fire all along the flank of the first foothill in front of the house. The flames were leaping up high and moving forward fast in the gusty wind. You could hear the crackling all the way from the yard. The strip of proteas and fynbos stretching from under the reservoir almost all the way to the wattles, was one seething mass of flames. You could hear from the loud cracks how the brittle wood of the wattles and the rooikrans caught fire.

What I've always predicted will happen, has happened, you said.

Of course you've always predicted it and of course you've been saying for a long time we should eradicate the alien invaders because they burn too easily, because of course you're a nature conservationist but nobody ever listens to you until it's too late, Jak said without looking at you.

It was clear that there was nothing to be done about the fire. The labourers were arriving in batches on the yard. Dawid hooked the water cart to the tractor. There was a shouting for sacks and spades. But they remained standing there dazed in a little group, pressing their hats to their heads. Now and again looked at you on the stoep. Making a firebreak wasn't an option with the wind. That everyone knew, extinguishing even less.

Look! Look! Jakkie called. It was a klipspringer that had come over the river. The first one, with bewildered zig-zag leaps. As you stood there, more and more small game scattered over the yard. Hares, buck, skunks, even a jackal or two. You sent two farmboys to the river to rescue the tortoises. You knew how they could run from fire.

My goats, Agaat said suddenly. Her hands flew to her cap. She pulled it deeper over her forehead, My goats, my goats, she mumbled. Jakkie gazed after her anxiously but she didn't return his look. Agaat's goats were tethered on the other side of the river in a patch of lucerne that she had sown there for her herd. Every year her cows calved and her handful of slaughter-lambs she could sell well to the butcher in Swellendam. The goats were the latest addition, bought from the Okkenels.

The poor things are perishing of neglect down there at the huts, she'd said, the workers can rather buy cheap healthy goat's meat from me than have them suffer from mange and blowfly and get slaughtered before they're properly dead.

Gone she was with her quirt to go and untether her goats and drive them out.

Jak had the roofs of the sheds watered and the vehicles moved out. You had wet newspaper packed on the hay in the shed. You felt as if you were drifting a few centimetres above the ground. In a stupor you packed a few cases and put in food so that you could get out if need be. The yard was dry, there were bales of hay, dry lucerne in the shed. One spark on the thatched roof of the homestead could spell the end. All the stubble-fields further to the back, all the newborn lambs. But you couldn't feel anything more that day. A paralysis had come over you, a bafflement as you stood there on the stoep next to Jakkie. Nailed to one spot he was through his own lying, too proud, or too scared, to give in.

You watched him closely. What kind of man is this, this child of yours, who can in a crisis like this put up a front, who can persist so in his own deceit? How scared must he not be that his father will find out that he's been lying about his leg? How scared must he not be to leave Agaat in the lurch? How many such conspiracies had there been in the past of which you didn't even know?

Ma, I smell rain!

That was Jakkie's voice next to you. Little tongues of flame were licking through the oaks next to the drift. You pointed with your finger, more to silence him than anything else. You didn't want him to talk. There was something pleading in his tone, as if he wanted to console you, apologise to you. His gaze was anxious, he couldn't even start confessing.

The rain splashed out of the gusty south-easter. Fat plopping drops. A stray cloud, an evaporated day, scooped up by a rogue wind on the open sea and left exactly there where a fire was raging inland, a freak, something that didn't even happen in books because it didn't conform to any pattern of probability.

The three of you stood there on the stoep and watched the fire being rained into oblivion in front of your eyes.

A wet black soot covered the whole yard the next morning. The foothill in front of the house was burnt down from Luiperdskloof all the way to the slopes on The Glen side. From far away, there where you saw her standing at the crossing-place by the river, Agaat showed up
against the blackened tree trunks. She was doing her rounds, making a survey of the damage. You turned around and went inside. You didn't want her to see you. But you noticed when she came in by the kitchen door, that her whole apron all the way to her cap was covered in fine black specks. You stretched out a hand. She jerked away her head.

Don't wipe, she said, it streaks.

Dawid came and told you an hour later in the backyard that one of Agaat's kids was lying with a broken neck there by the river and he didn't understand it, it wasn't tethered any more, and its mother had been driven to safety in the hanslam camp behind the house that night.

It's sopping wet and full of mud, Nooi. Dawid hesitated, cleared his throat.

Seems to me it stayed behind there, it seems somebody got at him quite badly, drowned it on purpose or something. There are skid marks there in the mud on the little bank. It was dragged in there, seems to me.

Agaat appeared in the doorway of the outside room with a black-and-white bundle of freshly laundered clothing in her arms.

Take it for yourselves, Dawid, clean it well before you slaughter, you have to make the best of such accidents. I suppose it lost its bearings in the fire.

She pressed past you. You could hear the clothes pegs rattling in her apron pocket.

Only later that day did you pick up the flat piece of river mud on the sitting room floor. Jakkie was sitting on the green sofa with Agaat on her knees in front of him. She was rubbing in his sore leg with Deep Heat.

Now what mud is this lying here? you wanted to ask but their faces forbade you.

The piece of trampled mud was grooved with the pattern of Agaat's school shoe. You said nothing. You went and threw it into the drain in the backyard. You stood there for a long time contemplating her washing, strange so on a Sunday, on the line. White and black it billowed and slapped there in the gusty south-easter. Two aprons, two pairs of socks, two caps, two black dresses. You went and took them down before they could blow full of soot again. You were surprised at the weight of the wind-dry material in your arms. Lighter than one would think, you thought at first, but when you hung it over the lower door of the outside room, it suddenly felt heavier, as if immediately drenched with the smell of the outside room: Red soap, Jik, Omo, Reckitt's Blue, starch, mothballs, borax, linoleum, body, bed, hair, Mum, calamine, rooibos tea, wool, thread, cloth.