Agaat (8 page)

If you want a nice surprise, open your mouth and shut your eyes, says Agaat.

I keep my eyes wide open to keep her attention. She looks. Like one standing in bright sunshine at the mouth of a cave, she peers into me.

I blink my eyes slowly, regularly, as encouragement.

Find it, Agaat, find the word in my mouth, find the impulse from which it must sprout, fish it out as intention, as yearning. The outlines of Grootmoedersdrift, its beacons, its heights, its valleys. You cannot deny me that.

M, I try again. Agaat's mouth opens. I flicker rapidly. Now you're warm, it says, now you're on the right track. She flickers back. My heart beats faster. Now there's understanding. Peering into each other's throats is the name of the game, two throats in search of a word.

Good, good, Agaat, watch my lips shut and open, then you imitate it, then you sound it for me, then you say ‘m', then you say ‘map', then you bring the sheaths out from the sideboard there, and then you take out the rolls and unfold them for me so that I can see where I am between heaven and earth, because my bed here is too small for me. My mouth is open, her mouth is open. Try once more. I can see your lips, Agaat, and I will signal when you move them correctly.

Suddenly I smell Agaat's breath. Of sweet rooibos tea it savours, of an hour ago, of the enamel jug.

Agaat closes her mouth. Her hands press on mine.

Don't go exciting yourself unnecessarily now, she says. She stands back. Cautiously.

Let's go through our list, she says, then we see what it is that you want.

12 December 1947. The day before your wedding, that was when it happened the first time. Afterwards, the days after, the first weeks, you listened to music to calm yourself. You told yourself that Jak had just been panicky about the wedding, nervous about all the new responsibilities, scared of his mother-in-law.

And then you were nagging away at him as well. That's how you tried to rationalise it to yourself. The thought of telling Beatrice you banished from your mind. Your father was the other possibility. The evening before your wedding he'd come to stand next to you and put his hand on your shoulder. I'm fretting for you, my child, he said, is something wrong? You looked into his face, grooved and emaciated with his disease. What would happen if you told him? He would do something about it immediately. He would tell Jak a few things straight out. And you couldn't afford to lose Jak.

You so badly wanted the house quite ready before the great day, because the reception would be on Grootmoedersdrift. The garden was another matter. It was untidy and overgrown. For that you had great
dreams, but they'd have to wait. There were more pressing matters. And in any case, you were sentimental about the old-fashioned plants growing there. You'd always want them there. The March lilies and the morning glory and the nasturtiums round the foot of the water tank, the unruly jasmine hedge that had climbed into the old guava trees and the black-eyed Susan, the old-fashioned purple bougainvillea that had colonised the side stoep, the stocks and the fragrant dwarf carnations, the tuberose. Looked at rightly, it was a paradise already.

Pa's wedding present to the two of you was generous, a brand-new thatch roof for the old homestead, thatched by the foremost thatchers of Suurbraak, and a new floor with a spacious underfloor area with proper air vents broken into the foundations. For the sitting room Pa managed, on his last legs, to get hold of some yellow-wood beams from an old house being restored in Swellendam. The old-fashioned narrow knotty-pine slats he'd collected over the years so that there were enough when the floors had to be laid in the rest of the house. Ma got a whole team of Malays from the Hermityk to do the work. It was in their blood, she said, bricklaying and carpentry. A section of the stoep staircase that had crumbled away they built up neatly and fashioned air vents in the jerkin-head gables so that the new roof could air properly. The two little doves under the overhang of each gable, the secret adornment of which you'd been so fond ever since childhood, were touched up, so that if the afternoon sun was at the right angle, you could see them there, heads towards each other, cooing in white plaster. The front door they sanded down and painted green, and fitted an old copper doorknob and lynx-head knocker from Ma's heirloom-trunk. They carted out all the rubbish from the cellars and dug the spaces deeper for storage. You can never have enough storage on a farm, said Ma. And Jak will probably want to keep his wine somewhere. She came herself to supervise the work on the cellars and sorted the stuff to be got rid of from that to be put in the storerooms behind the house. There was lots of furniture that you wanted to have fixed in time, she pointed out the most valuable pieces to you and tied labels to the legs. The books she and Jak wanted to get rid of, all of them, but you stopped them. Don't think that just because Pa is ill you can do as you like with his things, you said. Many of the old books were beautifully bound in leather jackets; encyclopaedias and reference works on insects and animal behaviour and rocks; also dated popular-science works that had belonged to your father. They'll look good in the sitting room, you said, and you never know when you may need information on unlikely subjects. You packed them in the shelves next to the poetry collections, the novels and dramas you'd read at
university, next to T.S. Eliot and Donne and Hopkins and the Complete Shakespeare and the
Oxford Collected Poems
and
Wuthering Heights
and
Northanger Abbey
and
Belydenis in die Skemer
and
The Cherry Orchard
and
Die Heks
by Leipoldt and
Kringloop van die Winde
and
The Soul of the White Ant
. The old reference works with which you'd grown up, you would study them too and make them your own. Your father used to read to you from them when you were small, about the soil-flea
Collembolla
with the spring under its tail that could destroy a lucerne field overnight. It was part of your farming equipment, you said, while carrying in piles of the old volumes.

In addition you had the inside and the outside painted and all the woodwork sanded and varnished. You had a few small cracked panes replaced and assigned carpets and spreads and curtains to their proper places. Everything crucial was done before the wedding date. Your nest was feathered.

It was more than good enough for a start, but you couldn't leave it at that. You nagged at Jak to help you at the last minute to paint the kitchen cabinets.

It looks bad, you said, what will the other women think of you with such kitchen cabinets? They look dirty. What will your mother think of the two of you that you can't even do a little thing like that for yourselves? That was what he couldn't stand. That you were threatening him with the opinions of other people. Not what you thought of him, but how others would judge him. Because that mattered greatly to him.

Then it happened. The day before the wedding. Dragged you by the hair across the back stoep of the homestead of Grootmoedersdrift. Pushed and shoved you in the chest so that you fell on the cement. Left you lying just there and walked away.

That evening you examined yourself naked in the mirror in the room of your mother's town house in Barrydale where you were staying over before the wedding. You pulled your hair back with your hands so that the shape of your head showed. You examined your body, your features. You were not a pretty woman in the ordinary sense of the word. Your mouth was crooked, your eyes out of line, your body did not have the regularity and proportions that the magazines held up as models. Your hair was inclined to fly out in points, bat-like. It formed crowns in the wrong places.

You felt the scrapes and bruises. There was a large bump on your head. You had trouble bending one knee. You sat on your bed and cried. Stopped later. You wouldn't appear in front of the pulpit with swollen eyes, not you.

You washed your face and put Pa's old 78 rpm with
Frauenliebe und -leben
on the turntable in your room. When lovely woman stoops to folly. Kathleen Ferrier could cry on your behalf. You sewed long voile sleeves and a stand-up collar of stiff lace to your wedding dress so that nobody would notice a thing. The wedding dress was made of the finest damask from your mother's trousseau, originally meant as a bedspread, too good for a bedspread. Between stitches you looked up into the mirror. Battered bride, you thought. Nun hast du mir den ersten Schmerz getan.

You were spoiling your wedding dress, it was starting to look like a fancy nightgown. You told your mother that the dress was too revealing. She narrowed her eyes to slits, she didn't believe you. She knew how you dressed, revealing had never been a problem for you. Perhaps, she said, you're not too taken with the idea of getting married in a bedspread, but as far as that's concerned you'll just have to get rid of your finickiness, because from now on you're the bed.

The properly made-up wife, you thought, the squared-off, the folded-back, the freshly covered wife. A wife with inner springs and a solid headboard, a wife with copper mounting.

You worked the fine stitches, carefully pulled the thread through, stitch for stitch you sewed yourself in, into the concealing sleeves, into the collar that had to cover the bruises on your neck.

And as you worked, you sat and thought of the first time. The first time was before your wedding, that day when you almost had the accident with the watermelon lorry.

You neither of you wanted to wait, you were just as passionate, as reckless as Jak. But there where you sat sewing camouflage onto your wedding dress, you gained another perspective on that afternoon.

He carried you over the threshold and threw you onto the old bed in Ma and Pa's sleeping-over room and had his way with you. Without ceremony or softness, nothing.

Wait, you still asked, wait a bit Jakop, slowly at first, but he couldn't hear you.

The mites drifted from the broken ceiling and the floorboards creaked under the squeaking bedstead. You were dismayed. You thought, no, not like this, but you gathered yourself into yourself. From inside you protected yourself while he drove home his will. It will come right, you thought. You would get to know each other in time.

You were taken aback at the quantity of blood on the spread afterwards, but he shrugged it off.

It's natural, he said with his back to you, you're a boer woman, aren't you? Now you're well broken-in. A little crash course. Don't be
so namby-pamby. What did your mother say? An Afrikaner woman makes her way in silence and forbearance.

When you'd done finishing-off your dress, you were a different person. You thought you understood what you'd let yourself in for. You thought: It's better that I should understand it now rather than later. You experimented in front of the mirror with your hairstyle so as to hide the damage. You could not share your new insight even with your mother.

Your cousins were all there, but you trusted nobody there enough to tell them. Beatrice, your friend from schooldays, looked at you enquiringly a few times. But you gave no quarter. You smiled and did everything right for the whole day of the wedding. It would not happen again. It was nobody else's business. And you did love Jak and you were sorry for him amongst all your people, your father shaking his hand all too solemnly and your cousins slapping him on the back too hard.

Pretty Jak, they called him, Jak with the woman's face.

They admired him for his way with words. Because he made a thunderous bridegroom's speech, your Jak, as you'd known he would. You'd got to know his style. His toastmaster club at Stellenbosch to which he dragged you as student. You didn't enjoy it much, but it was in exchange for the lieder evenings he in turn had to sit through in the little Conservatorium Hall. He always had the people at his feet, liked you to hear it. Just as with the wedding speech.

Once upon a time there was a most beautiful little farm, he started, and winked at you.

At the foot of a mountain, close to a stream, with a thatched house between the trees. But the yard was silent and deserted. In the evenings the trees sighed and the house creaked and the mountain whispered to the river: Now when are we getting an owner, a man and his wife who will bring life and laughter to the yard and will love each other above all?

Were you the only one who heard an undertone of mockery? You caught your father's eye. He didn't like it, that you could see, but he composed his face and smiled.

Perhaps Jak intercepted the glance. The mockery disappeared from his voice. He charmed himself and all the others, roused them even. In the end he had all two hundred wedding guests singing. O farm of my blood, o soil of my birth, it thundered over the yard of Grootmoedersdrift, yours I will be till the end of the earth.

When he had done, everybody believed fairy tales could come true.