Agaat (93 page)

 

B. sits there with a sceptical slant to hr face & drinks hr tea with her little finger aloft. That's all very good & pretty & noble she says but I should really think very well about the long-term consequences not only for us but for the broader community & also for A. herself. At this her mouth contracts into a nasty little slit. (J. always says it's the
can't-get-the-knot-through-the-hole mouth & he doesn't want to know what she looks like down south.)

 

Must say it's an aspect of B. that I haven't been so aware of before but I'm noticing it more & more frequently of late. I know old Thys belongs to the Broederbond & he's now proposed Jak but Jak feels little for the idea. I know why: They read too many books there. Beatrice says old Thys pores over the dictionary every evening it's way beyond him.

 

I say I'm not sure about such secret organisations & I vote Nationalist but I'm not ashamed to object in public to such skulduggery. B. says it's top secret & who am I now to think I can turn against the leaders & intellectuals of my people I'll cut my own throat & Jak's as well if that's my attitude & I'd better realise on which side my bread is buttered & ‘they' can make things very difficult for people who are not well disposed to the national cause & we'll never reach the top rung if ‘they' know Jak de Wet's wife swims upstream however learned & refined she may be. So I went off to make tea to keep my temper within bounds & when I came in again she carried on exactly where she'd left off.

 

Yes, she says, A. can't do a thing with the education that I'm giving her & what use does one in any case have for an over-educated servant on a farm. She's not a servant I say & then B. said well she hasn't noticed other people's children of the same age sweeping stoeps & feeding chickens & serving tea to guests & calling their mothers Nooi. I say A. & I understand each other it's play names & play work it's a special relationship. B. says what's the use the two of us thinking it's a game & it's special & everybody else in the country thinks it's abnormal & a sin before God.

 

Will have to go & talk to the dominee myself. Can't altogether believe what B. tells me about the judgement of the pastorie. After all Van der Lught himself named her & baptised her? How can he turn like that? Could swear it's that wife of his that's the real poison pusher.

Period two weeks late if my sums are right. Has happened before. Perhaps the ado about A. that's telling on my system she's so tuned in to my moods she sees immediately when I'm depressed & always asks if it's she who's done something wrong. This morning I found by my bed a bunch of hydrangeas made up with red leaves of fire-on-the-mountain
in the grey vase they won't last long she says it's too hot but it's to cheer me up asks me if I'm feeling ill.

Had blood drawn today. Dr had left on holiday already & only his partner there & he can't tell me when the results will be available. He says with somebody who's been trying for such a long time as I they want to be absolutely sure & it has to go to Cape Town for analysis.

Walking up & down & waiting for the phone to ring or not to ring don't know which one in case it's bad news. Ate nothing yesterday. Almost don't want to think it. Dear God! After all that! A. circles around me like a bothersome bee if it's not coffee then it's tea that she brings get off with you I say. She knows something is going on you can't hide anything from hr.

Fancy I'm nauseous all the time. Have phoned but there's no reply. A. tries to comfort me, puts flowers in the grey vase every day. Lord they really can't keep me in the dark like this. Festive season. Everybody gone. Was sitting there just now with my head between my knees with nausea then I felt A.'s little hand putting something in mine. Chew she says in my ear it helps for when you're feeling sick. Fennel seed. What is Même's wish for the new year? she asks.

Too trembly to write. Too superstitious to write it down here in black & white in case it disappears! Dr happened to be in his consulting rooms & there was the result from the laboratory! Positive! I'm walking around with it like a pearl under my heart. Haven't told J. yet. Must wait for the right moment. Tonight we're going out to Frambooskop—big party. One of the Scott brothers is coming back to take over the berry farming the old man can apparently not keep it up. Perhaps if J. is in a good mood tonight when we get back I'll tell him.

 

A. asks what are you thinking? What's eating you? I say I'm thinking curiosity killed the cat. Why are your cheeks so red? To look prettier my child I say in front of the mirror. Couldn't stop looking at myself today so then I caught hr eye in the mirror looking at me oddly then I clicked it was because I'd said ‘my child'. Oh gracious heavens how
unthinking of me. Now I'm going to have my own child. What will she make of that?

 

Perhaps it's the Lord's will that it should happen just now perhaps it will make things clearer & decisions easier. What are you going to wear tonight? A. asks. Take out my black dress with the wide sleeves that I last wore on my honeymoon when we went dancing. Aitsa, says A. queen of the night & she whistles the tune of the great aria from The Magic Flute all down the passage all melancholy it sounds. Ai she always whistles when she's feeling happy & busy & to tease me because she knows she's not supposed to whistle.

Went & crawled in with A. after the scrap again last night. Was ever so miserable. Perhaps B. is right perhaps one should just keep one's mouth shut about everything. Perhaps I angered that crowd of men with my talking about fertiliser & the soil. What on earth got into me? A. pretended to be asleep when I slipped into her bed. Had she eavesdropped & heard me telling J. about the child? Perhaps she heard what he said then? She's downcast today she must have gone to unearth the shards of the vase J. broke last night out of the rubbish bin because I found it this afternoon all neatly stuck together. Don't know if it will hold water but won't throw it away for the time being to spare A.'s feelings. She looks as if she wants to cry all the time. I feel as sick as a dog.

Can't find the right book heavens things go so fast nowadays & it's so difficult to keep one's wits about one through it all. Would rather not page back too much here. A.'s childhood & growing up. Feels like a lifetime since I last wrote in this one. Changed into a different person in the span of six months. Lord be thanked no longer nauseous. Just swollen ankles & heartburn in the mornings.

 

Had a situation again with Ma this weekend. First it was J. & his dog-kicking & then Ma presumed to preach to me about men. No she says I must send the story of J.'s battering into the world via the housemaids & especially A. I ask you the child my messenger to somebody like B.! Why must I listen to a single word she says? After she kept poor Pa under her thumb all his life with hr prescriptions. The worst is that that I'd left the outside room that I'd prepared for A. open by accident after I'd shown Ma all my preparations there & that Saar of course
took the gap when she came in in the late afternoon for the milk & went in there. Clearly inspected everything to the last detail & then she was prancing around the kitchen with a spiteful expression & provoking A. with a so-called ‘secret' & that after all the trouble I'd taken to work there only at night when everybody was asleep. Had succeeded so well in hiding it from A. till now. So I took Saar aside & tried to talk to her about it. Wouldn't she just interrupt me & answer me all cheekily: Never ever I won't tell her anything about it Mies & if she notices anything I'll say it's my room. I'll say I've done now with my hotnot hut down there next to the drift & its leaking roof & the mosquitoes that eat me alive at night. It's me who's going to stay in the back here a nice soft bed & a mirror & a stove & tea & rusks & a white cap & a white apron just like the maids in the Royal Hotel.

 

Lord what kind of trouble we can expect from this again. If you think you do right by one then the same thing is a wrong to somebody else.

Agaat's footsteps, they're different from when she wants to open the curtains, wants to open the stoep door. They're always different when she's setting her mind on opening my eyes. The tread of somebody who has a book in hand and is too burdened by the contents to read it to its conclusion, and yet feels obliged, compelled. Even though the ending is predictable and has been foreseen for too long.

That's what it felt like the last few times when she opened my eyes. She couldn't look at me.

But today it feels different. Have I at last been brought back to normal proportions? I've always felt too big and always too much in this bed, her expectations of me far too high. I've allowed myself to be influenced by that. Made my life, her life, more difficult than was necessary.

But today it is different.

Whom did I become for her overnight?

Suddenly she's no longer measuring herself by me.

I wait for her to open my eyes for me. What can I give her to study? My blue irises, my motionless eyeballs, the white of my sclera, the black of my pupils? Not much more than that. That is what has remained.

When she left here in the night, last night? she closed both my eyes, the sleeping eye that she distended before the meal and the stare-eye that I can no longer blink or shut, caulked my limbs as if I were a ship, smeared pitch between my planks before she set sail in the embroidered garment.

Did I dream it? The white cap, the white gown at the black wrought-iron gate, the white ring-wall? The taking-off of the shoes?

Did I see it? The gliding passage between the headstones, the feet in the heap of black soil, the sinking away up to the ankles?

A ritardando on loamy clods, lento, lento sostenuto, then the looking
down and the hesitation, the lowering into the hole, for a moment only the cap, a mainsail above the waves.

Did I invent it?

And when at length she was lying flat on her back in my grave there in the old family cemetery, was the night then a star-filled rectangle, the Bear and the Scorpion, the Goat and the Ram, the whole ream and the seasons stippled on the great hourglass of the firmaments?

And the Southern Cross, was it visible to her as it always lies above Grootmoedersdrift in the last half of December? Tilted on the rib, a cast anchor?

Was there a trilling? Did I feel the chill under my back? Was there an unevenness under my shoulders? Were my wings properly folded under me? Were the four corners of the Milky Way squared? And the sides, were they dug down plumb?

And the song? Did I hear it then? The song of which the ending is like the beginning? Arising muffled from a dark place?

A tree grows in the earth

And blooms in beauty—

O tree!

For hours it went on, sometimes at long intervals. I sang along, in my dream I could sing, a second voice.

And on the tree grows a branch,

a comely branch,

a lovely branch!

Later the words submerged in the depths soared up and from the heights floated over the yard, a great coloratura voice out of the mountain, words that tied the long rope of cause and effect together in a noose.

Then the child laughed,

a comely laugh, a lovely laugh!

Then the child laughed with the woman,

the woman sits on the bed,

the bed comes forth from the feather,

the feather comes forth from the dove,

the dove hatches from the egg,

the egg lies in the nest,

the nest is on the branch,

the branch grows on the tree,

the tree grows in the earth,

and blooms in beauty—

o tree!

In my end is my beginning. Now it's morning.

A new sound!

The new footfall of Agaat, as if she's lost weight overnight.

What do I hear? The locks of a suitcase being opened, old-fashioned sprung clips that click as if they've been oiled? When is she going to approach and open my eyes so that I can see what's happening?

Her shadow falls on my bed, on my skin. Out of the coolness materialises a hand. How light her hand is on my forehead! And now on my cheeks, how different are her palms!

They are poised now for the final chord. For the last kneading. As good as it gets, they say. No more we can do for you. A bread is a bread mixed like that and risen like that and at some point it has to be baked. And music isn't music if it carries on for ever. There's an introit and an amen. That's the minimum for a mass. Even the fantasy for solo harp has to conform to the requirement of closure. Once touched, once sounded, even the last note must eventually die away.

Here we have now the taking-off of my eyepatches, the pulling-off of my plasters, the casting-off of the cotton wool. Shaft by shaft the light opens up. Pale red is the dawn behind my lids. The pitch is soaked off with cool wet swabs. And here are her finger-tips now on my eyelashes. To pull them apart. To risk it. As I taught her.

She arose out of that grave of mine last night.

She went up into the mountain. Now it's my turn, now she's coming to fetch me from the water. I strain to keep up, to get where she is, to do my bit.

Ag, that I could speak now! I would want to ask her if she remembers. The butterflies we picked out of pools. After the showers that fell so unseasonably that first year after I got her. Too heavy to fly, trapped by the rain. We took them out of the mud, blew on the stuck-together wingtips until we found fingerholds, carefully, carefully like wet scraps of tissue paper we pulled the wings apart so that one shouldn't come off on the other.