Agaat (98 page)

The turbulence is less now, the plane has been humming evenly for a few hours. Can still not sleep. The last few days on the farm remain with me, the dust on the Suurbraak road, the dried-up drift, stones, cattle grids, flower arrangements, legs of pork, professions of grief. And just look at him now. His bag of samples knocking at his knees.

Not puzzled things out for myself by a long shot, but I'm making fair progress, especially after this lot. God help us. Gaat making people by the graveside sing the third verse of
Die Stem
: . . . When the wedding bells are chiming, Or when those we love depart.

And then all eyes on me for: . . . Thou dost know us for thy children . . .We are thine, and we shall stand, Be it life or death to answer Thy call, beloved land!

Wake up and smell the red-bait, as Pa would have said. Poor Pa with his ill-judged exclamations. Did at least make a note for my article on nationalism and music. Thys's body language! The shoulders thrust back militaristically, the eyes cast up grimly, old Beatrice peering at the horizon. The labourers, men and women, sang it like a hymn, eyes rolled back in the head. Word-perfect beginning to end.

Trust Agaat. She would have no truck with the new anthem. Only Dawid didn't open his mouth. Totem pole. He watched me closely, whether I was singing along. And then also:
As pants the hart for cooling streams
, all the verses according to Ma's directions, a whole programme there before the coffin could be lowered.

It's a Boeing 747, this time. A light vibration, now and again a few faint shocks, but not as bad as on take-off. The bag by my feet is starting to get in my way.

Inconvenient stuff to cart along. These fragments. Apart from the blue Delft birth-plate and the parcel of fennel seed, the horn and the bellows. Extra hand luggage that couldn't go in the hold. Wild aromas of Africa, dry protein. Will have to be declared on arrival. Will in all probability be sniffed out by the customs dogs. Be confiscated.

Agaat insisted.

Blow me a note on it every now and again, she said, looked away.
I'll hear it, she said. Thought that's what she said, only her lips moved. Then her voice was clear again.

And make yourself a nice fire in your fireplace. Do you have a fireplace? It's covered in snow almost all year round there where you are, isn't it?

Still ten hours of flying to the snow. The cabin in semi-darkness. Here and there the yellow shaft of a cabin light over the book of a late reader, a hostess in the aisle with glasses of orange juice, with extra blankets, with milk bottles for a baby. A few rugby players still up and down. Without exception younger than twenty, raucous all through the meal. Now and again sang a snatch,
Make her say no make her say oh
, to the tune of Macarena. Will have to write something about it. Wine, women and balls. Now also at last to rest.

Sleep that knits up the ravelled sleeve of care.

A nightmare it was. Had still considered a tour of the Overberg, a few tape recordings in the townships, all the old places once more, the farms and little towns with the odd names of which I try to tell people in Toronto. Entertainment for Vermaaklikheid, Le Fleuve Eternel for Riviersonderend. Rather just let be.

I do admire our Good Lord for his aesthetic flair in creating a world that is at one and the same time both heaven and hell. Who wrote that? Konrad?
The Garden Party
. Ma's funeral obsequies, posies wherever you look, the garden in full flower, around it the summer drought.

Discrepancy, a gritty feeling ever since I set foot on land. The trip from the airport, the light glaring white, the blaze that blinds one. Arid red lands next to the road, black shadows of bluegums, pit dams with yellow condensation-rings, a last slimy dreg at the bottom. It's always been like that. When and where did my romantic yearnings originate? Deserted farmyards, neglected buildings, rusty bits of machinery.

My standards have shifted, of civilisation, of human dignity. Drove for a long time behind an open lorry, full of labourers being carted to town for their Saturday shopping. Crush in the main street. Stayed in my car, stared out of my eyes. Boundary-maintaining body language if ever. Drunkenness in the streets of Swellendam. Your mother's cunt! the coloureds yell at one another, unmistakable the inflection. Hurrying through them the whites with quick little steps and stolid faces.

As if from behind three-inch glass, suddenly it was there, the old realisation. I don't belong here.

Have been away for too long.

More than a decade.

Perhaps too short.

Gaat didn't twitch a muscle. Her cap was higher, more densely embroidered than I remembered it, spectacles on her nose. For the rest she was as always, perhaps a bit stouter, her chin pushed far out, her steps energetic, her soles squelching on the wooden floor. Apartheid Cyborg. Assembled from loose components plus audiotape.

The funeral food made me sick, the quantities, and then after that a whole week's recycling till Gaat had it put out in enamel dishes for the workers. The children falling upon it before the adults could even get to it. Agaat letting fly with a cane among them.

Can't stop thinking about it. An abundance that never suffices, as always on Grootmoedersdrift. And everything sweet. Sweet sweet-potatoes, sweet pumpkin, sweet stewed fruit, sweet yellow rice, sweet peas, banana salad in yellow condensed-milk mayonnaise.

The undertaker, pudgy little fingers, chatty, his theme the embroidered shroud: Genesis and Grootmoedersdrift in one, a true work of art, must have taken a lifetime, every stitch in its place.

Relieved after all that I was too late. Couldn't have stomached it. Agaat herself sewing Ma up in the fully embroidered gown, Agaat lifting Ma into the coffin, placing the hand-splint that she wrote with in the last years in the coffin as well and screwing down the lid. Nobody else was allowed to touch her, according to the undertaker.

And then also the diaries, perhaps that's what's bloating my stomach. Like sheep dip. Takes a while to be excreted into the bloodstream. Was asking for it. Perhaps I should be grateful. Perhaps its effect is more like inoculation against smallpox.

Two days after the funeral. The yard still after the midday meal. Me naked on my bed in the spare room, the heat pressing on my chest.

Gaat's white apron hanging from the hook behind the kitchen door. The big apron pocket, Agaat's marsupium in which she stows her keys. Stuck my hand in there, goose pimples all over, a scoundrel, naked in his deceased mother's house.

The key to the only room in the house that was locked, the only room in all the house that had a door. New hinges but no explanations.

The silence with that key in my hand, heavy as before the offering up of prayer, before the laying on of hands, before the sprinkling of the forehead, like those silences of my childhood, the town church, the re-echoing coughs in the pews. The roof ticked with the heat, the floorboards in the passage creaked under my feet. My heart beating. The same feeling I had as a child when I slipped away in the afternoons to the outside room. To be with Agaat, with her soft body in the nightdress where she was taking forty winks, her smell of starch and Mum.

Dark it was in the room. Locked the door and stood still to accustom my eyes.

Ma's room. For a moment it was just like always. Drawn curtains, an atmosphere of aches and pains, an aroma of grievance, of anxiety. Meine Ruh ist hin, mein Herz ist schwer. Soft radio music. Midday concert. But this time it was quiet.

And there before me: A high bed piled with pillows, a dark stain on the top one, objects dangling from the ceiling. Chrome railings, benches, chairs, steel frames. Cramped it felt, the walls covered in stuff. Installation for percussion. Shadows shifting behind the curtains.

That's the way it was. As always. More questions than answers.

Her voice! Muted, from somewhere. Some things don't have reasons, Jakkie, some things just are the way they are. And you don't have to believe everything you're told. There's a lot of ill will. There are old wives' tales.

Walked through the room with long strides, plucked open curtains, unlocked and threw open stoep doors. There were too many smells, of cloth and upholstery, and dry grass and vanilla, medicine, disinfectant, soap, breath, a sweetish miasma of mortality.

Turned round, surveyed the room. The afternoon light on the floor, points of light on chrome and glass. Trumped. Ali Baba's cave. Not quite an accurate simile. The murky realm of mothers, rather. Monstrous specimens everywhere. Samples of some weird mnemonic.

Dresses and hats, mirrors, watches, maps, photos, yellowed diagrams, pieces of paper scribbled over with lists of phrases: I wish, I fear, I hope, I dream. Question marks, exclamation marks, a chart with the letters of the alphabet:
V is Canaan's vine bearing bunches so black, the explorer returns with a bunch on his back.

Ran my hands over everything, over the feathers, the seeds, ears of wheat in an old ginger-beer jar, scraps of paper pinned to the curtains.

One by one I picked up the objects and put them down again, the skull of a buck, of a baboon, a lizard's skeleton, a ram's horn, a trocar and cannula.

Cranked once the meat-mincer screwed down to the end of a table. The empty metallic sound on wood. The mills of God.

There were my varnished birds' eggs in a bowl, the old binoculars in their leather case with the red lining, Oupa's old telescope with which Ma taught me and Gaat about the stars.

The moon and the stars, that's about all that was missing from that room.

There were butterflies pinned to green felt, a copper pestle, the blue Delft birth-plate, now in my suitcase, a spade, a tarred rope, a combine
blade, a dried-up sheep's ear, a horseshoe, three droppers, a wire spanner, a bag of compost, jars of soil samples, a wire clipper, a Coopers dosing-can for sheep medicine, a rusty sickle.

Not quite pictures in a gallery.

Also a worn brown suitcase, lichen around the locks, set up on the arm rests of a straight-backed chair right next to the bed, full of mouldering bits of cloth and paper and bone, a few marbles. Musty. Corpus delicti. Lifted it off and sat down in the chair, dizzy.

It was Gaat's handiwork, unmistakable. Miss Havisham in the death chamber.

What would I myself have selected to commemorate my mother? So vaguely present in my life, compared with Gaat.

Definitely more than commemoration had happened there. To judge by the placing of the chairs, a kangaroo court rather. And me there naked amongst the deceased props a nude figure in a Kienholz environment. He would be jealous of it. Homunculus in the skull nursery.

At last I could get up. Simply had to go and see what the dark object on the pillow was. A little pelt, soft-brayed, of a mole, of a bat. Suspended by threads from the ceiling, the rim of a little wheel. And a stick. Analyse that.

Only after a while noticed the Croxley booklets lying everywhere in little piles. Pages from these torn out and pinned to the curtain, filled with Ma's handwriting. Diaries. From before my birth. Everything that Milla de Wet saw fit to bequeath her readers. In the hope that somebody would discover it. And I wasn't the first reader. She must have reread the diary herself, several times, there were corrections in her handwriting with dates, days and even months, years later than the original entry. As if she'd had trouble rendering the whole truth in just one version.

I was nervous of being caught, but got enough read to form an idea, especially the parts underlined in red with dates in the margin in Gaat's hand and ticked off as ‘read', the first, the second and the third time. Some parts were read every day of the last months. Read from the wheelchair, inside the walking frame, in the hip-bath, as Gaat had noted on each page. Sung, recited, copied in block letters with a different line division on the counter-page, biblical texts, curses, indictments. All the words written out in full, the sentences provided with punctuation. As if she couldn't tolerate the abbreviations and untidiness.

Two of the copied-out sheets were still clamped to the reading-frame.

14 September 1960, a month after my birth: