My tongue is being wiped. It’s not Agaat’s hand. Not the little hand that ventures beyond my uvula. The fingers are thicker, more innocent. Something is pressed on my face, over my mouth. A thing is placed in my mouth, a mouthpiece, plates between my teeth that pull my lips apart, flatten them. Cool air is blown into me.
Behind my back there’s a whispering. Two voices. Agaat’s and somebody else’s. I am lying on my side. There are four hands working on me. The starling, the crow and two other, cooler hands. I’m being rubbed with something.
Shadows in the mirror. A glow on my ribs. I eavesdrop. Can one eavesdrop if one is mute?
Everything’s fine, you’re managing pretty well here, there’s nothing that could have been prevented, Agaat. And they say it’s going to get cooler, perhaps a little summer shower, that will also help. Then you can open the doors for a while, it’s stuffy with the room closed up like this.
It’s Leroux. He clears his throat. I smell his aftershave lotion. Cloves.
But why did she . . .? She’s never just passed out like that while I was knocking out her phlegm.
I’m sure she has. You just haven’t noticed. It’s a lack of oxygen. That’s what’s lacking here, oxygen. Beyond that we can’t do anything.
She’s been different of late.
How do you mean?
Restless, sort of. To and fro with the eyes, like that, to and fro all the time like a thing looking for escape. I thought I knew what it was.
What?
I thought she felt trapped in here, she wanted out, outside, so I turned the mirror so that she could see the reflection of the garden. It’s better than nothing. But it’s something else. She wants to see something, something that’s outside and inside. Outside and inside at the same time.
You must expect that, the boundaries will start to fade now.
How do you mean, doctor?
Between waking and unconscious. She’ll start going into coma, remain in a state of half-sleep, be unconscious for long periods, be confused when she wakes up, mix things up, like who you are, and where she is. You must try to imagine it. It’s someone who can’t communicate, somebody who perhaps more often than you think is delirious, an endless tunnel you must imagine full of shreds of yesterday and today and earlier times. And then when she comes to, she can’t talk and she can’t move, and then she gets into a panic.
I can imagine Agaat’s face behind me. Set to neutral. She is representing me there behind my back. She knows I can hear everything.
It’s not that, doctor, I know, she was quite lucid, she knows very well who I am, she knows what she wants, she wants something from me, she wants to see something, she asks, with her eyes, continuously, if she gets the opportunity. But I’ve made a plan now. I’ve selected a few things, I’ll hang them here, by her bed, until I see that’s the right one, that’s what she wants to look at.
Agaat, you must do as you must do. You two chose it yourselves and had it set down before the law, it’s in the will, you may decide everything, she gave you the right, so I can’t force you. Don’t over-exert yourself, see to it that you get rest, you can phone me at any time if you want an assistant. I can send you a sleep-in nurse, two even. To relieve you, twice, three times a week.
That’s not necessary, we’re still managing. She won’t tolerate anyone else now.
That’s meant for my ears. Tolerate.
Well, just remember that it’s also a matter of how much you can tolerate. Give the oxygen as I showed you when you think it’s necessary, when you do the auscultation. Beforehand and afterwards as well. It could have been a fright too, shock, remember she feels everything, it’s possible that in her condition she’s more sensitive, registers pain more quickly than is normal. To faint would then be a kind of flight reaction.
Faint, yes doctor, she’s fainted easily, all along, when she was having a hard time, but not . . . not flight.
Can tolerate her, only her, with no possibility of flight. Hand over hand Agaat casts her lines in my direction. The doctor has long since become merely an excuse to get it all said. She got a fright, now she’s aggressive. Push and shove at a dead thing to get some life into it.
Would Leroux suspect any of this? His voice is soft and businesslike. You can take off the mask in an hour or so, he says.
The towel is taken out from under me. Two pairs of hands turn me on my back. Under my knees I feel Agaat’s arms, the lever and the little auxiliary brace. Leroux takes uncertain hold of me by the upper body. Stupid is his grip, stupid and bereft of messages, such hands, enough to make you feel you’re dead already.
Look, says Agaat, the eyes are opening.
The eyes. As if I’m a perverse child.
Mrs de Wet, can you hear me? This is Leroux.
Fingertips snap before me.
She doesn’t like things in front of her face, says Agaat.
Again the snapping of the fingers.
She’s completely conscious, I can see, doctor.
Mrs de Wet, it’s Doctor Leroux, everything’s under control again now, the phlegm has been knocked out, we cleared your air passages. You fainted, we gave you a bit of oxygen, now you’re as right as rain again.
Leroux’s face looms above mine. He looks at my eyes as if they were the eyes of an octopus, as if he’s not quite sure where an octopus’s eyes are located, as if he doesn’t know what an octopus sees. He shines a little light into my face, he swings it from side to side. I look at him hard, but seeing, he cannot see.
Agaat catches my eye. Wait, let me see, she says.
Leroux stands aside. He shakes his head.
Agaat’s face is above me, her cap shines white, she looks into my eyes. I blink them for her so that she can see what I think. The effrontery! They think that if you don’t stride around on your two legs and make small talk about the weather, then you’re a muscle mass with reflexes and they come and flash lights in your face. Tell the man he must clear out.
A small flicker ripples across Agaat’s face. Ho now hopalong! it means. Her apron creaks as she straightens up. Her translation is impeccable.
She says thank you doctor. She says doctor is welcome to leave now, she’s feeling better. She says thank you for the help, thank you for the oxygen, we can carry on here by ourselves again now.
I close my eyes. He must think she’s crazy.
Again the fingers snapping in front of my face.
She’s conscious, really, doctor, you can leave her alone now, she’s just tired, when she shuts her eyes like that then I know. Everything’s in order, she says, she just wants to sleep now. I know, I know her ways.
Agaat, I don’t know about that, aren’t you imagining things? How can you know it all with such certainty? You can’t get into the ounooi’s head, no matter how much you want to. You know this kind of illness that locks people up like this in themselves, they get a bit dement . . . senile from it. It’s the loneliness, it’s the isolation. You can’t trust that you’re reading them correctly. It’s better to attune yourself to literal meanings, to their essential needs, without subtle intentions, without complicated messages. Otherwise you confuse them, or put all sorts of unnecessary stories in their heads. And as it is they have a hard enough time of it. Don’t you want me to stay over tonight? Do you think . . .?
No thank you doctor, I’m not imagining anything, I know her, she’s far from senile. Perfectly sound of mind still.
Agaat looks at me.
I signal to Agaat yes, and you’re also quite sound of mind. Tell the man our imagination is a shared one, tell him we thought each other up and he’s early, it’s not my time yet, tell him a lot of water must pass under the bridge here, tell him I want only you here. And he must stop snapping his fingers in my face as if I’m a poodle. That I find a wee bit too literal, thank you.
Agaat widens her eyes. Ho now! it means, behave yourself. But glad to see you’ve still got some kick left nevertheless.
Leroux steams ahead. It would be no problem at all, I brought an overnight bag, I can sleep on the sofa in the sitting room . . .
Perhaps the language of women is impenetrable to men anyway. Even when the women can say everything out loud. Or perhaps it’s the language of the nurse and the patient of which the highly-educated physician has no inkling.
It’s not her time yet, doctor, Agaat parries, I’ll know, she’ll let me know.
As you see fit, Agaat, then I might as well go now, just come and collect the other oxygen tank from the car, the extra mask.
I’ll be back in a moment, she signals to me behind the doctor’s back. She makes a sign to show she’s working him out, she’s getting rid of the intruder, him with his little light and his case and his sign language for dogs. He mustn’t come and interfere here. We’re man enough.
Suddenly I feel weak. It’s their backs, first Leroux’s, his back in a grey suit with the double vent at the back and then Agaat’s with the stiff white bow of her apron. For my sake she tried to walk backwards, so as not to leave me alone too abruptly, to reassure me. But now she’s turned around. And here I lie, here I’m left behind. Perhaps we’re not up to it, perhaps he’s right, the doctor, perhaps we are jointly out of our minds to think we can complete this project in the allotted time. All the parts of it. The remembering, the reading, the dying, the song.
She pretended not to see my second thought. Leroux’s footsteps stop in the passage. Agaat walks on.
And all these things lying here? I hear him ask.
Agaat doesn’t reply, she has passed him, she opens the front door for him.
I’m asking, what are all those things piled up there in the passage?
Just some old stuff. She wanted to throw it away a long time ago, when we cleared out the house. Then I didn’t believe it. So I kept it all in the cellar. Now she’s asking to look at it all again, her little things from long ago.
I see, says Leroux. There’s suspicion in his voice.
That’s what I think she wants to see, says Agaat.
Well, you know she must remain calm. She mustn’t upset herself unnecessarily. The slightest thing that makes the breathing irregular, anything that brings too much spit to the mouth, grief, consternation . . .
I can just see him, how he bobs with his head. Then she’s had it, he wants to say.
The man is a bit unpolished. I’ve known it for a long time. He’s improper. He does rounds in the zoo, where the creatures are caged in and he has to feed them, give them oxygen, mumble little anodyne platitudes. The only diversions, he thinks, are his visits. An outsider representing the real world and the wisdom of the wise.
I don’t upset her, says Agaat. If she wants to see things, she’ll see them, she still has quite enough of a will of her own. Agaat sounds determined, as if she would sponsor my will of my own to the end of all time.
Leroux’s footsteps resound loudly. Well then, go ahead and bugger up, his tread says, past cure is past care. You complicate the course of events with your little games.
His parting words I half catch.
It’s of no use to anybody, he says, if you drive yourself to the brink . . .
I can’t hear any more of this. What could he have said? It’s of no use to anybody if you drive yourself to the brink . . . of death, of somebody else’s death? . . . to the brink of insanity, somebody else’s insanity?
The brink of the abyss. The last frontier. Before the hinterland. Before the Hottentots-Holland. Before the Overberg. No-man’s-land.
No, the man is too obtuse to think up something like that, the wind blows his words back into the sitting room. The front door bumps against the doorstop. They are standing on the stoep. Under the front-door light. Where the geckoes sit with their mouths full of moth. The message is clear. Agaat, will she hold back the door with her little hand, keep it open so that I must hear?
It’s of no use to anybody if you drive yourself to the brink of exhaustion, Agaat. Remember, you’re the only care-giver here. If you also collapse, we have an even bigger crisis on our hands. Do the necessary. Spare yourself, cut out the frills. See to it that you eat regularly, get enough sleep, go for a walk in the veld, in the mountains. You can’t hold her. She’s withering away, every day a little more. You must accept. You must resign yourself. It’s time. Nobody can battle against death.
They’re out on the stoep, down the steps, the boot clicks open, slams shut again. The engine idles. Last instructions, inaudible directions, a car door slams, lights swivel across the yard.
Then Agaat calls the dogs back into the yard, she removes the doorstop, closes the front door. She puts something down on the floor. It sounds like deep-sea diving equipment. She rustles something in the passage.
She comes into the room with a rolled-up length of cloth, tied with bows in three places.
Ai mercy, the doctor, she says, he’s a meddler.
She looks at the wall.
Ounooi, it’s only your breath.
She brings a chair.
You have a lack of breath.
The cloth has a piped seam that is threaded onto a bamboo rod. One of those that we used to train tomatoes. Tomato-rod. There’s a string attached with a loop and a picture hook. She smoothes the seam with one hand, so that the cloth is in the centre of the rod.
Shall I take off the mask now?
The simplest question on earth. From the start. So shall I break the eggs for you? Shall I fasten your dress? Wipe your bottom? Hand you the walking sticks? Bring the walking frame? Push the wheelchair?
Crank up the bed? Farming as usual. Milking, slaughtering, shearing, harvesting.
She climbs onto the chair. Measures the length of the string. Fits the hook to the picture rail.
You don’t like things near your face, do you, Ounooi.
She picks loose the first bow, bethinks herself, looks at me.
And you look like something from Mars with that thing on your face.
Mars. On the brink of Mars. Don’t waste your breath, I flicker at Agaat. One with too little breath in this room is enough.
Wait, she says. She gets off the chair. First things first. Then the surprise.
Agaat has a sequence. There is nothing, she believes, that so reassures and motivates for the execution of a difficult task as the knowledge that you will be rewarded for it. She smiles at me. The you’ll-never-guess smile.
Poor Agaat. What has my life been? What has her life been? How can I ever reward her for daring to come this far with me here on Grootmoedersdrift? How does one compensate somebody for the fact that she allowed herself to be taken away and taken in and then cast out again? And to be made and unmade and remade? Not that she had a choice. I even gave her another name.
First the mask, says Agaat. When it comes off, I’m going to press you lightly on the chest, Ounooi, don’t get a fright. Gently up and down. You blink with you eyes, I follow you. I learnt it from the doctor just now, it’s to assist your muscles. So that you can breathe. Come, let’s first sit you up a bit more.
Agaat aims to adjust the bed so as to get me more upright. She doesn’t want to take her eyes off my face. Her foot searches for the pedal, her hands grope for the screws.
Oh, oh, she starts singing, softly, on an intake of breath. But the white-throat crow doesn’t follow, plummets into emptiness, Agaat’s face crumples, her cap wilts, her mouth gapes, wounded.
A little bundle of bones and feathers she drops, down through the blue and the white of the skies, the brown horizon a whirling haze, down, down, black-and-white, a rushing, before she comes to herself and opens her wings and the air buoys her up and she can fly again.
Agaat’s foot finds the pedal, her hand finds the wing nut. The bed erects itself with a hissing sound and a light shock.
She puts my arms next to my sides. Wings that can no longer fly.
Go from here to great Tradouw, she resumes on the right note, the crow taken for granted, skipped, omitted from the text, but without loss, because a song that we both know can tolerate that all too well.
Flying high and turning low.
What kind of cloth could it be that’s hanging there rolled up? Agaat’s décor for the great breathing-scene? It would be the first handmade decoration to hang in my room again after she carried everything out of here.
Went there fast and came back slow.
She unclasps the buckle of the mask behind my head. And the elastic over my nose. One hand is on my chest pressing lightly and rhythmically and letting go. It’s the weak hand. It feels like a bird perching on me, smaller than a crow, bigger than a finch, a starling perhaps. The starling helps me breathe.
There we are, in for a penny, in for a pound. Blink at me, Ounooi, blink with your eyes whether you’re managing.
She fixes my eyes while the strong hand puts aside the mask. The strong hand replaces the weak one on my chest. Bigger than a finch. Strong shiny wing-beat.
White-throat crow.
From here. To the wall, to what is hanging there.
Now, says Agaat, now I reckon we’ve got you going full-steam ahead again.
The hand pumps lighter and lighter all the time, until it gives only the smallest pulse. Then I’m on my own.
Agaat contemplates my solo flight.
You can be satisfied, Agaat. Visibility poor, plenty of tailwind, but I log them, one by one, the turbulent nocturnal hours, the hours of stormy flight, I know, the landing lights are on, I blip clearly on and off on the radar screen.
She ignores me. How are the slimes feeling? she asks.
Clear, open, thank you.
Did I knock you too hard?
Her voice is low.
My back feels like tenderised steak, the skin of my ribs as if I’d leant for hours on end against a running baling-press.
Don’t exaggerate, says Agaat. She smiles on my behalf.
Now I’m going to clear up here and then you can see what I’ve hung up for you.
Agaat puts on the soft neckbrace. EasyHead. She swivels my head into position for a good view. She supports it on both sides with pillows. She turns the bedside light to the wall. She pulls it out to its full extent and tilts it so that the shade looks like the head of an eager spectator. She gets onto the chair again. A horizon arises. Black seam of the house coat, white seam of the apron, folded-over white socks, brown calves of Agaat, crêpe-soled shoes of which both heels are slightly worn down at the back. Dig-in and hang-in hocks, tug-of-war heels.
Doctor says I must be careful not to upset the ounooi, so that the ounooi can carry on breathing nice and evenly.
From up there on top of the chair comes Agaat’s voice, slightly strained as she stretches to arrange the cloth, but with the mockery directed at the doctor, at how he thinks our relationship is, at how he thinks she addresses me.
Now I’ve chosen something to send you to sleep restfully. Now you look at it till your eyes fall shut.
She unties the other two ribbons.
The cloth unrolls with a shuurrr. It radiates down on me.
The great rainbow.
An embroidery experiment, from the time Jakkie went to high school in Heidelberg, when Agaat had to conjure away the empty time.
Everybody thinks they know what a rainbow looks like, she said, but when it’s from close by like this, they’ll wonder what they’re seeing.
I remember the start of it, impossible, I’d said, a waste of time, why don’t you rather make something one can use, but she’d just looked at me.
She anaesthetised herself with the work, for hours on end, in the mornings on the front stoep, before the arrival of the moment that she lived for, three o’clock, when she heard the chug and the squealing brakes of the school bus and she could run to go and fetch Jakkie at the drift, sometimes on the other side of the drift at the road, the time that she could sit with him while he ate, the hours that she could bend over his homework with him, and could learn with him about the French Revolution and the World Wars and the Boer War and he taught her everything that they sang at school, Ne’er your children need ask who are true, O God of Jacob.
Folded on a chair it lay aside then, the great rainbow.
And here it hangs now.
A straight inside section of the body of the rainbow. All over the cloth. The yellow of the spectrum runs off into creamy white, then pure white. The veld gradated so subtly that my eye reels, that I seek for a stay inside of me, for the blue-green of the Waenhuiskrans horizon, for yellow-green shoots of self-sown oats, water-green pineapple drink, lime peel, sunflowers, orange cannas, a dust-dimmed sun over stubble field, a harvest moon blood-red, a watermelon’s flesh. And Geissorhiza radians, Babiana purpurea, amongst dark bracken the seven other purples of September. Swift effulgences, pleats of light.
But here is neither place nor time. It’s an embroidery of nothing and nowhere. What Agaat must have imagined to lie behind the tender despair of defenceless creatures, behind the firefly, the evening star, the poppy, the blond lad in his corduroy pants. Everything that slipped out of her grasp, Jakkie’s whole childhood, replaced with this embroidered emptiness.
Around me Agaat is clearing up the battlefield. She thinks she’s distracting my attention with her rainbow. The buckets with the swabs full of phlegm she bustles away first, the kidney-shaped dish with the gouts of wet cotton wool, the sponges, the cloths, the water that smells of Milton and lavender. Swiftly she works, before her work of art’s effect on me evaporates.
But I hear the screwing of the lids of the jars and tubes, see the sure-handed strokes with which the trolley is wiped, the quick snatch with which the slimy sponge on the bridge is grabbed away, the jingling assurance with which the brand-new rigging of oxygen tubes and snorkels and mouthpieces is rolled up. That, all the movements conspire to assert, now belongs to the past. Now we are in another safer place. The rainbow has been brought in for you. A complete colour chart. The origin, the fullness, the foundation of all.
What am I supposed to do with it all? It’s the wrong medicine. Completeness. The death of the song, of the small dusty tale.
Rainbow of death.
Is it meant to hypnotise me?
Perfection, purity, order. Adversaries are they all, the devil’s own little helpers.
How my heart burns to tell her this! Now that I can see it. Now that it’s too late.
…
Friday 23 September 1960 nine o’clock in the evening.
A. is terribly excited about Jakkie’s christening in a week’s time. Have just gone out at the front door & surreptitiously walked round the back of the house & peeped into the kitchen window to see what she’s getting up to there. Wouldn’t she close the kitchen door after supper & tell me I’m not allowed in now she’ll come & call me when she’s done. Looks like at least two cakes & a savoury tart that are under construction there as far as I can see. The whole table is packed with stuff & there’s a hectic beating & a mixing & a singing at the top of her voice all my recipe books open in a line bowls full of batter & icing-sugar & grated orange peel & plates full of chopped bacon & onion & parsley. Everything for the dominee & his elder who are coming tomorrow morning to discuss the arrangements for the christening.
Saturday 24 September quarter past eight morning
Have just had to go & do inspection. A. came to call me to come & see if everything’s right. Fresh flowers arranged in the sitting room (she’s been up since crack of dawn) & her cakes have risen beautifully orange & chocolate covered under netting on tea table & the best cups put out & cake plates & forks the savoury tart is all ready to be baked everything is ship-shape. I did think this was all rather a to-do, & the eyes shine & the chin juts all the way out & then it came out: Seems she wants to carry Jakkie into the church. I ask you! Won’t I big-please get the dominee’s permission.
Now obviously this is totally out of the question! Couldn’t bring myself to tell her this on the spot, what with all the trouble she’s gone to with the baking & all. Oh good heavens.
To crown it all she’s embroidered a christening robe for Jakkie. Here & there a bit of a tangle but it’s something quite exceptional. Morning glories & bunches of grapes round the seams & the collar everything white on white & the most delicate little white buttons & ribbons & belts of soft brushed silk cloth with a slight sheen—good enough for a little prince. Must have taken hours & hours of work. But it’s obviously unheard of, a coloured girl in church & everything has already been arranged in any case, & Jak’s niece will bring him in in their old family christening robe.
A. says she wants to hold him for the sprinkling isn’t she a baptised child of the Lord as well she says & he won’t cry if she holds him. There she does have a point.
Saturday afternoon 5 o’clock 24 September
Too upset really to write but dear Lord in heaven how on earth could I have proposed it to Ds van der Lught? Perhaps I should really have done it & then she could rather have had it from his own mouth she was in any case listening behind the kitchen door all the time.
So there is the christening robe on the sideboard neatly wrapped in white tissue paper & A. serves the cake all prim & properly with little serviettes & Dominee praises her extravagantly but he doesn’t eat any cake only the elder nibble-nibbles a bit because of course by that time they’d been on house visits all morning & already full of cake & there she had to recite Psalm 23 & Dominee asks her everything about sin & redemption & she knows it all & he praises her to high heaven isn’t she so tidy & in her place & so clean & he can see her heart is as white as driven snow. All I could see was that Jak was going to lose his temper.
All the time she’s signalling to me with her eyes so that only I can see: Show him my christening robe with the result that I ate far too much cake just to show her it’s good thank you you’re my right hand & later she brought Jakkie in & then Jak sent hr out because then we had to kneel & pray & I looked at the chintz on the chair & when it was my turn to pray I couldn’t get out a word & Jakkie started screaming & A. comes & picks him up & soothes him there so that he can have the pre-baptismal blessing pronounced upon him & Dominee prays & the elder prays & they just can’t seem to stop & under the prayer I look at A. & she’s standing there with open eyes big-please asks her mouth but I couldn’t ask & then we still had to sing as well The Lord Bless thee out of Zion & A. joins in with the second voice & Dominee & the elder look at each other & they say let’s sing another verse but I feel ashamed because coloureds don’t sing with white people in the sitting room J. almost has a fit on the spot but he has to behave in front of Dominee & I see he’s threatening A. she must stop but sing she does.
When at last they left I rushed out of there & I walked off in some direction with Jakkie in his pram sick of all the cake & when I got to the dam at the ducks’ landing place there was would you believe it the white parcel; with the christening robe. The same that had just recently been on the sideboard! I thought at first I was seeing things.
Come out! I shouted Come out! because then I knew A. was hiding there somewhere amongst the reeds to torment me. Lord knows how she got there so soon must have taken a short-cut through the little vlei but she wasn’t coming out & then I took the parcel & chucked it far into the dam. Then it took a long time to sink & all the time I knew she was watching. Threw a few clods of earth in there to chase her out but it didn’t work. What a spectacle, good Lord.
So now we’re going to have a whole drama about it again.
Better go & have a look at what’s happening it’s been dead quiet all afternoon. A. nowhere to be seen. Jak had to see to his own lunch. Six o’clock now. Still don’t hear anything stirring in the kitchen. Perhaps she’ll come back when it’s Jakkie’s bath-time. How are we to look each other in the eye?
Last Sunday of September 1960
A. in a mighty huff. As good as her baking was for Dominee’s visit so disastrous was everything for the christening tea. Deliberately upset a jug of milk on the tray & the guests’ shoes were full of dogshit because she hadn’t swept the garden path. Remained sitting in the car during the christening service even though Dominee had said she could sit in the side-room & listen to the service. Didn’t even want to pose in the little church park with the blue cranes for a photo with Jakkie in his christening robe.
Will bloody-well not let myself be buggered around by her. Will make her work until she is tractable so that she can see what it cost. Faith & sweat & blood of generations just so that she who’s Agaat can live off the fat of the land on Gdrift & pluck the fruits through no effort of her own.
Must I skin her alive? I asked & then I had an idea. Tanned & brayed you must be that’s punishment number one & if that doesn’t cure you then I have a few others.
3 October 1960
Have been watching her though the binoculars where she’s sitting & braying the thongs in the back under the bluegum trees. Had D. provide her with a bray-stone & handle. She’d better sing I told her so that I can hear where she’s working. As long as you keep jibbing you’ll bray hides I said. Will teach her to pull up her shoulder at me. I see J. has gone & added three more lynx hides to the heap it sickens me how he decimates the small game. New sporting rifles with sights they can’t miss take a trap I say then at least the poor things also have a chance.
5 October 1960
It’s my will against hers & she knows it. The chin is stuck out there & she carries on with the one arm. Up & up she winds the thong till it drips & plucks the stick out of the handle & down & down winds the thing & then up again on the other side. Has broken two bray-poles already. A mob of farmboys mocking her. That’s how the first rod broke says Lietja one got a blow against the head that had the blood flowing so now they’re more careful stand there at a safe distance.
6 October
I cut off a piece of thong with the knife & press it under hr nose. See the hide is tanned & the core is white. I take a raw thong & I cut it & show her look the core is black. Just like that it will be with you. I’ll wind you up until all your black sins drip out of you & wind you down & wind you up again in the other direction till you’re a decent servant-girl who doesn’t leave one in the lurch when you need her most. She gives me that wooden eye I could slap her.
7 October 1960
Four days of curing thongs & A. just gets worse all the time. Breaks things in the kitchen when she has to help cook in the evenings. Mixing bowl glass jug in shards two saucepans so burnt had to throw them away milk sour from bottles not washed properly clothes get stained in the washing whole baskets of eggs get broken hens have stopped laying & Jakkie constantly fretful. Must look after him myself all the time now can’t lie there in the open under the bluegums with A.
I ask hr: But don’t you miss Jakkie then during the day? Don’t you just want to leave off your quirks now & become good again? Conceived & born in sin she says. I scold her about the thistles in the flower garden & charlock in the vegetable garden & the hornet’s nest on the stoep they fly in at the front door & go up & down with their abdomens against the curtains. Take down the hornet’s nest I say just now one will sting Jakkie. Can’t reach she says. Very well then I say then you’ll plough an acre with a handplough & a mule.
J. says you & that coffee-toffee of yours can’t you just fire her next thing she’ll drop dead with exhaustion & what will you do then? Just remember I’m not erecting the monument.
Don’t have an answer for him. Feel guilty. But the guiltier I feel the angrier I get.
9 October 1960
On purpose at first gave her an old plough with a rusty share with the wrong blunt point & a bent beam & saw to it that the hauling-chain was first hanging too high & then too low & watched her struggling with the share that wouldn’t grip & kept on sticking & somersaulting head-over-arse or climbing point first out of the furrow & the mule eventually getting all confused & headstrong.
Waited for her to get good & tired & then I said now you go & read your Handbook well where they explain the art of ploughing by hand & then you come & say your lesson to me & when you know it & explain to me why you’re struggling like that then we make a plan but plough you will the field one arm or not. D. says Ai Mies. I tell him to keep his trap shut if she wants to be otherwise she’ll find out at first hand what that means. A good servant is like a shiny share that shears with ease.
11 October 1960
A is walking with an even tread on one side of the plough with the strong hand on the handle & hr shoulder pulled up high & talks to the mule & sings to awake the echoes: Big baboon climbs the hill farmer’s wife takes a pill. Knew everything when I tested hr this morning. The whole logic of the plough-bottom. Share-point inclined to the unploughed ground. Hollow under hoof. Mould-board. Tow-line on the centre of the share. On the tips of her fingers.
Took her to the co-op & said now you choose yourself a plough here & shares that look right to you for that damp river-soil. So then she knew exactly what is what & as cheeky as you please asked me right in front of the salesman: Do we have a wire brush & grease & graphite & fine oil to soak the bolts after I’ve finished ploughing & do we have paint otherwise this plough will lie & rust just like the old one. Punish me as much as you like said her crooked back as I walked behind her.
Must think up something else. Feel terrible. But can’t stop.
13 October 1960
J. says he feels like going to live in a flat in town & becoming a lawyer he’s had a bellyful of being an extra in my concentration-camp movie. Says he’s had enough of the mess in the house & what’s happened to my wonderful house-slave she can’t even iron a shirt properly & why must she struggle with a handplough or is this now my latest design for a hotnot hobby first the flat seam now the plough furrow. Had to throw away three shirts this week with scorch marks on the collar. Made her waterproof a large tarpaulin with fat & linseed oil over & over again on both sides.
If I can’t break her with sweating blood I’ll get into her mind then we can see at the same time if she’s really as clever as she thinks.
I’m humiliating myself. God in heaven.
14 October
Instructed D. to move the McCormick seeder onto the tarpaulin in the shed & to jack up one wheel & to loosen all the gears & to put out a few bags of wheat seed. 150 pounds is what we must sow per morgen I said to A. Now you calculate how we must set this machine’s gears so that it’s going to sow the right density & how much seed we need to sow 16 morgen & while you’re about it teach D. as well & you needn’t come home & you needn’t be given food before you’ve done the sum go & read your Handbook & help yourself to pen & paper in the baas’s office. Since you tell me you know how to multiply & divide. Bless me if she doesn’t talk back & tell me it’s not sowing-time it’s almost harvest-time don’t I rather have a sum for harvest-time. I restrain myself. The labourers are watching me with eagle eyes. Tsk I hear behind my back. They look at me as if they don’t know me.
Do I know myself?
14 October 1960 1 o’clock.
A.’s light is still burning & there’s been a droning on three notes all evening. I know what she’s struggling with. They don’t say how many square yards in a morgen & how many feet to a yard. If she’s clever she’ll look on the farmer’s almanac tables behind the kitchen door.
Have dried up completely now. Jakkie full of colic from drinking cow’s milk.
16 October 1960
Heard a to-do in the shed early this morning & D. is in & out of the door. So there was the seeder sowing on the tarpaulin & A. is turning the jacked-up wheel with a piece of rope tied to one of the spokes so that she can count the revolutions & there is the Handbook & the almanac with tables & I see hr papers with the sums. By then they were setting the seeder’s gears for the third time already to try & arrive at exactly 150 pounds a morgen. So then I relented & gave back the rowel that I’d removed & then the machine worked properly & the sum worked out & A. all but put out her tongue at me. D. gives me a straight look & says lord Mies but nothing further & next thing I see Lietja is giving A. a plate of rice & mince with vegetables in the kitchen & I happen to hear her say never mind it’s over now you’re terribly clever. Like a serpent as clever as a cat as sharp as needles but now just must start eating slowly otherwise your stomach will get a fright & then you must go to bed in your room you look like a ghost shame.
Made myself scarce because next thing I heard sniffling there in the kitchen & I don’t know whether it’s Lietja or A. that’s bawling but A. doesn’t cry of course. Then I heard J. there in the kitchen egging A. on: Go & sing your white stepmother a little song, go on: Anything you can do I can do better.
A. in the outside room all afternoon. Very quiet.
There’s not a single farmer of my acquaintance who could do that sum. How can I do it to her?
That October after Jakkie’s birth, after the battle with Agaat over the christening robe, five things happened that changed everything on Grootmoedersdrift. First Jak had the cattle-troughs with licks & the salt blocks removed from the lands. And then you noticed one day that the farm boys’ wire cars were no longer built from wire but from bones. White vertebrae, white ribs, white collarbones, little white carts of death rattling over the yard. Without your putting two and two together. The third thing was Jak’s new hunting rifles. What was he on his way to do when he left the house with the long leather bags? You didn’t want to know. And then there were your diaries. Somebody was reading your diaries. Or that’s what you thought. But most important of all was the change that came over Agaat. You saw her looking with new eyes at the two of you. But mainly at Jak, as if she was noticing him for the first time.
Five things that preceded that first catastrophe. Five things that helped shape all future catastrophes.
In the evenings there were the squabbles over the farm as usual, over your compost heaps, over your pumpkins amongst the pear trees.
It’s not a laboratory, Jak, you said, it’s mixed farming, the surfaces can’t be bare and sterile without a sign of the processes that keep a farm healthy.
There he sat, pushed away his plate of food, taking apart his rifles and putting them together again, firing silent shots at the ornaments in the sitting room. Through the sights. Click. Click. You thought it would drive you mad. It fascinated Agaat. Not the rifles. Jak’s face, his hands.
Then she brought home the story one evening. End of October 1960 it was.
The cows are eating tins.
Just as Jak was taking his first mouthful.
What tins now?
You had Jakkie in your lap, were trying to get him to take to his bottle.
Paraffin tins, car-oil tins, turpentine tins, sheep-dip tins, molasses tins, she said.
That they pick up where, Agaat? you asked.
You were incredulous. Why would cows eat tins? You thought she was inventing it to pay you back for the punishments she’d suffered.
Agaat was silent.
Ag, the stupid cows of yours, said Jak, probably calving again, you know they’re always full of shit then, if it’s not the trembles, then it’s something else.
I’m just asking, where do they find that particular collection of tins to eat? Do they select them in the supply shed?
You looked at Agaat.
The tins are lying in the little grazing at the back next to the river amongst the stones, Agaat said.
Full sentence with prepositions. From a grammar book for second-language speakers.
She jutted out her chin.
Jak pointed his fork at Agaat. They’re my tins, leave them just there where they are, or you’ll be given another field to plough!
You handed Jakkie to her. He wouldn’t drink so well with you. She just stood there with the child in her arms.
It’s my shooting range, dammit, I do target-shooting at the bloody tins! Jak exploded. And that’ll be the day that I let myself be put off by a bunch of silly cows from enjoying the little bit of healthy recreation that I’m allowed in this internment camp.
You gestured to Agaat that she could leave. At her leisure she walked out, her ears flapping backward under her cap.
She must keep her nose out of my business, I’m telling you here and now, she’s carrying on as if the farm belonged to her. And . . . and . . .
Jak was red in the face. With an oil cloth he polished furiously at the barrel of his rifle.
Yes, Jak, and what else?
You were used to it. Always in such situations he brought it up. Agaat was the cause of everything that went wrong, and you were the cause of Agaat. With your finger to your lips you signalled he should lower his voice.
And, he said, if I ever have to hear again that my child, my little Jakkie . . . I’ll cut off her two tits for her one by one and throw them to the pigs! What must the people think? Jak de Wet’s child is being . . . suckled by a . . . by a cast-off kitchen-goffel!
You were startled. Who had read, who had seen, who had told whom?
You kept your cool. Where do you find such rubbish? you asked.
Jak was on his feet, he knocked his chair over backwards.
I hear it from the labourers! I hear them talk! They know everything that happens in this house, you say so yourself! Dawid’s cousin says Saar saw it. They piss themselves laughing, the hotnots. Where do you think this must end? What must they think of me? So-called lord of the manor?
You don’t know how much Agaat is worth to me, you said. You would probably never even have had a son if it hadn’t been for her. And perhaps not even a wife.
Bluff back. But your heart was beating in your throat. Could Agaat have planted the story herself?
Dammit, Milla, once again that pretty-pious little story of yours, how long do you think you’re still going to entertain me with it, your stupid serial? Go and write it up for Springbok Radio, go on, you’ve hardly put that skivvy of yours in her place than you start praising her to the skies all over again. Agaat of Grootmoedersdrift, Littletit of the Overberg! Then they can listen to it on the wireless every day from Caledon to Swellendam.
Jak slammed doors in his storming out.
A mite vehement about cows eating tins, you thought. A mite fierce over a mere rumour amongst the labourers. But it was only the following day that you realised why Jak had been on the defensive.
You were numbering the diaries that were full. From ’53 onwards. In the correct sequence, with the periods that they covered written clearly on the cover. So that you could keep exact tally of how many there were. High up in the bedroom wardrobe you were putting them away. Under the eiderdowns.
Then Agaat came to call you.
Come and have a look, she said, the boys say it’s not just tins that the cows are eating.
You followed her to the grazing next to the river. There against the wilderness of brambles the pregnant cows were standing and eating white ribs, the carcase of a cow that had been lying there for a long time. The white shards were sticking out of their mouths as they were chewing. You gazed at the drooling and the crunching, too shocked to put one foot in front of the other. To one side the cows’ off-colour calves were standing neglected, watching.
Dawid says he shot Blommetjie and Gesina yesterday, Agaat said, they must also have eaten funny stuff.
She went to show you, two cows on the other side of the river.
Blommetjie had already burst open. You could see the dead foetus of her calf. Blommetjie, a great-granddaughter of Grootblom, another one of the Grootblom clan from your mother’s old herd.
All that you could get out of Jak was that the cows wouldn’t get up and that they were lying in the grass drooling with their heads in their flanks and that he’d wanted to put them out of their misery.
You phoned the vet in town. He would come and see what he could do but he didn’t have serums, he would order them immediately from Onderstepoort. If the sickness was what he thought it was. It could take a week to arrive.
You grabbed Agaat by the apron and shook her.
Why didn’t I hear the shots more often? Why don’t we ever hear anything? Why do I only learn about this now? Why did nobody come and tell me that the cows didn’t seem right? Why don’t you notice things, I know you know what a healthy cow looks like!
She looked you straight in the eye, her body ramrod-stiff. You could see the hurt settling in her gaze. On top of the poker face, a film of aggrievedness. More than that.
He screws a pipe into the front of the rifle’s barrel, she said, her voice neutral.
You let her go, she retreated. When she spoke it was soft, but clear and controlled.
I saw it yesterday for the first time. All you hear is thud like a bag of salt falling off a wagon. But I know what it sounds like now. From now on I’ll know to listen for it.
Don’t let him see you, Agaat.
You are my eyes and my ears, you wanted to say, he knows in the long run I find out everything, but just don’t let him discover that you’re spying on him.
You were silent, blew your nose. Her gaze forbade you to say anything further.
You should have said you were sorry you scolded so viciously. You should have said you would be more alert yourself. Never mind, it’s not your fault, Agaat, you should have said, you’re with Jakkie all day, how could you know what was happening in the fields? But you didn’t. You stepped past her, your hands to your face. Shattered because of the cows. Over those injured eyes of Agaat’s you stepped. Right over the insinuation flickering in that eye.
Must I see the germs even before they hatch? Must I keep death itself from your body? There was reproach on her face.
Sobering it was.
You gathered yourself. Saw to it that the old bones and tins and cartridge-shells and rusted wires and everything on the old grazings next to the river were cleared up. Jak trembled with dismay when he heard the name of the sickness. He buckled down and helped. You controlled yourself, said if it was really necessary, then he should go and lay out a proper shooting-range with real targets at the back of the fallow land in a special camp where he would be out of the way of man and beast. There would never again be a single thing shot and left lying in the veld, you said.
You immediately started administering bonemeal with the salt, for the sheep as well, and gave instructions for the making of new little troughs that would ensure that each head of cattle would get its eight ounces.
You got in a team of convicts and had the whole farm, next to the rivers and on the side of the drift, scoured for bones. More than a hundred bags full were collected.
You wouldn’t forget that, the shaven heads of the men as they moved stooped down in a slow phalanx before Agaat’s white apron over the lands. The old hymns there on the fallow, carried by the wind, you could hear them as far as the yard, Agaat’s descant high and bright above the deep voices of the men.
From depth of dark’st disgrace
of deliverance bereft
where hope’s forlorn last trace
in despair my heart has left;
from depths of desolation
oh Lord, I b’seech thee, hear,
and let my lamentation
ascend, Lord, in thine ear!
Everybody was flabbergasted. Cows that eat skeletons. As if death itself had nutritional value. Even Saar and Lietja who could produce a ribald laugh on any occasion, stood there in the kitchen singing, dragging it out with that lugubrious bending of the notes that the brown people could give to a song. A weeping and wailing it was in those days on Grootmoedersdrift, as the wagons full of white bones arrived in the yard. And as the digging of the trenches began and the skeletons of skunks and meerkat and guineafowl, and the carcasses of cattle, were cast into them, Agaat led the workers in the singing of another verse.
Hope, Israel in your sorrow,
trust, o nation that grieves;
His favour light’ns the morrow,
His grace your grief reprieves.
Then shines a sweet salvation:
all Israel is free
of trial and tribulation.
Do like, Lord, unto me!
It set you crying all over again. For more than the cows. For Agaat’s eye that was dry and sharp with supervising. In her mouth it was a battle hymn, that you could hear, and it was directed at you and you felt how she was piling up her case against you. It was a case for which she could locate her injustice in the very hymns of your own church, in the very mouths of the prophets of the Old Testament.
Did she have everybody on her side even then?
Jak could in any case not endure it too long under Agaat and her convicts. He left his bag of bones and tried to assist the vet. You yourself tried to hurry along the bone-collecting. If the singing were to carry on any longer, you felt, the walls of the homestead would tumble down like those of Jericho.
The bonemeal feeds that you administered helped to get the oxen, the bulls and the cows that had not given birth that year back into condition. But the best dairy cows, all of those that would have calved that season and that had been put to graze in the little back camp next to the river, were lost.
Three days long the deaths continued. Over and over the process repeated itself, the staggering gait with which it started, the glassy stare, the puzzled gaze, the drooping ears, the tangled coat, and the dried-up nostrils. One after the other they lay down. One by one the heads became too heavy there where they were lying in the grass. They turned their noses into their flanks trying to support their heads. The flanks collapsed. The jaws were paralysed, the tips of the tongues lolled on the teeth in front, drool and foam glistened around the mouths, heavily the great brown gullets moved up and down. One after the other soft, pining death you accompanied, your hand on the flank, your hand on the little crown between the ears. You wept by your cows. The best of them were descendants of the animals you had known as a child. Aandster’s great-great-grandchild, Pieternella’s distant cousins, all the meek caramel-coloured mothers.
When the convicts had gone and all the cows were buried, Agaat came to you. She came to sit by you in your room with Jakkie drinking his bottle in her arms. She put the old green Handbook on your lap. Her voice was neutral. Her eyes shone.
Open on page 221, she said, open, and ask me anything, I am fully learned now, about anything that can possibly happen to a cow.
…
the countenance of doctors is the seat of dissimulation the whispered consultation behind the screens i don’t add up on any side am wrong geometry am failed electricity am vapour before the sun am nothing more than particles and waves my irradiated skeleton a room-divider my head in a tunnel my neck in a hole my leg in a bath my arms weightless groping for nothing in sleeves of lead in cylinders full of pink water wild and waste is death before death in a solution of salts i am dipped painted with mediums contending for dominance water earth fire and air a quadruple judgement hangs over my neck invisible eels prick the skin of the fingertips skin that provisionally enshrouds my failure a fascicle of breath engirdled by fate against him the intact the voluble the preserved in his coat of whitewash i fear mrs de wet the worst oh my soul you are audited by a battery of stethoscopes gallery of savants who are gauging the woman who cannot break an egg the woman who cannot sweep with a broom the one in hundredthousand mrs de wet oh genuflecting deeply edified congregation of god in swellendam all in the twinkling of an eye compassionate in tones of gloating resounds the intercession she must fall safely as rain in winter o Lord must descend soughing like a manna of edible butterflies while silent assistants connect me to electrodes transilluminate me weigh me the specific gravity of my spirit which i must surrender if i correctly understand the explanation of gradual enfeeblement on the dials of the control panels of the angels with flaming swords the electromyographers their needles in my flesh they whisper in unison the sickness of charcot the sickness of lou gehrig now the sickness of grootmoedersdrift the mother of all sicknesses you are besieged in your head a tongueless bunker with loopholes