Agaat flings a sheet over me. It balloons and flaps over my head.
If Jakkie comes, you have to look your best, she says.
The sheet settles over the bedspreads. She ties the two upper corners with a double knot behind my neck. She pulls it tight from my neck and tucks it in around the mattress. She places the round hand mirror on its stand on the bridge.
He mustn’t think that I’ve just let you lie here and waste away, she says.
The sheet looks like a lampshade, a circus tent.
Plant a pennant in my skull and I’m the main tent, I flicker at Agaat. She flickers back without looking at me, to indicate she sees, but it’s sheer bullshit that I’m flickering if even she can’t understand it.
My head is the stopper in the hole in the roof-top, I persist, my neck the central pole. In the dome of my forehead glows forty watts. A circus tent full of sawdust, a lantern, a paper bag around a candle, shadows of trapeze artists glide to earth in the spotlight, inside resounds the applause of the crowd.
He must know his little old mother has been in the very best of hands, says Agaat.
She ignores my flickering, not inclined to risk a translation, doesn’t even want to start guessing, practical matters first, the hour of the manicure has struck.
She places another towel round my neck, tucks the edges into the top of the neckbrace.
Right, she says, now you’re nice and stubble-proof.
Doesn’t feel up to another itching episode, that’s clear. She slots a tape into the player. Noonday Witch, symphonic tone poem by Dvorˇák. A gift from Jakkie on her last birthday. Not exactly a lullaby, he wrote, but to remind her how she had ‘snatched him from oblivion’ on the Tradouw.
Who does she think she’s spiting? What’s driving her? The end, I imagine. It’s the end that’s hoving in sight for her. Then people tend to lose their wits. You can afford to fiddle while the drift burns. You start squandering the rations. During the day you ride your horses recklessly through the piss. Because you’re almost there. There’s a light at the end of the road. It’s worse than the Great Trek, this stretch.
Now which hairstyle will it be this time? Agaat asks. Daisy de Melcker? Or Margaret Thatcher?
Very funny, I signal. Circus!
It’s curiosity that’s driving her. I can see straight through her. Feigned dressage of the half-dead! What’s the use? She lies! She’s standing outside the tent again peeping through the chinks to steal a glimpse. Of the ringmaster, of the elephant on all fours on a little drum, of the lion lying down before the whip. Of the strong woman lifting a horse. The clown tripping over the bucket. The only difference is that Agaat is no longer the child that she was.
When you can no longer laugh, she says, you might as well give up.
Does she know what she’s saying? Give up! As if the logic of struggle and discouragement applied here! It’s much simpler. All that needs to happen, is that I must die. And it seems the show must go on till then.
What will be the final number? The tattoo announces it, the spotlight is on the slit. But what emerges from it? Only a procession, everything we’ve seen before, the lion tamers and the gymnasts and the rubber man and the twins in the barrel, round and round the ring until they vanish through the folded-back flap. Until only the ringmaster remains behind. He lifts his top hat. Farewell. Auf Wiedersehen. Perhaps the clown will trip over his feet one last time. But then it’s over. For me at least, not for Agaat.
I smelt it last night, the smoke, apparently the wattle forest caught fire there next to the labourers’ cottages, everything is black with soot down there and one house was lost, and the roof of another caved in, she says. Apparently from a spark of their cooking-fire that leapt across, because the drift is dry, everything paper-dry there on the banks.
This morning I heard Dawid talking in the kitchen. Demolish, I heard and build and three extra houses please in the place of the corrugated-iron hovels that have been put up there for the children of Julies, of Kadys.
There was a long silence. It was only Agaat and Dawid there, she’d sent out the other two. At last she spoke, loud and clear so that I could also hear.
One thing at a time, Dawid, she said, you must just make do until after the funeral. Till after the New Year, I’d say. Draw up your plans so long, work out how many bricks and bags of cement it’s going to take, corrugated iron, doors, windows, everything, I’ll check it and then I’ll see what I can do, but I’m telling you now there are too many of you, I’m not building more than two new houses, in the place of the old ones that are falling to pieces and exactly the same size, but I’m not building extra houses, you can decide amongst yourselves which three of the six and their families will go, we’re never going to need all of them and I can in any case not carry on paying them all and I don’t like unpaid hungry labourers sitting around here getting up to no good and stealing my sheep. And those who stay on, they must stop breeding or I’ll have the women fixed, sooner rather than later. Everything is going to get smaller here now, that you’ve known for more than a year now, if I need people for big jobs, I’ll hire kaffirs on contract, as at shearing time, it’s much simpler and cheaper too, all the farmers are doing it like that now. They come, they work, they eat, they sleep on sacks in the shed and I pay them and their boss comes and fetches them. No drunken brawls, no stabbings, no loafing around and no babies that I have to catch and that get ill and that I have to doctor and keep healthy all their lives.
Dawid didn’t talk back. There was a silence and then the slamming of the screen door.
Is that what’s bringing out her nastiness? The new order?
Snip, Agaat cuts with the sharp-pointed scissors in the air, snip, snip, while she regards me from all sides. She pretends to restrict her gaze to my surface, to the wet strands of hair plastered straight against my scalp, up against the tent around my neck. She pretends that everything about me is purely a matter of layout and systematic attack.
But actually she’s looking for a peephole. She wants to see what I think of her latest installations here in the room. Straight into me she wants to peer, direct, as if there were a silver screen behind my eyelids full of moving images that could provide her with a truer, more intimate version of my reaction. As if I could contain any secrets that she doesn’t know.
She has carried everything she could think of into my room and covered the walls with it.
Only not the maps.
Why should she at this stage want to disregard the maps? From the day that I’ve been lying here and can no longer move around in a wheelchair, I’ve been hearing the door of the sideboard open. Tchick, open, tchick, closed. One of the imbuia pieces from my mother still, just like the dressing table here in the bedroom. With the powerful little magnets and the copper lips on the inside of the catches. Tchick. A seamlessly solid and impenetrable object, with its heavy undulating edge on top and scalloped fringe below. Congealed on ball-and-claw feet. Squatting. Full of dangling little copper handles and festoons. Like an old-fashioned American negress in the National Geographic. With many gold rings, earrings and nose-rings. Hunkering. Tchick, open, and after a while, tchick, closed. Then I knew Agaat had selected herself another blue booklet, to come and deposit here with me for the time being. With an announcement of the title that she had thought up herself, a foretaste of the evening’s reading. Not backward at all in getting good mileage out of it. Now the books from two little parcels are lying here with dog-eared pages and I hear the same old stories ad nauseam. Where are the rest? Surely there was a third parcel?
Other than that there are only the photo albums in the sideboard, the title deeds of the farm, my marriage certificate. What else? In a little suitcase, all Jakkie’s school reports and cuttings of his school concerts. His degree certificates and medals he removed and took away with him when he left that morning in ’85. And then a few pieces of silver and old porcelain from my mother’s house. A little set of Woodstock glasses. The coffee set with the desert scenes. Agaat knows it will be hers one day. Soon. In a few days. And the napkins that she embroidered with white gardenias for my fiftieth birthday meal. Too pretty to use. The golden year. 1976. Cape gardenias while the country was going up in flames. In two years’ time she will be fifty herself. Perhaps she’ll start using them then. With whom would she ever in any case sit down to such an elegant table?
Perhaps with Jakkie if he comes. Perhaps she will herself, of her own accord, set a place for herself at the table with him. Perhaps not, perhaps that’s my dream for her, more probably he will have to make her sit with him, a meal for two when everything is over, before he returns. And she will sit down and pretend to eat.
Would it really be for Jakkie that she now all of a sudden wants to tidy me up? Or does she want to take it out on me that he still hasn’t let her know when he’ll be coming? Or has he? Tomorrow perhaps? Eyewash! This hair-cutting has nothing to do with anybody else. It’s just she who wants to get at me.
First she washed my hair. She dropped the back railing of the bed, released the brake and rolled it away from the wall. She brought up the small trolley. I could lie back with my head in the washbasin with the neck-support. She massaged my scalp, shampooed with anti-dandruff tar shampoo, rubbed in conditioner, rinsed three times, rubbed dry. Special treatment. An ultra-thorough itch-repellent delivery. Energetic too. Where she gets it from.
It can’t be from absent-mindedness that she doesn’t want to fetch the maps. She will remember them, she had to unpack the whole sideboard that day to fit in the fat roll of maps from Jak’s office in the back. I remember I found her there on her knees in the sitting room surrounded by all the stuff with the blue booklets tied with string on her lap. So what is this then? she asked. As if she wouldn’t have remembered.
Just old stuff, I said. Throw it out, it just takes up space.
I could see she had other ideas. Her jaw betrayed her. But she said nothing.
With the last clearing-out, when I was half paralysed already, the diaries put in another appearance. The string on two of the packets had fallen off. I was sitting in the Redman Chief next to her with the Royal Reacher. I could still pick up or move the odd thing here and there. I manoeuvred the blue booklets aside, the third pile that was still tied up.
Onto the bonfire with that, I said. Take a little suitcase from the top of the cupboard in the passage and pack all Jakkie’s things neatly in that, he’ll want them one day. One day he’ll want to see again what his teachers wrote there, his first composition book, his first swimming and rowing diplomas.
Suddenly I remember the whole hullabaloo. She made everything tumble down from the passage cupboard in searching for the right size of suitcase, small enough to fit into the sideboard, large enough for Jakkie’s things. It sounded as if she was kicking around the suitcases there in the passage.
The house has always spoken up when Agaat has taken a vow of silence. When could she have gone to replace the blue booklets in the sideboard? And how long ago did she start reading the first two packets? Just wasn’t up to the first little lot? 1953 to 1960, it’s written on the cover, the dates. That was how I divided them up when I tied them that time.
I could hear from the way in which she pulled up the railing of the bed’s head again that I was going to be subjected to more than hair-washing. That it was only the start.
Now she wants to manicure the whole imminent carcase. The full treatment. Everything has been set out neatly in a line. Pumice stone, nail scissors, files coarse and fine, razor, magnifying glass, tweezers. As if the cutting and plucking and shaving and filing will reveal something of my inner being. As if relieved of unwanted hair and nails and calluses, my shell will become transparent so that she can see my inner workings.
What does she think it will consist of? Gears, ratchets, cogs? A central axle driving everything? A little black humming box in which the motor is housed? A film on a reel, conducted through all the channels and grooves and spools? That’s where she wants to end up, at the still frames, to see what I think of her resistance, to find out what more I want, to see why on earth I carry on whingeing like that. Preferably she would want to dismantle me, unscrew all my components.
Why does she think they lie so deep?
They lie around ready to be salvaged, compared with everything else she has carried in here from the cellar. Everything that I said we should throw away and burn and give away. Everything that we set aside for her to keep.
Like a stage-prop store it looks in here. Beach hat, fish gaff, old black bathing costume from the year yon. From day to day the exhibition is changed. She makes me smell everything, presses it under my hand to feel.
How does she think she’s going to get everything out of here before Jakkie comes? Or is he not coming? Or is it all meant expressly for his eyes?
She’s well-practised in the art of leaving tracks. It was one of their regular games. Follow me if you can. Broken twigs she taught him to read, spitballs in the dust, scratch marks on bark, turned-over stones. As I had taught her.
She jerked up the railing, rammed extra cushions behind my back, far enough from the bed-head so that she could reach easily behind my head, pushed the bed still further from the wall so that she could move around me freely. The black comb half protrudes from the top pocket of the apron, the curlers are clasped on both sides of the bib of the apron. A bottle of water with a spray head stands ready in the trolley. She comes and stands behind me. Ceremoniously. After the fashion of a salon. Chez Agaat. My stylist and I.
So, she says, today exactly a month ago we last cut and look, it’s grown a whole inch.
With the comb she pulls a strand of hair away from my head so that I can see. A mouse tail, thin and grey. She looks at me in the hand mirror.
Just see how much vigour there still is in you, she wants to say. She bethinks herself. But the thought is a snare. She’s already caught in it. In her own snare. I know it. The teeth are bared, the nails come out. It’s a reflex. She combs hard, straight partings in my hair. She plucks up tufts of hair, she pinions them in stiff crests with curlers. Now I am also in battle array. Sound the horn! Charge!
Grow forth! would be the wrong battle cry. She wouldn’t dare shout it out loud. But it’s a snake from which a string of white eggs slip. I see them rise up behind her cap like thought balloons in a comic strip.
A whole inch of hair! Without sun? Without bread? What are these strings that can grow from nothing? How many metres in a lifetime? And whom would you want to appoint to measure it for you? Because there are still the few inches that have to grow out in the coffin. Threads of a worm that grazed in poplars. Spun of last thoughts. At last all bright and clear. Silver-white hair. Pitch-black blood.
Is that what she thinks? I no longer know.
Ounooi, she says, don’t perform like that. I know you don’t like it, but when it’s all over you always feel miles better.
She drags the comb through a few times, walks to the calendar, marks off the date with the pencil suspended there from a string. 11 December 1996. She taps the back of the pencil on the dates of the past days. Has now pasted the old paper on the reading stand. Middle column, last row. Agaat’s periodic table. Bisacodyl suppository. Tap. Lactulose. Tap. Know it by heart already. But it’s one thing she won’t scrap from her battery. She’s besotted with the bizarre names of the medicines, the sadistic language of the recommended treatments. Symptom: large bowel stoppage. Therapy: Exercise. Tap, tap, tap.
Not difficult to decipher, the tapping. It’s Morse code for The Pan. It says: More hairs come forth from your head, Mrs de Wet, than dung from your belly. The Skull Pan is replete but the Other Pan is empty. Almost seven days nothing but winds in it.
Shit and hair. The last secretions of the almost-dead. Shit and hair.
Like old oil still leaking from an engine on the scrap-heap. And piss and nails. That’s why they stopper you with a plug or two. So that you don’t start oozing and spoil your coffin, or interrupt the sermon. That’s why they draw a little net over your hair. So that your skull doesn’t start rustling. And that’s why they bind up your jaw. So that the tongue doesn’t erupt in post-mortem gabbling.
Beloved, go forth in peace and pinch your noses. In the name of the Lord who created heaven and earth because He also designed the fragrant death. The jaw drops open with a snap. Bluetongue put out at the pulpit cloth. Lisping among the lilies.
That’s the kind of disgrace that must be guarded against.
I look at myself in the mirror. Wordlessly my eyes blaspheme. How many watts worth of sacrilege? Blasphemy without the use of the orbicularis oris muscles. That’s what she wants from me. She wants to see how far she can push me. Drained to the last of the lees. On my knees in the sawdust. In the dry course of the drift. In the place where the last footlight fades to black.
Agaat puts the mirror down flat. She wipes my eyes, she wipes away the spit dribbling from my mouth.
Who needs the old mirror anyway, she says, rather look at what I’ve displayed for you, the whole of Grootmoedersdrift, Ounooi, from front to back. Better than the movies.
I hear another language in the clacking of the scissors.
What more can you want? Speaking of hair, it gets into my hair, I can tell you, it gets into my hair looking after you like this!
Tchip. A big shiny swallow with two sharp wings, a flying dive narrowly missing my eyebrows.
A dirty-grey skein of hair falls on the sheet. More than an inch I’d say, more than two even.
Agaat likes an open face.
It carried on for three days, the carrying-in. Where she had stored it all, everything that had been on the discard heap, I don’t know. In the cellar? Sometimes I heard a bumping and bustling here under me. Other items emerged from the storeroom, from the outside room. Everything that she’d removed from the room here has been restored. The built-in cupboards are filled with my clothes again. She brought in armloads at a time with hangers and all and piled them up on my bed, spread out shawls and skirts before me, pressed the jerseys against my cheek. The soft red mohair, the little maroon one that smells of Chanel No. 5 that she was so mad about when she was small. The dances, the mountains, the snow, the sea. Everything back into the drawers.
The hat-stand, the walking stick stand with all the umbrellas, the walking frame, the trolley. She came wheeling in here at speed, in one or other of my wheelchairs, first with the Spyder as if she were taking part in a paraplegic race and then all whooshing with the Redman and then standing in the IBot with the knee-support flapped up. Like the Popemobile it looked. All that was missing was for her to wave blessings. The head-dress everybody would have recognised.
I went to sleep intermittently with all the activity. Sometimes I thought I was dreaming. When I woke up there was a clattering in the passage and then yet another object was dragged in from the shed. A bag of guano, a bag of chicken feed, a can of dipping fluid, a can of vaccine, the ploughshare from under the wild fig tree and the pipe for striking it, a silver corner post, three droppers, freshly-tarred, feathers of the red rooster, feathers of the white rooster, a sheaf of wheat, a bag of compost, a ram’s horn, a horseshoe, a skein of the finest wool. Held in front of my nose for me to smell, all of it. Rustling, the grasses, the pods. Struck, the gong, shaken out, the coir sacks, just about the whole farm carted in at the back door on a wheelbarrow from sheep-shears to rake. I heard her give the labourers three days’ leave so that she could complete it all in peace. Because whom would they suspect of being crazy? They know I just lie here. They know it’s been a year since I said anything.
The trocar and cannula.
The lip-halter.
The mowing-snaffle.
A bray-pole.
A tine of the shallow-toothed harrow.
A rowel from the seed-hopper.
The tool with which the fencing-wire is twisted.
One by one she came and held the things in front of me. Until I signalled no, that’s not what I want to see. Sometimes I thought she wanted to put the snaffle under my tongue, fit the halter to my upper lip, punch a hole in me with the trocar between my short-rib and my hipbone in hopes of deflating me, so that the sound from my hip would sound the word for her, the name of the thing that I’m dying to see, the old maps that for her own murky reasons she cannot find in her heart to go and dig up in the sitting room. As if she’s scared that something might bite her there in the sideboard.
Tchip, tchip, tchip, go the scissors, faster and faster. I feel the blades against my ear. Hair goes flying. The whole awning is full of snippings. I see them dry, the little wet tails becoming fluff, puffing up, starting to roll around and disintegrate, thousands of crescents stirring in the slipstream of my stylist as she moves around the bed. Here comes the spray bottle. Zirrrts, zoorrrts, from all sides. As if I were a rose-tree full of lice. Rosecare. What’s in a rose. Young Miss Redelinghuys. The rose of Tradouw.
She starts a second round of snipping.
I want to see the mirror, I signal. Now!
Wait, she says, I haven’t nearly done. All the old fluff in the neck, she says.
Grrr, grrr, grrr, she saws at it with the serrated blade. My head is cold.
Almost done. Here’s another loose strand. Here’s another tuft. Oh well, that will have to do, Ounooi, it’s not as if your hair is what it used to be.
She brings the drier. The little hand twists and tosses my hair under the stream of hot air.
It’s too hot, I say.
Too this too that, says Agaat. She switches the drier to cold.
Don’t come and complain to me if your nose runs, she says.
She brings the mirror closer again. Last time I looked like Liza Minnelli. Before that like Mary Quant.
It’s the magnifying face of the mirror that she holds in front of me. My chin and cheeks bulge and distort, my haircut falls beyond the frame.
And then God saw that it was good, says Agaat, are you also satisfied?
Thank you.
Rather stingy with compliments tonight, aren’t we, says Agaat, use your imagination. You look exactly like Julie Andrews.
The hills are alive with the sound of music, Agaat hums. One phrase, then she changes her tune.
My grandma’s mangy hen.
Clack, she pulls the tape from the player. Too many tunes for one throat.
Now the ears, she says.
Well and good, my ears are exposed to view now.
The top comes off the little bottle of Johnson’s ear buds. Plop. Agaat shakes the bottle so that it looks like a porcupine full of quills.
First wet, she says, then dry.
She dips the end of the ear bud in a bowl of water.
The deaf adder that stoppeth her ear, she says, full of old wax. Say if it’s too deep.
She looks into my eyes while she pushes the lukewarm bud into my ear.
Just let me be please, I signal, it’s been too deep for a while now, you don’t need clean ears to die.
Oh yes, says Agaat, you do, St Peter sticks in his key to check.
She twists and twirls the stick. Liquid gushes in my left ear. It blocks up. One half of the world mutes.
Still waters, says Agaat.
The stick emerges with a dark-brown lump on its point. She holds it in front of my nose.
Well-greased, she says. Very healthy still. Pure turf.
She examines it minutely before she wipes it on the sheet and pushes the other end into my ear vigorously.
Please, don’t you have any respect? I ask.
It could have been worse, says Agaat as she takes possession of the other ear. Her voice cracks, she swallows the rest. But I inspect her jaw. It’s pushed far out and it’s agitated with subterranean rumbling.
At least you still have ears to hear! If your gut looks like the inside of your ears we don’t have a problem! Pure sweet-potato peat! All the way to the portals! Don’t keep looking at me like that! What more can I do? Everything is here now. Must I then divert the water from the godgiven drift itself through this room for you? Install a pump down there and lay a pipe to the room and flood everything like a deluge? Well, let me tell you, it’s dry! The drift is dry! There’s nothing left in it.
Forgive me.
How’s that?
Forgive me!
I didn’t say anything!
Or do you think perhaps that you’re in the ark here? That I have to cart in two of everything? You and I! That’s the two! That’s Two enough!
Forgive me!
Give you what? Arsenic or arsenite or arsenate? Don’t be silly. We’ll start with the usual medicine, otherwise it will just have to be an enema again. You can’t lie here like this. You’ll poison yourself.
She thinks she can scare me with her talk. I don’t scare any more. I’m tired. She tires me. I tire her. There are dark circles under her eyes. Her ankles seem swollen. When she sits on the chair, I see her knees, bloated like those of a pregnant woman. We wear each other out. How is this to end if she doesn’t want to make an end of it with me?
She puts on her glasses for the next task. Now the nails, she says, you know you dig holes into yourself. Just see what it looks like here, ai!
She straightens the fingers of my right hand. I’ve been feeling it for a while now. The cutting into my palms. But it wasn’t on the list. When I looked at my hands to try and draw her attention to them, she briefly rubbed them or tucked them away under the sheets. She shies away from the shrivelled little claws of mine, I can see it in her face. But tonight they’re on her list. Now that the room is full again, I’m the one who must be pruned back, scraped out all the way to my cuticles. So the wheel turns. Hip up, hop down.
In my right palm the nail of my middle finger has cut through the skin. The other nails have curled upwards where they’ve been pressed against the inside of my hand. Two are ingrown. That shuts Agaat up. Neglected area. Nothing that can inflame her more. She works away at every problem systematically. Little crescents of nail-clippings fall on the sheet amongst the hair. Into the quick the ingrown nails are filed away. The cuticles are pushed back. The cuts in my palms are disinfected, are given fresh plasters.
Now the feet. The dog’s-nails are filed down. I smell horn. The calluses on my feet are anointed with emollient. The minutes are counted while they dry. Then the filings are rubbed off.
A quarter strikes in the sitting room, how many does that make? I’ve lost count. What could the time be? It feels like deep, deep in the night. No other sounds except those of these foolish ministrations, the click of the tweezers, the rasping of the files, the tchi, tchi, tchi of the rubber soles around the bed, the white cap that ascends and descends over parts of my body. Is she establishing a firebreak? Is it to save time when I have to be coffined? Her lips now and again relax out of the straight line, they gape, as if she’s gasping for extra breath, now and again she compresses them completely, keeps them tightly pursed. A notch between her eyebrows. I can’t see her eyes.
Agaat recovers the faculty of speech when she beholds my hairy shins.
Orang-utan, she says. She clears her throat.
I don’t want to know what your armpits look like by this time. Stubble-field! Don’t let us forget about them!
She takes her magnifying glass, inspects my face.
And the stubble on your chin. And just look at how your eyebrows curl up. Little brushes in the nostrils. Heavens, seems to me there are two evenings’ work here.
Her voice is thick. She stands back. She takes off her glasses. She rubs her eyes.
Let’s just shave the old legs and then go to bed, she says, tomorrow is another day.
My left leg is soaped. The first stroke draws blood.
Thin, she gets out, too thin.
Razor in the air she stands and looks at the blood trickling a crooked little line through the lather, blotting the soapiness pink before the rivulet divides and drips onto the sheet on either side of my calf.
Yes, look, Agaat. Now you’ll just have to look well. Because there you have what you’ve been looking for. It’s only blood that’s inside me. Replete I still am with it. Heavy and dense I am with blood. And that is all that will flow from me if you make a hole in me. Blood! No ready-made pictures to make your skin crawl, nor a tent full of entertainment, that thing on my shin is no peep-hole of a kaleidoscope in which you can make glass fragments tinkle in pretty patterns. The costumes are your brainwave. The orchestra. The stage set you carted in here. It’s behind your curtains that the play is waiting to commence. You will have to produce the lines. Because the void is in you.
The darkened coulisses.
Like gills they drape layer upon layer.
I hear the effort of your breathing.
Rippling.
…
Was it after that night, the night that everything changed between you? Was it two days after that that Jak broke down?
That night, the night that elicited it all, that was in the time when you started fighting anew for your marriage, when Jakkie was starting to grow up and a playmate appeared at table from time to time. With all your might you tried to cultivate a more loving manner, for a year or more you’d consciously tried to look more kindly on Jak, also for Jakkie’s sake. He was quick to pick up tension between the two of you and then he would withdraw himself from everybody and everything except Agaat. Sensitive, just like you, was the child, even though in appearance he was Jak’s child in every respect. To and fro you could gaze at that time, at your husband at your child and back again. With Agaat following every movement of your eyes.
There is something to you, there must be something in there, you thought when you looked at Jak’s face. You refused afresh to accept that he was just a pretty shell. Late at night when you were on your own, you tried to get yourself in the mood with wine, with your old pieces of sheet music, accompaniments, almost forgotten, that you dug up out of the piano stool and played to yourself haltingly and sang to, after the example of the great singers on Pa’s old records, Ferrier, Flagstadt, Schwarzkopf. So, somewhat mellowed, you managed to go to Jak in his stoep room more regularly. You switched on his bedside lamp because you wanted him to look at you, at the new black nightgowns that you had ordered by post to save yourself embarrassment in the shops in town. Every time he had swept the switch back with the flat of his hand. And every time it had been a few minutes’ scuffle in the dark, without a word or a caress.
But you didn’t want to give up. You were alone, it felt worse in your forties than ever before. Not that Jak ever had a wandering eye as far as you were aware. But nor did he have an eye for you any more.
What year was it that night? Sixty-nine? Or was it nineteen seventy already, seventy-one?
It was an evening in early summer, October, you could hear the rushing of the drift, full after a good winter. You were standing on the stoep after everybody had gone to bed and you thought, Milla, is this what your life has come to? Your only child in a conspiracy of games and secret language with his nursemaid, your husband estranged from you in his own wing on the stoep. What have you retained of it all? Of your education, your music, your books? Only Grootmoedersdrift? And what good did it do you? All the struggling to get the farming going smoothly, only then to be left feeling so loveless and forlorn?
Just like your father, you thought. And just like your mother.
You caressed your own body. What a waste, you thought, what a pity.
You wouldn’t give in. You were different from her, different from them. You would make an extra effort.
That night it was.
You went and picked a bunch of blue larkspur and yellow fennel branches in the garden and arranged them in a vase, opened all the doors and windows of the house so that the sultry evening air could move freely through it, switched off all the lights and lit candles, opened a bottle of wine, took out the crystal glasses and went to have a bath, massaged your body with fragrant cream, brushed your hair in your new Liza Minnelli style that could best camouflage the shocks of hair and misplaced crowns on your head. You remember it, a touch of make-up around the eyes, the full-length satin petticoat. You looked at yourself in the bathroom mirror. The damage of years of demolition work was visible already, but like this, in a sentimental mood with a few glasses of wine in you, excited by the music, your face was soft, your lips relaxed, your eyelids seductive. You did not want to look at yourself for too long. You did not want to see what lay right under that voluptuous radiance. You were amazed that you could produce such an image at all.
The music you selected to suit your mood. Jak usually rolled his eyes at your music. A Strauss waltz he could just about tolerate. But this was not a night for Viennese waltzes, it was a night for violas, for mezzo-sopranos, for dark, melancholy sex.
What did you play that night on the old turntable? A cello sonata by Rachmaninoff? Lieder by Brahms? O komme, holde Sommernacht? Meine Liebe ist grün? And lieder by Schubert and Schumann? Der Hirt auf dem Felsen? Widmung?
Let me satiate myself with it, you thought, let me charge myself with all these subtle European yearnings. Let me ignite his blood with these melodies in my body, through osmosis.
What a massive over-estimation of yourself. To expect that you could attract him again after all the hard words, the slaps and the jibes and the grudge he bore you. To dream that surely there could someday be something more somewhere.
There was more to him. Much more than you could imagine at that stage.
That was your problem, Milla, a lack of imagination. You read him wrongly, looked past what was in him, you could assess him only in your terms, couldn’t imagine that anybody, even Jak, shouldn’t be able sometimes to yearn exactly like you—for tenderness, for excitement, for eyes mutually intoxicated.
How in God’s name did you conceive this notion?
Romantic German Lieder! That had much to do with it.
Sehnsucht. Lust. Wonne. Duft. The words alone had enchanted you as a student, the impossibly beautiful melodies. You would never recover from it. But wasn’t it a bit much to expect that you would, on wings of that kind of song, consent to being a muse for life in the Overberg the other side of Swellendam, to somebody, the son of a provincial doctor?
You were forty. You knew enough at that stage to be able to live with irony. You need only look around you and there were other realities, perhaps other songs that would be better suited to your world, other words to rhyme with and to sing.
Ewe, ram, kloof, buttermilk, barley, pizzle, ruttish, bluegum, wattle, lucerne flower, lark.
But that night irony was not in your repertoire. To you Grootmoedersdrift was all ‘rieselnder Quell’, all ‘flispernde Pappeln’, and in your slippery black satin garb you wandered through the sitting room to the left wing and pushed open Jak’s door and went to lie on top of him and kissed him in the neck gently.
He mumbled impatiently but it was clear that your advance had an effect on him. You unbuttoned his pyjamas and stroked his chest, you put your hand into his fly. You took his hand and pressed it between your legs so that he could feel your moist pubic hair.
Not that such doings had anything remotely to do with ‘Frauenliebe und –leben’ or a ‘girrendes Taubenpaar’, but you thought you knew how you had to handle him. You thought so.
Come to me, you whispered in his ear, come, I’m in the sitting room, I’m waiting for you.
You put on a new record, a selection of Schumann songs, and went to lie on the sofa with a glass of wine in your hand.
Maja of The Spout! If you think back on it now! What third-rate play-acting!
Jak appeared in the door sleepily. His hair was rumpled, his pyjamas unbuttoned, the state of his excitement evident.
Come here, you said, come taste this wine.
It’s the middle of the night, Jak said, you’ll wake up everybody.
You opened your arms to him.
Good Lord, Milla, why here? What’s got into you? Jak asked.
It was your reply that was wrong, your reply to the question of what had got into you.
Love, you said, love and longing for you.
You’re sozzled, that’s what, Jak said and gathered his pyjamas in front. He looked aside to where you’d placed the wine and the flowers on the table next to the silver candlesticks and shook his head.
You got up and pressed yourself against his back and moved your hands along his flanks.
What’s with you? Are you randy all of a sudden because you’re in love with somebody else? Jak asked. What would make me good enough all of a sudden, it’s not as if I can do anything right in your eyes, is it?
Don’t talk like that, you pleaded, you know there’s always been only one man in my life.
Jak snorted, took the wine out of the ice bucket, looked at the label, took a long draught from the bottle and put it back.
Do you really not love me at all any more then, Jakop, you asked in his ear, just say that you love me, just hold me.
Why did that infuriate him so?
He turned round and grabbed you by the shoulders.
You, he said, you with your needle-sharp intellect and tongue to match, you’ve always been too simple-minded to understand that it doesn’t work like that. Love is not something one asks for.
But you never give it to me, I do so long for it, I’m alone, Jak, I need you.
He let go of you and waved his hands about his head.
Jak, you said, smell the night, and went and stood in front of him and moved your pelvis against his.
We’ve made everything on the farm as we want it, can’t we also try to make each other happy?
You took his hard penis in your hand. He pushed you away.
Leave me alone dammit, he swore, I’m not your toolbox!
You let the straps of your petticoat slip down your shoulders and pressed your breasts against him.
No! he said, no, Milla! and pushed you away, stood away from you, glared at you until you covered yourself with your hands. At last you could no longer bear his stare. You lowered your face into your hands. You collapsed onto the sofa.
Just tell me what I do wrong, you sobbed, I no longer know . . .
What you do wrong?! No, my dear Milla, you do everything perfectly right, all the way to the stage swoon, let there be no mistake about that. Right, I’ll tell you what I think. You think I’m stupid. You think you can play with me. Who do you want to look like in all your silly get-ups? Elisabeth Schwarzkopf in Some Like it Hot? It doesn’t work, you know. A bloody scrap of black lace, after all the years of breaking me down and disparaging me. I’d rather go and pull my own wire, thank you!
No names, no roll-call, he said, and turned round.
Jak, wait, you said, but he wouldn’t hear you.
Jak, wait! he mimicked you in a whingeing voice, and gave the dining-room table a shove. You nauseate me, that’s what, I puke from your affectations.
With a hiccup the table rolled off the edge of the carpet, the bottle of Nederburg Rhine Riesling chinking in the wine holder, the larkspur trembling in the vase, the candle flame juddering in the candlesticks. Jak gave it another hard shove. As far as the furthest wall of the sitting room it rolled, past the half-moon table with the white swans of blown glass, and stopped next to the gramophone under the portrait of your great-great-grandmother.
Poor Jak de Wet, look at him, see what his wife has made of him, Jak said, as if addressing the portrait. First the stud bull. Then the obelisk. What dost thou say, O Great-great-grandmother? You are after all the origin of the world around here!
Jak kicked against the table-leg. The table bumped against the wall. The ice bucket fell down and the bottle broke. The record got stuck. You saw the needle in the pick-up head slide and bounce over the grooves. Will you ever forget the disfigured song, the treacherous smell of fennel?
Du meine Seele, du mein Herz Herz Herz Herz,
Du meine Wonn’, o du mein mein mein Schmerz,
Du meine Welt, in der in der in der in der ich lebe,
Mein Hi Hi Hi Himmel du, darein ich schwebe be be . . .
Was that when you saw Agaat standing in the door? Could you read her face? She was half in the shadows. You saw her eyes shine.
Go away! you signalled with your eyes, what are you doing here? Vanish!
She resisted you. There she was, in the middle of the night, perfectly pleated, cap and apron and all, reporting from the backyard. She was barefoot. With an unfathomable countenance she stood there, broom and scoop ready in hand, and listened out the last phrases of the song.
Du hebst mich liebend über mich,
Mein guter Geist, mein bess’res Ich!
Soundlessly she approached and lifted the needle off the record, replaced it on its cradle.
How much had she heard? Had Jak heard her come in by the back door before you saw her?
Aha, the stage hand, Jak said, like a moth to the flame. He took one pace, stepped on a shard and swore, lifted his foot over his knee and removed a piece of glass.
On his way out he rolled the wine cooler towards Agaat.
Let the one foot not know what’s befallen the other, he said, please do see to it that she cleans it all up nicely for you here, Mrs de Wet, and kindly make sure that she puts on shoes, otherwise she’s liable also to tread on a splinter.
You remained sitting on the sofa with your head in your hands, listened to Agaat sweeping up the glass, packing away the records in the shelf and the music books in the lid of the piano stool, leaving by the back door, without a word.
That was the last time, you decided, that German music would land you in a farce in your own sitting room.
That was how you dismissed it. A farce.
What Jak said, all the terrible words, and what Agaat could have heard, that you banished from your thoughts.
But that was not the end of the German problems. The Simmentals were next and they came up for discussion two evenings later.
You could see all the time that Jak was upset about the night of the music, but it was too difficult to talk about it. And there was Agaat’s presence, whiter than snow spotlessly whitewashed and mockingly correct and attentive. You certainly didn’t want to add fuel to her flame.
How did it begin? It was before supper even, when you remarked in the bathroom that you were tired. All day long you’d helped with the spraying against fruit-fly in the old orchard and afterwards saw to it that the anchor-poles were treated properly with rust-repellent undercoat and silver paint and that the young ewes were dipped against blowfly, all the absolutely essential maintenance on the farm of which Jak took very little notice.
Tired! he shouted from under the shower, it’s more than tiredness that’s wrong with you, you’re not all there, that’s what, it’s work, work, work as if you’re being driven by the devil and it must be this and not that, all the time with your melancholy mug and the whingeing and the whining, help me here, help me there, I can’t do everything on my own. And when midnight strikes, then you’re transfigured into the great seductress, half-naked tarted up with your wine and your candles and your stupid music, and keep me from sleep, what’s the matter with you? Do you think you’re Marilyn Monroe on a Texas ranch?
You looked at the sinewy muscles of his arms as he dried himself. Something about his hard body, something about the emaciated appearance of his ankles and wrists disturbed you, as if his joints were under extreme pressure.
It’s because there’s always too much happening on the farm, he said, this is not a damned experimental farm.
You knew where this was heading. That was always his defence when you pointed out on your statements how much money was being wasted on Grootmoedersdrift, through sheer neglect, through the wrong purchases, through cattle diseases that could have been prevented with the right care. He got angry when you brought it to his attention, the proof of squandering. The seeder with the disks instead of teeth that he’d bought, when you’d told him all the time, disks don’t work on shale, the stones get stuck in them and then the disks drag, wear away on one side and then the whole thing’s gone to glory, the rowels that he never remembered to remove from the hoppers after sowing-time, so that they were rusted through from the guano remains when sowing-time came round again. And if only it had stopped there, with neglected machinery, but then there was the mastitis problem with the Jersey cows. Isolate the sick animals, Jak, remember the walk-through foot-bath at the entrance to the stables, strain the first milk from every cow every day, you had to insist time and time again without his ever paying any attention to your words.
Every time his story was that dairy cows were just a nuisance, the slaughter-cattle were far less trouble and maintenance. But with his Simmentals that he acquired time after time things didn’t really go much better. They got eye cancer and every year there were deaths amongst the heifers calving for the first time. The vet’s bills for Grootmoedersdrift were astronomical. Jak’s solution was: Sell all the cattle.
Was that how it began? Jak’s proposal later at table? Sell the cattle herds, before they put us even more out of pocket. The market is good now, we’ll concentrate more on sheep and wheat, it’s lunacy to want this farm to look like a picture in a children’s book.
You made the mistake of protesting.
I’m not the one with the expensive hobbies, I’m not the one who’s forever experimenting with this that and the next thing, Jak. Nor am I the one who walks around with my head in a dream about how easy it is to grow rich from farming. It’s because you don’t inform yourself of all the factors, it’s because you don’t study all sides of a matter before you make an investment. That’s where the trouble starts.
You saw his face set in a grimace, but you couldn’t stop yourself.
If you want to buy Simmentals, then you select them by hand, Jak, and you see to it that each and every one has a decent pair of spectacles. Everybody knows that white faces are prone to growths. They’re spotted cattle and the spots must be on the nose and ears and around the eyes as well otherwise you sure as sure will have problems with growths. Don’t sit there looking at me as if I’m talking Greek, this isn’t Germany, the sun scorches the poor animals to a frazzle, seven, eight months of the year. But no, Jak de Wet of course thinks all he need do is take out the cheque book and phone the importer in South West Africa: Hello Mr Liebknecht, and I’m looking for seventy cows and the biggest champion bull south of the equator to service them, thank you very much, goodbye. And that then is supposed to guarantee success.
Come, Jakkie, Agaat said, I’ll clear later, let’s take a lantern, then we go and see next to the dam if the skunk that’s been eating the ducks’ eggs has stepped into the snare yet.
Jakkie looked at you.
Go ahead, you two, you indicated to him.
Jak clenched his teeth. He wanted to keep the child there to support his arguments. You knew about the promises when one day the cows fetched a good price, of the hang-glider and the microlight with which the two of them would inspect Grootmoedersdrift from the air and float over the kloofs like cranes.
How was a child to resist that? And how must you then present your case so as not to look like a spoilsport?
Sell the bull then if you must sell something, you said while Jakkie was still within earshot. After all we now have excellent offspring from him, younger bulls that would work just as well as him with the cows.
He glared at you. You could feel it was heading for a collision. You couldn’t stop yourself.
Was that perhaps what you wanted, Milla? a collision, after your humiliation two evenings earlier? A collision if a reconciliation wasn’t possible.
You pushed the point.
Year after year, Jak, you put the almighty Hamburg with the young heifers, year after year the calves are too big to be born independently, year after year I ask nicely: Please, get rid of the bull. It’s never you who has to deal with the consequences, you lie snoring and I’m the one who has to play midwife right though the night.
Are you stark staring mad! Jak exclaimed. That bull is worth its weight in gold to me, all the farmers of The Spout phone me to get Hamburg to cover their cows, I’m thinking of fitting out a sperm installation, then I spare the bull and make a profit out of him at the same time.
Jak, you don’t know what you’re doing, you said. Do you want to increase the misery artificially now as well? It’s very hard for the cows, they suffer unnecessarily, but what do you do? You always just walk away when it becomes too hard to behold, so you don’t see what it looks like, you don’t see how we have to damage the cows to deliver the almighty calves, one should have respect for the animals, one should assist them as much as one can . . .
For God’s sake just don’t start that again, Jak said.
You looked at his mouth, his lips distorting with exasperation, the ridges on his jaws as he clenched his teeth. Something in that excited you. What was it? You could never place it. You felt it in your own mouth, extra spit, and in your gullet, a kind of widening, in your gums, an itchiness. You waited for his delivery. You closed your eyes, so strongly did you feel it coming. His voice was high and hard, his speech-rhythm emphatic. You sat back, you knew how it was going to be, how it was going to enter you, the deluge of solid, heated sentences.
You’re imagining things, Jak, you said. I’m not starting anything.
Jak slammed his hand on the table.
No, of course not, Milla, nothing said, nothing meant, I’m imagining things again, the old story, but I know what you think, you always want to get back to that. That I left you in the lurch with Jakkie’s birth. That I deliberately kept myself out of the way because I supposedly didn’t want to behold your travails. That you were unnecessarily damaged in the process. Those are always your exact words when you talk about it, so don’t think I don’t know what you’re insinuating.
Jak got up, went and stood behind his chair, clutched the backrest so that his knuckles showed white.
He was too early, the child, that’s all! A whole ten days! How was I supposed to guess it? I wanted to help you with it, and I wanted to be present, of course, it’s my son after all! But you, you think the worst of me, always have, you don’t want to think otherwise of me, you decided long ago, in the very distant past, that Jak de Wet is the villain of this story and he’ll remain the villain. All written up and bound, what everybody most wants to read.
But do you know, Milla, what it’s like to spend your days next to a woman who always knows better? In whose eyes you can’t do anything right? For whom everything that you tackle is doomed in advance? What it’s like to live with someone who’s forever hinting that you don’t love her enough? Who only cherishes her own little needs, no matter who you are, what you are, the whole you, that feels and thinks . . .
Jak had never expressed himself like that. His voice was strained and his mouth trembled, but he held your eyes and pushed through with what he wanted to say.
. . . the whole you, he said, with his own thoughts and dreams, not only yours, Milla.
His eyes were fierce and gleaming. You wanted to get up and go and put your arms around him on the other side of the table, but he retreated. That was when you recognised it for what it was, exactly what the strange expression was. It was fear, more even, hysteria it was. He tugged at his collar as if he needed air.
Just you don’t come near me, woman, he said, you keep your hands off me! His voice was hoarse.
Jak, you said, don’t, please, don’t you see then? That’s what I’ve always wanted, that you should talk to me like that, so that I could know what you’re about.
You moved around the table to him. He groped behind him, knocked over an earthenware jug, he was almost against the curtains of the sitting room trying to escape.
Leave me alone, just leave me alone, I know you, I know who you . . . are!
Jak, calm down, you said, you’re overwrought, it’s not as bad as you’re making out, you’re imagining things. Come now, it’s only me, Milla, you look as if you’re seeing a ghost!
You! he screamed, short of breath, and extended his arm, pointed his finger at you. His hand was trembling. His chest was heaving.
He put his hand in front of his face, one hand around his throat. You were afraid he might have a fit. He plucked at his clothes as if there was something crawling on him.
You, you suck me dry, you worm my guts out of me, that’s what you do, a leech, that’s what you are! Nobody knows it, nobody can guess it, nobody can read between the lines, but don’t think I don’t see through you. Even if I’m the only one who sees, even if you fool everybody else around you. I hear how you talk to the neighbour’s wife, I hear it all. I don’t buy your story. I don’t buy it any longer, do you hear! I don’t buy it! Your tale that you spin everyone! The fine, intelligent Milla de Wet! How sensitive! How hard-working! Lonely! Long-suffering! It’s a lie, an infamous lie! You don’t suffer, you flourish, that’s what! You’re in your element here! A sow is what you are, an eternally ravenous sow with teeth like that! With wings! In Jerusalem! You’re in the trough! In the trough with your snout in the swill! That’s where you are! You batten on me!
Jak’s voice broke with the force of his shouting. He sank to his knees. His shoulders were hunched. The bones of his skull showed through the stubble. You poured a glass of water from the carafe on the table and held it out to him. He didn’t want to take it. He struggled to his feet. He stood in the corner of the sitting room pressed against the curtains, trembling, ashen-faced. You placed the glass of water on the coffee table, your hands in front of you to show that you weren’t coming closer.
I’ll go, you said, I’ll leave the room, just calm yourself. Rather go and lie down. Should I phone a doctor? you asked.
He averted his face. His Adam’s apple went up and down as he swallowed. The front of his shirt was stained with dark patches of sweat.
You went out onto the front stoep. You thought, what now? how to carry on? You looked back through the window at the uncleared supper table. The wine bottle was still more than half full. So Jak wasn’t drunk. You looked out over the yard to see whether you could see Agaat and Jakkie’s lantern. You could go to them.
They know that I’m good, mostly good, they know how gentle I can be. You remembered when you were small, how your father sometimes after he’d quarrelled with your mother, came and sat on the edge of your bed, and stroked his hand over your forehead, how your mother would later join him, and how they would try to effect peace between themselves by telling you bedtime stories.
You heard from the dogs in the backyard and the slamming of the screen door that they were back from the dam. Agaat would see to it that Jakkie had a bath and got to bed. You would go to them, to the steam and the aromatic soap and the white towels. You could get them to hurry up so that the table could be cleared, you could help Agaat with it, pack the leftovers in the fridge, and carry on with the normal things, with your life.
But you remained standing there on the stoep listening to Jak pouring himself a glass of wine. He came out and stood next to you.
There’s another story here, Milla, he said, you don’t want to hear it because you can’t manage anger and disillusionment and breakdowns. It’s doubly difficult for you because at the same time it’s energy that you can’t do without. But we know that you have your nose in the story-books all the time. Perhaps you’ll understand it better in the form of a fairy tale. Perhaps you’ll get the point then. I can come and tell it to your whole cake-and-tea club one day, because you are of the same species.
You didn’t look at each other. You gazed into the dark garden. You wrapped your arms around yourself.
Once upon a time there was a man who looked at himself in the mirror and thought that he was good enough, said Jak. He took a draught from his glass.
He was word-perfect as if he’d rehearsed it many times in his head. But he was silent for a long time before continuing.
I don’t know if I want to listen to this, you said.
You turned around and went inside, but he followed you. Agaat came in by the inside door and started clearing the table. Her face was set straight, but you could see she knew exactly what was happening.
Jak started again, more emphatically. Did he want Agaat to hear? You knew that he liked playing to an audience, but here it was as if he was calling a witness.
Once upon a time there was a man who looked at himself in the mirror and thought that he was good enough, he said again, emphasis on every word.
He started stacking the plates himself, something he never did. Agaat kept her eyes averted, but you could see her listening.
To and fro between the kitchen and the dining room the three of you moved as you cleared the table. Jak saw to it that nobody missed a thing. His voice was still hoarse with shouting, full of bitter and sarcastic intonations. It was not the first time that you’d heard something in this mockingly bombastic strain from him, there had been previous times, bits and pieces of it, but now it was a complete tale, causes and effects and details.
Agaat, you said, get going to the outside room.
She ignored you. Her eyes were fixed on Jak.
No problem, Agaat is welcome to stay, Jak said, she’ll be able to use it someday, let her hear by all means, it’s good general background for any domestic drudge. I can do with a bit of credibility in her eyes. She’ll know what I’m talking about.
The man, Jak continued his story, was a farmer, he was rich, he was clever, he was strong. So then he married a woman who admired his talents.
How good-looking you are, how good you are, how wonderful!
But it was all just lip-service.
It was because she thought herself weaker and more stupid than she really was. Ugly duckling, no swan in sight. Sob.
She thought, well then, I’ll just find myself an attractive husband, then it reflects on me as well.
But she felt no better even though he shone fit to burst. She was always worried about everything and always complained about everything. She complained about the earth and complained about the water and complained about the air and complained about the fire. Nothing was ever to her taste. She wanted her husband to right everything that she found wrong on their estate. The ploughshare and the sheep-shear and the stable and the table and the roof and the floor and the mincers and the pincers and the pens and the hens. She wanted him to be the master and control everything as she would do it herself if she herself could be good-looking and strong and clever and rich and be the master. Follow my drift?
Help me with this and help me with that, she whinged and carried on as if she had no hands. Even though she knew everything about farming she fancied that she could initiate nothing without him. She wept when he had to go on a journey and when he was with her, it had to be in such otherwise ways which he didn’t understand, that he got quite discouraged. Stuff me a teddy bear, whistle like a mackerel for me.
You don’t love me enough, you don’t care enough for me, she went around all day sighing and doctored herself with a glass of wine, with a sleeping pill, with cookies, with chocolate, with talking on the telephone.
And she was always full of complaints. My legs are heavy, my arms feel tired. And at night she sleep-walked through the house in her black shawls and with her fluttering eyelashes.
What strange behaviour, the man thought as he led her back to her bed. I give her everything, what else could she want from me? How can I ever make her happy? he wondered as he lay behind her in the dark until she calmed down. And thus he became a hero of introspection, without anybody’s suspecting it, a silent ponderer of his fate, but that’s best left there, dear members of the audience.
So what do you think happened?
Jak had found his stride. He looked at you and Agaat in turn. He opened the curtains and took a deep breath.
Wonderful, wonderful aromas of Grootmoedersdrift, he said, fennel and coriander, six of one and half a dozen of the other.
When he turned round, his voice was hoarse.
The man, he said, started thinking that he was not at all good enough. Not clever enough, not strong enough, not handsome enough, not rich enough. He thought he might just be the very worst farmer on earth.
And he was unhappy. But in truth he was angry. His heart was bitter.
And he, yes, sin of sins, he started manhandling his wife when she nagged. Slap, kick, shove, these three.
Jak held three fingers in the air, showed them in turn to you and Agaat.
He pushed her away when she begged that he should hold her. He scolded her, and despised himself that he could be so cruel with somebody that he loved. Ai, ai, tsk.
And guess what this man did then?
Jak, that’s enough, you said.
He ignored you, closed the passage door so that Agaat couldn’t get out there.
Guess what the wretched man did then? Here, Milla, have a little glass, don’t think I don’t know who drinks my brandy late at night.
The man trained to become stronger and farmed to become richer. The fool. He read to become wiser and bought the best clothes to look better in the mirror.
But all of this was of no use.
His heart was sore. And his wife just badgered him the more.
You’re going to leave me, she mewled, tomorrow you’re going to pack your bags and abandon me, I know it. When men turn forty, then they start cheating on their wives, all the psychologists say so.
What could he do? What does a man do with such erudite aspersions? The man protested for all he was worth.
Jak put his hand on his heart and looked at the ceiling. I shall never abandon you, what did I do to be distrusted like this? Woe is me!
And then his wife showed him her titties anew and lifted her little dress and pouted her little lips and praised him in front of the guests.
Behold, my husband, he is the best that there is and my husband says this and my husband says that and you should be glad that I’m sharing his wisdom with you.
His jacket that was hanging from a chair, Jak hooked over his shoulder, with his free hand he brushed a few crumbs from the table.
But flattery means nothing, that we all know, don’t we Agaat, your missis here also has nothing but good words, not so, about your service, and how she can depend on you, she tells it to all the neighbours’ wives, to her book club, no matter what she’s done to you in your life and how she treats you behind the scenes and all the things she suspects you of, hmmm? And you do your very best every day, don’t you, to show her how good you actually are, hmmm? Do you think you can convince her, my girl?
Jak, leave Agaat out of this, it has nothing to do with her, you said.
Jak struck himself against the forehead.
Oh dear, how could I ever make such a mistake?
When he resumed, it was softer, his eyes flickered to and fro between you and Agaat. He spoke rapidly.
But with the years the man ceased to trust his wife’s attentions. She started setting his teeth on edge. Teeth on edge, yes, finger in the sea anemone. Schlupp! Brrr! He knew that all her compliments were merely a plot to keep him with her, to get the spanner round the nut, as we say in the Overberg. And oh, the poor man, as luck would have it, he had been blessed by the good Lord with such a handy monkey-wrench. How does that poet of yours put it again, Milla? Why were we crucified into car mechanics? But that’s not the point. The point is: who else could siphon off his oil so expertly? But he knew that the siphoning was nothing other than hunger, and it froze him to the bone.
Pretty story, don’t you think? Aren’t you applauding yet? Anybody for film rights? Or an option on the material? For a learned case study? Jak made his voice deep and theatrical for the conclusion.
And so they lived. What could satisfy her hunger and thirst? His blood, his marrow, his soul? Was that what he had to give in exchange for her compliments? Compliments, yes, you heard aright. Not love? you ask, isn’t that what he wanted from her? Her love? Where then can the love be in this tale?
Jak cleared his throat, spoke in a sing-song voice, his hand to his side as if he were doing a folk dance, Oh no, no, no my Milla, no, self-love, I tell you, self-love, the malignant, the contagious kind, that unfortunately is what this tale is all about.
So I am sorry to disappoint you, my dear ladies. All that I know further is, the farmer got thin and his wife got sickly but they couldn’t do without each other.
Who would deliver them from their misery?
Their cattle?
Their stranger within their gates?
Their only-begotten son?
Their faithful maidservant, who worked for them?
To be continued, Jak said, and turned away to the front door.
Jak, wait, please, stay with me, let’s talk, it’s not true, you said, you can’t do this to me, Jak, don’t go. Jak, what’s to become of us?
His face was white and his eyes gleamed. You felt you as if you were going to faint. You clung to the edge of the table. You felt Agaat looking at you. Was there a trace of a smile on her mouth?
What’s to become of us? Jak echoed, he looked from side to side at you and Agaat. Is that what the two of you want to know? Well, all I can say is: Please be patient, your curiosity will be rewarded. Otherwise, do use your imagination in the meantime, between the two of you you can calculate the precise degree of heat at which the earth will perish.
He went out and drove the bakkie out of the garage, drove into the night.
You stood on the stoep and watched him open the gate and close it again, first the white beam of the headlights and then the red glow of the brake-lights on his trouser legs. Would he have had it in his head by then already? He obviously had more in his head than you’d thought. You felt that he had plans. You felt that he was in resistance, you could see his desperation, from his body, from his eyes. You were shaky. Your heart was beating wildly. You told Agaat to mix you a sleeping-draught.
…
clear out! clear out! the whole caboodle is up for auction then you who remain behind can start afresh from scratch throw out the silver hand-bells for the table-summons for whom would you want to ring it anyway? the red copper and the brass the ornaments without reason throw them out! porcelain dogs! dark-brown diana with the wolves at her hem! reading nursery couple on the half-moon table, what a misplaced idyll! the silver coasters engraved with canadian swamp cypresses where in god’s name does it all come from? the drift the vlei the mountain pictured oval mirrors stuck-together vases woven hangings birth-plate of delft blue take it give it to him when he comes or wrap it in foam and bubble-wrap and post it to the north gathered lamp-shades blown-glass necks of preening swans framed portraits the talcumed bloom of my great-grandmother my great-grandfather’s waxed moustache mustard-yellow curtain tassels pewter ashtrays copper indian shoes cast-iron doorstops compotiers on precarious stems behold all this work of their hands cast cavities forged fillings riffled textures ornate weights leather upholstery chintz velvet macramé nests where spider and mite and self-satisfaction breed dense banal things that give a name to nothingness clear out the wardrobes! court shoes shift dresses wrapover skirts culotte pants double-breasted jackets bat-sleeve coats cable-pattern jerseys button-front cardigans raincoats windbreakers church hats beach hats pantyhose maidenform cross-your-heart bras step-ins panties don’t give it to the servants they’ll just fight about it select for the kitchen the essentials do away with the multitude of mixing-bowls the meat-mincer the dough-paddles endless breadboards sharpening-rods redundant knives wooden spoons plates from broken sets with autumn leaves empty bottles under the sink old pyrex dishes blackened pots the thick-lipped lieberstein cups the cracked römertopf the stained porcelain the worn gilt edges the faded glazing the lidless soup tureen the stopperless carafe the old enamel jugs the buckets and the cans and the zinc tubs with the slow leaks the sixty labelless frisco tins the brasso and the silvo with nothing as last dregs throw away the plastic bands and pieces of string and used sheets of silver foil the bags full of bags full of bags plastic paper string I must die in a year
…
16 May 1968
A. now measures Jakkie every week—Friday evenings much ado about his supposedly growing so fast. Have just again observed the operation there in the passage she calls it keeping up-to-date the ‘growth rate’. He has to take off his shoes & exhale & open his ribcage & stand with his heels against the skirting board & his back up straight & his head to attention against the ascending ladder of pencil marks from each preceding birthday.
Suspect it’s just an excuse that A. thinks up to touch him because of course he’s starting to get shy nowadays. She presses & pushes his shoulders & neck & knees as if she’s trying to stop him from changing sometimes I’m scared she’s doing him some harm & then she brings the ruler & places it square & level over his crown & makes a small pencil line. Have just seen her holding him round the throat with hr strong hand while he’s standing bolt upright against the wall with eyes shut tight. But you’re growing way past me now you’re going to get an Adam’s apple just like your father just feel this almighty thick gullet.
What are these other lines? I hear Jakkie ask there at the end of the passage. Reply: low-tide mark depth of the drift height of the time length of the shadows who can tell? it’s an old house maybe it’s your mother who was measured there or perhaps your grandmother.
Who posted letters here? asks Jakkie & he clappers the copper flap of the post-slit. Internal correspondence says Agaat perhaps there was somebody in quarantine she says. What is quarantine? asks Jakkie. That’s when you don’t know what disease someone’s suffering from then you isolate them otherwise they infect the healthy people then they communicate only in writing because talking is too dangerous because the germs live in the breath.
In passing I got an almighty look from A. What does she want me to say? What would Jakkie make of it if he knew? Does she want to protect him from the knowledge? Or does she want to protect me? Or herself? Suspect in any case J. has already told him everything. Although perhaps he’d rather hush up the past from his son.
Concerning Jakkie’s birth there are several stories. One story is that A. changed into the noonday witch & caught him on the pass & stuck his tail into a pillowslip & chopped it off with an axe before de-hairing him further. But there are also always new stories & there is the last bedtime story that must always remain the same & of which I never can make out the ending.
I suppose it’s time for the facts of life. Wonder if I should leave that to J. Perhaps A. has also in that left us far behind. Saw her the other day standing there on the front stoep with him hr little hand on his shoulder & pointing with the other hand down there by the river the stallion pawing his front legs in the air trying to get on top of the mare.
15 July 1968
A. & Jakkie’s games—something about them I find disquieting nowadays. Do so badly want him to mix with children of his own age. Time that he went to school again.
They call each other from long distances. The game is apparently to see who has the finest hearing & turns up within a reasonable time. Sometimes it’s a terrifying hissing deafening between-teeth-whistling & hammering on the yard gong in season & out of season & a sounding of the lorry’s hooter fit to wake the dead. Put a stop to that the shouting with the hands in front of the mouth is bad enough. What on earth could fascinate them so about it? The one or the other vanishes into thin air & then the agreement is apparently to leave something behind in the vanishing-place like a handkerchief or a bottle-top (as proof of how far you could hear). The latest variation is the ram’s horn. The notes don’t really vary much. Sometimes though the duration of the notes & the intervals sometimes longer sometimes shorter. Just now again I was standing on the front stoep & heard one of them sounding up from somewhere in the mountain. Lugubrious it sounds plaintive it must have been A. she has a tremendous lung capacity from blowing fires into life in her fireplace & then very faintly from somewhere behind the ridges Jakkie answered. To & fro went the calling on the horn a code if I had to guess. What could the message be? Without content it would have to bore them very quickly but apparently they can carry on with it into all eternity.
12 September 1971
A. learns everything with Jakkie from his schoolbooks, asks him his idiomatic expressions & his multiplication tables. He teaches hr what they sing at school. Land of our fathers. She knows more verses of The Call of South Africa than he. You’re making it up! he says & she shows him in black and white in the old FAK. You sound just like a donkey when you sing she says stay in tune now! Do hope he retains his love of singing after his voice has broken. A lyrical tenor I would guess.
16 September 1971
Am all of a sudden not allowed in the bathroom when Jakkie is having a bath. Not J. either. No, he’s too big now says Jakkie but not for A. no she’s allowed. In & out with pyjamas and clean towels all bustle and display for my benefit. Sits with him on an apple box while he baths & chatters (have already removed the chair from there to discourage hr but she takes no notice). Had to go and fetch a bag of down in the little store for two new pillows and stuff them there in the backyard otherwise J. will complain of the mess & then I saw through the steam the movements. A. adding water or getting up to wash his back. Then I heard him ask her: Where do you come from? what does your name mean? Long stories she spins him. Couldn’t make out everything. She teases him he laughs and giggles he persists with his questions. A. says: I crawled out of the fire. Isn’t true says Jakkie you’re lying he says. Is true she says I was dug out of the ash stolen out of the hearth fell out of a cloud came up with the fennel washed down in the flood was mowed with the sickle threshed with the wheat baked in the bread. No seriously asks Jakkie what kind of a name is that? nobody else has a name like that. Baptised like that left like that. But it’s actually A-g-g-g-g-gaat that goes g-g-g-g like a house snake behind the skirting board. Gaat Gaat Gaat says Jakkie, sounding the g in his throat as if he’s gargling, it’s a name of nothing. That’s right says A. it’s a name of everything that’s good. It’s everything and nothing six of one and half a dozen of the other.
So there she was singing him an odd little song with Scripture thrown in an odd tune I’m writing it up here what I remember of it. Perhaps J. is right A. not a good influence on Jakkie. Can’t put my finger on it. After all she got it all from me but what she makes of it is the Lord knows a veritable Babel. Doleful in a way that makes me want to hide my head somewhere. This person!—how in God’s name did she get like that?
I’m the ear of the owl
I’m the eye of the ant
I’m the right of the rain
The song started off quite low & went higher & higher & faster & faster. Made me think of a choral piece. Which composer? Can’t think that I would ever have told her about it can hardly remember it myself it was so long ago at university. I write your name on the sand & the snow on the white loaf of my days. Everywhere on everything that is dear to me, I write your name. And by the power of this word I shall start my life anew. I was born to call you by your name: Freedom. Something like that. But A.’s song was about something else. Couldn’t make head or tail of it.
I stand sentry at the meal of the mealy-mouthed jackals (here she sings in high head-tones)
I’m the meal of the first milling
Rejoice oh young man your joy is short-lived
I’m the rising of the dough
The lump in the throat
I’m the mouth of the mother
I’m the faith of the father
And the babble of the baby in the bath
Come come bath in my hands
my hands my song of deformity (could that be? perhaps I misheard here? & it just went on and on)
I’m the riches of the ridges
The palms of palmyra are mine
Where’s the what of the wattle?
Where the fen of the fennel?
With me!
I’m the end of the river-bend
And the breadth of the Breede
I’m the why of the whynot
I’m the where of the nowhere
I’m the blood of the bluegum.
Stop stop! Jakkie shouted please stop that’s enough! No that’s what you wanted isn’t it! A. said now you must listen! & she teases him because he doesn’t want to get out of the bath naked in front of her & he can’t run away & he just has to stay and listen there until she’s finished singing & then she sang even louder to irritate him & then she patched together a little tune with talking in-between a whole performance there in the steam condensing ever more densely on the windows.
I’m my brother’s keeper
His white apron strings
And the ash that turns to ashes
I have the tongues of fire of men and of angels
The riddle of riddle-bread I know
But my tongue is a stake in my mouth
Coals of fire I heap upon my head
Yes, less than lesser
The least amongst you
Bushwillow cedar and wild olive
The turn of the wheel is
the curl
of the tip
of the maidenhair fern
am I
On and on it went in that vein. Jesuschrist Agaat says Jakkie but you really can sit and sing a lot of shit on a box get going I want to get out now! but I heard him just now mutter-muttering in his voice that’s starting to break—my child!—growing up so fast!—there in his room heard him singing over & over on A.’s contrived tune her heathenish song that carries on to all sides.
the why of the whynot
the where of the nowhere
the mouth of the mother
the faith of the father & the blood
the blood of the bitter bluegum.