W·H·O S·T·A·R·T·E·D T. F·I·R·E O·N M·O·U·N·T·A·I·N, I ask.
I look at the alarm clock. It’s taken ten minutes to spell out, even with Agaat’s abbreviations of articles and conjunctions.
Do you think it was me by any chance? Agaat asks with her eyes. She looks away quickly.
Yes, I signal, according to our customary code. One blink with both eyes.
She looks at me just long enough to catch my reply.
Hottentot madonna, she says.
She pushes at the side of her cap, she grasps the stick of the duster more firmly, she lets me continue, she taps on the chart. After every tap she looks at me. A tap B tap C tap D tap.
D is right I blink with my right eye. It must be so boring for her. Then she ticks from A again. I stop her on I, I is right.
And then she has to start tapping again from the beginning, as far as D. D·i·d We again spelt ‘did’.
D·I·D Y·O·U S·T·A·R·T· T·H·E F·I·R·E . . .
In the hayloft? she completes my sentence. Quite correct, that’s what I wanted to ask. She places the duster upright in the corner. End of conversation.
I should have stuck to the weather, to the rainfall figures, the sheep-stealing statistics for the year of Our Lord 1996. I should have kept to pure farming matters, to how she wants to run things henceforth here on Grootmoedersdrift. I should have known that by this time.
She comes to stand by my bed. She folds her hands on her stomach. Her reply comes direct and without hesitation.
The cream separator, she says, to ensure that it works properly, place it on a solid foundation and make sure that it is dead level. If a machine separates badly, that may be because it is turned too fast or too slow. The speed can be adjusted only when the milk-supply tank is half empty. If a first-class machine does not separate properly, it is because the supply tank is out of balance and vibrates excessively, or because the centrifuge is not calibrated in the spring when the milk is poor and again in the autumn when it is richer. Watch the spout where the cream runs through. If the cream tends to cover the spout, the speed is too high for the quantity of milk passing through the supply tank, if it emerges from the spout in scallops, it is being turned too slowly. If the cream falls from the spout into the cream dish almost but not quite perpendicularly, that is in the case of the vast majority of creamers about the right consistency. In any case rinse the supply tank regularly with skimmed milk.
Farmer’s Handbook. I was asking for it. Douse the fire with cream. Extremely original. What argument can I bring against that? She will recite all her texts to me rather than talk to me openly.
I flicker my eyes. Bravo! that means.
She ignores me. She bends to unhook the urine bag. She drags the chamber pot under the open tube to catch the drops. Tip, I hear it drop on the enamel, tip.
Leroux first came to fit the catheter for the urine bag and then came to make the hole for the gut bag. Home surgery with local anaesthetic. Agaat’s decision. The wound was supposed to heal first before the bag could be attached, but it wouldn’t. Now every time she empties the bag she has to perform a major disinfection around the stoma. She enjoys it. All my orifices interest her. The more I have the better.
I had to be moved as little as possible, was the consensus. The pan was too high for me. So lower the madam. That was what Agaat decided. Make a hole in her side. She threatens me every day with the feeding tube in my trachea as well, but I refuse. I don’t want another artificial portal punched into me. I don’t want to eat anything more. I want to talk. There’s a lot to talk about. Now that we’ve found a way with the alphabet chart.
She holds up the full urine bag for me to see. Dark yellow, almost amber-coloured it is, but not clear.
Cloudy, she says, but it makes the bluest blue.
She opens the stoep door, holds the bag far away from her, walks out with small brisk steps. I watch the mirror. There she is in image now. She knows the range of the reflection, she’ll see to it that she stays within it.
Douse the fire with cream, put out the flames with my last dark fluids.
I mustn’t complain, I was asking for it.
The hydrangeas are deep purplish-blue, just the colour for my funeral arrangements. That’s what she wants to say with the whole palaver of emptying the bag so conspicuously. She knows I can see her in the mirror. There are other hydrangeas around the corner as well where she could go and empty it out. But these are from the mother stock. Here she learnt to empty her own little chamber pot.
That’s the kind of risk I run since I’ve been able to talk to her. Her punishments become subtler. The message is: Your influence will be felt for a long time yet, even unto the capillary roots of the plants of your garden. I’ll keep up the old traditions for you.
I see her crouch down between the leaves. Only her behind sticks out.
I understand, Agaat. You turn your arse on the last conflagration that you’ve perpetrated here in the sickbay.
She stands back. She examines her handiwork. Beautiful voluptuous, purple orbs of flowers.
Pissy, pissy in the pot, who makes the bluest of the lot?
Am I imagining things, or is she shaking her head there?
How dare I ask her such things? Imagine, she an arsonist! Am I going out of my mind now?
Go ahead and shake your head, Agaat. I know it was you. Who else?
She puts the empty bag down on the lawn. Here come the little scissors from the top pocket of her apron. She snips one, two, three, four, five flowers. She moves out of range. She’ll go round the back to the kitchen to put them in water, then go and select a vase in the sitting room. Perhaps I’ll be lucky. Perhaps I’ll be given flowers next to my bed today. That will teach me to keep my questions to myself.
I wonder about the timing of the sudden appearance of our new means of communication. The old alphabet chart. Would she have remembered it all of a sudden out of the blue? A technique she read about long ago in the pamphlets and conveniently forgot about? Or did she avoid it because she was too tired? Because she realised she would be empowering me in my last moments here where I no longer hesitate to speak my mind? Because she could guess what would come out, what had to come out between us?
Perhaps it will never come out, perhaps there’s even less of a chance now than before. Perhaps that which has to be said has nothing to do with the truth.
And do I myself know what it is? Is the truth beyond what happened or didn’t happen, what happened how and where? Beyond the facts? I’m the one who’s being tested to see whether I have the words to arrive there.
Perhaps it was the maps that gave her the idea. The place names. The pointing at the dots of the towns till I nod, yes, tell me about Protem, tell me about Klipdale, what happened there, what we did there, who we saw there.
Shall I ask her? How did you come upon the idea of hanging it there, the alphabet chart, the old yellowed, varnished cardboard sheet with the fold down the middle, with the ornate capitals and the Bible pictures and the scenes from the history of salvation, stiff prophets and visions amongst grapevines and sheaves of corn?
I could ask, now that I can pose questions.
Why did you keep it till now? After all, you’ve known all along that I’m itching to talk, you could surely have guessed that I’m lying here brooding over all my life?
I could confront her with it. Perhaps she’d only wave a little blue book in front of my nose. Because she did find it after all then, the third parcel. About her first life on Grootmoedersdrift. Barely alive and I her source of life.
Now it’s the other way round.
Me dying and she to accompany me.
Who’s going to give in first? On the facts of the past? Or does our assignment lie here in this present?
Here I’m cutting my own throat now, she said when she hung up the alphabet.
Did I hear aright? She whispered it on the inhalation.
Here I’m cutting my own throat now.
But whose throat is it really? It’s my spelt-out words that she has to pronounce for me, it’s my sentences that she has to complete aloud for me.
Who’d want to bluff at the end? That everything is in order? Forgive and forget and depart in peace?
Perhaps it would have been better to have kept to eye signals to the very end, without any chance of a retort on my part. Perhaps we could have brought the matter to a workable conclusion if we’d resigned ourselves to the list of questions?
Are you cold? Are you hot? Are you hungry? Are you tired? Too dark? Too light? Do you want to poo? Do you want to pee? Do you want to read? Do you want to listen to SAfm?
Yes and no.
But it’s getting more complicated. Now she’s added to the alphabet auxiliary lists on slips of paper, opening phrases and conjunctions. She’s stuck them up there close to hand around the chart, short cuts by which we can arrive more quickly at the point. They stir and rustle with every draught or current here in the room, they flutter up and down when Agaat walks past, the loose slips, as if they were alive.
I am, I wish, I fear, I hope, I believe.
Because, but, and, nevertheless, notwithstanding, even so.
Necessary conjunction which betonkeneth concord, who wrote that again?
Milla. Jak. Agaat. Jakkie.
I’m no longer hungry, and I’m beyond tired . . .
Whom did I love in my lifetime and why?
I have, I will, I can, I want. Or not. I would be able to. I would have wanted. If I could have it over, then . . . What might have been.
There’s a whole grammar developing there on the wall. Every day there’s more of it. Question mark, exclamation mark, swearword, dots to mark an implication. A skeleton of language, written down in print and in script with a Koki chalk, bigger, more complicated than Agaat on her own, than I or the two of us together could think up. If it had to be fleshed out as well . . . muscles, skin, hair, nerves, glands . . .
How, when, who, why, what . . .
But my nerves are extinct and my muscles are moist cotton wool, my hair grey strands, my skin worn, my glands dry dumplings. My secretions trickle out of me through tubes. My poo and my pee are no longer my own. My sphincters no longer open and close me. I am one might say permeable.
Why would she want now of all times to invest me with language?
Up, down, under, before, behind, above, in.
Or perhaps ‘invest with’ is the wrong expression here.
Goad with, perhaps.
She is the one who takes up Japie. She can put him down whenever she wants. Or she can pick him up and walk out and go and dust somewhere. Or she can turn him round to point his stick at the map.
Japie mostly stays in the corner of the room. She holds him in the left hand, she always starts from the beginning again, she points, letter by letter. A is for Adam, B for Babel, C for Christ, our Redeemer and Lord. She looks at what I signal and she points and she points until there’s a word, three words, half a sentence, and then she starts guessing.
Don’t put words into my mouth, exclamation mark, I then have to spell out for her. Don’t anticipate my meanings, don’t impose the wrong stress, wrong nuances on me. Exclamation, exclamation, exclamation!
My protest is not of much use. She gets impatient when it takes too long. She wants to make my sentences flow for me. She wants me to sing. She’s looking for a rhythm. A march from the FAK.
Onward, onward, ever onward, by forest and by foam, ever shall we wander, ever shall we roam.
I can see it in her face. Shift-boss habits. She taps the beat on the railing of the bed. Then the words come.
Don’t shirk! There’s a nation to lead, there’s a war-cry to heed, there’s work! There’s no glory or fame, there’s no compromise tame, there’s but following the hot bright flame. Come on!
If I have managed to produce something, an exposition, complete with nevertheless and notwithstanding, it’s my turn to exert pressure. Then she must reply. It’s only common decency, her responding, I spelt out for her. But she often remains quiet. Or she says, next sentence please. Or she shrugs her shoulders, which means, you answer it yourself. Or she puts down the duster and walks out. Or she looks at me until I shut my eyes.
Put in a bookmark, she says then, then we can remember where we were, this is one of your long stories again, and I can’t see how it’s to end.
I was alone, I felt useless, I wanted to do something for my fellow humans.
She goes to stand by the stoep door and looks out. Or she takes up after a while where we left off, and leaves me talking to myself.
I did not realise what a big responsibility it would be, I did not think far enough.
Just go ahead and forget that I’m here, her face says, I just spell out everything for you and say it out loud so that you can hear what you sound like.
Jak was always against it and I resisted him, for years I resisted him but the pressure was too great and then I gave in.
She can’t always keep her voice neutral. She charges my sentences with her own resonances. Disbelief, emphasis, mockery. She adds on and improvises. To my own ears I sound like running commentary rather than original intention.
Do something for your fellow humans? Or do something with your fellow humans or to your fellow humans? Fellow human or in- or super-human? Or half human? Less human than yourself?
Sometimes when we’ve completed a sentence, she doesn’t repeat it at all, so that I lose my thread amongst stray words.
Sorry. Powerless. Guilty. I am. I shall be. But. How am I to. Die. Question mark.
Then she changes the subject. Or she says, for heaven’s sake get to the point, Ounooi, you’re much too long-winded again today.
As if there were endless days extending before me. As if tomorrow could be much different for me from today.
It takes so much time, this business. Clarity is not guaranteed. It causes misunderstandings instead, that we then laboriously have to clear up again. The tapping and winking and spelling is harder on my eyes than the splint ever was heavy on my hand. Her prefabricated phrases block me rather than help me, my language feels like a brutal instrument with which I’m torturing myself. How long will I still be able to blink my eyes? The left wants to droop shut, the right opens wider than I’m used to. If my eyelids freeze, that’s the end.
The chance, I’m getting a last chance. Perhaps I should rather associate freely than try to explain point by point, let her see who I’ve become in the meantime, here speechless on my bed, delirious, yearning, a poet of losses, a teller of legends.
The task weighs more heavily on my mind than the writing of my last words when I could still write. It’s more momentous than the making of my inventories for the clearing-out, my will, my self-determination codicil.
It’s more difficult than any last wish. It causes complications at a stage when she, and I, had hoped that things would become easier. Now the close will be more difficult than either of us could ever have predicted.
I can understand very well that she wants to keep the talking within limits, has established a fixed structure for it. She keeps us to it strictly. One hour in the morning, one hour in the evening.
Before she goes to bed, I’m granted another few sentences, if she feels the need herself, when she’s done reading from the blue booklets, the last parcel from the sideboard, the first lot that I filled with my writing, without abbreviations, full particulars with the explicitness of the beginner.
She took a long time to remove the string with which it was still bound. The first few days that it was lying here, she fiddled with the knot a few times, but then let it be again. At length she snipped it off with her scissors and started reading in a whispered intake of breath, as if she wanted to vacuum the words.
When she’s had enough, then she gets up, then she takes the duster. Then I know it helps her to talk to me, but mostly about trivialities. Harmless.
It helps her to believe that I’m harmless. She even wants to believe in my goodness, it seems to me. But then I have to be potent as well, because what would virtue be for Agaat without power?
That’s something she can’t tolerate.
If on the other hand, as happens on some days, she makes me out to be entirely bad, then she feels that she’s bad herself. And that she doesn’t want to be. That she can’t be. Her name is Good.
Would it be good to forgive me? It would be too easy. And it would solve nothing.
Would it be good to take revenge? It’s been a long time since that satisfied her, avenging yourself on a helpless victim is not interesting.
How can I help her?
Too many sentences to spell out. I must keep my text simple. I can’t tell her story on her behalf, and if she’s too tongue-tied and has too little pride to do it herself, then it’s not my fault.
How many Jerseys do you now have in your herd? That I’m allowed to ask. How many heifers are you going to sell in autumn? What’s your price? What does the market look like? She supplies the figures.
If you carry on like this, you’re going to be a rich farmer one day, I’m allowed to say.
What good is it going to do me? her face asks then. When she sees that I’ve caught her out in self-pity, she backtracks quickly. As with the tirade yesterday.
Yes, I just have to give, give, give nowadays to keep the labourers happy. The creatures of late seem to want to guzzle and guts, even steal the dogs’ food out of their bowls around the back. Before you fell ill they were still happy with flour and coffee and now and again their smoked pork and their sack of beans and onions and pumpkins. But no, now it’s a sheep a month on top of it, and then I have to provide for the women and children as well, if the one isn’t suffering from this, then the other complains of that. They eat you out of house and home and they’re too lazy to work, they just want to lie in their hovels. I told Dawid a long time ago the whole lot must go, I want casual labourers, or better still, I get in a team of Transkei kaffirs every now and again, they’re happy anyway with mealie-meal porridge and sour milk.
I said nothing in reply. And she knew why.
In the silence that followed, she took up her embroidery and sat working wordlessly for two hours. That’s the way it often goes since we’ve been able to talk, as if she’s trying to gather strength for the next conversation.
She’s sitting just too far away for me to see what’s she’s doing there on her cloth.
She’ll show me when she’s done, she says.
Apparently it contains all the stitches in the book.
Diagonal ripple-stitch, odd wave-stitch, step-stitch, honeycomb-stitch, blanket-stitch, hemstitch, paving-stitch, wreath-stitch.
There’s still a lot to fill in, she says, filling-in patterns for drawn-fabric work, sheaves, ears of corn, stars, eyelets, flowers, diamonds, wheels, shadow-blocks.
Some parts she has to unpick and redo, though much smaller, otherwise not everything fits in so well. It takes much longer than she thought to get everything in place, she says.
Everything? Every what thing? Rather say it’s a pastime till I’m in my place six feet under.
Sometimes when I can no longer bear it, the two of us together like this, trapped in the room, without any escape, I plead without disguise. I flicker through my tears. One eye flutters more rapidly than the other.
Please, talk to me, I want to talk, I want to explain things.
Sometimes she consents, but venture one sentence into the maze, and she stops.
Look for the butterfly, Agaat! You’ve seen it before! Show it to me!
But mainly she ignores it when I’m like that. Mouth set in a sulk. Chin out. Her eyes flash. The message is clear.
Your soul! Me having to look for your soul! Bugger your soul!
I can guess what she’s feeling, what sentences she’s addressing to me in her heart. Once I spelt it out for her word by word.
It’s too late for tears now, tears just make you choke. So choose. Choke or talk about things you can afford to talk about.
She pretended not to understand whose words these were.
I never cry, she said, you’re the one who cries.
Just so, I said.
She just gave me a look and walked out.
I’m not made of glass, she said later, while she was soaping my arms.
She was washing me very gently. I don’t think I’d ever felt her touch me so gently, as if she were afraid I’d break.
I’m not made of glass.
She knows she’s transparent to me, she knows I can read her thoughts and express them too. It’s no longer all that safe for her in this sickbay. She’s decided to restore my voice to me. And she wants to honour her decision. She knows she’s caught in her own snare.
Gently she soaped me. Once more on an inhalation she said: Not of glass!
She was washing my arm with her strong hand. The washcloth disappeared a long time ago. My skin is too thin. When she saw the dampness in my eyes, she stopped immediately.
No, not again, she said, and rubbed me dry with a rough towel.
That was yesterday.
This morning I woke up again with the headache. Through the haze in my head I wanted to understand it, the dynamic between us. I can’t understand it. It’s too difficult for me. I wanted to explain it when the talking-hour struck.
Then something entirely different to what I’d planned came out of me. Because I feel so powerless, so needy, then I attacked her, then I started casting aspersions upon her.
You and the fires of Grootmoedersdrift, Agaat. The fire on the mountain, the fire in the hayloft, was that you?
Accusations have always set her off. And complaints. And criticism. If I can’t mollify her, that’s the only alternative. I can anger her. And if I can anger her, I can get angry myself. That would be better than nothing.
Who’s the arsonist here on the farm? Who’s the great setter of fires amongst us?
That hit the mark. All that she could do, was to draw off my pee and get out and turn her backside on me to pick hydrangeas, the ones far down, those that are a bit tousled already with sun and water. The prettiest ones, the strongest, those she’s saving. It’s a matter of timing.
Blue-purple hydrangeas for my funeral, with the white dahlias and the white Joseph’s lilies, nicely rounded off with a little ribbon of crape, I can just see it.
The quarter-hour strikes in the front room. Here comes the preview. In the grey vase. The vase that was not on the clearing-out list. Could still be used at my funeral, I thought to myself. Scenes from coming attractions, as Jak would have said. Not yet quite the demure style of the funeral arrangement. Pretty, lively, informally arranged are the voluptuous blue heads with the yellow privet branches and the bronze-coloured foliage of the prunus nigra, sprays of abelia, orange Cape honeysuckle, a few orange roses. And to round it off, under the base, how else? a few large exuberant bronze leaves of coleus, the plant we call fire-on-the-mountain.
Just look at the hydrangeas, says Agaat, they’re flowering as if it’s Christmas, I must take cuttings.
She clears a space on the night-table next to me. Her neck is stiff.
Just picture it, is written all over her face, what it will look like on the half-moon table at the front door, there where the guests will be entering. Sincerest condolences, Agaat, it must be a great loss for you. Will that be good enough for you? Or do you think the orange and all the branches are a bit too wild?
If I could I would like to tap the stick of the feather duster on her face. Alphabet of the underworld. Percussion band.
Hands on hips she stands and surveys her handiwork. Well then, Ounooi? Looks as if you want to have a bit of a chat, we have half an hour left.
She takes the duster by the head.
We’ll gather lilacs, she sings on an inhaled breath.
A B C D E F G H
I blink H and A and G and swearword on the auxiliary list that’s supposed to indicate feeling.
Wow now, says Agaat, which one now?
Y·O·U, exclamation mark, I spell, N·O·O·N·D·A·Y W·I·T·C·H.
Well I never, says Agaat, how’s that for a parting shot. What else?
S·A·R·C·A·S·T·I·C, I spell, Y·O·U K·N·O·W W·H·A·T I M·E·A·N.
No, I don’t know, says Agaat, you’ll just have to spell it out.
F·I·R·E O·N T. M·O·U·N·T·A·I·N, I spell. I roll my eyes at the flower arrangement.
Yes, doesn’t it look pretty with the blue, says Agaat.
If I’m trying to be difficult here on my deathbed, is the message, she’ll pretend to think I’m senile.
Can there be a doubler barrel? How do I deal with it?
B·R·O·W·N S·U·I·T·C·A·S·E, I spell.
Where, when, why, question mark, Agaat taps for me on her scraps of paper. They flutter like leaves. I blink Y·E·S Y·E·S exclamation mark.
She puts down the stick. She reformulates my question for me in my own strain, with all my modulations of indignation. And with her own increment of pepper.
What, I ask you for the how-manieth time, happened to your brown suitcase that I put on the half-shelf of the washstand in the outside room, on the day of your birthday, twelfth July in the year of our Lord nineteen sixty, when you moved in there? What happened to all your possessions from the back room? To the pretty dresses that I hung up there for you on the railing behind the curtain, a red and a blue and a yellow one, specially made for you with my highly pregnant body and all? To your first shoes that I had bronzed?
Absolutely right, I blink. How excellently you can guess at the senile thoughts of an old woman. What is your reply to this?
Agaat stands back a little, hands on her stomach. She looks me straight in the eye. The cutting-up of an ox is her reply. Fluently she recites.
Sirloin, cut into flat slices and fried in a pan.
Wing rib, suitable for pot-roasting, bones may also be removed and meat rolled.
Flat rib, suitable for pot-roasting, may be rolled.
Prime rib, suitable for pot-roasting, may be rolled.
Mid-rib, suitable for pot-roasting, may be rolled.
Silverside and topside, suitable for corned beef, pot-roasting, biltong. Shank, may be roasted, but more suitable for salting and boiling.
Thick flank, may be salted and boiled or stewed.
Cheek, can be stewed.
Neck, for soup or stewing.
Collarbone, for soup.
Brisket, best suited to pickling and boiling.
Bones, are generally sold to kaffirs.
Tail, soup and stew.
Hoof and shin, brawn.
Pauper’s rib, for soup and stew.
Do you want to hear about the cuts of the birthday hanslam as well? Agaat asks, the nice fresh braai chops for the nice fresh kitchen-skivvy? The two of them, skivvy and lamb, both cut up much better than an old tough cow, let me tell you that!
She falls in with her stick. Oh Japie is my darling she sings, so early in the morning.
Next? she asks.
V·E·R·Y F·U·N·N·Y, I spell.
She waits for the follow-up. Doesn’t bat an eyelid. Lets me spill my guts. Fills me in. Tops me up.
W·H·A·T W·E·R·E Y·O·U D·O·I·N·G F·I·R·S·T N·I·G·H·T O·N M·O·U·N·T·A·I·N I·N Y·O·U·R U·N·I·F·O·R·M, question mark. S·A·W Y·O·U W·I·T·H B·I·N·O·C·S, full stop. F·U·N·N·Y S·T·E·P·S + L·A·T·E·R W·I·T·S·A·N·D E·A·R·L·Y M·O·R·N·I·N·G I·N Y·O·U·R C·L·O·T·H·E·S I·N W·A·V·E·S, full stop. S·A·T·A·N·I·C R·I·T·E·S, exclamation mark. M·A·I·D·S S·A·Y Y·O·U A·R·E P·O·S·S·E·S·S·E·D W·A·N·D·E·R A·R·O·U·N·D A·T N·I·G·H·T + L·E·A·V·E M·E H·E·R·E A·L·O·N·E, full stop. N·O·T T·A·K·E·N I·N B·Y Y·O·U·R I·N·N·O·C·E·N·C·E, comma, W·I·T·C·H, exclamation mark. = M·Y D·E·A·T·H N·O·T E·N·O·U·G·H F·O·R Y·O·U, question mark. O·N W·H·A·T C·L·I·M·A·X A·R·E Y·O·U S·E·T, question mark, swearword.
Agaat stands back from the chart, the wall full of fluttering bits of paper. She presses against her cap. She places the duster in the corner. This time her answer is taken from the embroidery book.
Shadow-work, she says, is a form of white embroidery that is within the reach of all because the technique is very simple. It is suitable for table linen, bedspreads, pillow covers for babies, bridal veils, blouses, christening robes, children’s clothes. Shadow-work is done on transparent cloth and from Italy we get special fine linen for the purpose. It can however also be done on silk organza or a good-quality Swiss organdie. Artificial fibres are not recommended.
M·O·C·K, I spell.
Mock turtle, says Agaat.
D·I·D Y·O·U D·R·O·W·N T. K·I·D T·H·A·T E·V·E·N·I·N·G O·F T. F·I·R·E, question mark. + W·H·Y, question mark. B·E·H·I·N·D M·E S·A·T·A·N, exclamation mark.
You’re really jumping around this morning, says Agaat, I can’t keep up.
She pulls her cap lower on her head, she stands alert for my next instalment.
W·H·Y D·I·D Y·O·U D·I·G U·P T. L·A·M·B E·A·R F·R·O·M T·H·E B·I·N, comma, W·I·T·H W·H·A·T S·U·P·E·R·S·T·I·T·I·O·N·S D·I·D Y·O·U I·N·F·E·C·T J·A·K·K·I·E, question mark.
It was my own hanslam, says Agaat, her voice uninflected. She looks out of the glass door.
What hanslam? Agaat always had nurslings, lambs, pigs, meerkat, every kind of nursling.
Sweetflour, says Agaat with her back to me.
Sweetflour? I remember Sweetflour. Discarded. One of a triplet. Full-milk Agaat fed her with extra cream and a teaspoon of clean slaked lime, from the bottle, eighteen times a day, at blood heat as her book says, reduced to six times a day, until she started eating oats and lucerne by herself. She was five months old and she came when Agaat called her. The one we slaughtered that day was a nursling wether with a fat belly.
Agaat turns back from the door. Her eyebrows on question marks. I blink at the board, show I want to spell something. She takes her stick.
Y·O·U L·I·E, exclamation mark, I spell.
I would surely never have made her slaughter her own hanslam? I would have checked up first. But did I? That ear wasn’t marked. That I remember, and Dawid had called I should come and have a look when he’d caught the lamb, but I didn’t go, I wanted to keep an eye, Agaat was busy ironing her first double sheet on her own that morning, I showed her how one folds it along its length on the ironing board, how one sprinkles water on it.
And, says Agaat, on top of that it was my birthday, twelfth July, you’d very kindly taught me that that was the day on which the Lord gave myself to me as a present. So then you forgot it in your hurry to get me out of the house. Then you pretended the outside room was heaven.
Agaat stuffs the knuckle of her small hand into her mouth as if she wanted to push in a stopper so that nothing more can come out of there. She regards me over the hand, for a long time. I see the entreaty in her eyes: Please, Ounooi, don’t force me to get angry, I’ve long since given up being angry, I don’t want to be angry, you provoke me, what is it you want from me? Tell me and I’ll give it to you, whatever you ask, if it’s within my power.
She stands ready with the stick.
H·Y·P·O·C·R·I·T·E, exclamation mark. D·O·N·T M·A·K·E T·H·O·S·E S·O·P·P·Y E·Y·E·S A·T M·E, exclamation mark. H·O·W M·AN·Y T·I·M·E·S M·O·R·E A·R·E Y·O·U G·O·I·N·G T·O C·O·N·F·R·O·N·T M·E W·I·T·H I·T, question mark exclamation mark.
It’s going too slowly. I think too fast. I only get the odd word out.
W·H·Y A·R·E Y·O·U O·N T. S·C·E·N·E S·O S·O·O·N A·T E·V·E·R·Y D·I·S·A·S·T·E·R W·O·N·D·E·R A·B·O·U·T Y·O·U·R T·R·U·E C·O·L·O·U·R·S S·I·C·K C·O·M·F·O·R·T·E·R F·I·R·E E·X·T·I·N·G·U·I·S·H·E·R S·L·I·M·E·K·N·O·C·K·E·R D·I·S·T·R·U·S·T D·E·V·I·L.
Agaat composes her own sentences from the words. I compose mine. They’re quite different, the versions that emerge.
That’s enough now, Ounooi, you’re just upsetting yourself. I can’t understand you. She puts down the stick.
I insist.
She picks it up again.
Y·O·U D·O·N·T W·A·N·T T·O U·N·D·E·R·S·T·A·N·D M·E, exclamation mark. Y·O·U P·L·A·Y D·I·R·T·Y, exclamation mark. D·O Y·O·U T·H·I·N·K Y·O·U A·R·E G·O·D W·I·T·H Y·O·U·R S·T·I·C·K, question mark exclamation mark.
By nature utterly indisposed, disabled and made opposite to all good, and wholly inclined to all evil, says Agaat.
H·O·W D·I·D Y·O·U G·E·T T·O T. D·A·M S·O Q·U·I·C·K·L·Y T·O P·U·T T. P·A·R·C·E·L W·I·T·H T. C·H·R·I·S·T·E·N·I·N·G R·O·B·E T·H·E·R·E, question mark. W·H·Y S·O D·E·V·I·O·U·S, question mark. Y·O·U K·N·O·W I C·O·U·L·D·N·T D·O A·N·Y·T·H·I·N·G A·B·O·U·T T·H·E W·H·O·L·E M·A·T·T·E·R, exclamation mark.
Agaat puts down the stick. Now I’ve got her. I know how angry she was about that.
Trailing-stitch, she says, morning glories, pomegranate pips, ai where are the days. Conceived in sin, I’d say. You too, you always imagined your hands were tied, with everything. But the work of my hands you were strong enough to pick up and throw into the dam! Tsk, I’d rather not think about it!
She lifts up my sheet. For a moment I think she’s going to pull it over my head. She folds it back neatly, pulls it up under my chin.
You think you can wrap me up here, I flicker. You think you can tidy up and finish off this whole story as you do with everything, but you can’t, it’s not in your sovereign power, you need me for it!
Whiter than snow, says Agaat, she strokes my hair.
I roll my eyes to the open books with the folded-back pages on the chair. She follows my eyes.
And she takes my eyes and she reads me direct, she no longer spells with the stick.
She bends her head, I feel the hard cloth of her cap against my temple. Softly she interprets my thoughts for me. She whispers in my ear with her sweet rooibos breath, I smell the borax in the starch.
I listen to myself. Would that be what I would say if I were suddenly to have my tongue restored to me? Can I believe my ears?
What do you think you’re going to achieve by rubbing my nose in what I’ve written in the diaries? the voice asks in my ear, a perfect imitation of how I talk.
It’s your story, it’s for your sake, so that you may have something in your old age to remember how you were rescued from destitution. How I made a human being out of you. You were nothing, you’d have stayed nothing, if I hadn’t taken a chance with you. I’m not saying I did everything right, I constantly made mistakes, I hurt you, I humiliated you, but by what example was I to measure myself? You know what it was like in those days. Your case was highly exceptional. But I tried, under the circumstances and by the light that was available to me, I tried. Now you’re making a circus of it.
A C·I·R·C·U·S! Agaat’s voice sounds the letters. There’s a pause before she recommences. I see the trailing-stitch on her cap, white on white violence.
It wasn’t easy. Nothing was easy about your whole story, let me tell you, it ruined my marriage. And look what I have to show for it now! A C·I·R·C·U·S, A C·O·U·R·T O·F L·A·W!
Agaat straightens up, she stands back, my ear feels cold without her warm breath. What will she reply to her own ventriloquism?
Didn’t know you were so interested in the little old books, Ounooi, but not now, I’ll read to you again tonight. Useful bits and pieces of all kinds.
She tidies up the blue booklets on the pile. For the first time I see the embroidery book and the Handbook and the orange FAK on the dressing table. Exhibits. Chapter and verse.
The lid of the bouillon pot, sings Agaat, must be removed overnight otherwise the bouillon will go off.
A recitative from the Farmer’s Handbook? What’s that supposed to mean?
She looks at me.
It doesn’t have the desired effect on me. I flicker at her: Go ahead and pronounce it now, Agaat! Stop your unfathomable parables. Go ahead and pronounce it all for me so that you can come to your senses, perhaps it will help if you can hear yourself say out loud what you think I think! What you think I ought to think! Mind rape, that’s what it is!
Again she bends by my bed, this time on the other side. Must my ears take turns in this devilish business?
Why do you torture me on my deathbed?
Is Agaat whispering that? In my ear? Am I hearing aright? Her voice is emphatic.
Why do you let me be ravaged by itching, push and pull my limbs, screw open my mouth, taunt me, threaten me with enemas and suppositories, dig in my ears as if you think I have ear-mite, have holes punched into me, shove tubes into me, cut my hair so that I look like a prisoner of war? Why?
She stands back. She answers from her own corner, a smile as if she’s ascending unto heaven. She opens her mouth wide.
When meat is cooked for the kitchen-maid or kaffir, she sings, or even for the house, it’s good to boil it in the bouillon pot for the first hour or so, to extract as much nutrition as possible into the water.
Again her lips are at my ear, I feel the moistness of her mouth.
Then why do you still leave me hanging? she whispers. Why do you come and stand by my bedside in the dark? Do you want me dead? What prevents you?
Sulphured fruit must not be eaten raw, comes her reply, a floating contralto, but first boiled again to drive off the sulphur.
How many voices has Agaat?
Calm down, Ounooi, she says, close your eyes now. Think of other things. You’re wandering again. But it’s not serious, just relax, I’m here, I’m staying with you, I’m not going away, here I am, right here.
She moves in behind the bed, above my head I hear the words that well up in me, lisping they drip from Agaat’s tongue.
And the slops you feed me! I’ll choke. And that will be too soon for you. You still want your pound of flesh from me, remember! Living flesh. What satisfaction would a dead liver give you? A dead heart? You want to pluck me out of the hole with a wire. Like a mole. Well, keep your wire! Soon I’ll be in a hole where even you won’t be able to get at me. Except if you dig me up to chew my bones. Bone hunger!
Agaat appears next to my bed. She looks at me.
How are we doing? she asks. She goes and writes something.
Who marks the day high up there on the calendar? The thirteenth of December, I recall and I remember. Could I have imagined it all? Am I dreaming?
She looks at me, smiles, writes something again.
Abracadabra, she says, twirls a little circle next to her head with her index finger.
Could she mean that I’ve lost my wits? I’m raving? It’s not me, witch! You’re the one who’s raving, you’re the one who’s trying to rave my rave for me! Not a word past my lips for three years now. The mute cannot rave! But they can hear!
There, there, Ounooi, don’t be scared, she says, it’s just the little light, it’s going on and off now. In your head.
That’s a good one! Interprets me to the brink of Babel, to the threshold of death. But there are limits! Back! Stand back! You’re too close! My death is of me! And my bed! There are boundaries!
Agaat goes to stand by the door. She clasps her hands round her body, the knuckle of the small hand in her mouth.
Take the stick, take the stick, I signal.
She comes nearer, takes the stick.
T·H·E·R·E A·R·E B·O·U·N·D·A·R·I·E·S, I spell, B·O·N·E M·A·G·G·O·T.
Agaat taps seven exclamation marks of her own. She puts down the stick. She bends her head over me, regards me, presses shut her eyes with the thumb and index finger of her left hand. And with the fingers of her small hand, mine. Her fingers are cold on my eyelids.
Rest, she says, it won’t be long now, we’re almost there.
The first letter that you intercepted was addressed to Jakkie at Langebaan, his official numbers and codes written in stiff black block letters on the envelope. You wanted to know what Agaat had been writing to him, sitting there in her room for hours on end.
The first letter, no it couldn’t have been the first. There were many. When you unfolded it the change in form of address struck you. No longer Dear Boetie as when he was at school or Dear Private when he was doing his basic training. Dear Airman Captain de Wet it was now. Your heart contracted inside you, sitting there reading next to the road, pulled off into a gate entrance on the way to town.
You’d told Agaat that Jakkie was now in a high-security position and that her correspondence wasn’t private. Jakkie had warned you and Jak. No searching questions about his movements, his further specialised studies, would be answered, and your private declarations and revelations might just end up under eyes they were not intended for. And here was Agaat’s camouflage now. All that she thought she could hide, was how close she was to him.
The words with which she concluded that letter, were even more poignant. No longer: Your loving Nêne. Respectfully yours, she now wrote. And no longer just Gaat. Now it was her full name: Agaat Lourier.
But as your eyes wandered over the densely packed lines, it was mainly the loving that you discerned, that was undiminished. It was in her descriptions. The jackal so delicately sniffing at the twig, its wide green eye in the night, as it approaches the yard with plans of its own. It was in the specific selection of things that she named. The three pink eggs of the little nightjar on the footpath to the old orchard. The way in which she wrote up the tiniest impressions, struck you. A love letter compared to yours. What would the Defence Force censorship make of it, you wondered. Like encrypted writing it would surely seem to them, like some code or other.
Your own letter was in your handbag. On the slender side. What you had to report was really rather meagre against Agaat’s epistle.
She held forth on everything that happened on the farm or didn’t happen. A chronicle. With wetted finger you counted, thirty pages, all in the precise upright handwriting she’d taught herself. You were amazed at the grasp she had of everything, from piss-ups amongst the farm workers to the service schedule of farm vehicles and the number of bales of wool, the variation in the quality of the milk and the cream in the spring and the fall, the treatment of the wheat seed against fungus. A record keeper’s statistics. She predicted the rains for Jakkie—a fine grey mizzle in the early morning just enough to make the eels stick out their noses—and guessed the wind for the following week for him and estimated the surge in the mountain streams and rivers for him with the naked eye and compared it with the average of the seasons. As if the farm belonged to him and to her.
What could you shore up against that? Against the number of cows covered, the report on the first signs of nasal bot among the sheep? What she left out, were the dreadful daily quarrels between you and Jak and the swearing and the tears. To judge by Agaat’s letter the Grootmoedersdrift homestead was a model of peace and harmony.
Why did it infuriate you so immoderately that day next to the road? The prettification to which every paragraph bore witness, was in the best possible taste. You couldn’t have done it better yourself.
You read the whole thing. At the end, for a whole paragraph, she asked questions, intimate questions from the nêne of old. What do they give you to eat there in the mess? Do you see meat in those army stews? Do you sleep warm enough? Is your pillow filled properly? Are your superiors well disposed towards you? Are you healthy? Are you safe? Do your subordinates listen to your commands? Are you getting used yet to taking off, to the blow to the heart and the horse rearing up? (rein it in) Do your ears still close up when you come down? (chew a dried peach) When are you coming home again?
The disquiet that was also in your and Jak’s hearts, she formulated as: I pray for your blessed and kept return from the distant skies.
It was herself she was comforting with the quince-mousse dessert she was thinking up for him, the roast of hare in pomegranate sauce that she would place steaming before him.
You wanted to read the letter again, you put it back into your handbag. Agaat’s blue Croxley envelopes you usually licked, and pressed closed again as best you might, asked at the post office for a bit of sticky tape. Your transgressions you trusted would be covered by the far more visible and sanctioned incursions of the military security that according to Jakkie opened and stamped everything. But this letter you didn’t want to let go, there was a tenderness and an obsession to these formulations after which you hungered.
Jak had his own formulae in which to clothe this new situation for himself.
How is Pa’s soldier? he’d ask on the phone when Jakkie phoned.
You listened in on the second phone. Jakkie could give him answers pertaining to his number of logged flying hours, the sensation of breaking through the sound barrier, the training with the ejector seat in the simulator.
He was a body of potentials for his father, a model of endurance, of physical discipline, of drilled limbs and sharpened reflexes.
And you? What could you ask this child about whom you felt your knowledge was of the second order, of the third, after Jak with whom he had had his baptism of fire in the mountains, after Agaat on whose bosom he’d grown up?
She was the one to whom he handed his laundry bag every time he came home, and who packed his suitcase for him when he left again.
What could you respond, what add, to the smile, the poker faces exchanged with the handing over of the bag, the handing back of the suitcase?
You knew of the little surprises with which from childhood they’d spoilt each other. Quartz pebbles, mouse skulls, tanned moleskins, under a pillow, in a shoe. Later, Agaat’s jerseys and pullovers for Jakkie, a bow tie and a new shirt that she went to buy him in town with her own money, cellophane packets of fudge and taffy and fennel cookies that she hid amongst his clothes.
And Jakkie’s gifts to her, boxes of fine chocolate, sachets of saffron and cardamom from the spice stores of the Boland, story books, Croxley writing-pads and envelopes, magazines, headscarves and fragrances.
Not that she ever used the perfume. The little bottles stood untouched, like an exhibition of trophies, on the shelf above her washing-table. The scarves she used as wall decorations for her room. She scrutinised them for new designs that she could embroider.
Your attention and interest you felt passed Jakkie by, unheeded. Was it for your sake that he joined the Air Force choir? He sent you their record. Side one, The Lord is My Shepherd. Side two, Oh for a gun in my strong right hand. He was more attuned to his father’s ideals, to Agaat’s favour than to your concern. From the sidelines you watched things develop.
As a member of the Permanent Force’s elite corps of highly trained personnel Jakkie made rapid progress, just as Jak had predicted. He could study and earn a salary at the same time. He obtained a degree in aeronautical engineering. In case he won’t be able to fly all his life, he said, then he can design machinery for the Air Force.
Like what? Jak wanted to know.
The plans are there, but it’s classified information, Jakkie sent word. All that you got to know in that time, was that the Bureau of Mechanical Engineering at Stellenbosch was a kind of front for Armscor. You had some misgivings about this, but Jak said why could the Afrikaner’s cultural headquarters not also be his arms factory, it goes without saying, that’s how all honourable nations consolidate themselves.
You both knew that Jakkie wasn’t really interested in politics, all he wanted to do was fly the Air Force’s modern fighter planes. That was Jak’s great dream. At supper table he read you and Agaat extracts and showed you pictures of aeroplanes from Paratus and Jane’s Defence Weekly, to which he subscribed.
You knew that Jakkie was flying Impalas and Mirages. You and Jak knew that it wasn’t child’s play in South West. You knew that it was the supreme game of heroes, that those who took part in the war against the Cubans in Angola were awarded the highest honours. You had the right to be proud, he was the child of all three of you.
But what was it that you felt there at the supper table when Agaat received a thick letter from him, thicker than that to his parents, and you and Jak asked her to read it aloud? It wasn’t pride, it was loss that united the two of you there under the lamplight. As united as you could ever be. Because you and Jak were suspicious of Agaat whose eyes sometimes glided rapidly over the lines, over the bits she left out. Jakkie’s letters to her you didn’t dare open or intercept.
You were dependent upon each other’s fictions about Jakkie. You were his family, but he belonged to the war, to secret operations. Later when it leaked out in the press, Jak bloodthirstily speculated about Jakkie’s part in the preservation of country and nation.
Oh please just shut up! you shouted at Jak when it became too much for you.
You locked yourself in your room, went to lie down on your bed, crying. You couldn’t figure out with whom you were most angry. With Jakkie who wasn’t open about his activities, with the Defence Force that employed him for its own purposes, or with the government that maintained a dour silence.
But it was the scene there in the dining room that really irked you, the scene with Jak and Agaat, she standing opposite him on the other side of the table, her hands on the back of the chair, half of her face in shadow. Jak telling tales of bombed-out enemy positions, of smoking Migs exploding in fireballs. Was she flattered to serve as audience to the fantasies of the baas?
It sickened you. You tried to keep yourself going with hard work, but then there was always the apprehension, the suspicion in those years, the late seventies, early eighties.
You went to see the doctor. He prescribed a stronger tranquilliser, better sleeping draughts. That helped, but it made you feel as if you were only half alive. Agaat checked your consumption closely. She was particularly interested in your faints, in the weakness that sometimes overcame you in the middle of wool-classing or during the stamping of the wool bales. Exaggeratedly solicitous she’d be then. Irony, no, sarcasm was in the crook of the elbow of the strong arm she offered to accompany you to your room.
After such an episode, after she’d attended to you in your room, she could go missing for hours. Stay with me, Agaat, you asked, but she closed the curtains. Stay with me, I feel scared, you said, but she remained standing there for just a moment, in the twilit room, with her hands folded under her breasts, her white cap, her white apron like nurse’s clothing, before walking out tchi-tchi on her thick-soled school shoes.
Was it one late afternoon that you woke up after such a collapse, after a dream that she had run off, that you went out? You had to look very closely, with the binoculars. She was walking with her head held high. From far away you could make that out. Unimpeachable in her solid body with her even tread she approached, unswervingly, as if she were in a play. This time she wasn’t on the koppie in front of the house where she always, in full silhouette, looked larger than she really was. She was approaching along the footpath in the dryland through the twilit wheatfields, her white cap like a prow above the stalks of wheat.
After half an hour she came in by the back door. All innocence, a castaway lamb under her arm, a story about a hare that had ended up in the jackal trap, a basket of lay-away eggs. That’s the way it always was.
A report of a gate lying wide open, of an empty drinking trough, of a windmill that doesn’t cast, of another kerbstone washed away from the bridge over the drift, of a plume of smoke in the poplar forest. But you knew that there was much more than met the eye to her walks. That evening again, when she’d brought in the food for you, she waited, emphatically and intransigently, for you to tell Jak what she’d found, noticed, suspected. And then she listened, expressionlessly, because the actual information you couldn’t communicate. You didn’t know what it was.
You shut your ears to your own voice pronouncing the deceitful words. You screamed at Agaat.
Stop staring at me as if I’m false! What have I done to you? What do you want me to say?
You slammed your fists on the table. Your glass broke. You put your hand in your mouth, you wanted to pluck out your tongue.
Jak looked at you askance.
My toastmistress, he said, lifted his glass, and carried on eating.
Agaat picked up the shards and took you to your room. She made you take your medicine and covered you with blankets, switched on the night-light by your bed. You listened to her serving Jak’s dessert and coffee, clearing up, closing the windows of the living room for the night.
Those sounds, that silence in which Agaat at length ate her evening meal behind a closed kitchen door, the back door that she pulled shut and locked behind her, the slamming of the screen door, the scuffing of the door of the outside room, all those black sounds to which you were listening in your room lying on your back, they were the opposite of music, they were the sounds of damnation.
Is that what’s become of my paradise here this side of the Tradouw? you thought.
Is that why you wanted to create the garden? Was that your response to the war stories with which Jak entertained Agaat evening after evening? A spell, a safeguard against the distant war and its hurt? Or to gain Agaat for yourself? To win back something of your dream?
You steeled yourself, went in to Jak at night, lay down next to him on his divan in his stoep room, satisfied him while he was half asleep.
What is all this, the stories of keening engines and missiles and explosions and blood and smoke and disembodied limbs and blackened ruins? you asked him after he had come, softly, persuasively, as one would talk to an upset child, so that he would answer you half in a daze, so that you could get the truth out of him.
I know you’re scared, just like me, you said, I know you’re worried. Who do you want to punish with such premonitions? What do you want to achieve by it? After all, you love him, he’s our son, why do you make him out to be one who sows destruction and death? With whom are you angry? Of whom are you afraid?
For a long time you listened by his mouth, to what he would say.
Our minerals, the white man’s future, he mumbled, the terrorists, we must prepare ourselves spiritually against the enemy, there are sacrifices to be made . . .
Jak, that’s not what I’m asking, you said, that I can hear on the television any day that I have a mind to. Jakkie’s your child, he’s the future. For the sake of what exactly do you want to sacrifice him?
He defends the borders, Jak said, that’s what we whites should have done from the start in this country. He’s obeying orders, and fortunately it’s no longer your and your handmaiden’s orders.
You’re fighting against me, you said, you won the child over to your side and now you’re inciting Agaat against me as well with your bloodthirsty talk.
If the people at home weaken, it’s bad for the morale of the men on the border, Milla, you can support him by showing a bit more fighting spirit instead of taking to your room on any pretext. Why don’t you join the Southern Cross and do something useful for the war?
A paradise, you whispered, your head on his chest, that’s what you promised me, do you remember? Long ago. A flower garden without equal. Let’s make a garden for Jakkie, he won’t always want to fly jet fighters. He’ll come home one day, and then we can show it to him, a sign of . . . a sign . . .
You couldn’t say it, of what it was supposed to be a sign.
Go ahead, he mumbled, make your garden, you do just what you want to in any case.
You went out onto the stoep. The sweet clove smell of carnations was in the air, the intoxication of the hedge full of white moonflowers. There had always been a garden on Grootmoedersdrift, in summer always a show of hydrangeas and agapanthus, but you wanted more than a higgledy-piggledy farm garden, you wanted to create a bower of beauty, on a few hectares, a park in which you could lose yourself, with arcades of rambling roses and round ponds with fountains, garden rooms such as you’d seen in the magazines, with laid-out paths and boxwood hedges and vantage points, with mixed beds throbbing with larkspur and poppies, striking accent plants, conifers and flaxes, and flowering trees and shrubs in all seasons. Formal of design you wanted the garden to be, but informally planted. Like a story you wanted it, a fragrant visitable book full of details forming part of a pattern so subtle that one would be able to trace it only after a while. That’s how you wanted your garden to be, a composition, a sonata with theme and developments and repetitions in varying keys, something that would form the jewel in the crown of Grootmoedersdrift farm.
Jak grumbled about money when he saw you were in earnest.
You brandished in front of his face the quotation for a de-wrinkling operation that Agaat had found in one of his pockets.
Thousands of rands! It’s your vanity that will ruin us, you said. Why don’t you ever want to help me with anything?
He grabbed your wrists. Keep your nose out of my affairs, to look at you, you’re actually the one who could do with a bit of plastic surgery. Reconstruction for Kamilla!
He pushed his fingers into the corners of your mouth. You tried to resist, to take his fingers out of your mouth.
Just look at you, this misery who calls herself Mrs de Wet. Permanently down in the mouth!
Agaat came upon you. Jak threw your hands from him and wiped his thumb and forefinger, which he’d had in your mouth, on his pants.
What do you want here? he asked.
Agaat’s voice was hard, her businesslike housekeeping voice with which she often broke up your quarrels.
I beg your pardon, Mr de Wet, she said, I just wanted to return the ash pan to the fireplace.
You kept your hands in front of your face, ashamed of her coming upon you like that.
Sometimes, Agaat said, and what she said did not accord with her tone, sometimes I wish I could . . .
You looked round. There she stood, the iron poker in her strong hand. It was superficially evident that she was referring to Jak, to something that she wanted to do to him. But her gaze was fixed on you.
Get out of here, you managed to say, it’s none of your business.
It is, she said, and flung the poker into the copper tray, it is most certainly my business.
Did she say that? Had you heard correctly?
Get out of here, immediately, Jak said.
Without looking at you, she walked out with rapid little steps and her head high. If she didn’t say it, her crooked drawn-up shoulder said it: It’s the only business I have, you and your husband and your child and your buggering around.
You kept wondering about Jak in that time when Jakkie went to the border. From his first breakdown on the night of his great nursery rhyme—how old was Jakkie then? eleven, twelve?—you felt that he was working at and building and adjusting his theory of you, of who you were, and what you had done to him. It hurt more than any shove or slap.
So if you don’t want to help me with the garden, you said, please do go ahead and write it up some time, all the stories that you’ve been accumulating against me for years, everything that you sit and think up about me, so that I can read it, because I don’t get the whole picture, only the tirades and the obscure parables.
Go ahead and write yourself, it’s no use your trying to pretend all of a sudden that you’re interested in what I think, I’ve been thinking it for a long time and I’ve been saying it for a long time, from the very start. Your problem is that that you don’t notice a thing, Milla. And now all of a sudden you want me to be your gardener, get knotted, I say.
You were sorry for him. His face and still-fit body were at last starting to show their age. It wasn’t only yourself, you realised, you wanted to console him as well with the garden, you wanted to soothe him as well.
You woke up one Sunday morning towards six o’clock with the garden layout practically complete in your mind.
Jak was away, the house was quiet. On Sunday mornings Agaat was off duty. You walked to the kitchen to make yourself some coffee. On an impulse you walked out into the backyard in your nightdress and knocked on the upper door of the outside room. It was wide open.
Come, I’m making us some nice coffee and rusks, I have a wonderful idea, Agaat, you must help me.
You started talking before you’d seen her. Your words dried up when you looked into her eyes.
The curtains were open. The room was bright with light. Agaat was sitting and embroidering in the deep chair in front of the window, her bare feet on a little mat of sewn-together moleskins. She was without her cap. Her hair radiated in combed-out peaks from her head. It was the first time in twenty years that you’d seen her without her cap. You felt as if you’d caught her naked, but you stood there and kept gazing.
The unkempt hair mass made her look feral. You wanted to look away, but you couldn’t. The hair filled the otherwise tidy room like a conspiracy against everything in league with daylight and subordination. From the enormity of hair your eyes strayed to the grisly cement-work around the fireplace. To and fro you looked, at her head and at the clusters of shells and skulls and quartz pebbles and marbles and little slivers of iron, rivets. It was as if Agaat had recreated her unkempt self there in low relief.
Her embroidery basket was standing by her feet, with the tight balls of thread and needles stuck into their proper places in the pockets and loops. The high white bed was immaculately made, with all her large embroidered pillows neatly arranged against the bedpost. On her clothes-rail the black dresses and the white aprons hung neatly serried. On the shelf above, fitted into one another three-by-three, the starched white caps, densely embroidered like mitres. But all of that, plus the zinc bath in its place under the washbasin, the table scrubbed white, the kettle shiny with scouring, the hearth-opening clean, the buffed noses of three pairs of black school shoes peeping out from under the curtain in front of the apple-crate cupboard, the Singer’s black body neatly folded back into the stowaway cavity, was not enough to reassure you. The clumps of steel wool on her head, the manner in which she looked at you in her ungroomed state, there where you stood in the door, yourself with sleep-fuzzed hair and an unwashed face, with your thin shins and white knees sticking out from under your pink flannel bed-jacket, that unnerved you. You clutched the front of your nightdress, even though it was buttoned. You felt as if she were assessing you naked.
I’m coming, she said, and stuck out her chin to manifest her displeasure, but the effect of it, without the cap, was one of vulnerability.
With an odd, reprimanded feeling you went and flung on a dress and dragged a comb through your hair so that when you went to sit down at the kitchen table you would at least not compare unfavourably with her. You knew how snow-white-starched she would report for duty.
She declined the rusk and drank her coffee with tight little sips. Her chin was stuck out and she listened to your plan with her eyes fixed to the wall, her cap a rampart before her head.
You had to control yourself not just to gather again all the papers and the coloured pencils and the gardening books that you’d set out and say to her she may leave now, thank you. Why should you suddenly become an apologist for your idea? A sort of sycophantish subordinate?
But you didn’t want to give up, you wouldn’t let yourself be quenched, and you changed your tack, excitedly you explained, elbows on the table, as lightly and merrily as you could.
Was she upset because you’d seen her embroidery-work? Nobody was ever allowed to see Agaat’s creations before they were quite complete, the cloth neatly washed and ironed and spread out for inspection. And this one was a huge cloth that she must have started that very morning, only the edges had been seamed. Were there sleeves attached? A neck-hole? You didn’t want to look too hard. Those unruly wads bowed over the fine white cloth, the hand working rapidly and accurately with the needle. It was the sight of that that suddenly made you feel terribly guilty about the letter. The one that you’d read over and over again. How long had it been in your handbag before you’d eventually posted it? Had you ever posted it?
Without looking up you filled one page after the other with your drawings and slid them in front of Agaat. One to explain the structure of the terraces, wider and narrower for variation, with stone walls and connecting steps that were supposed to lead the eye to the front door of the homestead. One to explain the scheme of arches and arcades and trellises that would grant the visitor access to prettily framed pictures of the garden. Another one to chart the location of the fountain and the fish ponds and the watercourses connecting them with one another, and one to indicate the irrigation pipes. The last one was to illustrate the colour scheme, blue and purple and white and green would predominate, with here and there an accent of bronze and copper and ochre. And then on the west side there had to be a formal herb garden with everything fragrant and tasty, with a sundial in the centre and paths of fine gravel as you’d seen in the books.
You took your time over every map, coloured in the levels unhurriedly, and kept talking softly all the time as if to yourself before presenting the end result at higher volume.
Coax, you thought, soft-soap, even it if takes hours. At length you got up to fetch a jar of green-fig preserve, Agaat’s favourite, from the pantry shelf. It was eleven o’clock and perhaps she could be won over with something to eat. Bread and butter and green figs. Anything to get her to open her mouth.
How about something special for the two old sweet-tooths on a sunny Sunday morning, you called airily from the pantry, and added even more airily.
So what do you say, Agaat? Do you feel up to it?
With a scraping sound you dragged the stepladder across the pantry floor and mounted its creaking rungs. You had to gain a bit of time to consider what your next move would be, perhaps a suggestion to go outside, to view the area under consideration, to asses the old garden as it was? That might bring some relief to the atmosphere, a displacement away from the square table-top where you were trapped together, something to break through the tension of the presentation and approval.
But the tension was even more palpable there where you were standing four shelves high on a rickety stepladder facing several seasons’ jars of preserved fruit, chutneys, jams, syrups and pickles.
Suddenly the thought occurred to you to fall off the ladder. That would be an instant solution. All balances would be restored in the wink of an eye. You would be paralysed with shock and pain and Agaat would jump to help and attend to you, and then you’d be able to exploit the situation of badly sprained employer to get her where you wanted her.
Where exactly you wanted Agaat, was what you asked yourself while you read the labels.
Albertas (old orchard) thick syrup 1970, Clingstone (old orchard) in brandy syrup 1971, Quince jelly 1973, Prickly-pear syrup 1975, Fine apricot 1980, Whole-fruit apricot and peach pickle (curried) 1981, Peach pickle (chilli) 1981.
Every preserving-jar in front of you on the shelf Agaat had handled, the picking, the peeling, the slicing, the boiling, the bottling, the labels were all in her upright handwriting.
Wholefruit kumquat jam (front orchard) 1972, Lemon marmalade 1972, Bitter orange marmalade, Wild watermelon (Gdrift, dryland), Sourfig cinnamon-sugar syrup (Witsand dunes), Green-fig (Pink fig tree) 10 October 1980.
You felt dizzy. For a moment the fall was a definite possibility. You supported yourself against the shelf.
Then you saw Agaat beneath you, head buried in one of the garden books that you’d set out on the table, the strong hand firmly clamped around one leg of the ladder.
Are you managing here? she asked. I see here they also talk of colour schemes.
The tone was sticky with sanctimoniousness. You were recalled from the faint to sudden fury. You could sweep off the whole shelf of bottles with your arm onto her head. She wouldn’t even know what hit her. A cluster bomb of preserves.
Jakkie phoned yesterday, she began, her voice low.
He says they called him on the carpet to ask who this Agaat-person is and why her letters arrived sometimes open, sometimes gummed shut. They’re scared of sabotage, he says, but he doesn’t understand it, because it’s mainly the other side’s people who are sent letter-bombs, he’s scared his superiors will think he’s turned wrong or something and it’s the secret police who want to eliminate him. He says he’s had it with war. He says he has nightmares.
That’s how your garden began.
After her deposition Agaat took the garden books to the outside room and made her own study of them. You kept thinking of the letter. Would she have seen it, you wondered? Would she have looked in your bag? When she went to take out the new pills from the chemist? You tried to remember when you’d eventually gone to post it, tried in vain to recollect licking and resealing it.
In the evenings after supper when Jak had gone to the stoep, Agaat would come and sit with you at the dining room table and make recommendations and see to it that you planned it all in the finest detail until your eyes were ready to fall shut. Then she made strong coffee which in turn kept you from sleep.
Take an extra Valium she’d say if you complained.
She persuaded Dawid to help you with the big things.
Jak stood on the sidelines, now and again when you weren’t looking, lent a hand when Dawid asked him.
You had a strong pump installed at the dam and on Agaat’s recommendation had a reservoir built for the summer on the rise behind the house. She saw a small bulldozer and scraper at Barlows in town and you hired it to construct the terraces.
Of compost material there was enough. You had big heaps made up from manure and straw from the stables. Agaat pushed a length of steel wire into each one and went and felt it every morning. It mustn’t be too hot, otherwise it kills the microbes, she learnt from her book.
She reckoned that the farm hotnots, as she called them, were too idle and too few for the garden work and at her insistence you got a team of convicts from town to dig trenches, stack stone walls and dig out the flowerbeds three feet deep to improve the soil texture with additions of compost.
Agaat cooked great pots of rice and pork for the convicts and kept them lively with jugs of sweet Frisco every three hours. With a short quirt she walked to and fro behind the lines with the guard to see that there was no idling.
When it’s spring again, she taught them, and the second and third voices of the refrain, day in, day out.
She had more or less burnt herself out by the time you were ready to go to Starke Ayres in Grabouw to buy seed and bulbs and trees and shrubs.
Those were your best times together, those excursions, those long hours in fragrant nurseries with your reference books and looking at the exotic flowering-habits and feeling the leaves of all the unfamiliar plants. And the names of the roses that you translated for Agaat, crepuscule, evening twilight, and explained, Mary Stuart, queen of the Scots with her long jaw, and wine-red Mario Lanza that she knew from your record with the songs from The Student Prince. Overhead the moon is bee-a-ming, you hummed together there in the nursery avenues. For the first time you had picnics again alone together, in the rose gardens of Elgin, in parks, on a bench under the huge wild fig tree with thirteen trunks, Ficus craterostoma in the botanical gardens of Kirstenbosch.
Cold sausage, sandwiches with thick butter and apricot jam and coffee with condensed milk from the thermos flask, Agaat’s favourite picnic fare. Together you sat on the old green travelling-rug in the Gardens, after you’d shown her the statue of Jan van Riebeeck and the Castle and the fountains in Adderley Street and the flower market where the Malay women tried to speak to Agaat in their Cape tongue and she didn’t really understand them.
People stared at you, the formally clad servant and the older white woman, as if you were a psychiatric patient, they looked at you, let out in the custody of your housekeeper.
See, I told you I’d show you Cape Town one day, you wanted to say, but you thought better of it.
She read your mind.
Well, would you believe, here I am actually seeing Table Mountain, she said and swallowed the rest of the sentence.
Let’s go for a drive, you said, then you can see it from the back as well.
With the map on her lap Agaat followed as you drove across Kloof Nek and read the names out loud of the corners and the bays and the heads. Lion’s Head, Kommetjie, Kalk Bay.
Beyond Simon’s Town you stopped at a little nature reserve next to the sea and went to show her the penguins.
Agaat’s face at the sight of the waddling nestling colony, to see her face as she gazed at the great world passing her by, the tanker on the horizon, the streets, the buildings, the shifting peninsula with its two horizons. On the way home she didn’t say a word.
After the structures of stone and wood had arisen in Grootmoedersdrift’s new garden, you did most of the work yourselves, sowed the seeds and planted the seedlings and thinned them and transplanted them from the seed trays and made cuttings and tied up the tendrils and scattered the snail poison and sprayed the roses. And now and then transplanted a thing that wasn’t in the right position, or grafted a little struggling tree onto a stronger trunk.
Without Agaat you couldn’t have managed it, you said in your little speech at the first spring celebration the following year. At Agaat’s suggestion you presented a garden festival and fund-raising drive for the border soldiers. You invited the local branches of the WAU and the Women’s Mission Union and the Southern Cross and the tea-drinking was opened by the dominee’s wife with scripture and prayer and closed with a hymn.
You peeped at Agaat where she was standing behind the cake table with her hand held in front of her stomach. Her eyes weren’t shut during the prayer. And with the closing hymn she stared straight into the blue sky and swayed lightly on her heels as she sang along, her black-and-white clothes sharply etched against the purple irises in the bed behind her, her fine descant floating above the hymn there in the open.
O goodness God’s ne’er praised enow, who would it not profoundly move.
…
who unpacks the boxes from bockmann independent living aids? see the fat green letters on the brown cardboard it’s fall 1994 land of hope and glory who cuts open the brown packing-tape? who pulls off blocks of foamalite and plastic packaging? it’s metal tubes chrome rods support surfaces who reads the instructions? who click-clacks the pieces into one another there they stand my externalised skeletons my walking frames one with legs one with wheels
tarantula or fortuna
choose!
who grabs the spider by the head? who shows the way? this is how you do it you lean forward on the crossbar who says it’s like walking with a little table but without the top? don’t look at your feet your feet are of no importance you drag them after your legs you keep straight you make a rigid knee the other one is like walking with the tea-trolley but without the tea you roll ahead you drag behind the wheels are braked you can adjust them if they turn too easily you fall
who shall tell the walker from the frame? and the wheel from the revolution? the imitator from the imitated?
who walks demonstration laps on the red polished stoep? who turns round at the furthest point with retracted chin with pursed lips? who cries soundlessly without tears?
I see she makes a rigid knee she flattens her feet she drops the arches drops her shoulders they bulge under apron bands her knuckles show white on the chrome
we’ll take both she says
the frame for the morning the wheels for the evening we support your last steps so god willing twofold.
…
Wednesday 16 December 1953 quarter past three (day one Day of the Covenant!)
The great clean-up has begun. She’s still groggy with the valerian. I thought I’d grasp my opportunity. Cut off the hair and washed with tar medicine and then with shampoo and applied ointment. Bad ringworm. Fiddled out the gouts of ear wax with matches and cotton wool and cut the nails. Big struggle to get the teeth brushed. Gums inflamed, lots of rotten teeth. Milk teeth fortunately, must be extracted, the whole lot while we’re about it. Disinfected the mouth with extract of cloves. The whole body first rubbed with oils and then soaked in a hot bath for half an hour, afterwards scrubbed down with hard sponge and nailbrush and soap. Scabs, raw patches everywhere. Half limp, the little body. Eyes keep falling shut. Look at me, Asgat, I say, everything will turn out all right. Must think up another name.
Dried well and the whole body rubbed with oil again, all the nicks and cuts disinfected and covered with plasters. Full of little black moles. Must have them looked at, some of them don’t seem right to me. Privates extremely tender and inflamed. God knows what happened to the creature, discarded, forgotten. Tomorrow to the doctor so that he can have a look at her. Who knows she may have all kinds of diseases. Must get inoculated.
Pox. Diphtheria. Polio. Can’t have an infection erupting here on the farm.
Made her bed in the back room. No window, door can be locked. Immediately fast asleep. In old pyjama jacket of Jak’s. Quite lost in it. Gave her another double dose of tranquillisers so that she can sleep for a long time. Suffering from shock it seems. Suppose to be expected.
Still 16 December half past eight
It’s dead quiet but a different kind of quiet to the usual. As if the house has acquired an ominous charge. Went to see, she’s out like a light.
Have brought something huge upon myself here. Feel exhausted/weepy/angry with myself or something.
Jak goes about grinding his teeth chronically. Selfish, he mumbles, what about me? I wait for the explosion. I’m trying to think of a name that will suit her, that she will take as her own, something not too far from what she’s used to. Agnes, Aggenys, Anna. Perhaps then Aspatat provisionally, it’s better than nothing and it’s better than Asgat, ash-pit, ash arse, good Lord above!
18 December ten o’clock
I must force her to eat, clamp her between my knees, force open the jaws with one hand, push spoon between the teeth, tip, quickly press the mouth shut. With the other hand rub the throat to make her swallow. Only thin milky porridge, lots of sugar. Won’t chew anything. Put down a bottle with teat next to her, she doesn’t even look at it.
I’m scared she’ll take to her heels again, I keep her locked up in the back when I can’t be with her. I feel bad about it but what else can I do? A lead? Perhaps not a bad idea for the first while. Dog lead with harness? Perhaps she doesn’t even want to run off.
When I put her up straight, she won’t stiffen her legs. Falls over, plays dead when I get close. What wild animals do, insects, when they feel danger threatening. Fall over. Protective colouring. Try not to be seen. Instinct.
Today she’s sitting in the corner in a little heap with her knuckle in her mouth. A sign of progress already, I suppose, that at least she’s sitting up. Yesterday she crawled in under the bed. I had to drag her out of there three times. Clung to the bed-leg with the good hand. Surprisingly tough, the little monkey, that hand I just about had to prise open to get her to let go. The third time I gave her a sharp slap over the buttocks. She must learn, my goodness. She can’t come and play her tricks on me. Showed her Japie. A good old-fashioned duster with a solid wooden handle.
How old could she be? Four? Five? Could be anything, she looks badly undernourished and underdeveloped to me.
I must first get her into condition a bit before I take her to the doctor. Don’t really want to hear what all he’ll have to say. Mother says I’m off my rocker. Who put it in my way? I ask. You, Mother, as you put everything in my way.
Jak paces up and down scolding. Do you think you’re a saint? he asks. Who are you going to wear yourself to a rag for now? Whose victim are you going to make yourself now? All I need to concern myself with is becoming a real mother, he says. Better that he insults me than that he says nothing.
19 December ten o’clock morning
Must simply go and sit and write down how it came about, the whole story, right from the beginning. The dam, the whirligigs round and round, the door creaking open. But it feels too long, too much. Where does something like that really begin? I must make time, before the details of it fade. I must supply the background, put into words the commission. Perhaps that will help me to look beyond the trees and see the forest.
19 December half past two afternoon
Dense as a stone. Not a peep. Close, black, dense, light, like coal. Won’t talk. Won’t eat. Clenches her hands in fists, one knuckle in the mouth, it’s all pink and raw already.
She refuses absolutely to look at me. Her eyes just scamper furtively past my legs. Shrinks away when I come closer, turns the head away as if expecting a blow.
I try everything. Today pulled her in an apple box cart (OuKarel’s handiwork with a strap around the legs and across the chest so that she can’t escape) to the dam. Sat by the water’s edge. Won’t look, won’t see. Showed her the whirligigs again, ducklings, everything that she should be able to recognise, but she shows no reaction. Pulled her to the drift, showed her the little boat, one day we’ll row in it, I say, but the neck stays between the shoulders.
Dug up a cap because the head looks bad, all bare like that and full of sores. She doesn’t like things on her head it seems, she pulls it off when I’m not looking, at least it’s a sign of life.
Gave her worm medicine. Soiled her panties something dreadful. Scolded and gave a good hiding with the duster handle, what’s the use? She’s very far behind her age I think. Could see the worms, flat pieces of tapeworm, round dog-worms.
Ordered nappies from the chemist, waterproof drawers. Wet her bed three nights running. Mattress ruined. Had fourth bath, still tightly-rolled into a bundle. Pitch would sooner soak out of a ship than the stiffness in this child’s limbs. Can’t reach anywhere with the washcloth. She keeps her head pulled in, arms rigid against the body, knees clenched together.
21 December
Aspatat has a cold! Coughing and snottering. Must be from the first washing there in the dam on Goedbegin. Fancy a bit more co-operation with the eating, maybe because the nose is blocked, so she has to open her mouth to breathe. At least she’s swallowing better. Jaws more relaxed. Must start with proteins. Today fish oil and vitamin C. Hellish battle. Gave malt syrup and lecithin on porridge. Sweet things do the trick, it seems. Will have to start using it as reward.
Sawed a hole in the door of the back room. Had Dawid install an old copper post-box flap over the slit. I must be able to see what she does when she’s alone. Suspect she’s sly, suspect she’s pretending to be stupid. Remembered the hessian sack Lys gave along, put it in the room with her. She looks at it for hours. Doesn’t move.
Head-sores healing nicely.
Went and dug up my old children’s books in the cellar. Read rhymes to her. Who’d have thought that! I remember them bit-by-bit as I come across them.
Old mumblemould
I have a cold
I have it now
I give it to you
I tie it up here
And I’m in the clear.
Jak says I’m wasting my time and why am I spoiling our Christmas? I ask where is your faith, where is your heart? I possess neither the one nor the other, I do it exclusively for myself, for nobody else, he says. I don’t dare use other people for my own purposes like that, he says. I’ll see what comes of it, apparently.
He’s just jealous, feels neglected. I devote all my free time to her.
Must succeed in this, I must make it work, make it worthwhile.
It feels as if the whole world is against me. First Mother, now Jak.
Must go and see the dominee about this, the child can’t stay so nameless.
22 December
Now I have a cold! Must have got it from her. Jak says it’s but the beginning. He doesn’t want to go anywhere near her. She gives him the creeps, he says, the idea gives him the creeps. He says I’m sick. He taps against his head when I peer through the slot at what she’s doing. What a whopper of a Christmas present I’ve got, he says. Unto us a child is born, unto us a woolly’s given, out loud down the passage, I say, Jak bethink yourself, what if she can hear and understand you?
Perhaps after all better get to the doctor if he can still see me before Christmas. Her poo is completely yellow from all the runny food she’s eating.
Made red jelly and custard, showed it to her dished up in a bowl and said if she was good and allowed me to wash her nicely in the bath, she could have it. She’s still not looking at me, but it does seem as if she hears me. (Must have ears tested. Deaf and dumb perhaps? I remember the funny high squeaking sounds. Retarded perhaps? You never know with these people. Generations of in-breeding, violence, disease, alcohol. Children of Ham.)
Fifth bath, still no relaxation in the limbs. It’s almost as if she’s holding her breath. Teeth do seem to part more easily, I fancy. She bites the spoon. Let go, I say, let go then you get more. I have to pull at it and wiggle it, then she lets go after a while.
Just like a dog. Reward works. Got down a fair amount of jelly.
She can have it every day if she’s good, I say. If she learns nicely to sit on the pot for me, learns nicely to look me in the eye, eats her other food nicely and takes her medicine. Learns to sit nice and upright and to walk smartly. If she’s a good girl. Only then.
Practise every day with her on pot at regular times. Hour after breakfast, hour after supper. Sit, I say. Pee. Poo. Push. I make little moaning sounds to encourage her. Pour water out of a glass into a jug for the pee. She is closed, shut as a vault. She presses her head into her lap. Then I walk out and lock the door and watch her through the slit. She hasn’t noticed it yet because she’s always looking down at the ground. She crawls off the pot as soon as I’m out, slither-crawls into the corner of the room as if she’s trying to squeeze herself into the wall. Then I relent and put on the nappy. The privates look better but they’re stretched and loose. Shudder to think what happened there. Wanted to put in my finger to feel, but she locks closed her legs. Doctor will have to look.
She has to get moving, then the poo will also get going. I tell her she mustn’t be so timid. She could run like a hare that day at Mother’s. I tap out the rhyme of the rabbit for her on the table-top.
There goes a bunny
says Sarah Honey
Shoot her with an arrow
shouts Mrs Farrow
It’s too short
says Mr Port
It’s over the hill
say Jack and Jill
Overshot the mark
says Jenny Dark
Right through the tail
says Dominee Heyl
It’s hit the spot
says Auntie Dot
Put her in the pot
says John the Scot
Add a bit of mustard
says coy Miss Custard
Now to carve a fillet
says old Doctor Willet
Tastes very good
says wicked Willy Wood
You’re a killer
says little Miss Milla.
27 December half past eleven morning
Both of us recovered fortunately. Christmas day rather quiet. Ma came but she didn’t even go to look in the back room. I put the radio in the room with Aspatat while we were eating so that she could listen to the Christmas carols. It can get hot there in the back room with the door shut like that, but I can’t really let her wander around at will.
Definite progress in the eating department. Little by little, but we’re getting there. This morning mealie-meal porridge with a little lump of butter and syrup, this afternoon mashed potatoes, meat sauce, sweet pumpkin puree. Cinnamon porridge this evening. And red jelly and custard. A bit more lively, I think. Jak’s gone to friends in town, but I can’t yet leave her here alone.
Half past seven evening
Great breakthrough! Got the bright idea just now, after reading her a bedtime story. Put three pink Star sweets in her hessian sack, left it at the foot of the bed.
I wonder what’s in here, I said. Do you still remember? They’re your own little things that you know! Do you remember Lys? Lys packed it for you to play with when you came here. Don’t you just want to have a look? Perhaps there’s something good inside that I put in there for you. Go on, you like sweet things, don’t you? Then I went out and peeped through the spy-hole to see what she would do.
The room was in twilight. I switched off the light in the passage to see better. Dead-still she lay under the covers for a long time. Then she sat up straight, there’s a hand creeping out! First the strong one, then the little paw like a flat-iron. Then she sat up even straighter. First stared fixedly at the sack. Then her eyes moved. The first time in just this way, I could see the whites showing. Forward inclination in the body, the head rigid on the neck. My heart beat very fast. I could feel myself straining my own body forward, as if it was I that had to get to the sack. My knuckles I see are raw where I bit them from the tension, didn’t even notice.
Fist in the mouth, fist out of the mouth she sits there, sits weighing and wondering, an eternity it felt like. Hand creeping cautiously to the lip of the sack. Gauging with the fingertips the hessian fringe, then the ravels of the sack between thumb and forefinger. Then she pulled in her breath sharply. Open is the hand, in slips the hand, mole wriggling in the sack! Deeper and deeper up to the elbow. Further still up to the armpit. Then the other hand, the weak one, like an outrider. Feel feel feel. There! Got it! Then both hands are working. Wrapping off. Teeth apart. Quickly she slips it into the mouth-hole. Lump in the cheek. Sucks. Smoothes flat the bit of paper, folds it, can you believe it! with quick precise little fingers, and puts the paper back into the bag!
I trembled. I couldn’t believe it. But that wasn’t all.
Then she took the moleskin and the little wheel and the stick out of the sack. Mole in the neck, stick in the wheel. Head at an angle. Fur against the cheek. Point against the rim. One, two, three, small revolutions she makes with the little wheel on the cover. Everything together again, from the beginning, breathe in and once more. Mole in the neck, stick in the wheel, roll! Bull’s-eye! Her own game! I told Jack when he came home.
Fantastic! he shouted, bravo! He clapped hands loudly. His face was ugly. Now you’ve broken her in. Clay in your hands. A blank page. Now you can impress anything upon her. Just see to it that you know your story, Milla. It’d better be a good one. The one that you fobbed off on me didn’t work so well.
Lord, he can be so terrible.
So phoned Mother instead. She just listened. Right at the end she said what I suppose I could have expected: You’re making yourself a bed, Milla, but it’s your life, you must do as you see fit. She did though ask whether I’d taken her to a doctor. Suppose I must do something about it.
4 January 1954
Took her today for a once-over. Don’t know if it was a good thing. She’s terrified all over again. Ai, it breaks my heart, after all my trouble the last few days to tame her. While I was about it I had all the milk-teeth drawn at the out-patient’s clinic for the coloureds there next to old Kriek’s rooms. Set up a commotion, certainly not mute. They don’t give anaesthetic there. Blood on the new frock in front. Had to apologise to the next doctor because I didn’t want to drive back all the way to the farm then to go and get clean clothes on her. Ramrod-rigid and wild and convulsive she was all the time, threw her little hat as far as she could. It took two sisters to hold her down on the trolley bed. The internal examination showed exactly what I’d suspected. Multiple penetration, says the little chap, Leroux’s holiday partner. He’s too young, looks pretty inexperienced to me, but on top of that he was arrogant as well. He doesn’t know if she’ll ever be able to have children. All the better, we both of us thought. Apart from that there’s nothing wrong. The flat black moles are not malignant, be can burn off the one on her cheek, he says, but he thinks it gives her face a bit of character—I think he’s making fun of me. There are, though, signs of malnutrition. Weak right hand and arm probably an ante-natal injury. Eyes, ears, throat, nose, pooper, examined all the holes. Tonsils will have to go. She was fairly upset by all the shiny instruments. The squeaking noise again. Inoculations high up on the little deformed arm. Took blood samples. Pale gums and rim of eye suggest anaemia, but that can be put right. She has to be fed lots of liver and spinach. Doctor can’t say if she’s mentally in order. Looks to him like a state of shock. I must bring her again when she can talk, then he’ll be able to form an opinion. He stares at me with such blunt eyes, the little doctor. How do I get her to talk? I ask. I must decide how much I want to spend, he says. Remediation is nowadays possible for all kinds of handicaps. It depends on what your ultimate goal is with someone like that, he says. Half provoking, as if he suspects me of something. Got annoyed with the man, as if I had to account for myself to him. I’ll work on her myself until she’s caught up, I said. I’ll look after her, she has nobody else on the face of the earth. There are few people who are prepared to do so much for the underprivileged, Mrs de Wet. Drily. Felt humiliated when I walked out of there. What kind of attitude is that to somebody who wants to do something that everyone is forever preaching and praying about? Love thy neighbour as thyself? Then they should by rights rather be asking: What can we do to help you with the poor child on whom you’ve taken pity? Hypocrites! The old wall-eyed nurse Schippers and so-called highly educated Sister Goedhals with their po faces in their white uniforms, tchi, tchi, on the crêpe-soled shoes, they stared me out of the door of the consulting room, as if I were trespassing on their territory, as if I’d polluted it. That’s the last time that I’ll take them Christmas prunes! How is the world supposed to become a better place if that’s how the medical profession feels about the under-privileged?
Bought a cup of ice-cream for A. and myself afterwards from the café. Needed it. Went and sat in a quiet spot next to the river with her. Couldn’t get the ice-cream into her. Knuckle in the mouth. Quite closed up all over again. On the way back bought a celluloid windmill on a stick and showed her how it works. Sang her an old song, The Magic Mill, from my childhood and was moved to tears by it myself.
Turn the mill in the mountain’s fall
turn the mill in the sea
turn the mill in the time of joy
nobody ever content can be.
She didn’t want to take it from me. I held it out of the car window with one hand so that it could spin.
Turn fine the good white salt
turn soft the falling snow
grind small the grains of wheat
nothing’s too hard for the mill of God.
Watched her in the mirror. Sits there with large eyes fixed in her face. It looks as if she’s crying without tears.
Nothing to cry about, Aspatat, I say, we’re getting you ready for life, that’s all. Just the tiniest flickering when I mention her name. But it’s not your real name, I say. Your name you still have to be given.
Still 4 January after supper
Had a terrible storm of crying, couldn’t stop. Too many emotions for one day I suppose. Jak says I’m putting it on. He says it’s New Year’s disease.
She would take in absolutely nothing. No tea. No jelly. So took her to the room early. I can’t any more. Feel as if I have to start all over. Have just been to peer through the slot at what she’s doing. Sits in the corner all hunched up with rigid eyes and looks at the door. She’s cottoned on to the spy-slot. I put all the drawn teeth into her shoes so that the mouse can bring money.
Can still not stop crying. Don’t know what about.
Jak mocks me by repeating the rhymes that I say to her.
Oh bat oh bat
butter and bread
you come in here
you’re good as dead!
He says I mustn’t blubber now, I must now chew what I’ve bitten off, he says I must go and cry somewhere else, he wants to sleep. So now I’m sitting here in the living room. The house is heavy and still. It feels as if a disaster has struck. Is it of my doing?
6 January 1954
Jelly for breakfast, afternoon and evening. That’s all she’ll eat. I can see the mouth is still sore from the drawing of the teeth. Sit with her in the garden in the morning. Sing everything that comes into my head, talk non-stop everything I can think of, all the names of the flowers. Clack my teeth, smack my lips, click my tongue, show all the speaking mouth parts. Imitate all sounds, brrr goes the tractor, bzzz goes the bee, clippety-clop gallops the horse, moo says the cow, baa-baa says the sheep.
Tried to explain her surname, Lourier, to her with the twigs of the laurel tree. Aspatat Lourier, down at the weir, Aspatat Lourier feels no fear. She slowly started to thaw a bit today. Watches me surreptitiously when I’m not looking. Still won’t take anything from me. Sweets, yes, but only when I’m not looking. I don’t want to teach her underhand ways. I close my eyes with the sweets open in my hand, she doesn’t take them, she’s more wary than a tame meerkat.
Have a sore throat from all the singing and talking. How long still before she’s going to become human? I feel I must prove something. To myself, to Jak, to my mother, to the community. Why do I always give myself the most difficult missions? The most difficult farm, the most difficult husband, and now this damaged child without a name?
I’ve exceeded the limits of my abilities with her. As if I’m trying to come to terms with something in myself. What exactly is it that’s driving me? With something like this most normal people would give up before they’ve even started on it. Perhaps those nurses were right after all, the little sceptical doctor? Perhaps I’m just wasting everybody’s time here? And then without any guarantee of success either, without support from the community. But is it fair? People here are quite prepared to clap hands if you’ve accomplished anything unusual, are only too fond of bragging of an achievement from among their own ranks, as long as it never cost them any extra money or effort. If it had been another country, would it have been better? But every country has its share of pettiness, I suppose.
10 January
I have nightmares about the child. Dream I pull out her tongue like an aerial, one section, two, three, longer and longer I pull it out, my hands slip as I try to get a grip on it, there’s no end to it, she laughs from the back of her throat, thousands upon thousands of red tonsils wave like seaweed, her tongue shudders in my hands, like a fishing rod, there’s something heavy biting and tugging at the line, pulling me off my feet, drawing me in, into her mouth, then I wake up screaming. Jak shakes me by the shoulders and slaps my face. He says he’s not giving it much longer. He says the day will come when I’ll open my eyes and she’ll be gone for ever. He’ll see to it, he says, and nobody’ll breathe a word. I, I say, I’ll breathe a word.
16 January
Breakthrough! This morning in the garden, all of a sudden, her gaze perks up. She raises her little eyebrows, the mole on her cheek moves up and down. She looks past my shoulder, looks at something behind me. Then she looks straight in my eyes for the very first time, and then back again over my shoulder, as if she wants to say: Look behind you! Look! Beware! Look! I play back with my eyes, raise my eyebrows: What do you see? Behind you! she signals with her eyes. What can it be? I make my eyes ask to and fro. She looks more and more urgently, she holds my gaze, she directs my eyes, I’m almost overcome with feeling her own will stirring, the very first time!!!
So then it turned out it was Jak all the time who’d stood there making faces at her behind my back. He gets more out of her than I. He laughs, says it’s easy, all it is, she knows who’s actually the baas here on Grootmoedersdrift, just maybe she’ll succeed one day in bringing it home to his wife as well.
17 January
I use Jak’s code now. It works well. I look past her. Look, I say with my eyes, look behind you. What? asks her gaze. Look, look, beware behind you, there’s something. Then I step back, pretend I’m trying to get away from the ‘something’. It’s the only way to get her to move in my direction, a kind of scampering crawl, then she stops, on all fours, just before she reaches me. I don’t want to scare her, but it’s the only way. When at last she dares to look round, I show her, ag, it’s only a cloud, it’s the sun, it’s a tree, it’s a bird. Nothing to be scared of!
Now we play it all the time. She’s starting to bluff back with her gaze. She understands quite well how it works, the eye game. Now I can at least spare my voice a bit, I was getting quite hoarse. Now there definitely is communication, I’m certainly not imagining it. I set my eyes in every possible way, I look in surprise at a spot right behind her, then she jumps round, or I stare soulfully at a place far behind her, she gazes into my eyes for a long time before turning round to see what it is.
20 January
She’s in thrall to my eyes now. She looks everywhere that I look. Ever more complicated bluffing games we play, surprise games, guessing games. I could never have dreamed you can achieve so much with your eyes.
For instance I look past her but she doesn’t look. You’d better see what’s going on there, I signal with my eyes, but she doesn’t look, she holds out. It’s very very pretty! I signal, or, it’s really ugly, or, it’s terribly creepy, or, it’s very nice, or, it’s going to catch you!
At last she looks, mostly there’s nothing in particular and when she looks back I evade her glance, all innocence. Then she comes and stands against me until I look at her. Then I shut my eyes to indicate: Close your eyes. Then I put down a cookie or a sweet somewhere. Then I signal again, look there, behind you is something nice. But then I have to look away until she’s eaten it. I must just take care that she doesn’t react to reward exclusively. There won’t always be a reward. She must simply learn to speak now. You can’t live by looking alone. I take out the duster. She’s going to get Japie, I say, on her backside, if she won’t talk.
21 January 1954
I always have a struggle with her in the mornings, she lies all huddled up and doesn’t want to budge. Just like a little cold animal that has to warm up first. Now I’ve thought up a warming-up exercise. ‘The Greeting to the Sun’ I call it. I demonstrate it to her, first nice and high on the toes, then stretch with one arm, then stretch with the other (the little weak arm I still have to operate for her, but I’m sure it’ll catch up), one big step forward, one big step backward, dip at the knees, down with the head, up with the head, good morning, o mighty king sun!
If she doesn’t want to, I rap her with the stick of the feather duster, that usually does the trick. I simply have to apply discipline here. We’re going to do it every morning, I say, until you jump out of bed in the mornings and do it of your own accord.
22 January
She must guess what I’m looking at, we play, she must point to what I’m looking at. At first the hand was close to the body, just a little protruding finger pointing, this or that, now she’s pointing with the whole arm, has even been running these last two days to the tree or its shadow, or the red-hot pokers, or the row of agapanthus, or the tap, or the fish pond or the stoep steps and then I call the name of the thing: Flower! Stone! Water! then she touches it quickly, as if she’s afraid it’ll bite. Perhaps she learns more from my saying a few words than from my talking non-stop.
27 January
I no longer have to lock her up all the time during the day. She follows me everywhere. Are you my tail, I ask? She only looks for my eyes. I show her in my picture book: Horse’s tail, pig’s tail, sheep’s tail, dog’s tail. There is a little finger pointing now, with its own will and purpose. Horse’s eye, pig’s eye, sheep’s eye, dog’s eye, she shows. I leave the books with her in the room. She pages for herself when I don’t look, but with such cautious fingers as if the pages are scorching her.
30 January
First day without nappy and without accident. This morning there was pee in the pot, so she must have got up by herself in the night, or early this morning. Saar says she poos in the garden when we’re not looking.
Don’t poo in the garden, Aspatat, I say, you’ll get worms again, poo in your pot otherwise you’re not getting any jelly.
1 February
Jelly threat works well. For two days didn’t get any jelly. Comes into the kitchen today to show me with the eyes: Come and see! Come and see! until I follow her down the passage. Look! the eyes signal. Look! the protruding finger points. A fine turd in the pot it was!
Oh sis! I say, one doesn’t show people one’s poo, it’s impolite, you say nicely: Excuse me, I’m going to the bathroom, and you do your number two nicely and wipe your tail nicely and then you get jelly. Now you’ve pooed in the pot nicely, but don’t think it’s that easy, jelly you’ll get when you’ve learnt to speak nice full sentences.
Then it looked at the ground and jutted out the chin! First sulk! First clear facial expression to play on my feelings! It excited me very much, but I can’t show it. Tidy up your face, then you’ll have jelly, I say. Then she rearranged the face and looked me straight in the eye, ever so sanctimonious. I had to look away. Couldn’t help wanting to laugh. Just like a little puppy that begs even though she knows she’s not allowed to.
5 February
Is eating well now, every day. Chicken and vegetables, with the hands when I’m not looking. First little slice of brown bread as well. Just has to be hungry enough. Doesn’t want to handle cutlery herself yet. Just as if she doesn’t want the insides of her hands to be seen. A few times already I’ve forced open the hands, pressed in the palms, felt through all knucklebones, couldn’t feel anything wrong, except that the small hand is colder and limper. Perhaps also it’s just become lazy, from being hidden all the time and never being used, the little arm though is clearly deformed.
You could fold the pink sweet’s wrapper, I say, don’t think I didn’t see it. You can do everything with those little hands of yours. She just stares at me with big eyes.
6 February
I open the little weak hand and put the hand-bell in it, I shake it with my hand folded around hers, but when I let go, she drops the bell.
7 February
Devised a little game, call-each-other-with-bells. I take the bronze bell and she has the silver one with her in the room. If she answers my ringing with her ringing, I’ll unlock the door of her room, I say. I ring it in the kitchen and creep closer and peep through the slot. What would make her so scared of picking up something, I wonder? She sits and just looks at the bell, does though hold it now for a few seconds if I put it in her deformed hand. We’re going to make it strong, I say, we’re going to make it clever just like your other hand, we’re going to exercise it and give it nice things to do every day.
8 February
Went to see Ds van der Lught in town this morning. Quite patient and fatherly. It’s a very big responsibility, he says, but the Lord put it in your way to teach you patience and humility.
Only over tea could I bring myself to touch on the matter of the name. The nicknames with which she grew up in her own home, he just shook his head, was immediately very helpful, took thick reference books off his shelf. ‘Agaat’ he suggested then. Odd name, don’t know it at all, but then he explained, it’s Dutch for Agatha, it’s close to the sound of Asgat with the guttural ‘g’, it’s a semi-precious stone, I say, quite, he says, you only see the value of it if it’s correctly polished, but that’s not all, look with me in the book here, it’s from the Greek ‘agathos’ which means ‘good’. And if your name is good, he says, it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. Like a holy brand it will be, like an immanent destiny, the name on the brow, to do good, to want to be good, goodness itself. We’ll have her baptised accordingly when she’s a bit bigger, when she can understand what’s happening to her, he says. Then we knelt and he prayed for me and for Agaat and the commission I’d accepted and he thanked the Lord for another heathen soul added to the flock by the good works of a devoted child of God, a stalk gathered into the sheaf.
I must write the commission as Dominee helped me to clarify it today. My task and vocation with this. Now I no longer feel so alone with it. And I must write up the beginning, the beginning of everything, before I forget the feeling, of how I found her and knew she was mine.